WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 72: The Scramble (1)

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After the Zero-sum Game ended, the Hunters gathered in one spot, a location that would serve as the temporary base camp.

The mood, though, wasn't great.

The Raon Guild Hunters clustered together, radiating enough hostility to look like they'd draw swords any second.

Jeong Hoil's face flushed red as he seethed.

"That was a cheap trick. A foul, plain and simple!"

"How's it a foul?"

"That's... those mana grenades are cheating! You're supposed to catch the kills with your own hands!"

Jeong Hoil's nonsense excuse pulled a dry laugh out of me.

Sure, a mana grenade's a grenade, but without mana pumped into it, it's no different from a rock.

I'd killed those Hopji with my own mana. Plain and simple.

"What's wrong with a grenade? If it was cheating, the system wouldn't have counted the kills. And so what if it is? You saying everyone who uses magitech weapons is some kind of con artist?"

A few Hunters holding ma-totals flinched at that.

Why? It's not like I said anything wrong.

"That, that's not what I meant..."

"Let's cut this pointless bickering short. Besides, so what if it's a foul?"

"The rule for the Zero-sum Game was whoever kills the most Hopji within 24 hours of entering the dungeon wins, right? Nowhere did it say no fouls, no throwing grenades."

"But! You brought a huge stockpile of grenades with you! Don't tell me you planned this from the start and hauled them in from outside the dungeon."

"Got proof?"

"So, I'm asking, got proof?"

Jeong Hoil clenched his fist at my shameless bluffing.

"That's enough."

Han Jongho cut in, apparently having seen enough.

Given how tightly run the guild was, Jeong Hoil, who'd been picking a fight with me, shut his mouth fast at Han Jongho's word.

His expression still looked plenty sour, though.

Even I have limits on how much nonsense I'll put up with.

If he'd said one more word, I wouldn't have just stood there either.

If reason doesn't work, there's always force.

Thankfully, compared to the yapping Jeong Hoil, Han Jongho seemed reasonably sane.

Han Jongho stepped forward and held out his hand.

"Rules are rules. I'll follow your lead. At least until the dungeon expedition's over."

"Appreciate it. Not really my style to lead, and honestly I didn't want the job either."

"Ha, sounds like quite the burden you've taken on, then."

"Right? My shoulders are already killing me. So I'd appreciate it if you'd fall in line."

Han Jongho and I gripped hands firmly.

After the handshake, I scanned the Aria Guild Hunters.

My back had been prickling for a while now.

"What's your problem now?"

"Hmph, I don't have a problem. Whatever, fine, the Hopji nest thing, I'll let that slide. But the mana grenade, that was overkill."

Coming from Jeong Hoil, sure, I'd expect it. But hearing it from Ju Seohye, who was technically in my own guild, that stung a little.

"Even friendly fire has its limits, but doesn't excessive team-killing count as trolling?"

"There's no way any decent person throws it around that carelessly, no matter what."

"What? A grenade's a grenade because you throw it carelessly. What else would it be for?"

Jeong Hoil, sure, whatever. But I genuinely couldn't figure out why Ju Seohye was foaming at the mouth over this.

The other Hunters, including the silent Han Seongcheol, all winced at the exchange.

What's with them?

Kang Hyeonseung poked me in the side and whispered.

"You have any idea how much one mana grenade costs?"

"No clue. Maybe a hundred thousand won a pop?"

"If it were that cheap, I'd be chucking them around too! The cheap ones start at three million won, the expensive ones go up to ten million."

Mana grenades hit hard, sure, but they weren't exactly cost-efficient.

Not many B-Rank Hunters could afford to burn ten million won on a single-use grenade.

Seemed like everyone had already figured out where my grenades came from.

"And out of all of them, the ACKO brand is the cream of the crop. That ten-million-won figure I just gave you, that's an ACKO product."

"ACKO?"

"The one you threw."

Kang Hyeonseung's face carried a note of quiet unease, like he was hoping I hadn't thrown it without knowing what it was.

Ah. Sorry.

I'd had no clue and just chucked them around happily.

I pulled out the leftover grenades I'd stashed in my pocket.

I hadn't noticed while throwing them, but sure enough, a small "ACKO" logo was stamped on one side.

I'd thrown around thirty of them.

Roughly three hundred million won had just gone off in midair.

At this point I wasn't killing monsters with bombs, I was clubbing them to death with cash.

Not intentional, but yeah, that counts as blowing money like an idiot.

Watching the Hunters stare at me in disbelief, I scrambled to smooth things over.

"Alright, alright, grenade talk's over. Whether it's a hundred million or ten billion, all that matters is the result, right? Am I wrong?"

Nobody agreed with me.

Damn capitalism.

The world isn't all about money!

Against my worries, the Raon Guild Hunters fell in line under my lead without much fuss.

Not that there wasn't grumbling, but with Han Jongho, basically the face of the Raon Guild team, quietly following my orders, nobody stupid enough to complain openly stepped forward.

Even after the mass kill count during the Zero-sum Game, Hopji still crawled all over the dungeon.

"Ugh, these damn worms."

"I'm sick of it."

"Why are there so many?"

Just like Park Siyu said, the dungeon was basically Hopji territory at this point.

The ones we'd cleared out of the nest were just the tip of the iceberg.

Days spent doing nothing but stomping worms underfoot, no wonder everyone was fed up.

While the other Hunters fought hard, I sat up in a tree eating a calorie bar.

Hm, this one's strawberry flavor.

With dungeons popping up all over the world, the emergency ration industry had exploded right along with them.

I'd recently developed a taste for calorie bars and had been running my own little taste-test experiment through the flavors.

Min Seongtaek, having cleared out all the Hopji nearby, walked up under the tree.

"Might want to at least pretend to work instead of just lounging around."

"Why should I?"

Munching the last of my Choco Emong, I swung my legs, and Min Seongtaek shot a look behind him, signaling me to check.

Nobody met my eyes directly, but plenty of them clearly weren't thrilled about me slacking off.

I raised my voice on purpose, loud enough for everyone to hear.

"Man, if someone overheard that, they'd think I'd been off goofing around! I went and cleared out every monster in the whole western sector by myself, and now I don't even get to eat in peace? I'm so wronged I could just die!"

"You're really done with all of it?"

Min Seongtaek looked up, eyes wide, like he couldn't believe it.

This morning, when we split up the zones, I'd volunteered to handle the west alone, since that's where the most Hopji were, and I'd just gotten back from it.

Grunt work like that's a piece of cake.

Killing the same monster type over and over naturally reveals its weak points.

And on top of that, the Executioner's Sword's "designated group" effect applies to the same monster species too.

Honestly, I hadn't even needed to raid the nest. If I'd committed to hunting Hopji the moment I entered the dungeon, first place would've been easy.

But clearing it out that way just isn't fun. No fun at all.

Isn't the real thrill of any game a comeback win, flipping the score at the last second?

Enough with the jokes.

Either way, the Hopji nest needed clearing sooner or later, so I'd just knocked it out while I was at it.

I finished off the calorie bar and climbed down from the tree.

"Obviously, what do you take me for. If it bugs you that much, go check the corpses yourself."

I glanced at the Hunters who'd been sneaking looks my way, and they scattered, using the Hopji further in as an excuse.

"Impressive. Your growth rate is honestly hard to believe. Are you getting some kind of special favor from your god, by any chance?"

Aria Guild had Hunters serving all kinds of gods.

Plenty of them followed lesser-known gods, not just the major ones.

A god with a huge following wasn't automatically the better deal, either.

Fewer followers meant, in other words, less internal competition.

Though that probably depends on which god we're talking about.

I didn't know the details, but I understood Park Siyu fell into that same category.

No real reason to explain all that backstory to Min Seongtaek.

"Something like that."

I cut the conversation short and did a quick sweep of the dungeon.

Days of large-scale Hopji hunting had clearly thinned the numbers.

Should be about time for it to start moving.

By evening, the Hunters trickled back into the makeshift base camp one by one.

Inside the tent sat six Hunters, myself included.

I raised the possibility to the others that the dungeon might not have a boss at all.

Since everyone had been combing through the dungeon top to bottom from the moment they entered for the Zero-sum Game, my theory landed well.

Cockatrices weren't the type to wander outside the farm, and on top of that, not a single Fire-light Rat had been spotted in days.

"I figured a bossless dungeon was mostly a low-rank phenomenon. That aside, then how did the earlier expeditions fail?"

"Probably the Lintbrum."

Ju Seohye, legs crossed, cut in from where she'd been listening.

During the Aria Guild meeting, Park Siyu had gone into fairly thorough detail about the Lintbrum.

"The Lintbrum? Isn't that thing beside the point?"

An A-Rank dungeon always came with plenty of variables.

Cockatrice Farm was relatively well-contained compared to other dungeons of the same rank.

The key point was that clearing it didn't require wiping out every monster inside, unlike other underground-prison type dungeons.

The quest labeled as the reward objective wasn't mandatory, and reaching the objective alone triggered the exit gate, which was what made that possible.

"That's true under normal circumstances. Right now we don't even know what the clear condition is."

"I thought it rarely leaves its cave..."

Most Hunters clearing Cockatrice Farm just ignored the Lintbrum entirely and pushed through the run.

The thing lived in caves and rarely picked fights unless provoked first.

Beating it wasn't a requirement for clearing the dungeon.

Think of it as something like a sub-boss.

Except that sub-boss was basically on par with the actual boss.

If the two of them had been coexisting, respecting each other's territory, and then suddenly one just vanished...

"Not an impossible scenario."

Han Jongho, having listened to the whole exchange, nodded with his arms crossed.

I'm the leader here, why are you the one acting all wise and important?

The first expedition, a straightforward failure.

The second, failed due to internal conflict, the boss turning into an incursion entity.

The third, failed because the Lintbrum filled the vacuum left by the missing Cockatrice, and the team couldn't adapt in time.

When Park Siyu put together the third expedition's team, not even considering the possibility that the Cockatrice was simply gone had been the fatal miscalculation.

"Starting tomorrow, we search the caves where the Lintbrum's likely to be."

Hold on, I'm the leader, why are you the one striking a pose and calling the shots?

I cut off Han Jongho, who'd already decided things on his own.

"No, we keep hunting Hopji."

"We know the Lintbrum's the problem now, shouldn't we go find it first?"

"Why do you think the first expedition failed? They were fighting the Lintbrum when every Hopji in the area swarmed them and wrecked the whole thing."

Hopji weren't especially strong monsters on their own, but in numbers, they got seriously annoying.

Fighting the Lintbrum while a horde of Hopji closes in from underfoot, that's a recipe for chaos, plain and simple.

Days of exterminating every Hopji we could find had all been groundwork for the Lintbrum fight.

"You little punk! How dare you talk to Team Leader Han like that..."

"Enough. He's the team leader right now. So what's your point?"

"I'm going after the Lintbrum. Never said I wasn't. I just don't enjoy getting ambushed."

We're the hunters here, not the prey.

"We lure it to a designated point. Makes the hunt easier, doesn't it?"

"Sounds nice on paper. You think it'll just go along with the plan?"

The Lintbrum was a massive monster.

If a Hunter could take down a monster with everything fully prepared, that was ideal, sure, but pulling that off wasn't nearly as easy as it sounded.

Unless there was a real advantage to it, the damage taken from luring it usually outweighed just fighting it head-on where it stood.

That much wasn't wrong, either.

So I decided to give a little ground here.

"Fine, if there's a way to lure it with no losses, no complaints, right?"

"That's assuming such an efficient method even exists..."

The Hunters in the tent exchanged uneasy looks with each other.

Have these people been burned too many times or something?

"Let's hear the method first."

I answered like it was nothing.

"Well, monsters get hungry too, don't they?"

Footnotes:

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