I Returned as a God - Chapter 6

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 6: Goblin Village (2)

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The goblin village was the lowest difficulty dungeon in the game, known colloquially as the practice dungeon.

The goblin standing guard had a small build, and more than that, it was noticeably scrawny.

The goblins I remembered, unless they were hobgoblins, stood over two meters tall with thick muscle and knew how to handle weapons.

"Hey, quit gawking."

Choi Minhyeok, catching me sightseeing at the front, shoved me forward.

I nearly went down along with the baggage, barely managing to keep my balance.

"There's a decent spot at the edge of the forest. We should set up there."

The forest wasn't very big, and just like Lee Yeeun said, an empty clearing opened up at its edge.

I set the baggage down and looked around the clearing.

The only goblin village in this small forest, and a conveniently placed clearing right at the edge.

'This lines up a little too well.'

However I looked at it, the layout seemed built with Hunters entering the dungeon in mind. It wasn't hard to guess who'd be behind something like this.

'Sick sense of humor, whoever they are.'

I clenched my fist. At that moment, I felt a presence. A goblin. Looked like the others had noticed too.

"I've got this!"

"Wait a sec..."

Choi Minhyeok drew his sword and charged the goblin before anyone could stop him.

The god Choi Minhyeok served, Elsion, was one of the gods who commanded fire.

Searching it online showed a fairly famous god. Flames flickered along Choi Minhyeok's blade as he closed on the goblin.

The goblin flinched back at the sight of the flames.

Realizing it was too dangerous to face alone, the goblin tried to flee, but Choi Minhyeok lunged and slashed its arm off.

The goblin screamed and staggered, its arm severed cleanly by the massive greatsword.

Bleeding heavily, the goblin raised its weapon anyway, apparently realizing there was no escape. At the same moment, an arrow flew in from the direction of the tents and buried itself in the goblin's head.

The moment it hit, the arrow exploded.

As the goblin's head burst apart, Choi Minhyeok blocked the spray of blood with his greatsword.

He snapped at Lee Yeeun, who'd fired the shot.

"Hey, kill it clean next time. It splattered everywhere!"

"That's because you didn't finish it fast enough."

"Ha, don't fight. No point in us fighting each other."

"The smell of blood and corpses might draw other goblins over."

Kim Taewoon shrugged lightly at Nam Unik's comment.

"I'll go deal with the body."

"Do it clean. Clean."

Choi Minhyeok sheathed his greatsword, still irritated.

Before we'd entered the dungeon, he'd gone on and on about how useless I was, how I'd be no help at all, but ever since the tents went up, he'd barely spoken to me at all.

He seemed to have realized that treating me like I was invisible was a lot easier than staying angry.

Kim Taewoon stuffed the goblin's corpse into a sack. Our eyes met once he slung the sack over his shoulder.

"Come with?"

"Sure, why not."

Everyone had settled into casual speech with each other, so it came out of me naturally too.

Choi Minhyeok clicked his tongue and disappeared into his tent, and the two who stayed behind didn't pay Kim Taewoon or me much mind.

We headed for a stream a short distance from the clearing to dump the goblin's corpse. After tossing the body in a decent spot, I washed my hands in the water.

"I heard you got wiped out one-sidedly in a mock battle before, so I figured you were totally useless, but turns out you can actually fight."

I scratched the back of my neck at that.

Most Hunters joined a guild right after awakening.

Even without being a fully registered Association Hunter, trainees could receive various benefits and support from a guild.

That included not just the basic education the Association provided across the board, but real field training, the kind that actually mattered once you stepped into a dungeon.

'Rigged from the start.'

Not rigged. I was just the anomaly here.

Knowing that didn't make me want to go crawling after some god to serve, not even a little.

Even now, inside the dungeon, I still had questions about this whole system, and the irritation hadn't faded one bit.

Whatever else was true, Kim Taewoon was clearly the most skilled of the four.

He'd figured out I knew how to fight just from the way I gripped a dagger. Staying silent forever would've been rude.

"Picked up a bit."

"Doesn't look like just a bit to me. I won't push you on it. But I'd rather you not test the team like that again. Knowing how to fight and still riding on everyone else's back, that's a little shameless, so I'm just saying it now."

"I figured you wouldn't even care."

Honestly, aside from Choi Minhyeok, the other two hadn't paid any attention to whether I was carrying a dagger or not.

"Even the extra guy still counts toward the headcount. If someone dies clearing a dungeon, we all have to retake the exam, so I've got to care. Besides, just because someone's got no skills doesn't mean they're not an Awakened."

"Most people don't seem to think that way, from what I've seen."

I understood well enough by now how much contempt an Awakened without a god or affiliation drew.

From their side of things, someone like Kim Taewoon, talking the way he did, was basically a heretic.

"True enough. But... after I watched Choi Suhyun fight, my thinking changed a bit. Choi Suhyun wasn't a no-skill type from the start, like you, but a no-skill guy is still a Hunter in the end. And if you can handle a dagger or any weapon, you can kill something like a goblin without a skill, no problem. Honestly, using a skill on something like that is kind of dumb."

It was pretty obvious who Kim Taewoon meant.

Looking at how easily the goblin had died, Choi Minhyeok's fire and Lee Yeeun's explosive arrow really had been overkill.

Still, it was a relief that at least one person on this team was someone I could actually talk to.

"Curious about something. Is that guy really that strong?"

I'd already looked into the rumors and legends surrounding Choi Suhyun online, to some extent.

The problem was that no matter how impressive it all sounded, coming from a completely different world, none of it really landed for me.

If I had to sum up my impression.

Ah, this guy's famous and strong. That was about the extent of it.

Kim Taewoon had apparently witnessed Choi Suhyun fight in person at some point. Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked.

"That guy... I mean, you've actually seen Choi Suhyun fight before?"

"Only from a distance, during a dungeon break. He took down a twin-headed ogre in no time flat."

The twin-headed ogre was an A-rank monster, one that usually needed about three B-rank Hunters to bring down together.

Forget skills, Choi Suhyun hadn't even drawn a weapon that time.

Watching Choi Suhyun scold the guild Hunters for showing up late while sipping coffee like it was nothing, Kim Taewoon had realized that affiliation and an individual Hunter's raw strength were two completely separate things.

Why someone who could get even stronger by joining an affiliation stayed unaffiliated and worked some Association desk job instead, that part he couldn't figure out.

Once Kim Taewoon finished the story, I chimed in too.

"A monster's a monster, huh."

I had no idea what an A-rank monster was exactly, but if the twin-headed ogre Kim Taewoon meant was the same one I knew, then yeah, it really was a monster.

The goblins had turned out weaker than I expected, so even accounting for the ogre being a somewhat lesser threat by comparison, the conclusion didn't change much.

'Not many people on the Arbelisia continent could kill an ogre bare handed either.'

That settled it, more or less, in my mind. Kim Taewoon muttered to himself.

"Guess I said too much."

"Happens."

Kim Taewoon gave my shoulder a light pat and turned back toward the clearing where the tents were set up.

'They'll manage fine on their own, probably.'

Kim Taewoon and the rest didn't seem totally clueless about dungeons, so nothing catastrophic seemed likely to happen.

'Better start thinking about what to do once we're out of here.'

By then my head was already occupied entirely with one question: how exactly was I going to latch onto Choi Suhyun once I got out of this dungeon.

* * *

I'd taken a turn on watch, though it hadn't really meant much.

I was yawning when Kim Taewoon came over. We switched off at a decent point. Time inside the dungeon ran the same as in the real world.

They picked the dim stretch just before sunrise, when the light was still gray, as the moment to strike.

Lee Yeeun's arrow buried itself in one of the crudely built wooden huts and exploded.

While the goblins scrambled in the chaos, Kim Taewoon and Choi Minhyeok cut them down.

Unlike Kim Taewoon's clean, efficient strikes, Choi Minhyeok's sword was still blazing away.

Less like a burning sword, more like someone swinging around a lit matchstick.

What was I supposed to do, not notice that?

Contrary to my guess that the village would be small given how few huts there were, quite a lot of goblins poured out.

The goblins holed up in the cave nearby noticed belatedly that the village was burning and came out to help.

There had to be at least thirty of them.

Any single small goblin wasn't much of a threat on its own, but if they hadn't finished off the goblins in the village before the cave ones arrived, things would've gotten messy fast.

Instead of getting overconfident from the obvious gap in raw power, the team had assessed the enemy's situation and waited until dawn to launch the assault.

'A flawless strategy, no holes in it anywhere.'

I had no information about the dungeon myself, so fair enough there, but a plan executed this cleanly most likely meant someone had fed them information beforehand.

For a beginner dungeon at this level, the accumulated database on it was probably substantial.

Thanks to Choi Minhyeok's skill, the small village turned into a sea of fire in no time.

A door at the center of the village shattered, and a fairly large goblin stepped out.

Unlike the other scrawny goblins, this one carried a proper looking weapon and wore a necklace made of animal bone around its neck, clearly the boss, the goblin chief.

Watching its goblins die off one after another, the goblin chief charged at Kim Taewoon in a rage.

Choi Minhyeok moved fast to block its path.

Nam Unik, stationed in the back same as me, cast a spell.

Three or four spears of ice formed above Nam Unik. The ice itself looked like it had decent piercing power, not bad at all.

The ice spears Nam Unik threw pierced the goblin chief's shoulder and thigh.

While the goblin chief staggered, Kim Taewoon drove his sword straight into its chest.

[The goblin chief (boss) has died.]

[The exit gate will activate once all remaining goblins are eliminated.]

[Remaining goblins: +18]

The status window alert rang out the instant the goblin chief died.

With their chief dead, the goblins panicked and scattered.

Naturally, the remaining four moved as if by silent agreement, methodically cutting down the fleeing goblins.