WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Oblivious
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◈ The World Is Not a Game ◈
Chapter 2
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Hyeokjin’s sword swept straight across the exposed masses of dark red light.
The instant the blade cut through them, a chilling psychic wave struck him, ringing through his mind.
It was a vicious mental attack that mercilessly stimulated the part of the brain responsible for fear. But far from freezing in terror, Hyeokjin’s hand darted back and forth, ruthlessly hacking at the red eye.
Countless battles’ worth of experience, and drugs that dulled his brain’s senses.
Numbed by an expert’s precisely calculated treatment, his brain barely registered the incoming terror. Decades of combat experience swept away even the scraps of fear the drugs had left behind.
Kieaaaaargh!!!
Whether the red eye tried to flee or hide, the slashes doggedly followed it. Before long, it burst with a scream and a pop.
Glowing liquid spilled from the ruptured eye. The red fluid mixed with the black smoke billowing around it, then crumpled inward and crystallized into a solid mass.
After planting his practice sword in the sand, Hyeokjin reached down and picked up the thumb-sized black polyhedron that had fallen onto the white beach.
For a moment, he stared at the black stone in his palm.
“All for this pathetic little thing...”
Frowning, Hyeokjin clenched the stone in his hand.
A warp stone, the core that sustained this shadow world. A crystallized mass of warp energy, the miraculous power that twisted the physical laws of reality.
Simply breaking it could reopen the exit of a dungeon that had closed after exceeding its capacity. Taken outside, it became a valuable energy source used for all kinds of reagents and enchantments.
For one this size, the Closer Association’s official purchase price would be $500,000. On the black market, it would fetch at least $4 million.
Of course, that was far in the future. Right now, it was nothing more than a dull black lump of rock that nobody wanted.
‘How irritating.’
The irritation cut through even his drug-numbed emotions. He had avenged the dead, but he only felt worse.
To think that such an easy opponent, a mere C-rank dungeon boss, had killed humanity’s salvation.
Under the force of his furious grip, the warp stone began to crack with a creak, creak. Then it shattered with a sharp crack!
As the warp stone broke, the world began to tremble.
The ground and space itself shook violently. At the same time, a faint image of the real world appeared around the spot where the stone had broken.
The warp stone was the core that sustained this shadow world. With its core destroyed, the unreal world was collapsing, and the boundary with reality was drawing closer.
Before stepping toward the projected image of reality, Hyeokjin glanced once at the shriveled remains of hope lying far away on the sand. Then he bit his lip and strode without hesitation toward a cruel reality without hope.
...Someone who had traveled back in time was trying to change the future.
[Toward humanity’s extinction.]
Episode 0. The Summons
* * *
The moment he returned to reality, Hyeokjin took a deep breath out of habit.
Light, sweet air passed through his gas mask’s filter and filled his lungs. It was nothing like the heavy, stale air of the shadow world.
While Hyeokjin took his time breathing it in, the others began emerging behind him one after another.
They were men and women in their early twenties, wearing Armored Garb made for Closers in the form of stylish long coats. Unlike Hyeokjin, who remained on his feet, they were in poor condition.
“Goddamn it! Get the sedatives!”
Those who merely collapsed on the floor and vomited were among the better cases. Some had twisted limbs or severe wounds.
And every one of them was babbling incoherently, their faces contorted with terror.
As the medical personnel waiting in front of the dungeon rushed over to give the fallen young people emergency treatment, a white woman in her thirties wearing a white coat approached Hyeokjin. He stood alone as though nothing had happened. She gave him a slight bow.
“Thank you for your work, Mr. Road. The casualties...”
“Nobody died. A few were about to have seizures from shell shock, so I used a little force. The two over there with twisted limbs are damaged beyond use. The rest can all be made usable again if you include psychotropic drugs in their treatment.”
Replying in his usual flat voice, Hyeokjin walked past his adjutant toward the waiting medical support team.
He had taken C-rank Closers into an A- rank shadow world to give them experience. They had cleared it without a single death, but bringing those burdens along had left his body in a terrible state.
His body creaked, and several pieces of the bionic equipment implanted in it were malfunctioning.
He needed repairs quickly if he was going to keep his next scheduled appointment.
“Mr. Road.”
His adjutant quickly stepped into his path as he approached the medical team for maintenance.
The red lenses of his gas mask turned toward her, betraying no emotion at her sudden action. She held out the folder in her hands and spoke.
“This is an official notice from the Closer Association. It arrived five days ago.”
Hyeokjin took the folder she offered, opened it, and read the document inside.
It requested his attendance at an emergency meeting at the Closer Association in New York. The appointed time had been yesterday, so he was already late. And the subject of the meeting was...
“The discovery of an unprecedented special-class core dungeon.”
“Yes. An Air Hospital dispatched by the government is waiting outside. You should be able to receive your maintenance aboard it. I spoke with the Closer Association, and they said the matter was extremely urgent. They insist that you attend, even if you’re late. The government feels the same way.”
Hyeokjin remained motionless and silent for a while after his adjutant’s reply. Then he slowly turned his head toward her and spoke in his usual flat voice.
“Who will take charge here if I leave?”
“The A-rank Closers holding the Tucson area in Arizona: Ashen Cole, Miguel John, Vale Hanson, Mitchell Amora, and Kinley Hazel. Those five and their squad members. They’re on their way here now.”
“...Thirteen or fourteen will die every time the dungeon opens. All of them Closers ranked B or higher, too.”
His adjutant said nothing.
Her silence was agreement. Hyeokjin crumpled the sheet he held loosely in his hand, threw it to the floor, and resumed walking toward the iron door leading outside.
* * *
Closer.
The comparative adjective formed from the English word “close,” meaning near, or a word for someone who shuts something.
But in English dictionaries published by the British Linguistic Society from 2034 onward, the word carried a new definition.
“A general term for people who enter shadow worlds and retrieve warp stones, by-products, and other materials.”
Put more briefly, in terms that better reflected reality, it meant “a human permeated by warp energy who wields superhuman power.”
Dungeons were rifts leading into shadow worlds.
And warp energy flowed out of those dungeons.
Scholars disagreed about exactly when the gates into shadow worlds, commonly called dungeons, had first appeared on Earth. But they agreed on one thing: these spaces had not existed on Earth for very long.
Shadow worlds were not something that could be hidden simply because someone wanted to hide them.
Human historians generally agreed that if spatial rifts had existed in the past, humanity’s history would have been shaped by powerful people wielding warp energy, rather than by an Industrial Revolution driven by steam engines.
That was how extraordinary the warp energy flowing from those spatial rifts was.
Warp energy was the easiest energy source humanity had ever discovered to use.
Before its discovery, every energy source humans had found required equipment to harness.
But warp energy was different. It was a strange power that could accumulate inside the human body and be controlled by human will. People could wield it with their bare hands, without any equipment, and it was extraordinarily useful.
Used properly, warp energy could strengthen the human body and even slow aging. It could also be converted into other forms of energy to produce fire and electricity.
It was far more accessible than any other energy discovered so far, and its usefulness was almost absurd.
When warp energy was finally revealed to the general public, people went wild over its power.
Everyone went mad for its sweet rewards.
Multinational pharmaceutical companies rushed to announce that they would develop new drugs using warp energy. Their share prices soared.
Humanity’s brightest minds competed to explore the unknown territory of warp energy, and their work produced astonishing results.
Cancer was no longer difficult to treat. A hundred-year-old on the verge of death could be restored to the youth of someone in their thirties. Humanity’s maximum projected lifespan rose beyond three hundred years.
A world that should have belonged to the distant future had suddenly unfolded in just twenty years. There were frequent accidents and incidents as a result, but humanity was full of energy and optimism.
‘...Yes. We were so drunk on its sweetness that we realized far too late it was poison.’
Aboard the Air Hospitaller C-17 heavy transport heading toward the Closer Association, Hyeokjin silently looked down at Manhattan, New York, spread out beneath the aircraft’s window.
A city once called the capital of the world. Now, most of it was covered by strange shapes like translucent black bubbles.
That was the poison threatening humanity’s continued existence.
The shadow worlds, those miracles that had thrilled humanity, had begun breaking through their dungeon boundaries into reality. Now they were swallowing the real world instead.
‘It’s grown much larger than it was two years ago.’
Recalling his previous visit, Hyeokjin adjusted the apertures in his gas mask’s red lenses to magnify the view inside the translucent bubbles.
Enclosed by a translucent black veil, the city center had fallen into ruin without human care.
The image of a vast black forest lay over it like a hologram, and misshapen black shadows wandered through that desolate space.
‘There are quite a few A-rank monsters, too. At this scale, it must already be producing more than a dozen A+ rank dungeons every day.’
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