WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS x FLAME COMICS
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint ◈
Chapter 79: Episode 16 - The Fifth Scenario (3)
──────
Shards of the Moon Stone, broken like eggshells, fell to the ground. Through the cracks in the shattered Moon Stone, a silver mane spilled out in soft wisps. If that thing had been a cub, it could have been controlled through the Imprinting Phenomenon, but the being that had emerged now was nothing so innocent.
[You are the first in this Scenario to encounter an otherworldly life-form.]
[Your affinity with otherworldly beings has increased.]
[You have received 2,000 coins as a reward.]
[You have received a bonus skill to facilitate smooth communication with otherworldly beings.]
[You have acquired Otherworldly Translation Lv.1.]
I could feel Han Suyeong swallow hard beside me. An encounter with an otherworldly being marked the opening of the Fifth Scenario, so her tension was understandable.
This was completely different from the Scenarios so far. If we made even a slight mistake in the Fifth Scenario, all of Seoul could disappear.
[You have activated the Exclusive Skill Otherworldly Translation Lv.1.]
[The effect of the item Imyuntar's Talisman has increased your understanding of a specific language.]
The talisman I had obtained from hunting the fire dragon would be useful from here on too.
[Automatic translation has begun.]
From inside the glowing Moon Stone, I heard a voice.
“#%#$. ......Damn it, already?”
The huge creature crouched inside the Moon Stone grumbled as it rose to its feet. At a glance, the silver mane covering its whole body made it resemble a wolf, but it was on a completely different level from something like a werewolf. More importantly, I knew this species.
「It was easily over three meters tall. One of the ruling species of the otherworld Chronos, capable of transforming at night through the power of Moon Stones. They were warriors of the wind, possessing monstrous Constitution and the Strength of giants.」
One of the five ruling species of Chronos.
“I am the great first wolf.”
On Chronos, they were called the first wolves, the imyuntar.
“I am Lycaon of the imyuntar.”
As his growling breath rang through the darkness of the night, every presence around us held its breath. Just making eye contact with him was enough to send Suyeong ducking behind me. Of course, I didn’t back down.
[Activating the Exclusive Skill, Character Profile!]
+
<Character Profile>
Name: Lycaon Isparang
Age: 371
Patron constellation: Shadow of a Destroyed World
Exclusive attributes: Noble Imyuntar (heroic), Humiliated Survivor (rare)
Exclusive skills: [Way of the Wind Lv.9], [advanced weapons proficiency Lv.9], [Roar of the Battlefield Lv.8], [Sage's Insight Lv.4], [Steel Skin Lv.8], [acting Lv.4].......
Stigma: [Guidance of Destruction Lv.1]
Overall stats: [Constitution Lv.75], [Strength Lv.75], [Agility Lv.75], [Mana Lv.75]
Overall evaluation: One of the five ruling species of ruined Chronos. After losing his world, he threw himself into the Star Stream and became a guide for the Scenarios. His distinguishing trait is that he always looks upon the world with eyes full of regret.
+
As expected of a hero from another world, he had absurd skills and stats.
An average of 75 in his overall stats. At this point, that number exceeded even the Scenario’s current cap. Most station Representatives would die from a single hit.
Lycaon’s blue eyes looked down at me with interest.
“Were you the ones who woke me?”
I nodded.
“I see....... Then the time has finally come. Congratulations on clearing the tutorial Scenario, warriors of another world.”
Tutorial, my ass. He was obviously doing a clumsy imitation of a dokkaebi for dramatic effect, and it was ridiculous.
There was no such thing as a tutorial in this world.
Every Scenario was the real thing, and the dead could never come back. So what was this supposed to be, a tutorial?
“To those who face destruction. First, I express my deep regret that a catastrophe has come to your world.”
Lycaon looked up at the sky as he spoke.
The Great Hole occupying the skies above Seoul. That gigantic vortex, reminiscent of a black hole, was expanding little by little with every passing moment. Lycaon must also have seen that Great Hole on the day his own world was destroyed.
Because every otherworldly being who appeared in the Scenarios was someone who had lost their homeland to the Scenarios.
“But now that I am here, you may rest easy. I am a guide who has come to prevent the destruction of this world. I will train you so you may prepare for the catastrophes, and I will teach you the instructions you absolutely need. And.......”
He must have come out in a hurry, but he recited his lines pretty well. He’d probably gotten a manual from a dokkaebi. Lycaon had been going on for quite a while when he suddenly cut himself off.
“.......But are the ones who woke me only you?”
“That’s right.”
“That is strange. Didn’t you clear the Fourth Scenario? If you cleared it properly, the five guides, myself included, should have hatched in the same place....... Where is the Master of the Absolute Throne?”
He was right. Normally, the five guides, Lycaon included, were supposed to gather there the moment the Master of the Absolute Throne was born.
I looked at Lycaon and said, “We have no king.”
“No king? ......Could it be that the Master of the Absolute Throne died? That cannot be. At this point in time, there should be no being capable of killing the Master of the Throne.”
Grrrrr.
Lycaon bared his disbelief with a threatening growl.
“There was never a Master of the Throne to begin with.”
“What do you mean?”
“We cleared the Fourth Scenario without obtaining the Absolute Throne.”
Flames rose in Lycaon’s pupils.
“You lie. Such a thing is impossible! The Fourth Scenario cannot end unless someone claims the Absolute Throne.”
“There is also a way to destroy the throne.”
Lycaon’s expression hardened. He seemed to weigh my true intent for a moment, then his eyes widened.
“......Surely not?”
The sight of that noble hero of another world losing his composure was truly something worth seeing. As he stared at me, his silver mane trembled.
“This weave of countless Constellations....... Don’t tell me you destroyed the throne yourself......?”
“That’s right.”
“How could you do something so monstrous?!”
I couldn’t quite make out the rest of what Lycaon shouted. Watching him howl, Suyeong whispered to me.
“Hey, was it really that serious? Because earlier, when you told me......”
It seemed Han Suyeong had also obtained [Otherworldly Translation] and heard the conversation just now. Before I could answer, Lycaon shouted first.
“Why did you commit such an act! Then does that mean there is not a single person in this world who has received the protection of that great god?”
“There isn’t.”
“Ahhh! So the Constellations of the Star Stream truly do not watch over Chronos! This world is finished! Creatures with less intelligence than kobolds have finally gone and done it!”
Watching the despairing Lycaon, I slowly began to feel annoyed.
Right. This was the true nature of otherworldly beings. On the surface, they acted as if they had been dispatched to help our world, but in truth, they had a different objective.
But in this round, I would never let it happen.
“Lycaon Isparang, prince of the imyuntar. It’s too early to despair.”
The proud prince of the imyuntar immediately reacted to the change in my tone. His growling roar thundered through the air.
“Insolent human. Show respect before a great race! It seems you do not know the weight of the sin you have committed!”
“Looks like losing your homeland left you blind to everything else. The world where the imyuntar were the ruling species was Chronos, not Earth.”
For an instant, surprise flashed across Lycaon’s face before it froze.
I didn’t miss the opening and continued.
“There were five catastrophes that destroyed your world.”
“What are you.......”
“The southern continent of Chronos was destroyed by the dragon among them. Right?”
Lycaon’s eyes filled with deep distrust.
“How do you know that?”
“Fire dragon Ignir. The Catastrophe of the Fiery Depths. That was the name of the catastrophe that destroyed your world.”
The lesser catastrophe I had killed, Lesser Ignir, had originally been a lesser version of Ignir, a fire dragon species ranked among the great catastrophes. A catastrophe that could turn a small city into a sea of fire with a single breath, and tear low-ranked monster species apart with a single beat of its wings. Chronos’s southern continent had been destroyed by that creature. By an unknown fire dragon species that had awakened from a catastrophe meteorite.
Lycaon ground his teeth.
“You speak as if it were someone else’s story. You will regret this. Before long, your world too will writhe in that blazing hellfire.”
“Don’t worry about that. Ignir won’t descend to this world.”
“What?”
“I already killed it. So the Catastrophe of the Fiery Depths won’t come to this world.”
Lycaon stared blankly, looking like someone who had just been told his homeland had come back to life, then twisted up the corner of his mouth.
“Is that this world’s idea of a joke? For a world soon to be destroyed, this is a rather amusing place.”
Well....... I had expected him not to believe me.
I searched inside my coat and pulled out a blue-tinged token. As if by magic, Lycaon’s laughter died.
The Imyuntar’s Talisman.
Lycaon’s trembling hand reached toward the talisman on my palm, then dropped with a thud.
“H-how....... How do you have that......!”
The Imyuntar’s Talisman was proof that its bearer had hunted a catastrophe dragon.
“Lycaon of the imyuntar. Show your respect before the talisman.”
Lycaon’s proud body slowly collapsed. First his knees touched the ground, then his head fell. As if unable to accept it, his pupils quaked violently.
“Properly.”
At last, his head touched the ground. Since he was over three meters tall, only after prostrating himself did his eye level fall below mine. I quietly looked down at Lycaon. I never would have guessed that killing the fire dragon back then would help like this.
Suyeong still didn’t seem to grasp what was happening. She only looked back and forth between me and Lycaon with confused eyes. I had nearly died because of Han Suyeong’s antics, but in the end, thanks to this woman, things seemed likely to be resolved easily.
Lycaon asked in a trembling voice, “Great dragon slayer....... Please forgive the discourtesy of asking your honored name so late.”
“My name is Kim Dokja.”
It struck me again that my name really wasn’t cool at all. If I’d said, My name is Yu Junghyeok, it probably would have made for a much cooler scene.
I quickly added, trying to smooth over the awkward atmosphere.
“Lycaon. There’s something I need you to do.”
At the mention of something to do, Lycaon carefully raised his head.
“Teach me your race’s secret art, [Way of the Wind].”
Lycaon’s eyes slowly widened.
This was the very reason I had hatched Lycaon. Since the fire dragon species, the Catastrophe of the South, had disappeared in such an anticlimactic way, the first catastrophe to descend in the Fifth Scenario would definitely be the Catastrophe of the East.
To stop the Catastrophe of the East, I absolutely had to get my hands on the secret art of the imyuntar.
[Way of the Wind].
It was the only answer that could stand against the Catastrophe of Questions, the Catastrophe of the East.
* * *
An hour later, I was explaining the situation to Han Suyeong, who still hadn’t been able to follow the conversation.
“So what you’re saying is, that thing called a ‘talisman’ came out of the fire dragon you killed back then, and it’s important to them?”
“Right.”
“I still don’t really get it....... Then does the fire dragon you killed back then also count as one of the ‘catastrophes’? Since it was a ‘lesser catastrophe,’ after all?”
“That’s right.”
“......Then that means the catastrophes we have to stop in the Fifth Scenario aren’t five, but four?”
“For someone who said they didn’t understand, you understood pretty well.”
At my words, Suyeong frowned.
“I still don’t buy it. What you killed back then was a lesser dragon, right? It was a degraded version, not the real thing, so why does that count as a catastrophe? Is that another convenient development from TWSA?”
“......Anything hatched from a catastrophe meteorite counts as a catastrophe. Since that thing came out instead of Ignir, Ignir won’t appear in this Scenario. And Ignir didn’t appear in the original either. Ignir’s hatchling did. This is only the Fifth Scenario. If something like that showed up already, how were we supposed to clear it?”
“You really can talk. What are you, a spokesman for TWSA? Are you secretly the author?”
The Scenarios might seem absurdly difficult, but they were built so that if you fought desperately enough, you could clear them.
Of course, they called it “adjustment,” but it was still vicious.
Even the lesser dragon, a degraded version of the hatchling, had wiped out prophets, who could be called top-tier forces. And that wasn’t all. It had even killed me once. Without the benefit of The King of No Killing, there was no way I could have taken it down. If that thing had been let loose on Seoul in that state and kept leveling up, Seoul would have ended up just like Lycaon’s homeland.
Naturally, Han Suyeong, who knew none of that, only kept running her mouth.
“Anyway, catastrophes aren’t that big a deal after all, huh? TWSA made them sound insanely terrifying, so I was really intimidated, but if even you could kill one, then the others must be......”
“The fire dragon was luck. The catastrophes rushing in this time are exactly like the original. Some truly horrific bastards are coming.”
Watching the plagiarist writer’s face go stiff at the words exactly like the original was pretty satisfying.
“What? Then what do we do?”
“What else? We use him.”
I looked at Lycaon in the distance, preparing for training.
Suyeong asked, “He looks strong. Is he going to fight for us instead?”
“He’s a coward. And guides, as a rule, aren’t allowed to oppose the catastrophes of other worlds. Our problems are ours to solve.”
Right then, I heard Lycaon calling for me.
“Hoju,[1] the preparations are complete.”
Hoju meant “Master of the Talisman,” the title used for the talisman’s owner. I had told him over and over to call me by name because the title sounded weird, but Lycaon wouldn’t yield on this one point.
“From this moment on, I will impart my clan’s secret art, [Way of the Wind].”
[Way of the Wind]. A hidden skill said to let its master command the surrounding air like their own limbs once they reached the ultimate level. Only one who possessed the Imyuntar’s Talisman had the right to learn the secret art of the imyuntar.
Under the original plan, Yu Junghyeok would have taken my role here, but not this time. I couldn’t just hand a skill this good over to someone who was already absurdly strong.
“Then let us begin.”
For the next three hours, I sweated buckets as I learned the skill.
It would have been nice if the system had popped up a message like [Would you like to learn this skill?], but this time, that kind of lucky break was impossible. When a skill was passed on through an otherworldly being, the only way to acquire it was to learn and master it directly.
Still, maybe all those years I’d spent reading novels counted for something, because I was gradually able to imitate Lycaon’s movements.
More precisely, I thought I was imitating them.
After about another hour had passed, Lycaon, who had been hesitating, finally opened his mouth.
“Hoju. I am truly sorry to say this, but.......”
Footnotes:
[1] Hoju (護主), "master of the talisman," sounds similar to hogu (호구), Korean slang for a sucker.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
