I Made a Tier List the Transcendents Are Obsessed With - Chapter 4

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: WeTried

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◈ I Made a Tier List the Transcendents Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 4: The Tyrant at the Bottom of the Tank

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About the Team One leader who was skimming my wages, I had no choice but to learn a great many things.

First, that the bastard's name was Lee Yeonghyeon.

Second, that his nickname was One-Hand, because one of his hands really was a prosthetic.

Third, that his One-Hand was cyberware, and that he was a former soldier.

And lastly, that he hated me with a passion.

Delivery work was one of the few decent ways to scrape by in Jeongmyeong City, Haedong.

That was why I had clung to the job, even if it meant being treated like cargo in the back of a truck.

There was nowhere left for me to retreat to anyway.

So, except for that last part, there were hardly any delivery drivers in Jeongmyeong City who did not know Lee Yeonghyeon.

The reason they needed to know him was because he was one of the people they could not afford to get on the wrong side of.

He was an augmented human with cyberware, and he had served as a delivery company team leader for a long time. The higher-ups generally believed whatever he reported.

In other words, he could dump his own mistakes on someone else, and the higher-ups would believe it.

No company was going to hear out the grievances of some lowly delivery driver anyway.

That was why Lee Yeonghyeon ruled like a local lord.

Tiny Haedong, and within it the even smaller Haedong City, divided into sectors.

He had lived as the tyrant at the bottom of a fish tank, where only a few small fish quietly swam.

"H-hiieek! P-please, spare me!"

But the tyrant was really nothing more than a goldfish slightly bigger than the rest.

He rolled around on the ground, begging for forgiveness.

"...Why would I?"

And I had no reason to forgive him.

* * *

"L-listen. I never hated you from the start..."

Lee Yeonghyeon crawled across the floor, desperately pleading his case.

I watched silently to see what he would say, and he apparently took that as an opportunity.

"You were so polite from the first day, weren't you? I might've thought well of you, but I never thought badly of you..."

I had been polite from the first day.

Naturally. I had been desperate to find some way to survive, and delivery work was a lifeline that at least promised a reasonably long period of employment.

The problem was that Lee Yeonghyeon had been the one holding that lifeline.

"I, I was just about to give you a bonus too. You worked hard this month, didn't you? It's only fair compensation. Right!"

Tremble tremble tremble...

With shaking hands, he frantically rummaged through his pockets.

What he pulled out was a thick wad of crumpled bills worth a few tens of thousands of hwan.

"Please... Please... I have children at home. If I die here, they'll all become orphans..."

When I remained silent despite all his struggling, he began crawling across the ground and begging for forgiveness.

Of course, it was true that Lee Yeonghyeon had children.

I had even met some of them before.

I had run personal errands for him a few times.

"Big bro, are you Dad's underling?"

"Ew. I think he smells like a poor person."

...Yeah, I remembered them being incredibly rude.

Which was why Lee Yeonghyeon's plea, invoking his own children, was having a very counterproductive effect.

"Team Leader."

"Y-yes, sir!"

My casual informal speech was followed by equally casual formal speech.

It had been the opposite before, but perhaps experience accumulated over a lifetime could not be ignored.

It was an extremely natural response.

"I know because I've lived as an orphan twice. It's not that bad. I haven't done it myself, but if you succeed later, you can write one hell of an autobiography starting with, 'I grew up abandoned by my mother and father.' Getting your parents insulted doesn't feel particularly bad, either."

"...Th-that..."

Lee Yeonghyeon seemed to consider what I meant for a moment.

Then his expression changed, and he swung his fist.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

But his fist could not reach me.

Spears made of wind pierced every part of his body.

He blankly looked down at his body, now riddled with holes, before coughing up congealed blood and collapsing.

...A fitting end.

"Maybe that was a little excessive. I don't really know how much mana it takes to kill someone..."

I muttered as I looked at what had become a lump of meat.

It was a fairly serious problem.

Since I had decided to live as an ability user, fighting like this was unavoidable.

Naturally, I could not become an idiot who cried out for a fair one-on-one fight in a real battle.

So I needed to get used to killing people without wasting too much energy.

"You said you'd give me a bonus."

I rummaged through the clothes of what had once been a person and pulled out all its belongings.

Besides the bills he had pulled out while spouting nonsense about a bonus, the wallet in his inner pocket held about twice as much.

Had he still been trying to hold some money back? In a way, that was impressive dedication.

"Here's your fare for the afterlife."

I left behind only one 1,000-hwan bill and took the rest.

There was also an ID card, a pack of expensive cigarettes, and a sharp karambit knife.

If I really wanted to, I could have taken his prosthetic hand too.

If I took it apart, the components inside would probably be useful.

But I did not want to carry it around after doing something so disgusting, so I left it alone.

It was disappointing that his belongings were so sparse.

"Where'd all the money he extorted go? Bet it all ended up in his wife's pocket. No wonder the missus was pretty."

I had caught him easily now, but from my old perspective, he had been something like a final boss.

Normally, whether it was a mid-boss or the real boss, beating one meant it dropped at least one named item.

Lee Yeonghyeon completely ignored that law of the world.

I decided to leave his corpse here.

He had acted high and mighty, but Lee Yeonghyeon was still a Fourth-Class Citizen.

Once they saw the traces of magic left on his body, the investigation would end there without question.

Fssst.

I took out a cigarette and lit it.

Everyone had known I was a notorious chain smoker in my previous life, but I had never touched one in this life.

Cigarettes were simply a ridiculously expensive luxury.

"Hoo..."

Smoke that had passed through my lungs flowed out in a long breath.

It had been a very long time since I had smoked, and this was the first time in this body, but I was simply happy, as though I had met an old friend.

Anyway, all those novels where reincarnated people coughed their lungs out over their first cigarette were complete bullshit.

Had those authors lived two lives themselves?

I ground out the cigarette butt beneath my shoe. It sizzled.

In any case, my three years here had been settled.

It wasn't as though there were only one or two people I held grudges against, but my time was too valuable to hunt down every last one.

That day, two Fourth-Class Citizens in Jeongmyeong City were respectively processed as dead and missing.

The investigation ended on the first day.

* * *

[Where the fuck did Oz go, that bastard]

[He made one post and ran, holy shit]

[Was there even any point in bringing Oz here?]

Criticism continued to pour through Transcendent Gallery.

The Oz brought in by WanderMerch had written one post, then immediately disappeared.

Of course, only a few hours had passed.

In the Great Heavenly World, where causality and even the flow of time were constantly twisted, that much time was hardly more than an instant.

Still, it was only natural to wonder why someone who had been actively leaving comments had vanished.

Considering the positions held by the Transcendents in the Gallery, there was little chance that something had happened in their present lives or that an urgent incident had arisen.

Was that not why they were wasting time on something like browsing the Gallery...

The atmosphere in the Gallery had therefore become almost riotous.

They were smashing shop windows beyond overturned stalls, fleeing with looted groceries, and removing wheels from cars.

(Meaning, trash posts were being mass-produced.)

In the comments, people looking for Oz were shooting and stabbing each other.

(Meaning, they were having flame wars.)

[Kill him!]

[Execute him!]

In the end, a trial was being held for WanderMerch, who had been considered a national hero for bringing Oz here only a few hours ago.

Naturally, the verdict was death.

[You bastards who deserve oblivion...] - Wandering Merchant

That was generally what a condemned prisoner shouted as their final cry from the gallows.

Just as they were divinity-slaying WanderMerch, bound to the gallows, with roughly 1,300 comments.

[I killed someone today] - Oz

The reason was absurd.

They skimmed my share.

Hmm, thinking about it, they probably deserved to die.

Oz's single post went up.

It was a post that could not be interpreted in any way.

[I killed someone today] [241] Likes 493

Yet it drew every bit of attention and stopped every war.

- Sun Gatherer) He ended the war the second he showed up. The gallery owner's class, LOL

└ Oz) Call me Redhead from today onward.

└ Sun Gatherer) What the fuck are you talking about?

└ Oz) It is the name of a man who does not exist in this world...

└ Sun Gatherer) ???

There was the usual incomprehensible nonsense as well.

Still, even a random trash post Oz wrote drew this much attention.

[Isn't it the consensus that Oz is at least a High Divinity? What kind of lunatic messed with a High Divinity? LOL]

[Basically means he beat a lower god to death.]

[I think one of the regular accounts we haven't seen since today got killed by Oz, yeah.]

Several guesses followed, and the conclusion ended around there.

Some Transcendent Entity that had been screwing around had probably been removed.

Before long, a topic far more important than that incident came up.

[So when is Oz making the next tier list and ranking chart?]

The debate over Oz's tier lists had become one of Transcendent Gallery's regular sports.

The question was when the original would return, the one whose presence had reduced the Gallery's countless imitators to derivatives and made them disappear.

- Oz) Wait a bit. I'll handle what I need to and make one.

└ Faceless King) I knew I could trust you, Sir Oz.

└ Beyond the Boundary) This is it, LOL

└ Sun Gatherer) What the hell are you so busy with? Quit messing around and come back already!!!!!!

The reply came immediately.

That was the true nature of Transcendent Gallery, a gallery full of head cases that could turn from a war zone into a festival in an instant.

Considering that most actual Transcendents thought much like so-called lunatics, it was hard to say that was inaccurate.

└ Broken Covenant) So what's the next topic?

└ Oz) Power Ranking for a Final Battle Fought Ready for Oblivion, Fifth Dimension Edition.

└ Beyond the Boundary) Holy shit, LOL. That bastard's getting triggered again.

└ No Existence) Shut up.

└ Beyond the Boundary) Hey, that bastard. LOL.