As he pulled me to shore, the mud covering me seeped into my clothes. I turned to look back at the King of Hell in the quagmire and saw that it was still moving. Its back was facing the surface and a huge hole had been blown out of it but there was no trace of blood.
I braced myself with my broken hand and instantly felt a burning pain coming from my joint. I lost my balance and fell to the ground right as the King of Hell slowly stood up again, its countless hands fluttering like spiders.
As one hand grabbed the stone on the bank and began to move towards us, Fatty let go of me and hit the hand with a stone. After a few blows, the hand shrank back, but another one had already reached the shore.
Fatty helped me up and supported me as we retreated in the direction of another grenade. We could see the King of Hell standing up despite the fact that its waist had almost been blown off. Its waist could obviously no longer support it so its whole body was making uncoordinated movements. After climbing to shore, the upper body couldn’t stay supported and tilted to one side like a puppet.
But unfortunately for us, it had many hands and was immediately able to brace itself. As I looked at it, I could see a large amount of powder leaking out from the huge breach in the armor.
Fatty stopped running, “What the hell’s going on with this thing? Why does it look like a machine?”
I had played a game before where there was a kind of thing called a mechanical person, which was actually a wooden robot driven by mice. Mohist technology was certainly fictitious, but such things did exist in the ancient Chinese legend of Lu Ban.(1)
But those things should have all been made of very delicate wood while this thing felt like a sack of sand.
Now that its waist could no longer support it, King Yama’s actions became very strange. Its lower body seemed unable to coordinate with its upper body (when I thought about this later on, I wondered how something— whether it be a zombie or a good— with its waist blown up like this and only a little bit of skin connecting it could be coordinated) and it couldn’t stand upright. But it still kept trying and failing, causing the distortion at the waist to become more severe. It almost felt like it was going to tear itself apart.
Fatty went back to the place where he had been thrown before, picked up the torch, and asked me how my hand was.
It was only at this moment that I felt the pain again and noticed that my hand had swollen to the size of a sweet potato. This definitely showed how focused my mind had been just now.
When I told him that I was more or less fine, he slowly walked towards King Yama while holding his torch. He then pulled out a grenade and threw it under King Yama’s body.
We hid behind a rock as it exploded again, the rubble also exploding all around us. When we got up, we saw that King Yama’s waist—along with its armor—had been completely blown off, revealing its skin. As Fatty and I glanced at it, we both froze.
After the armor was completely blown off, King Yama’s upper body was completely exposed. Its rock head was basically a huge stone ball like a human head that had been inserted into its trunk, which contained a dried-up corpse covered with short black hairs. A large amount of sand flowed out of the hole that had been blasted in it.
“Fuck, someone shaved a zombie,” Fatty said. “This is a fighting corpse.”
I had heard of this concept before. When the North and South factions fought each other across the river, there was a legend that they had used fighting corpses, but it was so outrageous that my grandfather didn’t believe it. Since zombies were very uncontrollable, using them was equal to stir-frying with nitroglycerin—a very precise temperature was needed in order to not blow yourself up.
“This thing is man-made so removing the head of the zombie is the first step,” Fatty said firmly. But just as he spoke, King Yama turned its stone head and began to climb towards us at a faster speed than when he had legs.
“I finally know what King Yama riding the dead means!” Fatty shouted as he retreated. “Don’t get caught by it. He’ll use you as his lower body!!”
<Chapter 81><Table of Contents><Chapter 83>
****
TN Note:
(1) Mohist refers to the Mohist School of the Warring States Period (475-220 BC) that focused on logic, rational thought, and science. Lu Ban was the legendary master craftsman, called the father of Chinese carpentry (mentioned before when Poker-face was in the scorpion tomb)
****
Updated 2/13/2022
MereBear's Translation 