WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 41: Raon Guild (1)

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When I kept quiet, Park Siyu clicked his tongue and answered, reluctant.

"I told you to take the video down."

If only he'd said that from the start.

Despite his calm looking face, Park Siyu actually had a pretty short fuse.

"Let's start with the annoying one, then."

"The Hunter Association has requested an aptitude test for you. For the record, I opposed it."

An aptitude test. Just like Park Siyu said, this really was annoying.

Normally, once a Hunter awakened, they spent a set period as a trainee completing education.

Somewhere in that process, they went through something called an "aptitude test."

They did go through it, sure.

But how strong could freshly awakened kids possibly be?

It was basically just the Association casually checking for kids who looked promising down the road, or kids who might turn into headaches later.

Stat windows only ever showed your own numbers. Nowhere did it say "A-Rank Hunter" or "B-Rank Hunter."

Ranks existed purely as a management convenience worked out between Hunters and the Association.

Park Siyu ran through my personal file in a few short lines.

"Kang Hangyeol. Unaffiliated the entire time you were a trainee. Projected rank D. After coming out of the dungeon as an accident victim in a fake dungeon during your final dungeon exam, you suddenly started serving a god. Became a C-Rank Hunter three months after awakening."

Nothing especially strange in that summary.

Climbing from D to C that fast was a bit quick, sure, but I definitely hadn't cheated.

"That's all true, isn't it? What'd I even do wrong?"

"Yesterday was excessive."

"Does the Association have time to care about a Hunter like me?"

"I just told you. I opposed it."

Park Siyu kept sending me these unreadable signals.

Nobody at the Association had the pull to overrule Park Siyu, the guild's representative, once he'd personally opposed something.

Which meant that if they were pushing it through anyway, it was the will of someone even Park Siyu couldn't do anything about.

Who could that be?

Not Choi Suhyun, probably.

No matter how hard I thought about it, no one came to mind.

I mulled it over for a bit, then gave up worrying about it.

If someone really did have their eye on me, I'd meet them eventually, whether I liked it or not.

No point stirring up trouble ahead of time.

"Yesterday was, uh, a little excessive, yeah?"

"Glad you know it."

"You saying that with a completely blank face doesn't land at all, you know that?"

"I was plenty surprised, believe it or not. If there's more I should be surprised about, I'd appreciate you telling me now."

His expression barely changed, so I'd figured he wasn't surprised at all.

Honestly, thinking back, I probably had gotten a little too into it.

I raised both hands quietly.

"Nothing like that. Everyone's got at least one finishing move up their sleeve."

"No ultimate finishing move, then?"

"You calling that a joke right now? I don't... can't really say I don't have one! Damn it. Ugh, whatever, doesn't matter if I have one, I can't even use it."

I deliberately showed Park Siyu the Ishtar's Ring Choi Suhyun had given me.

"Choi Suhyun's ring."

"He lent it to me."

"I know."

That 5% that had always bugged me on the status window, that was the actual size of the power I possessed.

"The aptitude test isn't anything special anyway, so just half-ass it and get out."

"Hey, if I do well on the aptitude test, does that bump me straight to A-Rank Hunter or something?"

"No such thing."

Park Siyu drew a firm line.

My overall stats were still C-rank.

The one glimmer of hope was that my vitality had barely crept up to B+.

To become a B-Rank Hunter, you needed a set number of dungeon clears under your belt, a certain amount of merit points, and a recommendation letter from an A-Rank Hunter on top of that.

A needlessly complicated system in every direction.

I made no effort to hide how annoyed I looked.

Park Siyu uncrossed his legs and tapped his fingertip against the glass table in front of him.

"Next is the apology."

Park Siyu leaned back into the sofa, arms crossed.

An insufferably arrogant posture, though it didn't actually bother me.

Wait, was there something I was even owed an apology for?

No matter how much I thought about it, the reverse situation seemed a lot more likely.

When the silence dragged on, the one with more at stake spoke first.

"Choi Suhyun came to see me yesterday. Showed up right at my front door. I thought I'd treated you pretty well, so this feels a bit unfortunate."

He was talking about the Choi Suhyun situation.

Even bringing up something that should've been irritating, Park Siyu's face still barely changed.

He had a personality every bit as strange as Choi Suhyun's.

"He would've found out eventually anyway, so what's wrong with me telling him first? Weren't you two friends? The one who hid it is the one at fault. How's that on me?"

Park Siyu kept his mouth shut and just looked at me.

I apologized, reluctant.

"Fine, sorry. All I did was tell Choi Suhyun what happened in the dungeon."

"Choi Suhyun's been showing interest in your god. What's going on with that?"

"Feels kind of backwards saying it, but exactly what it sounds like."

"You really think you can get Choi Suhyun to move?"

Move, nothing, that guy's mind had already been made up for ages.

I was a little uneasy, sure, but it wasn't like I had no confidence at all.

I hadn't even been the one to bring up the name Soter to begin with. Choi Suhyun putting off joining probably had more to do with sorting out his own affairs first.

Park Siyu had probably been suspicious in his own way about why Choi Suhyun was being so good to me.

He'd clearly already drawn some kind of conclusion from yesterday and was asking about it now on that basis.

"If Choi Suhyun serves the same god as you... then whatever he's after is definitely a partnership contract. Such a hassle."

"Partnership?"

"That's a story for later."

Park Siyu brushed past it, acting like there was no point explaining it now anyway.

If that was really what Choi Suhyun was after, I decided to just let the two of them sort it out whenever that time came.

The annoying stuff was covered, and I'd apologized to Park Siyu.

All that was left was the order.

Calling it an order didn't exactly sit well with me.

"Last thing, about the order. You're joining a joint dungeon expedition with Raon Guild. Raon made the first request, and I didn't oppose it."

Park Siyu made it clear he hadn't opposed the Raon Guild dungeon expedition.

Which meant this one really was an order.

Simple guy, this one.

Nothing complicated about it, straightforward to the point that I almost liked it better this way.

"You keep butting heads with Raon Guild."

The orcs from the first fielding, and now Mosman, both had been fields Raon Guild was trying to handle themselves.

The first one had ended as a mere mishap, but this time I'd broken through a barrier a Raon Guild Hunter had set up to take down the boss, so there was no excusing it.

I couldn't exactly claim there'd been no intent behind it.

"Different matter. About that CCTV thing from last time. Turns out you were right. The Raon Guild people filed a false report with the Association."

"See, I knew it. Told you they were sketchy."

Park Siyu gave a light shrug, dodging the question.

Guilds filing reports slanted in their own favor with the Association wasn't exactly a one or two day old problem.

The Association turned a blind eye to plenty of it too, knowing full well what was going on.

The real issue was that the failure rate for C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons had been climbing sharply lately.

Unlike before, C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons weren't dangerous by nature, but they were also the most commonly generated dungeons by far.

"You know An Juhye?"

"The female Hunter who went into the dungeon with me."

The Hunter I'd meant to look into, then let slide because of the whole Kim Yuhan situation getting in the way.

"A few days ago, she reached out wanting to speak with me directly."

It was rare for a D-Rank Hunter like An Juhye to get a one-on-one meeting with a guild representative like Park Siyu.

Apparently Park Siyu had happened to be investigating Raon Guild right around when he'd heard my account of things, so he judged it fine to meet with her.

An Juhye confessed to Park Siyu that she was the one responsible for the Giant Ant Cavern incident.

"Apparently there's someone going around Hunters offering to grant a wish in exchange for doing them a favor. I'd heard the rumor, but I didn't realize it connected to this incident. Whatever the case, it seems she wanted in with Raon Guild."

"And she believed something that stupid?"

If a total stranger showed up claiming they could grant your wish, suspicion should be the first response, not trust.

"Scams like that have been around forever, nothing shocking there. When you're struggling, you'll grab at any straw, so I understand it."

"What do you mean?"

"An Juhye's been a D-Rank Hunter for seven years."

"She didn't look like someone with seven years behind her."

An Juhye had looked, if anything, around my age or maybe a year or two older, no matter how I looked at her.

I didn't remember hearing her exact age, but I'd gotten the sense she wasn't old.

If someone's career length seemed way too long for their apparent age, there was only one explanation worth suspecting.

"Exactly how old was she when she awakened?"

"Fifteen."

Awakening at fifteen would certainly explain seven years of experience.

An Juhye had apparently been told by the mystery man that all she needed to do was enter a dungeon, wound the boss monster, and plant a single glass shard inside it.

Given that the shard was the medium that transformed into an incursion entity, it was clear this man had never intended to actually grant her wish from the start.

"I looked into the Hunters who died in recent failed dungeons."

Hunters like An Juhye who'd been stuck in the same spot for years, or ones who believed they'd been treated unfairly, or ones drowning in massive debt. The circumstances varied, but every single one of those Hunters shared exactly one thing in common.

Every one of them believed they were the unluckiest person alive, trapped in their own personal misfortune.

Someone was deliberately targeting Hunters exactly like that.

"That's messed up."

Exploiting people at their absolute lowest, whoever this was, they had one seriously rotten hobby.

"It's messed up, alright."

Park Siyu added, sounding like he agreed.

Right now in Korea, when the failure rate and death toll for C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons rose, there were only so many places that stood to take the hit.

"First, as you know, is our guild."

People out there mocked Aria Guild as the guild of nobody gods, but it hadn't changed the fact that it was the largest guild in Korea by number of Awakened secured.

Plenty of Hunters said they'd rather be with Aria Guild than face discrimination elsewhere.

The sheer number of Hunters who didn't serve major gods was too large to ignore, next to the far smaller number who did.

Aria Guild handled somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons generated in Korea every year.

"Second?"

"Raon Guild."

"Raon Guild takes up a significant chunk of the remaining C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons. Apparently similar incidents have been happening there too recently."

"You mean someone approaching Hunters like An Juhye?"

"Right. That place has just as many complicated circumstances as we do."

"Complicated circumstances?"

"There's a story there."

"You don't have to say if you don't want to."

"It's less that I don't want to say, more that it's awkward to explain."

If it was awkward to explain, it could only have something to do with Lux, the god Raon Guild served.

The mainstream of Raon Guild consisted of Hunters who served Lux.

Aside from the guild representatives and the executive-level Hunters called Masters, Aria Guild didn't really have much of a hierarchy among its ordinary Hunters.

Raon Guild, on the other hand, was thorough about exactly that kind of thing.

The higher your merit points offered to your god, the better treatment you got within the guild.

Raon Guild worked C-Rank and D-Rank dungeons second only to Aria Guild, so they'd surely already picked up on how suspicious the current situation looked.

Thinking about it in the simplest terms, nobody but Aria Guild stood to benefit as Raon Guild's dungeon failure rate climbed.

"Seems like they suspect us."

Well, this was just a straight up turf war over market share.

Footnotes:

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