WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
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◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 50: Big Brother (3)
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1.
I had known it deep down.
No matter how hard we fought here, this loop would end here.
This city, Necropolis, was a pit that sucked every last shred of hope down to its bottomless depths.
A city of death where any faint light was swallowed by pitch-black darkness.
Yiming was clearly exhausted.
From what I had seen, Yiming was the powerlifter or strongman type.
Each blow might be powerful, but his stamina was terrible.
The Gold Carp Family had released the jiangshi and focused on exploiting that weakness. Too much fatigue had already built up.
And then there was Li Cheng, the Gold Carp Family’s Red Pole and final boss.
A third-Rank Mage. A powerhouse who would have held the advantage even against Yiming at full strength.
A second-Rank Mage who was half-dead after playing tag with jiangshi.
A third-Rank Mage who had eaten a hot meal and just come out of a sauna.
The result of their clash was obvious.
“Urk!”
Yiming charged Li Cheng in an explosion, only to be flung back.
He rolled helplessly across the ground.
“Brother!”
“Don’t come over! Cough...!”
Yiming coughed up dark blood.
I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
Yiming was low on strength, sure, but if I had stood in front of that charge?
I would’ve been turned into finely ground meat without a single chunk left.
Yet Li Cheng had stopped that charge five times without even taking his hands out of his sleeves.
What kind of magic was that? Telekinesis? Psychic force?
Yiming had been thrown back as if he had slammed into an invisible wall.
“My, my. Incense Master Yiming, your stubbornness is admirable, but you still fight like a brute. If you stay still, I can let you die comfortably.”
“Ptooey.”
“You have no strength left anyway, do you? There’s no chance of victory.”
Li Cheng leisurely mocked him.
Yiming spat blood and rose again.
Li Cheng’s tone was obnoxiously smug, like some terminally online troll, but he wasn’t wrong.
The fight was already over.
There was only one reason Yiming could still be alive.
A Mage’s corpse was valuable on its own, and the more intact it was, the more valuable it became.
What Li Cheng was doing wasn’t a fight.
It was closer to careful butchery for unblemished meat.
Yiming had to know that too.
“Rowan.”
“Yes, Brother.”
“I’m sorry. It looks like... I can’t go with you.”
An awkward smile formed on that vicious face, a face so ugly no one could call it handsome even with a crooked mouth.
“Rowan, let me ask you one last thing.”
“Yes. Tell me.”
“Will you still regard me as your brother from now on?”
“Of course...”
I had been about to answer lightly, but the words caught in my throat.
I had never once regarded Yiming as my brother.
To me, Yiming was the idiot whose head Kisara had lopped off with a sword strike after he tried to pull some nonsense about adding Ceres’s corpse to his collection.
He was the moron who had let a spy in because he had been giggling over stockings and high heels.
And then there were his hobbies.
He cross-dressed, turned corpses into dolls, and held tea parties among them.
He was such a lunatic that even Hannibal would have gone, “What the hell is that?”
That was why.
The loyalty I had shown him was not loyalty.
I had always been waiting for a chance to stab Yiming in the back.
Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t even have hesitated to kill him.
Even now, I was hiding much from him.
That was the lifestyle I had learned, one optimized for Necropolis.
His actions might look like consultation and loyalty at a glance, but coldly speaking...
They were just the meddling of an idiot who was easy to use.
And yet, at this moment.
I placed my right fist in my left palm.
“Brother, you are my one and only brother.”
“Good! Then this brother will give his little brother one final lesson.”
Yiming grinned, patted my shoulder, and turned toward Li Cheng.
“Rowan! Do you know the Three Powers of a Mage?”
At a time like this? Confused, I answered from behind him.
“The Three Powers? Mind, Skill, and Body?”
Then.
Whooosh.
A wind blew.
A hot gust from somewhere made the blood-soaked hem of his changpao flutter like a heavy flag.
Whoooosh.
No. It wasn’t a hot gust.
“You are wrong! You don’t know at all!”
The scorching mana rising from Yiming’s body made the air tremble.
“That is the principle of trash who prattle on about cowardly tricks! The Way I pursue is nothing so trivial!”
Yiming’s thick finger pointed to the sky. Then the ground.
Finally, his own chest.
“My Way is Heaven, Earth, and Human!”
With a hearty laugh.
Rrrrrumble.
An invisible force surged from Yiming’s body.
The smog over F Sector shot toward the sky as though caught in a whirlpool.
“You still have this much power...?!”
Li Cheng’s face, relaxed until now, stiffened.
At the center of the storm, Yiming took a heavy step forward.
Boom!
The ground split with a scream from that single step.
“My head supports the Azure Heaven, and my feet stand upon the Yellow Earth!”
The red energy of the earth rose from beneath his feet, while blue energy from the heavens struck down from above.
Kwoooosh!
Those two tremendous forces passed through Yiming’s body and joined as one.
“This body shall become the pillar joining the vast sky and the solid earth!”
A colossal pillar of light pierced Necropolis’s Black Dust-covered sky.
It seemed as though it could reach Aden itself, far above.
“Flowers bloom upon the stem that joins heaven and earth! Now, this is my stage! The time for the curtain to rise has come!”
Within that beautiful, tragic pillar of light...
“Zhengdan[1], Tyrant Queen.”
Whispering the final line of his chant, Yiming slowly walked out.
I swallowed at his overwhelming presence.
“What...?!”
Li Cheng also stared so hard that his eyes looked ready to pop out.
Yiming’s buzz cut had become long hair that flowed in the wind.
His massive 130-kilogram body was wrapped in blue palace robes decorated with peacock feathers.
Red and black lines were painted over a face powdered white.
The corners of his eyes rose in a bizarre shade of red, and his lips gleamed blood-red.
At a glance, it looked like a mask.
The exaggerated facial makeup of a Peking opera actor.
Yiming now looked exactly like an enchanting princess who had just stepped off a Peking opera stage.
Though with a seriously high BMI.
For the record, historically only men took the stage in traditional Peking opera, so the accuracy checked out.
Though I had no idea what Heaven, Earth, and Human had to do with cross-dressing.
But who cared about that!
“Brother, do whatever you want!”
Since ancient times, cross-dressing had been the manliest act possible, one that only men could perform.
But there was an idiot here who couldn’t understand this obvious truth.
“W-what is that?! That disgusting appearance...!”
Li Cheng finally regained his senses, stammering as he pointed at him.
“The very essence of supreme beauty.”
“Bullshit!”
“Can you not realize it even after seeing it?”
Curling up coyly like a cat, Yiming shouted.
“Rowan! Go! I’ll handle this!”
The instant he stretched out his body.
He vanished with the flutter of silk robes.
This wasn’t the destructive movement from before, which shattered the ground and tore through the air.
A 130-kilogram giant moved without sound, wind, or even the slightest vibration.
His body reappeared right beside Li Cheng.
“You disgusting bastard! Don’t come near me! Stay away!”
Faint golden threads gleamed around Li Cheng, who had forgotten all about keeping up appearances in his horror.
At a gesture from Li Cheng, tens of thousands of golden threads poured down like willow branches that had lived for thousands of years.
“Myriad Gold Cascade!”
A golden waterfall that minced the space around it.
Its absolute cutting power collided head-on with Yiming’s fist.
Kwooom!
A deafening crash that seemed to turn heaven and earth upside down.
“Holy shit!”
That was Big Brother Yiming for you!
I had thought he was a little weak for a second-Rank Mage!
He had been hiding his true power all along!
“Such a hideous spell...! You dare show me something like this?! Die!”
The two clashed again and again.
To my eyes, they were two natural disasters colliding.
This wasn’t a level where I could interfere or help from the side.
All I could see was Yiming’s afterimages flashing as though he were teleporting.
And the golden threads cutting through space like branches scattering in the wind.
Boom! Kwooom!
Vibrations shook my organs.
Whenever the two powers crossed, the air screamed as if bursting apart.
“Hyaaaaaah!”
One thing was certain. Yiming was fighting while burning away his life.
He was clearly using more power than his body could bear.
Every movement left behind a bloody haze.
With every breath and motion, his blood vessels burst, scattering sprays of blood.
“Eek! Stay away! You monster!”
Li Cheng seemed horrified by Yiming’s appearance in Tyrant Queen mode, but that was all.
Every thread Li Cheng scattered wriggled as if alive, easily blocking Yiming’s charge.
Rrrrumble!
But.
“Uoooooh!”
Little by little, he pushed through.
Like a fairy swimming upstream through a golden waterfall.
Even as the golden threads tore his clothes, ripped through his flesh, and scraped away his bones.
He kept advancing.
“Being born beautiful!”
He took another step toward Li Cheng.
“And being born ugly, then striving to become beautiful!”
Li Cheng’s relaxed face steadily turned pale.
“D-don’t come...! I said don’t come!”
As though defying the fate he had been given.
Li Cheng was consumed by fear before Yiming’s beauty, burning brilliantly with his own life as fuel.
“Uoooooh!”
And finally.
Yiming’s palm passed through the golden waterfall and touched Li Cheng’s chest.
Tap.
A tiny sound that should have been swallowed by the roaring battlefield.
But I heard it as clearly as thunder.
The moment Li Cheng’s eyes filled with confusion.
Daaang!
A tremendous boom rang out like a great New Year’s bell.
Li Cheng’s body exploded like a bursting water balloon.
2.
With Li Cheng’s death.
The golden threads embroidering the space snapped one by one and scattered.
Golden flurries drifted across all of F Sector.
I immediately kicked off the ground.
Yiming stood at the center of that golden blizzard.
“Brother! Are you all right?!”
“Ah, Rowan... Don’t worry. Right now, I am the strongest...”
Yiming curled up his lips, then collapsed limply.
“Brother!”
I rushed over and caught him.
Up close, his condition was far worse.
His torn lungs rattled with every breath.
His skin had been completely stripped away, leaving not a trace of the tattoos he had been so proud of.
His huge body was hot enough to burn me just from holding it.
He was alive, but barely. A corpse that still breathed.
“Brother...”
“Rowan, I told you... I don’t think I can go with you.”
“Don’t say that! If you’re not going, neither am I!”
“You should listen to your brother...”
With great effort, Yiming reached into his clothes and pulled something out.
Five Universal Coins, soaked wet with blood.
“With these... you can operate the lift.... Once you reach Aden... go straight to Smugglers’ Street... to Changhwa House.... And if you tell them my name...”
If he had stored up this much power, he could have escaped by himself.
But he had stayed here.
To protect his little brother at the cost of his life.
Even as he took his last breath, he was worrying about me.
I hesitated.
Parting was approaching.
Should I let this beautiful farewell end upon a spotless lie?
Or...
“Brother, I don’t deserve this kind of love...! The truth is, I...”
Having made a great decision, I tried to tell him the truth.
“Khah! Khahahaha...!”
Yiming laughed.
He laughed, baring teeth stained red with blood.
“You... stupid bastard. Did you think... I wouldn’t investigate my own zuobi?”
He sounded genuinely amused.
“You think I didn’t know... you were fucking Ceres, you bastard...?”
I realized.
At some point.
He had stopped ordering me to bring him Ceres’s stockings and high heels.
Yiming had known everything.
Yiming’s pot-lid-sized hand grabbed mine tightly.
There was warmth in his eyes.
“Even so, you are my... Yowppi[2]. Would I... cut off my own arm?”
Partings in real life didn’t give us enough time to share our hearts like they did in movies.
Yiming’s final breath slipped out of his throat with a click.
The strength left the arm that had gripped my hand so firmly.
I opened my palm.
The blood-soaked Universal Coins he had forced into my hand gleamed.
I stared at them for a long while.
For some reason, a hollow laugh escaped me.
“No, Brother. If you suddenly hand me these...”
Universal Coins were a guaranteed death flag.
That great Kisara Yagyu from the Administration Bureau would come slice my neck off in about three hours.
“Don’t worry. We’ll meet again.”
I closed Yiming’s eyes and put his final cigarette between my lips.
Purple smoke drifted away.
So this loop was really over.
Hadn’t this been the most eventful one yet?
“...Cedric.”
I turned toward the voice calling my name.
Ceres stood there.
Footnotes:
[1] Zhengdan: A principal female role type in Peking opera. “Tyrant Queen” riffs on the classic opera story Farewell My Concubine, matching Yiming’s theatrical female persona.
[2] Yowppi: Korean rendering of Chinese yòubì, “right arm.” Yiming contrasts it with zuǒbì, “left arm,” and says Rowan is still his indispensable right-hand man.
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