WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B.
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 159
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A little later.
Only after the lingering roar had completely faded did everyone begin moving again.
“Haah... haah...”
“...Fuck. What was that just now?”
Hyeji was breathing heavily.
Choi Yejin slowly removed her hand from her bow.
Valdemar staggered, then caught himself on the edge of the desk.
Iing Iing was panting in my arms.
I looked at them all in confusion.
“No, why were you all so frozen?”
“Jiho... you were fine?”
“It was a little loud.”
“That’s not what I mean. Just now... I couldn’t move. I tried to, but... for some reason...”
Hyeji looked down at her hand.
Her fingertips were trembling.
Choi Yejin wiped the cold sweat from her face.
“That was definitely not an ordinary sound. My body froze before I even realized it.”
“Hooong.”
As I checked on the condition of those two ordinary people...
“Iing...”
I heard Iing Iing’s thin little cry.
Looking down, I saw Iing Iing clutching tightly at my clothes in my arms.
The sight of her tiny shoulders hunched up was truly pitiful.
“Iing Iing. Were you scared too?”
“Iing...”
She nodded.
I could feel her trembling faintly.
“It’s okay. I’m here.”
I gently stroked Iing Iing’s back.
Usually, Iing Iing would unleash a Killer Slide Kick even on the Sect Leader’s jar.
To think she would be this frightened by a single sound.
Anyway.
They heard a sound, and their bodies froze...
No matter how I looked at it, this really did seem like that Dragon Fear thing, right?
Glancing outside, I looked over the city.
Chaos had erupted throughout it.
“W-what the hell was that...!”
“I suddenly couldn’t breathe...”
“It’s the end! The time of the apocalypse has come!”
“Aaaaah!”
An elderly person wandered around in confusion, clutching their head.
A young person stood blankly in place.
A woman trembled all over in terror.
There was even a child sobbing loudly.
The citizens had been seized by terror after their bodies froze from that presumed Dragon Fear.
I muttered quietly.
“This really does look like a Dragon.”
Daesik’s words suddenly came back to me.
The earth dried out, the wind grew hot, and beasts fled.
They were signs that a Dragon from legend would appear.
And now there was that bizarre roar too.
It was becoming more and more convincing!
If one did not show up after all this, I might be seriously disappointed.
Anyway, I was curious.
Was it really a Dragon or not?
I raised my staff.
Clap clap!
“All right, listen up! Attention! Chuumoku!”
After clapping my hands to gather everyone’s attention, I quietly spoke to the party.
“Let’s hurry and check it out.”
“...Where?”
Choi Yejin frowned as she asked.
What an obvious question.
“North, of course. Aren’t you curious what’s over there, showing off its lungs like that?”
“After hearing that utterly insane noise, you’re curious?”
Choi Yejin looked at me as though I were absurd.
What could I do if I was curious?
I was the type who could not stand unanswered questions.
A human being powered by curiosity.
The typical personality of a wizard in fiction.
Anyway, I was curious.
And lava was flowing toward my city.
Shouldn’t we at least find out what was in the north?
We could go take a look first.
If there was something we could deal with, we could deal with it!
Anyway!
“I’m not particularly scared, but you’re all making such a fuss. It was nothing more than slightly noisy sound pollution. Election campaign broadcasts are louder!”
“No, you fucking asshole. That’s because you...”
“Scared? Don’t tell me you got scared, Choi Yejin? What a disappointment.”
Choi Yejin sharply furrowed her brow.
Since she had her own pride as a Hunter, my scared? provocation seemed to have gotten to her.
Biting her lip, she said,
“...If we see something fucked up, we leave immediately. Don’t get close and poke it for no reason.”
“Ah, wakata.”
“Jiho, are you really going? Do we have to? I’m scared... Can’t I just wait here...”
“You know supporters are tools without human rights, right? Hyeji, you follow quietly too. Don’t act like a hyeji, a stereotypical female support player.”
“What does that even mean...?”
Anyway, that was how we decided to investigate the north.
* * *
Poro-rong.
We immediately flew north.
Iing Iing clung tightly to my shoulder.
Still frightened, she would not let go of my coat.
“Iing Iing, tell me right away if it gets too hard. We can turn back then.”
“Iing.”
“...Why do I get treated differently?”
Hyeji grumbled about something, but I ignored her.
Iing Iing was cute.
That alone was enough to deserve special treatment!
Once we left the city, the scenery gradually changed.
The farther we went, the redder the ground beneath our feet became.
Gurgle...
Lava flowed in several branching streams.
Black earth remained between them, but even that was covered in cracks, red light leaking from every crevice.
Just yesterday, this place had been a wasteland.
The trees and grass had withered away, but at least the ground itself had not been flowing.
But now?
“It boiled the entire ground.”
The bright-red earth flowed.
Stones melted and flowed with it.
Black smoke billowed up from it.
If I had not built Wall-Iing Iing, my city would have ended up like that too.
Just thinking about it annoyed me.
“What the hell does someone have to do to turn the ground into that?”
Was sucking dry the mana veins not enough?
Did they have to boil them into broth too?
Anyway, Daesik and that presumed Dragon were both awful bastards causing nothing but trouble.
This was why environmental destroyers were the worst...!
As we headed toward the volcanic region, I noticed something else strange.
“Come to think of it, there aren’t any monsters either.”
There were no land monsters.
Yesterday, we had encountered them the entire way north.
Trolls, Ogres, Cyclopes, all sorts of creatures fleeing south in a panic.
But today was different.
Not a single one remained on the ground.
The reason was obvious.
“They couldn’t have survived on a lava-covered floor.”
They had either fled or sunk into the lava and become lava-grilled monsters.
One of those two.
In exchange, there were an awful lot of Wyverns.
Kaaaaah!
A flock of Wyverns came rushing at us, roaring.
There were hundreds of them, so I wiped them out at once.
Kra-kra-kra-kra-kaboom!
Pierced by Railgun rounds, the flock of sparrows fell like autumn leaves.
I clicked my tongue.
“You damn sparrows! You dare show yourselves before Mao Zedong’s successor! The blood of the Four Pests Campaign boils within me!!!”
“Please stop exploiting Mao Zedong already...”
Maybe it was because the land monsters had vanished, but there seemed to be an especially large number of Wyverns.
Anyway, we continued steadily onward.
After flying north at high speed for quite a while, we finally saw it.
The edge of the lava region.
And beyond it, an enormous volcano.
“Jiho, you couldn’t go any farther than here yesterday, right?”
“That’s right. It was the end of the map.”
We had reached the place where we had been blocked yesterday.
Yesterday, a map boundary had stopped us.
But this time was different.
“Oh. We can get through?”
Maybe reaching Floor 48 had changed the area we could explore.
A new region had been unlocked.
It felt like leveling up in an RPG and unlocking a new hunting ground!
But once we entered, the environment did not look very pleasant.
Everything was black.
The volcanic ash piled across the ground.
The rocks hardened from cooled lava.
Even the smoke hazily veiling the sky.
If it were not for the red lava flowing here and there, I would have doubted whether color even existed there.
And...
It was far too quiet.
I could hear the earth boiling and the wind blowing.
But that was all.
There were no cries from monsters.
No footsteps of fleeing beasts.
Not even the sound of shrubs swaying in the wind.
A place blanketed in silent stillness.
I had been spreading my senses for a while, but I could not detect a single living thing.
Not animals.
Not even a tiny insect.
The only living beings in this place were our party.
“...This feels fucking awful.”
Choi Yejin muttered quietly.
Rather than doodling on her map as usual, she held her bow in one hand and scanned the area.
Hyeji silently looked down as well.
Iing Iing was different from usual too.
Rather than boldly flying ahead, she clung close to my shoulder while looking around.
Whenever wind blew from the north, her grip on my coat tightened.
That roar from earlier still seemed to be bothering her.
I felt a little strange too.
Normally, I should have been happy when there were no monsters.
But this place did not feel that way.
It was as though every living thing had been erased.
Like the landscape of a ruined world.
I raised my head and looked north.
The roar did not come again.
Beyond the black smoke, there was only the enormous volcano.
“Let’s go a little farther, Iing Iing.”
“Iing!”
Poro-rong.
We moved forward again.
But before long...
“Iing!”
Iing Iing stopped in place.
She stretched out her hand and felt around in the empty air.
Hyeji spoke.
“Jiho, she says this is the end.”
“Again?”
I reached out too.
There was nothing visible in the air.
Yet my palm was clearly touching something.
A map boundary.
We could go no farther.
“Tsk. A barrier?”
“Jiho, you use that meme every time we hit a map boundary...”
“Kh. An AT Shield?”
“No, I wasn’t telling you to say a different version...”
Anyway.
It was the end of the map again.
We had come farther in than yesterday, but we still could not reach that volcano!
I raised my head and stared ahead.
Beyond black Shandong Province, an enormous crater spewed red light.
Was the thing that roared earlier somewhere over there too?
I did not know.
I could not see it.
I could not sense its presence.
This was as much as we could confirm for now.
“This fucking Tower always cuts things off at the important parts.”
I clicked my tongue and withdrew my hand.
We had come all this way...
Only to head back without seeing even the tip of a Dragon’s tail, let alone its face.
As I gazed north in disappointment...
“...Huh?”
I saw something.
Beyond the map boundary, in the northern sky veiled by black smoke.
‘Blue Motes.’
Blue Motes far in the distance were warping.
The cluster of light briefly seemed to form some kind of shape.
Then, the next moment...
Crack-crackle...
The arrangement of Blue Motes shattered.
Like a thin pane of glass breaking, the blue cluster fragmented into tiny pieces and scattered in every direction.
“What was that just now?”
I narrowed my eyes.
An array?
Had someone used magic?
But it was too far away.
Before I could properly make anything out, the cluster of light vanished without a trace.
I had no idea what had happened.
As I stared intently north, Hyeji asked beside me,
“What is it, Jiho? Did you see something?”
“The mana moved strangely over there. Like something was shattering into pieces.”
“...Mana?”
“Yes. It looked like some kind of magic array...”
I narrowed my eyes.
It was strange.
I had observed and copied countless spells, but I had never seen an array like that before...?
And it had been far too distant for me to observe properly.
Tsk.
If I had been just a little closer, I might have been able to figure out its structure.
Just then, as I stared north in disappointment...
Suddenly.
“...Huh?”
Something caught my eye.
It was in the exact spot where the Blue Motes had scattered apart earlier.
Below that.
There was a large object sitting there.
“What is that?”
I narrowed my eyes and examined it.
Blackened earth.
A valley filled with bright-red lava.
And in the middle of it...
Something large and round.
At first, I thought it was a rock.
But when I looked more closely, its shape was a little strange.
A smooth surface.
An oval shape that narrowed toward the top.
And bizarre patterns faintly engraved across its surface.
“...Wait. I’ve seen that shape somewhere before.”
More specifically, in my refrigerator at home.
Then a possibility suddenly crossed my mind.
That thing kind of looked like...
“An egg?”
It looked like an egg, right?
Egg in English.
No, now that I looked at it, it really was an egg.
A fucking enormous egg, at that!
“Hooooong?! Why is there an egg in a place like this?!”
I had found an egg completely out of nowhere in a volcanic region!
What was going on?
But wait.
This was a volcanic region, right?
We had heard an unidentified roar earlier.
And above the egg, a magic array I had never seen before had appeared and disappeared.
That meant...
“Could that be a Dragon egg?!”
“...What?”
“Over there! You can see something egg-like, can’t you?!”
I pointed north with my staff.
But...
“Where? I can’t see it very well...”
“What? An egg? Where are you saying it is?”
Tsk, tsk. What a bunch of blind people.
Maybe because Yejin and Hyeji were merely Hard-rank and Easy-rank ordinary people, their eyesight seemed quite poor.
Anyway, the important thing was that something was there!
“Iing Iing! Let’s go over there!”
“Iing!”
Poro-rong!
We moved with Iing Iing’s Psychokinetic Flight.
But...
Thud!
“Ah.”
We were blocked.
That damned map boundary.
The egg-like object had, unfortunately, been situated beyond the boundary!
“No, fuck! My Dragon Pet!!!”
I had finally found a presumed Dragon egg!
And I could not take it?!
Fury welled up inside me.
But soon, I was able to calm down.
“...Wait. Come to think of it, we couldn’t even get this far yesterday, right?”
We had been blocked on Floor 47.
But once we reached Floor 48, we could enter this far.
Which meant...
If we climbed to the next floor, Floor 49...
Wouldn’t we be able to go there and take the egg?
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