Chapter 23 – The Soldier Left Behind (1)

In front of the ammunition depot door, behind a barricade made of sandbags, a soldier was saluting me.

A machine gun with a bent barrel lay in front of the soldier, and white smoke was rising from both the barrel and the soldier’s hands.

Just by the fact that he was saluting me, it was clear that this soldier was insane.

The smoke rising from the soldier’s hands was undoubtedly due to burns from touching the hot barrel.

It must have been incredibly painful, but the soldier’s expression remained unchanged.

Ignoring the burns on his hands, he continued to speak to me.

“Private Kang Hyun-woo! I’ve defended the ammunition depot until reinforcements arrived!”

To say such things while looking at a blonde knight in plate armor.

I wonder how this soldier perceives me.

Although he was clearly mad, he didn’t seem likely to shoot, so I called out to my party members hiding outside the clearing.

At my signal, Hoffman cautiously approached while surveying the surroundings, and behind him, Zahina walked towards me as if taking a stroll.

“…One survivor, the platoon leader and all other platoon members deceased!”

As Zahina approached, I pointed to the soldier who was still enthusiastically talking.

“I was hoping you could understand what he’s saying.”

In truth, I could understand him perfectly well, but I couldn’t let the two of them know that.

There might come a day when I’d have to tell someone about my past life, but for now, I had to keep it hidden.

Although they had become my party members, I still couldn’t trust them completely.

Even if I came to trust them, I might not be able to tell them.

I was probably already raising suspicions, but I planned to feign ignorance as much as possible until we parted ways.

After all, we would go our separate ways once the gate reopened.

“Understood.”

At my words, the elf woman sprinkled mana.

Neither the soldier from this world nor Hoffman noticed, but I could feel the mana flowing from her.

‘As expected, something has changed since coming to this side.’

When I was in the other world, I definitely couldn’t sense mana to this extent.

I had been letting it slide thinking it was for the best, but I would need to find out the reason when I had time later.

The mana that flowed from Zahina approached Hoffman, the soldier, and me.

The mana seeping through my body and into my head.

Perhaps because I was aware of the mana, it seemed like I could reject Zahina’s mana seeping into my mind if I tried.

But there was no reason or need to do so.

I accepted Zahina’s mana coloring my mind.

“I’ve been waiting for reinforcements for so long. If you look at what I’ve protected, even you, Lieutenant… no, Captain… no, Sir Knight, will surely recognize it!”

Even after accepting Zahina’s mana, nothing had changed for me.

After all, I had been understanding the soldier’s words all along.

But it wasn’t the same for Hoffman.

He understood the soldier’s words and clicked his tongue softly.

“He seems ambiguously crazy… I wonder if it’s better than being completely insane.”

It was quite common for soldiers to go mad during war.

Especially in a war against the Demon King of Death, it was even more common.

Both Hoffman and I had seen many soldiers go mad like this before.

As Hoffman said, it was better than being completely insane, but either way, this soldier would only be a burden.

I looked at Zahina.

She had said she would handle it, so it was her turn to step up.

When I looked at her, Zahina walked towards the soldier.

Unaware of Zahina approaching, the soldier continued to ramble on about his battles.

Zahina stood in front of the babbling soldier and lowered his saluting hand.

A mad soldier and an elf trying to heal him.

It seemed like a plausible scene, but neither Hoffman nor I were the type to be captivated by such a sight.

We were somewhat mad ourselves, after all.

Once again, I could feel mana flowing from Zahina’s hand.

That mana seeped into the soldier’s head, and the soldier’s voice gradually quieted.

“I’ve worked so hard, so hard…”

He stopped talking and stared blankly at Zahina.

After a moment, light returned to the soldier’s blank eyes.

And then, he cried out in pain.

“Argh! It hurts! Damn! It hurts so much!”

It seemed that the first thing he felt upon regaining his senses was pain.

I thought about taking out a potion, but Zahina could heal burns of that level.

As Zahina’s mana seeped into the soldier’s hand, his reddened hand gradually returned to normal.

“Huh? Oh? It doesn’t hurt anymore. But… who are you?”

The soldier looked at his healing hand in wonder, then raised his head to look at Zahina.

With a puzzled face, he stared at Zahina and then his mouth fell open when he saw her ears.

“An, an, an elf. Elves really exist!”

As expected, that’s what he would say.

I almost said the same thing when I first saw the elves.

Moreover, with Zahina’s exceptional beauty even among elves, it was impossible not to hear that elf comment.

The soldier blushed looking at Zahina, then seemed to notice me and Hoffman standing behind her.

“Oh, there’s a knight and a ranger too. Could it be… that I’ve dimension traveled?”

Dimension travel? I wonder if that genre is still popular.

“If not that, did I die fighting? Or maybe I’m hallucinating…”

The soldier looked at me and Hoffman, then back at Zahina, muttering with a dazed expression.

He seemed to have regained his senses, but he still didn’t look entirely normal.

Anyway, it seemed we could get some information from him now.

I stood next to Zahina and asked him.

“Could you tell us what happened?”

I spoke in the Imperial language, but the soldier understood me.

“Suddenly zombies started pouring down from North Korea… Huh? If this isn’t a hallucination or dimension travel, then who are you? It can’t be cosplay.”

Is it because he’s come to his senses?

It seemed we needed to explain who we were before getting his story.

I looked around.

We were in front of a clearing strewn with corpses. Not a suitable place for conversation.

We needed to find a better place to talk.

“Is there somewhere we can sit? It seems our conversation might be lengthy.”

At my words, the soldier looked around the clearing, then pointed behind him at the ammunition depot.

“Then, if you’d like to go to where I’ve been staying…”

Okay.

We were invited to enter the ammunition depot without a fight.

As the soldier was guiding us, he looked at Zahina with a troubled expression.

“You don’t have to keep holding my hand…”

At the soldier’s words, Zahina shook her head.

“I can’t let go of your hand.”

“What? No, if you suddenly say that…”

Is he imagining the number of children after marriage?

Judging by the soldier’s expression, he seemed to have fallen into a proper delusion.

But unfortunately, that wasn’t the reason.

Mana was continuously flowing from Zahina’s hand.

“If I let go of your hand, you’ll go mad again.”

As expected of an elf. She didn’t mince her words at all, true to her race.

Indeed, they were a race I didn’t want to get close to.

At Zahina’s words, the soldier looked at his hand held by her with a blank expression.

“Ah… I see. That’s right. I’ve been mad all this time.”

The soldier looked at Zahina with a complicated expression.

“So, I’m not cured?”

“No. I’m just holding it back. Your soul is already damaged beyond repair.”

Cold words without a hint of consideration.

Even Hoffman was scratching his arms as if getting goosebumps.

“Haha. Is that so? It’s so merciless that I can’t help but believe it.”

It might have been better if he was mad, but the soldier didn’t seem normal.

The soldier who still looked somewhat broken.

We followed him into the ammunition depot.

As expected, the ammunition depot was a mess.

The ammunition and firearms that should have been stacked full were barely visible, replaced by garbage likely left by the soldier.

It was only natural.

To gather troops and move out of the base, they would have had to distribute the weapons and ammunition from the depot,

And for that soldier to hold out inside the ammunition depot, this much garbage would have accumulated.

Moreover, looking at the garbage piled up inside the ammunition depot, it seemed the soldier had brought in a considerable amount of combat rations when he retreated here.

Private Kang Hyun-woo, was it?

I clicked my tongue softly as I watched the soldier clearing away the garbage on the floor.

The soldier’s condition was regrettable.

Judging by how he had holed up in the armory with food supplies while his unit was being annihilated, he clearly wasn’t an ordinary soldier.

It was a shame he had ended up like this.

“It’s not my home, but please have a seat everyone.”

We took our seats just inside the entrance of the ammunition depot.

Fortunately, there were many ammunition boxes left, so we didn’t have to sit on the floor.

Once everyone was seated, I spoke first.

“We are people from another world who have come through a gate chasing after the Demon King.”

At my words, the soldier’s eyes changed strangely.

Does he find this hard to believe?

Whether he believed it or not, I told the soldier our entire story.

That we were people from another world, that the Demon King had crossed over from another world, and that we had followed the Demon King.

I told the soldier everything except for details like the slain hero.

In fact, it wasn’t something to tell a soldier from another world we had just met, but it didn’t matter with this soldier.

After all, he wouldn’t remember anything once we left.

When I finished speaking, the soldier looked at us with a blank expression.

“That’s hard to believe.”

It was indeed an unbelievable story for someone from this world.

But we couldn’t give any other explanation.

We couldn’t say it was cosplay. We couldn’t say we were superhumans.

Ironically, telling the truth was the most plausible option.

The soldier must have thought the same.

“But after seeing the knight kill a huge zombie with a glowing sword, and the elf healing me like this, it’s hard not to believe.”

As he said, he had seen and felt it with his own eyes.

“The fact that what you’re saying and what I’m hearing are different proves that the languages are different too, right?”

Moreover, he had fought directly against undead and zombies, so there was no reason not to believe my words.

The soldier sighed and looked at the hand Zahina was holding, then said to me.

“If what you say is true, then you want to hear about the situation in this world from me, right?”

The soldier was correct.

Of course, we had gathered information from various places so far, but we hadn’t properly heard from a living person yet.

Moreover, this unit had managed to gather troops and fight against the Demon King’s army.

This meant it was a unit with a proper system in place, so we could hear a different story from this soldier compared to ordinary people.

If we were lucky, we might even hear about surviving military units or government agencies.

To be honest, it didn’t matter if we didn’t hear anything.

We had already achieved our goal in coming to this military base.

I looked around the ammunition depot.

Ammunition boxes scattered here and there.

Even though the ammunition depot was nearly empty, there were still weapons and ammunition left.

There was the machine gun with the bent barrel that the soldier had been firing, and boxes of ammunition remained.

There were enough weapons and ammunition here to give to Zahina.