A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk - Chapter 27

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Haruto

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈

Chapter 27: Trigger

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Today's lesson.

Zombie apocalypses are dangerous, so don't imitate them. Only watch them in theaters.

"Pant, pant... Fuuuck... I'm dying...."

I had thrown away my blood-soaked coat and jacket long ago.

My originally white shirt was dark reddish brown, like it had been dipped in an ink bottle.

My left ring finger and pinky were bent at strange angles and comically swollen.

My stamina was drained as if I'd sprinted forty kilometers.

My throat felt scorched.

I'd grappled with zombies, punched them, kicked them, thrown them around....

Anyway, after doing everything but kiss them, I couldn't even tell whether I'd been bitten.

"Fuck it. If I was bitten, I'll die."

I spat out saliva that tasted of blood.

How many had I killed? How many bullets had I fired?

Dozens, maybe even over a hundred?

I killed the ones rushing at me, then killed more, then more still.

But to give the conclusion first....

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::: Challenges (NEW!) :::

- Survive the Infected Citizen Swarm. +5pt

======

Near my studio apartment, I, Cedric, was the only one still standing on two legs.

I had survived.

"I'm alive!!!!!"

I was so definitely alive that I could pull the same complacent act as an extra who dies and still make it out alive.

It was all thanks to Laplace’s Eye and Augmentation's superhuman strength.

Still, I could understand why Isis had warned me that Augmentation ate away at your lifespan and life force.

I seriously felt like I was about to die.

But an enhancer that burns through your lifespan and life force....

That might actually be kind of cool?

"God, my whole body...."

I barely made it back to the limousine and collapsed inside.

I started the engine and put a cigarette between my lips.

"Phew...."

When I inhaled deeply, the smoke tasted like burning corpses.

"Ha, this is the stuff...."

After resting for a moment, I started the car.

Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle.

"What the hell is wrong with this thing?"

Maybe because it had joined me on such a brutal journey, the limousine was in no better condition than its owner.

It managed to move, but the ride felt like a tractor.

"Ugh, I'm going to puke...."

Would Ceres fly into a rage when she saw the state of the car?

Or would she be amazed that I'd somehow returned?

Either way, it didn't matter much.

My final mission this run, whatever happened, was to meet Ceres, the mastermind.

I had to ask what the fuck Project Z was.

Ask why she'd made me take the Formless Poison.

And ask why she'd tried to stop me from leaving.

Even if she lied, it wouldn't be a problem.

I had Jokers.

One use of the Exhumation Monocle, which dug up a past the target wanted hidden.

Two uses of Coin Toss of Truth.

I would use them well and expose Ceres's contradictions.

There wasn't much time.

My body was in such poor shape that my vision blurred whenever I let my guard down, but....

The biggest risk was Choices appearing the moment Arbel died and changing my save point.

I had to avoid that.

"But... can I even get out of here?"

I had managed after the fight with the help of adrenaline.

But three minutes after taking the wheel, I realized something.

I didn't even have the strength to lift a spoon, let alone shoot another car action scene like before.

Fortunately, my worry about zombies attacking in this condition proved unnecessary.

"Ah, so that's why."

It was true that I'd carried out a zombie massacre so horrifying that even John Wick would tremble, but there had been no follow-up wave.

"One bite means infection. Hold the line!"

"Kill them!"

"Raaagh! Raaagh!"

"Keep the damage minimal! We have to sell the corpses!"

Fixers had been deployed and were cutting down the zombies.

"...!"

Among them was Sunming, looking gallant in a blue changpao as he swung a hammer.

"Truly magnificent."

I fixed the sight of the man I would defeat someday in my memory and headed for the barricade.

"Stop! Stop! Unauthorized personnel may not pass!"

Unlike when I came in, the area before the barricade was littered with zombie and human corpses.

Both groups had probably tried to leave E Sector and been dealt with by the fixers.

Of course, that didn't apply to me.

Rattle-rattle-rattle-rattle.

When the near-scrap limousine rolled through at roughly twenty kilometers per hour...

"The secret royal inspector is here!!!"

The fixers panicked, but still moved the barricade aside.

I bit my tongue whenever I nearly lost consciousness.

I was so sleepy along the way that I even hit a few people, but it was fine.

This was Necropolis, after all.

Just kidding.

I felt like I would collapse and die, so I was trying to lighten the mood.

After many twists and turns, I arrived at Ceres's Haeng House.

I barely parked in the garage and entered a private elevator that looked ten times nicer than my studio apartment.

"Uuugh...."

The second I leaned against the wall, a groan escaped me.

Should I at least take a shower before regressing?

I hadn't known dried blood could feel this disgusting.

"This isn't the time to be thinking about that."

What should I ask?

Why had she tried to save me?

Why had she poisoned me?

Should I at least try appealing to her emotions?

After spending time with her, maybe she wasn't completely heartless after all.

Ding!

The elevator doors opened, revealing the entrance.

"...?"

My brow twitched.

Something was off.

The entrance visible as soon as I stepped out of the elevator looked as it always did.

It was decorated like a long gallery filled with artwork.

But the living room beyond it had been tossed around as if a typhoon had swept through.

"...."

That wasn't all.

Shouting came from inside.

"What are you trying to pull? This isn't what we agreed on!"

One man.

"Shut that filthy mouth. I never wanted to indulge your disgusting tastes."

One woman.

The woman's voice did not belong to Ceres.

Fortunately, they seemed too busy raising their voices to hear the elevator arrive.

They were arguing in the living room beyond the corner, so they hadn't noticed me either.

I had a bad feeling about this.

The wrecked interior.

A man and woman shouting at each other in someone else's living room.

Ceres would never tolerate this kind of behavior.

There were two possibilities.

Either Ceres had suddenly left home at five in the morning, or....

"I kept my promise. I did kill Ceres, didn't I?"

What?

I doubted my ears.

It was impossible, logically.

This was Ceres, the Eight-Foot Widow.

Ceres, that terrifyingly charismatic Mage said to be at least Rank 4 or higher, was dead?

It was as unimaginable as seeing Jensen Huang, Lee Jae-yong, and Chung Eui-sun going hard on chicken and beer at Kkanbu Chicken.

Get a grip.

Information. Gather information.

Holding even my breath, I crept forward.

'Lucky!'

Just then, there was something like an award plaque on one side of the display stand.

Like a sniper using a mirror to secure their view, I used the plaque to look into the room beyond.

"You fucking cunt. You only kept half the promise. You said you'd hand her corpse over to me intact, but tearing it into pieces is just screwing me over! I can't even use her as a toy now!"

The man shrieking since earlier was someone I'd never met.

But a turtle-shell pattern was embroidered over his luxurious black changpao.

He was from the Xuan Family, one of Overnus Pharmaceuticals' three families.

"What if things went wrong? Would you take responsibility, Yiming? If you go easy on her because of your filthy sexual fetish and botch the job?"

The other person was familiar after all.

Gisela Rosenbach, one of Twilight Resource Development's eleven directors.

I had seen Gisela while traveling to and from headquarters as a driver.

"What could possibly go wrong?!"

"Ceres was a dangerous woman who could do anything right up to the very end."

At Gisela's rebuttal, Yiming barked back.

"Fuck! I knew that, so I helped you! I was the one who tipped your side off that Ceres was trying to interfere with the project! I was the one who poisoned her so she'd be easier to handle! I'm asking why you butchered her when cutting off her head would have been enough! You went to the bathroom and came back singing a different tune, you bitch!"

"A grown man whining, whine, whine. And what are you going to do about it now?"

"What?"

"I dealt with a traitor. But what about you? Because of your filthy hobby, you didn't properly report to headquarters, did you?"

"You fucking bitch... So you'll have your fun and then neatly slip away? Do you think I came here without any countermeasures?"

My reunion with Mama Ceres had been postponed until the next life, but....

I had obtained plenty of information from their conversation.

It was as if Nietzsche had descended into my head.

I understood the entire flow of events.

All right, let's look at it one thing at a time.

First, according to what the monocle had shown me, Ceres had made herself an internal whistleblower.

She had leaked Project Z, a plan to disperse biochemical weapons and commit mass murder, to the rival company Overnus Pharmaceuticals.

Why? I didn't know the details.

She probably didn't want Project Z to be carried out.

Yet the project went ahead.

Why?

Because Yiming of the Xuan Family betrayed her.

That bastard received the information from Ceres and did not report it to Overnus.

Instead, he reported Ceres's betrayal to the Twilight Resource Development board.

Why?

And judging from how he'd been whining about the corpse....

He must have wanted to play around with Ceres's body.

The average level of civic consciousness was fucking awful.

So Yiming, who had colluded with Gisela, poisoned Ceres.

And Ceres, the "traitor," was purged by Gisela, a Twilight Resource Development director.

If that was the case, every piece fell neatly into place.

It also explained the Formless Poison I had never understood.

Ceres hadn't poisoned me.

Ceres and I had been poisoned together.

I had endured because of Sturdy Stomach.

Then her attempt to stop me from going outside, and lending me her car when I said I had family at home....

They had been the smallest gestures of kindness.

Just as expected of the late Mama Ceres.

Sure, she was a stern executive who gouged out eyes during interviews, but there was no way such a beautiful woman with such big breasts could be a bad person, right?

Her capacity for compassion was built to entirely different specs from Gisela's petty, asphalt-flat chest.

...Still.

Fuck, I felt dizzy.

What a godawful city.

Even a Mage like Ceres could die from office politics?

Anyway, I had learned everything I needed from the conversation.

That made my instructions for the next run clear.

'Good.'

Starting next run, I would give up on the Ceres route.

Even if Project Z dragged on far beyond the point of reason, from Season 1 to Seasons 2 and 3 and all the way through Season 8, until audiences and critics tore it apart and nothing but zombies remained in the Necropolis slums, it wasn't my problem.

How was an ordinary citizen like me supposed to stop something like that?

Besides, it seemed Ceres's whistleblowing had already been exposed.

What, was I supposed to say, "Let's change the world together"?

We'd cross the rainbow bridge together.

I had already gotten all the information I could. Rather than get caught and have my legs twisted in a torture rack, I should take the easy way out.

It was lucky I hadn't been discovered until now.

Click.

That was when I fumbled the gun barrel into my mouth.

The moment the bitter taste of gunpowder filled my mouth.

I saw something strange.

Blink. Blink.

The orange lights illuminating the gallery slowly flickered.