WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 14: I'm Kind of a Big Deal (2)

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Choi Suhyun kept his promise and didn't bother me for ten whole minutes.

The wide living room fell into a sudden silence.

An alarm went off on the phone with the finished stopwatch.

Choi Suhyun flipped his phone over and tapped the screen.

Choi Suhyun was a hunter who'd fallen into a space called the Dimensional Rift and experienced another dimension.

The man he'd met there had served the god Soter, and after coming back to reality, he'd been searching for that same god.

Something didn't add up here.

Because the epithet "Soter" was something I'd only made up recently.

Choi Suhyun's near-death dungeon incident and his departure from his guild had happened roughly two years ago.

Had he known this name before it even existed?

Given how the system worked, the odds of an epithet or a divine title overlapping by coincidence seemed slim.

"I've got a question."

Choi Suhyun cleared away the finished pizza, cradled Songsong in one arm, and set a bottle of soju on the table.

The guy looked like some bookish nerd, and yet here he was, knocking back straight soju. It was genuinely bizarre. Choi Suhyun didn't answer right away, but I asked anyway.

"What was the name of that man you met? The one who said he served this god Soter."

"Don't know."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Not kidding. I really don't know. Can't remember."

Songsong, sitting on Choi Suhyun's lap, barked at me.

Choi Suhyun soothed the dog and poured soju into a glass.

"That's the weird part, honestly. There's no way he didn't tell me his name. But that's exactly the piece I can't remember."

"What about his face? What did he look like?"

"Would it mean anything if I told you?"

I gave an awkward laugh at Choi Suhyun's pushback.

Choi Suhyun pointed a finger at me.

"Looked about your age. His skill was solid, but he was young. That's all I remember. I gave you all the time you asked for, so now it's my turn. What happened in that place?"

I told Choi Suhyun what had happened to me.

Not all of it, though.

The story about falling into the Dimensional Rift was very likely one of Choi Suhyun's own secrets.

Still, since I'd heard his secret, it only seemed fair, if fairness even applied here, to offer something back in return.

I left out the part where Soter was an epithet I'd made up myself, along with anything about the Tower of Trials, and seasoned the rest just enough to make it plausible.

Choi Suhyun chewed on the dried squid he'd brought out as a side dish.

He seemed to feel a little self-conscious drinking alone, because he pushed the soju bottle toward me.

"Want a drink?"

"You want me to chug it straight from the bottle or something?"

"Go get your own glass. Don't try ordering me around. While you're at it, bring another bottle of soju. Actually, just bring three."

The bottle on the table was less than half full, so I got up, unable to argue.

Telling me to fetch a glass looked like a flimsy excuse no matter how I sliced it. I walked into the kitchen and found a refrigerator that looked like something out of a commercial kitchen.

When I hesitated, Choi Suhyun, as if he'd expected exactly this, raised his voice from the sofa.

"Bottom, it's on the bottom shelf!"

"If that's how it is, come get it yourself!"

"Come? Who are you talking to like that? You want to die?"

Ignoring Choi Suhyun, I opened the bottom compartment of the fridge.

"What the hell."

Looking inside, I couldn't help but curse for real.

The fridge had an entire crate of soju stashed inside.

In a house that could've easily kept a few bottles of some château-labeled wine on hand, and instead there was soju.

I genuinely couldn't understand where a character like this had come from.

I gathered three bottles of soju in my arms, grabbed a glass, and came back.

"You don't have shot glasses?"

"Who drinks soju out of a shot glass. You a kid? Oh wait, you are."

Choi Suhyun let out a snort and laughed at me.

While I'd been off getting the soju and glass, he'd apparently finished off what was left.

"And what are you, a liver made of alcohol sponge?"

Choi Suhyun poured just enough soju into the glass to barely cover the bottom.

I'd been half worried he'd fill the glass to the brim, so seeing his restraint was something of a relief.

We clinked glasses lightly, and the moment I swallowed the soju, I broke into a coughing fit.

Once I'd forced down the burn lodged in my throat, I picked the story back up.

I cut what needed cutting and added just enough to fill the gaps.

"So to sum up what you're saying, you fell into the Dimensional Rift, ended up at the entrance of some strange tower, and you were the only one who survived. That about right?"

"That's right."

"And you met the god Soter and got delegated authority. What's the divine title?"

"Huh?"

"Huh, my ass. Soter's the epithet. I'm asking for the divine title."

I caught my breath, took another swallow of soju, and looked at Choi Suhyun.

"You think I'm some kind of pushover?"

"That's not it, but... how did you even know there was a separate divine title? Everyone else seemed clueless about that."

"That's only true for the third-rate ones. If you're an authority proxy, you'd be at least Guardian-rank, and it wouldn't make sense not to know the divine title of the god you serve."

"Can't tell you. Well, if you're actually thinking about serving the same god as me, I'll consider it."

"Deal."

"...Excuse me?"

Choi Suhyun had received countless recruitment offers ever since leaving his Affiliation. Even now, three years later, that was still ongoing.

It wasn't as if I hadn't been thinking about recruiting Choi Suhyun myself.

The moment Soter's name came up, I'd already decided I needed to bring him onto my side.

I never expected he'd bite on something I'd tossed out so casually.

If getting Choi Suhyun to switch sides were this easy for other gods, there'd have been no reason for him to drift around Unaffiliated for three years.

If anything, it was too easy.

"Wondering if this is easy enough to be some kind of trap?"

"Ahem."

Had it shown on my face?

At my cough, Choi Suhyun set his empty glass down on the table and leaned in slightly.

"I'm not just agreeing to join for nothing. I'm not exactly some ordinary catch, you know."

"I hate that I can't argue with that."

"Saying that right to my face?"

"Can't beat you with my fists, so at least I should speak my mind straight."

"There are exactly two things I want to know."

Choi Suhyun folded down his fingers one at a time as he spoke.

"Like I asked before, the true divine title, not the epithet. And the purpose."

"Purpose?"

"Yeah. What your god actually wants."

"Is there a reason I need to know that?"

"Because this world's insane."

Choi Suhyun reached out, cracked open a fresh bottle of soju, and drank it straight from the bottle.

He didn't seem to be bothering to hide anything anymore.

Whether Choi Suhyun drank soju by the truckload didn't really matter to me.

There'd be nothing more absurd than an S rank hunter dying of alcohol poisoning.

"Gods want merit points, and the more merit points hunters donate, the more power they get. You know at least this much, right?"

What Choi Suhyun was describing was exactly the core of the proxy war being waged to win the title of Ruler.

Hunters had no idea this whole thing was one giant game.

"The world I went to, ordinary people had merit points too. You know what that means? Ordinary people were required to donate merit points to their god's followers, and the ones who couldn't lived lives basically no better than livestock."

"Uh..."

"The people called believers went to any length, used any means, to bring in more merit points for the god they served. And the reason behind it was kind of a joke. They'd been promised that if their god came out on top, everyone would be saved. But this is a picture I've seen plenty of times before."

Choi Suhyun poured soju down his throat like it was water.

Had something similar happened in another dimension too?

I couldn't quite piece together what was going on.

While I was still puzzling it over, Choi Suhyun kept talking.

"Servia. You probably already know from searching online, that's the god I served. Forgive me for not being able to say the divine title."

Since a god's name carried power, saying it out loud carried a real risk of drawing that god's attention in some way.

I steered the conversation elsewhere instead.

"So what happened?"

"Nothing much happened, really. The thing happened over there. The god I served came close to winning first place. Right up to the end, that god toyed with its believers, and then killed them off in the most brutal way imaginable. That's when I got my answer. You think it's something a god would do, ordering a child to strangle their own parent?"

That was when Choi Suhyun said two more questions had come to him.

Was his own god the only one like this?

And if not, what exactly was happening in the reality he'd come from?

"The number of dungeons really is increasing. Which means dungeon breaks are on the rise too."

"I think I saw something about dungeons on the news."

"Meanwhile, the number of hunters keeps dropping. It's not that the number of awakened is dropping, mind you. It's the opposite. More people are awakening, but more hunters are dying early on too. I'd bet every last merit point I have left that at least half of those deaths were at someone else's hands."

Choi Suhyun sighed.

Coming from someone who'd experienced the world above and currently worked at the Association, the story carried real weight.

Choi Suhyun said that after returning to reality and meeting the god he'd served again, he'd become certain of it.

"Those things never gave a damn about us from the start. This is just one big game."

Choi Suhyun had grasped the truth of it with startling precision. Honestly, I hadn't expected him to understand this much, this clearly.

Hunters went to any length, used any means, to squeeze out even a little more in merit points.

The frequency and the cruelty of it, rather than fading with time, kept getting worse.

Korea managed its dungeons far better than most other countries. Which also meant it had the kind of database and research infrastructure that made real study possible.

As a government employee, Choi Suhyun used his job as an excuse to investigate dungeons.

An S rank hunter walking into a D rank dungeon would raise eyebrows, but a government employee doing the same was nothing unusual.

"Not every dungeon is like this, but some of them are genuinely strange. Like someone built them on purpose."

It felt similar to what I'd sensed in Goblin Village. Come to think of it, the whole merit-point system itself wasn't exactly normal to begin with.

"Some people, no, a lot of people, compare it to an online game. I get why they think of merit points as experience points. What I'm trying to say is, games have developers. Maybe not exactly someone who says 'I made this,' but at the very least there's got to be a company behind it."

If you compared it to a game, Earth was one giant server.

This wasn't some MMORPG overflowing with dreams and hope and adventure. And the decisive part was.

"We're not the players of this game."

NPCs in a game live out their whole lives never knowing they're NPCs. It stung to hear, but the logic held.

My own actions, my own life, had actually been manipulated by someone else. The emptiness that anger left behind was beyond words.

Choi Suhyun clenched his fist tight.

An NPC in a game might end its story as nothing more than an NPC, but at the very least, Choi Suhyun wasn't one.

"The god I serve could be the exact same way, couldn't it?"

"That guy believed his god would really save the world. Isn't that a lot better than gods who order mass suicides as proof of your faith? Besides, that guy was the one who told me to go find Soter."

"He couldn't remember the name or the face, but he remembered that?"

"Tell me about it."

Choi Suhyun seemed baffled by it too, muttering to himself as he tipped back more soju.

But who on earth had met Choi Suhyun and told him to go find the god Soter?

Either way, the fact that someone had gone so far as to tell Choi Suhyun to search for Soter made it obvious that whoever it was trusted me a great deal.

At this point, it'd be strange not to take the bait.

This looked less like coincidence and more like something closer to fate.

"Fine. I'll tell you. Just don't laugh."

"Don't laugh, why would I laugh?"

"I don't know. I said it, so just take it as it is."

Choi Suhyun's face had gone red from the alcohol. I took a sip from the drink he'd left half finished and slowly opened my mouth.

"Ah..."

"Ah?"

"Dark Destruction God."

Footnotes:

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