WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 40: Premium Fever! (2)
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1.
Let’s sort out the situation.
I chose the option to kill Arbel.
Time limit: 20 days.
Various Premium Fever benefits.
While looking for a trick to clear this route while saving Arbel,
I even got information from Isis that True Progenitor's blood might make it possible.
‘So who the hell is this True Progenitor?’
‘...’
Maybe because of her Commandment, Isis kept her mouth shut whenever I asked who the True Progenitor was.
Still, the information she gave me connected to something Yiming had said before.
The biochemical weapon spread for Project Z was actually diluted True Progenitor's blood.
But since Project Z had been shut down, maybe Twilight Resource Development still had some blood left?
Or could a charismatic True Progenitor heroine please show up already?
Please...
“I'll figure it out bit by bit.”
I still had plenty of time.
I needed to diligently power up, grind achievements, and gather information.
After leaving Isis Clinic, I headed straight to work.
And naturally, my commute led to Drunken Red Pavilion in Night Blossom Garden, where Yiming stayed.
Night Blossom Garden was dazzling at night, but early in the morning, it resembled a public toilet the day after a record flood.
“Bleeghhh!”
“Arghhh! I lost three hundred thousand! My life is over! Somebody lend me money!”
Drunks worn out after partying until late at night, gamblers who had lost their souls at the betting halls, and courtesans smoking pipes with empty eyes as they clutched bodies countless men had passed through overnight.
The last group especially caught my eye.
Gave me chills.
If I'd been hit by the TS Beam[1] back then, I might be sitting beside them right now.
I worship you again today, Misfortune-Warding Talisman.
“Good morning, Rowan.”
“Yeah.”
“Why not stop by our establishment? We'll treat you to some hot service.”
“Then could I take a qipao with me? About this size.”
“...Yes? Of course!”
“Make it a new one.”
As I passed through the brothel district, the pimps under Yiming's management greeted me.
I'd spent the last few days following Yiming around like goldfish poop, so they naturally pegged me as someone important.
After farming a qipao for Arbel, I entered Yiming's office.
“Brother Yiming, I'm here.”
“Rowan, is that you?”
Yiming was already thoroughly drunk first thing in the morning.
The position of Incense Master was equivalent to a director at Twilight Resource Development, but Yiming was the complete opposite of workaholic Mama Ceres.
I knew this would happen!
“Have a good drink. It'll settle your stomach.”
“Oh, thanks.”
I handed over the honey water I'd brought and asked him.
Normally, Yiming's face would have brightened immediately, but today he looked grim.
“Did something bad happen?”
“Something pissed me off.”
“Really? Want to go blow off some steam?”
“Forget it.”
Manager Yiming was turning down club activities?
“Then I have some stockings I just got my hands on...”
“Forget that too.”
No! Yiming was refusing Ceres's stockings? He wasn't some yellow mutt turning down dog food!
This was fucked.
An emergency.
Even his tone was grumpier than usual. Maybe it was that time of the month for our Brother Yiming.
I wanted to ask what a True Progenitor was, whether he could explain the connection between Project Z and True Progenitors in detail, and whether there was any way to obtain True Progenitor's blood.
But...
It wasn't the right atmosphere.
“Brother, if I can ease your worries, I'll help.”
“You? Ah, right. You're a Grade 7 too, aren't you?”
“Yes, Brother. Officially, I'm Grade 9, but I can handle someone around Grade 7.”
Yiming seemed to consider it for a moment, then waved it off.
“No, no. Forget it. You don't need to get involved too.”
“What happened?”
After hesitating for a while, Yiming finally told me.
According to his explanation...
There was a fixer office in the E Sector slums called the Red Cloud Gang, formed by around fifteen Grade 8 fixers.
It mainly took subcontracting work from the Red Dragon Family's Incense Master.
“I think those fucking dickheads from Red Cloud Gang stole our goods. But I don't have any clear proof they did it.”
I'd seen and heard enough to know.
Overnus Pharmaceuticals had put down roots throughout the industries of C Sector in the form of a cartel.
That meant its fights over interests were far more violent than those at Twilight Resource Development.
War itself was taboo, but proxy wars involving hired fixers were freely allowed as long as they did not cross the line.
There was a reason Necropolis had no insurance companies.
Yiming was probably wondering who he could send to settle the matter without escalating it into open war, while still saving face.
In a world of violence, face was directly tied to authority.
Hmm, this was an opportunity.
I might be Yiming's unofficial Yowppi, but all I'd actually done was join a cross-dressing club that had nearly been disbanded because it had no members.
It would be embarrassing to call myself part of the Xuan Family at this point.
I'd finally infiltrated them as a spy. I couldn't just learn Yiming's rankings of favorite courtesans and his lipstick of a lifetime.
To become his true Yowppi and build more trust with him,
I had to get one foot into the organization's affairs.
And since this was a play style I had never experienced before, I could probably raise my Points too.
“Brother.”
“Hm?”
“What am I to you?”
“Why ask that all of a sudden? We don't share blood, but you're my brother.”
“Don't lie to me.”
“What?”
When my expression hardened, Yiming blinked in surprise.
“If you thought of me as a brother! As a man! You should've told me to go kill those fucking bastards immediately!”
“No, I was just worried you might get hurt...”
“Brother!”
I pleaded with all my heart.
“I don't serve you because I want to live comfortably in your shadow!”
“...!”
“I'm here because, as a man, I want to be your strength! Why don't you understand that?!”
“Ro, Rowan...!”
“Wouldn't you be prouder to have a younger brother like that?! The proud spirit of the Xuan Family beats in this heart too!”
Yiming's eyes shook violently.
Then they turned serious.
“Can you do it?”
“Just tell me where they are. I'll twist the necks of those chicken-headed bastards from Red Cloud Gang and bring the goods back too.”
“...What a bitter regret. Why did I only meet you now?”
Yiming closed his eyes tightly, then embraced me warmly.
Fuck! Don't do this!
“Come back in one piece, my little brother. Rowan.”
I lowered my voice as I answered.
“I'll be back before your drink gets cold.”
Ha... I managed to play along, but honestly, I didn't really understand this whole mainland sensibility.[2]
2.
In previous iterations, Project Z had exploded when I had nothing to my name, putting me under unbearable pressure.
But this Premium Route gave me as much as 60 days of leeway if I maxed it out.
That meant I could steadily lay the groundwork for reviving Arbel through Edo Tensei.
“Even gold farming starts with building a solid foundation.”
There was one part I was personally looking forward to.
✧ [Growth Acceleration]: All growth proficiency gained ≪500%≫ UP!
This.
Premium Fever's Growth Acceleration.
Five times leverage was a little tame, but still.
I intended to see what kind of synergy it would create when combined with High Understanding of Death.
Death Sentence was, after all, the act of projecting a cause of death into mana and pronouncing it upon an opponent.
The problem was that I could not properly compare its effects on things that were not alive.
Which meant actual combat was best.
And so I arrived at my old hometown, E Sector.
The Red Cloud Gang's hideout was a logistics warehouse on the outskirts of E Sector.
Did he say fourteen Grade 8 fixers?
“Anyone below Sunming, I can take them all.”
Not just Sunming either, but drugged-up Sunming.
Before me, the strongest Grade 7 fixer alive, they were just a little exercise after a meal.
I hid in the dim shade created by the smog and watched.
The warehouse was two stories tall.
The bare H-beam frame had rusted black.
The first floor seemed to be for storage, while the second was used as an office, judging by the lamp light leaking through the windows.
One entrance. Two guards in front of it.
Calling it guarding would have been generous.
They were just smoking and giggling together.
There was something I wanted to test.
During my battle with Sunming, I had recreated Kisara's slash and death by falling.
But I had not yet recreated the death I suffered when my head was blown apart by a gun.
“Phew...”
I raised my mana.
It felt like thick liquid was flowing through my veins.
The mindscape of death itself formed like a droplet on my hand.
The target was a little under fifty meters away.
There was no hesitation now.
I had already decided what went first and what came after.
Who told them to open a gangster office and steal Brother Yiming's goods?
In Necropolis, that was more than enough to make it a matter of life and death.
“Focus.”
I brought my index and middle fingers together, like firing a handgun.
Aim.
Control my breathing.
Fire.
Without a sound or warning,
a black droplet shaped like a bullet sliced through the air.
Thwack!
Almost at the same time as the Death Sentence was fired, the head of the man I had aimed at burst apart.
The ember from the cigarette in his mouth scattered, making a small firework display.
Blood splattered over the warehouse wall like paint.
I thought I could kill quietly, like in a movie with a silencer, but the sound of a skull bursting was louder than I expected.
I had never heard it before because it was buried beneath the gunshot.
“Uh?”
The fixer beside him seemed horrified by the magic trick that had made his comrade's head disappear.
“Not a trick. Magic.”
This time, I changed the mindscape contained in the Death Sentence.
Mana stretched out like a flexible cord and wrapped around the man's neck.
The image I summoned was...
A special forces soldier silently sneaking up behind an enemy and snapping their neck.
What was this called again?
Death by neck twist? Cervical crushing death?
Crack!
Anyway, once mana wrapped around his neck,
his head spun like a top wound with string.
A brief death cry of Ghk! rang out with the crunch of shattered cartilage.
“Okay, confirmed that works too.”
It was far easier to recreate than I expected.
Just in case, I had also kept my most familiar slash at the ready.
“Hmm.”
I looked down at my hand for a moment.
Could I feel the proficiency going up?
It did not really seem like it, but maybe it had felt smoother than usual.
Maybe it was just placebo. Then again, one or two times probably would not be enough.
The only time I had used Death Sentence in actual combat until now had been against Sunming.
As I pondered this and approached the warehouse...
Gurgle, gurgle...
The man whose neck had snapped was alive.
More precisely, he was barely hanging on and suffering.
I frowned without realizing it.
“Ugh, hey. Sorry. That wasn't clean.”
Living the life of a fixer, I believed in no complaints when people killed and got killed.
Still, I had intended to send him off without pain.
Swish!
“May you reach paradise.”
I finished him cleanly with an extra strike.
“Hmm, strange.”
Looking back, it had felt like the mana was snagging a little.
Maybe my mindscape lacked definition because it was not something I had experienced or done myself?
“Can I get used to this through repeated training?”
A few more tries might give me a better sense of it...
Clatter!
“W-what the fuck?!”
“You bastard! Who sent you?!”
“How dare you attack Red Cloud Gang...!”
A side door of the warehouse opened, and a crowd of men in coats poured out.
It looked like they had all been gathering to go to the bathroom together.
The Red Cloud Gang bastards spotted me, drew their weapons, and rushed in from every direction.
There were sixteen of them.
Including the two I had killed, that was four more than the original information.
That could happen.
They were only Grade 8s anyway, right?
I had beaten drugged-up Grade 7 Sunming.
And the gap between Grade 8 and Grade 7 was as wide as the gap between sheep and wolves.
Still...
“Ha, fuck. Looking at them like this, there are a lot of them.”
I formed hand seals.
It did not seem like I would have time to leisurely experiment and verify things.
In that case...
“Die split in half.”
I would just fire the opening salvo.
3.
Wang Fei was Red Cloud Gang's Grade 7 fixer and leader.
However, he had not originally belonged to Red Cloud Gang.
Wang Fei had led Rising Dragon School, a fixer office composed of four Grade 7 fixers, and recently took over Red Cloud Gang by force.
Less than two days later, he received information from a client and successfully skimmed a hefty amount of goods.
Until then, Wang Fei had thought this takeover was a tremendous success.
There was always risk in fixer work, and opportunities for a score this large rarely came along.
If Wang Fei was taking a similar risk anyway, it was better for their future to side with the Red Dragon Family.
Wang Fei had already completed Level 2 augmentation, and they had three colleagues of comparable skill.
On top of that, Wang Fei had gained fourteen underlings, so they thought all that remained was to keep climbing.
“Cough, cough...”
But now, Wang Fei thought differently.
They should not have entered the arena of monsters.
Through vision half dyed red with blood, Wang Fei saw a man.
Black hair like the Reaper's, and cold black eyes.
Not even a small scratch on him, nor any sign that his breathing had faltered.
“Ha... Is it different somehow? It feels like the output is much stronger than before... Or not? Is it placebo? They're all mixed together, so how could I tell?”
Wang Fei's gaze slid away,
settling on the mountain of corpses and sea of blood before the man muttering like a madman.
Bodies sprawled everywhere, like fish chopped apart at a fish market.
‘How?’
Wang Fei could not understand.
With a head turning slowly as blood drained from their body, Wang Fei could not understand at all.
The moment that man formed bizarre hand seals, dozens of black straight lines shot out in every direction.
In the first volley, half of the Grade 8 fixers were split in two and died instantly.
But they were all fixers.
They had combat instincts born from experience and years in the field.
Those who survived tried to slip through the gaps.
They advanced from all sides, using their mobility to evade the straight lines or dodge them entirely as they closed in.
“No. Think positively. At least I can fire in all directions now, right?”
But it was meaningless.
Straight lines, dense as scribbles scrawled by an autistic child, repeatedly covered the space.
Their density was easily double that of the first attack.
They wore protective garments resistant to many kinds of sorcery, even Rank 0 magic.
But that too was meaningless.
One second later, every surviving Grade 8 fixer was dead.
Before three seconds had passed, the Grade 7 fixers originally from Rising Dragon School had fallen.
Wang Fei, desperately trying to evade, did not even last five seconds before his protective garment was torn apart, and before ten seconds had passed, his limbs were severed.
“Tch, bastards. I think there were some guys who weren't Grade 8 too...”
The man's back as he complained and entered the warehouse was the last thing Wang Fei saw.
Wang Fei's eyelids sank heavily shut.
Footnotes:
[1] TS Beam: “TS” is Korean genre shorthand for a sex or gender transformation, imagined here as a fictional beam that would have turned him into a woman.
[2] Mainland sensibility: Korean slang for the heightened, melodramatic brotherhood associated with Chinese popular media.
Edo Tensei: A reference to the reanimation technique in Naruto, used here as joking shorthand for reviving Arbel.
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