WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Escaping the Tower at Hell Difficulty ◈
Episode 101
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The Julius Squad's corpses lay before me.
Honestly, those bastards had some nerve.
I could leave them here to rot, but...
I was afraid it would stir up trouble if other hunters saw them.
Any experienced hunter would be able to roughly figure out what had happened between us.
They could easily twist the story before spreading it.
Shhk.
I drew my dagger and collected their corpses and souls.
They didn't deserve to rest peacefully in a grave, but...
They were still the same species as us, so it left a bad taste in my mouth.
"Whew, that's done. What about the loot?"
"A defensive talisman dropped. Should we give it to Juwon?"
"Sure."
Following Yuki's suggestion, the new talisman went to Han Juwon.
We'd had a successful boss fight, so a flock of Crows would soon come swarming in.
The hunters underground might not have caught on yet, but the ones still above ground were different.
"Pack up. We're leaving right away."
"Toward the exit?"
"That's right."
Since the Great Temple was in the center, we were free to choose any direction.
Sang Hajun soon picked one.
"A hunter team is approaching from the north."
"Then we'll head south."
Our backpacks were nearly full after taking the German team's equipment and loot as well.
There was no need to go out of our way to fight third-rate hunters carrying junk equipment.
I wanted even less to fight first-rate hunters.
"Run!"
After setting up a Reinforced Barricade behind us, we ran straight for the forest.
It was better to break through quickly before everyone gathered.
I detected monsters ahead and pulled out my lever-action rifle.
Even with Four Seasons, that distance was too much for a pistol.
Bang!
A skeletal soldier holding its rifle awkwardly fell over.
More monsters rushed in at the gunshot.
Still, their firearms and marksmanship were so awful that it was hard to expect them to hit anything beyond medium range.
"This way, run!"
"Huff, huff..."
Han Juwon, the most heavily armed among us, ran while drenched in sweat.
Sang Hajun took his backpack for him.
Whenever something like this happened, I thought the same thing. Whether they were special forces or hunters, the greatest skill was probably marathon running.
Bang!
After emptying the tubular magazine, I threw a smoke grenade to buy us some time.
Since the forest monsters hadn't been cleared out much, the hunters couldn't approach easily.
When we found the exit, I sensed people nearby.
"Ah, another ambush."
I'd almost be disappointed if there wasn't one by now.
From what I could tell, their equipment wasn't anything special.
I greeted the ambushers by tossing in a grenade.
"Ugh!"
Boom!
Maybe they were lucky. No one died.
I could finish them off for sure, but I didn't have time.
Their injuries wouldn't automatically heal just because they left the Tower.
The shrapnel lodged in their bodies would give them plenty of trouble.
Their medical bills probably wouldn't be cheap either.
"Good luck. I'm leaving first."
"That bastard...!"
"What?"
I was starting to change my mind.
Should I just kill them all after all?
I'd already killed people, and my head was a mess.
Would covering my old sins with new ones make me feel better?
When I pulled out another grenade, they changed their tune.
"Have a safe trip!"
After making sure all my team members had entered, I followed them inside.
Flash!
Escape successful.
[Smoke Screen skill level has increased to 5.]
[Physical Technique skill level has increased to 10.]
[Effortless Motion skill level has increased to 1.]
"Uh..."
"What's wrong, Team Leader? Did your Transcendence skill level up?"
"No. Transcendence didn't level up when it should have. Physical Technique hit level 10 instead."
"Wow... You really got Physical Technique to level 10?"
Physical Technique had always been damn hard to level up.
It had finally reached level 10.
"Alchemy didn't reach level 10 either..."
Still, I was lucky to get an upper skill.
The upper skill was Effortless Motion.
It removed unnecessary movements to improve efficiency.
With unnecessary movements gone, noise and vibration were minimized too.
"Wow, Team Leader, you're seriously obsessed with efficiency."
"Not everyone gets the same upper skill, right?"
"No. They say the upper skills you get differ slightly depending on how you used the skill."
I liked Effortless Motion quite a bit.
It suited me well.
I told Go Jiho, who had been waiting nearby, about what had happened with the German team.
His expression immediately turned serious.
"A German First-Tier Team attacked you first, and you retaliated? If this gets into the news, it'll cause a huge uproar. Do you want to make it public?"
"I don't particularly want to."
It wasn't like all Germans were like that.
It made more sense to see this as the Julius Squad going rogue.
Still, what was a First-Tier Team from a developed country like Germany doing specializing in exit ambushes?
Maybe their claim of being a First-Tier Team had merely been their own unsupported claim from the start.
"All right. We'll bury it for now."
Everyone spent longer than usual at the bathhouse.
We scrubbed ourselves raw in case there was still blood on us.
The Mushroom Spores had already made me feel disgusting enough. I finally felt clean inside and out.
"Whew... That feels good."
Next, we returned our ammunition.
Even if we were hunters, it wasn't right to let us walk around carrying live rounds.
Of course, I could make ammunition with the Alchemist's Ammunition Box.
Still, this was the standard procedure for all hunters.
As I watched Han Juwon return his machine-gun ammunition, a thought suddenly came to me.
"Seeing this, I don't think we'll need to worry about nonhuman hunters for a while."
"Why not?"
"Even if they have guns, they don't have facilities to supply ammunition."
"Ah. They can't keep up with the consumption."
Han Juwon had entered with three hundred machine-gun rounds, but he only returned around a hundred and fifty.
We'd avoided combat as much as possible this time, and it was still that much.
And this wasn't even ordinary ammunition. We used things like Tungsten-core armor-piercing rounds as standard.
Even we had trouble supplying them whenever there was a problem importing raw materials.
Could nonhuman races with no proper factories mass-produce something like that?
It was ridiculous.
They would need facilities just to produce gunpowder in large quantities. Where would they find those?
Firearms and ammunition had to meet exact standards.
Nonhuman races specialized in small-scale custom production.
They might be able to get their hands on guns somehow, but mass production would stop them cold.
"That takes a load off my mind."
"Please have the Association continue monitoring the Dimensional Shop. Someone might start selling ammunition there."
"All right. What do you want to eat today?"
"Anything's fine, as long as it doesn't have mushrooms..."
"Then how about this place? They make their own kimchi, and it's really good."
Kim Yuna snatched the phone Go Jiho showed us.
She rarely watched videos from other channels because she didn't want to give them views, but she still kept up with hunter-related videos and restaurant reviews.
"Ah, this place is really famous. Don't we have to wait? I heard they close before two in the afternoon. They don't even take reservations properly."
Yuki shrugged beside her.
"We have guns."
"Yuki, please... Haven't you returned your ammunition yet? Go do it."
"We don't need to use guns. There are always ways."
Go Jiho made a brief phone call, then returned with a thumbs-up.
"They said we can come right away."
"How did you do that? Did you pay extra?"
"No. Restaurant owners usually agree when you tell them hunters are coming to eat. Korea's still a pretty good place to live, right?"
"Ah..."
So there was some reward for it after all.
We hurried to the restaurant and stuffed our stomachs with meat and kimchi.
"Ten servings, please."
"No... Can you really eat all that?"
It seemed they had never served hunters before.
As I filled my stomach with good food, I felt alive.
I felt completely safe.
Maybe this was why I worked as a hunter.
After going for a second round and having a few drinks, Yuki glared at me with unfocused eyes.
"Team Leader. Praise me already."
"We survived this time because of you too, Yuki."
"Hmph..."
Honestly, Yuki's expression when she shot the German hunters would probably haunt my nightmares.
Han Juwon, watching from across the table, casually threw in a comment like it was someone else's business.
"Why don't you just live together? We never know when we'll die."
"We already moved in together."
"What? That was fast."
Sang Hajun and Kim Yuna stared at us with wide eyes.
I hurriedly defended myself.
"The bed was off-limits."
"You already made it into the bedroom?"
"... Next he'll say he protected his own ass."
I shot Kim Yuna a vicious glare until she shut up, then drank.
"Wow, Team Leader, you said you didn't drink, but you're pretty good at it now."
"How could he not drink after all that? Should we drink too?"
It seemed everyone still felt a little unsettled, so we shook it off with alcohol as best we could.
A few days later.
After resting well at home, I went to the Association for the first time in a while.
I usually trained the next day or the day after, but it had been a long time since I'd rested this much.
Maybe it was the first time since I had been discharged from the hospital.
The first person I went to see was Millon.
Even after the Necromancer Hunter Lord Aratib was defeated, he was still on Earth.
In exchange for cooperating properly, he had even been given decent accommodation.
He was waiting for me at the Association headquarters.
"You've been doing well, right?"
"Ah, Hunter! Welcome!"
"What have you been doing lately? Still just reading comics?"
"No, I've been living quite busily, giving lectures on necromancy and such. Of course, not as busily as you, Hunter!"
His value as an information provider was far greater than his value as a hunter or Necromancer.
Although he had defected to Earth, he still kept in contact with his Necromancer acquaintances.
Maybe because Necromancers all lived hard lives, they were thorough about sharing information for survival.
"How are things on Modus's side?"
"Modus and Mortis have united the Necromancers at a terrifying speed. They are now the undisputed Necromancer Emperors."
That was much faster than expected.
"That's not good..."
"Team Leader Kang Hyun! We have a problem!"
At that moment, an Association employee called out to me.
"As you instructed yesterday, we monitored the Dimensional Shop, and someone has already started selling ammunition in bulk."
"What? Who is it?"
No matter what, this was too fast.
Ammunition wasn't incredibly rare on Earth, but we had already signed an agreement on interdimensional exports at the last Seoul conference.
The employee led Yuki and me into a meeting room and explained.
"We asked the state agencies to investigate... It appears to be North Korea."
"Ah... North Korea?"
Naturally, they hadn't joined the agreement.
Since they couldn't receive any technology sharing from South Korea, they probably needed gold even more desperately than other countries.
There was no way they'd let a chance to earn gold for free pass by.
"Do we have samples?"
"Yes, an Association member is purchasing some right now."
"Team Leader! I brought the samples!"
"Let me see."
I held an intact round in my left hand and lined up the ammunition bought from the Dimensional Shop with my right.
Something was strange from the start.
"... Hm?"
"What's wrong, Team Leader?"
"Wait, are these really the same rounds?"
"Yes. They're both Standard 7.62×39mm rounds. The shop described them that way too."
"... They're different."
The Association employees and Yuki looked at me as if they couldn't understand.
It made sense.
They were the same caliber and the same type of ammunition.
How could they weigh different amounts?
Even with Complete Senses, these weren't objects that weighed several kilograms.
They only weighed a few tens of grams at most, yet I could feel the difference so clearly.
"Bring me a scale!"
"Here's a scale!"
The electronic scale showed a definite difference.
[16.3g], [15.8g]
"... What is this?"
The 7.62mm was a fairly large round, but...
It was seriously short on propellant.
"Are they defective? Give me another one."
[15.9g]
"Look at that. Next!"
I didn't even need to put the third round on the scale.
"Ah, this one's defective. Dispose of it."
"Team Leader, how can you tell it's defective?"
"The primer has already deteriorated. Even if you strike it, it won't fire properly. Wait, this one's defective too. And this one..."
Once I counted them, there were more bad rounds than good ones.
"These bastards... They weren't selling proper ammunition."
They looked somewhat old, but properly manufactured and stored ammunition wouldn't have this high a defect rate.
"Then what happened?"
"They made them half-defective from the start, then failed to store them properly."
On top of that, they had listed them in the Dimensional Shop for sale.
There was no chance of receiving complaints from another dimension anyway.
"Did they pick up some ammunition that had already expired or something...?"
Thinking about it, this was only natural.
They sold duds even to their own allied countries. Why would they treat customers from another dimension properly?
If they had good rounds, they would keep them for themselves.
"At this rate, can't we just let them sell it?"
Go Jiho arrived just then, heard that, and clicked his tongue.
"What? I just got here. How did you reach such a crazy conclusion?"
"Let's leave them alone. Even a perfectly good gun will break if it fires this stuff."
"... They're consistent, at least."
We had casually solved another problem today.
Then we all went to get some snacks.
Footnotes:
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