NOVEL WEB Chapter 14 - Indifferent Humans
The tank shell flying towards us rings like a bell and turns back towards the heavy tank. Seeing the performance of the superhuman called the greatest talent of the current generation, I immediately understood why Briar Churchill lived with such a nickname.
The tank shell flew straight towards Zhou Lizhi’s Black Dragon tank, but was soon caught by her hands.
“Huh?”
One student made a dumb sound seeing the instructor catch the high-speed tank shell with both hands as if practicing a basketball pass. But the moment they saw Zhou Lizhi catch the shell with her bare hands, most students probably wanted to make the same sound.
The student who let out an exclamation was just fiddling with a coin in their hand with wide eyes. I asked her:
“What’s that coin?”
“Ah, ah, ah, m-me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Oh, this is called a Sheng Tao Tong Bao, it’s an old currency that was circulated a few decades ago.”
A coin from a few decades ago. It’s not that old, but it seems to be a coin in fairly good condition. But is there a reason to be fiddling with it while a Chinese major is trying to shell us with a tank?
I recalled the information I had read about the woman standing next to me. Ah, right. This woman. Hoang Thi Linh, an exchange student from Vietnam.
Her ability, according to the documents, was… hypnotist, wasn’t it?
“This is a tool I use for my ability… if I tie it with a thread through the hole in the center of the coin like this…”
Hoang Thi Linh shyly tied the coin to a thread and let it hang down. She asked me:
“W-Would you like to try it?”
“No, I’ll pass.”
“Ah, that’s a shame. Th-Then I’ll go and hypnotize that instructor. That would be a successful defeat, right? I pass the test, right? I become the MVP right away, right? Confirmed as this year’s all-star, top of the school, elite course, special scholarship… Ah, if nothing else, I really want to get the scholarship… Hehehe…”
Ah, she’s a bit of a strange person. Though I haven’t really met anyone who isn’t strange yet.
I quietly moved away from Hoang Thi Linh’s side. A ‘boom’ sound rang out again, but the Maestro easily blocked another tank shell and dropped it to the ground. It didn’t seem like there was a part for me to step in.
“Hey, Bhatt. Aren’t you ashamed?”
Briar Churchill said provocatively. Shradha Bhatt gritted her teeth and held her head high in front of the British lady.
“Huh? Did I do something I should be ashamed of?”
“Not only is your country surviving day by day under the protection of our country, but you’re also hiding behind the shield I made, staying quiet like that.”
Churchill seemed to want another argument, so I didn’t want to intervene again. I moved away from my roommate for a moment and approached the two soldiers who were still chatting calmly.
Looking closely, there aren’t many students seriously taking this test. Rather, that Vietnamese who wants to become the MVP of this test and receive a scholarship seems to be the most enthusiastic… But if she’s going to try hypnosis, shouldn’t she get closer? How would she approach the tank with just hypnosis and no other abilities?
Hoang Thi Linh herself seemed to have realized the fatal flaw in her plan and was quietly hiding behind Briar Churchill’s sound wave shield, just fiddling with her coin.
“Ah, Miss Shin Eun-young. You came this way. Want to join us? We were having a current military personnel club meeting.”
Catherine Duey greeted me cheerfully in Chinese as she saw me approaching. I gave a hollow laugh and shook my head.
“I’m sorry. I’m not a soldier… Why don’t you try persuading that major over there?”
The tank’s engine sound was getting closer, so we had to raise our voices to have a proper conversation. It seemed that Zhou, unable to break through the sound wave barrier with the power of the tank shells, was slowly closing the distance.
“I’d like to invite her if possible, but in that state, she doesn’t look like she’d be up for a conversation. An emergency test, what is this, some kind of movie?”
“Actually, this space itself could be material for a movie, couldn’t it? Something like that? Yes, that’s how it is.”
Tikhonov said. I asked Lieutenant Duey:
“Are, are you okay?”
“With what? The tank? The tank is no problem. I’ve seen many tanks in our unit, so it’s not like I’d be scared of it now.”
“No, not the tank. That person next to you…”
“Ah, you mean me.”
Barbara Tikhonov smiled, fiddling with the brim of her military cap. Her expression was smiling, but seeing the glittering rank insignia on her uniform and the hammer and sickle drawn inside the red star, a strange fear arose. It was the terror of the Korean Communist Party that shattered our peaceful family and murdered my parents. After all, the Korean Communist Party was just a small organization acting under the instigation of the Soviet or Japanese Communist Party. I had no reason whatsoever to have good feelings towards communists.
“Lieutenant Duey, come to think of it, it’s strange. Everyone else was sneaking away just seeing that I’m Russian.”
“Well, the Chinese government must have taken care of it, right?”
Catherine Duey said refreshingly.
“Thinking about it, it feels better than the French intelligence, I guess. If I had met you in France, they would have arrested you on the spot and handed you over to the military organization.”
“That’s an interesting story, hahaha!”
For some reason, the two soldiers didn’t seem very inclined to actively participate in this test. Then I turned my steps towards where Rebecca Katerfeld was…
“Ah… I can’t feel any spirits… This field, no one has died here yet… They don’t kill students in tests… Yes, that’s it… There’s no chance of dying…”
She was muttering something in German that was difficult to understand clearly. Feeling my desire to talk to her suddenly disappear, I gave up on going around to other people and approached the Maestro again. Briar Churchill seemed to have given up on counterattacking the tank using the shells and was now juggling two tank shells for fun. Even though Zhou Lizhi was still circling around us on the field, rotating the turret.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“But everyone looks unmotivated.”
Churchill said with a bored face, flicking her baton. The two shells in the air were spinning around following her conducting. With her other hand not holding the baton, she pointed at Shradha Bhatt lying on the ground.
“And Shradha ended up like this after attempting a suicide attack on the tank.”
“Huh?”
Hearing Churchill’s words, I saw Bhatt lying on the ground and took a slight step back. Half-destroyed… should I say? Anyway, Shradha Bhatt was lying on the ground groaning, with wires and machine parts sticking out haphazardly from her body.
“It’s okay. I’m self-repairing. Being nanometal, the repairs should be completed soon. It would be a problem if I get attacked in the meantime, but surely they wouldn’t do that…”
Shradha Bhatt said in a groaning voice, seeing my gaze. Ah, right. Shradha Bhatt. The so-called machine human. The funny thing is that she was a normal human until her teens, but at some point, she ‘awakened’ and spontaneously turned into a machine.
The public suspected that she, the only daughter of a conglomerate family, had undergone artificial modification, but no matter how much they tried to suspect, intelligence organizations including our CIA all knew. She had indeed awakened, not undergone body modification.
To begin with, nanometal itself belongs to the realm of dream technology scientifically, and the technology to modify a human body in this way has never been developed.
It seemed that the hypnotist, Hoang Thi Linh, was even more frightened after seeing the machine human get hit by a tank shell and collapse, and was now sticking close to Briar Churchill. Churchill, seeming bothered by the hypnotist clinging to her back, sniffed and said:
“There’s some strange smell…”
“That’s racial discrimination. If you have prejudices like I don’t wash well or I have body odor, it makes me very sad… I could hypnotize you to never smell again, you know. Gasp, heuk! I’m not really saying I would do that!”
Hoang, who was expressing her dissatisfaction to the Maestro with a frown, hurriedly waved her hands and blurted out an excuse as soon as Churchill turned to look at her. Churchill grinned and said:
“Bear with the smell. It’s one of life’s pleasures.”
“Then how about hearing…?”
“I won’t tolerate that even more!”
These people, are they aware that they’re currently facing a heavy tank…