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Chapter 13 - I’m Kind of a Big Deal (1)
I did think the way I was being treated by the interrogators was a little strange. It looked like Choi Soo-hyun must have had a hand in it.
“I had a nice talk with the higher-ups. Fortunately, you being unaffiliated means that you could not have had a plausible reason to kill the other members of your team.”
“So, have there been cases where Hunters of different affiliations commit murder in dungeons?”
“Why do you think there wouldn’t be?”
This time, I kept my mouth shut.
Just because there were dungeons and monsters in this world didn’t mean that the selfishness of humans had disappeared.
If I thought about it, it was truly a stupid question. A situation that might be a terrible nightmare for someone might be someone else’s dream come true, a great opportunity. These opportunities weren’t fair for everyone.
If you have an enemy, then you just have to get rid of them. In that sense, a dungeon, where no evidence would remain, would be the ideal location. If there were no witnesses, then no one could tell whether someone had died at the hands of a monster or a human.
As always, the enemy of man is himself.
Nothing had changed.
Choi Soo-hyun uncrossed his legs and spoke patronizingly to me.
“You owe me.”
“Yes, but—”
“What’s with the ‘but’?”
“Weren’t you unaffiliated as well?”
As far as I knew, Choi Soo-hyun was currently an unaffiliated Hunter.
“I am unaffiliated.”
I also knew that unaffiliated Hunters couldn’t use skills. But despite that, he was a Key.
“How can you use your Key skill, then?”
At my question, Choi Soo-hyun’s mouth fell open in a small Oh.
“For now, the fact that I can use the Key skill is a secret. Got it?”
“I don’t even have anyone I could tell that to.”
“Strangely, that skill just works.”
“Huh?”
I tilted my head in confusion, but Choi Soo-hyun just scratched at his cheek as if he had nothing more left to say.
“I got this skill from a different god than the one I was originally following. I don’t know if that’s the reason why, but anyway, I can use that skill.”
“Are you lying about being unaffiliated?”
“You really wanna die?”
Choi Soo-hyun raised a fist as if to tell me to stop saying useless things. I needed Choi Soo-hyun, but I had no intention of being blindly pulled along.
Now, I really wanted to hear the reason why he’d invited me to his house.
“So, what was the purpose of inviting me here?”
Choi Soo-hyun suddenly raised his hand at my question. He stared at his vibrating cell phone with a serious expression. What an unsatisfying response.
“Hey, wait here a sec. The pizza’s here.”
Choi Soo-hyun turned around and went out to get the pizza. Feeling frustrated by his quick disappearing act, I rubbed at my temples with my thumbs.
“Shit, what a mood-killer.”
This was why my way wouldn’t work.
A little bit later, I ate the pizza that Choi Soo-hyun brought in while perched on the couch. It wasn’t the best setup for eating a meal, but since I hadn’t had anything to eat since morning, I diligently ate my pizza.
Choi Soo-hyun went to the fridge and took out a bottle of soju. What kind of combination was pizza and soju?
After pouring a paper cup full with soju, he drank more than half of it in one go.
Of course, you can’t have a real conversation with Koreans without the help of alcohol.
Choi Soo-hyun pointed at me as I gulped down some soda along with my pizza.
“My business with you is pretty simple. I called you over here because there’s something I’m curious about.”
“Something you’re curious about?”
I wondered what he could possibly be so curious about that he’d have to invite me over to his house. Choi Soo-hyun nodded slightly.
“So, how are you alive?”
This would’ve been an insultingly simple question even if he hadn’t invited me here. But since I couldn’t fully grasp his intentions, I ended up tilting my head in genuine confusion.
“Sorry? I’m alive because I’m alive.”
What did he mean by that? Where the hell did that come from?
Choi Soo-hyun patted Shong-shong, who was sitting on top of his knee.
“Do you know how long those Hunters were in that dungeon?”
“I heard it was about 10 days.”
“Yeah, they found you exactly on that 10th day. Right before they went to defeat the boss.”
“I heard that story so much at the Association, I’m tired of it. As I said, I was scared so I was hiding within a cave inside of the canyon.”
The corner of Choi Soo-hyun’s mouth lifted up.
“I’m pretty good friends with one of the Hunters that went inside of the fake dungeon. I’m a Key, so I couldn’t go in myself. So I asked that guy, and he told me that the cave that you were found in was already fully investigated before he even entered the dungeon.”
“Wait, I haven’t heard of this before?”
I had heard that the cave was an unexplored area. Because of this, I could make the excuse that I’d hid there for the entire 10 days.
‘Damn, I knew it was too good to be true.’
“Goddamn it. Wow, wouldn’t this be considered forgery of official documents?”
“The one who would’ve been in trouble had the record been written down correctly is you.”
“Well, that’s true.”
I knew he was being nice to me, but I didn’t think he’d go so far as forgery. Forget having a “nice talk” with the higher-ups, it looked like he had a lot of favors he could pull in order to settle this.
“So how did you survive the dimensional rift?”
“Huh?”
All I could do was blink in response upon hearing that term for the first time in my life.
PR/N: Just to avoid confusion, this is his first time hearing it, not seeing it.
‘Is the dimensional rift you speak of the same as the Tower of Trials?’
Unable to say that out loud, I scratched at my cheek awkwardly. Instead of taking a bite of my pizza, I took another sip of the soda in my paper cup.
‘Not yet.’
Because of his position as a Hunter, along with his skills and his flawless personality, there was no better mentor to advise the growth of new Hunter ‘Kang Han-kyul’ than Choi Soo-hyun. But in my opinion, this and that were two different matters.
I wanted to keep the Tower of Trials a secret for now. The problem was, it might’ve been the ‘dimensional rift’ Choi Soo-hyun was talking about.
I responded with another question instead of an answer.
“Why do you think I fell into a dimensional rift?”
“Because I’ve obviously fallen into one before. But in my case, it wasn’t a double dungeon.”
* * *
Reaper Scans
Translator: Igixri
Proofreader: Imagine
Discord Link: https://dsc.gg/reapercomics
* * *
Choi Soo-hyun poured more soju into his glass.
Despite his appearance, he was a man with a lot of rumors surrounding him. Stories and gossip about him were overflowing on the Internet.
Whether they were true or not, I’d searched for and read all of them. Among all the stories relating to Choi Soo-hyun, there was one that always came back up: the story about why he retired as a Hunter.
To be precise, he had severed relations with the god that he had followed and decided to become Unaffiliated from that point on.
“I definitely remember reading on the wiki that you survived after some sort of accident in a dungeon.”
“Stop looking me up on wikis.”
“There’s a lot of great stuff there.”
“More than half of it is bullshit.”
“So the remaining less than half is actually true?”
“Just tell me you learned this from seeing it on the news. Also, a wiki? Seriously? You’re making me look classless.”
Choi Soo-hyun scolded me for my sources, but it didn’t seem all that sincere. Whether I saw it on a wiki or saw it on the news, it wasn’t his business.
He bent over slightly and tapped the glass table with a finger. 10 seconds later, he finally opened his mouth to talk.
He told me he couldn’t go into the details, but he explained that his story was roughly like this:
During a dungeon expedition, he’d fallen into a trap and had to escape into the depths of the dungeon. The enemies that were chasing after him couldn’t follow any further, but since the dungeon had already been cleared, they were able to go out through the exit gate.
Just like the dungeon entrance gate, once the first person leaves, the exit gate disappears after a set amount of time.
There has never been a recorded case of regular Hunters who weren’t Keys making it out alive from dungeons where the exit gate had disappeared. Once the exit gate was gone, the rest of the dungeon would also disappear, but there was a legend that if anyone was still inside at that time, they would fall into a place called a ‘dimensional rift.’
‘So that’s what this is.’
Although I’d stood my ground, I couldn’t verify if the dimensional rift Choi Soo-hyun was talking about was the same place as the Tower of Trials that I’d arrived at, so I couldn’t speak out recklessly.
Choi Soo-hyun continued his story.
At that time, Choi Soo-hyun wasn’t even a Key yet, and he’d been hurt so badly that he was fading in and out of consciousness. He thought that he was going to die there, but he found himself in an unfamiliar place when he finally came to his senses.
I couldn’t help but feel oddly sympathetic when he said that at first he suspected that he’d been summoned to another world.
Choi Soo-hyun said that he’d met a strange man in that place. It turned out that it was a very fortunate thing for Choi Soo-hyun to have met him.
“That man said that he was certain that the god that he worshiped would be able to save the world.”
While he’d been telling this story, Choi Soo-hyun had almost finished off the entire bottle of soju. After drinking every last drop, he collected his breath before speaking again.
“Soter. That was the name of the god that guy worshiped. After finding my way out of that place, I tried my best to find this ‘Soter’, but I couldn’t find any trace of him.”
The reason why Choi Soo-hyun had decided to join the Association and become Unaffiliated was to find that god called ‘Soter’.
As soon as the name Soter came out of Choi Soo-hyun’s mouth, I had to quickly collect myself into a poker face.
Because that was the name that I was currently using as a ‘display name’.
I didn’t think I’d ever hear that word coming out of anyone’s mouth, let alone Choi Soo-hyun’s.
But something here was strange.
Very, very strange.
Before I could clear up this weird feeling, Choi Soo-hyun gave me his own opinion.
Right after the fake dungeon had appeared, I’d gained an Affiliation.
For someone who had enough influence to make deals with the high-ranking members of the Association, he could not only solve the issue, but also edit the details of the story, it wouldn’t be difficult at all for him to find out the name of the god a fledgling Hunter was affiliated with.
The story that Choi Soo-hyun told me was surprising.
Once someone is Awakened, their ‘Affiliation’ would be decided within a week to a month after the fact. No matter how obscure or unknown the god was, it was normal for an Awakened to get some love calls during that time.
“Do you know why the Unaffiliated are Unaffiliated? It’s because even after Awakening, they won’t be able to find a god to worship for the rest of their lives.”
“I was told at the school that you could be waiting for up to a year.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Choi Soo-hyun neatly rejected my words. Even if you were a talentless Unaffiliated, an Awakened was an Awakened.
All Awakened had to be affiliated with the Association.
The government was sensitive to the crimes of the Awakened.
If a talentless Unaffiliated were to learn that they would never be able to worship a god, they would probably reject their affiliation with the Association and/or engage in disruptive behavior. As a result, there was a high possibility that they could become a huge problem.
Because even if they had the title of “talentless”, it didn’t change the fact that they were Awakened. Unaffiliated Awakened were the black sheep of the Hunter Association.
“In a nutshell, it’s false hope.”
“But I wouldn't be surprised if, on a random day, an Unaffiliated Awakened were to suddenly say that they found a god to worship.”
To an extent, the goal of the Hunter Association was to observe what happens to the Awakened that they place within certain limits.
Outside of that, whatever went on wasn’t their problem. This was because if one was affiliated with the Association, then that would create grounds by which they could be punished.
“You were thought to be dead. During the exploration and clearing phase of the dungeon, the hunters found no signs of human life… But after 10 days, you suddenly appeared inside of a cave they had already cleared. On top of that, you now have a god you’re affiliated with. Also, that god is one that no one has ever heard of. At this point, don’t you think this is enough evidence to prove that you’ve come back from a dimensional rift?”
At Choi Soo-hyun’s confident words, the inside of my mind became very complicated.
“Please give me some time to think.”
“How long?”
“30 minutes.”
“Finish thinking within 10 minutes. Are you meditating or something? Who thinks for 30 minutes straight?”
Ah, that man’s goddamn personality.
I leaned back on the sofa with my arms crossed and glared at Choi Soo-hyun.
“You don’t have any friends, do you? That’s why you give puppies names like Shong-shong and drink soju all by yourself. You probably even buy soju by the carton, don’t you?”
“You’ve got 9 minutes and 10 seconds left.”
Choi Soo-hyun held out his phone to show me the timer app screen that marked exactly 9 minutes remaining.
I couldn’t even remember seeing him set that timer.