WeTried Translations

Translator: Joy

Editor: Joy

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◈ Damned Transmigration

Chapter 38

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Adventure

The list of requests Jake had brought was a bestiary of half-forgotten memories from the game: Carnivorous Vines, Pacing Mushrooms, Toxic Flies, Fanged Rabbits, Slimes, Bipedal Lizards. The low-level trash mobs of Logos, made real and visceral.

“First, we pass through a Carnivorous Vine cluster,” Jake began, his voice a gravelly monotone that spoke of a thousand such briefings.

“They live in a ghastly symbiosis with the mushrooms and flies. It’s the flies you watch for.”

He described their grim, efficient ecosystem of death.

The buzzing, fist-sized insects would swarm first, their bite delivering a paralytic neurotoxin. The dizziness was the overture; full-body paralysis was the crescendo. Once the victim collapsed, helpless, the vines would drag them into the undergrowth. There, the mushrooms would latch on, sprouting from living flesh, while the flies returned to feast.

The orphan Yuri had never seen a monster.

The man he was now had encountered them on the desperate flight from Oldor, but Haryeong’s daggers had always been faster than his fear. He had been a spectator to death, never a participant.

He listened with the focused tension of a man about to step into the arena for the first time.

“Poison is a triviality,” Elena said with a dismissive sniff, her boredom palpable.

For a 4th-Circle mage, it was. Antidotes were simple enough, detoxification spells even more so. Anyone at the 3rd Circle or higher could shrug off the toxin with their own internal energy.

“Yuri-nim is the only one who needs this,” she said, handing him a vial.

The liquid was viscous and appallingly bitter, leaving a chemical slick on his tongue that made his eyes water. He grimaced.

“The trials of a mere 2nd Circle,” Haryeong murmured, her voice dripping with mock pity.

“Truly tragic.”

The day's objective was simple: cut a path through the vine cluster, fulfilling the subjugation request along the way, and return to the village by nightfall.

The adventurer’s bracelet on his wrist, a piece of magical convenience that eliminated the need for collecting gruesome trophies, would automatically record their kills.

“Are you not trembling with anticipation?” Haryeong asked, noticing his fascination with the bracelet.

“Your fateful duel with a goblin awaits.”

“An ordinary man can beat a goblin with a club,” Jake grunted from the driver’s seat.

“I don’t have a club.”

“Oh, dear,” Haryeong said, her face a mask of stone.

“But then, you are no ordinary man, are you, Yuri?”

After the briefing, they retrieved their carriage. To Haryeong’s visible, if silent, delight, Jake took the reins.

‘What is their story?’ the guide wondered, stealing glances at the trio.

His initial assumption had evaporated. The dynamics were all wrong.

The woman, Haryeong, was a 3rd-Circle martial artist, yet she addressed the 4th-Circle mage with the deference of a servant.

A bodyguard weaker than her charge? Unlikely.

That left the boy. A 2nd-Circle martial fighter, clearly the weakest link. He’d assumed ‘porter’, but the mage’s fierce protectiveness yesterday had scuttled that theory.

Lovers, perhaps? No, their levels were too disparate, and there was an odd, unbreachable distance between them.

“They’re childhood friends.”

The voice, calm and quiet beside him, made Jake flinch. Haryeong was watching him, her gaze unnervingly direct.

“The real reason we’ve come to Logos,” she continued, as if discussing the weather, “is to provide Sir Yuri with a convenient, safe, and comfortable ‘experience’. He is an aspiring adventurer. Since you are a veteran, Jake-nim, please feel free to offer him your counsel.”

“Counsel…” Jake muttered, glancing back at the carriage where Yuri was climbing in, completely unequipped.

“My first piece of counsel would be for him to buy a spear.”

He had daggers, but against monsters, that was a fool's gambit for a low-level fighter.

“Yuri, did you hear that?” Haryeong called out.

“I appreciate the advice,” Yuri’s voice drifted back, “but I have no intention of using another weapon.”

“There you have it,” Haryeong said to Jake.

‘Then why ask me for advice?’ the guide grumbled to himself, and flicked the reins.

* * *

The mountain of Logos was contained. A five-metre wall of stone, reinforced with the divine power of the Sect of Earth, encircled its base. Above, invisible to the naked eye but a roaring presence to Yuri’s senses, was a vast dome of magic, a ceiling to cage the flying horrors within.

“The work of the Tower Masters,” Elena explained, her voice swelling with pride as she noticed his flicker of interest.

“The wall was a joint effort by Guzel Havert the Iron Fortress and the High Priestess of the Sect of Earth. The barrier in the sky was designed by the Polar Point, Arsen Lucionell, and woven into being by several Masters.”

‘She builds cages,’ Yuri thought, running a hand over the wall, feeling the thrum of harmonized mana and divine power.

‘Chuk-sin-doo shatters worlds.’

The difference in scale, in purpose, was staggering.

Past the gate, the air grew thick and wrong. The clean, refreshing scent of a normal forest was choked out by a cloying odour of rot and decay.

The trees were twisted, monstrous things, their canopy a dense, light-stealing roof that plunged the forest floor into a perpetual twilight. The woods were alive with the chittering, skittering sounds of things that should not be.

“There,” Jake whispered, pointing.

It began. Dull green vines slithered through the undergrowth like sluggish serpents. Fleshy mushrooms, large as a man’s leg, crawled on writhing tendrils. And from all around came the buzzing of the flies, a sound that vibrated deep in Yuri’s bones.

“Do you remember how I used to hate bugs?” Elena murmured, a ghost of a memory passing between them in the gloom.

He remembered. The six-year-old girl who would run screaming to him, the seven-year-old boy who would beat her tormentors and stuff the offending insects into their mouths.

“I still hate them.”

The woman of twenty did not scream. Her face hardened into a mask of pure, unadulterated disgust.

Crackle.

The air grew sharp, smelling of ozone.

“Chain Lightning.”

A living serpent of golden electricity erupted from her outstretched wand. It struck the nearest swarm of flies, turning them to incandescent puffs of ash and smoke, then arced with impossible speed to the next, and the next.

It was a web of liquid fire, a storm of controlled destruction that leaped from monster to monster, leaving only blackened, twitching husks and the smell of burnt meat in its wake.

The slaughter was over before it could be called a battle.

Elena surveyed the scorched earth, the charred remains of vines and mushrooms, then calmly produced a comb from her robe and smoothed the static from her hair.

“So,” she said, turning to him, a triumphant, challenging glint in her eyes.

“What do you think?”

Yuri stared at the devastation, at the casual, terrifying power she wielded as easily as breathing.

He remembered his fleeting, foolish thought in Oldor, of attacking her and escaping. He wouldn’t have been captured; he would have been a smear of ash on the floor.

“How about you learn magic from me?” she offered, puffing out her chest.

“I am, after all, a great teacher.”

This was her plan, laid bare: awing him with the splendor and might of magic, giving him a reason to stay by her side, choosing her world over the one he was determined to find for himself.

For the next few hours, that was the pattern.

Jake would guide them, monsters would appear, and Elena would annihilate them. Jake, who had started the day with his spear held at the ready, was now practically dragging it behind him, his sighs of weary admiration punctuated by the frantic stuffing of valuable monster parts into his ever-expanding pack.

“Wait.”

Haryeong, who had been a silent, unobtrusive shadow, suddenly held up a hand.

“One moment. Stay here.”

Before anyone could ask, she was gone, a blur of motion that melted into the dense foliage without a sound.

The suddenness of it put everyone on edge.

Elena’s wand, which had been resting at her side, crackled back to life. Yuri fell into a low stance, the nascent fire of the Heavenly Art of Annihilating Evil beginning to smolder in his dantian.

A moment later, Haryeong reappeared, leaping back over the bushes with the same silent grace. She was not alone.

“Kik, kee-ek…”

Clamped in her hand, its skinny legs kicking uselessly against her iron grip, was a goblin.

“A Green Goblin Scout, to be precise,” Haryeong announced to their stunned silence.

“Its presence indicates a den nearby. I thought our quiet companion deserved a chance to shine.”

She gave the struggling creature a little shake for emphasis.

“Demi-human monsters like these possess a rudimentary intelligence. This one, however, was born of the Rift. It knows only instinct.”

She grasped one of its long, pointed ears, pulling its head back.

“Listen well, goblin. The man before you is named Yuri. You will now fight him to the death. If you win, I promise to return you safely to your family.”

“Haryeong-nim, have you lost your mind?” Yuri finally managed to ask.

“I am perfectly sane.”

Without another word, she tossed the goblin. It landed in a heap at Yuri’s feet.

“Go, Green Goblin Scout. Show him what you’re made of.”

The creature understood nothing of her words, but it understood the universal language of survival. To escape the terrifying woman who had plucked it from the forest like a weed, it had to kill the unassuming man in front of it.

“Kiaaaargh!”

It scrambled to its feet and charged, claws extended.

Yuri let out a long, weary sigh.

He’d been tense, expecting his first real monster fight to be… more. But the creature rushing him now moved with all the speed and grace of a drunken toddler. The Oh Brothers had been more of a threat. He didn’t even bother with a named technique. It wasn’t worthy of one. He simply stepped forward.

Thwack.

His kick was a simple, clean, economical arc of motion. It connected with the goblin’s temple with a sickening crunch. The creature’s head caved in, and it crumpled to the ground without a sound, a puppet with its strings cut.

Haryeong blinked. Her face, for the first time Yuri could remember, was utterly blank.

For a split second, a phantom afterimage had flickered in her vision, the ghost of a motion from the Moonlit Reveller’s impossible Kicking Arts.

It was absurd. It made no sense. Yuri had kicked a goblin’s head, not a sphere of condensed Ganggi. And yet… the form… the devastating efficiency…

“What’s with that expression?” Yuri asked, lowering his leg.

“Where did you learn to kick like that?”

“Does one need to be taught how to kick?”

“That is not what I meant,” she pressed, her voice sharp with an intensity that startled him.

“That was not a simple kick. It lacked depth, yes, but the form was… perfect.”

“Well, the Moonlit Reveller had some good kicks,” he said with a casual shrug.

“I’m a martial fighter, but that doesn’t mean I should only use my fists. Kicking is more efficient against smaller opponents.”

He nudged the corpse with his boot, as if to prove his point.

“I’m focusing on my fist techniques for now, but I’ve been practicing the form in my spare time.”

Haryeong’s carefully constructed composure fractured, then shattered.

He was saying that six months ago, during a life-or-death duel between two masters, a battle that even she struggled to fully comprehend, he had not only watched but analysed the footwork of one of the Revered, memorised it, and had been practising it in private ever since?

“Madness,” the word escaped her lips, a raw, involuntary whisper.

She clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late.

She had known he had a good eye, had seen him dodge Namgung Jin when he was little more than a street rat. But this was something else entirely. This was a monstrous, terrifying talent for observation and assimilation that bordered on the inhuman.

She composed herself with a visible effort, lowering her hand.

“I was expecting a battle for the ages. How anticlimactic.”

“Did you seriously think I’d have trouble with a single goblin?”

“You just took a life, Yuri-nim. Do you feel no remorse?”

“Nothing,” he said, his voice flat.

“Excellent,” she said, and her eyes, when she looked at him, were gleaming with a new, predatory light he had never seen before.

She pointed into the bushes.

“The scout came from that direction. Let us go and find its nest.”

She turned to Elena, her voice crisp and commanding.

“My lady, you are not to interfere. We will observe how well Sir Yuri fights.”

Elena hesitated, a flicker of concern on her face, but she nodded.

“Come, Yuri-nim,” Haryeong said, and for the first time since he’d known her, a faint, chilling smile touched her lips.

“Let us go and create a goblin hell.”

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