Chapter 147 - Godslayer II

3

Once upon a time, there was a dirt-poor Russian medical student named Anton Chekhov.

Then as now, Russia was a frozen land steeped in strange magic. Its Homo sapiens carried DNA that made their writing flourish the more miserable they became.

Chekhov died young, at forty-four, of an incurable disease.

Armed with the three sacred treasures of “Russia,” “poverty,” and “incurable illness,” Chekhov sacrificed his lifespan in exchange for terrifying literary prowess. It was as though every evil spirit in Russia had whispered to him to become a writer.

Having transformed into a literary giant through black magic unparalleled in history, Chekhov declared:

-If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act of a play, it must be fired in the final act. If it will not be—do not hang it there in the first place.

The so-called “Chekhov’s Gun.”

Originally, Chekhov probably meant no more than, “So put your foreshadowing to good use, you writer bastards.”

But, as is the way with all black magic, Mr. Chekhov’s spell produced unintended repercussions.

Incidentally, Chekhov also spent time in Siberia, and the air masses that formed around Siberia were famous for sampling the Korean Peninsula every winter.

Even an archmage cannot escape the weather. Chekhov’s black magic likewise rode the wind onto the Korean Peninsula.

Let us consider a concrete example.

“Huh? Honey, look over here! A gun! A gun!”

“Oh. A military unit must have dropped it. Nice work! We found it thanks to you, Miro.”

“Hehe.”

There was a loving couple in Seoul.

Even amid an anomaly-stained apocalypse, the two were living happily in their own pure-love romance.

Then one day, they discovered firearms and magazines dropped by a military unit. Delighted by their fucking fantastic luck, the lovers took the weapons.

And then.

BANG!

Less than two weeks later, one shot the other dead.

“Urgh... M-Miro. Why...?”

“I’m sorry, honey. I... I don’t think I can keep living anymore. So let’s become one in death.”

“No...”

A couple who had clearly been enjoying a cozy, happy pure-love romance suddenly swerved into misery fiction.

And this was one of the milder cases.

BANG!

Some families picked up a gun, only for the entire family to die of gunshot wounds that very night.

Someone, bewitched by an anomaly in the middle of the night, imagined that “enemy troops are ambushing us from all sides” and massacred their family.

“Aaaaaaah!”

At dawn, realizing that all the “enemy troops” they had killed were actually family members, that person took their own life.

With the gun, of course.

There were countless similar cases.

-Anonymous: There’s a group of survivors living in a hideout they built in the next neighborhood over. Place got completely wrecked last night lol

-Anonymous: Gunshots all night, so I guess they’d stockpiled guns. Got a little curious and crept closer. They were yelling and screaming at each other. Total chaos.

-Anonymous: They were all from the same hometown, and their families seemed really tight too, but guns << that one thing wrecked everything. Scary shit;

By now, you can probably guess.

That’s right.

The Russian writer’s black magic had fallen upon every firearm. All guns had become possessed by the anomaly called “Chekhov’s Gun.”

Thus, in this world, “if a gun exists,” it will invariably “fire at a crucial moment.”

To be more precise:

Because a gun exists, “a crucial moment is forcibly created.”

The death of lovers who love each other.

The collapse of a tightly knit group.

Regardless of the people or circumstances involved, if a gun exists, that gun will inevitably bring about decisive scenes.

For how long? Until its magazine runs out of bullets.

It was truly a modern-day version of Paris’s golden apple. Wherever guns existed, discord and tragedy were staged.

“Huh? What? Hey, put that gun down!”

“Shut up! My whole family’s dead! Why should I stay in the army? You can all die too!”

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The Republic of Korea Armed Forces, which had once marched on Seoul in an attempt to seize the Korean Peninsula’s new throne, were annihilated in an instant.

Tenlegs, the “Solitary Gourmet,” filming a mukbang with the armed forces as its meal had played a major part, but the final, decisive blow came from Chekhov’s Gun.

“No, if we start fighting among ourselves here, all hope for our nation will be—”

“Fuck the nation! Die! Just die!”

“Stop that bastard! Wait, what the fuck? Why are you loading your guns too? Are you insane?”

Simply put, mass shootings erupted in every unit. Rumor had it that even a corps commander was caught up in one and killed instantly.

At least on the Korean Peninsula, firearms were concentrated in military units, so the modest price was merely the disappearance of its military might.

Things were somewhat more serious in the Land of the Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget. In other words, America, where a shotgun had long been considered an essential item for every household.

Within less than a month of the void’s arrival, fifty percent of Americans had died. Had they known things would turn out this way, even opponents of gun control would surely have given the matter another thought.

And so.

-[Three Thousand]PresidingJudge: This announcement is for all awakened entering Busan, not only members of the Three Thousand Worlds guild. Firearms are strictly prohibited in Busan. Anyone violating this prohibition will...

-[Hundred Flowers]HighSchoolYear13: Prohibited firearms have been discovered in Sejong City! There’ll be an execution in the square outside the government building around lunchtime today, so please come watch! >_<);;

Not only on the North American continent but on the Korean Peninsula—indeed, throughout the world—societies began imposing ferociously strict gun control.

Possessing a firearm was a capital offense in almost ninety-nine percent of cases.

Owning a gun was worse than killing someone.

Naturally. Guns went beyond killing people: they sowed discord within a group, then inevitably staged a tragedy.

In a sense, the alias “Forced Staging of Tragedy” might have suited this anomaly better than its true name, “Chekhov’s Gun.”

That was why Cheon Yohwa had muttered darkly, “That crazy fuck,” the instant she discovered a K5 pistol in her hideout.

4

“So.”

We had searched all of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School. Thankfully, there were no more firearms besides the pistol found beneath the window frame.

“Why did your guild member collect and hide a K5 pistol?”

“Hmm. I got a confession out of her after giving her some water. The perpetrator had a crush on our school’s student council vice president.”

Cheon Yohwa sighed.

“But the vice president is dating someone else. That girl was the victim in this incident...”

“A lovers’ quarrel?”

“Well, yes. That’s riiight...”

This was so far removed from anything in my own life that I felt somewhat like an observer.

“So the perpetrator meant to use the gun to kill the victim? Foolish. That wouldn’t win her the vice president’s love anyway.”

“Ah, well... It’s a little more complicated.”

Cheon Yohwa scratched her cheek.

“She was actually planning to use ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ as a defense for her murder.”

“What?”

“Here was her plan. You know how our school regularly goes on expeditions to Seoul? She was going to pretend she’d happened to find a gun on the road during one of those trips.”

Cheon Yohwa formed a finger gun and flicked it.

“Then, while on patrol, she’d act as though ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ had bewitched her into firing on impulse... Bang!”

“... Act?”

“Yes. Act. She was going to make it look as though the victim had died from an accidental discharge.”

“Well, now.”

“Of course, she wouldn’t escape blame entirely, but she’d have the excuse that ‘an anomaly bewitched me into making a mistake,’ right? She figured that even if she was demoted all the way to first year, at least she wouldn’t be killed or expelled. Ugh, kids these days really are devious.”

I was a little taken aback myself.

“So, to sum up, she was planning to murder someone while pretending to be possessed by an anomaly?”

“Yees. Isn’t that just awful?”

Good lord.

I had occasionally heard stories of people secretly abandoning guild members they disliked on expeditions into the void, but cases of such proactive attempts to use an anomaly as an excuse were rare.

Human malice truly knew no—

“...?”

That was when it happened.

Something flashed through my mind.

The idea of an audacious student who had tried to turn “Chekhov’s Gun” to her own advantage gave me a realization.

Gun. Ruin. Gun. Exploitation. Gun.

Countless words tangled together.

“Hm? Teacher? What’s wrong all of a sudden?”

“...”

“Oh. You’re lost in thought.”

As though accustomed to this, Cheon Yohwa went about her business.

It took a little over three minutes for me to organize my realization and return to my senses.

Throughout that time, she remained beside me, like someone standing guard over a companion circulating their qi in meditation.

“Yohwa.”

As soon as I spoke, she smiled softly, as though she had been waiting for me. Then she handed me a cup of tea simply brewed with a green tea bag.

“Yes. You’ve had a good idea, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Perhaps, if things work out, I might obtain the Korean Peninsula’s most powerful weapon this time.”

“The Korean Peninsula’s... most powerful weapon?”

Cheon Yohwa tilted her head.

Warming my palm against the teacup, I nodded.

“Yes. What do you think the most powerful weapon on the Korean Peninsula is, Yohwa?”

“Huh? Uh, hmm... North Korea’s nuclear missiles?”

“Those vanished without putting so much as a scratch on Tenlegs. Think of something a person could actually wield.”

“Oh, then... The Four Tigers Evil-Slaying Sword?”

As befitted the student council president of a prestigious private high school, she knew even such unusual objects.

Incidentally, Cheon Yohwa had scored in the top band in Korean, mathematics, English, and Korean history on the college entrance exam.

How had she taken it in a world where the government had collapsed? Well, uh. Every November, an anomaly and void called the “College Scholastic Ability Test” appeared on the Korean Peninsula.

Its questions were exceedingly bizarre, but Cheon Yohwa had earned near-perfect marks. Search her bag and you’d even find an “Honorary Seoul National University Student ID.”

Anyway.

“That sword would be quite powerful too, but it’s ultimately weaker than my sword cane. It never actually wrote any myths of its own. In the end, the most powerful weapon in this day and age is one with a ‘story’ of its own powerful enough to cut down anomalies.”

“Hmm... I’m not sure. I don’t really have much interest in weapons, but did our country ever have anything like that?”

“There is one.”

I smiled.

“Yohwa. Have you ever, by any chance, heard of the heart of a beast?”

“What?”

The “bullet that killed a god.”

A German-made Walther PPK pistol.

Serial number 159270.

The Korean Peninsula’s most powerful treasure.

The blow that pierced the heart of Yushin.

That’s right.

The gun that had once assassinated a president was now crying out for me, the Undertaker, to hurry up and loot it.

5

Surprising though it might be, the gun that had accomplished the unprecedented feat of “assassinating a president” was not carefully enshrined in a museum.

Its whereabouts were unknown to begin with.

After the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency committed the assassination, the pistol was transferred to the Ministry of National Defense’s Army forensic research institute.

Immediately after the scientific examination was completed, it was sent to the Security Command, then to Army Headquarters.

Finally, once the trial had concluded, it returned to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency on the reasoning that, “Well, this pistol belongs to another agency anyway, so we ought to give it back, right?”

In South Korea, letting an object pass through three or more groups of civil servants means surrendering ownership of that object forever.

Even “the Korean Peninsula’s most powerful treasure” was no exception.

Naturally, the PPK pistol went missing.

The Korean Central Intelligence Agency claimed:

-“The Security Command confiscated that, though?”

The Security Command claimed:

-“We returned that to the KCIA ages ago, though?”

And so they each insisted.

If this seems like a familiar sight, you are not imagining things. Whether local or national, civil servants share the same DNA.

But this is not merely a matter for ridicule.

Perhaps the civil servants of the time had felt an instinctive fear before this cursed demonic sword... no, demonic gun that had killed a god?

It was an uncanny object that should not exist upon the earth. Feeble mortals could only hasten to return it to the divine realm.

Yes. In the end, the civil servants were right.

Since ancient times, one way of dealing with a curse has been to pretend it simply “does not exist.”

The South Korean government had succeeded in sealing away the cursed object in the wisest possible fashion.

And now I, the Undertaker, needed that object. Quite desperately.

Immediately after parting with Cheon Yohwa, I raced north from Sejong City.

Then I arrived in a certain district of Seoul.

[“... Mr. Undertaker.”]

Only then did the Saintess, who invariably whiled away her time spying on the CCTV camera she had attached to me, speak up.

“Yes?”

[“Are you really planning to go in there? I mean, that’s the void you’ve always warned me, over and over, never to enter. That place.”]

“Yes. You mustn’t enter, Saintess, but I’ll be fine.”

[“...”]

Lightly ignoring her silence, I looked up at the scene before me.

First, Seoul’s famous Namsan rose in the background.

And the building that naturally belonged with the name “Namsan” stood there as well.

The Korean Central Intelligence Agency’s main building. The headquarters of the organization some might know better as the “Agency for National Security Planning.”

A place now reduced to a void.

That’s right.

As I said in the preceding episode, “monopolizing lucky breaks,” which could be called the pinnacle and culmination of genre fiction, had met its end in our world.

At the hands of that vile anomaly called The Total Fortune System.

But why grieve?

Sweet-and-sour pork from a dedicated Chinese restaurant tastes better than buffet food in the first place. Even if monopolizing the entire menu was forbidden, I could simply eat the finest specialty dish.

I, the Undertaker, prided myself on being the Korean Peninsula’s foremost gourmet after Dang Seorin and Tenlegs, appearances notwithstanding.

“Saintess. Today, I’m going to loot the ‘treasure that killed a god.’”

[“...”]

“Please watch over me.”

Today, I would feast on the Korean Peninsula’s greatest lucky break.