WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 44: Raon Guild (4)

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Eunyoung noona did a backward tumble and landed behind the one-horned beast.

The one-horned beast caught wind of her presence and froze.

It seemed to be hesitating over which of us to attack, me standing right in front of it or noona behind it.

After a brief moment of deliberation, the one-horned beast lunged at noona, who had no weapon.

Eunyoung noona dodged the one-horned beast's attack and climbed onto its back.

Wait, she wasn't planning to ride it, was she?

Sure, that thing was technically a horse, but it definitely wasn't a normal one.

Right as I started genuinely panicking, I heard the sound of a neck snapping.

Along with a scream that scraped like nails on a chalkboard, the one-horned beast's neck twisted and it collapsed.

Eunyoung noona hopped down from the fallen one-horned beast and waved casually.

Honestly, when I'd heard the qualifying dungeon was Skyfield, I'd been a little worried.

One-horned beasts weren't numerous, but they moved fast and nimbly, and the odds of a mistake turning fatal were way too high.

On top of that, they preferred targets who were alone or unprepared over going after multiple people at once.

The usual strategy was to have one Hunter lure it to a designated point, then have everyone surround and attack it together.

Guess it doesn't matter now.

Judging by how noona had handled it, it didn't look like she was in any danger of getting caught off guard.

Eunyoung noona crouched in front of the dead one-horned beast.

I sheathed my sword and walked over to her.

"Noona, what are you doing?"

"Shouldn't we grab loot or something?"

Dungeons held strange creatures and plants that didn't exist outside of them.

Even the monsters we had to deal with right away were, to humans, objects of research.

There'd been a period of active study into dungeon plants and monsters, but these days that enthusiasm had cooled off compared to the early boom.

Why? Simple. There's no real use for most of it.

Take the Giant Ant Cavern we'd just been in, for example.

The Giant queen ant's egg sold as a research material for cutting-edge substances, sure, but the rest of the giant ants were basically useless for anything.

The ant shell, tough as steel?

Peeling the flesh off the shell is a whole chore, and processing it afterward is a pain.

Might as well just use regular steel instead.

Modern science is more impressive than people give it credit for.

The reality was that anything coming out of D-Rank or C-Rank dungeons got treated as garbage, with a few exceptions.

So does that mean there's no loot at all?

Not exactly. Some items from higher-rank dungeons could genuinely be worth whatever price you named.

The conditions for something counting as loot came down to rarity and value, basically.

Well, if noona wanted to take the one-horned beast's horn since it was her first kill, I wasn't going to stop her.

"That thing's not really worth much, though."

"I heard one-horned beast horns sell for a lot. No?"

"Get off the wiki already."

"You're on it all the time too!"

Eunyoung noona brushed off the dirt and stood up.

One-horned beast horns really do sell for a lot, sure.

Except, to be precise, that horn wasn't a one-horned beast's horn.

"That's not a one-horned beast, that's a Bicorn's horn."

The boss, Bicorn, was a black horse with two horns.

People also called it a "two-horn" in contrast to the one-horned beast's "one-horn," and among Bicorns there was a certain probability of a hidden boss variant appearing with a red horn.

That red horn was the main ingredient for status-ailment potions.

The horn noona was talking about was the Bicorn's red horn.

Noona nodded at my explanation.

"So a regular one-horned beast's horn is just useless, then?"

"Not completely useless. Ground up, it's good to eat."

"Good for what?"

"Stamina. You know, down there."

Eunyoung noona looked disappointed and got up, brushing herself off.

I knew there were some people who bought and ate it after hearing the rumors.

If we'd had extra manpower, grabbing a few as a side haul wouldn't have hurt, but with just the two of us, we weren't in a position to bother collecting horns like that.

If we did take anything, it'd be the Bicorn's red horn at most.

"I thought everyone grabbed loot whenever they went into a dungeon."

You said you read the wiki!

This is all written right there, you just didn't read it properly.

Don't just scroll past it.

Do you know how hard those people worked writing all that up in their rooms?

"Maybe at B-Rank or A-Rank dungeons, that kind of thing happens."

Even then, loot gathering was mostly the job of whoever came in second, except in a handful of special cases.

We walked a bit past the spot where the first one-horned beast had fallen and came to a hill that was more like a rise.

One-horned beasts were scattered across the rise at regular intervals.

One-horned beasts tended to be strongly individualistic, which was why they respected each other's space like that.

That kind of habitat made hunting them a lot more convenient.

An old stone tablet stood on top of the rise.

We decided to set up base camp by a river a little ways from the rise.

Not that "base camp" meant much. We just tossed the bags we'd brought up onto a decent-looking tree.

The usual rule of thumb was to plan for about one overnight stay for D-Rank or C-Rank dungeons.

Some special dungeons required two nights, but there weren't many of those.

One day was plenty for a single dungeon.

Watching noona's skill level, it didn't seem like we'd even need the overnight stay.

"How come you're so bad with weapons but so good at fighting like that?"

You could tell just from how she'd dodged the one-horned beast's ambush.

I wasn't sure "fighting like that" was quite the right term.

Put more elegantly, you could easily call it hand-to-hand combat technique without it sounding out of place.

Normally, Awakened people relied on weapons as the default.

Attacking with a weapon was much easier, and it made defense easier too.

You didn't have to use a weapon, but going without one meant your body had to absorb that much more of the burden instead, which came with real risk.

In noona's case, she had no talent for weapons, but her bare-handed combat skill was genuinely excellent.

"My dad taught me. He was a Hunter who fought with his fists. Oh, and he started teaching me back in elementary school."

Teaching combat technique to an elementary schooler?

Eunyoung noona read the shock on my face and explained.

"My dad was, how do I put this... kind of a unique guy. There was this one time I came home after getting beat up in a fight with friends. He went absolutely ballistic, said next time, hit them instead of coming home beaten."

"That's not something you say to a kid."

"Right? Even thinking about it now, it's pretty funny. But well..."

Eunyoung noona clenched her fist tight.

Talent for weapons aside, all noona could really do, having been Unaffiliated for so long, was master the fighting style her father had taught her.

I didn't need her to say it to know how hard she must have worked.

"Come on, let's get moving!"

I headed toward the rise with noona.

We climbed a tree to check on the state of the one-horned beasts.

Eunyoung noona came up beside me.

"So how do we get this sealed orb, anyway?"

"It drops when you take out one-horned beasts. That one over there looks good."

Some missions got complicated, but this was a C+ Rank dungeon. No reason for it to be twisted up in some complex way.

Noona and I worked out a simple plan to handle the one-horned beasts.

Honestly, calling it a plan was generous, it was that simple.

"One, I pull aggro. Two, noona hits from behind. That's basically it."

Eunyoung noona had been killing monsters by climbing on top of them and twisting their heads.

Same method she'd used to kill the orc last time.

That happened because she didn't have much real combat experience against monsters yet.

I should probably ask Choi Suhyun to help her out with that part.

Right now, noona's Strength stat was A.

Choi Suhyun was the only person who could take noona's strength and still keep up with a decent level of hand-to-hand skill.

Judging by how he'd taken hits from her and held up fine, his durability seemed solid too.

"Something wrong?"

"Sorry, just thinking. I don't think you should climb on top of one-horned beasts and attack like you did just now."

That kind of attack only worked on orcs.

With stronger monsters, there was no guarantee that simply twisting the neck would kill them.

The one-horned beast dying in one hit earlier had just been because noona's strength was absurdly high.

Relying on raw power wasn't a bad thing in itself, but one wrong move could easily turn into a serious injury.

Instead, we shifted our approach to targeting the one-horned beasts' weak points.

Once we finished talking it over, we moved in to hunt.

I drew my sword and stepped into the one-horned beast's range. The wary one-horned beast charged straight at me.

I blocked the charging one-horned beast's rush with my sword.

Its horn grazed past the side of my neck.

The one-horned beast's horn flashed.

The first one-horned beast we met got killed by noona before it even had a chance to use magic, but these things were fundamentally spellcasting monsters.

I pulled my sword back and put a little distance between us.

Lightning struck the spot where I'd been standing.

A one-horned beast that used magic went into a brief stun right afterward.

"Noona, now!"

At my signal, noona, who'd been in the one-horned beast's blind spot, charged in.

Fast approach, right foot, left foot. Then a small jump and a punch. Noona struck exactly where I'd told her the heart was.

I'd only given her a rough description of "around there," and she'd nailed it precisely, which said a lot about her sense for this stuff.

The one-horned beast screamed and coughed up blood. I rushed the fleeing one-horned beast, set my stance, and threw a punch.

The one-horned beast's body, over two meters tall, staggered and toppled sideways.

Not dead yet?

The fallen one-horned beast's body twitched in response.

While I was debating whether to finish it off, noona climbed onto the one-horned beast's body and stomped down on its spine with her foot.

"Got it!"

Watching noona look so pleased with herself, I broke out in a cold sweat inside.

For a second, I genuinely wondered if some god had messed up while making her.

Whatever the case, I figured I'd better not mess with Eunyoung noona going forward.

Among the black blood the one-horned beast had coughed up, I spotted a white orb. For a second I panicked, thinking it might be a fragment forming an incursion entity.

Eunyoung noona picked up the orb.

"This is an item, right?"

"Looks like a quest item."

"The sealed orb thing? Is one enough?"

"Not sure. Let's just clear out as many as we can and head up."

There wasn't any particular reason to rush and clear the dungeon right away.

Noona and I lured out and took down the one-horned beasts nearby.

I figured she'd wear out fast after a few kills, but noona held up better than expected.

Sure, I had past experience giving me a head start on growth, but Eunyoung noona was just an ordinary human.

Even accounting for that, her instincts and ability were genuinely impressive.

Some of it was her own drive, sure, but at this point I started wondering all over again why none of the other gods had picked her.

She seemed to get the hang of it as we went, moving faster and faster through the one-horned beasts.

Managing to pull off an ambush against one-horned beasts, creatures whose whole thing was ambushing others, said a lot about how much confidence she'd built up.

I called out to noona, who was busy killing a one-horned beast and picking up the sealed orb.

"Eunyoung noona! Let's pull back."

Footnotes:

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