WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 33: Memories of Murder (4)

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I muttered that Dead should stop saying weird things.

I turned toward the direction the voice was coming from.

A boy, maybe ten years old, stood in front of me.

The cat that had been Dead was gone.

I gripped my sword and stayed on guard against the boy.

"It's me."

Dead answered like it was nothing.

Just in case, I studied him carefully as he stood there.

Looking at the eyes, it did seem to be Dead.

A cat one moment, a child the next. I had no idea what kind of being this guy actually was.

"Some kind of shapeshifter race or something?"

"Do I look like it?"

Dead tilted his head toward the man tied to the seat, still driving.

I swung my sword at the man's neck.

The train kept running.

At this speed, it would reach the capital within an hour or two.

I left the body outside the driver's cabin and came back.

Dead, now in the shape of the boy, was driving the train.

I'd worried how a body that small could possibly drive, but the worry turned out to be pointless.

Funny that someone named Dead had managed to survive all the way to the end.

Well, it probably wasn't his real name anyway.

I leaned against the wall and tore open a vitality potion, popping it in my mouth.

I was sure I'd been given a hundred of them, but fewer than ten were left.

Still, thanks to eating them here and there, my wounds had mostly closed up.

If small ones existed, there had to be large ones too, right?

Wasn't there some item like an elixir that healed wounds all at once?

I hoped there was.

My mouth felt restless, so I chewed on the potion wrapper like gum.

Honestly, the texture wasn't great.

Tasted like chewing on rubber.

Watching Dead drive, a question came to me.

Before killing the man, Dead had said the train couldn't be stopped.

The reason was that every braking mechanism on it had broken down.

Killing the infected man and taking the controls was one thing.

"So what's the plan for stopping the train once we reach the capital?"

"I'll ram it."

Real confident way to say that, mister.

Wait, guess he's not really a mister anymore.

I was baffled, but I couldn't find a way to argue with him.

Ramming did seem like the only option left to stop the train.

"We'll just have to aim for wherever has the fewest people."

I pulled a shower bomb from my item window and popped it.

My blood-soaked body and filthy clothes came back clean in an instant.

I dragged a half-broken crate over to the wall and sat against it.

I spoke to Dead as he drove.

"Isn't this some kind of military law violation, by the way?"

Dead had been a soldier.

He'd taken the form of a boy now, but that didn't change the fact that he was still Dead.

I was an outsider, so it didn't matter for me, but I had no idea if it was fine for a soldier like Dead to get tangled up in something like this.

"Are you worried about me? Kinder than you look."

"It's not that. Just, if I hadn't failed, none of this would've happened."

I did have some guilt about it, believe it or not.

Even after going back to the lobby, I figured some of it would stick with me for a while.

Not as much as the dried meat incident, though.

"If you're worried, don't be. It was my last day before discharge anyway."

"I'm really sorry."

I nearly choked on the potion I was drinking, the shock hit so hard.

A disaster this size, one day before discharge.

I felt like a criminal who should be kneeling and slamming his forehead into the floor.

At my heartfelt apology, Dead laughed heartily.

Hearing that laugh come out in a child's voice gave me a strange chill.

Even in the short time we'd had, he didn't seem like a bad person.

Maybe that impression only felt stronger because I'd never had a normal conversation with anyone inside the tower before.

"I've been curious, what exactly is a taboo?"

Up until now, things had been too chaotic. I'd barely managed to keep up with events as they happened.

I knew it would look suspicious to ask, but this felt like the only chance I'd get.

Sure enough, at my question, Dead, hands on the controls, turned his head back.

"Never once in my life have I heard a question like that."

"As you can see, I'm kind of a country bumpkin."

Dead looked me up and down.

It was the blatant look you'd give someone you thought was suspicious.

"Let's just say a city bumpkin."

Just play along, would you.

I'd thought he had enough sense to catch on.

At my shameless request, Dead turned his gaze to the window.

"A taboo is exactly what it sounds like. A taboo."

The answer that came back from Dead was ridiculous.

Who doesn't know that much already?

I'm asking what kind of taboo it actually is.

"Every muel carries one taboo of their own."

"And what's a muel?"

"Guess a city bumpkin is even more clueless than a country one."

Honestly, it didn't matter much either way.

I could just ask that guy when I entered Layer 4.

"Beings who carry mana. Aren't you a muel too?"

"That's it?"

There'd been a fairly long pause before Dead got that out.

I could tell he'd thought it over before explaining.

It felt like a massive oversimplification, but it wasn't too far off from what I'd already guessed.

"You're not expecting me to give you a full history lecture right now, are you? Every muel carries a 'taboo' they must never break. Since a taboo differs from person to person, there's no way to define what it actually is in general terms."

Lia Angelina's taboo had been cannibalism.

Meaning eating people was forbidden to her.

Dead had said that Lia, having broken her taboo, must not be allowed to become an incursion entity.

I'd been too overwhelmed to think much of it at the time, but breaking a taboo apparently carried a high chance of turning someone into an incursion entity.

I had no idea what an incursion entity even was, or what happened once someone became one.

It didn't seem like something I'd understand even with an explanation.

I asked a different question instead.

"What happened to her arm?"

"She carries the blood of a giant. Half of it, to be precise."

"Half?"

"Didn't you see how only her arm turned out that way?"

That explained why she'd looked like some half-finished monster. Made sense if she was only half muel.

I drank the last of my vitality potions and tossed the wrapper on the floor.

I pulled my back off the wall. In the distance, something like a massive city wall came into view.

Even at a glance, it was clearly grand and enormous enough to know it was the capital.

"Know the legend about cats? The superstition that unlike other animals, a cat has nine lives. I don't put much stock in it myself."

Dead's hands stayed gripped tight on the controls, his eyes fixed straight ahead at the front of the train.

Outside the city wall stood a train station of massive scale.

The station drew closer, bit by bit.

"Live through about nine lives, and getting into an accident near the end stops feeling like much of anything."

I quietly drew my sword.

The skin on Dead's hands, still gripping the controls, split open.

Black liquid dripped from the cracks in his skin. His entire body was collapsing like slime.

Dead's taboo was, without a doubt, his tenth resurrection.

Dead closed his eyes, and I quietly gripped my sword.

The train slammed into the platform.

[Layer 3 'Assassination' has been cleared.]

[Merit point settlement will begin.]

[Clear reward merit points + 5,000]

[(Hidden) Slaughterer + 7,000]

[(Hidden) Host killer + 10,000]

[(First) Ally killing + 13,000]

[(Hidden) Train terrorist + 10,000]

[(Failure) Lia Angelina assassination failed - 5,000]

[Final + 40,000]

After clearing Layer 3, I came out into the lobby.

People surrounded me the moment I stepped out of the gate.

However I looked at it, this didn't look like a random gathering.

They called themselves the Central Guild, ruling over the lower lobby.

I waved my hand to the side, dismissing the settlement window.

The man standing at the center pushed through the crowd and approached.

"Yu Jihan, was it? Making it out without our help, whatever god you're serving, that's impressive."

"Join the Central Guild. I'll put in a good word with the master, make everything before this a clean slate. You might've gotten lucky up through Layer 3, but it only gets harder from here."

I burst out laughing at his words, tossed out like he was doing me some huge favor.

That day, I killed a person who wasn't infected.

An old-model phone sat on the living room table.

The vibration buzzing out of the phone rattled loudly against the table.

"Ugh."

The vibration shook hard enough to threaten breaking the table, and Jihan snapped awake.

He'd meant to just close his eyes for a minute on the couch, but it looked like he'd slept until morning.

Jihan's mood was far from good.

Of all things, why did he have to dream about that.

He had no idea why that memory kept surfacing in dreams.

Even without being reminded like this, Jihan remembered everything that had happened in that tower, down to the smallest detail.

Sitting up, Jihan answered the phone.

An agitated voice came through from the other end.

"Hey! You know how many times I called?"

Jihan yawned and didn't answer the man.

If anything, he put on a blatantly annoyed expression.

The man calling Jihan was someone named Ichan.

They'd met in a simple way.

Jihan had helped him out when he was about to starve to death on the street.

Turned out he was a Hunter.

He served some god with a name like Fluffysoft or Softfluffy, something like that, and the guy was about as unhinged as the god he served.

Jihan was convinced that this god calling itself Fluffysoft had to be the White Hand God.

Otherwise there was no way a god would take in a follower like Ichan.

He put the phone on speaker, went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and by the time he came back, the man's voice had finally quieted down.

"You weren't even listening to me, were you?"

"What I asked for?"

"Ugh, I don't get why a super genius elite like me has to take orders from a petty little guy like you. Do you have any idea how many people around the world want me? Just a few days ago, the FBI..."

"Shut up and get out of your room."

"Quiet! O-outside is dangerous! Don't you know the saying, it's dangerous outside the blanket!"

"I'm hanging up."

"Ah, wait, please, don't hang up! It's been a whole month since I talked to a real person, I'm actually so happy right now! You said you wanted to know about Kang Hangyeol, right? Aren't you curious? Say you're curious, hurry!"

Jihan turned off speaker and put the phone to his ear.

"Hey? Seriously, not curious?"

"What."

"You finally answered! See, you are curious, right? Like you said, Kang Hangyeol belongs to Aria Guild. Joined as a D-Rank Hunter, recently became a C-Rank. That's a pretty crazy growth rate. Though, not as crazy as mine, of course."

"I know."

"You know I'm a genius?"

"Not that. The other thing."

"Hmm, when Kang Hangyeol joined Aria Guild, he told the contract manager that he and Park Siyu were best friends."

Park Siyu was one of the three guild masters of Aria Guild, and the most recognizable figure both inside and outside the guild.

Park Siyu is connected to Kang Hangyeol?

All Jihan could think was, why.

A C-Rank hunter with nothing especially remarkable about him having a connection to Park Siyu, an S-Rank hunter and guild master, wasn't normal to begin with.

"There's actually testimony that Kang Hangyeol has been in and out of Park Siyu's office. And here's where it gets really interesting..."

"Why'd you stop talking?"

"Reveal in sixty seconds!"

Jihan clenched his fist.

Should he go find this guy and beat him up?

Footnotes:

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