WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Max-Level Swordsman of Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 1
──────
There was an online game called Chrome Blade Saga.
It was set in a fusionpunk world where neon-lit night streets and enhanced cybernetic bodies mixed with guns and magic.
One day, roughly 200,000 players who enjoyed the game were abducted into its world. Kang Doseok was one of them.
Ten years had passed since then.
* * *
The Blackdog Gang’s office was empty. Kang Doseok leaned back on a black reclining sofa.
It was quiet outside.
He had deliberately avoided setting off an alarm. If he waited here, his target would come up on his own. The information he’d received beforehand covered that much of the man’s movements.
While he waited, Kang Doseok took his terminal out of his jacket. When he turned on the screen, a new notification appeared at the top.
[Reminder.]
[This is day 3,649 since your first entry.]
[Last entry: 1,532 days ago.]
[Would you like to create a new entry?]
Kang Doseok looked down at the screen for a moment.
“...Has it been that long already?”
He had no intention of writing a new entry now. He’d given that up a long time ago. Instead, he tapped the bottom of the notification window. Records he’d long forgotten appeared on the screen.
[Day 2 after the transfer.
It still doesn’t feel real. Yesterday, I was at a PC gaming cafe. Today, I woke up in an unfamiliar alley. My younger siblings have gone quiet. They all look like they have no idea what’s happening. I have to keep it together, even if no one else can. I’m the eldest son.]
.
.
.
[Day 26 after the transfer.
I got stabbed. At first, I didn’t even feel the pain. Then I looked down and saw blood pouring out. I passed out once, too. I barely managed to escape, but my body won’t do what I tell it to. I might die like this. It’ll be a miracle if I survive.]
.
.
.
[Day 104 after the transfer.
I killed someone again today. It was kill or be killed. It wasn’t even my first time, but my hands were shaking.]
.
.
.
[Day 163 after the transfer.
My hands didn’t shake today. I can’t really remember the dead guy’s face, either. I just stabbed him, the blade sank right in, and blood sprayed out. Afterward, I searched his pockets. Found a little money. At least I won’t have to go hungry for a while.]
.
.
.
[Day 226 after the transfer.
Cheolho died yesterday. Some fucking thugs were chasing us. Cheolho tried to stand in their way to protect me and got shot. I can still hear those screams from before Cheolho died.]
.
.
.
[Day 734 after the transfer.
I’m starting to get tired of this. Why do I have to stay here killing people? I want to go home.]
“...”
Kang Doseok silently stared at the old sentences, then turned off the screen. There were still plenty of entries left, but he had no desire to read any further.
“Was this ten years ago, too?”
Just as he muttered those words, the office door swung open with a bang.
“What the hell? Who’s this bastard?”
The man who entered narrowed his eyes. Kang Doseok turned his head slightly to look at him.
A mechanical eye glowing red. A thick neck. A knife scar across his cheek. He looked exactly like his photograph. This was Beckman, the Blackdog Gang boss Kang Doseok had come to find for the job.
Kang Doseok spoke.
“You’re here.”
“Who the hell are you?”
Beckman narrowed his eyes. His gaze shifted to the chair Kang Doseok was sitting in. It was his usual seat.
“What kind of bastard sits in my chair?”
“Boss. What’s going on?”
Men followed him inside, one after another. Six in total. The large men lined up behind Beckman. Every one of them had thick arms and a vicious face.
They stared in disbelief at Kang Doseok sitting in their boss’s chair.
“Is he a guest of yours, boss?”
“Would a guest be sitting in my chair?”
“Then who the hell is he?”
“I don’t know either.”
Beckman asked, “Who are you?”
“My name is Kang Doseok.”
“Kang what?”
“Kang Doseok. I’m a fixer. Pay me, and I’ll do anything from blackmail and intimidation to debt collection and contract killing.”
“...”
“For the record, I don’t deal with junkies.”
“What an unbelievable bastard. Who asked you to introduce yourself?”
Still leaning back in the recliner, Kang Doseok looked at Beckman.
Beckman rubbed his chin as if thinking for a moment. The knife scar across his cheek twitched with the muscles of his face.
“...A fixer. Why would some bastard who calls himself a fixer come looking for me...?”
Beckman glanced at the old terminal on the desk, then looked down at Kang Doseok again.
“I’ve got no idea why you’re here. I’ve committed quite a few sins.”
“Last week, you stole an insurance company’s list of high-value policyholders.”
Kang Doseok had accepted a job from an insurance company.
They would pay him to recover something stolen from them. A fairly common sort of job.
From Kang Doseok’s point of view, there was no reason to turn it down. It was a profitable job with a decent payout.
“Oh, that? I found some dirt on a dumb corporate lackey and did a little blackmailing. I didn’t think they’d actually bring it to me. Thought they were just some bottom-level employee. Anyway.”
Beckman nodded as if he finally understood. Then he asked, “So you’ve come to kill me over that?”
“If I have to.”
“How much are they paying you?”
“One billion relic.”
“One billion... Unbelievable.”
Beckman let out a short sigh. Disbelieving chuckles came from the big men behind him.
“You crawled all the way in here just for that?”
“Yeah. Is there a problem?”
Still sitting in the chair, Kang Doseok tilted his chin.
“A billion to kill one ordinary gang boss is plenty.”
“...Ordinary gang boss, my fucking ass...”
Beckman’s face twisted into a vicious scowl.
“Do I look like some small-time punk shaking people down in an alley? We’ve got a firm grip on three lines in Sector F. We break into insurance networks to blackmail VIPs, and we even strip the organs out of corpses on the street and turn them into cash. The money tied up with us alone runs into billions of relic. And you barge into our place for a measly billion?”
“You keep busy. That hardworking attitude is admirable. Quite an example to follow, apart from your lack of self-awareness.”
“...”
The knife scar on Beckman’s cheek twitched.
Kang Doseok continued.
“But in the end, you’re just a guy who blackmails people and picks organs out of corpses to sell, aren’t you? A billion relic is a generous price. Unless you’ve got gold plating on your neck?”
Beckman’s expression slowly hardened.
He glared at Kang Doseok, then tapped his temple with a finger.
Tap. Tap.
“No gold plating. But I’ve got something more expensive stuck in my skull. That list of high-value policyholders you want? There’s plenty of stuff like that in here.”
The corner of Beckman’s mouth twisted upward.
“But what a shame. I have no intention of handing it over. If you want the data, you’ll have to cut off my whole head and take it with you.”
Beckman drew a pistol from inside his coat. His finger slowly slipped inside the trigger guard.
“This is my office. Counting the boys outside, there are more than thirty of us here. And you still want to take me on?”
“Don’t see why not.”
“I see.”
The smile vanished from Beckman’s face.
“Shoot!” he shouted.
The big men raised their guns in unison.
Kang Doseok looked ahead.
He’d spent ten years using a blade.
Dealing with men carrying guns wasn’t particularly difficult anymore.
Boom! Kang Doseok kicked the desk. The heavy metal desk slid forward, blocking the gun barrels. Ratatat! Gunfire erupted.
Bullets hammered the desktop, sending splinters of wood and fragments of metal flying everywhere.
Kang Doseok sprang out of the chair. The instant his blade left its sheath, he swept his sword sideways.
The blade cut straight through the desk and sliced open the bellies of the two men closest to him. Before blood could spurt out, Kang Doseok thrust his sword at the next man. He pierced the man’s throat, then used the force of pulling his sword free to turn and cut through two more necks in succession.
Shraaaak!
Blood sprayed through the air. Before the droplets could hit the floor, Kang Doseok took another step.
The last big man was a moment too late in turning his gun. The blade passed through his neck. His head slid off his shoulders and fell to the floor.
Without stopping, Kang Doseok closed in on Beckman. He swung his sword, and with a shraak! the forearm holding the pistol was cut clean off. The severed hand rolled across the floor, still clutching the trigger.
“Aaaaargh!”
Kang Doseok’s blade traced another half circle. Shhk! Beckman’s right leg came off. Thud! He lost his balance and crashed to the floor.
By the time Beckman blinked, Kang Doseok already had him by the hair with his left hand. The sword in his right was pressed against Beckman’s neck.
Beckman’s gaze wavered.
“W-wait!”
Skrch. The tip of the blade made a shallow cut across his Adam’s apple. Blood spread beneath it. He gulped and hurriedly opened his mouth.
“Spare me, please! I’ll take out the data chip...”
Kang Doseok lowered his head.
“No.”
The next instant, the blade swept across. Blood spouted like a fountain from Beckman’s severed neck. Krrrk. A moment later, his body jerked and collapsed into the pooling blood.
“...”
In the silence, Kang Doseok looked down at the floor for a moment.
The headless body twitched slowly in the pool of blood. The severed forearm lay beneath a desk leg, and the fingers holding the pistol still hadn’t released the trigger.
Kang Doseok wiped the blood off his sword on Beckman’s coat.
Then he searched the corpse’s pockets.
A piece of outdated cyberware. A mechanical eyeball that wasn’t even worth scrap. Several unidentified data chips. A few crumpled banknotes.
“Anything worth money?”
Kang Doseok tossed the bloodstained objects onto the floor, one by one.
“...Hmm.”
Then a question suddenly occurred to him.
Come to think of it, he’d just killed seven gang members.
From the noise outside, it sounded like the others had heard the gunshots and were gathering.
Even in a situation like this, he was calmly searching a bloodstained corpse’s pockets. For a moment, that version of himself felt strangely unfamiliar.
‘When did I become like this?’
He couldn’t quite remember.
He remembered his hands shaking the first time he killed someone.
He remembered searching a dead man’s pockets so he wouldn’t starve, and learning that getting shot hurt far more than he’d expected.
He remembered rushing out to find money for medicine when his youngest sibling developed a fever. He remembered how the money he’d found turned out to be counterfeit, leaving him unable to buy the medicine after all.
He remembered risking his life to storm a gang’s office when his second-born sibling was taken hostage. He remembered failing to save them in the end.
He didn’t remember every moment, but he remembered most of the major events.
Yet he couldn’t quite remember when killing people had stopped bothering him.
Kang Doseok flicked the blood off the tip of his sword. Red droplets spattered the floor.
Footsteps and shouts mingled outside.
“...Well, does it matter?”
Now that he thought about it, it wasn’t all that important.
So Kang Doseok decided to simply make sure he took the head with him.
A little later.
Kang Doseok emerged from the building covered in blood, Beckman’s head in his hand.
Tap, tap. He walked up to a black sedan and searched his pockets.
Beep-beep! The lights flashed twice, and the locks released with a clack.
Kang Doseok opened the door, got in, and carelessly tossed Beckman’s head onto the passenger seat. Blood-soaked hair hung limply across the seat.
He pressed the accelerator, and the car slid into the darkness. Neon signs stretched into long streaks beyond the dark windows.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried