Chapter 31 - The Maker I

1

Some of the people who have listened to my stories so far might be wondering:

So what the hell is the government doing?

Amid all this chaos, all the cultists’ batshit antics, this crazy apocalypse where Cthulhu tentacles crawl around and World Tree zombies sprout, what exactly are the politicians and the government up to?

First, there’s something I’d like to tell those people.

'Guys, the Korean government says it has something to say!'

That’s right. We ought to consider the government’s position, too.

You’ve probably already heard that the National Assembly building launched itself into space the moment the gates erupted in Seoul.

For the record, the president was right in the middle of delivering an address to the Assembly on the supplementary budget. It was a truly moving moment, as the Republic of Korea shot to the forefront of the space-pioneering age.

The grand unification of the ruling and opposition parties was fated to take place not on that wretched Earth, but in a new colony called outer space.

From the politicians’ perspective, wasn’t Korea merely their shabby old homeland now? Just like the Portuguese royal family, which relocated its home-base Command Center to Brazil to escape Napoleon, the Korean government went on summer vacation.

Q) What was left on the Korean Peninsula?

A) A few Assembly members who hadn’t even attended the address, ministers, provincial governors, mayors, and county heads. And a whole, whole lot of monsters.

While society’s infrastructure was still not completely ruined, the politicians foolishly wasted three days.

You’d understand if you experienced it yourself, but in an apocalypse, three days was more than enough time to drive people insane.

Surprisingly few tough guys could keep it together after hearing, 'Oh my, the monsters are holding a savings-club meeting in our apartment complex’s park and parking lot!'

And finally, on the third day, the government—or its scattered crumbs—delivered a national address that set off the grand festival’s final fireworks.

-My fellow citizens. The Republic of Korea remains safe. For the time being, please rest assured and continue your respective livelihoods.

A thoroughly unremarkable speech.

What the politicians had failed to account for was none other than the Korean people’s DNA.

Boundless trust in the government was etched into that DNA. The people of this country remembered the blitzkrieg King Seonjo, Yi Yeon, had demonstrated when the Japanese army landed. They also remembered the patriotic spirit with which, when North Korean forces invaded, the national army had immediately retaken Uijeongbu and proclaimed its resolve to defend Seoul.

Get fooled once, and it’s the swindler’s fault. Get fooled twice, and you’re an idiot. Get fooled three times, and you should just hand in your Homo sapiens license. And Koreans had not yet been eliminated by natural selection.

“Rest assured, my ass!”

“Goddammit! I knew these bastards would pull this!”

“South! Head south, no matter what!”

The civilians of the Korean Peninsula evacuated in astonishingly good order.

“Citizens! North of the Han River is still safe! Please trust the government and our armed forces, and go ba—”

“Who’s this asshole?”

“They say he’s the deputy mayor for political affairs.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“Dunno. Toss him.”

“Huh? Wh-whoa, wh—?”

Seoul’s deputy mayor for political affairs—third in line to serve as acting mayor in an emergency, and the only survivor—personally rushed out to Banpo Bridge to put on a show of dissuading the citizens. The citizens of Seoul, however, simply threw him off the bridge, giving him a hands-on lesson in the Han River’s water temperature.

It was such a clean, magnificent throw that the citizens of old Prague would have given it a standing ovation.

Things might have improved a little if the politicians had simply admitted the truth: *'We are, admittedly, fucked right now, but judging by the monsters’ distribution, north of the Han River is surprisingly safe. To be more precise, every part of the country is equally dangerous.'*

But what could they do? They could only blame their predecessors for burning through the public’s trust stacks twice already.

Once the Republic of Seoul went spectacularly belly-up, the remaining coalition governments had little choice either. Mayors and county heads across the country engraved deep in their hearts the national guiding principle handed down in this land since ancient times: “Every man for himself.”

The crowning touch—and the killing blow—was that the mayor of Busan, who should have been closest to claiming the throne in these troubled times, fled to Japan of all places.

Before long, the “Second Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea” was established in the Japanese archipelago, with the mayor of Busan installed as its leader.

-My fellow citizens. Malicious rumors are circulating that I abandoned my duties as mayor and fled. This is untrue.

-I have merely relocated to the diplomatic arena in order to secure foreign assistance more easily and reclaim the territory of the Republic of Korea!

But even the government’s most ardent supporters tilted their heads at the fact that the provisional government’s capital was Fukuoka, Japan. 'Uh, was that where the provisional government’s capital used to be? I thought it was a little farther west.'

The Japanese must have been a little rattled, too.

After all, wasn’t a Korean provisional government traditionally a fighting organization with a hobby of packing bombs in lunchboxes instead of food? How could anyone rest easy without knowing what these lunchbox otaku would do next?

After various twists and turns, the “Second Provisional Government” was ultimately shunned by its own citizens and foreigners alike. In my opinion, the cause of death was suicide.

And to put the cherry on top, there was even an attempted military coup on the Korean Peninsula by people who had apparently mistaken the era by about seventy years.

-My fellow citizens. Today, the fearless servicemen defending the territory of this nation, the Republic of Korea, myself included, have agreed on the overriding principle that we can no longer stand idly by amid this political chaos.

-To overthrow a regime that has lost the people’s trust through corruption and incompetence, we, the members of our armed forces, have risen as one!

But the military coup failed.

The reason was simple. Astonishingly, the boss-level monster Tenlegs turned out to be an ardent champion of democracy.

The military units heading for the Blue House kept getting their destination mixed up and arriving in Tenlegs’ stomach instead.

The generals hadn’t known this, but Tenlegs had a habit of recognizing any moving group of three hundred or more people as a food truck.

The military unit that tried to enter “Sauron’s Tower” in my previous story was a remnant of the already collapsed national armed forces. Those surviving units, too, slowly disappeared for their own various reasons.

And that concludes the short answer to the question, “So what did the government do?”

An age of chaos. An utter mess. Everything in tatters.

But for a lotus to bloom, muddy water must first collect.

Even among the ranks of the Korean government, which had so spectacularly screwed the pooch in its initial response, a single lotus blossomed.

Noh Doha.

A grade-seven civil servant who had worked at a public rehabilitation hospital.

He was the star of this episode.

2

Paradoxically, the reason Noh Doha succeeded where other civil servants failed was that he was only a grade-seven civil servant.

From the outset, he had never dreamed that he could replace the Korean government. Managing taxes? Electing Assembly members? Universal welfare? Why should I care about any of that?

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I don’t particularly think of myself as a civil servant...”

He often said things like that to me. Not just to me, either. He said them to everyone. I couldn’t say for sure, but he probably said exactly the same things back when he was living off the taxpayers’ money.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I dislike the public...”

“No, isn’t that something you really shouldn’t say?”

“What does it matter, awakened Undertaker? Are there more employees in the world who like their bosses, or who dislike them? The latter, surely? For civil servants, the public is the boss. So naturally, more civil servants dislike the public...”

Noh Doha muttered with his shoulders sagging.

I first met this exceptionally eccentric individual in my eleventh run. I’d heard bits and pieces about him through other people before that, but this was the first time we actually made each other’s acquaintance.

“Ah, all done...”

“Oh.”

“Would you stand up and try walking...?”

You see, in my eleventh run, my left leg had been cut off, so I needed a prosthetic.

I stood up. I tried walking casually, jogging a little, and hopping up and down in place. Noh Doha watched every part of the process closely.

“How is it? Any discomfort anywhere...?”

“None. Wow, this thing works amazingly well. I can feel all the muscles and nerves, just like it’s my real leg.”

“That’s a relief, then...”

Noh Doha smiled faintly.

Depending on who was looking, that smile might have seemed creepy or sinister. But my long experience as a regressor had left me fairly free of such prejudices. So I could look at his face and assess it without hesitation as a “kind smile.”

“If something goes wrong, you may experience stabbing nerve pain. Just think of it as losing a gacha roll with a five-percent failure rate... Come back to me if that happens. I’ll make you another one for half price...”

Noh Doha was a maker of assistive devices.

Assistive devices were aids used by people with mobility disabilities. Wheelchairs, crutches—you know, things like that.

Even before the gate crisis, he had worked at a public hospital, repairing and making various assistive devices.

Apparently, even then, he had been well known among wounded veterans who had lost ankles to land mines and the like. Veterans’ hospitals had supposedly been eager to recruit him, but he himself didn’t seem particularly interested.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I dislike soldiers...”

“Just to check, Mr. Noh, are there any human beings you actually like?”

“No, there aren’t...?”

“...”

It was practically a miracle that this man hadn’t become a shut-in.

Even Noh Doha had his concerns. Concerns about his patients, specifically those with severely limited mobility.

“It’s been getting a little harder for the patients to get around...”

Patients with nerve damage in their lower backs had to get around in wheelchairs.

Things were somewhat better when vehicles with accessible seating could still operate. But as the years passed, not only did gasoline run out, the asphalt roads themselves grew uneven. They were difficult to navigate in cars, let alone wheelchairs.

Most people would have given up at this point.

For one thing, once the gate crisis began in earnest, the very idea that people with disabilities ought to receive treatment became quite rare. This was an age when being killed by a monster counted as dying of natural causes. Without Noh Doha, I too would have calmly abandoned my eleventh run the moment my left leg was cut off.

“The elderly patients also say the roads are so difficult that getting to and from our workshop is becoming harder and harder...”

But this exceptionally eccentric individual really was a breed apart.

“Then shouldn’t we make the roads a little easier to use...?”

Dragging his drooping body along, Noh Doha entered negotiations.

At this point, quite apart from the increasingly callous attitude toward people with disabilities, their actual numbers were growing more rapidly than ever. Losing an arm or a leg fighting monsters didn’t even qualify as a badge of honor.

And Noh Doha was an awakened whose ability was “Assistive Device Crafting.”

The assistive devices he made had the effect of feeling like real muscle to their users, even if they were made of wood or iron. All you had to do was put on the prosthetic leg and start running. No rehabilitation or adjustment period was necessary.

In short, an enormous number of his “regular customers” were awakened.

Just about every guild leader knew him personally. Even if they were perfectly healthy themselves, wouldn’t they need to send an injured guild member straight to his assistive-device workshop?

Noh Doha was a true former civil servant who never refused a bribe. Fail to get acquainted in advance, and you’d hear, “Ah, sir, there’s a bit of a backlog for your appointment. You only need to wait another six months.” Once they considered the chances of an awakened with severed limbs surviving for six months, even the haughtiest guild leaders found it a little easier to bow.

“Well, Mr. Noh! What brings you all the way out here?”

“Ah, yes... I was thinking of repairing the road from Haeundae to Bansong-dong...”

“Pardon? The road? You? Why?”

“I have a patient who lives in Bansong-dong, and they were complaining that the entire route to our workshop had been destroyed. Finding them a house in Haeundae would be easy, but I don’t want to be that considerate, so I thought I might just build them a road...”

Normally, building someone a road was a far greater act of consideration than finding them a house, but this lunatic’s brain hadn’t received the proper balance patch.

“But you have a firm grip on this part of Bansong, Guild Leader. I was wondering whether you could lend a little help if I built a road...”

“Hmm. So no other guilds are involved? This is just your own project, Mr. Noh?”

“Yees...”

“Oh, then of course we’ll help! Just tell us what you need!”

And so a single-lane asphalt road was completed, connecting Haeundae District, where Noh Doha’s workshop stood, to Bansong-dong in Busan.

Since they were simply restoring an existing road, it wasn’t a particularly difficult construction project. Noh Doha’s workshop took responsibility for all the work and subsequent maintenance.

Thanks to that road, one of Noh Doha’s patients, a seventy-one-year-old named Lee, could safely come in for appointments, even if the trip took a while. The patient was happy. Noh Doha was happy. Bansong-dong’s property values were happy, too.

That was the beginning.