WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 56: One Misunderstanding Breeds Another (4)

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The Association staff who'd rushed over after hearing hunters were fighting each other already felt dizzy trying to figure out how to handle this.

A brand-new Ferrari pulled up on one side of the residential street.

One of the Association staff approached Choi Suhyun as he stepped out.

Choi Suhyun had just finished a business trip out of town and happened to be nearby, so he'd made a U-turn to come, and his mood wasn't great because of it.

Choi Suhyun kept one hand shoved in his suit pocket and grumbled.

"Seriously, there's not one hunter out there with their head on straight! Not one! They've got a perfectly good dungeon sitting right there and they still gotta throw a fit outside it? Am I wrong? If they fought inside the dungeon, who'd even say anything?"

The man gave an awkward smile at Suhyun's stream of complaints.

"This way, sir."

Suhyun followed the man's lead deeper into the alley.

He'd heard the report that hunters had fought in the middle of a residential neighborhood, but he didn't know the details yet.

Suhyun rested a hand on his hip and muttered, staring at the A4 paper taped to Jihan's body.

"Sounds like something a cop would say."

Fights between hunters were rare, but they happened from time to time.

Suhyun ran his eyes over the field staff who'd responded to the call.

"So what's the actual problem?"

If this were a simple fight, there'd be no reason for Suhyun to get pulled off a business trip for it.

"We responded the moment we got the report of a fight, but by the time we arrived on scene, he was already like this."

The man glanced briefly at the unconscious Jihan.

Suhyun pulled a lollipop from his pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

The man broke into a sweat watching Suhyun just suck on the candy without saying a word.

"Actually, we got a bunch of calls from all over around the same time. About a hundred reports, and every single one of them turned out to be a prank."

"So that's why it took you so long to find this? You're telling me some lunatic decided to prank call the Association? Then how'd you end up finding this?"

The man broke into a cold sweat at Suhyun's irritation.

"A passerby reported it to the police. At first they thought it was just a regular assault, but people nearby testified that it was hunters fighting each other, so we got dispatched. And... there's more."

"What else!"

"Yes, well. There's a fair number of security CCTVs around here, so we collected the footage, but every single file was corrupted. The fight definitely happened, but we've got no evidence."

"Unbelievable. Just unbelievable."

He said that out loud, but Suhyun's mind was already working overtime trying to piece the situation together.

Hunters who'd genuinely snapped enough to brawl out in the real world usually didn't bother with details like this.

Prank calls timed to the fight, corrupted CCTV files to match, this was proof the whole thing had been deliberately staged.

"Ah, and one more thing. About the house where the fight first broke out. There's a hunter living in the semi-basement unit there who's a suspect."

The candy in Suhyun's mouth cracked clean in half.

He'd had a bad feeling, and sure enough.

Any other day, Suhyun would've told the dispatch order to shove it and gone home for a nice bath.

I saw the location and thought, no way. And why the hell isn't that Kang Hangyeol brat answering his phone?

The candy crunched apart with a harsh crack.

While Suhyun chewed on it, the man kept reporting.

"We looked into it, and apparently he's a hunter affiliated with Aria Guild. Kang Hangyeol, C-Rank Hunter. We've already contacted the guild."

The moment Hangyeol's name came up, Suhyun sighed inwardly. Knew it.

There was no bigger trouble magnet than Kang Hangyeol.

Without letting it show, he turned his gaze to the collapsed Yu Jihan.

At least this face was new to Suhyun.

What could the guy possibly want, and why attack Kang Hangyeol at all? The question lingered.

As far as he knew, whatever happened at Skyfield had already been handled cleanly with Yu Seyeon.

The remaining suspects would be Seo Jihoon, or someone from Raon Guild's side. Is this guy with Raon Guild? Anyway, somebody really went all out beating him down.

Suhyun found himself even less able to make sense of it.

Sure, letting a hunter who'd followed them into Skyfield off the hook made some kind of sense given the situation, but Kang Hangyeol wasn't stupid enough to just let some hunter who showed up outside a dungeon walk away.

There had to be a reason he'd spared this guy's life while beating him half to death.

"What about him?"

"We're planning to request his cooperation once he wakes up."

"Same story once he wakes up, huh. Hey, at this rate when are you people gonna actually get anything done? I heard a couple of buildings got wrecked too."

Suhyun pulled out his phone and opened the HN admin app.

He grabbed the unconscious Jihan's hand without asking and pressed the fingerprint down.

The field staffer standing nearby gaped at that.

"Wait a second. That's illegal..."

Accessing someone's HN personal information without the hunter's consent was flatly illegal.

The man looked flustered, but the woman beside him, who looked like she outranked him, just crossed her arms and shook her head, telling him to let it go.

「Fingerprint could not be recognized.」

"What? Why isn't this working?"

Suhyun wiped the phone's front screen on his sleeve and tried again.

"Is something wrong?"

"Somebody hand me their phone. Quick."

Suhyun reached a hand back without looking and hurried the woman along.

The staffer standing in front handed over her phone, still logged into her own account.

Even after three tries, the fingerprint scan never went through.

Suhyun handed the phone back and tried a different approach.

「No ID found matching this fingerprint. Would you like to register a new ID?」

"Wow."

The man who caught a glimpse of Suhyun's phone screen went wide-eyed.

Suhyun let out a quiet whistle.

Aria Guild Headquarters, main conference room.

The space could hold over a thousand people, but fewer than thirty were actually inside the conference room right now.

There wasn't any special reason for booking the main hall.

The meeting had been called on short notice, and it was simply the only room left available. That was the whole story.

Booking the main conference room usually came with a strict set of rules, but since the one running the meeting was Park Siyu, one of the guild's co-representatives, those rules might as well not have existed.

Aria Guild's side had six people listed, but that was only the core six. The actual headcount was much higher.

The A-Rank dungeon slated for the coming raid, Cockatrice Farm, had been designated as a ticket dungeon for the upcoming raid.

A total of twelve tickets could be earned from Cockatrice Farm.

That was the reason behind the number six. Aria Guild and Raon Guild were tackling the dungeon jointly.

The dungeon in question was A-Rank and also a three-strikes dungeon, having failed three times already.

Statistically, the lower the dungeon rank, the more frequently rifts occurred.

For higher-tier dungeons, artificial rifts tended to happen more often than natural ones.

Artificial meant a dungeon had racked up repeated failures.

Normally, an A-Rank dungeon allowed four to five attempts. An S-Rank dungeon could be attempted up to ten times.

The more times a dungeon failed, the more the monsters inside learned, so clear difficulty climbed as a bonus on top of everything else.

Damn it, I even lost my phone, and now this.

Sure enough, the meeting had already started.

I'd explained my situation to the lobby staff and just barely managed to get a temporary ID before making it up to the conference room.

Opening the door and stepping inside, I found people gathered near the podium.

Fewer than a hundred people, and I couldn't figure out why they'd booked such a massive room for it.

Standing in front of the podium, Park Siyu had a giant projector running a slideshow while he talked.

Park Siyu's eyes met mine.

"Sit down."

He had a mic clipped on, so even his sigh came out loud through the speakers.

I sat down without thinking in the nearest empty seat and banged my arm on the armrest.

The arm Yu Jihan had broken still hadn't been treated since I'd sprinted straight here, and it ached like hell.

Around thirty hunters sat divided across three rows.

Five hunters sat up front, about eight more behind them, and the rest filled the third row.

Being late, I had no choice but to sit in the corner of the back row.

Two familiar faces sat in the same row. Min Seongtaek and Kang Hyeonseung.

Unlike me, who'd been stuck out of dungeon expeditions for one reason or another, those two had kept going in steadily.

Their skill level was similar to mine, and I ran into them often. Lately they'd even started working as a fixed team.

Min Seongtaek spotted me first and gave a light wave.

I'd just walked in and my head was still all over the place, so I only nodded quietly back.

Park Siyu had a track record of clearing Cockatrice Farm, which had failed four times, with a party of just three.

"What you need to watch out for is that worm... no, ahem. The Hopji. Normally it wouldn't be much of an issue, but three failed runs have stirred it up enough that it's become a serious headache. That thing's highly toxic and breeds fast, so any water source in there is basically guaranteed to be poisoned. Getting drinking water inside the dungeon is close to impossible. So we're restricting drinking water to what's brought in from outside."

Park Siyu's explanation kept going.

A guild representative personally handling the briefing for an A-Rank dungeon wasn't common.

That held true even for a three-strikes dungeon.

Part of it was probably about Raon Guild too.

Guess his pride took a real hit.

I'd heard the last team that went in had been assembled by Park Siyu himself.

A guild representative's ability wasn't just about being strong in a fight.

What kind of people are Koreans, anyway.

Not delivery people. Fighting people.

They're stupidly good at throwing down.

Korean hunters actually did average out higher in skill compared to other countries.

But being good at fighting and being good at leading a team were two entirely different problems.

Skill was the baseline. What decided things after that was leadership.

An expedition that shouldn't have been able to fail had failed, and on top of that, the dungeon had turned into a ticket dungeon they now had to split with Raon Guild. It made sense his mood would sour over it.

Then Raon Guild's side had gone and held their own private meeting without a word to anyone.

It was practically an announcement that they had no intention of cooperating properly.

Honestly, it was impressive he'd held back this long.

Park Siyu clicked to the next slide.

The screen abruptly went black, cutting the presentation off mid-flow.

To anyone who didn't know better, it might've looked like a technical glitch, but this wasn't an accident.

"That covers the basics. Now for what comes next. Like I said at the start, I never thought the previous team would fail. I'm not bringing this up out of spite or leftover frustration."

Most leaders hated exposing their own weak points. Park Siyu was different.

He was someone with fierce confidence in his own decisions.

A woman sitting up front raised her hand. Park Siyu gave a small nod, and she spoke.

"I read that report too. Honestly, it felt like overkill. My friend was one of the people named in it too... but the report left out something pretty important, didn't it?"

"Did it? I remember writing it pretty thoroughly. Since there's no reason my memory would be wrong, I'll take that to mean you didn't read it carefully enough. That report's only accessible from A-Rank up, so are you saying I deliberately left something out on purpose?"

Park Siyu shot back without missing a beat.

Honestly, this is kind of fun to watch.

My arm hurts!!

I wanted to cry.

Footnotes:

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