WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 192

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Say You Want to Live - 8

"Urk."

For a moment, Ulfen's consciousness went hazy. Blood sprayed, his skull rattled. A throbbing shock rang through his head, then, as if that still wasn't enough, tore through his entire body.

He somehow endured through sheer will and forced himself back into stance. The distance he had struggled to close opened up again, but this wasn't the time to care about that.

It felt like standing before a tiger, his whole body going numb. Ulfen had felt something similar before, in the Abyss itself.

When you faced a superior you couldn't resist, the same feeling came: no matter what you did, nothing would work, as if human beings were divided into different ranks by nature.

A gap in power so vast that even the will to resist became meaningless.

He felt that same thing from the young general in front of him.

Should I have... run?!

But it was already too late. Just like when he had faced the Magician, from the moment he entered the other's line of sight, resistance was the only correct choice left.

Ulfen steadied himself and raised his arm to grab his short blade again.

Then something flickered across his vision. Right after that, his left arm was severed.

Blood splashed from beneath his cloak, and everything below his left elbow flew off at a grotesque angle. Ulfen watched part of his own body abandon him with his own eyes.

Bang.

The gunshot came after. The pain came far later.

"Ah, tsk. That one finally hit right."

At the end of that trajectory stood the Gunslinger, gun leveled at him. Blue flames rippled from the weapon in her hand.

"Simple rules. I ask, you answer. Every time you don't answer, one of your limbs flies off. Easy enough for a worm-brain like yours, right?"

It wasn't gunpowder. Mere gunpowder could never produce that level of power.

The extreme of bullet-deflecting energy. Highly compressed energy packed into a bullet, detonated all at once and launched out.

Gunpowder was too weak, so she fired with energy.

The barrel couldn't endure the impact, so she reinforced it with energy.

The recoil was too strong, so she canceled it with energy.

Technique, principle, tool.

A supreme weapon forged with energy that surpassed everything humanity had ever made, even overcoming bullet-deflecting energy itself.

They called it a gun, but in truth it was closer to a spear. An infinitely long spear fired with a flick of a finger.

Still, he wasn't without hope.

...She just made that bullet. Then that gun should be empty. Then...

The last move he could choose to survive. Even if he couldn't kill her, he at least had to wound her to escape alive.

Then.

Ulfen thrust out his left arm. He caught his flying severed forearm with energy, charged while spraying blood, and shoved forward the horrifying cross-section of exposed bone and muscle.

"Ugh. I'm already sick to my stomach...."

As she frowned like she might gag, Ulfen lowered his stance and rushed her with all his strength.

With his still-intact right arm, he thrust his half-split short blade forward. At the same time, he secretly drew the dagger he had hidden for stronger opponents. Black smoke billowed from his body, and from that darkness, a pitch-black blade thrust out without warning.

A shadow blade for killing a careless target at point-blank range. One hidden blade beneath the short blade's shadow, a technique trained for nothing but murder...

...and it shattered between the Gunslinger's elbow and knee.

His right arm was crushed to pieces between her elbow and knee. Not because his strength failed, but because his hand was no longer a hand that could hold anything. The short blade and dagger slipped through his broken fingers and fell.

Pain flooded in. Compared to that, the Gunslinger remained indifferent after crippling a man's arm.

"Two limbs down. Now you've only got two legs left."

Muttering, the Gunslinger struck Ulfen's back with her pistol grip. It was only a light tap, yet Ulfen felt as if his whole body had been torn apart as he slammed into the ground. Pain hit him as if the earth itself had surged up and crashed into him.

A military boot lightly rolled him over. In Ulfen's vision, as he lay there with both arms reduced to rags, he saw a tall building behind her and the Gunslinger's face looking down at him like he was an insect.

"Feel like answering now?"

An arrogant bearing only an overwhelming powerhouse could show, a stance that looked down on everything in the world.

Ulfen's resistance ended in vain. Realizing everything was over, he coughed blood and asked,

"...Cough. Why... is someone like you here over some back-alley matter...?"

No matter how he thought about it, she was far too big a figure to dispatch over the deaths of a few lowborn people. A powerhouse like this was national-level force, someone whose movement alone should be handled with care.

At his question, the Gunslinger scratched her head with the gun.

"Strange. I said I ask the questions."

"Need to keep promises," she muttered, then pressed her boot down on Ulfen's knee. Watching his twisted mouth, she spoke lazily.

"I'll tell you this just once, so answer my next question properly.... You know Hameln, right?"

Of course he knew it. Ulfen nodded.

The military-state taboo. The incident where middle-school students on the verge of graduation died en masse.

Ulfen had used that as bait to draw in the military state and purge the entire back-alley district.

It was only a back alley. A discarded place where those abandoned by the world gathered, where nobody cared. He had thought he could rule there like a king.

Then what the Gunslinger said next made him realize he had misunderstood something all along.

"Hameln. That little hilltop garden of learning. That's my alma mater. Well? Feeling a little clearer now?"

"...No way. You're the last graduate of Hameln...?"

"Shut up. My question now. The one who told you about Hameln was Rancart. That bastard, right?"

Of course. Ulfen nodded.

He was the one who had told him about Hameln.

Colonel Rancart, the other one among Hameln's last graduates.

A young madman who had fallen into Tantalus later than anyone else, yet bent prisoners to his will in every possible way.

Sometimes by force, sometimes by knowledge, sometimes by desire. That sorcerer who breathed new life into stagnant, murky Tantalus eventually led them in a jailbreak.

Right before escaping, he had visited Ulfen too. He stared at Ulfen for a long time as if weighing how useful he might be, then said,

"Ulfen. I need competent subordinates. Lots of them. A timid, sneaky guy like you... hmm. Barely. You might just manage scout duty in our party!"

"Whaaat? You want to go back to the military state? You're turning down a chance to become greater and going back to that little rat hole?"

"Hah. Never thought you were this unromantic a small fry. I'm giving you a fragment of the power to change this world, and you want to be king of a back alley? Seriously. Even a horse running across the plains keeps new ground in its eyes. But you want to stay buried in a rat hole, staring at the same view forever? Ugh."

"Ah, don't worry. I don't kill people one by one just because I'm disappointed. What a hassle. Why would I? If someone stirs up the military state's back alleys, that works for me anyway."

"Since I'm leaving, want one military state secret? If you spread this around, the military state will lose its mind. How you use it is up to you."

The red-haired Magician spoke as he recalled the past. It seemed even a monster like him had memories; his eyes were fixed somewhere far away....

"You know Hameln? Something very interesting happened there...."

"And second."

The Gunslinger's voice dragged Ulfen out of his thoughts.

"Why did you leak that incident to Black Cat? Was that Rancart's order too, or your own decision?"

This time he couldn't understand what she meant. Ulfen showed confusion.

"Black... Cat? You mean the Family's territory?"

"Yeah."

"I... don't know what you're talking about."

"Hah? You trying to play dumb?"

Crack. A weight like a boulder pressed onto Ulfen's knee. As joint-crushing pain shot through him, the Gunslinger's voice bored into his ear.

"Black Cat is an exposé paper that deals in gossip. Sometimes they even catch military corruption, so of course intelligence keeps an eye on it. But if you write that name out in the open... what is that supposed to be? That's basically calling me."

"That... name...?"

As if telling him to quit pretending, she frowned and pressed him harder.

"Hui, top student in middle school. I don't know what the hell got into Rancart to tell you even that. But if he told you that name... you were played from the start. Might as well have begged me to kill you."

Ulfen agreed he'd been played, but what she said was new to him. He voiced his doubt.

"First time I've heard that name."

"What?"

"What I know is that their deaths were suicides. That they cursed the military state before dying. And that Rancart... took second place. Beyond that... he said it was up to me how I wrote it... so I made up the rest."

"That bastard was third! Other than that, it's mostly true."

Ulfen wasn't lying, and he spoke with that much sincerity.

Hearing facts that didn't match her expectations, the Gunslinger fell into thought. She scrubbed her head with the gun, dug through her pocket as if searching for something, let out a deep sigh, then clicked her tongue.

"Yeah, that's not Rancart's style. And you lot have no reason to do it either. Then what? Then who the hell did this?"

She sank deep into thought without even paying attention to Ulfen beneath her boot, as if he were just a roadside stone.

But Ulfen, treated like little more than a stone, felt not anger but helplessness.

...Helpless.

That was exactly what Ulfen had realized in the Abyss.

In a world where ranks were fixed, all resistance was powerless.

Talent, mystery, time, whatever it was, there was a wall that determined human strength, and that wall could never be crossed. No matter how hard one struggled, one could not touch it. Those standing in that unreachable realm didn't even glance downward.

Maybe someone could do it, cross that wall and stand shoulder to shoulder with the absolute.

But people blessed like that were few.

The rest simply crashed into the wall and vanished.

To him, who had once reigned as a kind of shadow in the kingdom days, the common sense of Tantalus had been too hard to accept. Like a believer realizing the absence of god, Ulfen fell into despair and dejection.

The Abyss was exactly what its name implied to him, a hell one fell into without end.

Then one day, when he got a chance to escape the Abyss.

He gave up aiming higher and chose to rule over the weak.

In the end, he caught the eye of someone stronger and was brought to this death.

I made a mistake when I fought the Magician. I should never, never have faced him head-on.

The Magician was weak, but he deceived and tricked me with all kinds of tools. He only crossed blades directly twice. If I had recognized his skill from the start and attacked at full force....

No, if I hadn't abandoned my tactics while fighting him. The result would probably still have been the same, but at least it might have been better....

Something kept tapping at his chest. No matter how hard he tried to identify it, Ulfen only groped in the dark, as if thrown into blackness....

Then, in his narrowing view aimed at the sky, on a rooftop rising between the buildings.

I appeared.

Holding my cane and wearing my hat, I stood on the rooftop railing. The Gunslinger, lost in thought, couldn't see me. From a position visible only to the fallen man, I tipped my hat slightly, extended my cane, and greeted him.

Ulfen let out a small sigh.

"Ah."

One lacked skill, yet one won and one lost.

I escaped successfully, but Ulfen lost and ended up under a military boot.

If you wanted to live, you should've kept your head down. You were the one who stirred up all this chaos.

Well, I won't brag. I had mind reading, so comparing us directly wouldn't be fair.

Still, one thing was certain.

You were the one lying there, but you were stronger than me.

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