WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ Omniscient First-Person’s Viewpoint

Chapter 003

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Even Regression Becomes a Pain in the Ass After Thirteen Times

The golem's message was completely unexpected.

Do nothing? The military state, which forced labor on ordinary citizens whenever it felt like it, let alone actual criminals, was issuing no orders at all?

I was too familiar with the military state to feel any relief at that. Whenever it showed an unusual attitude, you had to look past the surface and read the true intention hiding behind it.

I was just about to ask the golem something, gripped by a rising sense of unease.

Then, with a thunderous crash, the front gate of the prison was blown clean off its hinges. Something burst out from inside with ferocious momentum. The moment it cleared the courtyard, an alarm blared to signal an emergency, and the searchlights swept the grounds in frantic pursuit of the escapee.

But it was pointless. Whatever was running was moving so fast that even the searchlights couldn't keep up. The moment the light tried to fix on its target, the target was already gone.

While the searchlights were still flailing around in confusion, the girl landed right in front of me like a bolt of lightning. Both me and the golem were struck completely speechless by the sudden appearance.

Then, for just a moment, the girl snapped her head up and barked, wagging her tail.

"Woof! Hi! Hi!"

Triangular ears standing sharp and alert, a golden tail swishing at her hip. Her large, round eyes were fixed on me, radiating nothing but goodwill. Her lush hair bounced with every movement.

She was a canine beastkin, a descendant of sins committed by humanity in the distant past.

The canine beastkin was crouched on all fours like an actual dog, staring up at me from near my feet.

What on earth, I thought, and raised my hand in an awkward greeting.

"Uh... hi?"

"Hi! Hi! Hi!"

She leapt up and down, celebrating my presence. No hostile intent at all, every movement completely friendly. It was less like meeting a person and more like being greeted by a well-trained dog.

The reaction was so innocent and guileless that I couldn't even summon the wariness I would normally feel when meeting a stranger.

So I was a little slow to realize it.

That it was deeply strange for her to show this much goodwill toward someone she had never met before.

And that I, a mind reader, could barely read this creature's thoughts at all.

"Play! Play! Play!"

"What? Why would I."

"Woof! Play!"

The canine beastkin slammed her head into the ground, grabbed the hem of my trousers with her mouth, and started pulling. I tried to shake her off, thinking what the, when all at once it felt like a rope tied to a loaded cart had snagged around my ankle.

Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint illustration

My legs, which had been supporting the weight of a grown man, were swept clean out from under me. My body hit the ground and the canine beastkin grabbed me and took off running, dragging me along with her. My body was pulled helplessly forward. Thud, thud. The sheer speed sent me bouncing off the ground like a skipping stone, as if a cart had started sprinting with me dangling behind it.

Then came the pain.

"Aaaargh!"

I had braced myself for the possibility of some humiliating things happening at the infamous Tantalus, but being subjected to something that felt remarkably close to being torn apart, and at the hands of someone who was genuinely fond of me no less, was something I had never imagined in my wildest dreams.

Grabbing onto anything was useless. A greater force simply kept pulling me forward. The friction made my clothes burn hot. Blood welled from the skin scraped raw against the concrete and dripped down to the ground.

I'm going to die. I'm actually going to die. I flailed my arms and shouted desperately.

"Wait, stop!"

"Woof!"

And then something astonishing happened.

The canine beastkin, whose bite force alone was enough to drag me across the ground, obeyed my command and stopped.

Without a moment's hesitation.

I stared at her, completely at a loss for words.

"Wait, you're actually listening to me?"

Even without mind reading, most people who had lived any kind of life would understand this much: there are far more people in the world who dismiss what you say than those who actually listen to you. And that goes doubly true when what you're saying gets in the way of what they want to do.

But this girl, the moment I told her to wait, had stopped. Without a single flicker of hesitation or resistance.

Hang on. What is this? Confused, I reached out with mind reading and tried to read her thoughts.

They didn't come through.

'Wait? Wait! Wait, wait, wait!'

No, more precisely: they came through, and I could get a rough sense of the feeling, but I couldn't make it out clearly. It was like reading a book written in a foreign language without a translation, where you could only grasp the vague mood and the emotions it carried without understanding the words themselves.

The thoughts were unreadable.

That's impossible. Is she not even human?

'He said to wait,' 'so she waits.' No doubt, no hesitation, not even a question asked in return. The way her mind worked was closer to a dog than to a person, the way a loyal hound obeys its human without stopping to ask why.

But her outward appearance was that of a human being with dog ears and a tail, and the physical strength she had just demonstrated had far surpassed anything human.

Wait. If she wasn't just some unhinged beastkin who genuinely believed she was a dog, then this creature might actually be...

"A Beast King?"

After humanity rose on two legs and established undisputed dominion over the land, the Kings of Beasts had taken on human form. They walked and spoke as humans did, representing their kind and voicing the will of their species directly to humanity.

But in their very nature, they were kings, beings who represented, spoke for, and acted on behalf of an entire race of animals.

And the canine beastkin before me was the one who represented all dogs, the King of Dogs, Puppy.

"Unbelievable. A Beast King is a sacred being. Why would they lock something like that up in a prison?"

And of all places, Tantalus. The military state had gone past insane and straight into deranged. I spun around to protest to the golem, when,

'...I can smell the scent of blood.'

A thought reached me from somewhere very deep.

The next instant, every hair on my body stood on end.

The drops of blood from my wounds began to tremble. Darkness coiled around me. Unable to even turn my head properly, I watched out of the corner of my eye as my own blood began to move.

The drops of blood smeared on the concrete shook violently, and then began rolling in one direction, as if the concrete floor had turned to ice. Perfectly round, like glass beads, leaving no trail behind them, defying every rule they should have followed.

I tracked the movement of the blood drops with trembling eyes. They rolled toward a deep, dark door far in the distance, then seeped through the gap beneath it.

From beyond the door came a dizzying wave of satisfaction. The deep, full feeling of a predator who had just sunk its teeth into flesh, the contentment of wetting its throat with something that had once belonged to its prey.

And the knowledge that the prey in question was me filled me with genuine terror.

Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint illustration

'...Murky. I would not call my palate especially refined, but this blood is simply not worth drinking.'

It hadn't even been offered. She had drunk it anyway, and then complained it wasn't good enough. Picky tastes for someone behind bars.

But I couldn't very well voice that complaint out loud.

Because it didn't take Mind Reading to know what was on the other side of that door.

Beyond it was a vampire. One who had lived for a thousand years, and who would go on living forever as long as she was never killed. The Queen of Blood.

The Progenitor, Tyrkanzyaka.

The oldest darkness, who had grown weary of her conflict with humanity and sealed herself away in the Abyss of her own accord.

"Oh no..."

Violent criminals? Not a single one in existence could compare to either of these two. The King of Dogs was a sacred being, and the vampire was a monster that made even gods look foolish. These were beings that ordinary people never had cause to encounter, let alone dare to look in the eye.

I felt fear at a scale far beyond anything I was equipped to handle, and yet, somewhere inside, I was also relieved.

Fortunately, these two were either friendly toward humans or completely indifferent to them. The King of Dogs showed obvious affection for people, and the vampire would keep me alive if only to have a steady source of blood. As long as I didn't seriously cross either of them, neither was going to kill me.

If anything, I might even be able to win them over and bring them to my side.

Just then.

"Fly."

A sharp, cold voice rang out, young but cutting. Beautiful enough to make anyone within earshot turn their head, yet carrying nothing in it but icy hostility and killing intent honed to a razor's edge.

The moment I read it, I threw myself away from the golem. An instant later,

"Skywarbler."

A crack split the air itself.

A world of nothing but light and darkness. As if space itself had been carved out, light and dark warped and buckled. A diagonal fault line appeared in the black, splitting the darkness. Sparks crackled from the cut in the air, and lightning struck down into the deep Abyss. An invisible blade divided the golem cleanly in two.

Every light inside the golem went out in an instant. The pinnacle of arcane engineering within it, the precisely designed mechanisms, the circuits, the mana, all of it, divided in a single stroke.

One half of the golem slowly slid and fell to the ground. With a flat, clean crack, the body crumbled apart.

It looked like a diagram of a cross-section. The cut was so immaculate you might have thought that pressing the two halves back together would make it function again.

But the golem's crystal orb never lit up again. With that, the remote-controlled arcane golem went permanently dark. Static crackled from what had been the microphone, then cut out with a quiet pop.

In its place came that blade-sharp voice again.

"There was still a spare golem left? It's not a cockroach, but god, it just keeps coming back. I hope there aren't any more."

A girl with closely cropped black hair and loose-fitting trousers walked toward me at a measured pace. She snatched the sword that shimmered invisibly in the air and fixed the golem with a look that could only be described as pure hatred.

Then her gaze drifted from the remains of the golem and settled on me.

"Well, then. Who are you?"

Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint illustration

My instincts screamed at me. They told me that if I didn't do something right this instant, I was going to die.

I reflexively reached out with mind reading and read her, as deeply and completely as I could manage.

She had been nothing special at all.

She had grown up in an orphanage, scraped by in back alleys, and been ground down by crime and disease and violence until she died, the kind of unremarkable extra whose story was too ordinary to even be worth telling.

She had learned swordsmanship for a while and had her throat cut by a wandering swordsman. She had studied magic for a stretch and had her entire body burned alive by a mercenary mage. Whatever she tried, she lacked the talent to truly excel, and whatever chance she was given, she lacked the ability to turn it into success. She was, at her core, an ordinary person.

The only difference was that she had been given an infinite number of chances.

...Wait. What? Did I actually read that right? None of this makes any sense.

In five deaths spent with a sword in her hand, she had honed her skills to the point where she could stand against a Sword Saint.

In seven other deaths spent directly and indirectly receiving magical instruction, she had acquired enough magical power to stand against a Demon King.

To be clear, that only meant she had earned the right to stand in front of them, and would be crushed completely in an actual fight, but even so.

And that still wasn't the end of it.

"Answer me."

The girl recalled her legendary sword, Skywarbler[1]. The sword that could only be obtained from the tallest mountain in the world, shaped like the sky itself, something no one could have acquired without knowing the future in advance. It let out a low, resonant hum as she raised it and leveled it in my direction.

Across thirteen deaths, she had repeated her attempts endlessly in pursuit of stopping the world's destruction.

The regressor, Shei, held her sword pointed at me.

"If you don't answer... I'll kill you."

To grow stronger. To stop the world from ending. To finally escape the cycle of regression and find permanent rest.

A regressor who had come to the abyss in search of a destined encounter.

She was genuinely weighing my life. Whether to kill me or let me live. Which choice was the right one for this iteration of her journey.

If I didn't meet her standard, she fully intended to kill me and remove the variable I represented.

"...Ha."

In front of me was someone who ran at speeds the searchlights couldn't follow.

Someone who exerted her dominion over blood from hundreds of meters away.

Someone who was a monster who had obliterated a military-grade arcane golem in a single strike.

And yet, strangely, my mind settled. I spread both arms wide and called out in a bright, open voice.

"Nice to meet you all!"

Right. The people remaining here were terrifyingly powerful. They could probably slaughter ten thousand criminals like me in a matter of seconds. They had every ability to do exactly that.

But so what? When had I ever survived because I was strong?

The back alleys where I had lived for over ten years, even in those narrow streets, there were people far stronger than me at every turn.

And yet, in the end, the one who survived was always me.

The man with enough brute strength to crack stone barehanded had his head taken off by a swordsman who could cut steel. That swordsman had walked straight into a trap laid by a wandering mage and been burned alive. The mage who had demanded his payment had drunk a poisoned cup and dissolved into a pool of blood.

Only I had lived, because only I could read minds. I had kept the swordsman's temper in check, gone wide around the mage's traps, and picked exactly the right cup to avoid the poison.

This was no different.

No matter how monstrous my opponents might be, as long as I could read their thoughts, I could manage their moods, step around whatever it was inside each of them that could get me killed, and build up enough goodwill to stay alive.

What reason did I have to die? No, better yet, what reason did I have to let myself be killed?

I had spent my entire life as a back-alley con man. No one alive was better at reading the room and making people like them than me.

I spread both arms wide and shouted.

[1] Skywarbler or Cheon-aeng where cheon, 천 (天) means sky or heaven, and aeng, 앵 (鶯) means warbler, a songbird known specifically for its clear, piercing singing voice. So the full meaning is roughly "Heavenly Warbler" or "Sky Warbler," which fits the narrative detail of the sword humming or singing when drawn.

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