WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Arsène

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈

Chapter 39: S-Rank Hunter Kang Junchi - [2]

──────

I didn't know the exact situation, but he looked really desperate. I even suppressed my cute way of talking and quickly typed a reply.

Ⓐ BabyBerserker : Location

Ⓢ Kang : Bukhansan. Enter through the Eunpyeong Course.

Kang Jun-chi sent a few details about where he was, then ended with this message.

Ⓢ Kang : And bring a weapon. Nothing too conspicuous. It can't stand out too much.

I had no idea why it couldn't stand out, but I did as he said without arguing.

I only took a combat hammer and a pistol before using Spatial Teleportation to go outside.

I hailed a taxi and hurriedly said,

“Get me there as fast as you can, even if you have to run red lights! I'll pay you three times the fare, so please, hurry!”

While the taxi sped along, I wondered why he'd called me.

If he was telling me to bring a weapon, it might've been urgent. Should I have brought my Hunter Rifle instead?

Still, carrying an automatic weapon capable of fully automatic fire was illegal in Seoul. Unlike Incheon's Hunters, who tossed their guns carelessly at home after a hunt, Seoul's Hunters had to leave their firearms at the police station after every hunt, then collect them again before heading out. Legally, Hunters were supposed to do the same in Incheon too, but the police and Hunters there couldn't be bothered.

Besides, there was already an S-rank Hunter there. If even he couldn't handle the situation, there probably wouldn't be much difference whether I brought a Hunter Rifle or a BB gun.

As I calmed my own impatience with that thought, he showed just how impatient he was.

Ⓢ Kang : You're coming, right?

Ⓐ BabyBerserker : On my way!

Ⓢ Kang : Get here as fast as you can, please.

Ⓐ BabyBerserker : Can you tell me what's going on, nya? It'll be easier to prepare if I know the situation, nya!

Ⓢ Kang : No. Someone could see the messages. I'll explain when you get here, so just come.

After that, he kept messaging to ask how far I'd gotten. He was obviously in a huge rush.

But since he wouldn't even explain what was happening, there was no way for me to prepare for anything.

To settle my nerves and kill some time, I opened YouTube.

Searching Kang Jun-chi brought up all sorts of videos.

Videos about how Kang Jun-chi was likely the strongest awakened person in the world. Nationalistic videos taking pride in the fact that such a great man was Korean. Military promotional videos covering operations he had taken part in...

One title caught my eye.

“The Man Stronger Than a Hydrogen Bomb.”

As if possessed, I clicked it. The video showed the sea.

A massive wave crashed over the container ship Kang Jun-chi was riding, filmed from a warship. It was big enough to overturn a forty-thousand-ton container ship, but when Kang Jun-chi glanced at it, the water that made up the wave stopped rolling.

As if it had frozen mid-crash, the water lost its energy and fell unnaturally downward.

Then the entire sea in the footage moved.

Water across a vast area surged and retreated, as though an invisible dam had appeared.

A hollow formed in the middle of the sea, a space the water couldn't enter.

A gigantic sea Monster was revealed in the space where the water had vanished. It was a shark at least a kilometer long, large enough to swallow a blue whale whole, but without water, it could only flap its fins where it lay.

Kang Jun-chi stared at the sea Monster with indifferent eyes. He did nothing but look at it, yet in the next moment, as if the process in between had been skipped, the Monster's absurdly huge body was compressed.

It flattened out like something from a silly cartoon...

When the video ended, my heart pounded.

I had an A++ rating, an upper-tier Hunter even among A-ranks and a superhuman among superhumans, but S-ranks really were on another level. That much was easy to see from the video alone.

They were something beyond a difference in weight class, more like the difference between a living creature and a natural phenomenon. True supernatural power had taken the form of an awakened person and breathed within that video.

Could I become like that too? If I kept hunting and training, maybe I could...

Guest123: Water is really heavy. I've heard roofs often collapse when people put even small temporary pools on them in summer. Even the cute little pools at kids' cafes can hold five tons of water.

Guest123: So to move all the seawater in that insane area from the video, how much force would that even take...?

Super★Great★Korea: Just looking at it, the energy behind that phenomenon seems far greater than a hydrogen bomb's, doesn't it? They say a force-field user's output is directly proportional to the durability of their force field, so Korea's pride, Kang Jun-chi, could probably withstand a hydrogen bomb with no problem ^^

Guest145: Sir, are you talking about those eco-friendly hydrogen bombs that don't produce radiation?

KimChumjiDead: Is a nuclear bomb some kind of joke? You think humanity's ultimate weapon is funny?

Maybe because the title mentioned hydrogen bombs, there were a lot of comments about them.

I was reading through them with interest when the taxi stopped.

Bukhansan. A mountain whose name suggested that perhaps Seoul might also be North Korea.

Kang Jun-chi was supposed to be there.

Like a lost hiker, Kang Jun-chi didn't know his exact location either, so he had only given me a rough area. That was no problem.

I spread my mental net from the location he'd described, and as soon as I detected Kang Jun-chi, I used Spatial Teleportation.

“Kang Jun-chi?”

And there he was. Korea's only S-rank Hunter, Kang Jun-chi.

Kang Jun-chi's eyes widened when he saw me.

“Oh, you're here? Good, you're not too late. Thank you so mu...”

The moment our eyes met, I was overcome by the sensation of being sucked somewhere.

A hallucination began.

* * *

I see a mushroom cloud rising in the distance.

This is what I did.

More precisely, it is a tactical nuclear weapon I detonated.

Regret over doing something irreversible mixes with a dark thrill at having finally raised a mushroom cloud over Korean soil.

Not even an ant could have survived that explosion. They say cockroaches can survive nuclear blasts, but even those within the blast radius would have left no trace...

Yet a large mammal, neither cockroach nor crustacean, emerges from the space where the mushroom cloud has faded.

It is a human. An awakened person as well.

Leaving the vast devastation caused by the nuclear blast behind him, he walks toward me.

At a glance, he looks ordinary. His face isn't handsome enough to turn heads, but not ugly enough to get turned away from a club. He is about 176 centimeters tall, neither particularly short nor tall.

That ordinary man, who looks slightly above average for a Korean man, is Korea's only S-rank.

“That crazy bastard.”

It is Kang Jun-chi. I detonated a nuclear bomb directly in his bedroom while he slept, yet it doesn't look like even a single hair on his head has burned.

A video I watched before, along with its comments, comes to mind.

“The Man Stronger Than a Hydrogen Bomb.” I remember people debating whether Kang Jun-chi could survive a nuclear weapon in that video. Most had predicted that no matter how superhuman he was, he was still only one individual and couldn't withstand a nuclear explosion.

This moment proves them all wrong.

Kang Jun-chi stands before me completely unharmed. The sturdy force field surrounding him doesn't appear to have cracked, his lungs don't seem to have been cooked by the blast's heat, and radiation hasn't destroyed every cell in his body.

I had heard that force fields created by force-field exoskeleton users often had filtering functions that purified things harmful to the human body instead of simply being tough. Kang Jun-chi's force field must have done the same. Still, I hadn't imagined it could block even heat and radiation completely.

A shiver runs through me. Isn't it almost moving? That terrifying nuclear weapon, created by all of humanity's science, technology, and intelligence, hasn't harmed that ordinary-looking man in the slightest.

This is a superhuman's victory over the civilization humanity has built, and one individual's victory over humanity itself.

It is also a hopeless moment.

The man standing before me is practically a natural disaster.

“Just in case, let me ask. You did this, right?”

Kang Jun-chi asks, but I don't answer. I try to use Spatial Teleportation and fail.

“You were targeting me?”

I fail again. Why?

Spatial Teleportation is difficult when my body is firmly wedged somewhere. That seems to be the case now.

Is this his doing? But awakened abilities can't be used directly on one another, so how?

Looking down, I see that the concrete beneath my feet has swallowed my ankles. I don't feel him doing anything, but it seems he has done this in an instant before I could even detect it.

“I don't remember ever harming you... We'd never even met before, so what kind of grudge do you have against me, huh?”

Only then do I speak.

“Because of you, Behemoth can't come to Seoul even if it wants to.”

Kang Jun-chi's expression twists. He moves his lips for a while, apparently with a lot to say, before biting down and speaking shortly.

“You motherless terrorist bastard. You're dead.”

His height and appearance are ordinary. Even his voice and the way he threatens me seem ordinary.

But nothing he does is ordinary.

Even what he accomplishes with a single glance isn't ordinary.

Kang Jun-chi casually looks at a building. It is a high-rise that appears completely empty.

The building, which would take a tremendous amount of explosives to demolish, floats up into the air.

It literally floats.

Even pulling a weed from a field doesn't look that effortless. Could lifting a bundle of straws tied together beforehand possibly be that easy...?

And something easy to lift is easy to throw.

The building's rooftop turns toward me, then the entire building flies at me with the speed of an arrow... No, that isn't right. My mental net measures its speed. The building is flying toward me at nearly the speed of sound.

Kang Jun-chi doesn't even seem to be exerting himself, yet that is the result.

While the building fills my vision, the development of my nervous system lets me continue my final thoughts for quite a while.

A jumble of thoughts comes first. That I have seen something amazing before dying. That this one building looks more dangerous than an ordinary meteor impact. That the aftereffects to come will be immense...

Then my head fills with rage at failing to achieve what I wanted, despair as I try to accept death, and sadness that my life is ending in the worst possible way.

My younger sister, Baek Dambi, Park Mihyeong, and other people I miss pass through my mind.

That is the end.

There is no pain.

My life ends without even enough time to shed a single tear, and I am expelled from the hallucination.

* * *

I gasped for breath. I only did so briefly because the rage and sadness I felt now were so familiar.

The dream I still had every day...

Whenever I woke from that dream, I always felt this awful rage, despair, and sadness.

So the hallucination I had just seen must have been the final scene of the dream I always had. The dream always ended with the nuclear explosion, so I thought I had died in it too, but apparently there had been more after that.

I wiped away the tears that had started to fall and looked at Kang Jun-chi. Having just seen such an astonishing scene, it was difficult to see him as an ordinary person.

That was why I didn't immediately notice what was wrong with his body.

When I finally took in his current condition, my eyes widened.

“Kang Jun-chi? There's blood all over you...”

Kang Jun-chi was covered in blood. His T-shirt had been dyed red, and the dirt beneath him was visibly soaked with blood. Why?

Nearby lay a Deathclaw corpse, mangled so horribly that I couldn't imagine how it had ended up that way.

Kang Jun-chi gestured at the Deathclaw's corpse.

“That bastard... A Deathclaw cut me.”

For a moment, I doubted my ears. What had this man just said?

“Pardon? A Deathclaw?”

“No, fuck, I definitely broke all four of its limbs! I don't know how the hell it did it, but that thing suddenly jumped up and slashed me...”

He rambled and cursed for some time. I listened blankly, and eventually Kang Jun-chi seemed to finish explaining himself.

He let out a breath and spoke in a serious voice.

“At this rate, I'm going to die.”

“You are bleeding quite a bit, but it can't be that life-threatening...”

“No. I think it cut deep inside.”

“Don't be dramatic...”

“I'm not being dramatic. I only look fine because I'm holding my torn internal organs together with my force field! I somehow managed to keep myself alive even though it's my first time doing this, but I really think I'm going to die if this keeps up, okay?”

Kang Jun-chi rambled again, saying that some crucial organ, either his lungs or heart or something else, had been badly cut. He was holding it together with his force field for now, and the moment he lost focus, the force field would disappear and he would die.

I tried to understand the situation first.

“How did you end up alone in the mountains and get tangled up with a Deathclaw? You couldn't have come here for an extermination job...”

“This is going to make me sound like a psycho, but I relieve stress by tormenting things, you know?”

“I know. I've watched all the videos you uploaded.”

Kang Jun-chi blinked at me.

“Really? Ah, I've read all the posts you put on Huntweb too. It was funny because everyone clearly knew you were this huge musclebound guy, but you talked like that. The latest post about bear underwear was hard to get through, but anyway...

“I wanted to relieve some stress and film a new video. But maybe because I've gotten too famous lately, or maybe I was just unlucky today, I couldn't find anyone to torment. I did see a bunch of assholes smoking on the street, so I thought about punishing them instead...”

“Didn't you already upload eleven videos about teaching smoking assholes a lesson? Your viewers seem to be getting tired of them too. The comments on the latest one dropped off a lot.”

“Oh, you really did watch all my videos... Yeah. Maybe because a lot of my viewers smoke too, but the smoking asshole punishment videos aren't popular at all.”

“So...?”

“So I changed my thinking and decided to punish something that wasn't human. Animals. But I'd feel guilty tormenting a hamster or pigeon, right? I don't know if there would be demand for tormenting stray dogs or cats, but I like dogs and cats too...”

So he had decided to torment an animal he wouldn't feel guilty abusing, specifically a Deathclaw, a Monster notorious for being particularly vile. He thought it might be entertaining to watch an S-rank Hunter play with the Monster like a toy while ordinary Hunters fought it at the risk of their lives.

And as expected, Kang Jun-chi had no trouble subduing the Deathclaw he encountered. It didn't matter that he couldn't use his force field directly on the Monster's body. He only needed to avoid using it directly on the body, and for someone like Kang Jun-chi, using his ability indirectly was incredibly easy.

Kang Jun-chi had completely disabled the Deathclaw within two seconds of it preparing to charge. Then, while spending dozens of minutes continuing to ruin its body through torture, the incident happened.

As he had said, the Deathclaw, which should no longer have been able to move at all, suddenly sprang up. Its hook-like claws sliced through the air, pierced even his force field, and cut his internal organs.

Perhaps some Deathclaws possessed a weak force-field exoskeleton ability, allowing them to move despite their bodies being destroyed. Or perhaps it had awakened to a force-field exoskeleton ability belatedly due to the stress of torture. Either way, there was no point considering that now.

Kang Jun-chi spoke in a strained voice.

“Anyway, take me to a doctor, okay? I think I'll die if I stay like this...”

I nodded, but I could only stare blankly for a moment, unable to overcome my bewilderment.

What even was this situation?

Only a few minutes ago, I had shivered at the sight of that man remaining completely unharmed by a nuclear explosion. Now he was in front of me, whining that he might die after getting hurt by a single Deathclaw.

How was I supposed to process that?

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried