WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 23: Song Eunyoung (3)

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Whoever you are, I owed the god Soter a thank you.

An Juhye shoved Kim Yuhan aside.

No fear on her at all.

Luckily, Kim Yuhan didn't seem to have any intention of hurting An Juhye too.

Kim Yuhan tossed my sword to the ground.

I grabbed An Juhye's hand and struggled to my feet.

I looked around the wrecked interior of the cave.

[The dungeon has been cleared.]

[Settlement will begin.]

What was supposed to be a routine expedition into the Giant Ant Cavern had ended in absolute disaster.

* * *

Unable to move, I sat there while the rest of the hunters went looking for the exit gate.

Once Min Seongtaek and Kang Hyeonseung got up, Kim Yuhan acted like nothing had happened.

An Juhye, thanks to her long stretch as a D-rank hunter, had sharp instincts.

She looked like she was planning to let it slide, pretending she hadn't noticed anything.

As for me, no matter how I looked at it, I felt cheated.

I'd gotten beaten half to death without even understanding why Kim Yuhan asked me that question in the first place.

I opened my mouth to say something, and Kim Yuhan shot me a look that could kill.

Ugh, fine, I'd let it go because my body still hurt.

"I'll head out first, then."

"Sure. Go ahead."

Kang Hyeonseung, oblivious to everything, said he'd be back soon and gave a polite little wave.

Once the others left, I sat slumped against the wall, staring into space.

The cave still bore the marks of the fight.

An Incursion entity referred to an impure kind of energy.

Gods had no concept of a physical body.

Form was just a temporary vessel.

It was said to be a collective of will, a self capable of exerting transcendent power.

Most gods held to their own nature, because that nature was the very reason for their existence.

A self that strayed from its own reason for existing, that was what an Incursion entity was.

Strictly speaking, though, what had possessed the queen ant was closer to an incursion than a true Incursion entity.

I needed to look into what had actually happened here.

Once some strength came back to me, I looked around the cave.

"This is..."

Something glinted where the Incursion entity had vanished.

It had been sitting in a puddle of muddy water, which was probably why nobody had noticed it.

I kicked the standing water away with the tip of my foot, and the shape became clear.

A small shard of glass.

I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket.

I set the glass shard on top of it.

"Figured as much."

Someone had used a medium to artificially manipulate the queen ant.

I heard the others' voices.

I wrapped the glass shard in the handkerchief and stuffed it into my pocket.

Right on cue, Min Seongtaek and the others came back, having found the exit gate.

"Ugh, we're running at a net loss on this one."

"At least we're alive."

"Must be nice being so relaxed about it."

"Relaxed, my ass, I'm just trying to comfort myself here."

Kang Hyeonseung and Min Seongtaek bickered back and forth in front of the exit gate.

Both of them said they were sick of caves and threw themselves straight through it.

I glanced sideways at An Juhye standing next to me.

The queen ant fight had gone smoothly, no question.

An impure will could summon an Incursion entity, sure, but a monster as low-tier as a queen ant shouldn't have been remotely enough to draw one in.

Just as I was about to say something to An Juhye, my eyes met Kim Yuhan's. He still hadn't left.

"Go ahead first."

At my irritation, Kim Yuhan let out a faint sigh.

I bit back the urge to snap at him for having the nerve to sigh.

His reply, when it came, was even more absurd.

"You go first."

"No."

Somehow this had turned into a childish standoff.

An Juhye, caught between me and Kim Yuhan, stepped into the exit gate first.

I tried to grab her, but I was already too late.

Now that I thought about it, the queen ant had started acting strange right after An Juhye threw her dagger.

I had no real evidence for it, but there was no harm in asking.

I'd missed my best window.

Not wanting to pick a fight over nothing, I quietly walked through the exit gate.

"Ugh, too bright."

After being trapped in a pitch-dark cave for over two days, the light stung.

There was no one around the dungeon gate but us.

Unless it was a special expedition, Association staff only checked hunters before they entered a dungeon.

Once hunters came out, all they had to do was log into the Hunter Network or the guild site and file a quick report. That was the whole system.

Of course, if a group went past their expected window, people started noticing something had gone wrong.

Either way, we'd come out of the dungeon within the expected range.

The problem was something else entirely.

A siren blared loud enough to make my ears ring, echoing across Jeong-balsan and the surrounding apartment complexes.

"That's a dungeon break."

"Feels like these have been happening a lot lately, right?"

Kang Hyeonseung and An Juhye exchanged the words casually.

A dungeon break. Wasn't that the thing where monsters burst out into the real world?

Wasn't that supposed to be dangerous?

But the three of them didn't react like it was. They seemed a little tense, sure, but there was also something almost eager in it.

Outside the dungeon, everyone's bags sat piled together in one spot.

Kim Yuhan was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, where's Kim Yuhan?"

"Didn't see him."

"Maybe he left right after the dungeon cleared?"

"Some guys do that. Weird one, that guy, no matter how you slice it."

Had he really vanished the second the dungeon cleared?

Even so, there wasn't so much as a trace of him left behind.

The siren kept wailing.

All four of our phones buzzed with a notification at almost the same moment.

[Notification]

Black Oak Temple (C) dungeon break in progress

Near Jeong-balsan, Madu-dong, Ilsan-dong-gu, Goyang, Gyeonggi

Estimated 100 monsters

I looked up, and a massive circle had formed over Jeong-balsan and the surrounding area.

Being up near the summit, I could see the whole shape of it.

So this was the fabled fielding effect I'd only heard about.

Fielding was basically a monster zone that formed whenever a dungeon break occurred.

[Hunt down the Black Orcs!]

Rank: C

Participants: 37

Rewards

1) First to kill a Black Orc [1000 merit points]

2) Per orc killed [30 merit points]

The wider the monster spread got, the wider the fielding zone got with it.

Any awakened person who set foot inside the field was automatically enrolled.

Since the Giant Ant Cavern had left the group running at a net loss, the dungeon break was, if anything, a golden chance for the others to make up the merit points they'd lost.

"Sorry, I'm heading out first."

"Same here."

Min Seongtaek and An Juhye headed down the mountain first.

Kang Hyeonseung, reading the room, waved and said he'd see everyone later, then headed down a different way.

Finally, the siren I was so sick of cut off.

I trudged my way down Jeong-balsan.

The streets where the dungeon break had struck were dead quiet.

Once the dungeon break broadcast went out, everyone had holed up in their homes or the nearby shops.

I'd come down off Jeong-balsan, but I was still technically inside the fielding zone.

An Association staff member in a black windbreaker approached, blowing a whistle.

"No entry past this point."

"I'm a hunter."

"Mind if I check your ID?"

I nodded at the staffer's request and pulled out my phone to open the app.

I pulled up the account info that worked as ID and showed it to them.

"Thanks for your trouble."

Having confirmed my identity, the staffer bowed and moved past me.

Looking around, I activated Mana Detection.

Orcs were scattered here and there across the field, but there seemed to be almost as many hunters in the field as orcs.

The distance felt too far to bother with, and I was about to turn back when I felt something strange.

That energy...

Much weaker than the queen ant's had been, but it was unmistakably the energy of an Incursion entity.

The shard I'd wrapped in the handkerchief trembled faintly, as if in resonance.

"It's not even a shard of profane will."

Either way, something was clearly going on here.

Checking it out wouldn't cost me anything, and it might tell me what was happening.

I shouldered my bag and leaped high into the air.

I memorized the surrounding terrain and sprinted the shortest route to a small park.

"Wrong spot?"

This looked like the right area, but there was nothing here. I figured I'd better look around a bit more.

An orc appeared at the end of an alley.

Watching a monster wander around a modern building was, in its own way, a novel sight.

"Aaah, aaaargh! Somebody, help!"

A man in a tracksuit was backing away from an orc closing in with an axe raised.

There's always one. Someone told to stay indoors who wanders around anyway and ends up in trouble.

I was about to step in and help when someone else ran forward first.

"Huh?"

A woman in a black suit drove a knee strike into the orc's face.

It did damage, but not enough to be fatal.

The orc swung its axe at her.

She planted a hand on the ground and dodged back, avoiding the blow.

While the orc's attention was locked on her, I moved toward the man still sitting on the ground.

"Can you stand? Run that way."

"Thank you so much."

The man braced against the wall and got up.

I pointed toward the main street, and the man took off running like his life depended on it.

The woman rose to her feet, brushing dust off her hands and clothes.

Off duty, maybe?

Not every hunter went around carrying a weapon.

Some hunters liked to advertise the fact they were hunters, sure, but most of them, when they weren't working, just went about their business in casual clothes like anyone else.

The orc, belatedly noticing the man had escaped, brought its axe down on the woman.

The axe gouged a chunk out of the concrete. She jumped.

She rose just a little higher than the orc's head, then kicked out sideways.

With the crunch of a snapping neck, the orc's head twisted a full ninety degrees and it collapsed to the ground.

The orc's body slammed into the wall.

It squirmed, still trying to hang on to whatever life it had left.

With its nerves severed, all it could manage was a few twitches.

The woman landed and let out a groan.

"Ow."

She must not have seen the rock near her landing spot, because her ankle looked twisted.

I mean, come on, who does a flying kick like that in dress shoes?

Rock or no rock, that ankle was bound to twist.

Awakened hunters healed faster than ordinary people, so it probably didn't matter much.

The orc was still alive.

Left alone, it would die eventually, but killing it now was clearly the better option.

"Not gonna finish it off?"

"Sorry?"

"This thing's still alive."

I pointed at the orc and asked her.

She looked back and forth between me and the orc, blinking.

She seemed more startled that I was standing there than by the orc itself.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"From the start? Well, maybe not the very start. Since you kneed it in the face."

"Ah."

She flushed, looking embarrassed, and glanced away.

"I'm not trying to steal your kill, so go ahead and finish it."

"It's fine."

"Sorry?"

"I don't get merit points for killing orcs anyway. You take it."

"What do you mean..."

"And I've got to get to work! Good luck out there! Ow!"

Before I could even ask, she took off running toward the station.

Her foot clearly still hurt, because she limped a little as she went.

Work? No merit points? Wait a second...

The work part I could brush off, but there was no mistaking what "no merit points" meant.

Not being able to earn merit points meant she served no god at all.

The woman who'd just run off was an Unaffiliated hunter.

I was about to chase after her when I turned instead.

In the exact opposite direction from where she'd run.

The Incursion entity's energy I'd been tracking from the start had suddenly vanished.

At the same moment, a massive explosion tore through the park at the base of Jeong-balsan.

A few trees in the park shot up into the air before crashing back down.

"Guess I have no choice."

I could always track down the woman later.

I ran toward the park where the explosion had happened.

The state of the park was brutal.

Aside from the trees that had launched skyward, everything else was a wreck too.

I'd never actually fought a Black Orc before. Made me wonder if a mere C-rank boss could really leave this much devastation behind.

Several orc corpses were scattered around, the Black Orc's body among them.

Someone had beaten me to it.

Honestly, I had a pretty good guess who.

I didn't know if there was a hunter around here capable of this, but my gut was telling me it was Kim Yuhan's handiwork.

What even was that guy?

"Better bolt."

I really didn't want to be caught standing here and get blamed for this.

I turned to make a run for it, and right then, the fielding effect lifted and a status window popped up.

Ugh, of all the luck.

Footnotes:

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