WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 76: If You're Sorry, Then Die (1)

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Choi Suhyun and Park Siyu both looked at me at the same time.

Maybe I said that a bit too fast... but it's not like it's wrong.

Park Siyu gave me a look like he needed an explanation.

Before I explained anything, there was one thing I had to confirm first.

"You two are both saying it's true, right? That you've met or known Unaffiliated Hunters besides Jung Hyeonseong?"

"My memory's not that bad."

"Hey, I'm Choi Suhyun. Tax thief or not, there's no way I'd forget something like that."

So you admit you're a tax thief, then.

Whatever.

I pointed a finger at the two of them.

"You can say that all you want, but you don't actually remember, do you? Jung Hyeonseong? Name me one other Unaffiliated Hunter besides him. Go on."

The two of them stared at each other, dumbfounded.

Yeah, something's definitely off here.

In a world where the rule is you awaken and then serve a god, why would there be Unaffiliated Awakened whom no god ever chose?

And on top of that, there was this quiet, unspoken contempt among Hunters toward Unaffiliated Awakened, a kind of dismissal running under the surface.

Was it just because they were weak? No, it wasn't that simple.

It felt more like something someone had deliberately arranged to happen.

"I'm not doubting either of your memories. If there's a problem here, isn't it more likely with the Unaffiliated Awakened themselves?"

"What kind of problem?"

"How would I know? Don't ask me that."

I'd said it, but honestly I was just as thrown by it as they were.

There was one fact I could approach simply, at least.

"For some reason, the memory of Unaffiliated Awakened got erased."

Park Siyu had a point.

Unless the two of them were colluding and lying, that was the most likely explanation.

And it wasn't just a matter of vanishing from memory either.

"Record erasure, Existence Erasure. Whatever, there's no fixed term for it, so let's just call it whatever's easiest. You both remember that Unaffiliated Hunters existed, you just can't recall who they were or what kind of people they were. That's the reason."

"Someone erased the existence of Unaffiliated Hunters? Why would anyone do that?"

"How should I know?"

Am I a god or something? You think I know everything?

Oh wait, I am a god.

But being a god doesn't mean I know everything.

Gods come in all kinds too, you know.

Choi Suhyun took his hand off the mouse, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his arms.

The gesture looked way too natural on him.

That's Park Siyu's seat, by the way. Anyone watching would think you're the guild master.

Throw this guy in the middle of a desert and he'd probably still survive somehow.

"What about Song Eunyoung?"

Figured that question was coming eventually.

Unaffiliated Awakened had either vanished from people's memories or been erased outright.

Following that logic, what did that make Song Eunyoung, who'd stayed an Unaffiliated Awakened for six years?

The answer to that was.

"No idea."

"How do you not know if you don't know! Song Eunyoung's your follower now, isn't she!"

"Sure, she's a follower now, but she wasn't a follower back then. Either way, wasn't she taken because that Jung Hyeonseong kid was needed for something?"

"Why would they need that weakling?"

"Because you remember him."

Set noona aside as the exception, and set aside the Unaffiliated Hunters nobody could remember too.

There was no way to even try recalling them when nobody knew who'd existed in the first place.

"So that means he's currently the only Unaffiliated Hunter left."

"There are Unaffiliated Hunters overseas too, you know."

"But bossless dungeons only happen in Korea."

"What's that got to do with any of this?"

"Why wouldn't it be related?"

Choi Suhyun sighed like this was giving him a headache.

Hearing about the situation at the amusement park, there was one thing I'd already suspected.

"You know what a divine temple is, right?"

Park Siyu blinked, looking at me like he couldn't figure out how I'd know that.

Choi Suhyun, on the other hand, seemed to be taking it in stride, like it was nothing new to him.

The stuff floating around online was accurate enough, but it only ever scratched the surface.

Not all gods are the same.

A god with a dimension of their own and one without get treated very differently.

There's also a difference between fully owning a dimension outright and sharing one, but that wasn't something I needed to worry about right now.

The next most important thing after a dimension is the "divine temple."

A deeply personal space.

Think of the dimension as a house, and the divine temple as that god's own room inside it.

Even among humans, not just gods, it works the same way.

Even close friends need time before you'd let them into your room.

Being a follower of a particular god doesn't at all mean you've ever set foot inside that god's temple.

"You know the easiest way to get into a temple? Become family. Not a friend, not a follower, family. Blood, basically. Same household. A family member you can't stand is still closer than a friend you actually like, right?"

Family might not get you into the room, but at least they can come and go from the house.

"If I were the kidnapper, I'd just throw a sack over someone's head on some dark street and haul them off, quiet, no witnesses. But this guy didn't kidnap Jung Hyeonseong, he attacked him. Why do you think that is?"

Snatching a Hunter who'd awakened less than six months ago, quietly, without a trace, wouldn't have been hard at all.

The condition for a boss monster to turn into an incursion entity is planting some fragment inside it that acts as a catalyst, corrupting the monster from within.

There was a good chance Jung Hyeonseong's injury had been deliberate too, aimed at exactly that.

It was a kind of ritual.

Once you're family, coming home isn't hard at all, is it?

I counted off on my fingers as I spoke.

"One, Jung Hyeonseong's got value as an Unaffiliated Hunter. Two, noona and that... ugh, damn it, that bastard's probably at the temple by now. That's about as far as I've got. The rest we'll have to figure out as we go."

I scratched the back of my neck.

Just finished one thing and already walked straight into another mess. This was giving me a headache in every direction.

"You're not worried?"

"I'm worried, sure... but it's not like there's anything I can actually do right this second."

I went back to the couch and stared blankly up at the ceiling.

This office ceiling's ridiculously high.

"Guess I'll just have to trust him, what else is there."

At least the Yu Jihan up in the tower hadn't been a bad guy.

If the transcendent Yu Jihan was really the Yu Jihan I knew, he wouldn't act without a reason.

...Right?

I wasn't sure if that thought made me feel better or worse, honestly.

Well, I'll trust the one worth trusting.

Park Siyu came over and sat down across from me.

He poured the last of the black tea into his cup.

"I'll handle everything related to this dungeon expedition, don't worry about it. And I'll keep looking into this incident."

That wrapped up the early morning meeting.

Take a rest for now, even if resting probably won't sit right with you.

After finishing that dungeon, I'd suddenly been handed a vacation.

I was mulling over whether to head home and jump into the tower when Choi Suhyun, who'd walked out of the office with me, grabbed the back of my collar.

"Hey. You're doing something with me."

"What kind of thing to say to someone who just spent an entire week working a dungeon? Let me rest for once."

"You slept the whole ride in the car! And Song Eunyoung's in the state she's in, and you're talking about resting?"

"What! You're not even her official Soter follower yet. Have you noticed you're always looking out for noona more than me lately? Guess you forgot she decked you that one time."

"Quit talking nonsense and come with me!"

Choi Suhyun dragged me into the emergency stairwell.

He leaned against the stairs at an angle and popped a candy into his mouth.

That's a sugar addiction if I ever saw one.

"Why the emergency stairwell, though?"

If you're going to talk, why not Park Siyu's office, or the hallway?

Choi Suhyun crunched down on the candy and kept going, undeterred.

"I've got a stalker."

"Even self-praise's got its limits before it turns into a disease. Who'd be crazy enough to stalk you, hyung? Does this person have a death wish or something?"

"That's exactly my point."

"...Wait, seriously? This isn't some paranoid delusion?"

"You want to die?"

Choi Suhyun swept his bangs back.

He didn't look like he was lying.

The real question was who, and why, and for what purpose, someone would be stalking Choi Suhyun at this exact moment.

"Catch him and beat it out of him."

"Watch your language. Beat it out of him? We're ripping his limbs off."

"You're worse than me! Anyway, what about this stalker? Don't tell me you dragged me out here just because you can't handle it yourself."

"Sharp little bastard."

Choi Suhyun popped a second candy into his mouth.

How many candies does he even have stuffed in that pocket?

Is it some kind of bottomless bag? You got an inventory window too or something?

"You remember when Kim Yu... no, Yu Jihan attacked you. There was someone helping him, you know that, right?"

"Yeah, sort of. Never met them, though."

He was talking about the one who'd deleted CCTV footage along every path Jihan moved through, hacked into Aria Guild's servers, and made Kim Yuhan a ghost in the system.

I'd known there was an accomplice, but I'd never really given the guy any thought.

"I was going to let it slide quietly too, normally."

That crunching sound, I was starting to lose track of whether it was coming from his mouth or his hand.

Doesn't sound quiet to me.

Choi Suhyun wouldn't bring something like this up for no reason.

"Don't tell me that stalker following you is that same guy."

"Have you met him?"

"No."

"Then how'd you figure it out?"

"Well... dug around here and there."

Choi Suhyun folded and snapped the finished candy stick, scratching his head.

"Wait, so you never even saw his face, but somehow you figured out he's stalking you, and that he's Yu Jihan's accomplice? How exactly?"

"Stalking doesn't have to mean literally following someone around, does it?"

"...Ah."

That made sense.

The guy helping Yu Jihan definitely seemed more at home online than in person.

"So this stalking, it's not real-world stalking, it's online stalking?"

"Traced the IP, worked it backward, tore apart the program, and it matched the same guy who messed with the CCTV back then. Hey. You have any idea how much trouble I went through to track that little shit down? The nerve, snooping through someone's computer."

Yeah, I didn't really have a response for that.

Choi Suhyun was seriously pissed off.

I still had no idea who Yu Jihan's accomplice actually was, but.

There are people in this world you can mess with, and people you really, really shouldn't.

Why'd you have to go and do that.

Why.

From the outside, it looked like an ordinary villa building.

There wasn't even a door lock at the entrance, the kind you'd expect anywhere.

This definitely didn't look like the home of someone capable of breaching Aria Guild's servers and online-stalking Choi Suhyun.

This has to be the right place, right?

I never in a million years imagined Choi Suhyun had the skills to trace a hacker's IP address backward.

His self-love issues were so extreme I'd wondered more than once if he'd eaten something weird as a kid, but seeing this side of him, I had to admit, grudgingly, that he was good.

"You still have that burner phone Park Siyu gave you, right?"

"Hey, let's not have an Association employee talking about burner phones like that in public. You're technically a public servant, you know."

"Call this number when you catch him."

He was every bit as full of himself as he was talented, and my words went in one ear and out the other, not landing at all.

A guy like that, working as a public servant. No wonder the country's a mess.

My hard-earned tax money!

Choi Suhyun said we might as well grab this guy while we're at it and dig into whoever kidnapped noona, and dragged me along with him.

Pure gut feeling on my part, but I figured we probably wouldn't get much out of grilling Yu Jihan's so-called accomplice.

Yu Jihan was a victim too, in a way, so what would this guy even know?

Wait, he did try to kill noona, though, so does that make him a perpetrator instead?

Anyway, I couldn't wrap my head around why this guy had such a deep grudge against the god Soter.

I stood in front of unit 302 holding a packaged chicken box I'd bought nearby and rang the bell.

"Delivery."

I rang the bell and knocked on the door several times, but got no response.

I spun around and looked back toward the alley where Choi Suhyun's car was parked.

Didn't you say this guy orders delivery food all the time?

What do I do now?

I had the door lock password Choi Suhyun had given me saved on my phone, but punching it in and walking inside felt like it'd sit wrong with my conscience.

What if this isn't even the right unit?

You gonna take responsibility for that?

"Ah, screw it."

I used Mana Detection through the door.

And immediately called Choi Suhyun.

"Hey, what happened? You catch that bastard?"

"Looks like he bolted."

"Shit."

Footnotes:

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