Chapter 86 - The Accomplice IV

5

CLAAANG

What shattered the world that had sunk like a dream behind my eyelids was the sound of hammering nearby.

A waking dream. Such things occasionally happened to me, someone who remembered the entirety of his past. In a fleeting instant, the eyes I had just closed in run fifty-three passed into the eyes I opened in run one hundred.

“Whew...”

A breath escaped.

It was Noh Doha. Half her breath lay submerged in the dazzling, white-hot sunlight of early summer, and half was buried in the ultramarine shadows of the abandoned cave mine in Jeongseon.

“Well, somehow or other, I seem to have finished a kitchen knife. Whew. I think I've done a better job than this dwarf, or whatever the little runt is...”

“...”

A mirage danced slowly.

In the breath a person had exhaled, specks of dust rippled through sunlight and shade, then sunlight and shade again.

It seemed the world needed light on one side and shadow on the other to dance. In that case, the blinking of eyes, swimming lightly, endlessly lightly, between attention and blindness, must be the first dance of existence.

“It's about time I tried the next level. Hmm, tongs seem just right. Awakened Undertaker. Go around the village, and if there's a dwarf bastard making something suitable... Awakened Undertaker? Hello? Hey. You. Asshole. Are you listening to me...?”

“Ah, yes. I'm listening.”

For the record, it took less than three seconds for ‘Hey’ to become ‘You’ and ‘You’ to become ‘Asshole’ on Noh Doha's tongue. A magical tongue indeed.

She sneered, pretending to dig out her ear with a hand hoe.

“Have you got iron rods stuck in your ears? I'm getting the hang of this, so find something a little harder than the hoe I just made... Oh?”

She never finished her sentence.

The dwarf anomaly, which had been hammering away at its anvil as though soulless until a moment ago, suddenly extended its hand toward Noh Doha in a smooth motion.

An unmistakable abnormality.

In an instant, I threw my arms around her and sprang back. Caught off guard by the sudden movement, she inadvertently let go of the hoe and dropped it.

“Be careful, Workshop Master.”

“Oh. Well, thank you, but... I don't feel any hostility from it...?”

“There are plenty of anomalies in this world without emotions like hostility. It's not as though radiation fucks people up because it's particularly malicious.”

—...

For some reason, the dwarf anomaly seemed uninterested in us. Instead, it slowly bent at the waist.

The hoe Noh Doha had dropped lay there.

“Hmm...?”

The dwarf picked it up and examined it from every angle, moving slowly, like a video playing at half speed.

—..., ...

WHOOO

Wind blew through its pitch-black eyeholes and mouth hole. From the inside out.

Then something strange happened.

As though it had been made of wind from the beginning, the dwarf anomaly's outline grew smaller and smaller the more wind it poured from its holes.

“Oh...?”

—..., ... ...

Every breath the dwarf expelled washed over the hoe Noh Doha had forged. Like a watercolor painter applying layer after layer of pigment, the dwarf anomaly was adding the final brushstrokes to the hoe with the sound of its breath.

CLATTER

The hoe fell again. Having expelled all its breath, the dwarf had shriveled like a balloon and vanished altogether.

“Interesting. What on earth is this strange phenomenon, Awakened Undertaker...?”

“... I don't know either. I discovered this mining village a long time ago, but I've never investigated it properly.”

“Aha. So you've slogged through a hundred runs, yet you couldn't see through the nature of a single village? Isn't that dereliction of duty...?”

“My apologies. I could have found out if someone hadn't strangled me to death last run.”

Noh Doha blinked and drew her brows together.

“It's not disappearing...”

“Pardon?”

“Normally, anything the blacksmiths make in this village disappears soon afterward. The kitchen knife I made this morning vanished too. But look. Time has passed, and my hoe is still perfectly intact...?”

“Ah.”

I rested a hand on my chin.

“I see. Perhaps the true nature of this ‘Taebaek Mountains Dwarf Mining Village’ void is... a practice ground exclusively for blacksmiths.”

“A practice ground...?”

“Yes. You could also call it a place for passing down a tradition. By making that hoe, you just had your skills ‘recognized’ by that dwarf anomaly, Workshop Master Noh Doha.”

“Oh, I see...”

“I think I can roughly guess how to clear this void, too. There are seven blacksmiths in the mining village. You've eliminated one, so now there are six.”

“Earn recognition from the remaining six craftsmen as well...?”

“Exactly.”

I picked up the hoe. Strange characters were engraved on the blade of this Adamantium hoe—a hoe that probably had never appeared anywhere in the entire history of fiction.

A script I had never seen. A language I couldn't understand. Rendered in the closest-looking letters I could find, it looked like this:

[Dicentra Spectabilis]

Noh Doha craned her head over.

“Hmm. What's this now? I never engraved anything like that...”

“The dwarf anomaly probably carved it with its breath. Well, what else would a blacksmith engrave on something they made? It must be its name.”

“Aha...?”

She took out a notebook. Squinting hard, she carefully copied down the letters of [Dicentra Spectabilis].

“Workshop Master, why are you doing that?”

“Hmm...”

She gave no answer.

From that day on, our routine was set.

First, we sorted the remaining six dwarf blacksmiths into levels according to the difficulty of what each was making.

The dwarf making a small kitchen knife was Level 1. The dwarf making a massive greatsword was Level 6.

“Shall we get started, then...? I'd like to focus and finish this quickly, so you can be my lackey, Awakened Undertaker...”

“Wow. You're probably the only person who uses an infinite regressor as a lackey, Workshop Master.”

“What kind of bullshit is that? You're the one who mortgaged my entire life to the National Road Management Corps and turned me into a lackey...”

“I've got it held in place, Workshop Master.”

“Oh, good...”

CLANG!

Noh Doha's hammer sent sparks flying.

Outwardly, she looked slender, without a single bulging muscle, but she pounded the anvil relentlessly, as though determined to demonstrate what compact, practical muscles could do.

Her long hair fluttered beneath the cave roof. Seen from afar, the figure of the blacksmith, one with her hammer, looked almost as though she were dancing.

Flame and shadow.

A round dance of red and black.

—..., whooo...

Upon seeing the kitchen knife she had made, the Level 1 dwarf, too, exhaled deeply.

The breath of an anomaly that must have crossed over from some other world granted the kitchen knife permission to continue existing in this one. Leaving only its own language upon the blade—a name no one could read—the anomaly perished.

“...”

How had anomalies like these come into being? Even after all my long years of repeated regression, I could only speculate about that intimate secret. I had never arrived at an answer.

I cooked, prepared bathwater, secured a place to sleep, and kept watch for abnormal phenomena nearby, helping Noh Doha keep her focus on ‘slaying anomalies.’ That was my role in this void.

It wasn't a difficult role.

The ‘Assistant’ of run fifty-three had already spent eight years working in sync with the skilled craftswoman before me. Those memories were still engraved behind my eyelids.

“Hmm...”

The next level. Then the next.

In just six days, Noh Doha reached the final blacksmith's trial. The phrase ‘talent freak’ must have been coined for her.

Yet, for some reason, her expression had grown worse with every level she passed. She glared at me, her brows tightly knitted.

“What's wrong?”

“Now that I think about it, I'm fucking annoyed...”

“...?”

“No matter how you look at it, aren't you unnaturally good at being a lackey...? You hand me tongs at just the right moment before I even ask, and when I ask you to hold something so I can hammer it, you hold it at exactly the most comfortable angle. You're practically a drone delivery service. Every time you do it, I'm acutely reminded that you're a creepy regressor pulling that ‘I know everything you don't, nyah-nyah’ move...”

“What the hell?”

I was speechless. Wasn't she a complete lunatic?

“... Nyah-nyah? I've never spoken like that in my life. And creepy? Creepy? Me?”

“Hah. It's a figure of speech. Don't nitpick over a single word. You're the geezer of all geezers, at least a thousand years older than me—a veritable old anomaly. How can someone like you be so petty...?”

“How many lethal strikes are you going to throw at me in a row?”

“There, done...”

CLANG

Noh Doha tapped the sword's grip lightly with her hammer. With a click, the slightly misaligned fittings snapped into place.

Level 6. The greatsword was complete.

—..., ...

The instant she finished the greatsword, the dwarf whipped its head around like an office worker catching the scent of bread from a subway-station bakery.

Then it reached out to breathe eternity into the craftswoman's masterpiece—

“Ah. Hold on...”

But its hand merely swept through empty air.

Noh Doha had abruptly pulled the greatsword back.

—...?

“Hmm.”

—...?

The dwarf's pitch-black eyeholes looked up at Noh Doha like a cat whose squeeze-tube treat had been snatched away before its eyes.

She was grinning.

—...? ...?

It hopped. Then hopped again. Its race wasn't called dwarves for nothing: no matter how it stretched onto tiptoe, it had no hope of reaching the greatsword she held high overhead.

Question marks were popping up in my head, too.

What was with this woman? Had tormenting humanity finally ceased to satisfy her, so she'd decided to start being an asshole to anomalies as well?

Noh Doha sneered.

“I'm not interested in helping you pass on. Not in the slightest. Nor do I intend to become your disciple. If you decide to ascend on your own with some ‘Now you must inherit our secret arts’ nonsense, you'll only be causing me trouble...”

—...?

“Honestly, I don't need these junk tools...”

She put everything she had made so far—the hoe, kitchen knife, dagger, sickle, pitchfork, longsword, and greatsword—into the furnace and melted them down.

The mining village's furnace reduced the tools back to Adamantium in an instant. Her hammer came down at once on the softened mass.

CLAAANG!

The mineral that had never originally existed in this world began to take shape, rippling beautifully.

CLANG! CLAAANG!

Without pause. Without regard for the sweat pouring off her, as though she meant to pour everything she had into this.

“Small hammer.”

“Ah, yes, Workshop Master.”

“Puller.”

“Here you are.”

“Sandwich.”

“Yep.”

Whenever she asked, I handed her tools and shifted the workpiece this way and that.

—...

The dwarf watched the two of us work with its empty eyeholes.

How much time had passed? Noh Doha, who hadn't wiped her forehead once throughout the forging, brushed away her sweat with the back of her hand. Then she took off her monocle and slipped it into her front pocket.

“Whew, finally finished...”

The finished item's unusual form left me briefly at a loss for words.

“This is...”

A sword cane.

With a soft metallic hiss, she drew the gleaming blue blade herself to demonstrate. A cane sword. What was called a swordstick in English.

The weapon, which served as a walking stick ordinarily and could be used for self-defense in an emergency, revealed itself clearly.

“Awakened Undertaker. On our way here, you asked me to make you a weapon, didn't you...?”

“... Yes.”

“Hah. Right. This is the weapon I offer you...”

A cane. The simplest assistive device one could make for someone who had difficulty walking. Thus, it bore Noh Doha's handprints.

A sword. The most common weapon a person could take up to kill something. Thus, it would come to bear mine.

So utterly like Noh Doha, and like me.

“...”

“Wait just a moment...”

Noh Doha set an engraving chisel against the blade. A metallic screech slid along it.

[Dicentra Spectabilis]

The name we had presumed belonged to the dwarf blacksmith who had first breathed life into the hoe.

With her notebook open, she glanced at it as she engraved the characters onto the swordstick's blade, one by one. Seven names in all. The letters of a foreign land—no, another world—writhed like beautiful tattoos.

And at the very end:

Doha—‘Crossing the River.’

Characters pronounced exactly like Noh Doha's name, and carrying the same meaning as the workshop she had run, flowed down the snowy-white blade like raindrops.

“There, here you are...”

—...

—...

—..., ...

When I looked around, the dwarf anomaly had disappeared. There hadn't even been any breath to imbue the sword with eternity.

Only a deep wind swept through the mine's gorge.

WHOOOOO

The mountain range's breath descended from the cliffs and rushed past us and the swordstick.

Where the wind, like a long sigh, had swept through, the village vanished. The Adamantium ore, the furnace, the stone buildings, and the anvils the dwarves had used—all had been swept away by the wind.

Only Noh Doha, myself, and a single sword remained at the entrance to the enormous cave.

“...”

It was a strange phenomenon.

But then, voids were strange by nature.

Without sparing so much as a sidelong glance for the disappearance of the dwarf mining village, Noh Doha simply held the swordstick out to me.

Evening. The crimson sunset blazed behind her, printing the scene before me onto my corneas.

The moment I finally reached out, the moment I was about to grasp the swordstick, her lips—which had seemed as though they would remain silent forever—parted.

“Do you really intend to take it...?”

“...”

“It's a good sword. One I'll never be able to make again. It will play its part admirably in your future hunts and slaughter. Do you understand what I mean...? Awakened Undertaker. From now on, you'll have to give this sword some of the credit for your accomplishments. Your achievements, great deeds, successes and failures, killings—shall we say it gets a half share in all of them...? In short, if you take hold of this, you are accepting this sword as your accomplice...”

“...”

I nodded.

I took the sword.

“I'll name it Doha.”

“... Hah.”

Noh Doha gave a small smile.

The sunset lay level with that smile, casting its red light.

“The split is fifty-fifty...”

Good grief. As if anyone could forget she was an exploitative employer, she had drawn up a vicious profit-sharing agreement.

6

There is an epilogue.

Everything should have reset and returned to its original state when a new run began, but for some reason, the swordstick ‘Doha’—‘Crossing the River’—was an exception.

From run one hundred onward, Doha was always planted at the cave entrance halfway up the Taebaek Mountains. Even though Noh Doha never made me a sword in any subsequent run.

“...”

It was something that could only be described as an anomaly. In exchange, however, the ‘Dwarf Mining Village’ void that should have occupied the cave was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps the ‘mining village’ really had crossed over from another world. And perhaps time flowed differently in that world, leaving ‘Doha’ outside the flow of time here, anchored like a fixed coordinate.

Or perhaps the sword cane called Doha had solidified into a void and anomaly in its own right, replacing the mining village.

Either way, the mining village had evaporated. Forever, along with its scant veins of Adamantium. I would never learn the nature of that void now.

It was the moment another ‘personal item’ joined the silver bell I always farmed from the waiting hall at Busan Station.

“Hmm? Wait a moment, Awakened Undertaker...”

“What is it?”

“Let me see that cane...”

Noh Doha roughly snatched Doha from me, all but forcibly taking it.

“Hmm...”

Then she even put on her monocle, scrutinized the sword from every angle, and checked it by drawing and sheathing the blade over and over with a series of clicks.

A long, thoughtful hum escaped her.

“... Awakened Undertaker. This. This sword. Where did you get it...?”

“Ah. It was a gift from the finest blacksmith on the Korean Peninsula.”

“The finest on the Korean Peninsula? Hmm, well, it does look the part... Very well. Someone who made a masterpiece like this would be entitled to call themselves that. But they're Korean? Who is it...?”

Shadows smoldered in her eyes, beneath their heavy dark circles.

“Why? Interested?”

“Well, of course... Someone with this kind of skill ought to be brought into the National Road Management Corps, or recruited somewhere, and put to work as an unpaid slave for life. That's the only proper way to use them...”

How could I not burst out laughing at that?

At my hearty laughter, Noh Doha knitted her brows tightly. A pair of pitch-black islands—twin islands, and therefore not lonely—glared at me.

“Huh? You're laughing? What's so funny? Do you want to fucking die...?”

“No. Absolutely not. Since you've asked, I'll obediently tell you. Workshop Master. The person who made that sword is my—”

- The Accomplice. End.