WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 61: The Old Sewers (3)
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1.
After crawling through the hole, we reached a tiny room.
Ever been in the basement boiler room of an old apartment block?
That was exactly the feeling.
Mold covered the floor, and rusty water of unknown origin dripped from the ceiling.
Glow mushrooms picked from the Mushroom Factory lit the space like lamps.
It seemed the fixer couple had been using this place as a treasure storehouse.
“These guys...”
I thought they were cheap bastards for splashing into the sewer without even dropping loot...
But they had left behind such a sweet stash....
I was deeply moved.
There were no bad fixers in the world.
This city had simply made them that way.
“Thank you. I’ll put your legacy to good use. Hey, Boksun. Search around too and see if there’s anything useful.”
“I am already doing so!”
“Aww, good girl!”
Shion and I began looting.
Three minutes later.
“Give me back my fucking moment of silence!!!!”
They had hidden the place so well that I had gotten my hopes up....
But there was nothing. Not even the True Progenitor’s slush fund.
A few cans, respirators and filters, and 20,000 Bios hidden in a leather pouch. That was it.
“They really were scraping by.”
It seemed they had taken all their good equipment into the sewage earlier.
Haah. Life.
Right. There was no way Cedric’s luck would be any good.
Still, finding a place where I could rest without worry, even briefly, was a plus.
The stench was a little weaker here, too.
Just being in an enclosed space gave me a sense of psychological stability.
“Boksun, should we rest for a bit?”
“Those are welcome words indeed.”
The fake Progenitor took off her respirator and wiped the sweat from her face with her clothes.
I grabbed a can and leaned against the wall.
I was doing all this to make a living. I had to eat.
“Today’s grub is...!!!”
<AdenFood - Original Baked Beans>
A plain label with a generic Ark-shaped logo.
It was a canned bean product that was extremely popular in Necropolis.
“Oh! It’s this one?”
Shhk.
When I cut open the lid with my knife, the thick, sweet scent of tomato spread through the room.
I scooped some out with the tip of my knife and put it in my mouth.
Cold, sticky texture spread across my tongue.
The salty beans, sharp enough to make my tongue sting, and the sour tomato flavor seeped into my exhausted body.
A spoonful of these salty, dry beans was quite the luxury in Necropolis.
They were industrial goods from Aden, so an intact can cost 2,000 Bios.
For low-grade fixers, this was Dubai chocolate and apple mango shaved ice.
“Hmm...”
It was my first time trying it, but honestly, it tasted so-so to me.
Just canned beans with a fancy tomato flavor.
I hated that this gave me a little happiness.
I was sick of this city. I wanted out....
“Want some?”
I asked Shion, who was sitting beside me and slurping from a blood pack.
“This concubine dislikes beans. Would it not suffice to buy me mochi instead?”
“You really love soft things like yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
I casually sexually harassed her, but Shion just tilted her head without understanding.
I snickered and enjoyed the brief rest.
Shion had been a bad connection in the previous loop, but I was benefiting from her this time.
She was more than just a tool for clearing the Premium Route....
A companion?
Yeah. That embarrassing word.
Ever since Akitt and Areng had stabbed me in the back, I had not made any companions.
So grinding myself to the bone alone in this dreary city had become my routine.
But having Shion around made it feel like I could breathe a little easier.
“Let’s move.”
“Already?”
“Boksun is a strong and brave True Progenitor, so do you want to rest here alone?”
“Do not say such things! I-I shall come too!”
I kept the rest as short as possible.
If I rested any longer, I would only stop wanting to get up.
Just as I was gathering my equipment and preparing to stand, something caught my eye.
“Hm?”
A dark corner I had overlooked while looting earlier.
Something was covered by an old blanket.
Flap.
When I pulled away the dusty blanket, I found...
“A diving suit?”
It was literally a diving suit.
But it looked like the kind that would appear in a steampunk deep-sea exploration scene.
“This is really random.”
The helmet looked like a huge copper helm covering the neck and shoulders.
Thick iron bars reinforced the viewing windows in the front and on both sides.
Below it lay a waterproof suit as thick and stiff as elephant hide.
Shoes weighted with thick lead.
A heavy oxygen hose, coiled like a snake, sat beside them to connect the suit and helmet.
When I lifted it, it was damn heavy.
“Boksun, do you know what this is?”
“Who do you take this concubine for? Of course I know.”
“What is it?”
“Clothes one wears when entering deep water, are they not?”
Shion puffed out her chest and raised her nose proudly.
Good grief.
“...”
“W-Why are you looking at me like that?”
Still, she was cute.
“Hmm...”
It did not look especially valuable, and I could not see an immediate use for it.
We had to reach the sedimentation tank in Sector D-13, and dragging this thing along would just get in the way.
I had covered the hole properly with plywood, and I roughly remembered where it was.
I could pick it up on the way out.
2.
How much farther did we walk after that?
At last, I saw D-13 written on the wall.
“Fuuuck... That took forever.”
Once I found the sedimentation tank somewhere in this sector and recovered the slush fund, this goddamn sewer tour would be over.
“Master... There is something over there.”
“What?”
The moment I heard Shion whisper, I held my breath and pressed myself against the wall.
All I could see was a long, narrow stretch of darkness, but Shion was still a vampire. Her eyes worked well in the dark.
Night vision mode, basically.
Clank, clank, clank.
A truly strange sound, too odd to be a sign of life, slowly approached.
I cautiously stuck my head around the wall.
“Ah.”
Now I understood why there had been a diving suit in the fixer couple’s stolen-goods cache.
The thing moving around in the darkness and making those sounds.
It had the form of a human wearing a complete diving suit.
Splash. Splash.
Bent over, it was using an iron rake to push the filth piled at the side into the waterway.
Very diligently.
With clues like this, there was no way I could miss it.
It was a Cleaner, one of the residents of this rift.
I had wandered for almost four hours without seeing a single one, so I thought they might all be on strike.
Turns out they had been holed up in a corner, working.
I had not brought an extractor, so I could not collect any Placer Gold.
Still, it was blocking the only path forward, so I had to clear it out.
The instant I raised my mana, the Cleaner’s head turned toward me.
“Fuck. Look at that terrifying mug.”
I had not expected there to be a person inside.
But it was an even greater visual shock than I had imagined.
Crushed flesh and red mucus filled the helmet like mixed dough.
Dozens of randomly embedded eyeballs rolled around as they stared at me. It was genuine horror.
“Boksun! Get behind me!”
“O-Okay! Do not lose!”
Keeping its gaze fixed on me, the Cleaner slowly turned around.
With mechanical movements that showed no intelligence, it drew its weapons.
A weighted net in one hand.
A long trident in the other, which I had mistaken for a rake.
The moment I saw its gear, something came to mind.
The retiarius of ancient Rome.
A gladiator who bound opponents with a net, then stabbed them to death with a spear.
“As if this dog’s-breakfast setting was not enough, they really threw in everything.”
I moved first.
It looked tough as hell.
I needed something destructive.
That meant death by falling.
The GOAT among the Death Sentences I had.
I formed my mana into a sphere containing the mindscape of death by falling and fired it.
The Cleaner was not very nimble, fitting its appearance.
It did not even pretend to dodge. The moment the mana struck it...
Booom!!!
The diving suit and helmet caved in.
The impact was enough to instantly kill even a Grade 7 fixer with Level 2 augmentation.
But...
“Uu... Uuugh...!!!!”
It did not fall.
It remained standing on both feet, then raised the net over its head like a cowboy and began swinging it around.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The sound of air being torn apart echoed through the narrow sewer.
Whenever the weight at the end of the net scraped the wall, sparks flew with chips of stone.
“Fuck.”
Throwing a net down this cramped, narrow path?
There was no way I could dodge it.
And judging from its shape, the physical impact alone would be no joke.
At this rate, Cedric was about to become diced Cedric.
“Die!!!!”
I dropped the humor and fired Death Sentences containing every cause of death I had. Death by slashing, death by falling, death by gunfire, death by burning.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Only after taking exactly sixteen hits did the Cleaner finally go down.
Crash!
The net it had released at the last moment barely missed me, swallowing the space beside me and kicking up dust.
======
::: Challenges (NEW!) :::
- Hunt a Cleaner. +3pt
======
The Cleaner lay crumpled on the ground, its helmet badly dented.
Pink flesh spilled from the tears in its diving suit.
“F-Fuck....”
Honestly, I had been scared.
It was only Depth 2.
I had dismissed it as something a Grade 7 could hunt without trouble, but it had endured Death Sentence, and death by falling at that, several times.
No.
It was not that the thing was particularly strong.
“This is a bad matchup.”
That diving suit itself seemed to interfere with imagining a detailed mindscape.
It just made it seem like it would endure.
It just made it seem tougher.
Death Sentence was magic that projected the mindscape I imagined onto the enemy, so trivial distractions like this definitely got in the way.
“M-Master! Are you all right?”
The fake Progenitor, who had hidden well until then, hurried over in a panic.
“Brat, were you worried about your master?”
It seemed we had grown attached after all. She was worried about me.
“Of course! If you are hurt, would this concubine not be left here alone?”
“Boksun, you just dropped your glutinous rice cake on the floor.”
“...M-My rice cake? Where did it fall?”
I ignored the fake Progenitor as she panicked without a shred of awareness and sank into thought.
Tsk....
Was it really right to keep going?
I had not encountered any Cleaners until now....
But if I ran into several of them, that could become troublesome.
They were durable, and their weapons seemed specialized for this terrain.
If I got tangled in that net and dumped into that sewage, or a fall zone, I would be one-shot.
“Whatever. It’ll work out somehow.”
After suffering this much to get here, I could not leave empty-handed.
I had a Plan B if it came down to it.
I could burn my lifespan, or use a Joker to summon the goat.
“Let’s go, Boksun.”
“I am asking where this concubine’s rice cake fell!”
Backing out now would be far too un-Cedric-like.
3.
Fortunately, I did not encounter another Cleaner for the rest of the way.
I thought finding the sedimentation tank in this maze would also be a problem.
But that was unexpectedly easy to solve too.
I heard a really fucking loud noise and walked toward it, thinking, Could it be?
Rooooar!!!!
With a thunderous roar that seemed to tear my eardrums, the view suddenly opened up.
A huge underground cavern on a scale I could never have imagined existed beneath the ground.
“...Wow.”
Several ventilation shafts connected to the surface, making the place noticeably brighter than the rest of the sewers.
Within the vertical shafts of light pouring down from above,
dozens of drains in the impossibly high ceiling spewed colorful wastewater like waterfalls.
Dark green, purple, brown, fluorescent.
Every color of the rainbow, like the hair of heroines in a harem story.
The waterfalls converged into a lake of black sludge.
======
::: Challenges (NEW!) :::
- Discover the Old Sewers’ “sedimentation tank.”
======
So the True Progenitor’s slush fund was hidden somewhere around here?
No way any fixer would crawl all the way into this shithole!
“Boksun! Our lives are about to turn around!”
“M-Master....”
“Come here! Let’s have a kiss!”
“Master! Look around!”
My grin vanished when I saw Shion’s pale reaction and looked around.
“What?”
Until then, the grand scenery had held my attention, and I had failed to notice.
There were wrecks.
Scattered across the ground like trash.
Embedded in the walls like decorative objects.
The wrecks of Cleaners.
Like a figurine display case after some obnoxious nephew had gone berserk in it.
Not one of them still had a proper shape.
“Fuck.”
A chill ran down my spine.
I had just fought one, had I not?
Cleaners were tough as hell.
Something had smashed creatures like that to pieces this brutally?
“Boksun, run.”
I could not tell the details.
But my survival instinct was ringing alarm bells.
A tip from the new-area entry message came to mind.
- Be careful of the Cleaners. To their eyes, you are organic matter clogging the pipes.
Cleaners were not stay-put Beasts.
They were the sewer’s white blood cells, constantly moving to remove foreign matter.
We had encountered only one Cleaner during our six-hour journey here.
And here were the remains of Cleaners gathered in one place and slaughtered as a group.
That led to one conclusion.
Right here,
there was foreign matter they could not clean.
Squish.
A chilling presence cut through the roar.
Squish.
Wet footsteps.
Scrape.
The sound of metal dragging heavily across the floor.
A gigantic silhouette approached from the dark passage, one step at a time.
Then a beam of light from the ceiling illuminated the predator,
like a spotlight on a stage.
A tattered blue changpao.
Skin glowing dark fluorescent green with poison.
A head half exposed to the bone, as if drenched in hydrochloric acid.
And...
Hissss!!!
A rocket hammer, dragged along in its hand and venting steam.
“...”
It spotted me.
“Kh... Khahaha... Khahahaha!!!”
Laughter filled with rage thundered through the cavern.
The monster that had created this carnage was...
The former strongest Grade 7 fixer.
The cowardly junkie I had dumped in the sewers and turned into poisoned marinated crab.
“F... F... Found you....”
Xuan Sunming.
....
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