Chapter 15: 15

I Returned as a God

Chapter 15 – I’m Kind of a Big Deal (3)

“So, is the god you follow by any chance…”

“He’s not just an edgelord middle schooler, so please drop it.”

Even though it was a name that I’d made up, I couldn’t deny that it sounded like something an edgy teen would come up with. Thinking about it now I felt embarrassed, but once a divine name is set, it cannot be changed.

‘Besides, there’s no other divine name that suits me better than this.’

Shong-shong, who had been perched on top of Choi Soo-hyun’s knees, jumped down onto the floor. As I watched him casually trot off to the back room, I began to think that a dog’s destiny was much better than a human’s.

“Anyways, it doesn’t really matter what the name is, but… If he’s the god of darkness and destruction, what exactly is he trying to destroy?”

A god’s divine name usually reflected their disposition. Of course, Choi Soo-hyun was aware of that.

“Everything.”

“What?”

“As I said, he will literally destroy everything.”

“Hey, you crazy bastard. Don’t say things like that with such a serious face.”

Choi Soo-hyun shook his head as if he was tired of listening to me. Even I thought that it was a bit much, but the truth was the truth.

“Don’t worry. He doesn’t have any intention of destroying the world or anything like that.”

“Just from your words, it sounds like he’s some kind of textbook villain? Now I get why that guy wouldn’t tell me the divine name no matter what I did. So, what is he going to do then?”

“If I’m being honest, I don’t really know the motivations behind why the other gods decided to participate in this game. All I know is that for the god that I follow, his reason is revenge.”

“Revenge? Against who?”

“Against those damn gods, of course.”

I shrugged my shoulders as if to ask why I even had to say such an obvious thing.

I’d laid out all the cards that I could play against Choi Soo-hyun. I would be extremely grateful if he chose to be on my side, but he wasn’t a person I could recklessly try and force to my side. 

After a long while, Choi Soo-hyun finished thinking it over and opened his mouth to speak.

“How long is this offer valid for?”

“Until you feel like following a different god. No matter what I offer here, right now, you would still be joining at a loss. However, there’s at least one thing I can tell you that is certain.”

“What’s that?”

“The god that I worship is not some idiot who would order suicide as evidence of faith.”

Choi Soo-hyun smiled bitterly at my response and drained the rest of his remaining soju.

* * *

* * *

My fingertips were twitching. I couldn’t feel any sensation.

The entire world seemed blurry. Splashes of bright red stained the black-and-white photograph of my vision.

My breaths came out in rasps as I gasped for air. My chest felt like it was burning, and I thought that I was going to go insane.

I felt like time was moving slowly… It was moving so slowly I’d lost my sense of reality.

‘Haah… Haah…’

As I lowered my head, the familiar face of a man appeared in my narrow field of vision. The man was alive, but his condition was so dire that he would’ve been better off dead.

At the sound of something gigantic collapsing, I suddenly woke up in a flash.

“Again…”

It was a dream similar to last time. 

I rubbed at my sunken eyelids and opened my eyes. My chest hurt as if something was pressing down on it.

Woof woof.

Shong-shong, who had climbed up on top of me, looked down at me and barked.

As I sat up, Shong-shong casually jumped off of me. The morning sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

I’d been having a lot of dreams lately. My head was throbbing in pain. My stomach didn’t feel well either because of the hangover. I stumbled as I got up from the sofa.

At some point after we finished talking, we decided to drink all of the remaining soju. It looked like I’d blacked out after that because I couldn’t remember what happened very well. 

Shong-shong, who’d been scurrying around on the floor, suddenly ran towards the staircase. I heard footsteps and felt his presence.

Choi Soo-hyun scooped up Shong-shong, who had rushed towards him as if begging to be picked up, and waved to me as he came down the stairs. 

“You up?”

“Yes. Somewhat. But aren’t you going to work today?”

“I’m using a vacation day because of the hangover. Anyways, do you want to eat something?”

“Will you be cooking it for me?”

“Ask your lover to do things like that for you, I’m going to get delivery.”

Choi Soo-hyun sat down on the sofa and fiddled with his phone.

“Then, can I get haejangguk?”

TL/N: haejangguk is a Korean hangover soup. It’s usually composed of cabbage, vegetables, and meat in a beef broth.

“Okay. I’ve gotta do something for a bit, so I’ll be upstairs. Let me know when the delivery arrives.”

“Alright.”

Choi Soo-hyun went upstairs. I lingered around and took the soju bottles from yesterday to the trash can.

I went into the bathroom and took a shower, and when I came out, the food delivery arrived. As soon as I put the takeout on top of the hardwood table that was in the living room, Choi Soo-hyun came back down from the 2nd floor.

Leaving me alone to open up the plastic containers one by one, Choi Soo-hyun went to the fridge and took out another bottle of soju and placed it on top of the table.

“Wow, are you really about to drink again? Didn’t you just say earlier that you had a hangover?”

“You’re actually supposed to get rid of a hangover by drinking more alcohol.”

“If you’re going to say that, you should just drink kaoliang wine. What’s with you and drinking soju like it’s water?”

TL/N: Kaoliang wine is wine with extremely high alcohol content (38-58%)

“It’s natural for Koreans to drink soju, you punk.”

“Do you even get drunk at this point?”

Choi Soo-hyun didn’t respond to my words and enjoyed his meal with his soju. As I was finishing up my food, I heard Choi Soo-hyun’s voice from where he was standing in the kitchen.

“You want some coffee?”

“If you’re offering.”

Choi Soo-hyun appeared with some coffee soon after I’d responded to him.

“Right. I have something I want to ask you.”

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“Park Si-woo of the Aria Guild.”

Choi Soo-hyun answered as if he’d read my mind as he set down his coffee.

This man… Was he a psychic instead of a Hunter?

Thankfully, it didn’t seem like he was capable of reading my thoughts. Did my face really reveal all of that? At my confusion, Choi Soo-hyun added:

“Don’t you need to join a guild?”

At Choi Soo-hyun’s words, I nodded my head.

For most Hunters, the god that they will follow is decided soon after they Awaken. Korea had a pretty good reputation despite its relatively small landmass and small number of Hunters, so quite a few famous gods had a few branch offices, if not a guild, stationed here.

Hunters that followed gods without a representative guild in Korea often had nowhere to go. In this case, there were two options.

One was to accept that you would be the odd one out and join the guild of a different god. The other was to affiliate yourself with a “third camp”.

If you resented being a minority, the solution was to join together with other minorities. Because of this, a third camp wouldn’t discriminate based on what god you worshiped.

Naturally, I had no desire to join a guild that was dedicated to worshiping a different  god, so what I needed was a guild of that type.

“Park Si-woo… I feel like I’ve heard that name somewhere before…”

“He’s the representative guy. There’s no one else who’s as much of a stickler as he is, but even though he’s the type who doesn’t know how to have fun in life, he’ll at least be able to accept someone like you.”

Choi Soo-hyun set down his finished coffee.

I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or not, but he said he would introduce me, so there was nothing to lose from my point of view.

He said that he’d gone into a dungeon, so it’d be about a week before I could contact him. It wasn’t an urgent matter or anything, so having to wait for that long didn’t bother me.

“Right. Do you maybe have any leftover weapons? A sword-type weapon would be great.”

“Excuse me? You’re really trying to bleed me dry, huh? When did I ever say that I’d be your sponsor?”

“Well, right now my role is to represent our god, and you know you can’t join us without my permission, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, get your threats out of the way.”

Choi Soo-hyun snorted as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A man who could go wherever he wanted if he put his mind to it had no reason to fear the representative of a third-rate god at best.

“I’ll put in a good word for you.”

“Obviously you will, don’t even bother saying that.”

I shut my mouth quickly at Choi Soo-hyun’s retort.

I tended to be able to read people pretty well. I wish he could keep his overinflated ego in check, but I knew that all his bragging was no bluff, so I couldn’t say anything else.

Choi Soo-hyun’s eyes met mine.

“What is it now?”

“You could tell?”

“If you need anything else, just tell me all of it right now. I don’t like having to do work twice.”

“Please recommend someone to me. A Hunter who has a lot of free time.”

“The only Hunters who have a lot of free time are guys like you. And you’re a special case.”

I didn’t try hard to deny Choi Soo-hyun’s words.

Choi Soo-hyun might think I was making a bad joke if I said it, but I thought he and I hit it off pretty well. Even though he talked like that, there was no way he didn’t know exactly what I wanted.

Choi Soo-hyun held the position of managing trainees in the Association. Even though he didn’t necessarily do any teaching himself, he had the right to access anything in the Association’s database.

“Someone who’s unaffiliated, but is also unable to give up their desire to be a Hunter. They should also be the type to move around from place to place and have no choice but to do work that undervalues their skills. Oh, and it would be even better if they had some sort of built-up grievances against society.”

At my response, Choi Soo-hyun gave me a look to say he was tired of my shit.

* * *

The lobby was still no different from a pile of garbage. The buildings made of wood looked like they’d been abandoned for at least a few decades. 

I remember at one point, I’d been to a village where everyone who’d lived there had died due to a deadly infectious disease.

A village that stood still, as if time itself had stopped.

The lobby that I was in right now felt exactly like that.

Giving up on cleaning it up, I went up onto the portal. 

[Would you like to challenge the 2nd Floor? You cannot return to the lobby until after you have cleared the floor.]

[Challenging the 2nd floor.]

[Sanctuary]

Floor Number: 2nd Floor

Goal: Protect the magic core for 3 hours.

Rewards: 2nd Floor Administrative Privileges

Yet again, I regained consciousness in a forest.

In the center of a vacant, open space, there was a blue crystal the size of an adult man floating in the air and emitting light.

There was a golden band around the crystal. Anyone could tell that this was the thing you had to protect. I placed my hand on top of the large magic core.

It was a gigantic magic rock made of condensed magical power.

I’d never seen anything like it. It was so big.

If it was a core at this level of magical power, it could probably be used to cast large-scale AoE magical spells.

It was something that anyone, not just monsters, would covet.

[Power Remaining: 100%]

[Time Remaining 2:59:30]

As soon as I put my hand on the magic core, a timer suddenly appeared in front of my eyes.

The leaves on the trees shook in the wind, and a couple crows took flight into the sky.

The ground shook as if there was an earthquake. After some time, a huge tree fell forward, and a troop of goblins holding axes appeared.

It wasn’t just one or two goblins that had appeared to take the magic core. And unlike the goblins that I’d seen on the 1st Floor, these goblins looked like they’d been well-trained.

If I had to describe them, these goblins were similar to the goblin troops I saw right after I’d first appeared at the Tower of Trials.

After taking over the Tower of Trials, I tried to summon the goblins that I saw at the tower’s entrance, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to summon them. And even if the summoning was successful, there was no guarantee that the monsters that I would have summoned would be the same as the monsters I’d seen at the tower’s entrance.

“Even though it’s regretful, I’ll just have to make do.”

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I drew the sword that Choi Soo-hyun gave me to show his support.

The goblins had burst out from the forest and were starting to show their faces one by one. At a glance, I could see more than ten of them.

At the signal of a goblin wearing a necklace made out of bones, all of them rushed in at once.

—-

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