Chapter 70
Chapter 70
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 70
Chapter Title: Clash with the Blue Dragon Guild
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“Looks like the people from Exbrian have ruined Telus’s reputation.”
Sonorim sighed as he saw our group shift into a defensive stance.
“We come from a different country than those who arrived on Earth not long ago. Different continent, different nation, different ideology.”
“Hold on, step aside for now.”
The Blue Dragon Guild had arrived, so I had the orc and the silver-haired man move to the side.
With the Blue Dragon Guild’s arrival, our team, the guild, and the two from Telus formed a tense triangular standoff.
“Hey, you hunter! Stay out of this and get lost!”
The man at the front, with his angular face, shouted. It was amusing how humans could be so rude while the orc was exceedingly polite.
He was the picture of a typical tank, wielding a sword and a large shield.
“Why are you chasing them?”
“Didn’t you hear me? We’re the Blue Dragon Guild! Get lost now!”
The guy slammed the guild mark on his shield with the flat of his blade, clang clang.
“T-... Team Leader!”
A hunter next to him whispered in the ear of the guy called Team Leader, and his expression changed.
“...Ahem. So it’s Hunter Lee Ji-seok and Hunter Bae Na-young. My apologies.”
He must have recognized my face. It would’ve been nice if he’d started with manners like that.
“Never mind that. What’s going on here?”
“This isn’t for Hunter Lee Ji-seok to concern himself with. It’s an internal Blue Dragon Guild matter, so stand aside.”
“You know these people are from Telus, right?”
“I don’t know that. I’m just carrying out orders from above. I don’t want any violence, so back off.”
His heart rate spiked, and his grip tightened on his weapon.
“Why force a fight?”
“If you don’t move, we have no choice. Even if you’re the hot topic these days, Hunter Lee Ji-seok, I’m an A-Rank Hunter too.”
The Blue Dragon Guild members spread out, encircling us widely.
“Sang-heon, Ye-seul, protect Na-young. Na-young, Blind.”
As I instructed while donning my armor, the three moved in perfect sync.
Ye-seul cast Goddess’s Shield, enveloping Na-young and herself in a translucent spherical barrier. She’d picked up the skill after leveling up during the forced march through the A-Rank Gate.
“Attack from the rear first!”
The Team Leader took me on, and under his command, the ranged hunters drew their bows and began chanting spells. But most of them were B- or C-Rank. In other words, slow to react.
Na-young’s Blind hit first, clouding their eyes. They couldn’t attack if they didn’t know where to aim.
The Team Leader and B-Rank hunters, whose Blind was dispelled first by their healer, charged at me.
“There’s a lot of talk about you, but you’re still just an A-Rank like me! Surround him!”
I needed to raise my rank quick to avoid these misunderstandings.
I caught the Team Leader’s thrusting sword with my bare hand.
“Huh?”
I kicked his shield, sending him flying with a yelp of surprise. Then an arrow flew from behind him. I snatched it midair, snapped it with one hand, condensed aura, and hurled it at the archer’s torso.
An ice spear from the mage embedded in my body. It couldn’t pierce the armor, merely frosting the surface. The thin ice layer shattered off as I moved.
As I closed in on the mage, another melee warrior blocked my path. His sword swung for my neck. No aura, but infused with heavy mana—it looked like a skill rivaling aura’s power.
I took it straight to the neck without blocking. A blade like that couldn’t even scratch my armor. I grabbed the warrior’s throat, hoisted him overhead, and slammed him into the ground.
“Y-You think you’ll get away with this? We’re the Blue Dragon Guild!”
The last remaining A-Rank mage, who’d thrown the ice spear at me, screamed as he glared at us.
“We’re just defending ourselves. You’re the ones who attacked.”
With that, I lightly struck the mage’s neck, knocking him out.
I turned to see Sang-heon beating down the Blind-afflicted B- and C-Rank Blue Dragon Guild hunters with the sheath of his sword. He was venting all the stress he’d built up on them.
“Why didn’t you two fight back and just run?”
I asked Sonorim and the silver-haired man.
“We haven’t been on Earth long, but we know about the atrocities committed by the Exbrian Empire’s people. If I used my power here, it would only spread Telus’s bad reputation further. So I couldn’t.”
“Hmm...”
“We have no intention of fighting. We only seek your cooperation, Hunter Lee Ji-seok.”
“You know me?”
“We were able to come here with the help of the Great Being. And that one instructed us to seek your aid.”
Sonorim spoke consistently calm and composed. It was hard to get used to such a belligerent-looking orc being like that.
“Who is this Great Being?”
“It is Telus itself, revered also as a god. It does not interfere in human affairs, but it judged the current state as disrupting the world’s flow.”
“Are you talking about the God of Destruction?”
“No. It refers to how the Bridge Gate has worsened Telus’s situation. While the weakening of the Exbrian Empire and its allied Eastern Continent nations is agreeable, if left as is, innocents will suffer too. Could you please close it?”
“How can I believe all that?”
“We didn’t come to use violence. We’ll cooperate fully. Let’s resolve this through talk. But if I fail, those who come next won’t be fragile beings like us.”
“Aren’t you a Master? Fragile?”
“W-Wait... that orc is a Master?!”
Sang-heon, who had just tied up the small fry, overheard and was shocked. Na-young and Ye-seul looked pretty stunned too.
“Weak and strong are relative. Compared to the Great Being, I am utterly insignificant.”
Watching the orc maintain such a humble posture throughout drained away any lingering hostility I had.
“Fine. Then come with us.”
I took them to the Awakening Bureau. And I’d hand over the Blue Dragon Guild attackers there too.
“Why do you always bring trouble your way, Hunter Lee Ji-seok...?”
Bureau Chief Baek Young-shin pressed his temples.
“No, this time I was just standing still, I swear.”
“The Blue Dragon Guild seems to be planning to cut off this team as scapegoats. A-Rank Hunters are always in short supply, so we’ll fine them and restrict them to government-supervised hunter activities for the next few years.”
The punishment seemed light, but going into Gates on government orders without pay was worse than prison. With the criminal extradition treaty, they couldn’t even go to other countries. An S-Rank might be worth starting a national dispute over, but not an A-Rank.
“So, can we trust what that orc... I mean, those people say to some extent?”
“I can’t read orc expressions, but I didn’t get a bad vibe. And that man didn’t show much expression either, but he wasn’t lying. Oh, but I could totally tell the Blue Dragon Guild was hiding something.”
“We suspect they tried to capture the Telus people to extract and monopolize otherworld information.”
“With Paul around, they can’t monopolize it, right?”
“We do get info from him, but he doesn’t know much useful stuff like what Helen provided. For example, could a Korean make a smartphone from scratch on barren land?”
“No. Got it.”
“And the prevailing opinion was that relying on one guy like Paul to grasp Telus is too risky. In this situation, allies are very welcome. Shall we go in and talk with them now?”
“Me too?”
“They say they won’t talk without Hunter Lee Ji-seok.”
“That’s why you called me...”
I entered the reinforced interrogation room with the Bureau Chief.
“Hunter Lee Ji-seok.”
The orc greeted me while seated. He couldn’t stand even if he wanted to, with his hands and feet restrained.
“What did you want to talk about that you called me here?”
“As I mentioned before, we’d like you to close the Gate.”
“Or else the Great Being will attack us, right?”
“If it sounded like a threat, I apologize. The Western Continent cleaning up the Eastern Continent’s mess isn’t pleasant, but for the future of planet Telus, we’ll cooperate actively.”
“Cooperate how?”
“Earth’s mechanical civilization is overwhelmingly advanced. As a result, magic technology hasn’t developed much, it seems. I possess considerable knowledge among mages, so I can help with that.”
In fact, before Bureau Chief Baek Young-shin entered, Paul had been deemed not very useful. A Master-level competent mage would be far more helpful than Paul. Plus, coming from a different faction, he could provide diverse intel on international dynamics.
“We’ll also provide the items we brought. Though some were taken by the first people we met.”
He said they handed them over when the Blue Dragon Guild first approached.
“If you give us detailed info on those items, we’ll recover them.”
Bureau Chief Baek Young-shin jotted notes beside him.
“So, you’ll trust us?”
“That depends on how you two act from now on.”
After that, we spent about an hour getting info on Telus’s political situation and a brief overview of what technologies they could share.
“What do you think, Bureau Chief?”
I stepped out for coffee and asked Bureau Chief Baek Young-shin.
“Hunter who can detect lies were watching from the start, and they said they sensed no falsehoods.”
“I didn’t sense any malice either.”
“We’ll need internal discussions, but we can proceed positively.”
After several days of talks, they agreed to close the Bridge Gate in exchange for technology transfer first.
And as compensation for my contributions, I got Jae-in slotted into the tech transfer team. It wasn’t hard after he proved himself in the last Gate Bridge incident.
“P-President! Have you seen this?! I never even thought of this approach!”
Jae-in shoved today’s transferred knowledge at me.
The paper Jae-in held was crammed with indecipherable symbols, charts, and writing—doodles or notes, who could tell.
“Impressive.”
I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but whatever.
“This... this means!”
“Jae-in, Jae-in, breathe. Breathe.”
I calmed the extremely excited Jae-in.
Jae-in, who’d been staring at the paper so close his eyes nearly touched it, suddenly snapped his head up and gazed into empty space.
“Jae-in?”
“Bro... I think it’s broken?”
Sang-heon waved his hand in front of Jae-in’s eyes, but there was no reaction in his pupils.
“That’s it!”
Jae-in shouted to himself, jumped up from his seat, and stormed out of the room like a whirlwind.
“Is he okay? Jae-in hyung?”
“I don’t... know.”
I glanced to the corner, and Na-young was staring into space too. She’d received magic knowledge from Sonorim and raved that it was leagues above what Paul provided in both quantity and quality.
Then for days, she’d scribble in her notebook or gaze into the void, organizing something in her head. Sometimes she’d wave her hands through the air.
“Is this really okay?”
Watching the two of them, I couldn’t reassure Sang-heon that it was.