Chapter 84 - The Accomplice II

3

Aside from uncovering the secret that Noh Doha was into choking play, everything went smoothly according to plan.

SG Net did get a little noisy, though.

-Anonymous: Heard the National Road Management Corps has no commander right now? Is that true?

-[National Roads]Historian: True. Our commander is away on extended leave.

└Anonymous: ?

└Anonymous: ?

└BookishGirl: That machine even knew what a vacation was??

-[National Roads]Historian: Yep. All the corps members were shocked too. As far as I know, the commander hasn't even taken a day off since the corps was founded, let alone a vacation. Then suddenly she booked a whole 21 days of leave and vanished without a word.

└Anonymous: You really can't predict a single thing about that woman. Must be genuinely nuts.

-Goryeojang: ? lol

└[National Roads]Historian: What? Why?

└Goryeojang: She signed herself out for exactly 21 days and left alone without a word? Did she disappear without a trace too? lmao

└[National Roads]Historian: Yeah. Why?

└Goryeojang: lmaooooooo

└[National Roads]Historian: ?

-[Three Thousand]WitchTrialJudge: Hmm...

“Hmm...”

Just as I read that comment, Noh Doha actually hummed beside me.

I folded my smartphone shut and returned from the virtual world to the real one.

“What's the matter?”

“... Nothing. This ore is fascinating, that's all. It's light. Hard, too. This really is something that doesn't exist on Earth. What did you call it, adaman-whatever...?”

“Adamantium. Be careful. You'll be in serious trouble if you get confused and call it mithril, even by accident.”

“...? Those two words have absolutely nothing in common...”

Noh Doha took out her monocle and put it on.

Her left eye's vision was particularly poor, but this was also a ritual of sorts. A signal that she was about to get down to serious work.

Like soccer players brushing the grass or praying to God as they ran onto the field.

“Hmmm...”

For a long time, she wandered around the mining village, the sight of dwarves forging weapons reflected in her monocle.

CLANG, CLANG!

The dwarves hammered away at their armaments mechanically, starting the exact same process again the moment they finished. But their finished products did not remain in reality. They simply dissolved into the air and vanished.

Noh Doha raised a hand and felt around in the remnants left in the air.

“Hmmm... A village where everything you make disappears immediately. Still, I think I could learn their smithing skills by watching...”

“What do you think? Figured anything out?”

“Well. Not particularly. You keep calling me a blacksmith or whatever, but I'm only a prosthetics technician... an assistive-device maker. Suddenly demanding that I make you a weapon just puts me in a difficult position...” she muttered.

Without taking her eyes off the dwarf, she extended her right arm toward me.

I snatched a hammer and tongs from another dwarf's grasp and handed them over. Her pale fingers silently closed around the tools.

“What am I, Doraemon? Making arms and legs is hard enough, but then it's build roads, organize and run the National Road Management Corps, balance the warlord guilds—fuuuck. Do you think I'm some vending machine that spits things out whenever you poke it...?”

CLANG.

Watching the dwarf out of the corner of her eye, she copied its movements.

CLANG.

Perhaps unfamiliar with the material, her hammer struck slightly off target.

“Hmm...”

The corner of her mouth twitched. With her lips pressed shut, she kept imitating the dwarf from start to finish for hours.

By nightfall, she held a sword. A crude blade, vaguely clumsy in shape and completely unbalanced.

Yet the outline revealed beneath the night sky was unmistakably that of a sword. Her narrow, moonlight-like gaze traced the blade's curve. That gaze had such a sharp physical quality that, were the two laid against each other, it seemed the sword would be the one shaved away.

“Hmm. I'm not quite sure about this. I'll have to start by copying something more manageable, like a hand hoe...”

From that day on, Noh Doha all but stopped eating and drinking as she copied the dwarves one by one.

CLAAANG.

I followed her around carrying tools, helping her like an assistant. We were a perfect match.

“...”

The stagnant shadows of dwarves, taking the place of humans who had fled the anomalies.

The mine of a mining village fallen into decline.

A village with no one but the two of us, where only the clang of metal rang out for eternity.

Naturally, it brought back a memory.

From hundreds of years ago.

The only time Noh Doha had called me something other than “Awakened Undertaker.”

4

“I'd like to work as an assistant in your workshop, Workshop Master. Please hire me.”

“Hmm...”

It was my fifty-third run.

Up to that point in my life as a regressor, the National Road Management Corps had never been founded. It existed only as a plan on paper, stored in the memory palace inside my head.

Around this time, I was searching for someone suited to lead a quasi-governmental organization. In other words, someone fit to become the most powerful person on the Korean Peninsula.

Dang Seorin... was the first candidate who came to mind, but she was my last resort. Perhaps I was playing favorites, but I didn't want to impose any more restrictions on her freedom.

I... was also an option. But I needed to run around the front lines holding back anomalies. It was difficult for Xiang Yu to double as Xiao He.

There were four requirements.

-Someone who would not be corrupted by the lust for power. In other words, mental fortitude or character.

-Someone who nevertheless knew how to wield power. In other words, competence or instinct.

-Someone who pursued practical benefit through a shared dynamic system, rather than public benefit as an arithmetic sum of individuals. In other words, conviction or philosophy.

-Someone who would set foot on a path no one had taken. In other words, courage or nerve.

Requirements that were practically impossible to meet.

But practically impossible was not outright impossible. The countless years at my disposal allowed me to cross the gap between “impossible” and “almost impossible.”

Testing began.

[“Hey, Undertaker! Aren't we the biggest family on the Korean Peninsula now? Let's teach those bastards in Incheon a lesson...”]

[“What? Connect the road all the way to Seoul? Why the hell would we do that? We'd just be wasting our strength building roads for those other guild bastards...”]

[“Taker. Sorry, but could you take a break? You're so damn good that your old pal here has trouble getting anyone to listen to him. I'll send you on a little vacation, and when you come back, I'll...”]

Rejected. On hold. Rejected.

Countless candidates were considered and eliminated. One by one, I became their acquaintance, colleague, friend, or partner, spending at least five years with each, sometimes as many as ten.

I gave them power and stripped it away. I bestowed honor and trampled it underfoot. If that still wasn't enough, I observed their character from every angle, even if it meant moving on to another run.

The position of commander in the National Road Management Corps I envisioned demanded that much scrutiny.

Like a vast tidal wave, I swept over the people of the Korean Peninsula one by one, raising the water level higher and higher, until at last I reached a secluded alley.

“An assistant. It's true we're always short-handed here... But why? Huh. Looking at you, you seem perfectly capable of joining another guild and making a comfortable living...?”

Noh Doha.

She was a woman who suited an island.

The sort of person I would never have met in my entire life had I not been a regressor.

She was already famous for making custom assistive devices to replace people's lost limbs. I, too, had relied on her services a few times in other runs.

But this was my first attempt at establishing a closer relationship than that of customer and shopkeeper.

I bowed my head.

“My father had trouble with his legs his entire life. I'd like a job where I can be of some help to people who have difficulty getting around.”

“Ah. Your father...?”

“He passed away.”

It was a lie.

“An anomaly killed him.”

“Hmmm...”

Noh Doha's thoughtful hum had much the same resonance then as it did now. A vibration that seemed to tap against a person and map their contours.

Like a bat casting a net of ultrasound to perceive its surroundings.

“Well, wouldn't taking revenge on anomalies be better than helping other people...?”

“...”

“Then again, encouraging someone to devote themselves to revenge is just as ridiculous as presuming to tell them to abandon it. Very well. If you don't mind being a temporary apprentice, why not give it a try...?”

She was a woman who, if the world wasn't an island, would make an island within it to live on.

The net she had spread throughout her world was by no means wide, but its mesh was all the finer for it.

What to let in and what to let slip through—she was the sort to haul everything up, inspect it piece by piece, and then decide.

I could tell just by watching how she treated the other apprentices in her workshop.

“Don't come in tomorrow...”

“Pardon?”

“It means you're fired. Got steel pins stuck in your earholes? Making me repeat the same fucking thing. Shall I pull them out for you...?”

“N-no. Workshop Master! Wait!”

The fired employee had attended to a customer who'd lost a leg, then muttered over lunch, “Bastard's still young, and he's sitting there with that fucking end-of-the-world face just because he lost a limb. Jesus, fuck, hardly anyone's intact in a world like this.”

The fired employee cried, but nobody helped him. Worker protections? Labor standards laws? Words reeking of Western influence like those don't exist in this land of Eastern courtesy.

“Oh, sir! With all this snow making the roads so difficult, how did you get all the way here? Here, have a nice hot cup of instant coffee.”

“Oh, but this is so precious. Thank you...”

And I was a top-of-the-line ultimate anti-elderly weapon, someone who had even gotten the Sword Empress—the biggest lunatic on the Korean Peninsula—to call me her little brother. Naturally, I had no trouble looking after the elderly customers who made up most of the workshop's clientele.

To Noh Doha, whose skull would surely reveal the words “Respect Your Elders” engraved inside if you cracked it open, I must have been a truly desirable recruit.

“Apprentice Undertaker.”

“Employee Undertaker.”

“Employee Jang.”

“Assistant Jang.”

Each time her way of addressing me changed, Workshop Master Noh Doha's staff roster underwent another overhaul.

Realizing she no longer needed to lower her standards, she awakened as a true member of the bourgeoisie. She more or less dumped all the troublesome jobs on me: managing personnel, customers, internal factions, improving profits, and so on.

“Assistant.”

Eight years.

That was how long it took the six-syllable title “Apprentice Undertaker” to shrink to the two-syllable “Assistant” in her speech.

Only one syllable shed every two years. What a difficult person to get close to.

“Yes, Workshop Master?”

“Aren't you evacuating, Assistant? You know, they say the northern cities are getting eaten away by anomalies one by one, and they're slowly coming south...”

“Come on, Workshop Master. Where else could I evacuate to from Busan?”

“Japan, perhaps. Or China. Or farther south, to Southeast Asia. Well, surely the world always has an infinite number of places to run to...”

“Oh, do you think those places are any better off? I'll pass.”

I wasn't the only unusual one.

I felt this every time I faced the end, but a surprising number of people in every run refused to flee, right to the very last.

Noh Doha was no exception.

“Have you heard? Three Thousand Worlds is assembling one final suicide squad to launch a counterattack.”

“Hmm. Do you think they'll succeed...?”

“It'll be difficult. The problem is that even if they succeed, there's no prospect of anything beyond that. It was already over the moment the anomalies formed a ‘monster wave.’”

“Oh?”

“Anomalies aren't particularly close to one another. Their very types and natures differ. But if they've mixed together to form an army, that means all the incompatible types and natures have been excluded, and the rest have fused into something like a single organism. No, even ‘organism’ could be misleading. It's simply... a mass of cancer cells. A bug in the world. Even if we defend Busan this time, the anomalies will keep spreading bugs in every direction, over and over, without any sense of purpose.”

“Hmmm...”

Noh Doha smiled with her eyes.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Sometimes... I find myself thinking that you really do know a great many things, Assistant.”

“...”

“Well. It doesn't particularly matter...”

The next day, even the final suicide squad the Korean Peninsula had scraped together was swallowed by the anomalies surging in like a tidal wave.

“Assistant.”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing? It's eight, and you haven't opened the door. Slacking off now that you're the most senior employee? Shall I help you write your resignation...?”

“No, no, not at all, Workshop Master.”

CLICK.

I flipped the sign on the glass door from [Closed] to [Open].

On the day the Korean Peninsula's last city fell.

Noh Doha's Workshop opened for business, just as it always did.