WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
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◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 125: The Clock of Death (1)
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Yu Seyeon looked up at Chaeyoung from where she knelt.
"Why... cough... why..."
Yu Chaeyoung raised her sword.
I sprinted forward and aimed my blade at her.
Something felt off. I changed direction at the last second.
The Sky Sword and a white blade clashed, with Yu Chaeyoung caught between them.
"An Seojun."
"Don't interfere."
His body was covered in fresh wounds, probably from the fight with Choa.
He deflected my blade, stepped back, then lunged in again.
Our sword tips crossed each other's cheeks at nearly the same instant, at nearly the same speed.
I gripped the Sky Sword tight and countered using a form from the Heavenly Dragon's Peerless Sword Style.
Every time our heavy blades collided, the shockwave rattled the trees around us.
"Ptooey."
An Seojun spat out blood. I spat out the blood pooling in my own mouth too.
An Seojun knew the Heavenly Dragon's Peerless Sword Style down to the letter.
Sword techniques got passed down through generations, sure, but I'd never seen anyone master it this completely before.
"What are you?"
"That's what I want to ask you. Where the hell did you learn that sword style?"
An Seojun and I shared the exact same question.
The important part was that neither of us had any intention of actually answering it, even while burning with curiosity about the other.
"Guess I'll just have to beat it out of you!"
I dodged An Seojun's attack and went for Yu Chaeyoung instead.
An Seojun caught my blade, visibly irritated.
I opened with the Falling Petal Flower Sword, and An Seojun scowled before answering with the exact same technique.
Bwoosh.
The clashing sword strikes burst apart in midair.
Fully expected.
I lunged at An Seojun, Sky Sword raised.
Lacking focus, sure, but there wasn't much choice.
It was the same skill that had failed against Yeongno.
A huge slice of the sky reflected down onto An Seojun.
He read it late and stepped into the Hundred Beasts Sword.
Sharing the same sect's techniques was unsettling, but flip it around and it meant I already knew everything he did.
And I knew the counter to the Hundred Beasts Sword.
Rushed as it was, and still without a proper name, the skill was more than enough. An Seojun couldn't block it.
The Sky Sword caught his blade and slipped through the opening.
The tip cut into his shoulder.
An Seojun refused to let go of his sword even then, clutching his shoulder as he staggered back.
The thorn bushes around us were fading, probably because of Yu Seyeon's injury.
"Unnie..."
"Bye now."
My Meteor Strike and Choi Suhyun's mana bullets hit Yu Chaeyoung at almost the same moment.
Massive rose thorns burst up through the ground and blocked part of the attack.
Yu Seyeon's last struggle.
I had no way of knowing what was going through her head in that moment.
But watching her older sister, she looked at peace, like she'd gained the whole world.
To Yu Seyeon, Chaeyoung looked like nothing less than a savior.
Chaeyoung's blade cut across her sister's throat.
Choi Suhyun blinked in beside me and cursed the moment he saw Seyeon's head fall to the ground.
Even I had to admit his timing was awful.
"Where's Park Siyu?"
"Choa's holding him back."
"Holding him back?"
"I asked her to. Seeing how this turned out, good thing I did."
"And whose fault is it that it turned out like this?"
This whole mess started because Choi Suhyun attacked without warning in the first place.
Choi Suhyun rested his gun casually on his shoulder and scoffed.
"So you wanted me to just sit there quietly and watch that garbage situation play out?"
"Never said that. Just saying you jumped the gun."
"You think that thing looks like Yu Chaeyoung to you?"
The barrel of Choi Suhyun's gun tracked toward Yu Chaeyoung, who still gripped the blade slick with her sister's blood.
I'd noticed it back when we tore Yu Chaeyoung's spirit off of Eunyoung noona. Choi Suhyun felt nothing for her. Cold as ice.
They weren't close the way Park Siyu and Yu Chaeyoung had been, sure, but they were still friends. There should've been some connection there.
"How would I know that?"
The Yu Chaeyoung I knew only existed after she died.
I had no way of knowing who she'd been while she was alive.
"I don't know what she was like when she was latched onto Song Eunyoung, but to me she's all the same thing."
Choi Suhyun's mana bullets flew toward her.
Yu Chaeyoung blocked them with her blood-stained sword.
"Yu Chaeyoung is dead. Ghost or whatever the hell she is now, I don't care!"
Her blade swung toward Choi Suhyun.
He pulled the trigger, and dozens of mana bullets poured out around him.
Yu Chaeyoung caught some, dodged others, and appeared right in front of him.
She kicked. Choi Suhyun ducked under it, using Blink to reappear above her at the same instant.
The moment he used Blink, she twisted her body and shifted her blade's angle.
Right before he pulled the trigger again, he used Blink once more to reposition.
Yu Chaeyoung reacted like she already knew exactly where he'd appear next.
Good instincts played a part, but there were only so many positions and timings that worked for using Blink in close combat.
After a few more uses of Blink, Choi Suhyun gained the upper hand.
Kwooooo.
Around then, I noticed something wrong with the sky and sprinted toward him.
Yu Chaeyoung's blade deflected a mana bullet and grazed Choi Suhyun's shoulder.
A black hand tore through space and dropped straight down over both their heads.
Yu Chaeyoung darted out of the way fast, almost like she'd been waiting for exactly this.
I swung my sword hard and shoved the black hand slightly off course.
Choi Suhyun used Blink to close the distance to me.
The shockwave from where the hand landed was worse than I expected.
Choi Suhyun grabbed my arm.
The next moment, we appeared together on top of a hill some distance away.
First time I'd experienced Blink firsthand, and my stomach lurched a little from it.
We'd landed at Choi Suhyun's sniping point.
Gangwoo hyung and other hunters were already there.
Choi Suhyun looked back toward where we'd fled from.
Where the giant hand had dropped from the sky, a crater had opened up, too deep to see the bottom.
Space tore open and a monster with dozens of hands and feet crawled out.
Choi Suhyun's sniping spot must have doubled as the rally point, because hunters started gathering there one by one, Eunyoung noona, Park Siyu, and Jeong Choa among them.
"Hangyeol-ah, what... what is that?"
"Probably the god Beritaas."
Choi Suhyun answered, arms crossed.
The thing looked hideous enough to pass for a giant spider without anyone blinking twice.
Long hair-like strands covered its body and swept across the ground, and wherever they touched, the life drained out of every living thing nearby.
Choi Suhyun sounded certain that was Beritaas.
I wanted to know why.
"How do you know?"
"Remember when I mentioned something about a different dimension before? I saw it there. Wasn't shaped like that, though, if I remember right."
Choi Suhyun scanned the area and dropped his voice.
Beritaas had been using shards of incursion to corrupt monsters.
"After Yu Chaeyoung died, I couldn't find a single one of Beritaas's followers anywhere. Like they all vanished on cue."
The god's following had always been small, and with Yu Chaeyoung, its center of gravity, gone, plenty of hunters figured the whole thing just faded out naturally. Still suspicious even accounting for that.
If Beritaas's corruption had reached Yu Chaeyoung, why wouldn't it have reached the rest of the followers too?
Gods couldn't intervene directly in the present world.
Even as a demigod, a god could never exceed the raw power of the vessel's own body.
Trying to push beyond that was exactly what happened to Jung Hyeonseong.
Intervening in the present world meant nothing if the vessel didn't have the strength to back it up.
Jung Hyeonseong hadn't been a proper follower.
He'd only managed to briefly become Beritaas's demigod because he happened to be a vessel, nothing more.
Those who'd taken in Beritaas's power.
What I'd seen in Seo Jihoon had only been a tiny fraction of it.
What stood in front of us now was an incursion entity built from every follower who'd once worshipped the god, gathered into one.
"I hope that's all it is."
Beritaas was consumed with rage toward every other god.
If the goal was to destroy the world or flip the whole game board over, there'd be no reason to drag things out this long.
Beritaas needed Yu Chaeyoung to reach its actual goal.
Even if that spider was made from hundreds of followers' souls and bodies combined, it barely amounted to a stand-in for one Yu Chaeyoung.
Red light rose from one side of Yukbaeksan.
Between the pillars of red light, Yu Seyeon's body came into view.
"What is that?"
Park Siyu stepped up beside me and looked over.
Between the pillars of light, Yu Seyeon's body twisted, then swelled up like a balloon.
The red light burst outward in every direction.
A massive planet-like body emerged from the dark red mist.
It looked ready to crash into the ground at any second, growing larger by the moment, its surface studded with red eyes and mouths stuck on wherever they pleased.
Not every Gross was the same.
"The one who sings the song that brings ruin. Gross, that's its name. And when it fully revives, it calls monsters from the outer realm."
Beritaas alone couldn't take on every god in this world.
If it couldn't solve the problem alone, then it just had to drag in outside help.
I'd explained this to Lee Eunyheui too. Once revival happened, there was no such thing as a dud.
"A monster from the outer realm?"
"Just assume it's stupidly strong."
"Any idea who's coming?"
"No clue. Best case is stopping the revival before it happens, but..."
I scanned the hunters still standing around us.
The core fighters were alive, but every one of them was carrying wounds, big or small.
Even setting the injuries aside, the exhaustion from fighting nonstop since the raid started wasn't something to brush off.
Come to think of it, what happened to that guy?
The Transcendent Yu Jihan was still trapped inside Beritaas's Divine Temple.
No way to guess how strong he really was, but going by what Eunyoung noona had said, he was probably on par with Choi Suhyun at minimum, maybe stronger.
Having him on our side would be more than welcome, but...
Let it go for now.
Tracking down the Transcendent Yu Jihan was a whole task in itself, and even if we found him, talking him into cooperating could take forever.
Last time, I'd used a cheap trick to beat him down and then bolted.
If I were in Yu Jihan's shoes, I'd be grinding my teeth too, Soter's follower or not.
Honestly, him staying trapped in there forever didn't sound so bad.
"Best case, but what?"
Jin Sangbyeok caught the tail end of my conversation with Park Siyu and walked over to ask.
Footnotes:
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