I Returned as a God - Chapter 5

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 5: Goblin Village (1)

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I could hear people murmuring in the distance. It sounded like screaming, and it sounded like cheering and roaring, both at once.

The sky was wrapped in black smoke.

The stench of blood stabbed at my nose, and the puddles on the ground held thick, sticky blood instead of water.

I hovered above it all like a camera looking down. On one side of the ruined castle wall, a familiar flag fluttered.

I turned my head, and among the fallen bodies I saw a familiar face.

A man on the verge of death, wounds so severe it was a miracle he was breathing at all. His whole body streaked with blood, the man opened his mouth.

"You ...must not ...the tower... Why on earth..."

Those were the man's last words.

* * *

The water running from the faucet sounded cool and clean.

I brushed my teeth and stared blankly at the mirror. A man in his early twenties, brushing his teeth. The face beyond the glass still felt strange to me.

"What kind of dream was that?"

I spat out the foam in my mouth and rinsed with water. I boiled water in the electric kettle and made coffee.

Coffee I'd bought at the nearby mart the evening before.

I sat down on the floor, where a blanket stood in for a couch, and savored the taste and smell of the coffee.

"What am I even doing."

A wave of self-loathing rose up.

Even accounting for everything, this felt like too much.

Outside the window, a car passed by. Once I made money, moving out would be the very first thing I did.

I drank my coffee and thought about the dream.

The details were already fading fast. If I didn't pin it down now, I never would.

'That face...'

It was Luciel, without a doubt.

That battlefield, that was where he'd died.

I remembered everything from before Luciel's death.

There was no way I could forget it.

'A tower?'

I had no memory of hearing anything like that. I set down my empty coffee cup and muttered.

"Must've just been a weird dream."

Morning sunlight was slipping in through the narrow gap in the window. Right now, I had my hands full just dealing with Kang Hangyeol's life.

I took the subway for about thirty minutes and arrived at Woojangsan Station.

A woman in casual clothes with a huge hiking backpack caught my eye. Lee Yeeun, the only female Hunter in the group chat.

'What's with all that stuff?'

The amount of luggage was enough to make you believe she was emigrating. Woojangsan wasn't even that tall a mountain.

There was no way anyone needed to carry that much gear just to climb something like that.

I bowed my head slightly toward Lee Yeeun, who was busy with her phone, and walked closer. Lee Yeeun put the phone in her pocket and lifted her head slightly.

"Who are you?"

"Ah, Kang Hangyeol."

Instead of answering, Lee Yeeun let out an "ahh" and nodded.

There wasn't much more to it than that.

After that, Kim Taewoon and Nam Unik arrived.

The two of them showed up at almost the same time.

Nam Unik got out of a taxi, and Kim Taewoon actually drove his own car.

It wasn't a super car like Choi Suhyun's, but it was still a pretty pricey vehicle.

'Why am I the only one with barely any luggage?'

Both of them had brought just as much stuff as Lee Yeeun.

Since it was supposed to be a goblin village, I'd taken it lightly and just tossed a bit of weapons, food, and clothes into an old hiking bag that had been sitting in the corner of my place. Compared to them, the difference was almost embarrassing.

I felt like an elementary schooler who'd misread the parent notice and showed up without half the supplies, awkwardly hovering at the edge of the group.

'How bad could it be.'

Not that I could turn around now and say, let me run home real quick and grab more stuff.

Better to act like it was no big deal, since it had already happened anyway.

Once we reached the middle of Woojangsan, two or three men in suits waved us over.

Officials from the Dungeon Association.

"You're the trainees, right?"

"Yes, Team 4."

Kim Taewoon, our team leader, answered for us.

After they checked our identities, we followed one of the men in a bit further.

A path ordinary people never walked.

Through the thick trees and brush, I could see a shimmering black space, its shape unclear.

Visible clearly to the naked eye, it was obviously a dungeon entrance to anyone who looked at it.

Back when I was on the Arbelisia continent, I'd been inside dungeons a handful of times, and the entrance itself looked exactly the same.

I just never expected to see a gate like that in the 21st century here.

Since the preparations were already done, all that was left was to walk in.

Standing at the back, I waited for the three ahead of me to go through first.

'Why aren't they going in?'

The moment the thought crossed my mind, Lee Yeeun, who'd been standing at the front, walked over to me.

Lee Yeeun set down a backpack in front of me, one that might as well have been moving boxes.

"There's a lot of breakable stuff in here, so carry it carefully."

"Hey, mine too."

Nam Unik, who'd been giving me the cold shoulder ever since the chat room, dumped his bag on me without a second thought. Just like that, I ended up carrying two people's worth of luggage.

Kim Taewoon walked over with an awkward laugh, watching Lee Yeeun and Nam Unik say their piece, grab only their weapons, and head into the dungeon. Half resigned to it, I held my hand out toward Kim Taewoon.

"Give me your stuff."

Being an unaffiliated Hunter really was rough, wasn't it.

Kim Taewoon apologized even as he stubbornly handed his luggage over to me.

The three of them went in first, and I, now fused with all the baggage, stepped through the dungeon entrance last.

The moment I did, some unidentifiable tingling sensation swept over my body. I flinched and instinctively stepped back, like static electricity had shot through me for a split second.

'Was that just my imagination?'

[...does...to...]

Didn't feel like it, though.

Some words I couldn't make out lingered in my ears.

'They said this was supposed to be a low difficulty dungeon. These guys aren't scamming us, are they?'

I called out to the man on his phone and pointed at the dungeon gate.

The man lowered his phone and frowned at me, asking if I still hadn't gone in yet.

"This dungeon's fine, right?"

"Is there some kind of problem?"

He shot the question right back at me.

The implication was clear: there's nothing wrong with this dungeon, so hurry up and get in.

Wanting to set down the load pressing on my shoulders as soon as possible, I sighed and turned back toward the gate.

"No, guess there's nothing wrong."

Ignoring the tingling sensation, I pushed myself all the way into the gate.

[An unauthorized individual is attempting entry.]

The voice, which had been faint before, came through clearly this time.

'Unauthorized individual?'

Was that talking about me?

No way, right?

The doubt didn't last long.

The moment I opened my eyes, a massive status window announcing the dungeon's information greeted me.

[Goblin Village]

Rank: D

Terrain: Forest

Recommended party size: 5-7

Objective: Wipe out the goblin village and claim the goblin chief's necklace.

Rewards

1) Clear: [Merit points 50] for all members

2) Clear within 3 days: [Merit points 30]

3) First to kill the goblin chief: [Merit points 100]

A gentle breeze carried the scent of grass to tickle my nose.

At the same time, I saw a green meadow, and beyond it, a dense forest of trees.

"Oh, that's neat."

The moment I entered the dungeon, a brief rundown of what I needed to do, along with basic dungeon information, appeared before my eyes.

Kang Hangyeol had already been inside a dungeon once before, but for me, this was the first.

Dungeons existed on the Arbelisia continent too.

Except the dungeons I'd experienced there weren't accessed through gates like this, and they didn't hand out missions or status windows either.

'Now I get why people online compare the current situation to a game.'

It felt like stepping into a virtual reality game.

The reason it felt like an MMORPG to me wasn't just the dungeon's status window.

We'd agreed to meet on Friday and decide on our positions.

Calling it a decision made it sound formal, but honestly the positions had already been set the moment we met.

Kim Taewoon, who'd made the chat room and taken on the team leader role, was the dealer.

Choi Minhyeok was the tank, Nam Unik handled backup support and assistance, and Lee Yeeun, the only woman on the team, took the main dealer role as an archer.

And me.

"Don't go acting up for no reason. Especially, if you lose the luggage, I'll kill you."

Choi Minhyeok, armor on and a huge greatsword slung across his back, glared at me.

Powerless (awakened), basically the unemployed class if this were an RPG, I was the porter for this dungeon run, in other words, the leftover nobody wanted.

Loaded down with all kinds of baggage, I quietly sighed to myself.

It wasn't like I was doing porter duty because I was a pushover.

'Though I guess people looking in might call it that.'

Either way, I wasn't a pushover.

I just wanted to watch how things played out for a bit.

* * *

As always, theory and practice were two different things.

I understood well enough that a dungeon meant crossing into a different space, that there were things to do inside it, and that everyone had their own role.

'What I want to see is the real thing.'

Anyone can strike a cool pose.

I was curious how this party, a bunch of people who looked like they were barely in their twenties, would actually fight.

In that sense, if I had to make an excuse for myself, porter and leftover was the optimal position.

"Let's scout ahead and get into formation."

Lee Yeeun's main weapon was a bow, and she was also doubling as the scout.

There was one thing I'd learned from meeting with the team members.

Contrary to what was floating around online, affiliation didn't actually determine your job.

Kang Hangyeol had probably learned the basics about "affiliation" somewhere along the line. Unfortunately, since I'd possessed his body right around when his trainee period was ending, I didn't have access to that memory.

Either way, affiliation was just affiliation, nothing to do with a Hunter's actual job.

Hunters in this reality could switch from a bow to a sword, or pick up a staff and cast magic, without much restriction at all.

So why did positions still end up divided the way they did? Simple.

Put simply, humans liked what they were used to and tended to keep doing whatever they'd already been doing.

Wasn't that true of real-world jobs too, come to think of it?

Everyone was born with the qualification to become a judge, a prosecutor, a lawyer, a doctor. Nobody was born already marked out as a judge from birth.

Unless they'd been born in some future somewhere.

Given that I now knew countless dimensions existed, I couldn't say for certain a dimension like that didn't exist out there, but at the very least, it wasn't this one.

In short, it had been bad information.

The claim that you couldn't use skills without an affiliation was also half right and half wrong.

Being affiliated with a specific god only meant you could draw on part of the power granted by that god, depending on your achievement points and abilities as a Hunter. It didn't mean you couldn't use skills at all.

It was closer to this: a swordsman who could originally wield fire ended up just swinging a sword, without access to the fire ability anymore.

'So that's why they called it useless.'

The internet really wasn't a reliable place after all.

Honestly, I still didn't quite get the logic behind it, but since that was apparently how it worked, there wasn't much choice but to accept it.

Lee Yeeun, on scouting duty, waved us forward from the edge of the forest.

'This is unbelievably heavy.'

What is this, camping?

A week's worth of exercise wasn't nearly enough stamina to handle this much baggage.

Once I got out of this dungeon, I was absolutely going to start working out for real.

Lee Yeeun, who'd gone deeper into the forest, pointed past the brush.

"Found it pretty fast..."

Inside the forest was the goblin village.