WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 129: The Crossroads of Choice (1)
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The egg-shaped core split apart, and black liquid poured out through the crack.
Kwaaaaaa.
Jin Sangbyeok and Choi Suhyun smashed the cores at their own positions.
Black hands rose from the lake and clung to the core.
I frowned watching the core start to reform itself.
I plunged my sword into the black lake and used a divine word on Yu Jihan.
[What are you doing!]
<... you son of a bitch, I'll kill you!>
Not long after Yu Jihan's voice reached me, the whole lake heaved violently.
It shuddered like someone had set off a bomb underneath it.
The impact struck exactly where the last core had been.
With the ground rippling nonstop and nowhere solid to stand, I scrambled out of the lake fast.
The moment the last core shattered, the entire lake dried out and shrank in size at a rapid pace.
Watching it happen, Choi Suhyun lowered his gun and let out a whistle.
"So where's that bastard, then?"
"In the divine temple?"
"You said this lake was probably connected to the divine temple. You asked him to break the core over there."
Just as expected, this lake wasn't really a lake at all. It was a small dimensional gate linking to Beritaas's divine temple.
My answer must have sounded unconvincing, because Choi Suhyun frowned.
"I get that much, but from what Song Eunyoung told me, that guy's not exactly the type to just do what he's told, is he?"
"You know him well. That's why I told him I'd pull him out of the divine temple if he listened. If he's got a brain in his head, he'll know something's off about what's happening outside the divine temple right now."
"You're actually going to pull him out? You even have a way?"
I swung my sword through the air, shaking off the monster blood clinging to the blade.
I shrugged lightly.
"How would I know that?"
"You just said you'd pull him out, didn't you?"
"That was just talk. Whoever believed it is the idiot. Besides, considering what he did to Eunyoung noona, he deserves another hundred years locked up in there."
"...You were planning to scam him from the start?"
"Obviously."
The destructive power the god Soter held was a fatal ability against other gods.
My destruction was the power to destroy space and worlds.
Not that I'd ever actually destroyed a world or a dimension before.
Right now I could only produce enough power to do what I'd done pulling Eunyoung noona out.
Whether or not I had a way to pull Yu Jihan out, I had no intention of doing it.
If I drag him out, it's just going to be a headache.
Getting irritated even in a wrecked divine temple was proof he still had plenty of fight left in him.
And even if I could pull him out, now wasn't the time.
Clearing up the misunderstanding with the transcendent Yu Jihan wasn't something the current situation gave me much room for.
[Who, exactly, are you?]
The massive leg shifted slightly.
Just that single step sent a shockwave tearing through everything nearby.
I rested my sword on my shoulder and looked up at the god Beritaas.
[Who knows?]
[Do not, interfere. Small god. You have, no right.]
[That's not yours to decide.]
I decide my own path.
A considerable amount of time had passed since the god Beritaas broke its taboo.
That had to be why it summoned Gross and was staking everything on this fight.
The god Beritaas looked massive, sure, but crack it open and it wasn't much different from pouring water into a bottomless jar.
[Die! Slaves of foolish gods!]
Beritaas's fury pierced the sky.
Hundreds of attacks rained down from above, carrying killing intent sharp enough to prickle the skin.
It looked like a scene straight out of the apocalypse.
Laughable, compared to the actual end of the world, but still.
Beritaas's wrath was aimed squarely at the three of us on the ground.
Choi Suhyun stepped forward.
"Hyung, I'll..."
I glanced at Choi Suhyun's status window and a few lines caught my eye.
[Blessing of Soter is at MAX.]
[Currently under the effect of Executioner's Sword.]
I'd already known this was coming, but seeing it again, one thing was clear: his ability was genuinely outstanding.
I understood now why other gods were so desperate to poach him.
A red circle formed beneath Choi Suhyun's feet.
He stretched a hand out to the side, and the circle grew larger and larger until it spread past the edge of my vision.
"There it is."
Behind me, Jin Sangbyeok set down his bastard sword and muttered under his breath.
"Consider it an honor to witness this!"
Fired up, Choi Suhyun unloaded a barrage of magic bullets into the attacks pouring in from every direction.
They said it had been a hundred years since Awakened first appeared in the modern world, since the dungeon gates first opened.
The higher dungeon difficulty climbed, the more generations passed, monsters kept appearing that ordinary bullets and weapons couldn't kill.
The question of how to use modern weapons to kill monsters efficiently gave birth to the field now known as magitech engineering.
Among the many weapons born from that field, the biggest hit product magitech engineering ever produced was magic bullets.
Magic bullets don't use the concept of bullets at all.
Instead they use something called a charge round, which converts mana into projectiles.
The easiest comparison for a charge round is a battery.
There are various types: limited-use rounds, single-use rounds, mana-capacity-limited rounds, and so on.
The magic bullets Choi Suhyun fired split into dozens of branching paths and collided with the falling attacks.
Among the hundreds, thousands of magic bullet users out there.
The reason Choi Suhyun proudly carried the epithet Bullet Marksman came down to his transcendent technique, Infinite Dance.
Similar to the personal barrier the god Beritaas had created, inside the space of Infinite Dance, Choi Suhyun was completely unrestricted by charge round limits.
Not only could he fire endless magic bullets, he could also freely redirect or reroute bullets he'd already fired.
The falling meteor storm and the lights rising up to intercept it tangled together in the middle of the sky.
A giant knight appeared above Jin Sangbyeok's head.
Leaving the two of them behind, I charged straight at the god Beritaas.
As I climbed up its body, Beritaas's skin rippled and rose in tendrils like tentacles.
I swung my sword and cut the tendrils down.
Monsters climbed out of holes that opened in its skin.
Magic bullets fired from somewhere finished off every one of the monsters.
No need to guess who did that.
My target wasn't anything else. It was Gross.
Far off, Choi Suhyun pulled his trigger, and magic bullets materialized around Gross.
They all converged and poured down on Gross at once.
Beritaas's body rippled and blocked the bullets closing in around Gross.
"That son of a bitch."
Choi Suhyun clicked his tongue in irritation and reloaded.
Just as he was about to pull the trigger again, Gross twitched and opened its eyes.
The eyeball, swiveling every which way, landed on Choi Suhyun.
The ground beneath his feet shook and split open.
Startled, Choi Suhyun leaped high into the air.
"Hey! If that thing was gonna attack, you could've given me a heads up!"
"It's a monster, of course it's gonna attack! Why are you even saying that!"
Choi Suhyun grumbled and fired magic bullets to intercept the incoming attack.
The iron knight Jin Sangbyeok had summoned collided head-on with the god Beritaas.
I used the opening to sprint toward where Gross was.
An eye that had opened up in the cracked skin turned to look at me.
[Do you, think? That you can change it?]
"Guess we won't know until we try."
[You, cannot.]
"Beats giving up like you did."
[I, did not give up.]
"It was over the moment you broke your taboo."
[Do you really, believe that? Foolish god.]
Beritaas's attacks rained down over my head.
Every single blow that fell carried tremendous weight.
Unfamiliar faces surfaced between the folds of skin.
"...don't want to. I don't want to die."
"Save me! Aaaaaargh!"
They were the faces of people who had once been Beritaas's followers.
They wept tears of blood, twisted in agony.
Not every taboo was the same kind of taboo.
A transcendent's taboo was a personal taboo, but the taboo of one who had become a god was a taboo of responsibility.
The moment a god broke its taboo, it affected every follower who served that god.
This was what they called incursion.
I raised my sword high and cut down.
Along the path the blade traced, the skin sliced clean away.
A hand, warped and swollen into something massive, reached toward me.
"Need a hand?"
"I'm fine."
I can manage this much.
Like always, it was never about whether I could or couldn't.
If it was something I had to do, I'd just do it.
The Heavenly Dragon's Peerless Sword Style pushed back the approaching hand.
"Not done yet!"
Gritting my teeth, I moved straight into the Hundred Beasts Sword Style.
Rough blades scattering in every direction sliced the fingers clean off.
Another of Beritaas's hands clashed against my sword.
Beritaas's taboo. Doubt toward the oldest thing.
The oldest thing, something Yu Chaeyoung never knew, referred to the first god.
More precisely, whoever had once held the Dimensional Ruler Authority.
And it was doubt over the fundamental reason this whole fight was even happening.
A taboo really was a cruel thing.
For a being granted the divine name of God of Truth, not being able to know the one truth that mattered most had to be an agonizing thing.
[There is nothing you can do! Even if I die, you cannot defeat them!]
I'd heard that when the god Beritaas broke its taboo, one of the Seven-Star Gods, Akhtaion, had been there.
The "them" Beritaas kept referring to had to mean the Seven-Star Gods of Babylon.
Beritaas's attacks grew steadily fiercer.
"Is that why you threw your followers away?"
[Threw away? I cannot understand what you are saying! They simply did what a follower is meant to do!]
"I bet."
Even now, ordinary transcendents don't spare a single thought for regular Awakened.
Let alone people who aren't Awakened at all.
Power, status, that's just how it's always worked.
If a mere transcendent thinks that way, how much worse must gods enthroned in divinity be?
To them, humans were nothing more than game pieces.
Becoming a transcendent alone isn't enough to beat a god.
To the gods, transcendents were nothing more than the highly useful knights or bishops among the countless pieces set on a chessboard.
Nice to have, mildly inconvenient without, easy pieces to push around either way.
Not thrown away. That was simply what they'd been for from the start.
"Your taboo cares for gods, but never once for your followers!"
[Why does that matter! That is what it means to serve a god! You're a god too, surely you understand!]
"That's exactly what I don't want to hear from you."
My expression hardened little by little.
That's what gods are like.
They treat their followers' sacrifice and faith as something owed to them by right.
Not a shred of guilt over it.
Yu Seyeon, used and then discarded for nothing more than wanting to see Yu Chaeyoung again, and Seo Jihoon too, they'd both suffered the exact same fate.
To the god Beritaas, their deaths were nothing more than a piece of the process toward achieving its goal.
My body got knocked back through the air, and the magic bullets Choi Suhyun fired blocked the incoming attack.
Spinning through the air, I used the Falling Petal Flower Sword.
The attacks that touched the blade were shredded to pieces and burst apart.
Standing on Beritaas's shoulder, I swung my sword down and glared at the eye that had grown out of the skin.
"Hey. Why'd you take Jung Hyeonseong?"
Footnotes:
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