WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Oblivious
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Surviving as a B-Rank Hunter ◈
Chapter 4
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Ppakdori: Are the bastards who actually go Hunter Hunting out of their minds?
I’m not trying to condemn them morally or anything. Do they seriously think tracking and hunting other people in a dungeon is efficient? Is that why they pull this shit? You never know what anomalies or monsters you might encounter, yet you hunt other Hunters wielding weapons, making noise, and maybe even carrying artifacts? You deliberately seek out and attack monsters like that?
Are they seriously fucking idiots?
Anon1: The idiot is you lol. Look at it the other way. You can take all the Vanaskelium and artifacts that Hunter has.
Anon2: Usually, teams hunt solo Hunters in Hunter Hunting, so they are idiots if they can’t take them.
JudgeKimGwanyong: They are idiots. If they can’t finish them off in the dungeon, they get put on a wanted list as soon as they leave. Once you’re branded a criminal like that, you can’t do anything in modern society.
⤷Anon1: No? My cousin has gone Hunter Hunting a few times and even let a Corporate Hunter get away once. They put out a warrant, but they still live well dealing on the black market.
⤷⤷Anon3: This guy’s an idiot too. I got your IP. The Corporate Punishment Team will be storming in any moment.
⤷⤷⤷Anon1: Yeah, right. It’s a proxy IP, so you can’t trace it lol.
* * *
When Kang Dohyeon turned and started running, the two Hunters who had been charging at him seemed briefly startled.
They had been rushing forward menacingly with weapons drawn, only to hesitate in place. Dohyeon’s escape had been that sudden and fast.
“What are you idiots doing? Get after him!”
The one who had fired the first crossbow bolt shouted as they passed the two frozen Hunters. Only then did they snap out of it and hurriedly chase after Dohyeon.
Dohyeon ran along the edge of the flower field, sprinting with fluttering petals to his left. The three Hunters ran after him.
Even while running, the crossbowman managed to draw the string and load another bolt. They immediately dropped to one knee and aimed at Dohyeon’s back.
Just as their finger pulled the trigger, Dohyeon glanced back and abruptly threw himself forward.
The bolt flew with a twang! and passed over Dohyeon’s head. Dohyeon sprang back up and continued running as though it had all been one motion.
“What the fuck... Do he has eyes in the back of his head?”
While the crossbowman muttered, the other two Hunters gritted their teeth and chased after Dohyeon. The distance had quickly narrowed while Dohyeon ducked the bolt.
“Stop, you bastard!”
Then Dohyeon suddenly changed direction and dashed up the hill. The two Hunters, who had been running at full speed, failed to follow the abrupt turn. They floundered, then slipped in the grass.
The flower field spread broadly over one slope of the hill. Dohyeon had been running along the boundary between the field and the ridge, and the two Hunters had been following him.
Having lost their balance, the pair slid straight into the flower field.
“Fuck!”
Their bodies crushed the flowers in full bloom. The smell of grass and flowers spread heavily through the air.
[When a flower’s fragrance is strongest is the moment it is crushed. Yet the guardians will not permit it.]
At the same time, Yggdrasil’s message appeared before the Hunters’ eyes. The corpse of the woman who had stopped moving after blooming a blue flower from the top of her head turned toward the two Hunters with a crack.
The crossbowman, who had been loading another bolt, saw the sight and recoiled in horror.
“You stupid bastards! Get out of there!”
“Uh, uh...!”
The two Hunters who had slipped into the flower field tried frantically to escape. But faster than they could, the Flower Doll, now something that could not be called either a flower or a corpse, moved toward them with a series of cracks.
It appeared to move slowly, but in the next instant, it tore its feet from the soil and leaped as though flying.
The Hunters got to their feet and, rather than turn their backs on the incoming Flower Doll, seemed to decide to fight. One held a long sword, while the other wielded a large machete.
Then the crossbowman shouted.
“Behind you, idiots!”
“Huh? Agh!”
The warning was followed by a bolt sprouting from the machete wielder’s back. Its source was Dohyeon, kneeling on one knee at the top of the hill. More precisely, it was the crossbow in his hand.
“That bastard...!”
Seeing that, the crossbowman swung the bolt they had aimed at the Flower Doll toward Dohyeon. But they could not pull the trigger. They had frozen in shock.
The flowers in the field were standing up.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The sounds rang through the entire flower field. Monsters that seemed halfway between animal and plant, made of mixed flower buds, vines, roots, stems, and human flesh, rose in rapid succession.
None had proper eyes, yet it was unmistakable that their gazes were fixed on the Hunters.
“Hyah!”
The long-sword wielder then met the leaping Flower Doll. The Hunter swung their blade wide, as though intending to split the falling Flower Doll in two.
Their swordsmanship was not bad. The Flower Doll’s narrow waist was sliced cleanly through, and it separated into two halves in midair.
Then its entrails spilled out in a rush.
“Agh!”
Blood, bodily fluids, vines, and seeds poured over the face of the Hunter, whose expression had brightened at their clean strike. The machete wielder, staggering with a bolt lodged in their back, was also drenched in it.
The crossbowman saw the scene, spun around, and ran.
“Lee Changsu! Where are you going?!”
That stupid idiot, calling out their name. The crossbowman thought that even as they ignored the other two Hunters’ shouts and kept running.
Dohyeon watched the scene from the hill for a moment, loaded another bolt, and stood.
The reason Flower Hill’s flower field was dangerous was because it devoured anyone who entered it. It was fortunate that those people did not seem experienced. If they had been monsters specializing in Hunter Hunting, Dohyeon could not have shaken them off so easily.
“Hyah!”
The long-sword wielder and the machete wielder, who had somehow risen despite the bolt in their back, began fighting the approaching Flower Dolls.
They had more plant parts than animal parts, so they were slower than the one that had leaped earlier. But there were too many of them. Those Hunters would not hold out for long.
Dohyeon raised his loaded crossbow and aimed at Lee Changsu, the fleeing crossbowman. But he soon lowered it. Changsu had already gotten quite far away, and the surrounding shrubs blocked Dohyeon’s view.
Of course, lowering the crossbow did not mean Dohyeon intended to let them go.
After glancing once at the battle between the Flower Dolls and the Hunters, Dohyeon immediately turned and ran after the crossbowman. The relationship between pursuer and prey had reversed with remarkable ease. Before long, the two crossed the ridge and ran through the brush and shrubs on the other side.
The crossbowman, who had immediately begun running after turning around, noticed Dohyeon chasing them. While running, they fired their crossbow at Dohyeon without even aiming properly.
“Get lost, you bastard!”
Naturally, the bolt sailed far from its target. Dohyeon did not stop as it flew off into the distance. He kept his eyes fixed on the crossbowman, running at a fast, steady pace.
As the distance rapidly closed, the crossbowman looked back and met Dohyeon’s cold, unshaken gaze. Startled, they panicked, threw away their crossbow, and staggered.
They hurriedly tried to pull a knife as long as their forearm from their waist, then screamed as though pricked by a needle.
“Argh!”
It was not a needle, but a bolt. From five paces away, Dohyeon had fired his crossbow into the person’s back. Thanks to his precise aim and steady posture, the bolt sank deep.
As the crossbowman staggered from the hit, Dohyeon threw his crossbow to the ground, rushed forward, and drove his shoulder into the person’s waist. The brutal tackle knocked the crossbowman down with a single choked breath.
Still, they were apparently not a complete fool. Even as they fell under the tackle, their hand drew a knife. A broad Bowie knife lunged toward Dohyeon.
Dohyeon did not simply let himself be stabbed. He grabbed and twisted the person’s wrist and arm while pinning them down with his body. Despite the pain of the bolt wound, the crossbowman gritted their teeth and struggled against Dohyeon’s strength.
“Y-you fucking...”
You fired first, so why were you the one cursing? Even amid the urgency, Dohyeon had that calm thought as he put more strength into his twisting grip. He intended to make the person drop the knife first.
At that moment, a strange heat spread from Dohyeon’s left index finger through his entire body.
At the same time, there was a crunch, and the crossbowman’s forearm broke like a dry reed. No, it would be more accurate to say it had been pulverized.
“Argh!”
The sensation of his nervous system heating up and the sound of the other person’s shattered arm bones startled Dohyeon, but he did not stupidly waste the opportunity. He immediately grabbed the Bowie knife the person had dropped, reversed it, and drove it down.
The large blade buried itself to the guard in the crossbowman’s left shoulder.
“Ugh...”
With their right arm shattered and a knife embedded in their left shoulder, the crossbowman only moved their lips with a half-lost expression, perhaps from the pain.
Dohyeon eased the force pinning them down and sat upright. He raised his left hand. The ring tattoo on his index finger remained unchanged, and the heat he had felt moments ago was gone.
“...Fuck. We just... just had to collect the flowers... We were lying in wait for two days...”
“...”
The crossbowman stared blankly at the sky with unfocused eyes as they muttered. Dohyeon, still looking at his own finger, could roughly grasp the situation from those few words.
“What do you have to feel wronged about? If you play with someone else’s life, your own life becomes a toy too.”
“...Fuck... What are you? Just showing up out of nowhere...”
An enormous amount of information was posted on the Dungeon Integrated Board. Strategies for dungeon patterns, ways to avoid danger, methods for easily picking up items with high Vanaskelium reactivity, the dangers of anomalies, and more.
There were also countless posts about Flower Hill’s blue flowers.
Most were stories of people dying while trying to obtain those flowers. But some concerned Hunters who had acquired them long ago, or speculations about how they had done it.
Such posts generally led readers toward the conclusion that if they followed the rules and were careful enough, they might be able to acquire the flowers safely.
Whether that was true or not did not matter. The purpose of those posts was not to offer a strategy, but to make fools who believed them enter the flower field.
Ordinary Flower Dolls did not have them, but newly created Flower Dolls did. In other words, corpses that entered the flower field and sprouted new growth would bloom blue flowers roughly three or four times out of ten.
Other blue flowers bloomed deep within the flower field. But in this case, the Hunter became a Flower Doll at the edge of the field when entering it. That made it more likely that someone could obtain the blue flower without disturbing the field.
The woman who had found peace from Dohyeon’s bolt was probably someone who had been deceived, and these hopeless bastards were the baiters.
There had been many such baiters in the early days of the Odin Shock. There were still plenty now, but few people were fooled by Flower Hill’s blue flowers anymore.
Flower Hill was an old pattern, and aside from the flower field, it had no particular threats, so its strategies were well known. Was it fair to call the woman who had fallen for it stupid?
It was an empty question for someone already dead.
Then strength returned to the crossbowman’s half-lidded eyes. Even with a bolt lodged in their back and a large knife in their shoulder, the fire of their determination was admirable for a Hunter.
“You... you bastard... If you kill me, my friends will track you down to the bitter...”
But Dohyeon did not listen further. He drew a palm-length dagger from his waist and made one smooth, brushlike cut beneath the crossbowman’s chin.
“Ghk...”
As blood streamed from the crossbowman’s neck and their body trembled, Dohyeon wiped the blood from his dagger on the person’s clothes and stood.
They attacked first, yet acted as though they were the victims.
After that brief thought, Dohyeon sheathed his dagger and raised both hands with a puzzled expression. It was because of the heat he had felt earlier and the strength that had crushed the other person’s arm bones.
Having worked as a Hunter for a long time, Dohyeon’s physical abilities were already better than those of an ordinary person.
His physical abilities had grown slowly but steadily since he began entering dungeons in his late teens. He had not reached A-rank, but he was better than many of the unskilled B-rank Hunters around these days.
Still, what had happened earlier was strange. Even an ordinary person’s arm bones could not be crushed so easily. It had not merely been a joint being broken. The forearm bones themselves had been shattered.
“Yooou!”
Dohyeon sharply turned at the shout from behind him. The long-sword wielder and the machete wielder were charging toward him, yelling.
“Grrrgh!”
But aside from the bladed weapons in their hands, it was uncertain whether they could still be considered the same people as before.
Green vines and stems were slowly pushing out from their grotesquely twisted faces. A flower bud had already sprouted between the long-sword wielder’s nostrils.
“You... will... die!”
The two Hunters shouted in slurred voices and charged at Dohyeon.
Dohyeon drew his sheathed dagger again, lowered his stance, and swiftly pulled the Bowie knife from the crossbowman’s shoulder.
The blade gave a screech as it scraped against bone.
Dohyeon muttered.
“Let’s see who dies.”
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