WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 124: Resurrection (4)
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"Thanks for understanding."
"So Yu Chaeyoung's ghost had been latched onto Song Eunyoung this whole time?"
"You don't have to call her a ghost."
"Ghost, spirit, same thing. Anyway, good job."
I'd braced myself for Choi Suhyun to blow up at me, so the unexpected praise left me speechless.
Eunyoung noona, propped up by Choi Suhyun, came back to her senses.
"Hangyeol... why..."
"Sorry, noona."
"I couldn't just let you die."
If the Yu Chaeyoung attached to Eunyoung noona got corrupted, it would affect noona too.
Choi Suhyun cut me off.
"Save the pointless talk for later."
The black clouds hanging over Yukbaeksan were gathering around Yu Chaeyoung.
I could feel the scattered monsters all converging on a single direction.
Choi Suhyun swung his gun barrel toward the underbrush.
Raon Guild hunters, Choi Jaebyung among them.
"Hey, you guys made it out ok... ugh. Choi Suhyun."
"What's with the casual talk?"
"S, sorry!"
Jaebyung folded at the waist, bowing his head in a rushed apology.
I'd noticed it back at the Association too. Jaebyung seemed deeply uncomfortable around Suhyun hyung.
And it wasn't just Jaebyung who felt that way about Choi Suhyun.
Right behind Choi Jaebyung, Choa appeared alongside Jin Sangbyeok.
I'd already known the two of them were coming, thanks to Mana Detection.
"Put me down."
"Didn't I tell you to be quiet?"
"I said it doesn't hurt."
"Look at yourself. Where exactly does that look like it doesn't hurt?"
"What the..."
Tall Jin Sangbyeok showed up with Choa slung over one shoulder.
Choa was covered head to toe in blood.
Her limbs were barely holding together. She looked like she could die at any moment and it wouldn't have been strange.
"Um, that's..."
"Found her."
"You didn't find me, you're just in the way."
"I genuinely don't understand how you plan to keep fighting with those injuries. If I hadn't stepped in, you'd be dead right now. Shouldn't you be thanking me instead?"
"I keep telling you, you're in the way. God."
Choa looked at me and Choi Suhyun, silently begging for help.
She kicked her legs, trying to get down off Jin Sangbyeok.
She must have been running low on strength, because even with all that thrashing, Jin Sangbyeok didn't so much as blink.
Unable to just watch, I pointed at Choa and spoke up.
"I think it's fine to put her down."
Jin Sangbyeok looked at Choa's thoroughly displeased expression.
He set her down, then flicked a finger toward Choi Jaebyung.
"Treat her."
"Ah, yes sir!"
Choi Jaebyung used a skill on Choa, who'd slumped to the ground.
"I already knew Park Siyu had bad taste, but I didn't know he was the type to treat a woman this carelessly. Disappointing."
I had no idea what gave him that impression, but Jin Sangbyeok seemed to have thoroughly misunderstood whatever was going on between Choa and Park Siyu.
"Don't talk trash about Siyu."
Jeong Choa shot Jin Sangbyeok a cold glare, but he didn't even flinch.
Choa had been fighting whatever that An Seojun guy was.
I'd guessed his skill wasn't ordinary, but I hadn't expected him to push Choa this hard.
A huge tangle of thorn brush came flying from the other direction.
Jin Sangbyeok swung his bastard sword in a wide arc and cut the brush apart.
Choi Suhyun blocked what he couldn't cut through in time.
Grrrrrr.
Growl.
The scattered monsters kept closing in.
They weren't especially strong, but the sheer sight of scattered monsters converging into one mass was intimidating enough on its own.
Ishtar's Flame threw up a wall between the monsters and the hunters.
"By the way, hyung. Don't you need the ring back?"
Ishtar's Ring had practically been Choi Suhyun's signature item back when he was an unaffiliated hunter.
Being unaffiliated meant he couldn't use his own skills, not that he couldn't use the power of an item.
Though for a signature item, it seemed to get passed around awfully carelessly.
Choi Suhyun had more or less forced Ishtar's Ring onto Yu Jihan, and Yu Jihan, catching on to what Choi Suhyun was really up to, had passed it along to Eunyoung noona.
"Nothing strange about it going to whoever it's meant for."
"Whoever it's meant for?"
"Grown-up stuff."
Grown-up, my ass.
A monster's tail whipped in from behind Choi Suhyun.
He spun to dodge the attack, then slammed the butt of his gun down on the monster's head.
Kraaaagh.
The beast-type monster's body slammed into the ground and burst apart.
Choi Suhyun spun midair and pulled the trigger.
A purple mana bullet struck something beyond the flames.
Yu Seyeon broke through the wall of Ishtar's Flame that Eunyoung noona had conjured.
Whether it was from the fight against Park Siyu, her whole body was covered in wounds, and she'd long since lost any resemblance to a human shape.
Yu Seyeon knocked away the mana bullet Choi Suhyun fired with a hand that had turned beast-like.
Yu Chaeyoung's body, which had been floating half in the air, slowly began descending.
I put a hand on Eunyoung noona's shoulder and pointed at the ring.
Noona caught my signal and dropped the wall of flame.
Park Siyu appeared through the gap in the vanished wall, surrounded by monsters.
He threw one of the two Light Sabers in his hand high into the air.
The blade of the spinning Light Saber vanished as it rose.
Strictly speaking, a Transcendent Mode only became the real deal from Form 2 onward.
A Transcendent showed skill beyond ordinary hunters even on their own, but a Transcendent's true strength only showed itself once they entered a Transcendent state.
It varied person to person, but Form 1 was usually tied to skills related to the Transcendent state itself, while active skills mostly started from Form 2.
Thousands of sword blades appeared across the sky.
"That's... Form 2?"
"Form 3. Moonlit Body Sword. For reference, I have five of them."
"I know."
Now that Choi Suhyun had become a follower of the god Soter, I knew more about Choi Suhyun than Choi Suhyun himself did.
I couldn't even describe how shocked I'd been to see he had five Transcendent Modes.
Technically it's six.
For some reason, Choi Suhyun's sixth form barely existed at all, with neither a name nor any skill description attached to it.
I had no idea how long he'd had it, but from the way he talked, it seemed like even Choi Suhyun himself barely registered it as a real technique.
"Damn it, isn't giving me way too much authority just because I'm a Proxy? That's an invasion of privacy."
Choi Suhyun grumbled, sounding genuinely baffled.
Thousands more Light Sabers appeared across the sky.
The sky looked like it had turned into an aurora.
The sight was impossible to believe a human being had created.
The hilt of the Light Saber spinning through the air dropped precisely into Park Siyu's hand.
Park Siyu swung the Light Saber's hilt down from above.
Fwoooosh.
Thousands of blades fell to the ground all at once, as if on cue.
The blades tore mercilessly through the monsters around them, piercing every last one.
Watching that scene, someone came to mind.
Lee Eunyheui.
Park Siyu's Moonlit Body Sword used a different method, but the effect looked almost identical to the Meteor Shower Lee Eunyheui used to fire.
Unlike with Jihan, my connection to her had lasted only a moment, but I couldn't help thinking of her anyway.
I felt a little guilty, actually. I hadn't been paying much attention to Yu Jihan up in the tower lately.
Having wiped out the monsters, Park Siyu walked forward slowly.
Choi Suhyun waved at him, unbothered.
"Still got that punchable face, I see."
Park Siyu mostly ignored Jin Sangbyeok's jab.
Choa got up off the ground the moment she saw Siyu.
"Wait."
"What now?"
Choa, already thoroughly put through the wringer by Jin Sangbyeok, made no effort to hide her annoyance.
Jin Sangbyeok half forced the cloak off a nearby Raon Guild hunter and held it out to Choa.
"I don't need that kind of thing."
"Wouldn't it be better to think of the people around you?"
It wasn't especially revealing, but both shoulders of her clothes had torn badly enough that the situation was riding a fine line.
Watching Choa refuse to the bitter end, Park Siyu eventually took the cloak Jin Sangbyeok was holding out and draped it over her himself.
Choa only pouted, unable to say anything to Park Siyu's gesture.
Jin Sangbyeok, for his part, didn't look particularly pleased with how the situation had played out either.
The Moonlit Body Sword planted in the ground vanished, and soft light rose up, illuminating the inside of Beritaas's Personal Barrier.
Thousands of points of light made it feel exactly like standing on the surface of the moon.
The moment of awe lasted only an instant before Park Siyu's gaze landed fully on Yu Chaeyoung, now completely down on the ground.
I'd wanted to avoid exactly this situation.
Choi Suhyun seemed to be thinking something similar, his expression twisted with complications.
The first to react wasn't me or Choi Suhyun. It was Yu Seyeon.
"Un, unnie? Is that really you, unnie?"
The older sister she'd wanted to see badly enough to lose her human shape entirely.
The mana bullet Choi Suhyun fired shot straight toward Yu Seyeon.
"Wait, what are you doing?"
"I'm not exactly free to sit around watching some garbage reunion scene."
Fwip.
Caught off guard by the sudden attack, Yu Seyeon spun her body around.
Yu Chaeyoung rushed forward and snatched the staff from Seyeon's hand, swinging it hard.
A crack ran through the orb on the staff, and the mana bullet deflected away.
Choi Suhyun pulled the trigger again, and dozens of mana bullets shot toward Yu Chaeyoung all at once.
Yu Chaeyoung handed the staff back to Seyeon and dodged the incoming bullets with barely any wasted movement, closing in on Choi Suhyun.
Before Choi Suhyun could even set his stance, Eunyoung noona's fist shot out and collided with Yu Chaeyoung.
Facing Yu Chaeyoung directly, noona's eyes wavered.
"Noona, move!"
I struck at Yu Chaeyoung using Hundred Beasts Sword.
Yu Chaeyoung dodged the attack and fell back.
The ground rippled, and black rose bushes rose up from it.
The area around us turned into chaos in an instant.
Yu Chaeyoung batted away an incoming mana bullet with her hand.
It hadn't been an ordinary mana bullet, because something burst out of the deflected shot and buried itself in Yu Chaeyoung's shoulder.
Fwip.
A Raon Guild hunter cut through the brush and appeared.
"Watch out!"
I used Meteor Strike, but it was already too late.
Yu Chaeyoung's fist slammed into the man's body.
The recoil made him drop the sword he'd been holding.
Yu Chaeyoung picked up the fallen sword and spun her body around once.
The blade grazed past and took the man's head clean off, and on the second motion she blocked the incoming Meteor Strike.
Damn.
It had happened in a single instant, but the curse slipped out of me anyway.
Yu Chaeyoung was a swordswoman.
Geomsu[1] could simply mean someone who wields a sword, but in her case, the word carried a different meaning entirely.
Yu Chaeyoung's epithet, Sword Tree, referred to a tree from hell whose every branch, leaf, flower, and fruit was made of blades.
I'd already known just from what I'd seen during her brief possession of Eunyoung noona.
Her swordwork was nothing like Park Siyu's or mine.
It wasn't Jin Sangbyeok's disciplined form either, or Choi Jaebyung's blunt style.
The sword Yu Chaeyoung had stolen grazed past someone's throat.
She was a genius of murder swordsmanship.
I met her sword head on with a form from Heavenly Dragon's Peerless Sword Style, aimed straight for the vital point she was targeting.
"Unnie!"
Yu Seyeon burst out from between the black thorn bushes, sending dozens of red roses whirling through the air.
I shifted my stance and used Falling Petal Flower Sword to cut down every incoming rose thorn.
Yu Seyeon used the opening to rush toward Yu Chaeyoung.
Yu Chaeyoung, who'd kept her eyes fixed on me until the very last moment, turned her body toward her approaching sister.
"U, unnie? Wh, what's..."
Red blood ran down the length of Yu Chaeyoung's blade.
[1] Geomsu, literally "sword hand/master," a common term in Korean wuxia/fantasy for a skilled swordsman. Here it's contrasted with Yu Chaeyoung's true nature as something closer to a blade-wielding monster.
Footnotes:
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