WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Seven-Time Hero Goes Live ◈
Chapter 39: Side Quest (3)
──────
After Jun-il accepted the Sub Quest.
“Hey...”
A sinister voice echoed through Fairy Corporation’s monitoring room.
“...”
Gulp.
Sam could only break out in a cold sweat. He could not answer.
‘What? Why... How...?’
Why had the elf’s Sub Quest reacted to Yulian?
They were supposed to hear Kang Hae-il’s story and give it to him because he was the right candidate!
“You said Sub Quests would never get stolen.”
“It’s not like this is the only one...?”
“You said they would absolutely never get stolen?”
“I-I never said not a single one would get stolen...”
Hah?
“Kihihihi!?”
Ram laughed.
When someone got too angry, they laughed.
If Sam had not saved her from turning evil twice already, she would have fired him by now.
“Lady Ram, the overall plan is still intact...”
“There’s a saying in a dimension we bought.”
“?”
Swish.
Ram pulled something out.
It was a long, silver rod.
“Is that the saying?”
“No, this is called a golf club.”
“Then the saying is...?”
“Everyone has a plan.”
“Come on. Not everyone does. You hardly ever make plans yourself, Lady Ram...”
Whoosh!
Ram’s golf club bent like a bow.
“Until they get punched in the mouth!!!”
Thwack!!
* * *
Thwack!
Jun-il’s fist slammed into the man’s jaw.
“!?”
The man’s neck whipped around, taking his upper body with it.
The impact was enough to spin him once in midair.
“Urgh...!”
Blood sprayed out with the sound of his breath catching.
[Spring Flower Shalala Effect]
Amid beautiful light and scattering flower petals.
Thud.
The man crashed to the ground.
- What the fuck is that effect LMAO
- So satisfying!
- LMAO He got hit so beautifully?
- Whoa LMAO
- The situation is brutal, but the effect is from a rom-com?
- He went easy on him LMAO There should be a hole in his head.
- He didn’t use mana LMAO
The Constellations were right.
Jun-il had gone easy on him.
The man could not die yet.
Grab.
Jun-il seized the man by the collar and hauled him up.
“You.”
“Y-yes!?”
The man had suddenly become extremely polite.
One punch had cleared his head.
“Do you believe Rank is just a number now, or not?”
“I-I believe you!”
- He was talking about F-rank earlier LMAO
- A manners-teaching punch, damn.
- Is this really that important? LMAO
- Immediately believed him LMAO
The man had definitely been taught a lesson.
His pronunciation was a little slurred, though. His jaw was badly broken.
“You’re a Necromancer, right?”
“N-no...”
“What do you mean, no? Your face screams Necromancer, you bastard.”
“Th-there’s no such thing...”
- LMAOOOOOO
- LMAO Face-reading.
- Face-reading deduction, damn.
- Holy shit LMAO
- He does look a little like a skeleton.
“So, can you see what this is?”
Jun-il pointed at the spirit.
“...?”
The man could not answer.
He could not see it.
Bzzzzzz!
Even though the spirit was moving with all its might.
“You can’t see it, right?”
“...”
The spirit the elf had lent him was Lumion, the lowest-ranked kind of light spirit.
They only revealed themselves to beings they permitted to see them.
It was not that Necromancers could not see them.
But Jun-il said it for the Constellations’ sake.
That way, it would look like he had more or less deduced something.
“So doesn’t that obviously make you suspicious? Why can’t you see this, huh?”
“Th-there’s no way I can...”
“Because you’re a bad bastard, that’s why!”
Thwack!
Jun-il immediately kicked him in the shin.
The man’s legs folded neatly beneath him.
It looked like something had broken.
He cried out in considerable pain.
“Aaaaaagh! Y-you’re right!”
- Holy shit LMAOOOOOO
- LMAOOOOO
- Ah LMAO
- Little Mermaid kick LMAO
- Agreed. He’s probably a Necromancer. He looks like a skeleton, right?
“You’ve got more friends, don’t you? Huh? Where are they?”
“Huh? N-no...”
“10.”
“T-ten?”
“9.”
“!”
Jun-il abruptly began counting.
He was almost certain now.
Not only was this guy a Necromancer, there was more than one of them.
‘He mentioned strange men earlier.’
He had been talking about himself.
Jun-il knew because he had beaten plenty of bad people to death back when he was a Hero.
He knew their verbal habits when they were anxious or pretending to be calm.
They casually let slip things about themselves.
They kept casually talking about what they should hide most.
People were naturally like that when they were anxious.
They wanted to keep talking about themselves and receive reassurance from the other person.
‘I can see it all.’
He did not even need to deduce anything.
A quick look at their faces was enough.
After reading two hundred volumes of Detective Conan, you might not know the trick, but you could identify the culprit just by looking at their face.
Seven runs of Hero work and thirty years of life amounted to thousands of comic-book volumes.
‘Bad guys have a different art style from the start.’
He did not know what they had done or how.
Still, he could roughly recognize the faces of villains set up in Fairy Corporation’s world.
Conan needed evidence, but Yulian only needed to know the culprit.
“6.”
“A-are you my boss? Wh-why are you counting...?”
- LMAOOOOOO
- Just starts counting LMAO
- ???: The truth is just a number.
- What kind of countdown is this LMAO
- This is terrifying LMAO
- And the BGM is still creepy as hell, so it’s even scarier LMAO
The man’s face filled with terror.
He could not hear the BGM.
He just felt like this was the final countdown of his life.
“5.”
“I-I’ll tell you! B-but!”
The man raised both hands and begged.
He said he would talk.
“I-I know... It hurts... I-I can’t talk because it hurts!”
He could not speak because it hurt?
The Earth still turned.
“4.”
“M-me! W-we! We!”
“3.”
Spring!
The man with the broken leg miraculously stood up.
- Holy shit LMAOOOOOO
- LMAO
- Jesus Christ!
- He can stand after that?
“W-we...!”
“2.”
Crack!
He reset his own jaw and shouted with perfect pronunciation.
“T-there! Over there! There’s a cave where our people stay if you go that way! That’s our hideout, boss!”
“Mm. Lead the way.”
Jun-il nodded.
“Yes!”
- No, LMAOOOOOO
- Healing magic that only requires counting numbers, damn.
- Nice.
- He fixed his jaw too LMAO
- That leadership is insane.
- This guy is really just a college student...?
* * *
“Th-this is it.”
“Yeah?”
The man pointed to a cave.
‘That was originally a Goblin den.’
It looked like the Goblins had dug out that cave.
The Necromancers seemed to have killed them and moved in.
‘Judging by the traces... Around fifteen?’
Now that Jun-il was this close, he could sense quite a lot of demonic energy.
More importantly, the spirit beside him was busily moving around and drawing some kind of pattern.
Piiing~ Piiing~!
It was easy to make further guesses.
The Constellations were uncomfortable with the gloomy, damp atmosphere.
- Whoa, what is this place???
- Why are Dark Mages always like this?
- There really are all kinds of weirdos.
- But if they survived after reaching Level 10, they probably aren’t normal people.
- Fuck, there are more than ten of them???
Perhaps the Constellations also found this place’s sinister energy unpleasant, because they were all making wild guesses.
What Jun-il found strangest here was the number.
Not the kind of number Hae-il talked about. An actual number.
‘If even the Constellations say there are more than ten, then there really are.’
Why were there so many?
Jun-il asked the man beside him.
“Necromancer is not exactly a common Class. How did so many of you gather here?”
“There was... something like an open chatroom. Necromancers have... um, our own circumstances.”
- Fucking LMAOOOOOO
- Necromancers in an open chatroom, holy shit LMAO
- LMAO
- They gathered more adorably than I expected LMAO
People involved in unpleasant magic always gathered among themselves to plot things.
Apparently, it was the same here.
The only difference was that they had gathered through an open chatroom, the modern way.
‘No, isn’t that more dangerous?’
Compared to sending letters back and forth in caves, this was far too advanced.
“Are your circumstances killing people and making corpses?”
“I-I... I had no choice! At first, we just gathered as Necromancers! We got drawn in by the thought, ‘Then we’re a legion’... But the leader here is a c-crazy bastard...”
Then it happened.
Was it because he was about to reveal something?
Whoosh!
His body suddenly caught fire.
“Aaaaaaagh!”
- Gasp.
- Damn.
- Huh?
- Gasp.
- Huh???
- Holy shit.
The Constellations looked extremely startled.
Jun-il only took a step back.
He observed the surroundings more closely.
Because he knew what this was.
‘They even carved a mark into him.’
A Mark of Silence.
It activated when someone tried to reveal certain information to an outsider.
“What, what is this?! Aaaaagh! W-what did you do to me!?”
But judging from the man’s reaction, he did not seem to know that he had been marked.
‘Did you get it thinking it was a fashion tattoo?’
Jun-il scoffed at him.
It was obvious that they had come all the way into a cave to indulge in delusions of building a legion, carving marks into one another to feel a sense of belonging.
‘But who is it? Who is already this organized?’
The victims were pathetic, but whoever had designed this was no ordinary person.
At this level, Jun-il wondered if this was really how adaptable modern humans were.
Most people in South Korea had probably never killed anyone.
Yet these Necromancers had formed an organization, carved marks into one another, and procured corpses?
‘Is their leader not from here?’
Had this Necromancers’ leader crossed over from somewhere else, like the elf?
Then it happened.
“You dare set foot in the forbidden zone!”
Figures in black robes emerged one by one from all around, their voices ringing out.
“And you even burned one of our brothers!? Who the hell are you?”
Clatter.
A considerable number of skeletons stood beside them.
They were all skeletal soldiers holding weapons and shields in both hands.
Jun-il gauged their number.
‘There are too many.’
There were too many to win by charging through head-on.
His side would suffer heavy losses as well.
‘And I still haven’t completed the quest.’
He needed to find the source of the demonic energy.
But he could not even get near it.
He needed to approach this more cleverly.
Sometimes idiots like Yulian during his first run gained power and tried to solve everything with force.
But the basics of war were deception and strategy.
“N-no! It wasn’t me!? I-I didn’t burn him! He suddenly caught fire on his own... Like malicious commenters...”
- ?
- ??
- Holy shit LMAOOOOOO
- Fuck LMAO
- But that really is true LMAO
- Fact: It is.
“What?! What the hell are you talking about? Does a person just catch fire by themself!?”
Jun-il casually looked at the wrist of the man waving his staff through the air in agitation.
He saw the mark.
‘The mark...’
He did not seem to be the leader.
The leader was still hiding somewhere.
‘I need to infiltrate them. First, I have to get out of this crisis...’
He had to prove that he had not burned the man to death.
How was he supposed to do that?
At times like this, he had an ability that was practically a cheat code.
“No, I don’t have an ability like that!”
Jun-il activated the only skill this world had granted him.
Ding!
[F]
F-rank coming-out!
“...?”
“F-F?”
“Huh...?”
“Wow. How can someone be F...”
“What a pity.”
“Merciful Avalokiteshvara...”
Everyone fell solemn at the sight of the letter F.
- Ah.
- Gasp.
- LMAOOOOOO
- Holy shit LMAO
- A Rank that even Necromancers fall solemn over...
- Fuck LMAO
- It’s treated like baldness, damn.
Before the overwhelming presence of F-rank, they could no longer suspect Jun-il.
“Fine, then. Why are you here?”
“I’m a porter. This gentleman asked me to carry some things for him, so I came. Then he suddenly caught fire, and it startled me.”
Starting from his fifth run as a Hero, Yulian had made it standard practice to deceive people before fighting them.
His acting skills were first-rate.
Those who had only just encountered this situation could not possibly see through him.
His innocent eyes and trembling voice.
He looked entirely sincere.
“Carry things?”
“I think... um, it was probably corpses.”
Necromancers often needed to transport corpses.
But they lacked the strength, so they usually used zombie-type summons to do the work for them.
There were none in sight right now.
‘They’ll probably need someone.’
The Necromancers looked at each other and nodded.
“Mm...”
“What do you think?”
“It makes sense.”
“I see.”
The one who seemed to be their leader pointed at the corpse of the man who had burned to death.
“Really? Then start by carrying that corpse. Let’s see how well you can lift things when you’re F-rank.”
Jun-il nodded, lifted the man’s corpse, and put it into his Inventory.
Whoosh.
“I’m not the strong type of porter... I have a skill like this. I can store things this way and take them out whenever I need them.”
It would be exactly the sort of skill Necromancers needed.
“...Oh?”
“Th-this is...”
“What? It’s perfect for us.”
“Should we use him instead of making zombies?”
“We should.”
The Necromancers had planned to kill him and turn him into a zombie if he had been a strong porter.
They gathered together, nodded among themselves for a moment, then spoke to Jun-il.
“Good. Now I understand why he brought you here. Follow us inside, porter. You have plenty to do.”
Footnotes:
“F-rank coming-out” recreates a Korean joke that treats revealing an F-rank as a dramatic public disclosure. “Merciful Avalokiteshvara” is a Buddhist invocation used here as an exaggerated expression of dismay.
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