WeTried Translations

Translator: Joy

Editor: Joy

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◈ Damned Transmigration

Chapter 40

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Still in Logos

Logos was a mountain that graded its dangers by altitude.

The requests offered in its shadow ranged from the manageable 2nd-grade to the harrowing 4th. The higher one climbed, the closer one drew to the celestial wound of the Rift, and the more the Chaos God’s influence saturated the very air.

As a result, the deeper one ventured, the more ferocious the monsters became. Even the flora was hostile, twisting into impassable tangles of thorny vine and blood-red fungi that defied any map.

Camping in such a place was a constant, low-grade misery. One had to be wary of everything from nocturnal predators to poisonous spores. Yet, trekking back to the village between each request was an unthinkable waste of time. So, they had come prepared for a prolonged stay.

Their system was efficient: with four people, the night watches were short and manageable. Elena’s shimmering wards and Haryeong’s cunningly laid traps made a fortress of their small camp each night.

If there was a single unavoidable problem, it was navigation. The mountain paths, warped by the Rift’s corrupting presence, were a confusing labyrinth where one’s sense of direction became a sick joke.

Fortunately, Jake was worth every sel they paid him. The hand-drawn map he carried was a masterpiece of survivalist art, allowing them to navigate the maddeningly repetitive terrain. More than that, he had a hunter’s instinct for locating their quarry.

While Elena’s magic remained the centrepiece of their battles, a storm of lightning and fire that annihilated lesser foes, Haryeong would occasionally nod, a silent permission for Yuri to engage.

He was no longer fighting pathetic goblins. His new opponents were demi-humans: Lizardmen and Orcs.

They were a different class of enemy entirely.

The Lizardmen were tall, slender beings covered in thick, mottled scales. Their movements were deceptively sluggish, but they possessed a reptilian strength that could shatter bone, and their scaled hides were as tough as boiled leather armor.

The Orcs, by contrast, were stout, brutish creatures, roughly human-sized but twice as broad. They were faster than the Lizardmen and stronger in a burst of pure rage, though they lacked any natural armour.

Elsewhere, such creatures might form tribes, wielding crafted weapons and wearing scavenged armour. But the monsters of Logos were feral, born of chaos.

Still, a few carried rusted swords or chipped axes, grim trophies looted from the adventurers who had come before them. When they encountered an armed opponent, Haryeong would intervene first, a shadow disarming the beast with contemptuous ease.

Yuri felt a prickle of frustration at this. He yearned for the challenge of facing a foe with a weapon, to test his techniques against cold steel. But he couldn't ask.

A 2nd-Circle martial artist fighting a 3rd-grade demi-human was already a gamble in their eyes. Adding a weapon to that equation was a risk they wouldn't entertain.

‘I wouldn't get hurt, though.’

He kept the thought locked away.

The fights were not difficult, but they were invaluable. Each blow was a lesson.

He learned the jarring shock of his fist against reptilian scales, a collision that would have fractured the bones of a lesser fighter. He learned to brace and deflect the wild, club-like punches of an Orc, redirecting their momentum with the fluid grace of the Fist of the Rending Cloud.

With his internal energy carefully metered, his strikes lacked killing force. This made the process tedious.

He would methodically disable them, seize a limb, wrench it until bone snapped, and then, with the monster subdued, draw the dagger from his belt. A quick, brutal stab to the neck.

"Of all the 2nd-Circle fighters I've ever laid eyes on," Jake admitted on the evening of the second day, his voice laced with a hollow laugh, "you're the first one who fights like you actually want to be there."

"High praise," Yuri replied dryly, while Elena, as if the compliment were her own, nodded with a ridiculously proud expression.

* * *

On the fourth night, the grime of the mountain had settled deep into their bones.

"Let's head down tomorrow," Elena announced.

She had just returned from checking the wards, her robes damp from a hasty wash in a nearby stream.

Four days in the wilderness had left her feeling utterly filthy. She sat by the fire, wrapped a sleeping bag around her shoulders like a cloak, and began her nightly ritual of combing her hair.

"Four days is enough," she continued.

"We can descend, collect our payment, and decide if we want to come back up."

"Alright," Yuri agreed.

He had learned what he could from this place. He had felt the burn of real combat, tasted the rhythm of an adventurer’s life. There was nothing more for him here, not at his current level.

"I'm turning in," Elena declared.

"If anything happens... well, you probably won't need to wake me. My wards will handle it."

During their time on Logos, Yuri had always taken the first watch, a small concession to his status as the lowest-ranked member of the party.

The mountain night was never quiet.

The chirping of insects and the calls of strange birds were drowned out by the howls and shrieks of monsters echoing from every direction.

But it wasn't just noise.

If he focused, truly focused, he could perceive things beyond sound and scent. The sixth sense, awakened upon reaching the 2nd Circle.

For each martial artist, this sense was different.

For Yuri, whose talent was exceptional, whose power was already straining towards the 4th Circle, it was the ability to feel the weight of a gaze. And that sensation intensified in proportion to the malice behind it.

Yuri sat cross-legged before the campfire.

He couldn't enter a true meditative state while on guard, so he kept his eyes open, staring into the hypnotic dance of the flames. He focused inwards, on the sensation of kneading the internal energy in his dantian, sharpening his senses to a razor's edge.

He listened. The soft crackle of firewood being consumed. The faint fizzle of a dying ember. The steady, deep breathing of Jake and Elena. If he strained, he could even hear Haryeong's respiration, so shallow and controlled it was difficult to tell if she were alive or dead.

Beyond the camp, the sounds of the wild night, and, occasionally, the distant, brutal sounds of a hunt reaching its violent conclusion.

A little more.

He sharpened his focus. His sixth sense brushed against the gazes out in the darkness, prickling his skin like phantom needles. Distinct hostility. Monsters. They watched from the gloom, held at bay by Elena’s magical barrier.

A little more.

At this level, pushing his senses further didn't expand their range outwards, but turned them inwards.

He looked into himself. The heavy thrum of his heart. The rush of blood through his veins. The river of internal energy flowing from his dantian along his meridians.

It felt like he was on fire. The campfire before him blazed, its light the only anchor in the crushing darkness. He watched the wood being swallowed by flame. A fire needed fuel to grow.

‘What fuel does my fire need?’

More internal energy? No. While a greater reserve was never a bad thing, he knew, with an unshakeable intuition, that it wasn't the key. The barrier between him and the next stage of the Heavenly Art of Annihilating Evil wasn't something that could be broken by sheer volume.

‘What is it…?’

He had hoped that real combat would provide a clue.

Even masters like the Moonlit Reveller and the Fist Wolf spoke of epiphanies found only in the crucible of a true battle. But his fights on Logos, visceral as they were, had not given him the answer he sought.

Was it because they weren't real enough?

‘Well, they were certainly overprotective,’ he thought with a wry smile, glancing at Elena's sleeping form.

They had, at most, a little over a month left together. They would return to Rutlan, spend a few days at the mansion discussing the future, sharing final meals, packing his meagre belongings…

‘I'll write to you. See you again.’

He could already hear the hollow words they would exchange, and a strange melancholy settled over him.

When he first arrived in Rutlan, his only desire was to escape. Now, with his departure imminent, he felt a powerful hesitation. He knew he shouldn't be swayed by such sentiment, but the roots he'd put down in those six months ran deeper than he’d realised.

The man called Lee Su-hyeok had lost his parents at fourteen.

It was a sudden, senseless accident. He hadn't been cast out entirely; he’d lived with distant relatives, but the house had never felt like a home. The sense of family was a pale, thin imitation.

He left the day he turned eighteen. His parents' inheritance was small, but thankfully, the relatives who had housed him for six years weren't savvy enough to steal it.

From then on, he had lived alone.

Looking back, it felt as though he had been alone long before he was ever truly on his own. He had sealed his heart away during those sensitive years and had never quite learned how to open it again.

Perhaps that was why these six months in Rutlan felt like a lifetime.

* * *

The next morning, as they began their descent, they found the body.

It was a corpse, or rather, what was left of one. The arms and legs had been torn from the torso with savage force.

This wasn't their first such discovery.

Only yesterday, they had passed the half-eaten remains of two other adventurers. Death was a common sight in a place like Logos. No matter how prepared you were, chaos was the only constant in a land blighted by a Rift.

"Ugh."

Elena grimaced and turned away, her city-bred sensibilities recoiling from the gruesome scene. Haryeong stood beside her, her gaze sweeping the surroundings with cold professionalism.

"No monsters nearby," she reported.

"But we are changing our route."

Even if a 4th-grade beast appeared, she and Elena could handle it. But Haryeong's duty was to eliminate risk, not confront it.

"I'll go check the body," Jake said, his tone carefully somber.

He had done the same yesterday, scurrying over to retrieve the adventurer's dog tags and rifle through their belongings. He claimed it was for the sake of honouring a fallen colleague, but the glint in his eyes when he found coin told a different story.

"I will accompany you," Haryeong stated.

It wasn't a request. Though they were changing course, she wanted to identify what had done this.

Jake’s expression soured, ‘I'd rather you didn't’, but he knew better than to argue.

"Must have been a Wolf Bear," Jake said, showing off his expertise as he knelt by the mangled torso.

"Rare 4th-grade that prowls these parts. Solitary hunters. To a 3rd-grade party, they're the godsdamned grim reaper."

He pointed a grimy finger at a torn shoulder socket.

"See here? The ragged edges? A Wolf Bear doesn't bite limbs off, it tears them. Beast doesn't like human organs, see, so it just takes the arms and legs for a snack."

Chattering on, Jake began rummaging through the dead man’s blood-soaked tunic. He found the registration tag.

"4th-grade adventurer," he murmured, his eyes lighting up.

"Should've known better… must have gotten careless. Happens to the best of…"

Jake's words died in his throat.

In a blur of motion, Haryeong exploded backwards. She spun in mid-air, kicked off nothing, and launched herself back towards Yuri and Elena.

"Haryeong?" Elena asked, startled.

Haryeong didn’t answer. Her arms shot out, grabbing both of them by their collars.

THUMP.

Her foot struck the earth, and she used the momentum to propel them all forward.

"What's happening?!" Yuri demanded.

"It died recently," Haryeong bit out, her voice tight with strain.

"And that corpse wasn't killed by a monster."

She held them fast, running with a desperate, ground-eating stride.

"What—?"

"There were no monster tracks. And I felt a gaze."

Her usual impassive mask was gone, replaced by a look of grim urgency.

Elena's face hardened as she risked a glance over her shoulder. Jake was still standing by the body, frozen in a half-crouch, bewildered by Haryeong's sudden flight.

"Wh-what's going on?!" he yelled after them.

At that exact moment, something dark plummeted from the sky. There was a sound like a melon dropped from a great height, a wet, percussive crunch.

Jake simply ceased to exist, crushed from the head down into a grotesque ruin of flesh and bone.

"He was right about one thing," a voice rasped, the sound carrying impossibly far.

"I am not fond of organs."

A gnarled old man with a wild mane of white hair lifted his head. A demonic light glinted in his blood-red eyes as he looked up from the paste he had made of their guide.

"They don't taste good. Such a hassle to prepare. I much prefer the simple pleasure of chewing on raw flesh."

He lifted his foot. The blood of the man he had just obliterated stretched into thick, sticky threads.

The old man cackled and began to walk towards them.

"Think yourselves unlucky? No, no. Don't think that. I've been watching you since yesterday."

Despite the growing distance, his voice was a whisper in their ears.

"The unlucky one was that poor fellow I tore apart. I went to all the trouble of clearing this area last night, but he had to go and stumble into it from somewhere else. Left me no time to tidy up. Heh heh. If only he hadn't come this way, he wouldn't have met such a terrible end."

Yuri looked at Haryeong’s face.

Cold sweat beaded on her forehead. Her eyebrows were knitted together, her lips pressed into a bloodless line. She was afraid.

"Do you really think you can escape?" the old man purred.

"I told you, I've been watching. There is no one here to help you. Blonde girl, your magic is so terribly loud. So flashy. But oh, it was brilliant. This was inevitable, you see. Your fault, really. That dazzling light… it caught my eye."

When Yuri looked back again, the old man was lowering himself into a crouch.

"I was hoping you'd wander a little deeper into my pantry, but since you insist on leaving, I have no choice. I'm not quite hungry yet… but I'd best catch my meal before it runs away."

FWOOSH!

The old man shot forward like an arrow released from a war bow. His speed was terrifying, far greater than Haryeong's, even without her carrying two people.

Biting her lip so hard she drew blood, Haryeong threw Yuri and Elena forward with all her might.

"My lady, run!"

"H-Haryeong, what about you?!" Elena cried, stumbling as she landed.

"Do not worry about me!"

This was a catastrophic miscalculation.

Watched since yesterday? But she had never felt his gaze. It was unavoidable. She hadn't been careless; his ability to conceal himself was simply beyond her ability to detect.

‘Who is he?’

A monster wasn't the only thing to fear in Logos. There were human predators who used the chaos of the Rifts as their hunting grounds. Fiends who hid their atrocities behind the carnage of monsters. She had known the risk. But Logos was supposed to be safe, managed, controlled.

‘To think I would truly have to risk my life on this escort mission.’

Haryeong swallowed a dry lump in her throat and flung her arms wide.

FWIP-FWIP-FWIP!

Daggers materialised in her hands and streaked through the air towards the old man. In response, he twisted his hideous face into a predator’s grin.

He kicked off the ground and spun, a low, blurring leap.

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!

A crimson aura erupted from his body, a visible wave of killing intent that deflected her daggers like gnats. Beyond that bloody shield, the old man splayed his hand open.

BOOM!

A torrent of scarlet energy engulfed Haryeong.

‘Ganggi…! A Master-level fighter!’

That meant he was at least 5th Circle. Haryeong didn't try to meet the attack head-on; she threw herself to the side.

CRASH!

The ground where she had stood was torn asunder, a cloud of dirt and pulverised rock exploding into the air.

Within the billowing dust, Haryeong pulled her mask up over her face. A new pair of daggers found their way into her hands.

CRACKLE!

A bolt of blue-white lightning lanced through the dust cloud.

"I TOLD YOU TO RUN!" Haryeong shrieked.

"He's not an opponent you can kill alone!" Elena screamed back, her wand leveled and glowing.

"He'll just kill you and come for us!" Yuri shouted, his fists clenched.

"We fight together!"

"I can buy you moments! That is all!" Haryeong retorted, her voice strained.

"He watched us for a day! He knows what we can do, and he still attacked! He is certain of his victory!"

"Truly," a voice drawled from the settling dust, "such flashy, pointless magic."

WHOOSH!

A gale force wind blew the dust away. Standing there, without a single scratch on him, the old man grinned, revealing rows of yellowed, sharpened teeth.

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