Escaping the Mystery Hotel - Chapter 291

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

◈ Escaping the Mystery Hotel ◈

Episode 290: Room 204, Mission Room - ‘Hotel Cinema’ (13)

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- Cha Jin-cheol

I'll be honest.

I'm not confident I can take that thing down before my wine cools. Was it even boiling hot to begin with? It'd take ten minutes at most to cool down, and there was no way I could kill a monster like that in such a short time.

Still, everyone would understand.

I was born a man and wielded a Guandao on a premodern battlefield. Even if I was going to die, it was only right to deliver Guan Yu's famous line at least once, wasn't it?

...

Let's think realistically. I'm the one who stepped forward saying I'd beat that thing to death.

Kurta was different from Murtanie.

If I rushed in with some complacent thought like, ‘Let's endure it with fighting spirit if things get bad,’ I'd be dead in three seconds at best. I needed a plan. What weakness could that absurd monster possibly have?

The first thing I focused on was the lightning Kurta spewed. It was lightning, but it didn't strike down from the sky. Kurta released it from its own body. Long streams of glowing blue current constantly spun around its body, like shimmering threads floating in the air.

Whenever one of those threads suddenly thickened, that was the sign of a lightning attack.

* * *

Thirty meters ahead. For that thing, that was practically right in front of its nose. Kurta's roars made my ears ring. After slaughtering the soldiers, Kurta turned its eyes toward me.

The beast looked as if it were sneering, asking whether I'd come to die.

I focused my entire mind and glared at Kurta as though I could see right through it. What was it going to do? Rush in and swipe at me? Or...

A lightning attack?

A white thread flowing over Kurta's shoulder burst with blinding light, and I threw myself diagonally with all my strength.

Lightning that shook heaven and earth passed within a single step of me. Even though I'd dodged it, the scorching heat nearly seared my entire body!

But I'd avoided the attack!

If I'd dodged the enemy's attack, naturally this was my opening. For one fleeting instant, the wolf that had released the lightning stopped moving.

I moved my right foot half a step back and twisted my waist halfway around. I pulled my right shoulder as far back as I could. Twisting my whole body, I squeezed every last bit of the monstrous strength Courage had granted me.

Like a bow bent to its limit releasing all its force at once, I unleashed the strength of my entire body. A thunderous boom that no human body should have been able to produce burst from me, and the spear in my right hand tore through the air.

--- THOOOM!

The instant the spear flew like a flash of lightning and buried itself in Kurta's shoulder, the elephant-sized wolf staggered.

For that moment, I was impressed with myself! Even Guan Yu probably hadn't managed to throw a single spear and land a solid hit on an elephant-sized wolf!

‘You won't die peacefully!’

A hideous roar echoed in my head like human speech. That wolf bastard could use telepathy too? Was that possible because it was a god's hound?

Kurta trembled in pain, and its eyes shifted to its own shoulder instead of me. It was going to pull out the spear lodged in its body.

The instant I realized the wolf's attention had left me, my instincts told me something.

A heaven-sent opportunity had come!

I ran. I moved without thinking. I thought as I ran.

Why? Why were my instincts telling me to cling to that thing right now? Wouldn't it be better to stay far away and throw spears?

No.

Keeping my distance and throwing spears at that monster was meaningless. Its mobility was overwhelmingly greater than mine. It had only taken that last attack because it had let its guard down.

So I had to get close. It wasn't enough to fight it at close range. I had to climb right onto its body.

Why?

A documentary I'd watched on TV long ago flashed through my mind. Mongolians had hunted wolves with hawks and eagles since ancient times.

Birds of prey were strong animals, but a large wolf weighed five to ten times as much as they did. So how could they hunt wolves?

It was because of the limits of a canine's body structure. They couldn't block attacks from above their backs with their forepaws or jaws, so they had no choice but to suffer one-sided attacks from birds of prey swooping down from above. That weakness didn't disappear just because a wolf grew bigger.

So...

I prayed that Kurta had a similar weakness. As the wolf pulled the spear out with its teeth, I jumped beside it with all my strength, praying again and again.

Please don't let this monster wolf suddenly stretch its forepaws backward like a monkey, or have some hidden fifth leg pop out of its back!

Nothing like that happened. The second round began.

* * *

The moment I climbed onto Kurta's back, a white heat ray glowing blue passed before my eyes. I jumped again as if I were skipping rope and cleared the beam, but Kurta moved while I was in the air, and I nearly fell.

“Let's see who wins!”

I gritted my teeth, grabbed the wolf's pencil-thick fur, and drove my fist into its back with all my strength!

What? An elephant-sized wolf? The punch I threw now had enough power to make an elephant jump!

--- THUD! THUD!

I hammered it with punch after punch. I was hitting so hard that the recoil from my own punches nearly launched my whole body into the air. I tensed my thighs and calves, clamping the wolf's upper body with both legs...

“Ah, fuck!”

Another mass of light giving off searing heat came at me!

Didn't this bastard get hot with that kind of power flying around its body? Then again, it would be funny if a wolf that controlled lightning got roasted by its own lightning.

This time, I buried my entire upper body in the wolf's fur. Was that fortunate, at least?

The white radiance only floated around Kurta's body. It didn't burrow into its fur to burn me alive. If the lightning went beyond floating nearby and entered its body, Kurta itself seemed unable to endure it.

After getting through that danger, I began beating Kurta's back with all my strength again. I swung so hard that the bones throughout my body, which Murtanie had praised as having the durability of iron, felt as though they would shake apart.

--- Grrrrr!

Kurta's roar shook the battlefield.

That cry, that scream, was clearly different from its earlier roars. Even a god's hound had pain it could barely endure, and that emotion had seeped into its howl.

I kept pounding Kurta's concrete-like back without stopping, until finally my fists reached their limit. My skin tore away, and my left index finger was completely crushed, leaving the bone nearly exposed.

I clenched my teeth hard enough to crush them. If I couldn't kill this monster wolf now, I would die!

At that moment, my entire body suddenly tilted, and the world began to turn upside down.

“Ugh, wh-what the hell is this...”

It didn't take long to understand what was happening.

Kurta had decided that simply shaking its body wouldn't be enough to throw off someone clinging to it like a leech. It had rolled onto its back and begun rubbing its back against the stone floor!

The wolf's body flipped over. When I turned my head back and saw a stone-filled gravel bed, goosebumps broke out all over my body!

Was I going to die? Crushed beneath the weight of an elephant-sized wolf and ground against the stone floor? Of all ways to die, it had to be this horrible?

...

Both I, trembling in fear as I imagined that awful end, and the wolf trying to scrape the savage monkey off its back against the stone floor had overlooked one thing.

Unlike humans, wolves had thick fur over their entire bodies. Kurta, too, had hairs as thick as pencils and longer than my legs sprouting all over its body.

Put simply, instead of being ground against the stone floor, I was driven deep into the wolf's fur. Some of Kurta's hard, sharp hairs stabbed into my upper body like needles, but that was still a thousand times better than being scraped over stone.

The crushing pressure forced my face into Kurta's back.

I barely managed to use my legs and arms to grip the surrounding fur and flesh, stabilizing myself. Then I realized my face had ended up against the spot where I'd punched dozens of times and torn away half the flesh.

Right now, both my arms and legs were being used to cling to the wolf's body. But...

I realized I still had one way to attack.

The most primal weapon of beasts surviving in nature, the mouth! Since I'd already buried my upper body in its fur, I bit down on the wolf's back and tore into it!

I was really doing every insane thing imaginable. I'd heard of wolves biting people, but I never thought there would come a day when I, a person, would tear into a wolf with my teeth!

As I tore into an enemy with my mouth for the first time in my life, I realized something. A human mouth wasn't such a bad weapon. I'd just never bitten into something with all my strength before. The power of my blessing-enhanced jaws was probably closer to that of a crocodile or hyena than a human's.

The moment I tore off a thick chunk of flesh, a noise sharp enough to split my head rang out.

‘You savage bastard! I'll fry you alive!’

Holy shit!

I'd lived long enough to be called savage by a wolf!

Today, I was going to pull this dog bastard's spine out and make gamjatang with it!

As I spread open the wound pumping out red blood like a pump with both hands and moved in to bite again, the wolf's body suddenly shook hard and rose back upright.

At the same time, its stiff fur stabbed into me from every direction. It seemed to have tensed the muscles in its back. What was it planning? Was it going to kill me by stabbing me with its fur?

When I came to my senses, I realized I couldn't move at all because of the stiff fur wrapped around my entire body. As if it had been waiting, the blue radiance floating in the air slowly approached.

Only then did I understand Kurta's intent. At last, the god's hound had decided to burn me alive with the power of lightning.

If it tried to scorch me with lightning while I was stuck tightly to its body, Kurta's own body would be badly injured too. Still, considering its size, I would die before Kurta did.

I couldn't move my body at all.

The physical force Kurta had put into its fur by tensing its back muscles was powerful, but that wasn't all. My body was already too damaged. The bones in both hands were exposed in several places, and my legs were full of holes, blood streaming down them.

Only when the force of the lightning had come right up to me did I accept it.

It was over. It seemed this insane monster was simply too much for me to defeat.

...

‘I'll help you a little.’

‘Watching you was a little frustrating.’

What was this?

‘Long ago, I despaired at the imperfection held within the human body. The evolution that could fill that imperfection was far too slow.’

“Y-you, who the hell are you?”

‘So I made up my mind. I would achieve a million years of evolution in a single instant.’

My skin began to boil.

My muscles twisted.

My bones shook.