WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 63: Zero-Sum Game (1)

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I finally arrived, got out of the car, and pressed hard against my throbbing forehead.

I'd had a bad feeling from the moment I saw the supercar, but who could've guessed someone that small would floor it with such joy.

These Hunters, why do they all love supercars so much?

I should've caught on the second she rolled up in a yellow sports car from the hotel parking lot.

Choi Suhyun was bad enough, but Jeong Choa was no better.

I walked up to Choa, who had a small bag slung over her shoulder.

"I'll drive on the way back."

"I'll think about it."

Think about it my ass, lady.

If I let her drive one more time, I'd end up dying in a car crash before any monster ever got the chance.

Choa clearly wasn't thrilled that I'd announced I'd be driving on the way back.

As we approached the dungeon site, an Association staffer in a windbreaker came up to us.

Guiding Hunters to dungeons was usually a job handed to rookies fresh off passing the civil exam.

New hires who passed the exam had to log two mandatory years of field duty.

This time, the man walking up alongside the younger staffer looked well past rookie age.

The middle-aged man was hard to picture as a new hire, no matter how you sliced it.

"Representative Park let me know in advance. I'm..."

"Yeah. I know."

Choa cut in abruptly, chopping his sentence off clean.

The man broke into a cold sweat at her attitude.

"Huh? Ah, just a brief introduction, at least..."

"We'll sign and head into the dungeon."

Jeong Choa held her hand out to the young man behind him.

He handed over the tablet he'd been holding.

Choa passed the signed tablet over to me.

Wow, half-assed.

Calling it a signature was generous. It looked more like one quick scratch and a line.

Something about her sloppy signature told me she was annoyed for some reason.

I handed the pad back once I'd finished signing.

"I'll go first."

Before I could get a word in, Choa threw herself straight through the dungeon gate.

"Ah, that... go ahead in. I'll handle things here..."

Time was just a formality anyway, there was no rule saying you had to enter a dungeon at some exact hour.

As long as you had a reasonable excuse, going in early wasn't much of an issue.

Bad luck for the man who'd shown up for once, though.

Since Choa had already gone in, there wasn't much point stalling, so I followed her into the dungeon.

[Trollwood]

Rank: B

Terrain: Jungle

Recommended party size: 10-15

Objective: Obtain the Giant Troll's essence.

1) Dungeon clear reward, everyone [Merit points 3,000]

2) All trolls killed, everyone [Merit points 2,500]

3) Whoever holds the Giant Troll's essence [Merit points 4,000]

4) Clean Cut (Single Stroke, Cleanly Cut) [Merit points 2,500]

10) No Mercy. [Merit points 1,200]

"Why's there so many?"

Once you hit B-Rank, the quest list clearly ballooned in a way you could really feel.

Turned out the other Hunters weren't exaggerating when they all said the real time sink in clearing a dungeon wasn't the monster hunting, it was the quests.

"We're not clearing all of them."

Choa's face poked out from between a pair of massive tree trunks.

Wondered where she'd gone.

I closed the status window and shook my head.

My real goal here was just to gauge her skill anyway.

The quests were a side note.

Trollwood was thick with growth.

Massive trees that looked like they'd stood for thousands of years stretched on without end.

"So why'd you tag along, Choa-ssi?"

"To keep an eye on you."

Not that I hadn't suspected as much.

I just hadn't expected her to say it that bluntly.

Is that really all the trust I've earned?

"Kidding."

"I asked to come along, that's all."

She had a real gift for lifting someone up just to drop them right back down.

"What was that back there, earlier?"

The man who'd held his hand out outside the dungeon had clearly been a senior figure.

Seemed like he'd gone out of his way to be considerate, no need to be that blunt and cold about it.

"Siyu never sent the Association anything about this. Anyone who shows up at a dungeon site like this, we all know what they're really after."

Choa hopped over a tree root about waist height, dusting off her hands.

Since the Association and the guilds basically ran on a symbiotic relationship, ties or stakes with a particular guild weren't something you could just brush off.

"For the raid coming up, Siyu's got the boss summoning right."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning Siyu's the raid leader."

"How'd he even land something like that?"

"Says a god told him."

Choa said she didn't know any more details than that either.

A boss raid was an event where a boss got artificially summoned to a specific location.

Only ticket holders could join, and it couldn't even start without someone holding the summoning right.

The difference from a rift was that a rift meant fighting without preparation, while a raid meant a fight you could genuinely plan for down to the last detail.

Of all the items out there, a boss summoning right was one you couldn't get your hands on even if you wanted it badly enough.

No wonder Aria Guild, or more precisely Park Siyu, kept climbing in value.

"Siyu's got high hopes riding on you. So do your best."

Choa pushed my back with both hands.

Shoved forward by her hands, I looked up.

Red eyes flashed between the tree trunks.

A branch came flying at me.

Calling it a branch was generous, it was about as thick as a tree trunk itself.

I drew the Sky Sword and cut the branch down.

I planted a foot on the trunk and launched upward.

The troll raised its head and a fist came flying.

I cut the arm off and went straight for the face.

The troll didn't so much as flinch at the loss of its arm and swung the other one instead.

I barely blocked the attack, but it sent my body flying.

Another troll, hidden behind a tree, reached out a hand.

I twisted my body slightly and gripped my sword, thinking to use Moonlight Slash.

Wait...

At the same moment I severed the troll's arm, I carved a deep gash into its shoulder.

Using the severed arm as a foothold, I cut through the neck of the first troll.

Blinded now, the troll kept stomping its feet without pause.

Unless its essence got destroyed, the thing was basically immortal.

I drove my sword into the right side of the disoriented troll's chest.

Something inside its body burst with a sharp snap.

A low growl.

I pulled the sword free and the troll let out a ragged breath, toppling backward along with the tree behind it.

Looked like the one behind me had finished recovering, its huge palm coming down over my head.

I sliced off its fingers and climbed a tree roughly the same height as the troll.

Mana flowed into the blade and it glowed blue.

This wasn't just some ordinary blue glow.

Sky Sword!

I used Meteoric Slash on the troll's chest.

Its body split clean in half along with the essence inside.

I dropped down along with the falling upper half of the troll.

The blood coating my sword slid off on its own.

Even after nearly a month of using it, I still hadn't gotten used to this thing.

At first I'd wondered what kind of sword even was this.

But the more I used it, the more I could really feel just how good a blade it was.

For one thing, it cut disgustingly well.

Way better than the 8.5-million-dollar sword Choi Suhyun had given me.

For something with such an unclear origin, it was way too good a weapon.

Whatever the case, seemed like I'd hit the jackpot on this item pull.

Well, it was a gift, technically.

I'd shown Noden my taboo.

Speaking your taboo out loud wasn't itself a taboo, so that part didn't matter, but some taboos could turn into a fatal weakness the instant they became known.

So I figured I'd paid a fair enough price for it.

Clap clap.

Applause sounded next to me.

Choa hopped lightly over the fallen troll's body and walked closer.

"Wow, amazing."

"Can you not read that off a script?"

"Oh, I mean it."

While I'd been fighting the troll, Choa had stayed well back the whole time.

I wiped the blood off my sword and sheathed it.

Choa closed the distance in an instant and stared openly at the blade.

"That's a sword I've never seen before. Is it from Choi Suhyun's stash?"

"Something like that."

Since I couldn't tell her about Noden, I gave a vague answer.

Choa didn't seem to care much about my answer either way.

She crouched in front of the dead troll's corpse and pulled something out of her bag.

"A syringe?"

"Something like a syringe. Troll spinal fluid's decent pocket money."

Saying that, she casually jabbed a large steel needle into the troll's spine.

The spinal fluid from the two trolls wasn't as much as I'd expected.

Volume-wise it came to about 50mL total, though considering an actual potion only needed about 2-3mL, it wasn't exactly a small haul either.

"Slow down!"

I called out to Choa, who'd gone ahead.

Whatever had her so excited, she was cutting through this rough jungle terrain at a pretty ridiculous clip.

With Mana Detection, there was no real risk of losing her, but if things went south I'd need to be close enough to protect her, so putting distance between us wasn't doing anyone any favors.

I barely managed to catch up to Choa.

Strictly speaking, it was closer to her waiting up for me.

"Getting hurt would be a big deal, you know."

"Why would getting hurt be a big deal?"

Choa tilted her head, dead serious, and for a second I had nothing to say.

"Because it hurts?"

Was that too simple an answer?

Choa laughed lightly and turned to the side.

A troll stood a short distance off, staring this way.

"You don't need to feel like you have to protect me, and it's fine if you don't worry about me getting hurt either."

"I'm not as weak as you seem to think, Hangyeol-ssi. So feel free to just treat me like I'm not even here."

Choa kept talking, completely unbothered by the troll charging straight at her.

The troll opened its huge mouth toward her.

Choa hopped lightly and swung a kick toward its neck.

The massive troll body pitched forward and slammed into the ground.

Standing on top of the troll's corpse, Choa dusted off her hands like nothing had happened.

She had a point.

Choa had told Park Siyu she wanted in on this dungeon because she trusted her own strength.

And the reason Park Siyu allowed it had nothing to do with me either.

He knew a B-Rank dungeon was nothing even if she went in alone.

Total waste of a worry on my part.

Another troll charged at Choa.

I swung the Sky Sword and cut its body clean in half along with the essence.

Choa watched me holding the sword and smiled.

"Please be careful about the spine when you kill them."

"Yeah, yeah, got it."

We kept clearing trolls one after another.

Choa's personality, hard to adjust to at first, gradually became something I could just calmly accept as time passed.

The troll hunt went smoothly.

Once I judged it was about time to move on to the boss hunt, I headed for the Giant Troll's location the moment dawn broke.

"You seem pretty good at finding monsters, Hangyeol-ssi. Is that a skill?"

"Yeah."

Mana Detection was an incredibly convenient skill if you used it well.

Proficiency mattered even more than just having the skill in the first place, so it wasn't easy for most ordinary Hunters to use it the way I did.

I hadn't been this good at it from the start either, not by a long shot.

Guess "talent monster" is the word for that guy.

Yu Jihan.

Only after I finally watched the full recording from Layer 3 did it really hit me how much of a monster he actually was.

He'd even introduced himself as Kim Yuhan on Layer 3.

If I'd seen that footage sooner, things wouldn't have gotten this tangled up.

But why Kim Yuhan, of all names?

Probably just made it up on the spot.

I could picture it clear as day without even needing to see it.

Kim was the most common surname in Korea[1], and Yuhan was just his own name with one character casually dropped.

For a guy his age, he had absolutely zero delicacy outside of fighting, not even a trace of it.

A deep rumble.

The whole forest shook and the air dropped in an instant.

What I'd taken for a hill slowly started to rise.

The boss monster of Trollwood, the Giant Troll.

"There it is... huh?"

But something about it was off from what I knew.

Choa, still chewing on her calorie bar, lifted her head.

"It's got two heads."

Like I didn't already know it had two.

[1] Kim is by far the most common family name in Korea, making "Kim Yuhan" as anonymous an alias as "John Smith."

Footnotes:

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