Why Poachers Exist
Why do poachers exist?
Mostly, I figured, because they don't have to care about the Association's rules.
This world's progress and technology have always walked hand in hand with the byproducts of the hunt. Even the Cooling Powder we'd used so freely through the summer was a monster byproduct.
But this world never treated the protection of monsters lightly. There was a philosophy here: humans are part of nature, and monsters are part of nature too. Overhunting monsters invited disaster, so the Association cracked down hard.
…Though eventually, as people grew numb to the idea of calamity, the future must have ended up the way it did.
Once you became a hunter, most of what you earned from a hunt was just the bounty. Unless a civilian or someone else put up a private request, the majority of subjugation jobs paid only what the Association had set. Of course, you could sell the byproducts — leave them sitting around and they were just dead weight — but you could only sell them to Association-affiliated merchants, and unless the byproduct was something like an Essence, the price wasn't high. It felt more like offloading cargo than making a real profit.
What hunters valued wasn't money. It was honor. Hunting paid decently enough, but almost no one challenged a monster for the coin. If it was money you wanted, taking civilian requests the way Pina did was far more stable.
So why did poachers poach?
Because there was demand.
…Obvious, really. Someone was willing to pay a high price, so they caught whatever they could and tried to sell it.
Even inside the Association, poachers were a headache. They were targets for crackdowns, but unless you caught them red-handed, they were notoriously hard to pin down. And poachers capable of killing monsters were never going to surrender quietly to a hunter's hands. A hunter could die for nothing against a poacher who fought back.
That was why the manual for dealing with poachers was deadly serious: punish on sight; if self-defense made it unavoidable, execute.
This was one of the darker truths of this world that Noah had told me.
This job might mean killing people.
For someone who'd already killed more monsters than I could count, facing something smaller than that wouldn't be hard. Compared to monsters that shrugged off hit after hit, humans were terribly fragile. A single bow would be enough. Loose the string once, and a person couldn't do a thing.
I rubbed my hands together.
I still dreamed every night. They weren't my memories — they were hers. I'd never felt confused among all those memories. I only watched her from a third-person distance. Most of them were of fighting. She fought countless monsters, and now and then she faced people too.
They were poachers. With nothing but a bow, she cleaned them up with ease.
It hadn't been a pretty sight.
I shook my head, pulled free of the thoughts, and let out a breath. I turned to look at Pina. She was rubbing the corner of her mouth.
"Pina, how was home?"
"Mm, well… same as always."
Yesterday, Pina had gone home for the first time in a long while — partly to see whether things had improved now that she'd been sending money from outside. Looking at her face, it didn't seem the situation had been to her liking.
"…I see. So you're moving into the hunter dorms now?"
"Yeah. I don't plan on going back home. I've got a bit of money now, so switching lodgings should be fine."
Being at home was exhausting, she added, rubbing her arm. Thanks to the steady stream of requests she'd been clearing with me lately, Pina's life was far more comfortable than before. Most of her pay still went to her family, of course, but she at least had enough left over to take care of herself a little.
"So, what about this time?"
"No people around, at least."
"A Master Hunter or someone isn't suddenly going to show up, right?"
"Yeah."
Pina gave a small laugh.
Catching poachers wasn't something that needed rushing. You couldn't just grab them because you wanted to, and we didn't have a single lead. Taking things a little easy was fine.
The next day, Pina left the inn where she'd been staying. The two of us only started sharing a room once autumn arrived. Pina barely had any belongings of her own, so there was no need to haul luggage twice.
"Times like this, having nothing is nice. Keeps it simple."
Pina said it self-deprecatingly — then kept humming under her breath. The tune was one of those songs the bards sometimes sang in Antico's commercial district. She seemed to be in a pretty good mood.
Having the two of us share a room after always splitting up at the end of the day felt new somehow. Not that our routine changed. Once Pina finished unpacking, I planned to head straight out.
I went into the bathroom, washed my face, and scrubbed the fatigue off. I held my rough hands under the running water and rubbed them clean. The little scars from hunting monsters had long since become part of me — blisters that formed and burst from swinging a weapon, skin scraped raw from bracing against the ground…. None of them showed any sign of fading. They were wounds of glory I'd made myself.
The clock was already pointing to noon. I couldn't go out in my sleepwear, so I changed before heading outside.
Pina and I went to the dining hall, ate a simple lunch, and sat at a table under the cool autumn sky.
"The best idea," I said, "is waiting."
"Waiting?"
"In front of a trap."
"Hmm. What about preliminary investigation?"
"Preliminary investigation?"
"We talk to the hunters who came back empty-handed and get a rough sense of what happened. Start from the beginning and go through it carefully, one piece at a time."
"…Not bad."
"Honestly, I was thinking more about Alice-nim than the poachers…."
"Hm?"
"Ah — nothing! We're legal, and illegal activity is bad!"
Pina laughed hurriedly and waved her hands.
Fallen leaves drifted past on the wind. The tall old trees linked together, drawing a single ridgeline across the sky. Following Pina's suggestion, we decided to work through it carefully, one step at a time.
Looking for poachers felt different from hunting monsters. We asked an Association aide to arrange meetings with hunters who'd failed their hunts, so we could hear the details firsthand.
Through the aide's introduction, we met a hunter at the Association counter — and he turned out to be an old acquaintance.
"…A-Alice? It is you, right?"
"…Who?"
"C'mon, you don't remember? During the hunter exam — I followed your signal and helped with the lure. New Light. I always knew you'd end up like that."
I remembered the situation. The face, not at all. While I stood there silently rubbing the corner of my mouth, trying to place him, the hunter's shoulders sagged and he let out a sigh.
"…Ah. You don't remember. I'm Ethan."
"Oh. Right. Ethan. Got it."
I pretended recognition a beat too late, but the name Ethan still meant nothing to me. He was a hunter with a sword and shield strapped across his back — apparently someone who'd taken the hunter exam alongside me. Honestly, I barely remembered anyone from back then…. I never imagined I'd run into one of them like this.
"…So, how've you been?"
"Mm. Fine enough."
"After taking the exam with you, I felt pretty pathetic. So I really went all out, like my life depended on it…."
"Just get to the point, please."
"…Ah. Right. Yeah."
Pina didn't seem to like how much Ethan kept talking to me. She looked eager to catch the poachers as soon as possible.
Ethan hesitated, then started laying out the story piece by piece.
He'd taken a request about a corpse-eating monster — a Cuchiorak — that had appeared east of the flood zone entrance. He went to hunt it, but even after days of searching, the thing never showed so much as a whisker. At first he figured he'd just been reading the tracks wrong, so he kept exploring again and again. In the end, the place that looked like the Cuchiorak's den held nothing but signs of death.
Wondering if someone else had taken the same request, he asked the aide — only to learn that no party but Ethan's had accepted it. Something nameless had simply stolen the monster out from under him.
"What if it was another monster?"
"…I don't think so. What I found was cut cord still tied around a tree, and a broken arrow hidden in the brush. There were blast marks, too."
That was the end of Ethan's story. We heard from other hunters as well, but most of them said roughly the same thing: someone had been hunting out there. The poachers' existence was certain. Judging by the skill level, they were about on par with a hunter who took Low-grade monsters. The reason we'd never crossed paths was probably because I'd only been hunting Mid-grade ones.
I didn't have the energy to listen to any more.
Pina and I left the Association and walked down Antico's central road.
"If Low-grade monsters keep disappearing like this, the ones that feed on them might come looking for food and end up drifting into Antico."
"That would be dangerous."
"…Protecting monsters from humans. Kind of ironic, isn't it?"
Enduring that kind of contradiction was what made a hunter… no, that wasn't it.
"We're not doing this for the monsters. Pina — like you said, if we let it go, it could lead to far worse casualties. That's why we stop it."
That was why the Association punished anyone who illegally hunted monsters so harshly.
"…That kind of thing can't be allowed to happen."
I had seen it. A future where humanity never achieved coexistence with the world's monsters — where humans made themselves the center of nature instead. Monsters lost their homes one by one and were driven out. In the end, the Supreme-grade monsters whose territories had been invaded began to move. Humanity declared even those a threat and subjugated them.
Miteraos looked upon that fate of humanity — a people who saw monsters not as living beings but as mere tools for human use — and judged it dark. And so it destroyed that timeline.
"We have to coexist with monsters. Poaching is wrong."
"Hearing Alice-nim say that feels a little off…."
"Why?"
"Ah — nothing."
What I did was legitimate subjugation under Association request — legal population control of monsters. Sure, I'd done a lot of it, but still….
Anyway, it was different from poaching. Completely different from poaching!