WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 111: The Marksman of the Magic Bullet (4)
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Silence settled over the cramped room.
Eunyoung sat at the desk, staring at the chessboard on the table.
Seeing the complicated arrangement of pieces, Jihan wandered over behind her.
"Pawn."
"No, knight."
"Pawn!"
"Kyaaaah! Shut up! Stop backseat playing!"
Ignoring Jihan's advice, Eunyoung moved her knight.
Chaeyoung moved her bishop and took the nearby pawn.
Eunyoung's face went pale looking down at the board.
"Checkmate."
"Idiot."
Eunyoung sighed at the sharp look she could feel from Jihan behind the couch.
Yu Chaeyoung crossed her legs and smiled at Eunyoung.
"Want to stop here?"
"Hey. Murderer."
Jihan, who'd been practicing sword swings behind her, thought he'd misheard something and turned around.
Eunyoung had spun around on the couch to glare at him.
The "murderer" she meant was, by any reading, obviously Jihan.
Jihan found it absurd.
"Murderer, my ass. I haven't killed anyone."
"Never killed anyone before?"
"You call that a question?"
"See, murderer confirmed."
Eunyoung shot back shamelessly.
At first Eunyoung had been uncomfortable around Jihan, but locked in the same space together for over two weeks, some kind of grudging affection was bound to form.
Calling it affection felt like a stretch, honestly.
"Who the hell calls someone a murderer to their face?"
"You keep calling me 'the woman, the woman' all the time! You tried to kill me, so murderer's fair! You murderer!"
"I haven't killed you yet! Why are you on about this!"
Jihan sheathed his sword and stalked over, irritated.
Eunyoung pointed at the chessboard.
"Help me out."
"It's over."
Jihan had clearly heard Yu Chaeyoung say checkmate.
He had no idea what she wanted from a game that was already finished. Eunyoung pouted.
"It's not over yet."
Yu Chaeyoung had asked Eunyoung if she wanted to end the game.
If it really was checkmate, there'd have been no need to even ask that.
Yu Chaeyoung's question had been a taunt, meant to get Eunyoung to give up on her own.
Eunyoung knew that perfectly well, but she still couldn't see any decent way out of the situation. That's why she'd called Jihan over.
Jihan studied the board in silence and snorted.
He wasn't unaware that Yu Chaeyoung's comment had been a kind of psychological jab, meant to push Eunyoung into quitting.
It's just that Eunyoung's reaction to it was even more absurd.
"The worst bastard alive, huh?"
"I'll kill you."
"I'm aware you're not exactly fond of me."
"Then flip the board and start a new game."
Nobody's life was on the line here, it was just a friendly game to kill time.
Since there wasn't anything actually riding on it, flipping the board and starting fresh wouldn't have been a problem at all.
Jihan couldn't understand why Eunyoung was so hung up on one chess game.
What Jihan didn't know was that Eunyoung's competitive streak ran a lot deeper than he assumed.
"I hate losing more than I hate dying."
"So you want to win even if it means borrowing a murderer's hand?"
"Winning is winning. Ever heard of using barbarians to fight barbarians? So can you win or not? Just tell me that."
Annoying as it was, Jihan's chess skill was a cut above Eunyoung's.
Eunyoung had already planned to flip the board the second Jihan said he couldn't do it.
Jihan looked over the board slowly.
He pointed at the bishop tucked into the corner.
"Two squares diagonal, to the left."
The bishop moved, and Yu Chaeyoung uncrossed her legs.
"Oh!"
It felt like a tangled thread finally coming loose.
Jihan leaned in and scanned the board.
"Not yet."
That had only blocked one line, nothing more.
Yu Chaeyoung moved exactly the way Jihan had expected.
Once she moved where he told her to, the position loosened up fast.
After a few more exchanges, only a handful of pieces remained on the board.
Eunyoung's head throbbed. Jihan, running through the piece simulations with his fingers, threw up both hands.
"It's a draw."
"What? Really?"
"Yeah, it's a draw."
Like Jihan, Yu Chaeyoung had also worked out every remaining possibility with the pieces left on the board.
Eunyoung cleared the chessboard and slumped back in her chair.
"Still, a draw beats losing. A draw."
Without Jihan, she wouldn't have even managed to drag it to a draw.
Now that the game was over, hunger crept in.
Locked in one place for over two weeks, she'd started feeling lightheaded.
The one saving grace was that Jihan had way more food stashed away than she'd expected.
Thanks to some clever item she'd never seen before called a shower bomb, even washing up hadn't turned into a problem.
Thanks to all that, Eunyoung was living in more comfort than she had any right to expect, trapped in some space of unknown origin.
Nearly getting killed by Jihan had been bad luck, but ending up trapped here with him had been good luck.
The only real inconvenience was not being able to use the internet.
"An item window, seriously, that's what I'm jealous of."
Jihan's item window held everything from convenience store lunch boxes to ramen, snacks, you name it.
Eunyoung popped a water pill between her teeth and sucked the water out, checking the community board.
She'd started messaging with Choi Suhyun a while back.
She'd genuinely been shocked when he first showed up on the community board.
Eunyoung had figured out that Choi Suhyun had become a follower of the god Soter.
Suhyun had nagged her about it in the comments, saying it was because of her that he'd gone in early.
Jihan noticed Eunyoung checking the community board and spoke up.
"Hey, woman. Give me a rundown on what's happening out there."
"You rude bastard."
She really couldn't figure out how someone around Hangyeol's age could talk so differently.
If he'd copied even half of Hangyeol's manner of speaking, he'd probably be popular.
Or at the very least, he could just not talk at all.
Looking at Jihan, Eunyoung felt, once again, just how unfair the world could be.
Handed a face and skill like that, and his personality got left in the dust.
His skill's kind of broken, though, gotta admit.
Eunyoung had enough of a competitive streak that she'd drag her enemy Jihan into a friendly game just to force a draw, but she was cool-headed enough too.
Beating Jihan, as things stood now, was flat-out impossible.
Jihan hadn't even fought at full strength against Jung Hyeonseong, the demigod of Beritaas.
Eunyoung checked over the comments Suhyun had left.
"Sounds like the raid's started."
"Last comment was two hours ago."
If the raid was underway, then even Choi Suhyun wasn't in any position to be checking community comments.
Still, just in case, Eunyoung left a reply asking him to give at least a brief update whenever he could.
"Hey, you. Woman."
Jihan, gripping a sword wrapped tightly in bandages, glared at Yu Chaeyoung, who sat there quietly.
That tone of his was clearly just habit at this point.
Even back when he'd been talking about Jung Hyeonseong, the demigod who'd come into the gap, Eunyoung had told him the man's name several times, and he still never bothered using it properly.
"Might as well say what you actually want now, don't you think?"
Jihan rested the sword on his shoulder, glaring at Yu Chaeyoung with a crooked stance.
They'd been trapped here nearly a month now.
Jihan figured he'd put up with enough.
Yu Chaeyoung's expression stayed unimpressed at his attitude.
"What I want isn't you. You know that already, don't you?"
"We're stuck here because of somebody."
"You really think so?"
A strange tension passed between Yu Chaeyoung and Jihan.
Eunyoung had seen this exact thing happen more than once or twice during her time here.
Yu Chaeyoung had always been friendly toward Eunyoung, but toward Jihan she kept a careful, calculated gap between goodwill and distrust.
Suhyun and Hangyeol had been working out a plan to use the Dragon Orb from the raid reward to get Eunyoung out.
There was some debate about whether the Dragon Orb was really an item that granted wishes, but according to Hangyeol, using the mana stored inside it, cracking open a rift in the divine temple should be possible.
Eunyoung had something on her mind that mattered more to her than just getting out.
"Hey. Why me?"
Yu Chaeyoung had treated Yu Jihan almost like an unwanted intruder the whole time.
The way she treated the two of them, there was practically a temperature gap between it.
Eunyoung had kept turning it over in her head, staying trapped in this gap inside the divine temple. No matter how she thought about it, she couldn't find a single thing about herself that beat Yu Jihan.
Setting personality aside, as a hunter.
In this world, strength was law.
Jihan's rotten personality only got a pass because his skill backed it up.
Before meeting the god Soter through Hangyeol, Eunyoung had been an unaffiliated hunter, same as Jung Hyeonseong.
At Eunyoung's question, Chaeyoung smiled, bittersweet.
That smile carried a mess of emotions all at once.
Like she'd wanted Eunyoung to ask, and at the same time, felt like the moment she'd been waiting for had finally arrived.
"Well, I mean... if there was something I needed to ask for, it made more sense to ask this one here instead of you. He's a rude bastard, sure, but his skill's the real deal. I've been awakened for a while now, but I've only actually been working as a hunter for less than a year. There's still a lot I'm missing."
"Not missing. Weak."
Eunyoung threw a punch at Jihan's face.
All Jihan did was open his palm and catch her fist.
Their palms met, and his felt enormous, thick with muscle.
It wasn't like Eunyoung had spent the whole month doing nothing either.
She'd challenged Jihan to sparring a few times, and she'd never once won.
At this point, you'd think he'd throw her a bone once in a while, go easy, at least fake it a little, but Jihan never once let up on her, not a single time.
Going easy on her?
That wasn't even a possibility worth imagining.
Eunyoung hadn't actually thrown the punch thinking she could land it, either.
She lowered her fist, huffing.
"You're special."
"Me? Come on, no way."
Eunyoung waved a hand through the air.
Not long before becoming a hunter, Eunyoung had been just another ordinary woman in her twenties, working a job, wondering about marriage, the kind you'd find anywhere.
She wasn't without her own story, but she didn't think a word like "special" fit her at all.
Wasn't being special supposed to mean you were better than other people at something?
"I'm not just saying that."
"What's so special about me, then?"
"Woman, you were unaffiliated the whole time until you met the god Soter, weren't you?"
The answer to Eunyoung's question came from Jihan instead.
The reason Eunyoung hadn't given up on the god Soter had something to do with that too.
"I've been bothered by it for a while now myself."
"Bothered by what?"
"That Jung Hyeonseong guy was unaffiliated too. That's the only thing you two actually have in common."
"I know that much already."
But something being in common didn't automatically make it the problem.
Even if that really was the problem, neither Eunyoung nor Jihan knew what exactly was wrong with it.
Jihan folded down a finger as he spoke.
"You. Jung Hyeonseong. Any other hunters?"
"Or how many cases are there of someone staying unaffiliated for years and then suddenly awakening, like you did?"
At Jihan's question, Eunyoung's face scrunched up.
Her thoughts suddenly tangled.
It was an obvious question, the kind you'd think to ask at some point, but for some reason she'd never once thought to ask it.
Or maybe it was more accurate to say she'd never gotten the chance to.
The problem was that she'd just accepted it as natural, without question.
When had she started thinking of it as just how things were?
Jihan felt the same unease.
It was such a basic question that he felt almost ashamed of himself for never having thought of it before.
Eunyoung's face went stiff, and after a long silence, she finally answered.
"I don't think there are any."
It was strange.
She'd definitely heard that unaffiliated hunters existed, but she couldn't think of a single one.
Jihan muttered, as if he'd already known what her answer would be.
"Existence Erasure."
"Exactly what it sounds like. Everyone who remembers you ever existing in this world disappears. That's why you and everyone else don't remember unaffiliated awakened ones. And Existence Erasure ranks among the harshest of divine punishments there are."
Divine punishment, Abyss, nothing but words she couldn't make sense of.
Chaeyoung spoke, having caught Jihan's words.
"Unaffiliated hunters, most of them vanish into the Abyss before a year passes from their awakening."
Jihan clicked his tongue, saying he'd figured as much.
Eunyoung's eyes went wide.
If it was true that unaffiliated awakened people disappeared like that within a year.
"Then what the hell am I?"
Footnotes:
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