WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Oblivious
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The World Is Not a Game ◈
Chapter 3
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Hyeokjin lightly smacked his lips as he watched the unreal horrors roaming the city center, now empty of people.
Goddamn monsters. They were far stronger than an unarmed human, but killing them was easy.
A single press of a missile launch button would wipe them out cleanly.
The problem was that even after they were killed, more would tear through space and emerge when the time came.
To stop that, the shadow worlds where those monsters formed had to be destroyed... But with this many shadow worlds spreading, they could barely hold back the flood of monsters, let alone clear the worlds away.
“We will arrive at our destination in one minute. Please fasten your seat belts.”
Hyeokjin had been unconsciously calculating how many Closers must be dying to defend this place. The announcement overhead brought him out of his thoughts.
Right. There was no point talking about the sacrifices needed to hold this place anyway.
This was the public symbol of the Closers. Even if dozens or hundreds died here every day, they would never abandon it, if only to keep up public morale.
Following the announcement, Hyeokjin settled back into his seat and fastened his seat belt.
Whiiiiiiine!
Before long, the aircraft rapidly lost altitude, then touched down on the runway with a shudder.
Hyeokjin unfastened his seat belt, stood, and briefly checked the bionic equipment inside his body. As he did, the transport’s rear door opened, and a group came aboard.
There were seven of them, all wearing armored gear designed for Closers. The woman at the front offered Hyeokjin her hand with a strangely awkward smile.
“Welcome to the Closer Association, Mr. Road. I’m Gina Han.”
The East Asian woman offering him a handshake was in her twenties.
Her Northeast Asian features were quite attractive, but the small scars on her face, her closely cropped hair, and the mechanical bionic eye embedded in her left socket made her look less like a person than one of the chilling killing machines from The Terminator.
Looking at her, Hyeokjin suddenly remembered the fresh-faced rookie Closer who had entered a dungeon with him six years ago to gain experience.
“You look completely different from six years ago.”
“...You remembered me.”
“I don’t forget faces easily. Especially when the person’s Korean.”
Hyeokjin nodded lightly at Gina’s surprised response and shook her hand. Then he stepped out of the aircraft and climbed into the transport cart waiting outside.
Gina Han immediately took the driver’s seat and steered toward the Closer Association.
As they traveled toward the Association, Hyeokjin casually surveyed the surroundings and asked Gina, who was seated in front of him, a question.
“Have the S-ranks from the other countries arrived too?”
“Yes. All seventeen existing S-rank Closers have gathered at the Association.”
Several other aircraft were parked on the Closer headquarters’ private airstrip alongside the Association’s plain white transport.
As Gina nodded and answered, Hyeokjin frowned slightly at the aircraft, lavishly decorated in designs that looked straight out of a superhero cartoon.
‘...I’ll never get used to those.’
They were the private aircraft of S-rank Closers. Their decorations were not chosen by the Closers themselves. The governments of their respective countries arranged them.
Being a Closer had now become a profession that stopped the spread of shadow worlds, making it essential to humanity’s survival, yet its death rate was higher than that of death-row inmates.
It was only natural that people avoided it, no matter how much it paid.
Governments around the world had worked to overcome that reluctance. Those garish aircraft were just one of their many efforts.
Superheroes.
That was another name for S-rank Closers.
A threat spreading with every passing moment, and humans with superhuman abilities who stood against it.
Seen that way, Closers resembled cartoon heroes.
Focusing on that resemblance, governments around the world had begun packaging S-rank Closers as cartoon superheroes more than a decade ago.
They presented them as heroes, producing and selling all kinds of merchandise and animated shows. At the same time, they tempted people who still didn’t know any better with displays of the Closers’ superhuman abilities and achievements, along with their carefully staged, glamorous lives.
Thanks to that, naive young kids admired Closers, the superhuman heroes who existed in the real world.
‘...But cartoon heroes and real Closers are clearly different.’
Remembering the two rookies he had disposed of with his own hands in the dungeon before coming here, Hyeokjin tilted his head back and looked up at the cart’s roof.
Cartoon heroes could endure any cruel ordeal thrown at them. Real Closers were not superhumans capable of surviving those trials.
They were merely ordinary people who had acquired unusual and powerful weapons: special abilities born from warp energy.
There was no way such ordinary people could withstand the horrors they encountered in shadow worlds, an extreme environment more stressful than a battlefield filled with bullets and artillery fire.
Of those who became Closers, 40 percent died in shadow worlds before completing their eight years of mandatory service. Another 40 percent suffered from an overwhelming fear of death and extreme stress until they became addicted to the government-issued combat stimulant known as the warp drug. Fifteen percent gritted their teeth and endured, only to retire the moment their mandatory service ended, have their abilities sealed, and be thrown back into society with lasting trauma.
Most of them then suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder and ended up as vagrants on the streets.
Dying in desperate combat.
Driven mad by extreme stress.
Or drowning in drugs to forget their fear.
That was life for 95 percent of active Closers.
The problem was incomparably worse than the issues once faced by American military veterans. One might have expected civic groups to raise objections, but for more than a decade, it had all been forcibly covered up in the name of humanity’s survival.
Even those government efforts, however, were slowly reaching their limit.
They couldn’t put it off any longer.
They had to break this vicious cycle... or fail to break it and collapse themselves.
Reminding himself once more why he had come, Hyeokjin slowly closed his eyes.
* * *
The World Closer Association building stood on the waterfront in Brooklyn, New York.
Built during a time when the products of shadow worlds had brought humanity overflowing prosperity, the Association building covered an area dozens of times the size of a soccer field. Its shape was highly unusual.
It looked as though a child had piled up disc-shaped toy blocks at random.
It was so twisted and asymmetrical that even someone who knew nothing about architecture could tell at a glance that a building constructed that way would soon collapse.
Its shape was clearly impossible by ordinary engineering standards, but the warp energy applied to the building transcended the laws of physics, allowing the abnormal structure to remain standing in the real world.
‘It wasn’t this bad even two years ago...’
Following Gina Han, Hyeokjin quietly surveyed the Association building.
The building symbolized the Closers who plunged into the unknown spaces called shadow worlds. Once, it had been packed with tens of thousands of Closers from around the globe and more than a hundred thousand tourists who had come to see the world’s first building constructed using warp energy.
Now, however, most of the enormous building stood empty. A tense silence filled it, like an armistice line on the brink of war.
It hadn’t been this bad on his last visit. Now the building was so empty that it felt bleak and eerie.
“Here we are, Mr. Road.”
“Mm.”
After passing through the silent corridors, Hyeokjin followed Gina Han’s guidance and opened the door to the conference room on the Association’s top floor.
The moment he opened it, pressure poured through the gap like a blast of scorching air. It was an unnatural presence born from the unknown energy called warp.
Gina Han’s legs buckled under that overwhelming presence. Hyeokjin gestured for her to leave, then went inside.
He closed the conference room door behind him and surveyed the people seated around the long table.
Seventeen people watched him enter. The S-rank Closers, the pinnacle of humanity, those called true superhumans, had been waiting for him.
“Long time no see, Mr. Vanilla. Has it been almost a year?”
Enduring the burning gazes and the oppressive force bearing down on his body, Hyeokjin sat in an empty chair at the table. Across from him, a beautiful Slavic woman with a short black bob gave him a playful smile and waved.
Nikki Malkova.
She was an S-rank Closer who was on friendly terms with Hyeokjin.
Hyeokjin returned Nikki’s greeting with a slight bow of his head.
Because his surname was Gil, most people called him Mr. Road. Among the small handful of top-level Closers who knew him, however, he was often called Vanilla instead.
The nickname meant a completely ordinary person, neither particularly good nor particularly bad at anything.
Five methods of handling warp energy had been discovered in the ruins of shadow worlds. In the assessment that measured aptitude for those five methods, Hyeokjin had shown exceptional A+-rank talent in every area, each a one-in-five-hundred-thousand gift. He was far from ordinary, but the S-rank Closers gathered here stood at humanity’s peak, with talents found in only one person out of several hundred million.
Compared with theirs, his abilities could only seem ordinary.
As Hyeokjin and Nikki exchanged greetings, a brown-skinned Indo-Aryan man spoke. He had been resting his chin on the back of his hand, watching Hyeokjin’s arrival with a sullen expression. Now his brow creased slightly.
“Who is that? Judging by the warp aura coming off his body, he doesn’t seem to be an S-rank Closer... Why don’t you take off that unpleasant-looking gas mask and show us your face? I’d say that’s only polite to people who’ve spent two days waiting for you.”
Before Hyeokjin could answer the man’s oddly sharp question, Nikki shrugged and spoke.
“Cut him some slack. That old guy’s had most of his body replaced with special bionic devices, so he needs a ridiculous amount of oxygen. He can’t breathe properly without respiratory support.”
“...Ha. Hahaha. He doesn’t have enough oxygen to run his prosthetics?”
The man who had questioned Hyeokjin stared blankly for a moment at Nikki’s answer, then let out a hollow laugh of disbelief.
Footnotes:
“Gil,” Hyeokjin’s surname, also means “road” in Korean, hence “Mr. Road.”
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