Antico's New Light
The road back was far more grueling than the journey out.
We had to retrieve every last piece of gear we'd left at the safe zone. After pouring everything into the fight against the Kometras, this was the last thing anyone needed. Yet there we were, shouldering those heavy packs all over again and marching on. The real enemy had been waiting for us all along.
The heat of the flooded forest. Bodies worn to the bone. Packs crushing down on our shoulders. And the bundles stuffed with materials harvested from skinning the Kometras and breaking down its parts.
A continuous chain of suffering — but that was what ordinary hunting felt like. The kill itself was never the whole of it. Every step there and every step back was part of the hunt. It was exhausting work.
Still, we couldn't afford to take our time. That would only drag the misery out longer.
The worse it got, the more determined I became to just get it over with in one go. So I kept walking.
And so, only after the sun had fully set, did our party finally reach Antico.
"Hah… hah… finally…!"
Leo leaned hard on his staff and cried out.
"We're back… Antico…"
He looked genuinely moved by the sight of the city he'd been longing for.
Yeah. How many times had we pictured this moment while we walked? I understood exactly how he felt.
Aaron exhaled a long breath behind him.
"That hellish march is finally over…"
"And monsters showing up midway, of all things… I really thought I was gonna die."
Chloe shook her head with a weary sigh.
She wiped the beads of sweat from her face, then suddenly looked over at me.
"Alice, you okay?"
"……"
I didn't even have the strength left to answer. I just stared blankly at Antico's entrance.
Chloe nodded and turned her gaze forward again.
She didn't need to hear me say it. She already knew.
In that same sorry state, we headed straight for the Association district.
Heavy packs. Bundles of materials. Faces soaked in sweat. Expressions twisted from sheer breathlessness. We looked for all the world like a defeated army, and every eye in the Association district turned toward us at once.
I looked back at them with a hollow sort of sadness.
We're the winners here… We deserve a hero's welcome…
My steps dragged, my body swaying with every exhausted stride. The heavy pack swayed with me, lurching from side to side. Somehow I forced myself forward until I stood before the counter. The hunters waiting in line took pity on us and stepped aside.
Leo murmured thank-yous over and over. Their kindness moved me, too. The world was still a decent place after all.
We stood before the counter's receptionist, Selene, and drew a deep collective breath.
One by one we set our packs down, then slumped in front of her, completely spent.
"Hah… We got the Kometras…"
Leo spoke as though he were on his deathbed.
Aaron promptly set the bundle of Kometras materials up on the counter.
The receptionist cracked it open and checked the contents.
Fragments of the rock-armored beast's helmet, claws, hide, carapace, and more… Inside were materials for all four of us, harvested from skinning the Kometras.
She finished her inspection and nodded.
"You accepted this request three days ago… And you took down a Kometras in that short a time? That's incredible! It's a good thing you acted before it could become an Armatras. Truly, Antico's new light!"
She was being unusually effusive today.
New light? What's that supposed to mean?
I wondered at her words, but what she said next pushed the thought aside.
"For medium-grade monsters like the Kometras, the Association handles the reward payout. The total compensation is…"
In this world, there was no biased distribution based on contribution percentages. Everyone received an equal share.
If you insisted on measuring contribution, it would come down to who got to the skinning first. Even that didn't mean much in practice. Everyone needed different parts, and people simply coordinated and took what they needed.
Everyone had worked together, so no one kept score of who did better or worse — that was the hunter community. Still, the reward for a medium-grade kill was a good deal richer than anything from a low-grade job.
And prestige came with it, too. For a hunter, that often mattered more than the money.
Even if the Kometras was on the weaker end of medium-grade monsters, it was still a formidable creature by human standards.
Hunters who specialized in monster hunting were far fewer than those who did gathering or survey work.
And the hunters here weren't players with endless retries — they were people with only one life to lose.
Taking down a Kometras meant you could reasonably call yourself a skilled hunter.
From now on, I could talk about hunting monsters without feeling embarrassed.
Once the settlement was done, the receptionist handed each of us a pouch of reward money.
It was far heavier than the last job's pay, and the weight of it filled me with deep satisfaction.
Hunters really are the best. If there's such a thing as a gamble worth staking your life on, this has to be it.
"We'll see you on the next request, then. Please come by anytime."
The receptionist said it while glancing meaningfully in my direction.
Don't go skipping out, is that it…? I found myself nodding without thinking.
With our rewards in hand, we decided to part ways there.
The others planned to drop off their gear and meet up again later. I didn't.
"Alice, you're really not coming?"
"Don't push too hard, Chloe. That's rude."
"I'm just disappointed, okay? Now I've gotta drink with these two guys again."
"Sorry."
Honestly, I wasn't much for drinking.
It left my head spinning so badly the next day that I hated it. On nights I overdid it even a little, I'd spend the entire next day clutching my skull and groaning. My hangovers were that severe, so I stayed well clear of alcohol.
Though maybe this body was different. It wasn't originally mine, and it was healthy with excellent physical ability. Still, I had no desire to find out the hard way.
More than drinking, I just wanted to get back and collapse into bed.
"It's fine. Well then — next time the chance comes up, let's go again."
"Don't you forget about us!"
"Get home safe."
"…Bye."
And just like that, the party came to an end. We parted ways with the promise of meeting again someday.
I watched the three of them recede into the distance, staring blankly. An afterparty… honestly, it probably would have been fun. Being invited had made me happy, too. Even in this body, I could form human connections without anything going wrong. That was a tremendous relief.
But today I was tired — far too tired.
I'd poured cold sweat into the fight with the Kometras, and though the creature had moved exactly as I'd predicted, just thinking about that final march killed any appetite I might have had.
After that, I headed straight back to the lodging. The world was sinking into dusk. Fighting the Kometras around this same time yesterday still felt vivid. The thrill of that moment hadn't faded at all.
The sensation of shattering its head by exploiting its burrowing pattern at the end had been pure perfection. My hands still seemed to tremble. Not from exhaustion. The pleasure of it was still lingering.
Every fight was like that.
When my right hand gripped the upper part of the greatsword's hilt and my left the lower, my mind went calm. The moment I clashed with an enemy, I became like a painter holding a pencil over a blank canvas. My greatsword was the pencil, and the monster was the subject on the page.
With my pencil, the subject met its end. The more meticulously I rendered it, the more brilliantly, the more beautifully the monster bloomed. In that sense, you could say the Kometras had shone its brightest in the final moment of its life before it fell.
A ridiculous thought to have after killing a living creature.
On the way back to the lodging, I watched the sunset. The sun that set the sky ablaze was just about to close its eyes.
I didn't have any grand, glittering reason for killing monsters. It was simply the means by which I existed in this world. If I, a former player, didn't work as a hunter here — what else would I do?
Chloe's words had given me a lot to think about.
This world's story was moving forward without me. Fighting the Kometras had helped me settle that thought to some degree.
In that case, I simply had to make the world need me.
I would become the greatest hunter no one could ever surpass — a Master Hunter. I made that vow as I watched the sunset.
And so I finally reached the lodging. The walk back had been soaked in sentiment, but the pack was so heavy that the mood didn't last long. I genuinely wanted to die.
I knocked on the door right away.
Noah, hurry up and open it.
Fortunately, Noah must have been resting at the lodging, because she opened the door immediately and greeted me.
"Oh, you're back."
I'd been hoping for something a little more dramatic, but Noah's reaction was thoroughly underwhelming.
She seemed to be in a bad mood, somehow…
I blinked and looked her over. She was in comfortable clothes with faintly damp skin, as if she'd just washed up and lain down. Her face wasn't its usual clear self — there was a slightly surly air about her that made me suddenly cautious.
What, did I do something wrong? Or maybe…
Then I understood. A certain unmentionable secret had clearly come calling.
I'd experienced that myself recently… and it hadn't been a pleasant feeling at all.
It was a new kind of pain that left me restless and strangely hard to describe.
Today, I won't do anything to set Noah off.
"Have you eaten?"
"Uh… no."
"You didn't eat with the people you went with?"
"…I wanted to eat with you."
I said it carefully, hoping it might ease her mood even a little.
The truth was I just didn't like drinking… but saying it sweetly seemed better than saying that.
"What's that supposed to mean."
Apparently that had been the right answer. Noah's expression softened, and a small smile touched her lips.
"Want to go eat out, then?"
"…Sure."
"You don't want to?"
"No. I do."
Noah must have been planning to eat with me all along.
Honestly, I didn't particularly want food. The nauseating march that had stretched through the entire morning and afternoon had left my stomach in no great shape. I'd been planning to just drink some water and go straight to sleep…
That was the plan, anyway — but once we went out and sat down, I was hungry.
And once the food hit my mouth, it went down just fine. My mind kept protesting that this was a bad idea, but my body was brutally honest. I… really liked the meat set meal…!
We talked in fits and starts over the meal.
I told her about everything that had happened while hunting the Kometras. Noah told me about the simple requests she'd been handling on her own in the meantime.
It had been less than three days, but our conversation made clear just how fully each of us had thrown ourselves into our own work. We'd both been living hard in our own time.
Noah's jobs had been simple ones, but that didn't make them lesser or laughable compared to mine. There was no hierarchy among the requests of this world. From low-difficulty jobs to high ones, every request existed because people needed it to live.
Noah had simply done work that someone had to do. She was a born hunter through and through.
We were sharing that kind of easy, laughing conversation when something suddenly occurred to me, and I brought it up.
"Noah."
"Yeah?"
"What's this 'new light' thing?"
"Ah, that?"
Noah twirled her fork.
"They're talking about you."
"…Me?"
"Yeah… you didn't know?"
Why on earth would that be?