The Rookie Slayer
Darkness.
A pair of crimson eyes watched me, unblinking. They worked their jaws as if they might swallow me whole at any moment.
Did it want to eat me?
Those eyes were familiar. They were the spitting image of the eye on my arm — the one I had named instant death magic.
But the thing could not come any closer. It simply sat there, watching me in silence.
What are you? A monster? Or something else entirely? Why are we stuck in this uneasy coexistence?
The red eyes shifted, slowly. There was something like fear in them. Then the creature drew itself in tight and turned away, meek as a lamb.
What could something like that possibly be afraid of?
I had no way of knowing.
A flash—
My eyes snapped open and consciousness came flooding back. A sharp ache pulsed through my forehead. A lump had risen there, fat and ugly — Dreygan's fist, just before I'd blacked out. The old man had acted like he wasn't going to hit me. When that punch came, he hadn't held back at all.
Once my head cleared, the room came into focus, and I realized where I was. One of the training center's rest rooms, by the look of it. I pushed myself up off the floor, still groggy.
Then I felt eyes on me and turned. Something snagged at the edge of my vision. Long hair. A woman?
The instant our eyes met, she let out a startled squeak and fled.
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Was there a ghost in this training hall?
I couldn't say. I gathered my wits and opened the door.
The sky outside had already gone dark. Instructors passed beneath the windows, finishing up the day's work. I stepped out into the open, and a presence registered nearby.
"You're up?"
I looked down. A boy sat there in a chair, smoking a cigarette — Dreygan, the director of the training center. His feet barely reached the ground. Seen like this, he really was just a small boy.
"What? Something strange about how I look?"
"Yes. I'd, ah, heard you used to be enormous."
I couldn't bring myself to lie, so I answered honestly. Dreygan took a long drag on his cigarette.
"One morning I woke up and this is what I was."
Not even magic was supposed to be able to do that.
"Don't know the how of it myself. But I knew my time was running out. So I threw myself into training day and night. I wanted to see the highest peak a man can reach in one lifetime."
He tapped the ash from his cigarette. Nothing about the gesture belonged on a child.
"Opened my eyes, and here I was."
"Isn't it some kind of mage's prank?"
"Hah. I may look like this, but my senses are second to none. Anyone as strong as a mage comes near, I'd know even in my sleep."
So it wasn't a mage's doing, then.
"Got younger, sure, but this body's fresh as a spring morning. Feels like I've bought myself more years."
More years. I opened my Third Eye, just to test it.
The world reeled. A life flame burned in front of me like a sun — more than a large monster, far more. It still looked short of what it would take to reach a mage, but the sheer volume of it was staggering. His lifespan really had stretched.
I couldn't begin to guess when Dreygan would die.
"Hm? You just do something?"
His brow lifted. He didn't seem able to see the Third Eye itself, but he had caught some faint shift in the air. I shut it in a hurry.
No wonder they called him a legend among monster hunters. If our village hadn't been his hometown, a man like this could have been anywhere in the world.
"Then… you could become a monster hunter again, couldn't you?"
I floated it as casually as I could. A dry little laugh slipped from his mouth.
"For those mage bastards? Monster hunters are nothing but mana-stone miners for the mages, in the end."
A weary contempt sat in his eyes.
"No matter how far you climb as a hunter, you learn you'll never reach a mage."
I wondered what had happened between him and the mages, once upon a time. He clearly didn't care for them.
"Then why train monster hunters at all?"
"So what if that's how it is? Still gotta eat. Figured running this place so one more kid survives is better than watching them all die."
An instructor had already advised me — weak as I was — to give up on being a hunter. That was how thoroughly this place taught people how to stay alive. Dreygan's will, no doubt, running through every lesson.
"Still. Meeting a brat like you gets the blood going. A sprout already this green."
He looked at me and cackled. It was a cantankerous old man's laugh, and it sat all wrong on a child's face.
Even with a personality like that, he was a legend. And a legend had rated me highly. That fact alone sent a current through me. In my old life, I would never have imagined it.
A shortcut was fine. I wanted to get stronger.
The thing I had faced in the dream — monster or otherwise — and I were one body now.
I don't know what you want.
But if getting stronger was possible, anything was fine. A life where I could keep even the smallest scrap of justice, instead of the wretched one I'd been living.
"My training's brutal. Especially for the promising ones. I ride those extra hard."
He was offering to train me himself. The word hard only made me clench my fists tighter. There was no life harder than the weakling's life I had already lived.
My eyes shone clearer and brighter than they ever had.
"Look at that. Kid's got a damn fine gleam in his eye."
Whether the will had reached him or not, Dreygan smiled, brief and thin.
"Training starts tomorrow."
"Yes. Ah — but I have to go hunt monsters in between."
"You think I'd tell a hunter to forget his job? Go. But every hour you miss, you make up in training."
I'd bought time to hunt as well. Training and monster hunting, both. The best chance I would ever get to change my life. I was going to seize it.
"Come to think of it, there seems to be a ghost in the training hall."
"What ghost?"
"Something with long, pitch-black hair."
"Ah."
Dreygan stroked his chin, slow, like something had clicked.
"Well. If it's a ghost, it's a ghost. Don't run into it. You'll die."
A ghost that killed you if you met it. Did it have instant death magic too? I had no idea. All I knew was that I was looking forward to the training ahead.
A month went by like that.
Spring was still cold. After a week of stacking training against mid-sized monster hunts, I had enough numbers to work with.
For one thing, each mid-sized monster seemed to bank me roughly ten days' worth of life flame. I'd worked that out from the size of my own flame, the rate it normally burned, and what I gained each time I absorbed one. The yield shifted a little from beast to beast, but never far from that ten-day mark.
Which means I still can't stop hunting.
Life flame and flesh were bound together, besides. When the flame burned higher, my body grew stronger. When it shrank, so did my strength. The one mercy was that the body lagged a little behind the flame — probably the leftover fire still guttering out in my veins.
But if I slack on the hunts, I'll slide right back to what I was.
Beating back Mana Stone Sclerosis seemed to be thanks to that physical reinforcement as well. A stronger body meant the disease crawled slower. If I kept feeding the flame, a way to overcome it entirely might present itself.
But in the end.
Unless I could handle mana the way a mage did, Mana Stone Sclerosis would never truly leave. If I wanted to tear the expiration date off my life, I needed to become a mage.
A mage.
Could I ever become something like that? I was getting stronger, and the mages still felt impossibly far away. Even Dreygan, as powerful as he was, had gone quiet on the subject of facing one.
But you never reach a thing you refuse to aim at. Even if the whole world laughed, I swore it quietly to myself: someday, I would become a mage.
"Grown stronger already, have you?"
The voice came from behind me. Dreygan sat astride a little pony. I was still circling the training-center yard, iron weights dangling from both arms and both legs. They were heavy enough that running alone carved my stamina down to nothing.
"A month ago you collapsed after a few laps."
"That's thanks to your teaching, Master, isn't it?"
"Never taken a student worth calling me Master."
Grumpy old man.
He wasn't wrong, though. A week ago I had gone down in the middle of this exact drill. Running with iron clamped to all four limbs was the kind of thing you weren't supposed to survive. So I had spent the week hunting monsters as hard as I could — and still shown up at the training center every single day in between. It had nearly killed me. I could feel myself pressing against the outer wall of what my body could take.
"Whatever else you cut, don't cut sleep. Drowsiness is the number one reason hunters get killed."
Tonight, then, I would sleep like I meant it. Dreygan's words had a way of becoming bone and meat. He was retired, but he was still rated a legendary monster hunter. On the subject of staying alive, there was no one more qualified.
"Is just physical training like this really enough, though?"
For the past week, running was all I had done here. I was already in debt, and I was peeling training-center fees off the top of what little I had. Doing nothing but laps left a sour taste.
"Nothing more dangerous than impatience. And running is the foundation of everything — hunting monsters and all the rest."
"Because you have to close in on them."
"No. The opposite."
He lifted his stick and rapped me across the legs. Whenever my stamina dipped and my form started to wobble, that stick found me.
"It's for when you're hurt. Or when you meet something you can't fight."
He wanted me able to run no matter what I walked into. That, more than anything, was how you raised a hunter's odds of coming home.
"You need to be able to run even in your sleep."
"Do things actually get that bad when you're hunting?"
"They do. On the capital's Monster Front, that kind of thing wouldn't even raise an eyebrow."
What kind of place was the capital, exactly? I had never been. From the stories alone, it sounded like a painting of hell.
"So run. Run yourself into the dirt and the light will come."
I ran. He corrected my form the whole way, and I ran until every last drop of stamina was gone. I finished the day's work on legs that would not stop shaking.
Tonight I was going to sleep. No excuses. I opened the training-hall door on that iron resolution.
"Ah—!"
A voice, right in front of me. I lifted my head, and something pitch-black stood in the doorway. Hair so long and black it hung all the way to her legs.
The ghost. The one I had seen before. The one Dreygan had said would kill me if I met it.
I dropped into a fighting stance the instant I saw her — and my body folded like wet paper.
"Oof."
A short grunt, and I was rolling across the sand. Only then did it catch up with me: my legs had already hit their limit for the day.
"A-are you all right?!"
The voice came from above. Far too lovely to belong to a ghost. I looked up, and there she was — the long-haired woman I had just seen.
"Well, damn."
Another voice, this one from behind. Dreygan was standing there. I had no idea when he had arrived.
"So you ran into her."
He said it like he had wanted to keep her hidden to the very end.
"Ah, Grandfather."
Grandfather?
I turned to Dreygan, slow. He stood with his hands folded behind his back.
"Allow me to introduce you. My granddaughter, Maria."
He had a granddaughter. That explained exactly nothing about why he had treated her like a ghost.
"And I'll warn you now. My Maria's nickname is the Rookie Slayer."
And then a line I never saw coming spilled out of his mouth.
"What?"