Chapter. 13. Hunter, Scavenger, and Swordsman (8)
****
There was indescribable regret in Woojin’s voice when he said that he worked for Raptor.
“…I couldn’t look away. If you think about it with common sense, it would have been better for the world if everyone, including me, died there. The countless wounded raptors I saved will produce casualties like them. But, but… when I saw it in front of my eyes… I felt weak. Yeah… I’m old. The iron will of the past has worn away along with the aging body. I thought not. I thought I could just remain Woojin as time passed…”
“No one here, no normal person in the world, would criticize you.”
Lisa, who was listening to the story next to him, tried to comfort the old man on the shoulder, but Woojin raised his hand and pushed her away.
“I’m already blaming myself. You can’t run away or refute it. From that day on, I lived as Raptor’s doctor. Two children pushed my wheelchair and saved the lives of countless animals. I could often see them scalping people alive, whom I had saved with my own hands, from afar. He was limping on the leg I had repaired and was shouting while holding a blood-soaked knife. You understand me? No no. That can never happen. Instead of using my skills as a doctor to save my children and myself, I killed them. “His life was saved, but in return, Woojin as a doctor died.”
Ian could neither comfort nor criticize the old man, whose hands were shaking slightly.
I had a conversation like that with Woojin a long time ago. One of the patients secretly went into the warehouse and stole all the medicine, and Woo-jin, who had neither morphine nor alcohol to use right away, was cursing the hospital to leave and harvesting all the aloe that was being grown to treat burns and making alcohol.
=========
“Inspiration.”
“They are fucking ungrateful bastards, they are dirty thieves who are opening up hospitals that are as bad as dogs…”
“Young man.”
“why! If you’re going to irritate me by saying things like picking people apart, get out of there! “It’s enough to do it alone!”
“…Why did you quit your mercenary job?”
“what? Why is that suddenly happening again?”
“That’s right. Woojin is a mercenary whose name I even know. If I wanted to work at a hospital, I would have done it at the same time. “Then you wouldn’t have been boiling a pot of aloe to squeeze out a bottle of alcohol like this.”
=========
It was about 8 months after my life was saved by his hands. Although my pronunciation was slightly slurred, my pronunciation didn’t leak, so I was about to ask something I’d been curious about for a long time, as the money issue came up.
Ian thought Woojin’s answer at the time was truly shocking.
=========
“If you came here and collected all the nonsense you said, you would come out with a book, but I would count today’s book among them. Why do you want to be a doctor and also be a mercenary? “Hey.”
“I don’t think it’s a particularly illogical story.”
“Again, you’re saying such harsh things about logic and efficiency. How many times do you tell me that it’s keeping you tied to the past? Please let me go. It means to be free. Why did you quit? That’s just it, you bastard! Is there a grand reason why people want to get rid of work? “It’s because I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s hard to understand!”
“Okay, stir the pot, you bastard!” “Throw away the cigarettes you can’t smoke!”
=========
Every time he was asked, Woojin answered that he just did it because he didn’t like it. just. I just hate it. Just because it’s annoying. And on days when I stayed up all night drinking, I just didn’t want to kill more people. So he ran away.
========
“As you get older… you think more. That’s right. I didn’t hesitate to do something illegal in order to survive. If I just look at it, I realize that even if I live like that, I will die when the time comes. What should I say about this? I felt like a student who didn’t do any homework but had to take a test a few hours later. It was scary to think that I didn’t have much time left to face the people who were killed, exploded, and dismembered by my hands. I became afraid of killing people. “I decided to quit my job as a mercenary in that mental state because it would be easy to die.”
“Then why are you using the same name? Just yesterday, there were three people who were chopped into turrets while screaming that they would get money for their blood. “If you really wanted to run away that much, you should change your name.”
“Hey, you have pride, you bastard. As for being a murderer, you should at least be proud of the fact that you are a murderer. Well, I can’t help it, so I have to put aside all things justice and revenge, and just keep the fact that I killed someone on the head. If you want to run away from there, you really have to run away without being able to settle for even a single moment of your life. “Unless I rip your brains out of your head.”
“…When didn’t I tell you to be free?”
“therefore. Only when you face it can you become free. I’m not asking you to understand it right away. When the time comes, you too will understand. “Because you have lived as both an animal and a human.”
========
It was the belief of a man named Woojin and the will of the man who made Ian Desmont live as Metal Joe.
Woojin, who had been so strong, eventually confessed that he had abandoned his beliefs for the sake of those two children.
“Neither the Hippocratic Oath nor the Declaration of Geneva tell us how to act in times like this! Many doctors of this era say, ‘As a doctor, I can only save lives when there is a patient in front of me.’ He said. But isn’t that… an escape? If my medical practice creates more victims, how can it be medical…”
“Elder…”
“I’ve never experienced saving someone’s life so terribly. It hurt more than when both my legs were cut off. I devoted myself to medical practice just to distract myself from the human defeat of a man named Woojin. Naturally, I touched a lot of those cyborgs and became familiar with how they were made and how to repair them. I made Mahmer’s legs and Riza’s arms that I saw during the day by combining the knowledge I learned there with the prosthetic technology I originally had. “To begin with, their technology wasn’t that great, so my results ended up being insignificant.”
At Woojin’s words, Liza raised her arms. It certainly looked unnatural and heavier than the older generation’s high-tech prosthetic hands, but it still seemed to have no problem moving, holding, and releasing it.
That was difficult to understand. A prosthetic hand is not just a simple machine like a hydraulic pump and lever. Even though it is a simple movement, it requires tremendous cutting-edge technology to be able to move according to Liza’s will like that. How can an old man on the black market obtain such high-tech parts that are not easily obtained even in the dome?
“You look like it’s hard to understand.”
“Honestly… I can’t say no. Is this possible? No matter how much of a genius he is, he could easily make my own chin or someone else’s limbs and attach them without even learning anything… but this is different, isn’t it? “Maybe you were more of a genius than I thought?”
“What is genius? Okay… I guess I should get back to the main topic soon.”
Woojin pushed the empty can on the table with his arm to make room, then opened his mouth to Lisa.
“Lisa. request.”
“Yes, old man.”
As if she had already told her, Lisa placed her mechanical prosthetic hand on the dirty table that had been roughly rubbed with canned broth.
He then took a screwdriver from his pocket and calmly began to disassemble her arms one by one.
As the screws were removed one by one, the streamlined exterior was opened, and the inside was revealed, Ian and Budlam Dorian’s faces began to become filled with astonishment.
Inside her prosthetic hand, biological tissue, clearly something alive, was pulsating between mechanical parts like a net.
****
Kirilik- Chagrak. Slam!
Lisa calmly assembled her arm using familiar hand movements. Budlam held his breath involuntarily when he saw a part sticking to the side of the screwed part as if it were crawling, drawn by living tissue.
In the silence that contained so much meaning, the first to speak was Lisa.
“I was a college student, a scavenger, and a vagabond.”
Liza bent her arms, slowly folding her fingers one by one, as if testing her assembled hands.
“I won’t tell you what life is like for someone without arms in the wilderness. “My comrades abandoned me after I lost both arms while running away from the mutants, and although I was barely able to save my life when I was noticed by the Dom’s transport unit that came to load the refugees, I was no different from a living corpse.”
At the time, Dom could not afford to take care of every single civilian patient like her. She couldn’t wash or eat, and her flesh was rotting away due to infection, so she couldn’t even work as a prostitute, so she was pushed around the refugee camp, waiting for the moment to die. I thought the end had finally come when someone grabbed her by the back as she collapsed in a dirty alley.
“I have heard rumors of people eating human flesh. “I thought maybe I was being dragged to that place.”
It wasn’t. The person who picked her up after falling was an old man with no legs, and the place where she was carried on his lap as she sat in a wheelchair was inside a shabby tent in a dark valley without sunlight.
Shines brightly even in the shadows. When Lisa saw a green cross made from broken green glass bottles and dim light bulbs, she thought she was dreaming.
She clearly remembered the old man’s burning eyes. In front of the two girls with their heads covered in dirty rags, the old man shouted as if he was yelling at the dying Lisa.
‘Say you want to live!’
‘Doctors do not perform procedures without the patient’s consent! I’m still a doctor. I will live as a doctor and do whatever it takes to prove it! So please, please, agree!’
In a dirty tent, under the glowing light of a green cross like stained glass, a doctor in a wheelchair holds a dagger with a black blade and hand-writes a ‘surgery consent form’ on dirty paper. Who would think it wasn’t a dream?
But the angry, almost crying face of the old man looked pitiful, so she mustered up the last of her strength and nodded.
So we were able to share this moment together.
“The elder… you didn’t just learn about cyborgs from Raptor. They have long viewed everything in the world as a resource, even mutants. Rather, I think they would have been obsessed with variants. Although technology cannot keep up with Dom, if we can figure out how to use that special variant of power that can only be considered a miracle or mystery at this point. “If we can use it, we can close the technology gap with the dome.”
“Due to the nature of the Nest, which is a mobile fortress, there would have been frequent encounters with groups of mutants, and although it is extremely rare, even before the Area 38 incident, there were ambiguous Type 3 mutants, now called Type 2.5, and Type 3, which is not aggressive. “At that time, we just lumped them all together and called them Type 3.”
“So…is this made with that technology?”
“okay. It’s called ‘Cell Gear’, which connects the human body and machines using mutant by-products. “It’s still in the development stage so it’s very vague, but I think it’s at a usable level.”
Woojin, who seemed to have calmed down a bit now and took a breath, added an explanation to Liza’s words.
“The variant virus is a virus with tremendous penetrating power. As soon as the host dies, it invades every cell in the body and maintains its function. It can be said to be a virus that ‘knows’ the human body so well that there is no precedent for it. And every single person in this era is infected with a mutant virus.”
“The greed of that ignorant virus is not limited to living things. In the case of Abomination, it is a type 3 variant that merges all infected corpses around a dead host into the host’s body, creating a large composite life form. In the process, I see the absorbed still life as part of my body and make it manifest. Do you remember the old picture? The data on old pictures proves that. “Because in the deepest part of the huge Type 3 variant, there was that old shoe.”
The point was that in some cases, the variant virus could accept foreign objects as part of its body. Woojin said that with that in mind, he thought about whether it would be possible to connect the part that commands the operation of a mechanical prosthetic hand to living nerves without using electronic nerves or other cutting-edge composite materials.
“The result is… as you can see. I got my new arm back, and word spread like wildfire, allowing Woojin Urology Clinic to become a pillar of the black market. Of course, the rumor spread to the high-ranking people of the Dome, and the inspection department released people to find the elder, but…”
“The refugees hid it. Right?”
“….yes. The elder’s name was already more widespread in the refugee area than Dom’s influence. Since the Dome has a hospital for wealthy and high-ranking people, everyone actively hid it, saying that ‘Woojin Urology’ could not be taken away. Most of the members of Moby Dick are people who have received favor from their elders in this way. “They may be small in number, but at least they are not people likely to betray.”
“The more people who don’t have anything, the more they band together like ghosts. That’s how you became the head of this huge black market organization.”
“You’re the director, not the president, you idiot.”
“People in the wasteland are always like that. They break laws and rules like they eat, but they strictly adhere to their own personal standards. “Moby Dick survived because it became a group that was ‘respected’ by the people in the refugee zone.”
Ian nodded as if he finally understood everything. People who had nothing, money or anything, left behind various things as a way to repay them, and as the items piled up, patients who visited the hospital began to exchange them as if they were bartering, and it quickly developed into a market to use money for medicines and equipment that were in short supply. As for the by-product market, as Old Man Woo-jin purchased the variant by-products needed for prosthetic hands, people selling such products began to gather and establish themselves one by one.
“That… inspiration. “Let me ask you something.”
The question was resolved, but ultimately no fundamental answer was obtained. Ian decided that this moment was the best time to get an answer to the question that had been bothering him all day since yesterday.
“Even after seeing the pods… don’t you have any aversion to using by-products? “After suffering so much among those horrible people who use people?”
“what? ….Huh, oh my. “Oh my god…”
Woojin, lost in thought, burst into laughter at Ian’s hesitant voice.
“This is surprising. “I can’t believe that that wild boar-like jaw can even think such gentle thoughts.”
“It’s okay for me to just use it even if it feels a bit uncomfortable. But people are different. I gradually got used to that, but like the Raptors, I thought, ‘Why don’t we just change people?’ “I’m doing this because I’m afraid I’ll get into trouble.”
“Yes… that’s right…”
Ian thought that he had a look in his eyes that made it hard to know what he was thinking. At least, it was clear that Woojin had become a different person from the old man he knew in the past.
Woojin, who was stroking his chin for a moment and choosing his words, placed the empty plastic bottle containing Moonglow on the table.
****
