I Returned as a God - Chapter 7

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 7: Goblin Village (3)

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There wasn't a single person dense enough to miss that something was wrong here, not even without anyone saying it out loud.

"What the hell, what's going on?"

"I've never even heard of anything like this."

"Don't tell me we're trapped in the dungeon? No!! No way!"

"Wait, everyone calm down!"

Panic started spreading through the group.

Through it all, the status window kept flashing that the exit gate had failed to generate.

[Error :: Exit gate generation has failed.]

At this point, it was enough to raise goosebumps.

"Wait, doesn't something feel off?"

Lee Yeeun, the team's scout and vanguard, was the first to react.

Is this an earthquake?

I felt the disturbance at almost the same moment she did.

At first I thought it was simply an earthquake, but I quickly realized it wasn't.

It wasn't just the ground shaking. The entire space around us was shaking.

My vision blurred like I'd had way too much to drink, and I could barely keep my balance.

[Those without authorized permission are entering '??? ?'.]

* * *

We all came to at roughly the same time.

"What is this? What happened?"

"Hey, this isn't right."

Nam Unik spoke up first, and Choi Minhyeok, looking around wildly, opened his mouth next.

We were standing on a massive bridge built from black bricks.

Below the bridge was a cliff so deep that not even an inch of it could be made out.

The bridge was severed behind the point where we'd been summoned.

Whatever this was, the structure only let us move forward.

Lee Yeeun stared into the empty air, her face grim, and spoke.

"This is weird. My status window isn't showing up."

Normally, the moment you entered a dungeon, an information window popped up first, showing details about the dungeon itself.

Information available from outside the dungeon was usually limited to the dungeon's name and its boss. Everything else stayed hidden until you actually went in.

More than sixty years had passed since dungeons first appeared, and humanity had grown used to dungeons and monsters by now. Every dungeon rated A class or below had its information fully public. That kind of blackout only applied to rare dungeons, ones rated Special A or S class.

"It's a shady place like this, so maybe it just doesn't show up?"

"No, I mean literally nothing shows up! Not just the dungeon info window, nothing at all!"

Yeeun, unable to contain her frustration, raised her voice.

At the same time, Kim Taewoon and Nam Unik both tried to open their status windows.

I'd been listening quietly, but I tried too.

"Anyone able to get their status window open?"

"No."

"Me neither."

"Damn it, same here."

Four pairs of eyes landed on me.

Like I'd be any different. I shook my head quietly instead of answering.

All four of them would have started their official hunter careers the moment they cleared this dungeon.

They'd been expecting to clear it like any normal run and walk out the other side, so something like this hit them like a bolt out of a clear sky.

The mood had turned funereal.

Kim Taewoon tried to calm the rest of the group.

"Let's move around first, or at least look around a bit."

"Damn it. I thought we were finally done."

"We're not gonna die here, right?"

"Don't say something like that!"

The four of them started searching around the bridge.

I joined in the search too.

The bridge had no railings, so one wrong step could easily send someone plummeting off the edge.

I knelt down and looked over the side.

Nothing but pitch black.

It seemed obvious that falling meant never coming back.

Half the bridge was made of black brick, but scattered here and there were white bricks that gave off a faint glow, almost like little lamps.

"You're pretty fearless."

Lee Yeeun stood a few steps back, arms crossed, and spoke to me. I looked back down.

I couldn't gauge the depth, but honestly, the drop itself didn't scare me much.

Probably because I'd already been through every kind of hell there was.

"Do you have anything I could throw down there?"

I turned slightly and asked her. Catching my intent, Yeeun dug through her pocket.

What she pulled out was a small iron ball, a little bigger than a coin.

"If this works."

"What is it?"

"A one-use smoke bomb, guild issue. If it hits something, it bursts and smoke comes up."

"Perfect."

If there was a floor down there, smoke would rise once it burst.

I took the smoke bomb, the little iron ball, from Yeeun and threw it down.

The rest of the group, who'd found nothing unusual after searching around, came over to where Yeeun and I stood after tossing it down.

"What'd you do?"

"Threw a smoke bomb down there. Not only did no smoke come up, there wasn't even a sound."

"Either it's disgustingly deep, or something's wrong. Either way, one thing's clear, falling means you're not coming back up alive. Looks like that's the only thing left."

Choi Minhyeok turned toward the building at the end of the bridge.

"What's that building for?"

"Isn't it more like a tower than a building?"

Yeeun pointed upward.

Up close, the structure looked almost like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

There was no telling how high it went. The top was lost from view.

"So what? You're saying we climb it?"

"I've heard of dungeons shaped like towers before, but this one looks like it's got way more than a few dozen floors."

"It's not a question of climbing it or not. Our status windows aren't even coming up, remember? What are we even supposed to do in a situation like this?"

"Why the hell is this happening to us in the first place?"

Amid the confusion, I could feel Choi Minhyeok's stare burning into me.

He wasn't the only one who suspected me.

Not that anyone interrogating me would get anywhere with it.

The one small mercy was that the two who suspected me weren't complete idiots swept up entirely by emotion.

Once we left the bridge, a small garden appeared near the tower's entrance.

Inside the garden stood a massive iron door, imposing just to look at. And it wasn't just its size.

The sense of pressure radiating off the door, off the entire building, was no joke.

Even I, someone who figured he'd been through just about every kind of experience there was, nearly flinched for a second.

The tower, its height impossible to gauge, felt that immense.

There wasn't time to just stand around.

We'd already done everything there was to do, searched everything there was to search, on the bridge.

All that was left was the tower.

The question was who would open the door of this tower whose nature nobody understood.

Everyone had already sensed the tower was no ordinary thing.

"Hey, Powerless. You go."

Choi Minhyeok grabbed my shoulder and shoved me forward.

"I don't know what the other guys think, but I suspect this whole mess happened to us because of you. Honestly, you're the strangest one here."

"Even so, that's not fair. Sure, he doesn't have a patron god, but Kang Hangyeol's still a hunter."

"What's not fair about it? You're the one who suspected him first, Kim Taewoon. Whatever. Even setting the status window thing aside, that guy's the weakest of us. Let's be cold about it, if something goes wrong, the one who's not combat effective is the one who should die."

Choi Minhyeok said something that could only be called cold.

Given the situation, everyone was too busy turning his words over in their heads to argue.

"Fine. I'll go."

"Don't worry. At the very least, I won't leave you behind if something happens. Unless you die before that, of course."

What a needlessly generous offer.

Ignoring Choi Minhyeok, I walked down the steps and stood before the massive door.

"Is this even a door?"

It looked less like a door and more like a giant slab of iron.

No visible seam, nothing that looked like a way to open it.

I glanced back at the others behind me, sighed, and pressed my hand against the giant slab of iron.

Nothing happened.

With my hand still on the door, a thousand thoughts running through my head, one idea cut through the noise.

Could it be.

Mana had been part of the status window too.

Mana had existed on the Arbelisia continent, where I'd spent my time.

In the hunter world, mana seemed to be treated as just another energy gauge for using skills. But in truth, mana was the soul's own power, something every living being possessed.

If stamina was the strength of the body, mana's source was the power of the soul dwelling within that body.

I hadn't used mana before since I had no skills yet, but if that theory held, then the status window and the use of mana shouldn't have anything to do with each other.

To begin with, the status window was just a convenient display of a hunter's current condition. Just because it wasn't showing up didn't mean the mana itself had vanished.

I took a breath and released the mana inside my body through my hand.

"Huh?"

A blue sigil slowly began to surface across the massive wall.

Not sure if this body can pull it off, but.

I poured out every last bit of mana I could toward the door.

I felt a bit drained afterward, but thankfully the door hadn't consumed as much mana as I'd feared.

At the same time, the blue sigil completed itself.

[The Tower of Trials recognizes the master of the tower.]

[Error :: Unable to identify floor number.]

[Annihilate the goblin platoon]

[Goblins remaining: 50]

[Error :: Unable to confirm reward.]