Get Yourself a Supporter
In the early days of Hunter Land, there weren't many weapons to choose from.
The developers had wanted to capture the desperation of ordinary humans — no mana, no special powers — throwing everything they had into killing monsters. They built a game about bridging the gap between man and beast with nothing but crude cold steel.
But it wasn't a game that shipped with an ending already in place. The path toward that ending was laid out slowly, piece by piece, through free updates. And along the way, new weapons began to appear one by one — as if to show that humanity, too, was evolving within the story.
Some of them were downright bizarre.
The dual shields of a coward who only wanted to keep himself alive. Twin blades that looked like they'd been forged from ten thousand years of pure rage. A meteor hammer with controls so godawful you wanted to throw the controller through a wall…
Weapons so weird you had to wonder what the hell the developers were thinking — and they had the whole player base in stitches.
Of course, I'd tried them all. Content burned out so fast there was nothing else left to do. Looking back, that was probably the right call. There were challenge quests, and with nothing better going on, I stubbornly decided I was going to master every single weapon. At first I fumbled through them in a confused mess, but getting my face smashed in by monsters over and over eventually drilled the muscle memory in, and the clumsiness faded.
Back then, I never imagined anything like this would happen. Just a light player thrashing around to fill the content drought. In the end, it turned out to be a damn good decision.
"Something different would be better."
Matillo muttered to himself, rubbing at the corner of his mouth. We'd left the training grounds and were back in his workshop. Whatever he was turning over so intently in his head, he was carefully looking over the weapons piled in the cart.
He wanted to make me something that fit. Well — he was a capable man. He'd figure it out on his own.
What actually had my attention was Noah.
She'd been quiet the whole time. We hadn't known each other that long, but I'd thought we'd gotten reasonably close. Looking at her face, though, I couldn't quite find the words.
"Noah, you okay?"
I spoke up to the listless figure beside me. She hesitated a beat, then nodded.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Just… feeling a little existential about life, that's all."
Maybe what she felt toward me was a kind of deprivation. Five years. Objectively speaking, Noah had been a hunter for a long time. She had every right to take pride in that. Then some rootless rookie shows up out of nowhere and turns out to be better than her — you don't just shrug that off and move on.
Maybe I should have held back a little.
But the moment a weapon settles into my hands, my body lights up on its own. While my head cools into something cold and analytical, reading the situation and chaining attacks together, my body burns hot with the joy of combat. From the second I grip a weapon, it doesn't feel like me anymore. Holding back just… slips away.
If I really am a hunter from the future, the way Hunter Land's story goes… is that hunter sleeping somewhere inside this body right now?
I didn't even understand myself. Where this body had come from, for instance — I couldn't answer that with any confidence. I'd told Noah I'd lost my memories, but the truth was I might as well have. A person with no past to speak of.
Noah had helped me so much already. Knowing I was the reason she was struggling left a sour taste in my mouth. I hesitated, then spoke again.
"Is it because of me?"
"Mm, no? Strictly speaking, it's because of me. Just a big shock I haven't felt in a while."
She hummed a little under her breath.
"I'd been getting pretty bored lately. Hunter work, nothing really going anywhere~. Well, my thinking's shifted a lot now. I need to step it up myself. At this rate, Alice is going to catch up to me in no time."
She said it like a joke. The gloom that had hung over her melted away under her smile before I even noticed it was gone.
I'd underestimated her. Pointless worry. Five years is a long time — not some fragile stack of days that collapses over something like this. Noah had built her tower carefully, brick by brick, so it wouldn't fall. She was tougher than I was.
What a cool woman. There was still so much I could learn from her.
I just smiled a little to myself.
Matillo kept fretting the whole time. Expecting something big, Noah and I waited and waited. He picked up this weapon, swung that one, and after a long stretch finally opened his mouth.
Here it comes—
"Get yourself a supporter."
"…A supporter?"
The conclusion he'd reached after all that was so simple it left me speechless. All that waiting, and his answer was just go around with someone else. I shook my head with a sigh, wondering if even Matillo had his limits.
"Kid, what the hell is that look supposed to mean?"
"…I was expecting something. You're just telling me to party up."
"Hey. Listen to people until they're finished talking."
A vein stood out on Matillo's forehead.
"It's not just any party. Looking at you, I think you need someone who can haul weapons around for you. There's a Master Hunter with a case like yours. You know him, miss?"
"I do. You mean Oflo, right? I heard he can handle every kind of weapon."
"That's right. That idiot's hobby. He couldn't trust other hunters, so he decided he'd just do everything himself. Pretty ridiculous in a hunter society where trust is supposed to be the highest virtue. Even more ridiculous that it got him to Master Hunter."
"…How do you know all that?"
"I was a hunter myself, back when I was young. Old connection, that's all."
Matillo shrugged. He was pretty smooth at steering a conversation away when he wanted to.
"So what that guy did was bring a non-combat hunter along with him. A pack mule to carry his weapons for him — a supporter."
Matillo's words hit harder than I'd expected. For one thing, I'd never even considered switching weapons mid-hunt. Thinking back on it now — if I'd swapped weapons with Aaron for a bit during the fight with Kometras, things might have gone a lot smoother.
Why had I been so bound by the game's rules in a world this free? Had I just wanted to keep thinking of this place as nothing more than a game?
"Kid. You listening?"
"…Yeah. I'm listening."
I pulled myself out of my thoughts and nodded.
"My take is you should do it Oflo's way for a while. Not a method I particularly like, but I don't think the hunters at your current rank handle weapons better than you do. Maybe once the level goes up, but not now."
What Matillo was saying, in other words, was that other hunters were dead weight to me right now. An unusually cold, rational judgment coming from him.
Well, wasn't that just because I was that good? As expected of a man like me… no, a woman like me…
"Go reel in a supporter. Do that, and I'll take care of the weapons for you."
"For free?"
"What did you just say?"
"Nothing…"
Under Matillo's murderous glare, I immediately tucked my tail between my legs.
Business finished, we headed back to the lodging. I flopped straight onto the bed. From the bathroom came the sound of Noah humming while she showered. Listening to that little song, I sank deep into thought.
In the game, a player was basically a monster-slaughtering machine who carried all their own gear and still fought just fine. So Hunter Land never had a concept like supporters. Never had a concept of switching weapons, either…
But reality was different. Just walking with a pack on your back left you dripping sweat, and securing a single base camp meant more hours of hiking. Somehow find and kill a monster, and on the way back the bag was even heavier with quest materials, crushing down on your shoulders.
Having a supporter would definitely make things easier, but…
According to Noah's explanation, the kind of supporter Matillo meant was either a brand-new hunter or a non-combat type who stayed well clear of fighting. They didn't hunt giant monsters. They took down small ones, foraged, checked ecosystems for anything off, surveyed various creatures.
Just because they didn't fight the big ones didn't mean there was some hierarchy between combat and non-combat hunters. If anything, they respected and looked out for each other. Their jobs were simply different from the hunters who killed monsters.
The catch was that parties were made of four people. Nobody had written it down, but the unspoken rule among hunters was to run with four combat-capable members — finish the hunt as fast as possible and keep casualties down. The more people you brought, the more agitated the monster got, and everyone had to watch each other while fighting, which meant more variables and a whole lot more chaos.
There was no room for a non-combatant in that setup. Not unless they were tagging along specifically to survey the area.
Besides, when you could barely keep yourself alive against a monster, did you really have the bandwidth to babysit a non-combatant? Sure, you could tell them to hide somewhere during a fight — but in my case I'd need to swap weapons mid-battle, and that would make things dangerous in all kinds of ways.
But all of that fretting ran up against one big problem that cut through everything else.
I didn't know a single non-combat hunter.
My entire social circle was still just two people: Noah and Matillo. I'd been dropped into this world a little over a month ago, and I still only had two. Truly breathtaking people skills.
So what now?
I tapped a finger against the corner of my mouth, thinking. Honestly, if I wanted to climb the ranks fast, going solo was the right call. Party play had its own appeal — hunting with Leo, Chloe, and Aaron had been pretty fun. But I'd also realized I wasn't really cut out for it.
I didn't have room to watch my surroundings. All I wanted was the monster.
It wasn't love. If I'd loved monsters, would I have gone around killing them like this? It wasn't hatred either. I was a hunter, so I liked a good brawl.
I thought back to the fight with Kometras. By the end, the smart move — for the party's sake — would have been to rest and live to fight another day. My head knew that. It was the rational call.
My body disagreed. It boiled over with the need to settle things with Kometras right then and there. So I charged in to the finish.
I'd been a player once, so of course I liked fighting — but this body was far more aggressive than I was. In short: an offensive style that looked after neither others nor itself.
Some game or other floated up in my mind. A personality that would fit right in on a romantic line of kill-or-be-killed, wouldn't it?
Anyway — that was the kind of person I was. Team up with me, and I'd wear everyone else out.
Not that it seemed like something I particularly needed to fix. If you can kill it right there on the spot, letting it go is just a waste. And getting back early is a good thing, right? Camping is exhausting…
Lame excuses no one would buy kept lining up in my head. I let out a short laugh.
Yeah. Party play really wasn't my thing. At the very least, parties could wait for later.
For now, Matillo was right — finding one person would be the smart move.
But how was I supposed to reel someone in?
"Alice, I'm done washing up! Go shower already~."
"Mm, got it."
Right. I'd leave that to tomorrow's me.
For now, I was just going to rest.