WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 122: Resurrection (2)
──────
The chains hanging from Seo Jihoon's scythe stretched out long.
The tangled mess of chains wrapped around me.
Pfwaaang.
A powerful force shoved every one of Seo Jihoon's chains away.
"Why, why are you interfering!"
Scythe and sword clashed without pause, slicing through the air again and again.
Eunyoung-noona blocked a chain that came for my back.
I could trust her. I could leave that to her.
I kept my eyes forward and charged straight at Seo Jihoon.
"You think reviving Yu Chaeyoung is going to make her grateful?"
"Don't talk like you know everything about her."
"You just don't want to admit it!"
I twisted my body and kicked Seo Jihoon's scythe away.
Sky Sword flashed blue and cut into Seo Jihoon's shoulder.
A chain end that Eunyoung-noona had missed grazed past my arm.
I'd only glimpsed Yu Chaeyoung for a moment.
I didn't even know if the Yu Chaeyoung attached to Eunyoung-noona was truly the same person she'd been in life.
"You don't know her. Neither do I. So bringing Yu Chaeyoung back is nothing but your own satisfaction!"
"What's wrong with that? If I'd been just a little stronger, she never would have died! I'll put everything back the way it was!"
"What do you even mean by 'the way it was'?"
"The place she belonged."
"You think that would make Yu Chaeyoung happy?"
"Even if Chaeyoung resents me for it, I don't care. She wasn't meant to die like that! If you get in my way, I'll kill you too, along with everyone else here!"
Eunyoung-noona knocked the chains aside and dropped a hand to the ground, stepping back.
The shadow around Seo Jihoon rippled.
The shadow swelled in size and surged forward like a wave.
Something unidentifiable writhed and tangled within the darkness.
Behind me, the flame Eunyoung-noona had summoned stretched out toward it.
"No! Noona!"
I ran and grabbed hold of her body.
A hand reaching out of the black wave grazed past Ishtar's flame.
Eunyoung-noona's eyes trembled.
The threads of incursion that Rizu had created once represented the corrupted will of souls she'd devoured.
What I was looking at now bore an unsettling resemblance to that.
"Noona! Are you okay?"
I shook her, but she didn't respond.
No choice, then.
I raised my hand high above her.
Thwack.
"Ow! That hurts!"
Something fast smacked the back of Eunyoung-noona's head.
At the same time, a whisper came in from Choi Suhyun.
"You realize you were about to do something dangerous just now, right?"
"Couldn't be helped."
"Don't make excuses."
Seriously, it's the truth.
Eunyoung-noona picked up the blue gem that had hit her.
"What's this? Anyway, just now..."
Her head was clearly spinning with thoughts.
I looked over toward Choi Suhyun and spoke.
"You're done over there, so you're helping out now?"
"No."
"You blew me off saying you were busy, and now this?"
"It bothered me. Then again, thinking about it, this isn't the time to worry about that idiot Siyu. Hey, if you tell Song Eunyoung about this, you're dead."
Choi Suhyun told me sternly not to say anything to Eunyoung-noona.
So it hadn't been me he was worried about. That stung a little.
"Just focus on backup."
Eunyoung-noona staggered to her feet.
She stared quietly into the black wave, then lowered her head.
"Don't look at that too much."
"Souls."
More precisely, the souls of those who'd once followed the god Beritaas, and the souls of Hunters devoured by corrupted monsters.
Eunyoung-noona blinked, as if she thought she'd misheard.
"So th, they're people? All of them?"
"Yeah. So try not to use area attacks if you can help it."
Even Ishtar's flame, however it looked, was still fire built on Eunyoung-noona's own mana.
Best not to let it touch anything at all, but if contact was unavoidable, keeping the area as small as possible was the safer call.
"Got it. And..."
Eunyoung-noona clenched her fist, and the blue gem in her hand crumbled to pieces.
"Choi Suhyun. You're dead when this is over."
"Whoa, hold on, you're blaming me for this? Hey! Kang Hangyeol was about to slap you across the face, you know?"
"Hangyeol would never do that. Don't try to frame him, you idiot!"
"Hey, wow... ah... never mind, I give up."
Choi Suhyun sputtered for a bit before finally giving up on defending himself.
See, this is what you get for how you usually treat her.
The mana bullets Choi Suhyun fired dropped in front of Eunyoung-noona and me.
I stood facing the surging black wave.
[Using 'Descent'.]
I raised Sky Sword against the wave crashing down toward me.
Didn't need to be perfect.
Right now, all I needed was enough to cut through this wave.
I gripped the sword with both hands and swung it down.
The wave split apart along the blade's path.
'No, no, I don't want to die, why...'
'Aaaaaahhh!'
The souls that touched the blade crumbled and vanished.
Their reactions varied, but none of that mattered.
Through the parted wave of souls, I caught sight of Seo Jihoon.
Eunyoung-noona came up beside me and used Sovereign's Initial Fist.
Mana surged out from her fist in every direction, pushing the wave back.
She probably couldn't hold that for long.
She jerked her chin, telling me to go.
The mana bullets Choi Suhyun fired rained down like a shower of meteors.
I ran straight through the path the two of them had opened for me.
Part of the black energy seeped into the wound Seo Jihoon had left on me.
[You, that one, from before.]
During the Giant Ant Cavern expedition, I'd used Descent once before to strike down the corrupted queen ant.
I ran and ran down a path I couldn't see.
No sense of distance registered at all.
[What could make you this desperate??]
[Foolish.]
[That is not the answer.]
Countless fragments of the god Beritaas's thoughts clawed their way into my head.
I swung my sword at the incursion entities closing in. More irritating than the countless voices of the dead was the thing whispering in my ear.
'I...'
On the Continent of Arbelisia, I'd killed more people than I could count, all in the name of saving the world.
[Little god, let me show you the truth.]
"Ngh..."
The power of the god Beritaas crept up through the wound on my shoulder.
An extravagant room appeared before me.
A voice spoke from within a room laid with a red carpet.
"You're really going to follow the order?"
"Yeah."
"Do you actually think this situation makes any sense? Wipe out every last person in the city just because we can't figure out who's colluding with the demon lord? A hundred thousand. A hundred thousand people!"
"There's no other way."
The blue-haired young man bit his lip.
Blood ran down between his clenched fingers.
"I've heard Luso has deep ties to you. Isn't there anyone you know in there?"
"So what, we just let the summoning ritual go through? The one they're summoning is the demon lord."
"We find them before the ritual completes."
"Too late. The whole city might be in on it, for all we know."
This had been a piece of my own past memory.
Damn thing.
The argument between me and it dragged on for a while.
Eventually, a low, sunken voice spread through the room.
"It's to save the world."
That night, everyone in that city died, men, women, children, the elderly, no exceptions.
The one who'd fought against destroying the city until the very end had smuggled a young boy whose parents had been murdered out beyond the walls.
By the time I found out and chased after him, what I saw was that man's body, brutally slaughtered.
The child he'd risked his life to save had been the demon lord's vessel.
I pulled out Angervadir and drove it into my shoulder.
Pain flared from the blade's tip, and the force flowing in through the dagger drove out the power of the god Beritaas from my body.
[The smell of blood suits you.]
[Shut up.]
[What could you possibly change, you who knows nothing but destruction?]
[Fuck, I said shut up!]
I'd said it was to save the world, but maybe that had just been an excuse.
Maybe it was the selfish desire to go back to how things used to be that had turned me into this.
To that man, and even to the child who'd been the demon lord's vessel when I killed him, I'd felt nothing at all.
Maybe it was because, deep down, I'd convinced myself that everything would be fine once I got back to my own world.
By the time more of other people's blood ran through me than my own, I finally realized something.
What had I even survived for?
Maybe it started right around then.
Spilled water can't be poured back. I'd started to understand, bit by bit, that going home was never going to happen.
After I fled to Lachesis, I kept drifting, lost.
In the end, this world was no different from the Continent of Arbelisia.
Every one of us struggles for our own personal reasons.
Why did it have to come to this, fighting like this, bleeding like this.
There was no such thing as a Dragon Orb that granted wishes, I'd said as much myself.
But if 'Dimensional Ruler Authority' really came closest to omnipotence.
This time, for real.
"I'm the one who's going to change the world!"
[You cannot!]
"Whatever you think you've figured out, none of that matters!"
Not to save the world, but to change it, that's what I'll keep fighting for!
A stance from the Sun-Felling Sword Technique unfolded before me.
The darkness around us cleared, and Seo Jihoon stood there with his scythe.
My blade shot forward in a straight line and collided with the scythe.
Bring her back to life?
Don't make me laugh.
Seo Jihoon, Yu Seyeon, in the end, neither of them had ever managed to step out of Yu Chaeyoung's shadow.
"What the...!"
Seo Jihoon's scythe couldn't withstand the impact and started to break apart.
Seo Jihoon's rage had always been aimed at the wrong target.
If he really wanted to avenge Yu Chaeyoung.
It shouldn't be the ones who killed her, it should be the ones who drove her to her death.
"Look properly!"
I gripped the sword again and unleashed Falling Petal Flower Sword.
If the god Beritaas truly cared about Yu Chaeyoung, it never should have done things this way.
"Who's the one who drove her to ruin? Who's really the fool here?"
Meteor Strike tore through Seo Jihoon's scythe and pierced straight through his body.
Blood dripped, pattering down.
Seo Jihoon dropped to his knees, blood pooling beneath him.
"If what you're saying is true, then who... drove Chaeyoung to ruin?"
"Who do you think?"
Yu Chaeyoung's Taboo had been self-destruction.
The god Beritaas knew Chaeyoung's nature better than anyone.
If Park Siyu hadn't killed Yu Chaeyoung, she would have taken her own life eventually, unable to bear the weight of what she'd done.
At the tone I used, one that clearly pointed at the god Beritaas, Seo Jihoon wavered.
"L, liar! Whatever other gods might do, he would never do that!"
"You know Beritaas isn't right in the head, don't you?"
"Let me ask you something. If Yu Chaeyoung really did come back like that, what are the odds she's still the Yu Chaeyoung you knew? Any guarantee she hasn't been shaped by the god Beritaas's influence?"
Red blood dripped from Seo Jihoon down the blade of Sky Sword.
I walked forward slowly.
Seo Jihoon kept trying to rise, and kept collapsing again.
He was only still alive because he was Awakened. An ordinary person would've already died of shock long ago.
"I just... wanted to see her again, that's all! But... why are you looking at me like that?"
If only I could see what my own eyes looked like right now.
"Just thinking about the old days for a second, that's all."
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
