WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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Chapter 13: I'm Kind of a Big Deal (1)

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No wonder his reaction had seemed off. Choi Suhyun must have pulled some strings.

"Talked things over with the higher-ups. Helped that you're Unaffiliated too, since that means you didn't have any plausible motive to kill the other hunters."

"Does that actually happen? Hunters from different affiliations killing each other inside dungeons?"

"Why would you think it doesn't?"

This time I was the one who shut up.

Dungeons and monsters showing up in the world hadn't made human selfishness disappear. Even I had to admit that was a dumb question.

To some people, this might be a nightmare. But to someone else, it wasn't a nightmare at all, it was a dream. Literally an opportunity.

And that opportunity wasn't handed out fairly to everyone.

If you had an enemy, you just removed them. In that sense, a dungeon that left no trace was the perfect place for it.

Without a witness, nobody could tell whether someone died at the hands of a monster or another person.

As always, man's enemy was man.

Nothing about that had changed.

Choi Suhyun uncrossed his legs and started fishing for credit.

"You owe me one."

"About that."

"About what?"

"Weren't you Unaffiliated, hyung?"

As far as I knew, Choi Suhyun was currently an Unaffiliated hunter.

"That's right."

Unaffiliated Hunters weren't supposed to be able to use skills. And yet, a Key skill?

"So what's the deal with your Key skill?"

At my question, Choi Suhyun's mouth fell open slightly.

"First of all, the fact that I can use a Key skill is a secret. Got it?"

"I've got nobody to tell anyway."

"It just... started working, somehow?"

"What?"

I tilted my head, but Choi Suhyun scratched his cheek like he had nothing more to add.

"This skill wasn't given to me by the god I originally served. It came from a different god. I don't know if that's the reason, but either way, I can use it."

"Isn't the whole 'Unaffiliated' thing actually a lie, then?"

"You want to die?"

Choi Suhyun raised a fist, warning me not to say anything unnecessary.

I needed Choi Suhyun, sure, but that didn't mean I planned on just getting dragged along blindly.

Now I really wanted to hear the actual reason he'd invited me to his house.

"So what's the actual reason you invited me here?"

At my question, Choi Suhyun suddenly raised a hand.

He stared at his buzzing phone with a dead serious expression.

The answer that came back was laughable.

"Hold on. Pizza's here."

Choi Suhyun turned and walked out to grab the pizza.

Watching him vanish in an instant, I pressed my thumb hard against my forehead.

"Ugh, way to kill the mood."

This is exactly why doing whatever you want doesn't work.

A little while later, I sat on the sofa eating the pizza Choi Suhyun had brought back.

It wasn't exactly the ideal situation for a meal, but I hadn't eaten anything since morning and I was starving, so I plowed through the pizza anyway.

Choi Suhyun pulled a bottle of soju out of the fridge.

Pizza and soju. I had no idea what kind of combination that was supposed to be.

He filled a paper cup to the brim and downed more than half of it right there on the spot.

Guess Koreans really do need alcohol in their system to have a real conversation.

Choi Suhyun pointed a finger at me as I washed down my pizza with cola.

"The reason's simple. I called you here because there's something I'm curious about."

"Something you're curious about?"

What could possibly be so important that he'd invite me all the way to his house?

Choi Suhyun gave a small nod.

"How are you still alive?"

That was a fairly bare-bones question for something that had warranted a house invitation.

Failing to catch his intent, I genuinely blanked and tilted my head.

"What? I'm alive because I'm alive."

How am I still alive, he says.

What kind of out-of-nowhere question was that?

Choi Suhyun set Songsong on his lap and stroked its fur.

"You know how many days the hunters were in that dungeon?"

"I heard it took about ten days."

"Right, and you were found exactly on day ten. Found right before they were about to go kill the boss."

"I already told that story to the Association until I was sick of it. I hid in a cave deep in the gorge because I was scared."

Choi Suhyun's mouth curved up.

"One of the Hunters who went into the fake Dungeon happens to be pretty close with me. I couldn't go in myself since I'm a Key. But when I asked him, he said the cave you were found in had already been searched right after they entered the Dungeon."

"Wait, I never heard anything like that."

I'd been told that cave was an unexplored area. Thanks to that, the excuse of having hidden there for ten days had held up.

No wonder it all lined up so damn neatly.

"Damn. Wow, doesn't it bother you that this is basically document forgery?"

"If it had gone out exactly as it happened, you'd have been the one in trouble."

"That's true, I guess."

I never imagined he'd have been kind enough to falsify the report on top of everything else. For someone who'd supposedly smoothed things over with the higher-ups, he'd stirred up a lot of mess trying to clean it up.

"How'd you survive coming out of the Dimensional Rift?"

"What?"

I blinked at a term I'd never heard in my life.

Where I'd gone wasn't the Dimensional Rift, it was the Tower of Trials.

Unable to bring myself to say that out loud, I scratched my cheek awkwardly and took a sip of cola from the paper cup instead of eating pizza.

Not yet.

Given his standing as a hunter, his skill, and his unshakable personality, there was no better mentor than Choi Suhyun for someone like Kang Hangyeol, freshly awakened, to grow under.

But in my view, that and this were separate matters.

I wanted to keep the whole Tower of Trials thing secret for now.

The problem was this "Dimensional Rift" thing Choi Suhyun was talking about.

Instead of answering, I threw back a question.

"Why do you think I fell into a Dimensional Rift?"

"Because I've fallen into one myself. Though in my case, it wasn't a double dungeon."

Choi Suhyun poured more soju into his cup.

Choi Suhyun was a man surrounded by more rumors than his appearance suggested. The internet was flooded with all kinds of stories about him.

Whether they were true or not, I'd looked every single one of them up and read through them.

Among the stories about Choi Suhyun, there was one that came up more than the rest, the story about his retirement as a hunter. More specifically, the story of how he'd cut ties with the god he'd served and become Unaffiliated.

"I definitely read on the wiki that you survived some kind of dungeon accident."

"Cut it out with that damn WoodWiki already."

"The entry was huge, though."

"More than half of it's bullshit."

"So that means the less-than-half that's left could be true."

"At least say you saw it on the news. A wiki? Really? Makes you look pathetic."

Choi Suhyun grumbled about my source, but he didn't seem all that serious about it.

Whether I'd read it on a wiki or seen it on the news wasn't really his business.

I leaned forward slightly, tapping my finger against the glass table.

Choi Suhyun opened his mouth again about ten seconds later.

Saying there were details he couldn't get into, Choi Suhyun gave me a rough summary of what had happened.

He'd fallen into a trap during a dungeon expedition and fled deep into the dungeon.

His pursuers, unable to chase him further, ended up clearing the dungeon and left through the exit gate.

Like a Dungeon Gate, an Exit Gate vanishes after a certain amount of time once the first person passes through it.

Unless you were a Key, there was no officially recorded case of an ordinary Hunter surviving after coming out of a Dungeon whose Exit Gate had already vanished.

A Dungeon whose Exit Gate disappeared would collapse, and it was said, like a legend passed down, that if you vanished along with the Dungeon, you'd fall into a space called the "Dimensional Rift."

So that's what the Dimensional Rift was.

I put on a decent show of nerve, but honestly, I couldn't be sure whether the Dimensional Rift Choi Suhyun was describing was the same place as the Tower of Trials I'd been to. So I couldn't afford to say anything carelessly.

Choi Suhyun kept talking.

Back then, he said, he hadn't been a Key yet, and he'd been hurt badly enough that his life had hung in the balance.

Certain he was going to die, Choi Suhyun had woken up in an unfamiliar place instead.

At first, he said, he'd suspected he'd been summoned to another world, and hearing that, I couldn't help but feel a strange sense of kinship.

Suhyun had met a stranger there. Meeting him had been sheer luck for Suhyun.

"The man told me the god he served would definitely save the world."

By the time he finished telling the story, Choi Suhyun had nearly emptied the entire bottle of soju.

He drained the rest of the soju left in his paper cup and caught his breath.

"Soter. That was the name of the god that man served. After I got out of there, I tried to find that god called Soter, but I never could."

Choi Suhyun said the reason he'd joined the Association as a Powerless awakened had been to find the god named "Soter."

The moment the name Soter left Choi Suhyun's mouth, I quickly put on my poker face.

Because that name was currently my own Divine Epithet.

I never in a million years expected to hear those words from Choi Suhyun of all people.

But something was off.

Very off.

Before I could even sort out the sense of unease, Choi Suhyun offered up his own theory.

Ever since the fake dungeon incident, I'd ended up with an affiliation.

For someone with enough influence to cut deals with Association higher-ups to resolve incidents, and even edit parts of official reports when needed, figuring out the name of the god served by a rookie hunter was nothing.

Choi Suhyun said something unexpected.

Once you awaken, your "affiliation" gets decided within a week to a month. Even if it's some completely unknown, no-name god, you're supposed to get some kind of offer.

"You know why the powerless are called powerless? It's because even after awakening, they can never end up serving a god for the rest of their lives."

"When I was getting educated, they told me you had to wait a year and see."

"That's bullshit."

Choi Suhyun dismissed it flatly. Powerless or not, an awakened was still an awakened.

Every awakened had to be registered with the Association.

The government was sensitive about crimes committed by the awakened.

If someone learned they were powerless and could never serve a god, and refused to register with the Association because of it, or acted out against society as a result, that was a serious potential problem.

Call them "powerless" all you wanted, the fact remained they were still awakened.

Powerless awakened were a sore spot for the Association.

"So to sum it up, that's basically torture by false hope."

"But if a powerless awakened suddenly said one day that they'd ended up serving a god, nobody would bat an eye or get suspicious."

The Hunter Association's whole purpose, at the end of the day, was keeping the awakened contained within some kind of boundary.

Everything else wasn't really their concern.

Being registered with the Association was what gave them grounds to punish someone if it came to that.

"They searched that fake dungeon for ten straight days and never found you, and then suddenly you show up inside the dungeon. With a god you'd apparently started serving, no less. A god nobody's ever even heard the name of before. Wouldn't it be weirder if that wasn't evidence you'd been through the Dimensional Rift?"

Watching Choi Suhyun lay it out so confidently, my head started spinning.

"Give me some time to think."

"How long?"

"Thirty minutes."

"Finish in ten. Who do you think you are, Buddha? Thirty minutes to think it over?"

God, this guy's personality.

I crossed my arms, leaned back against the sofa, and glared at Choi Suhyun.

"You don't have any friends, do you? That's why you name your dog stuff like Songsong and drink soju alone. Did you buy that soju by the crate or something?"

"Nine minutes and ten seconds left."

Choi Suhyun showed me his phone screen, the stopwatch reading exactly nine minutes remaining.

I had no idea when he'd even started that stopwatch.

Footnotes:

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