WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 32: Memories of Murder (3)

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Muttering something about taboos or whatever nonsense she was going on about.

I still felt my stomach turn just thinking about that jerky I'd eaten back then.

I used Line to cleanly slice off Lia's arm.

According to the god Soter, this skill could cut whatever I aimed at with the cleanest possible edge.

The massive arm fell away, and confusion spread across Lia's face.

I spun my body around, sword ready to take off the other arm too.

She seemed to realize the danger and jerked back.

That retreat had been the smart move.

"Kyaaaaaaah! My arm! My arm, my arm!! How dare you touch my arm!!"

Lia screamed, her arm severed.

Watching something with a monstrous arm scream like that was more than a little unsettling.

Lia screamed like someone who'd lost her mind, then suddenly burst out laughing.

I flicked a finger at her, beckoning.

Lia's rage-filled claws came at me.

I twisted my body slightly and cut off the fingers with my sword.

The three fingers I couldn't cut in time stabbed into my shoulder and thigh.

"Fuck."

I stepped back and pressed hard on my bleeding thigh.

It hurt.

Hurt like hell.

The kind of pain that made cursing unavoidable.

Before I could even fully register the pain, Lia's next attack came in.

I jumped, lifting my body slightly to dodge the strike.

I spun in midair and thrust the sword forward.

I swung not at the arm this time, but at the neck.

Whatever her body structure was, unlike the arm, that neck was clearly still an ordinary human's.

"I just... wanted to know..."

Lia's severed head fell off the side of the train.

"Spouting nonsense I can't even understand."

Taboo, my ass.

I didn't know what that meant, and I didn't want to know either.

I stared down over the edge of the train for a while.

Please don't tell me she's still alive even with her head cut off.

I worried, but thankfully nothing like that happened.

Thud.

The headless body toppled forward.

"Ow."

I limped on one leg.

Blood gushed from between my thighs.

The ground beneath my feet was soaked red.

Dizziness hit me at the same time.

If I kept going like this, I'd be in real trouble.

I pulled out every small health potion I had left in my item inventory.

They'd worked pretty well on the wounds I got from the goblins back on Floor 1.

Lately they didn't seem to do much at all.

If I had to put it in a metaphor, it was like a miracle cure suddenly turning into first-aid ointment.

Guess that's why they gave me a hundred of them.

I sat down on the roof of the train and tore open a health potion.

If mana potions were candy, health potions were more like junk food.

Something like those wax bottle candies they used to sell outside school. Tasted like old-school fever medicine.

Both the mana potions and the health potions.

At this point I had no idea why they even bothered calling them potions.

I kept tearing them open without stopping.

My mind kept drifting in and out, filling with all sorts of random thoughts.

By the time the empty health potion wrappers had piled up on the ground, the bleeding finally stopped and the wound closed.

Even with the reduced effect, it was still amazing that a medicine could heal a wound just from drinking it.

Nothing like drinking a healing potion in a video game.

The wound had closed, but I'd lost a lot of blood, and internal damage still lingered.

"Meow."

I turned around at the sound of a cat.

A white cat was staring at me.

Why the hell was there a cat in a place like this?

I drew my dagger and eyed the cat warily.

The cat leaped.

I nearly swung the dagger out of shock.

The cat landed right where Lia Angelina's headless body lay.

Worse than the headless corpse was the jerky memory it dragged up.

Felt like it might scar me for life.

The cat batted Lia's body aside with a front paw.

Lia's corpse rolled off the edge of the train, that giant arm still barely clinging to it.

What did I just see?

Lia's body I could accept, but that arm alone was well over a meter long.

The kind of size you'd expect a giant to have, if giants existed.

And the cat had just batted it away like nothing?

I stepped back, hand going to my sword.

Thankfully all those health potions had kicked in enough that I could still move.

No way I was about to die to a cat.

<It's me.>

The cat meowed, and a voice sounded in my head.

<That's right.>

That cat was Dead?

Dead had died, run through by Lia. I'd confirmed it myself.

I couldn't wrap my head around it. I asked him what was going on.

"What happened?"

"It hasn't even been three days."

Dead came toward me.

Going from a middle-aged man to a cat was a hell of a gap. And this one looked female, too...

While I was busy overthinking everything, the train shook hard.

There had been a few tremors already, but this one was worse.

Bad enough that I thought we might derail.

Dead seemed to be thinking the same thing.

Part of the train cars toward the back snapped off.

The car I was in with Dead started tilting to the side.

I scooped Dead up and climbed back into the train through a window.

Inside, it was still a mess.

"What happened to the infected?"

"They're not going to turn back to normal, are they?"

Dead's voice was firm.

"Do you think there are any survivors?"

<Can't say. But one thing's certain.>

"What's that?"

There was no way forward except clearing out the remaining infected.

Dead climbed down out of my arms.

"Go ahead."

I already had a rough idea what it would be.

There was only one thing worth calling a favor in this situation.

Honestly, it was funny that Dead was even asking me for it.

If you thought about it, this whole mess was my fault for failing to finish Lia off.

"Got it."

<You're not going to hesitate? They were human once. No, they still are human.>

"Not finishing Lia off was my mistake. And it's fine now."

Lia had a point.

Both she and I were murderers.

If the infected still counted as people, I'd already killed plenty.

Killing a couple more, or a few hundred more, wasn't going to change anything.

Dead gave a warning.

I thought back to the train station I'd seen before boarding.

Even that station alone had been packed with people.

The capital would have far more.

If the infected got loose at a station like that, the outcome was obvious without needing to see it.

That was what he'd meant by no one being left alive on the train.

While talking with Dead, I kept tearing open small health potions and popping them in my mouth.

"Junk food. Don't worry about it."

I said that while chewing another wax-candy-shaped health potion.

"Let's go."

I drew my sword and moved into the next car.

The moment I stepped into the next car, every infected turned to look at me all at once.

I raised the sword high.

That day.

I killed more infected on that train than I could count.

By the time I looked up again, faint morning light had begun to rise beyond the window.

"P, please spare me! I'll give you all the money you want!!"

A man hiding in the corner of first class dumped gold coins out of his pocket.

There was a bite wound on his shoulder from an infected.

I approached with my sword, and he raised a self-defense dagger, watching me warily.

"Why are you doing this? You're not infected, are you! Hurry and treat me! Do you have any idea who I am..."

He rambled on with tears streaming down his face, whatever came to mind.

Looking at the dagger in the man's hand, I nearly laughed out loud, though not because he was funny.

It was because he reminded me of myself a few months back.

Shaking after killing a single goblin, right after entering the tower.

Pathetic.

That self-loathing came right after failing to kill Lia.

I finally understood what Dead had meant by that look in my eyes.

Down in the lower lobby, there had been a group calling themselves the Central Guild.

I still remembered the way they'd looked at me when I first entered the tower.

The way I was looking at this man right now was the same look those Central Guild people had given me back then.

You couldn't climb this game without losing your mind a little.

That was how the whole thing had been built from the start.

I kicked at the man's hand holding the dagger.

He bent down to pick it up off the floor.

I brought the sword down across his neck.

I closed the door and stepped quietly out of the first-class car.

Dead, waiting in the corridor, murmured as he watched me.

"It was my choice."

That's just the kind of world this was.

All that was left was the driver, up front in the engine cab.

Good thing it wasn't a coal-powered setup, at least.

The train ran on something called mana stone.

The size looked similar to the Mana Core I'd seen on Layer 2.

Though it did seem different from the Mana Core in some way.

There was no chance this train had anything like modern auto-drive features.

If it did, this train should've derailed a long time ago given everything that had happened.

The fact that the train kept moving despite everything meant someone in the driver's cab had to still be operating it.

Maybe, just maybe, that person hadn't been infected.

I cleared out the infected near the driver's cabin, then broke down the door.

What if there's someone in there who isn't infected?

That thought had started creeping in once I'd grown used to killing like a machine.

Dead's request was to stop the infected from spreading beyond the train.

That was why he'd asked me to kill them.

He hadn't asked me to kill anyone still alive.

Him, though, he'd said something a little different.

Thankfully, all the way here, there hadn't been a single person who wasn't infected.

Except for one, someone who'd hidden the fact they were infected and gotten caught.

The door fell backward, and I found the conductor still gripping the controls.

The moment I saw him, I realized how pointless my earlier worry had been.

There was no one on this train who wasn't infected.

His arms were tied to the controls with rope.

When I entered, he let out a twisted sound and jerked his head, but his hands stayed locked on the controls.

It wasn't his mind driving the train anymore, just a body running on years of trained muscle memory.

A kind of professional dedication that was honestly terrifying.

Dead checked the train in my place.

He didn't seem like a total stranger to this, so if Dead said it couldn't be done, then it couldn't be done.

The train would reach the capital in three or four hours.

There were no survivors.

I'd checked thoroughly with Mana Detection, and this was the last of them.

I didn't know how to drive a train, and I didn't know how to stop one either.

"What should we do?"

There was always the option of just letting it ride until it reached the capital.

"What about the train?"

Killing the man wasn't the issue. The train was.

<I'll drive it. Leaving him like this any longer feels too cruel.>

Thankfully, he wasn't telling me to drive it.

Though this, too, was its own kind of ridiculous.

"How's a cat supposed to drive a train?"

At least say something that makes sense if you want me to go along with it.

Footnotes:

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