WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 132: The Crossroads of Choice (4)
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A few hours earlier.
"Kang Hangyeol! This little punk, seriously!"
Choi Suhyun snapped in irritation, watching Hangyeol vanish.
He'd known the guy was reckless. But shouldn't he at least explain why he was pulling this kind of stunt?
Hangyeol had clearly had a way out.
But at the last moment, he'd changed his mind and switched tactics.
"You got honey smeared on the inside or something?"
Dozens of swords came flying at Choi Suhyun through the split in the air.
Choi Suhyun fired a mana bullet, and the swords burst apart in midair.
He turned his body and pulled the trigger downward.
The mana bullet dropped from the sky and swept clean through the monsters clustered around Jin Sangbyeok.
Choi Suhyun walked through the storm of incoming attacks without a hint of concern.
Jin Sangbyeok glanced at him and swung his Bastard Sword in a wide arc.
The Iron Knight's blade collided with the god Beritaas's body.
The god Beritaas's power was the interpretation of space.
Now that he'd broken his taboo, the space Beritaas generated had gone completely haywire.
"Find Yu Chaeyoung."
Kang Hangyeol wasn't the type to say something like that without a reason.
"Hey, you ever seen Yu Chaeyoung?"
"Shut up, I can't concentrate."
"I asked if you've seen her."
"You're the one flitting around like a gnat, you'd know better than me."
"Should I just crack your skull open?"
Choi Suhyun raised his gun toward Jin Sangbyeok's head.
He pulled the trigger, and a mana bullet came flying from a completely different direction, killing a monster behind him.
The comms room's down too.
If the comms room had gone dark, something had happened to Kim Gangwoo.
"Hey, magpie nest! I'm gonna go check the situation for a bit, cover for me!"
"Who're you calling a magpie nest!"
Jin Sangbyeok swung the Bastard Sword hard in Choi Suhyun's direction.
The Iron Knight's blade collided with the god Beritaas's leg.
Even counting it as an attack, the motion had clearly been deliberate.
Jin Sangbyeok's Bastard Sword cut through empty air.
Where Choi Suhyun had been standing, there was no one left.
Jin Sangbyeok glanced toward the back of the forest and swung the Bastard Sword forward without any particular concern.
Choi Suhyun used Blink toward where Kim Gangwoo and Park Siyu were.
"Damn it, all I said was the truth and he's still throwing a fit."
Blink cost more mana than he'd expected.
He could manage one, maybe two more long-range Blinks at most.
Factoring in the trip back, it made sense to conserve what he had left.
Moving with the shortest possible Blinks, Choi Suhyun suddenly spun around.
Something came flying through the broken trees at tremendous speed.
Choi Suhyun caught the incoming Jeong Choa.
Whatever had launched her had launched her hard. The impact knocked him flat on his back.
Falling, Choi Suhyun fired a mana bullet upward.
The bullet he'd fired burst somewhere else entirely.
"Oh my, Suhyun-ah. You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm... fine."
Choa, who'd pinned Choi Suhyun under her, calmly got back to her feet.
He'd assumed Jeong Choa was fighting that An Seojun guy.
She'd said even back when Yu Chaeyoung died, there'd been a follower of Akhtaion present.
An Seojun's appearance did seem awfully sudden, now that he thought about it.
Since Choa had been the one occupied with him, he hadn't paid much attention, but holding out against her this long meant the man had to be seriously skilled.
On top of that, a key broker.
The word broker attached to it already meant an unregistered Hunter with the Association.
Choi Suhyun weighed whether he should head back to the others or throw in here instead.
The decision didn't take long.
"I thought you'd tell me to just leave."
She usually had no particular drive for anything, but once a fight lit her up, she went all in without a second thought.
"You came because the comms room blew up, right? Then this is exactly why we need to stop him."
"What's the reason?"
"That guy's one of the ones who pushed the god Beritaas into breaking his taboo."
"How do you know that?"
Choa pointed at An Seojun's neck.
There'd been an ugly scar there.
Now it was completely gone.
Old wounds sometimes told you plenty.
An Seojun rubbed at the spot on his neck where the scar had vanished.
"An unpleasant ability."
"I healed you, didn't I?"
"What did you take from me in exchange for the wound?"
An Seojun swung his sword, and Choa lightly hopped back to dodge it.
"Like some rat! Scurrying around!"
Choi Suhyun fired a mana bullet at An Seojun.
An Seojun blocked it and glared at Choi Suhyun.
Origin Recovery, one of Choa's skills, let her draw a target's wounds onto her own body, or accumulate them there, and in exchange she could read the memory tied to the wound.
From what Choa had said, Choi Suhyun was now certain the scar on An Seojun's neck had come from Yu Chaeyoung.
"So the reason that bastard's here is..."
"Surveillance."
Even if they'd succeeded in driving the god Beritaas to break his taboo, that didn't mean every variable had been eliminated.
An Seojun was both a watcher and an accomplice in all this.
Swoosh.
Wind scattered the leaves in every direction.
An Seojun, sword in hand, appeared and vanished in an instant.
Choi Suhyun's gun and An Seojun's sword collided.
"I figured you'd run."
Choi Suhyun ignored the comment.
He planted a hand on the ground and swept his leg in a wide arc.
Falling back, Choi Suhyun fired his gun, and dozens of mana bullets converged on An Seojun.
Jeong Choa appeared through the storm of bullets and threw a punch.
An Seojun's sword cut into her arm, but Choa didn't so much as flinch.
An Seojun pulled back, and her fist slammed into the ground.
The impact carved a crater into the earth.
Choa and Choi Suhyun lightly pressed their backs together.
"This takes me back."
"As I recall, you weren't quite this savage back then."
"I like it better this way now."
Choa puffed her cheeks out slightly and smiled.
Choa charged toward An Seojun.
Mana bullets rained down around An Seojun.
Some of what he couldn't dodge struck Choa's body.
Pushing through the barrage, Choa reached An Seojun, dodged his sword, and pressed her palm to his body.
It was barely a touch, but An Seojun went flying, coughing up blood.
"Still fighting like a lunatic."
"Doesn't look like you'll have time to look away, does it?"
Mana bullets fired by Choi Suhyun streaked past Choa from behind.
Jeong Choa and An Seojun were evenly matched.
Part of the reason the two could trade blows on equal footing was that neither had activated their Transcendent Mode.
Choi Suhyun was different.
Within its range, Choi Suhyun's Transcendent Mode let him fire mana bullets freely, with no restriction on position.
Homing shots, bullets fired from physically impossible angles, still found their mark.
Sometimes a bullet fired upward would come raining down from below.
It wasn't like Choi Suhyun was weak in close combat compared to other bullet marksmen either.
And on top of everything, he had Blink, the ultimate escape skill, in his back pocket. A genuinely troublesome opponent.
An Seojun had heard the rumors about Choi Suhyun, but the man was more trouble than the rumors let on.
And there was a woman fighting alongside him who used an insane style of combat on top of it.
An Seojun was certain now: Jeong Choa clearly felt no pain.
It wasn't just that she didn't feel pain, either.
That body was wrong somehow.
He'd swung his sword with enough force to take an arm clean off.
And yet the arm hadn't come off.
This is insane.
Jeong Choa's body was absorbing the wounds and pain whole.
He couldn't fathom how a human body could do that, and it sent a chill through him at the same time.
An Seojun blocked the mana bullets raining down over his head.
Jeong Choa immediately swept a kick toward him.
In any normal two-on-one fight, being careful of your partner always left an opening somewhere.
Choi Suhyun showed zero basic consideration for his partner.
Whether Jeong Choa got hit by his mana bullets or not, he didn't care in the slightest.
Jeong Choa had come close to getting hit by his bullets more than once.
Did he just not bother because she didn't feel pain anyway?
This kind of teamwork, no communication, no consideration, attacking on pure trust that the other would handle it, only worked because of the trust built between them.
An Seojun was feeling that fact in his bones right now.
They're perfectly in sync.
This wasn't something you could just fall into on the spot.
The two of them had clearly fought together before, even before Choi Suhyun left Servia.
A lunatic fighting style, matched by another lunatic willing to keep pace with it.
An Seojun stepped back and shouted.
"Two against one, have you no shame?"
"Suhyun-ah, what's he saying?"
"No need to pay attention to nonsense. Guess he wants to die early."
"You villains, honestly!!"
"A villain shouldn't be the one calling someone else a villain."
"I am not a villain! I'm... damn it."
An Seojun's face flushed red as he fumed.
Choi Suhyun looked at him with a face somewhere between confused and done.
The gun aimed at An Seojun swung upward instead.
The mana bullet flying up got deflected by something.
"Wait a second. Suhyun-ah."
Sensing something was off, Choa stopped Choi Suhyun before he could fire again.
The one who dropped down from above was none other than Yu Jihan.
"That guy is..."
"Hey, Poodle."
A cold silence fell over the three of them at Yu Jihan's words.
Jihan's gaze was fixed on An Seojun, nobody else.
An Seojun, sword lowered slightly, blinked.
"Poodle... you, you can't possibly mean me?"
"Who else would I mean? I heard something pretty funny, by the way. You're a follower of Akhtaion?"
"P, poodle... who's calling who a poodle!!"
"Pfft! Hahahahaha!!"
"N, now that you mention it, maybe there's a resemblance..."
Choi Suhyun clutched his stomach and started laughing.
With Jeong Choa chiming in agreement, An Seojun's face went bright red.
Yu Jihan, the one who'd actually called him a poodle, showed no particular change in expression.
Jihan pulled a sword out of his item inventory.
A long, thin blade, jet black.
Furious now, An Seojun charged straight at Yu Jihan.
"I, I am not a poodle!"
Yu Jihan knocked An Seojun's sword aside in a single exchange.
"W, wait a..."
An Seojun stumbled backward, startled that his technique had been broken in one clean hit.
Yu Jihan, never one to miss an opening, thrust his blade toward An Seojun's chest.
An Seojun twisted his stance at the last second and barely blocked it, but the force sent his body flying into the air.
Yu Jihan rose above him and swung.
An Seojun scrambled, hand planted on the ground, and leaped up into a tree.
Cold sweat ran down An Seojun's back.
Even accounting for the moment of carelessness, that attack a second ago had been genuinely dangerous.
Fighting off Choi Suhyun and Jeong Choa had been manageable, but Yu Jihan crashing in alone was a whole different level of trouble.
If all three came at him together, there wasn't even a question.
An Seojun tensed and kept his eyes locked on Yu Jihan.
Yu Jihan turned his head casually, looking at Choi Suhyun instead.
"...hey, did you just click your tongue at me?"
"Wait, Suhyun-ah."
"Just disappointed the so-called Bullet Marksman turned out to be an idiot after all. That's all. Pathetic."
"What? Y, you little punk who hasn't even dried behind the ears!"
"Get lost. I've got no business with some dog who serves the god Soter."
"How do you know that..."
"I said get lost."
Yu Jihan's blade touched Choi Suhyun's skin.
He'd heard bits and pieces from Hangyeol, but this was the first time seeing Yu Jihan back in his right mind up close.
This isn't just a lunatic. This is a top-tier lunatic.
"Chuunibyou punk."
"I'll kill you first... You'd be better off leaving while I'm still being polite about it."
"Let me ask you one thing. What kind of grudge do you have against a follower of Akhtaion?"
"Why would I have to tell you that?"
"Fair enough, but... that guy's pretty annoying. If you're going to kill him anyway, might as well team up..."
"I believe I said you're in the way?"
Choa fell silent, faced with a conversational style that plainly wasn't going to bend.
Choi Suhyun ended up grabbing Choa's arm and signaling her with a look.
Getting held up by An Seojun like this wasn't exactly a good situation either.
"Glad we can still talk, at least."
"Shut up, this isn't me stepping aside because I like you."
Yu Jihan had definitely trailed off mid-sentence at one point.
Given his personality, it wouldn't have been strange for him to want to fight them too.
The fact that Yu Jihan avoided it meant that, at least for now, he had no reason to fight them.
Choi Suhyun grabbed Choa's arm and used Blink upward into the sky.
"Wait, Suhyun... what are you doing right now?"
"Even when I'm the one bailing, I'm not bailing quietly!"
Choi Suhyun fired Black Inferno Spiraling Bullets down toward where Yu Jihan and An Seojun stood.
Footnotes:
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