WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 24: Song Eunyoung (4)

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[The field 'Defeat the Black Orc!' has been cleared.]

[All orcs have been eliminated.]

[Settlement will begin.]

[Final tally: + 0]

Since I hadn't actually done anything, no merit points came in, just as I'd expected.

The Association staff I'd seen earlier came running toward the park.

Not just the staff, either.

Hunters from nearby who'd finished off their own orcs noticed the commotion and started gathering at the park.

"You're..."

"Wait, did you kill this?"

"No, that's..."

Min Seongtaek was among the hunters who'd rushed over.

Around me lay more than ten dead orcs, including the Black Orc boss.

Sword marks everywhere, and me standing right in the middle of it.

I watched the orc corpses dissolve away and scratched the back of my neck.

Merit points weren't visible to other people, so it was easy for anyone looking at this to assume I'd done it all.

I gave up trying to explain.

* * *

A few days later.

Having wrapped up the expedition, I headed in to Aria Guild Headquarters.

Hunters affiliated with a guild had to write up a report within two weeks of finishing a dungeon expedition. That was just the unwritten rule.

Not that the report itself amounted to much.

You just filled out a form saying something like "this happened in the dungeon, then that happened, and I came out alive with all my limbs intact."

The guild collected the reports from team members, compiled them, and passed them along to the Association.

Along the way, the guild gathered dungeon intel and reassessed each hunter's interpersonal dynamics with teammates. Basically, it doubled as a performance review.

If something in the dungeon report didn't add up or seemed suspicious, they'd call you in for questioning.

For higher-rank dungeon expeditions, writing the report alone could apparently take as long as the expedition itself.

For a C-rank dungeon with plenty of publicly available information, the reports weren't usually too demanding.

"So annoying."

Even if it only took two or three hours, work was still work.

I was sitting in the cafeteria on one of the middle floors of Aria Guild Headquarters, laptop open, grinding out words to fill the form, when it happened.

While I was enjoying my free Americano to the fullest, a man approached my table.

Late twenties, decent looking.

I set down my coffee cup and looked up at him.

"I'm not sharing this table, so go find another seat."

He blinked, looking taken aback by my attitude.

"What do you want."

I already knew he wasn't here to share a seat or steal my table. I drained the rest of my coffee.

"Kim Gangwoo, from the secretary's office. Someone would like to see you."

"Who?"

If they'd sent a secretary to fetch me, it had to be someone with a real position in the guild.

I had a guess who it might be.

Park Siyu, one of the three guild masters.

Right now, he was the only person in the guild who'd have any reason to call me.

But the timing bothered me.

There had been plenty of chances to call me in before now.

Too busy?

If that were the reason, the gap felt way too long.

I'd been with the guild over three months at this point.

If he was calling me in now, it meant something specific had come up.

The only thing that could possibly count as an issue was the dungeon expedition from a few days back.

Which was strange too, since I hadn't even submitted that report yet.

Kim Gangwoo didn't answer my question.

Less like he was deliberately ignoring me, more like he was watching for people around us.

I closed the laptop and stood up.

"Follow me, please."

I followed Kim Gangwoo out of the cafeteria.

He opened an emergency exit door in the middle of a hallway, revealing a private elevator.

We got off on the 45th floor, where three massive doors waited.

Kim Gangwoo opened the one in the center.

As I was about to step in, he asked, "Would you like something to drink?"

"Coffee. Hot Americano. And some chocolate, if you've got it."

Kim Gangwoo nodded at my order.

I turned my back on him and walked inside.

The cafeteria view at Aria Guild hadn't been bad, but up here, on a much higher floor, the view was clearly on another level.

The office itself was nothing special.

White floors, a modern bookshelf, a stiff metal desk and chair.

It felt way too spartan to be a guild master's office.

I'd been expecting something more classic and antique, so this was a bit of a letdown.

"Bad taste."

"Sorry my taste doesn't suit you."

Park Siyu rose from his chair and came toward me.

Celebrity-tier looks, tall build, jeans paired with a neat shirt, Park Siyu looked less like the head of a massive conglomerate guild like Aria and more like the CEO of some startup.

Or maybe an actor or a model.

Either way, the man was clearly built for the camera.

Meanwhile his friend Choi Suhyun looked like your average burned-out finance office worker pulling all-nighters.

"I wasn't really trying to criticize. Taste is just taste, right?"

"Have a seat, make yourself comfortable."

We sat across from each other on the sofa.

Right on cue, his secretary Kim Gangwoo brought in coffee and tea.

The coffee was clearly the expensive stuff, tasting nothing like what I'd had in the cafeteria.

Not that the cafeteria coffee was bad, either.

We drank in silence for a while.

Not because it was awkward or uncomfortable. If anything, the silence felt as easy as sitting with a close friend.

Park Siyu knew me, and I knew Park Siyu pretty well too.

Being the guild master, there was no way he didn't know what I'd been up to.

Meanwhile, I'd done my own fair share of searching Park Siyu online.

Unlike Choi Suhyun, there wasn't much public info about his dungeon exploits or skills, but aside from that, Park Siyu was famous in a different sense entirely.

I mean, the guy's lip balm brand went viral online just because he'd used it walking out of the Association building.

The lip balm, which wasn't even expensive, apparently sold out within a single day.

"I heard you were in the Jeong-balsan field. That right?"

"You mean the dungeon break? Yeah. It went off right after the dungeon ended."

Park Siyu and I traded these exchanges without much weight to them.

There was zero sense of two strangers meeting for the first time.

Some of that was probably just Park Siyu being used to dealing with people like me.

"Raon Guild filed a complaint."

"Complaint? To who?"

Park Siyu tilted his chin slightly.

His look said, who else could it be, since it's just the two of us here.

It wasn't that I didn't understand what he meant.

It just came out on reflex, because the whole thing was absurd.

Since I looked too baffled to respond properly, Park Siyu explained for me.

"Black Oak Temple was a dungeon Raon Guild was running an expedition in. They noticed the dungeon break happening and were planning to handle it themselves. Their claim is that you swooped in and took it."

"Once Fielding kicks in, any hunter who joined has the right to kill monsters, don't they?"

I knew the other members had rushed to kill as many orcs as possible for exactly that reason.

Park Siyu let a piece of chocolate melt in his mouth before answering.

"Guess you don't know the meaning of moderation."

He crossed his arms and glared at me.

He seemed to be talking about the park.

"That one wasn't me."

I hadn't had time to explain earlier, but I figured I should clear up the misunderstanding now.

If I'd actually done it and got blamed, at least that would've felt fair.

Park Siyu tilted his head, looking confused.

"According to the report your teammate filed, the hunter who took down the Black Orc was you. Raon Guild's side is also saying it was your doing."

Park Siyu trailed off, like he expected me to explain myself.

"Doesn't the park have CCTV? Go check the footage. I keep telling you, it wasn't me."

Park Siyu clicked his tongue, looking annoyed at my response.

His expression said, do we really need to go that far over a measly C-rank dungeon break.

Blunt-faced as he was, the guy seemed to have complaints about everything.

Whatever guild that was, Rion or Ribbon or something, they apparently suspected I'd stolen the monster kill they were after.

At least if I'd actually killed something and got blamed for it, it'd sting less.

"How would you even know if I did it or not? You got proof? Ugh, forget it, I didn't do it either way. Sue me. This is so unfair! Seriously. Accusing me of stuff I didn't even do."

I leaned back against the sofa and put on my best show of nerve.

I wasn't joking, either. It genuinely felt unfair. Getting complaints for something I hadn't done, come on.

"You're a lot more entertaining than I'd heard."

"You think this is funny? I'm actually annoyed here."

"I'll look into the CCTV."

"Like you're actually going to be the one looking."

All a guild master like Park Siyu ever did was give orders to the people below him.

At my jab, Park Siyu went quiet.

A thought crossed my mind.

"You're not seriously going to bill me for repairing the park, are you?"

"You have money to pay it?"

"If I did, would I be sitting here like this?"

"I hear you owe Suhyun eight million dollars."

"Eight point five million. Unless you're offering to pay it off for me, don't even bring it up."

I'd figured that debt would just slide by, but of course he had to bring it up too. What a petty guy.

Park Siyu shook his head at my answer.

He changed the subject.

"When are you submitting your report?"

"Deadline's six PM today, isn't it? I'm working on it. Quit nagging me like a parent asking their kid when they're gonna do their homework."

This particular dungeon expedition had been anything but normal.

I had no idea how I was supposed to explain the whole incident with the incursion entity.

If I just wrote something vague and glossed over, I had no idea what the other hunters might have written.

Given the situation, I couldn't help but obsess over how to word the report.

"For reference, everyone else on your team already submitted theirs. You're the only one who hasn't."

"Figured as much. What'd they write?"

"Just ask me to show you."

Even Park Siyu seemed to find my question ridiculous enough to snort.

There were plenty of reports in the guild about the Giant Ant Cavern.

A C-rank dungeon with plenty of existing data, there was no reason for a guild master like Park Siyu to personally check every single report.

The job of guild master couldn't possibly be that free of responsibilities either.

"So if I write here that 'the expedition was routine, nothing happened,' does that mean I get dragged down to some interrogation room in the guild basement for questioning?"

Park Siyu tossed a business card toward me.

The card didn't even have a name printed on it, just an email address in a sans-serif font on the back.

"Timeframe."

"A week."

"Two days. Your guild account is suspended, so don't get any ideas about running off into a dungeon."

"This is starting to sound like abuse of power, no matter how I look at it."

"Have you considered that you might be the one benefiting from special treatment here?"

"Fine, fine, I'll just send it to that email. And I've got a question, by the way."

"Go ahead."

"How much do you actually know?"

A short, silent standoff passed between Park Siyu and me.

Park Siyu was the one who backed down first.

He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled something out.

Inside a glass bottle a bit bigger than a finger sat a few small glass fragments. At least four or five of them, from the look of it.

The same kind I had.

"There's been an increase lately in monsters showing anomalous behavior inside dungeons. Several hunters who survived say they found fragments like these in monster corpses."

Park Siyu narrowed his eyes.

He was clearly suspicious of me.

"Corruption shards?"

"You're not seriously suggesting that, are you?"

"Half serious. Maybe they combine into some kind of orb or something."

"That's genuinely nonsense."

Each fragment had its own distinct shape, which was Park Siyu's basis for concluding that combining them was essentially impossible.

Park Siyu's phone buzzed.

A call, apparently.

He finished it quickly and set the phone down.

"So?"

"So what?"

"I'm asking if you've found a fragment yourself."

"Top secret."

Honestly, if Park Siyu invoked his authority as guild master and demanded I hand over the shard, I had no right to refuse.

"Cooperate with us."

"Not asking me for the shard?"

"Already have plenty. They're not particularly useful anyway."

Park Siyu gave the glass bottle a light shake.

Having gathered that many, he'd clearly done some research or investigation and reached a conclusion of his own.

"So what exactly am I cooperating with?"

"My god has taken an interest in you. That's all I'll say for now. I'll be in touch again soon with the details."

Park Siyu clammed up, seeming to weigh what to say next.

Watching Park Siyu throw on his coat and head for the door, I pulled the laptop back out of my bag.

"Mind if I work here?"

Park Siyu, seeing me already comfortably seated with the laptop back on my knees, said nothing at all.

* * *

A five-star hotel in Gangnam, Seoul.

Choi Suhyun had rented out an entire ten-person buffet room.

For this kind of money, ordering the full course meal at the hotel restaurant would've been way cheaper.

Choi Suhyun set down his plate and sat across from me.

"Just go to the restaurant already. Order the course, they serve you, they pour the wine and everything. Why pay all this extra money to rent a room just to eat buffet food?"

"My call, isn't it? You're not the one paying. You're getting a free meal and still complaining."

Choi Suhyun stabbed a strawberry from the plate he'd piled high and popped it into his mouth.

Must've been strawberry season, since there were promotions for it everywhere.

I told Choi Suhyun about my meeting with Park Siyu.

"So you just left your report writing to come here? Wow, there's shameless and then there's you. You got any conscience at all?"

"So you want me to leave that quiet space and go back down to the loud cafeteria instead?"

"A D-rank hunter should be grateful just to get into the cafeteria! Back in my day, D-rank hunters weren't even treated like real hunters!"

"Ugh, old man alert. And by the way, I'm C-rank now."

"Already?"

Choi Suhyun pulled out his phone.

He searched up my info and looked genuinely shocked to find out it was true.

"How is this so fast? Did you sneak into some solo beginner's package or something?"

"I wish something like that existed. Oh right. Can you help me find someone?"

"If someone's missing, go to the police."

"It's a woman."

"You trying to get killed? You know how many women there are in this country?"

Impatient as ever, Choi Suhyun cut me off, muttering.

Like anyone would seriously say something as ridiculous as "help me find a woman." Come on, let me finish talking, man.

Noticing his water glass was empty, Choi Suhyun waved through the glass wall.

A staff member came in carrying a water pitcher.

"At the very least, tell me what she looks like, what she does, how you met her."

"I was about to, okay? So, um..."

I paused for a moment, trying to figure out where to even start.

Meanwhile, the staff member who'd poured water for Choi Suhyun approached my side of the table too.

I turned my head, and the moment my eyes met the woman's, I blurted out on instinct.

"This is her."

"Excuse me?"

The woman froze, and Choi Suhyun stared at me like I'd lost my mind.

Footnotes:

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