If the N-word is the button that sets Black people off, then Chōsenjin1 is the Korean-only special edition.
It’s bad enough when Korean weebs who’ve overdosed on Japanophilia start throwing around Chōsenjin1. But you hear its full ugliness when it comes straight from a Japanese guy.
Like right now.
“Chōsenjin?”1
The moment that magic word reached my ears, the will of Hongik Ingan, passed down from Grandfather Dangun in the distant past, and the vital essence of Joseon’s eight provinces surged up from deep within me.2
And if you compressed that long-winded sentence into four syllables, you’d get something completely unrelated: Scorching Yang Qi.
Honestly, I was pissed off and just spouting whatever came to mind.
Whoosh!
“Uh. Uh-oh…”
“Please don’t, Mr. Jin!”
The sudden burst of heat made the Skeleton King swallow saliva he didn’t even have. Team Leader Choi launched himself at me like a football player and grabbed hold.
“You can’t hit him yet! He’s a patient!”
“Right. Team Leader Choi is right.”
“Yes, yes. So…”
“But so what?”
“Huh?”
“Let go. That bastard’s pissing me off.”
I pried Team Leader Choi’s arms from around my waist and muttered, “Ahn Jung-geun. Yun Bong-gil. Yu Gwan-sun. Ahn Chang-ho. Kim Won-bong…”3
“Gasp.”
“Mutaguchi Renya.4 Little Boy. Fat Man…”5
“Help! I can’t hold him back by myself!”
At Team Leader Choi’s cry for backup, the Skeleton King answered calmly.
“Even the two of us couldn’t stop him.”
“We need to hear his testimony!”
“We do. But who’s going to take responsibility for my beautiful skull if it gets smashed trying to stop him?”
“Johnson! Mr. Johnson! Help!”
Bang!
“Who dares bully my Choi—Oh.”
Magic Johnson burst through the door like a knight in shining armor, then blinked.
“What on earth is going on?”
“Hmm. A wicked human is trying to kill a monkey human.”
“What the fuck? Why?”
“Because the monkey human called the wicked human Chōsenjin.”1
“Chōsenjin?”1
Magic Johnson still looked puzzled. The Skeleton King helpfully explained.
“As far as I know, it means about the same thing as ‘nigger.’”
“Motherfucking Japs! You goddamn son of a beach! Jin! Kill that bastard right now!”
Even the hulking Grand Mage, well over two meters tall,6 had started raging. Team Leader Choi muttered so quietly I could barely hear him.
“Fuck, I really can’t do this anymore…”
“Oh.”
When I’d first met him, I’d thought, What kind of Young Master is this? But now, even the occasional swear that slipped out of him sounded native.
Was this how a master felt when he saw his Disciple grow?
I looked at Team Leader Choi with pride.
“You’ve come a long way.”
“Quit screwing around and finish what you were doing.”
“I’m really going to hit him, you know?”
“You were going to do it even if I stopped you, so why ask? Just one hit. And go easy.”
“Okay.”
With that settled, I turned around. Yamamoto Genji had become the picture of politeness.
“I’m sorry. I was out of my mind earlier.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry in advance, too.”
“Mr. Jin…”
“No, just call me Chōsenjin.1 That’ll make me feel better.”
“Jin-sama!”7
After a three-stage transformation in how he addressed me that would’ve put Frieza8 to shame, Yamamoto Genji sprang to his feet, dropped to his knees, and pressed his forehead to the floor.
“I sincerely apologize!”
“…Did you go to a dogeza9 academy or something?”
It was a perfect, textbook dogeza.9
At this point, I was starting to wonder whether dogeza9 was part of the Japanese S-rank Hunter certification test.
I sighed and shook my head, then stared silently at the back of Yamamoto Genji’s head.
Damn it.
Whatever else, he’d come all the way to the Middle East on my orders.
He’d hesitated for a while even after the order to withdraw, and in the end he’d lost every member of his team. But if you looked at it closely, I was more or less responsible for all of it as the one in command.
If Yamamoto Genji was an incompetent defeated general, then I was a pathetic commander who’d entrusted hundreds of lives to a man like that.
“Get up.”
“……”
“I said, get up.”
“H-hai.”
Yamamoto Genji cautiously sat back on his heels.
His potion shower had left his body without a scratch. And judging by his wide-open eyes, his mind seemed to be working properly again, too.
“Tell me everything that happened. From beginning to end. Don’t leave anything out.”
Yamamoto Genji hesitated, licked his parched lips, and finally began.
“We were traveling in unmanned transport vehicles when he appeared.”
“The Prophet?”
“…Yes.”
At the mention of The Prophet, Yamamoto Genji shuddered and swallowed.
“The vehicles suddenly stopped, and an unfamiliar energy sent a chill through my whole body.”
He was a coward and a fool, but he was still an S-rank Hunter. He must’ve instinctively sensed that something was wrong.
But…
“The vehicles stopped? On their own?”
“Y-yes.”
Magic Johnson met my gaze and spoke.
“It was magic. He must have used mana interference to shut down the Magic Gems powering the unmanned transport vehicles.”
“What are the odds it was an artifact?”
“That’s possible. But I understand J1 had ten vehicles assigned to them. Is that right?”
Yamamoto Genji answered.
“That’s right. They all stopped at once.”
“Magic used through an artifact has clear limitations. He’s definitely a mage.”
“R-right. That’s right.”
Yamamoto Genji nodded spasmodically, like someone being chased, and continued.
“I saw it clearly. The flash of light, the blood, people falling at a single gesture… I’d never seen anything like it. Everyone around me died in the blink of an eye. It was definitely magic.”
As if he were reliving the terror of that moment, his hands and feet began to tremble.
I watched him for a while, then asked, “What about you?”
“Huh?”
“How did you survive?”
“Th-that…”
His pupils, which had just managed to refocus, wavered.
He reflexively avoided my gaze. I saw no grief over the loss of his comrades, no anger at himself.
Fear.
The only things Yamamoto Genji felt now were fear of The Prophet and relief at having survived.
“You ran. No—did you try to run and fail?”
“……!”
You son of a bitch.
He flinched as if I’d hit the mark, and something hot surged up inside me.
If someone hadn’t grabbed my shoulder, I would’ve punched that cowardly face of his, testimony or no testimony.
Damn it.
I chewed on my lip, trying to hold down the bitterness and anger.
I silently glared at Yamamoto Genji, his head bowed. A long time passed before I spoke again.
“What happened after that?”
Yamamoto Genji kept his head down, his eyes darting around, and answered cautiously.
“He heard the reinforcements arriving and left.”
“Was the situation so urgent that he had to leave you behind, an S-rank Hunter? The Prophet must have known you’d be a problem if he let you live.”
“Th-that…”
Yamamoto Genji hesitated at Team Leader Choi’s sharp question, then answered.
“He must have had another reason.”
“Another reason…?”
“He sucked everything out of my teammates who’d died before me.”
“What?”
Sucked everything out of them?
The rest of us stared at him, unable to make sense of his words. Yamamoto Genji hurriedly continued.
“I-I swear I’m not lying. He sucked up the pools of blood all around us, too. He pulled something like a pale mist out of the dead people’s bodies and swallowed it. After that, the corpses dried up like mummies…”
It was like being struck in the back of the head. The words that followed came through only faintly.
And I wasn’t the only one stunned.
“No. This… That isn’t magic.”
Magic Johnson muttered as if he were groaning and rubbed his forehead. Under the lights, his forehead had grown damp with cold sweat.
“Damn it. What the hell is it? As far as I know, there’s no magic available to humans that could do something that horrifying…”
His voice trembled. He fell silent, stood frozen like a statue, then slowly turned his head.
No—all of us did.
And there, at the end of our gazes, stood one being.
The Skeleton King.
My friend. A comrade I could trust with my back.
But we’d instinctively looked at him because the answer to The Prophet lay in his very existence.
Someone who used magic unavailable to humans.
A powerful being capable of taking out a Grand Mage single-handedly, whose strength had never once been revealed to the world.
Another secret Michael Silbert had hidden even from Huginn, his right-hand man.
A monster.
Yes.
That was what The Prophet really was.
“H-he left behind a message.”
The monster called The Prophet was dangling bait in front of me.
On a high, moundlike hill, an old man in a turban watched a hazy cloud of sand rise not far away.
More precisely, he watched the dozens of vehicles visible through it.
“Shall we eliminate them?”
At his subordinate’s voice, which came from empty air, the old man asked calmly, “How many?”
“We estimate more than five hundred.”
“Any S-rank Hunters among them?”
“Not that we’ve been able to determine. Even if there are, I could wipe them all out if I went in.”
The old man stroked his coarse beard. He fell silent in thought, and only after a short while did he speak.
“Leave them be.”
“But the distance…”
“Hamid, did you not hear me?”
After a moment’s silence at the sudden call, the subordinate answered, “I’m sorry, Amir. I was out of line.”
“Restrain your hot blood and wait for the time that is soon to come. Did The Prophet not say as much? Everything will unfold according to his will.”
The old man reached out and felt around in the air. Something invisible was protecting them from the infidels.
That was why even satellites in orbit couldn’t detect them—and why the infidels couldn’t find them despite drawing within a few kilometers.10
No, the infidels wouldn’t find them even if they came right up to them.
Unless they lifted this veil and stepped out themselves, no one could see or sense them. And if that moment came, it would be the intruder’s last moment alive.
This mysterious power could only be thought of as divine protection.
Their god had sent The Prophet down to earth in his place, and The Prophet would lead them to the promised land.
They would punish the wicked infidels and establish God’s will across every land and sea.
“Do not be impatient. As long as The Prophet is with us, victory in this great holy war will be ours.”
“But where is The Prophet now…?”
“He will come of his own accord soon. Do not doubt it. With the net God has laid, he will gather up every last one of those infidels and send them to God.”
“……!”
“Inshallah.”
The old man murmured it once more, his reverence swelling.
Inshallah.
God willing.
Footnotes
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Chōsenjin is a Japanese term for Koreans, used here as an ethnic slur. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
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Hongik Ingan, “to broadly benefit humanity,” is the founding ideal attributed to Dangun, Korea’s legendary first king. “Joseon’s eight provinces” is a traditional expression for the whole country. ↩
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The five people named here are figures in the Korean independence movement against Japanese colonial rule. ↩
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Mutaguchi Renya was a Japanese general in World War II, associated with the disastrous Imphal campaign. ↩
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Little Boy and Fat Man were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, in 1945. ↩
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Two meters is about 6 ft 7 in. ↩
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-sama is a Japanese honorific conveying a higher degree of deference than -san. ↩
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Frieza is a Dragon Ball character known for transforming through multiple forms. ↩
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Dogeza is a formal Japanese gesture of apology or supplication performed while kneeling and bowing to the floor. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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A kilometer is about 0.62 mi, so a few kilometers is roughly a few miles. ↩
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