Ch.195Request Log #016 – Transformation (6)

How long until the angels arrive? I spat out my chewing tobacco and picked up my rifle. From this street, I could faintly see inside the house attached to Gretchen’s farm. I had a good position.

It probably wouldn’t take long. With plenty of weapons at hand, dealing with them shouldn’t take much time either. I might even finish them all before the angels arrived.

It didn’t matter if I had no means of escape. Even if I got caught, I wouldn’t rot in prison for life or hang from the gallows for hunting dwarves who entered with impure intentions.

In a jury trial, I’d practically have a not guilty verdict without even having to bribe the jury. I aimed my rifle. If someone leaned against the window of that house, things would be much simpler.

I arrived early simply because I had no need for sleep. I didn’t think the meeting would be this early, but a car approached Gretchen’s farm sooner than expected. Judging by its size, it was meant for dwarves.

A dwarf with bushy beard and hair stepped out. A typical dwarf look. One of those who believed that not cutting their hair and beard made them valuable.

But then, I faintly saw a red car stopping in the distance. It was far enough that Gretchen’s farm was barely visible from there. I thought it might have stopped momentarily, but it came to a complete halt.

I raised my binoculars to check the car. Two people sat in the driver’s and passenger seats. After conversing and checking their watches, the man in the driver’s seat fell asleep with his hat over his face.

Were they lovers looking for a place to be together on a day like this? After confirming that the woman was holding a notebook while looking out the window, I lowered my binoculars. Neither of them were dwarves. They seemed to be waiting for something.

I looked back at Gretchen’s farm. The old dwarf appeared to be preparing for the meeting. He opened the window and seemed to be cleaning in his own way. This was a place he only visited once a week.

When that dwarf raised his binoculars to survey the farm, I remained still and watched. The gun he carried to check for anything suspicious wasn’t a Doppelgewehr but an ordinary shotgun.

Where was the Doppelgewehr? I also had reason to find and destroy the gun marked with the death of my comrade. However, he wouldn’t brandish such a threatening weapon just anywhere.

Could I change position? When the dwarf finished examining the abandoned farm, I crouched down with only a pistol in hand. I held my collar to avoid making rustling sounds in the bushes as I moved. I headed to the opposite side of the farm.

The ground was piled slightly higher on this side, giving me a better view inside the house. And I could also locate the Doppelgewehr. It was hanging in the middle of the living room. Better to think of them as hunters.

After confirming the Doppelgewehr’s location, I returned to the bushes on the opposite side. Infiltrating from these bushes was much better than entering from the other side. For sniping, the opposite side would be better, but the Argonne Invincibles they remembered were those who charged into trenches with double strength and vigor right after bombardment ended.

This place was a farm but also a haunted grave. Ghosts still living in the Great War crawled along the ground, avoiding sunlight as they crept around this place. I waited for the other dwarves.

After sniping one, I would immediately rush in. If I were the only one with a rifle, I’d definitely keep my distance, but they had the Doppelgewehr. One way or another, I needed to get close.

After that, other dwarves began to arrive. They were quite ordinary. Very ordinary faces with nothing special about them, and some even appeared rather wealthy.

They exchanged greetings leisurely. They asked each other if anything special had happened last week, and said things like, “Why is Otto so late?” Otto wouldn’t be able to come.

Then, one of them dragged an unconscious ogre out of a car. His upper body was exposed, with ritual markings carved into his chest. An ogre this time. They certainly collected a diverse range.

No, they weren’t collecting diversely. People who could be deceived by the words of such creatures or easily subdued with spells or drugs would be few, so there was simply a mix of various races. It was ultimately about vulnerability.

I waited until no more people arrived. After confirming that no new personnel had entered for over thirty minutes, I aimed at the window. Once someone approached, that’s when I would begin.

My heart wasn’t racing. It seemed to have forgotten how to beat. Having forgotten how to live but remembering only how to kill, I tried to build a life with that. I was building a sand castle with sand that had no water.

Dry sand flows away with just a breeze. A dwarf approached the window. He seemed to be coming to close the window as the weather had turned distinctly autumnal. I closed one eye and aimed the muzzle.

I pulled the trigger. I kicked away the crumbling sand castle. A gunshot suddenly rang out in the middle of the quiet Staten Island farm. Birds flew away. I put down the gun, grabbed my shotgun, and ran.

“Louisa? Louisa! Wake up the monster and the Doppelbane first! Some bastard has noticed…”

Was it a woman? I didn’t see her face. It was a silhouette. On the targets we used at the training ground, there were images of dwarves. It was similar to that. I ran straight toward the house.

I leaped over bushes and fences almost as tall as me and landed in front of the house. My body felt light. As I ran forward, I took a few steps back. I didn’t stick my head through the window.

The Doppelgewehr was a gun weighing well over 30 pounds. The only chance they’d have to shoot it would be when I stuck my body through the window. Ridiculously, only we could shoot it while standing.

I knocked on the wall once with the stock of my shotgun. I moved my body toward the window frame.

“Over here!”

At that moment, the Doppelgewehr fired with an explosive sound, creating a perfectly round hole in the wooden wall of the house, as if punched out with a cookie cutter. I immediately grabbed the window frame and threw myself into the house.

It was a bolt-action rifle. I stepped on the body of a dwarf who had been shot in the head by my gun and was now slumped against the window frame. I entered and pulled the trigger against the head of a dwarf who was aiming the Doppelgewehr at the wall, his shoulders shaking.

A gunshot rang out. The dwarf’s head snapped back as he fell. The Doppelgewehr was neutralized. Another gunshot. Feeling a stabbing pain in my side, I pumped the shotgun to extract the shell and turned around.

A pistol bullet had lodged in my side. As with the Rat-Catcher, pistol bullets were almost useless against me. The same went for suicide. Brooklyn had been the first to try, but he failed.

I covered only my eyes with my forearm and pulled the trigger. I had no desire to live wearing an eye patch or getting a glass eye. The dwarf who took a slug to the stomach began firing his pistol wildly in all directions.

It stung. The bullet hadn’t penetrated deep enough to reach the muscle, so it didn’t hinder my movement much. I covered my face with both hands, absorbing all the bullets until I heard only the clicking of an empty trigger, then raised my shotgun.

The dwarf sensed his death. Perhaps thinking I would blow his head off for a clean finish, he sneered.

“See you in Hell, you Doppel bastard…”

That’s why I shot him in the stomach. I also shot his knees twice so he couldn’t crawl away. I gladly showed him why I hated those cheap last words.

“We’re already there.”

Only one slug remained. I used the last shot on the back of an old dwarf woman who was hiding behind that dwarf and trying to escape. It hit her squarely in the lower back. Her scream was ugly.

Her collapsing body scraped the floor as she desperately tried to crawl toward the back door of the kitchen. Throwing the shotgun to the floor, I gripped the club from my waist. I clutched it until my palm turned white inside the glove.

I hated them. I hated them with all my heart. If the word “hate” were replaced with “love,” it would be comparable to how I felt about Sarah. I walked toward a dwarf who didn’t need a confirmation kill.

As I raised my club to strike, a kitchen knife flew at me from inside the kitchen door. Most of the numerous dwarves were visible. So all of you are here.

I grabbed the flying wrist. I raised my club and struck down. A cracking sound echoed. It was closer to a crunching sound than a simple crack.

It was the kind of sound you hear when you accidentally bite a bone while eating meat—unclear whether it comes from your teeth or the bone fragment.

Dwarves who weren’t even properly armed were gathered there. I blocked a thrust from a dagger inscribed with rune letters with my forearm. The knife slid off without penetrating. A hole formed in my shirt.

Even if they weren’t armed, everyone had to share the price of using magic. I raised my club high and struck down on a head. Leaving the collapsing figure, I walked to the next dwarf.

A dwarf standing behind, seemingly about to go mad with fear, shouted. He squeezed out his voice.

“This, this won’t change anything! You’re just Sisyphus after all!”

I raised my club. I brought it down in a straight line. I didn’t crush his head. I had to answer his words that suggested I was doing this in hope of salvation.

“Don’t talk as if I started this.”

I lowered my hand holding the club. The club had a gear attached to its end. The gear was clean and well-oiled. No. The gear had blood and hair stuck to it. I struck down.

“It was all you who started it. In the Argonne Forest. Here. Everywhere. Continuously.”

I struck once for each word I spat out. At the beginning, the dwarf screamed, but by the end, there was only a squelching sound from the mashed flesh.

Something began thumping heavily from the upper floor of the building. I had forgotten about the monster. Leaving the dwarf woman who had crawled to the middle of the kitchen before dying, I turned my head. Those things could be dealt with later.

Instead of drawing my pistol, I ran to the living room. I pulled the Doppelgewehr from the hands of a dwarf who lay face down in front of a table scattered with documents containing personal information, a slug bullet lodged in his head.

I properly pulled the half-drawn bolt to extract the shell. I took a large bullet that the dwarf had been holding in his other hand, pushed it in, and closed the chamber. The recoil was only half anyway.

As I watched the stairs where the dwarf sorcerer might have gone up, a heavy rupturing sound echoed from the living room ceiling where the thumping had been heard earlier.

I had never seen a monster made from an ogre, but monsters followed their original form. Monsters made from humans resembled humans, and monsters made from dwarves resembled dwarves. It was obvious what a monster made from an ogre would resemble.

A massive, muscular monster broke through the ceiling and fell to the first floor. Its face had only black eyes embedded in it, and its mouth was attached to its thick, fleshy belly. Its appetite was predictably terrible, unlike a typical ogre.

“Grha, aaaaargh! Seunhin, seung, seuchen! Tseuk, haju! Aaaaargh!”

For a monster with such a distorted body, existence itself was pain. The constant pain drove them to madness. Like waves eroding rock, it stripped away their humanity, reducing them to simple monsters. I felt pity.

But monsters were also living beings. They were creatures that couldn’t live without a brain. I gripped the Doppelgewehr just as I had first held my father’s shotgun. I aimed at its head and squeezed the heavy trigger.

Once again a chilling gunshot rang out, but fortunately this time it wasn’t aimed at me. The Doppelgewehr’s bullet cleanly pierced the monster’s head. The color of the wallpaper was visible through the hole.

The corners of the mouth on the monster’s belly turned up. Though monsters might be as physically strong as us, they were beasts consumed by pain. They had no connection ritual to protect them from all harm.

The angels still hadn’t appeared. Were people still ducking down, not even thinking of reporting? There was also that red car watching from a distance. They must have fled at the sound of gunshots.

I pulled the bolt again to extract the Doppelgewehr’s bullet and loaded a new one. I stuffed the remaining bullets from the box into my pocket.

Suddenly, a woman’s scream echoed from upstairs. Judging by the pain, it seemed they were creating more monsters. No. This time I could hear a voice.

“I’m not a Doppelbane! I’m, I’m…”

A dwarf’s shout followed. There was no resisting monsterization. I decided to be glad that I could be someone who remembered that she resisted until the end. I headed toward the stairs with my gun.

“Shut up! You just need to stop that bastard until I get out of here! Do you really want to become a monster to the very top of your head? Do you want to be hunted like cattle by that bastard, like that ogre just now? Huh!”

I didn’t know what it meant to become a monster to the very top of one’s head. I didn’t even try to guess. I held the gun upright to hide the Doppelgewehr’s muzzle and climbed upstairs, concealing even my footsteps.

“That bastard is quiet… Block the hallway! I can’t see below the hole… Anyway, I command you by magic. Until I leave this place, block that bastard even if it costs you your life. Understand?”

Instead of an answer, a scream rang out. It didn’t seem like an ordinary monster. If Hexenbane meant “witch slaughter knife,” it was obvious what Doppelbane meant. It was obvious regardless of whether it was actually useful.

I leaned my body against the end of the staircase and waited for the screaming to subside. A sobbing woman’s voice could be heard. She was almost weeping.

“I get, I get it. I understand. So, please…”

Afterward, I heard faint footsteps approaching to guard the stairs. She was limping. It sounded like her body’s center of gravity was off. It didn’t matter.

I didn’t know how she had maintained her human mind, but if she was a monster under orders, she had to be killed. No, it was better to kill the sorcerer first. If he started giving more orders, things would get annoying.

Something that looked like a human form peeked its head out in front of the wall where I was hiding. As she tried to examine the stairs, our eyes met. There was a woman wearing ragged clothes, her face stained with tears.

I shoved her with my shoulder, slamming her into the wall, then ran forward with the Doppelgewehr now aimed ahead. The woman couldn’t stop me at all. The name Doppelbane was laughable.

The dwarf who was trying to tear up a paper filled with something like a magical prescription had no chance. I pulled the trigger, and the Doppelgewehr, held with double strength and vigor, didn’t waver.

The gun meant to kill us was now in our hands. A gun that could kill even members of the Argonne Invincibles could very easily kill ordinary people.

The thick bullet from the Doppelgewehr not only pierced the center of the dwarf’s chest but also left a round hole in the wooden frame of the window behind him. I immediately turned around. It was time to check the last monster.

Behind me stood what appeared at first glance to be an ordinary woman. Her face was ordinary. Most of her body was ordinary too. Signs of abuse and torture were to be expected for someone kidnapped to a place like this.

However, the woman’s arms were covered with black eyes. Eyes embedded in arms as thick as the ogre monster’s arms were filled with hatred for me. No wonder her center of gravity was off.

But there was another ritual mark on the woman’s shoulder blade. I analyzed its shape. The visible patterns represented suppression, isolation, and symbols of hands clasped together. The last sentence was commonly used in contracts.