N-Rank Hunter Lim Chae-beom (1)
"This is no joke."
I stepped on the scale, and my weight had nearly doubled since my days as a competitor. They said the bodies of magic beasts and the Awakened were rewritten down at the molecular level, able to put out far more force than their mass would suggest. Even so, I had doubled. That alone told me how much stronger I had become.
"I-I'm not getting on that, hyung-nim."
"It's all muscle and bone."
"Even so! Even so, I can't, hyung-nim!"
Lee Hae-il flung her hands as if the mere thought of learning her weight terrified her, then flopped onto the sofa and started fiddling with her phone. At first I figured she was just killing time. For killing time, though, it was far too violent.
"Hnnnngh."
She twisted herself into knots and made strange noises, raked at her scalp, and kicked her legs in every direction.
"Why?"
I couldn't hold it in.
"Gate cameras are way too expensive, hyung-nim."
"For streaming?"
"I want to see the chat flying and the donations exploding. If I can't stand in front of a camera, it feels like my soul is drying out, hyung-nim."
Put that way, it made sense. Everyone has a fencing of their own.
"How much?"
Hae-il held up the price tag.
"What, did they make it out of gold? No—diamonds?"
"Lab-grown diamonds hit the market and the price crashed, hyung-nim."
"Then they must have built the thing out of antimatter."
Knock off two or three zeroes and it still would not have been cheap.
"Guess I'll have to look at used ones, hyung-nim."
"There's a used market?"
"Dig through the hunter communities and something ought to turn up, hyung-nim."
She got up and headed for the room with her computer. I didn't follow. Watching her do something I wouldn't understand was nowhere near as pleasant as running a little mind-training on today's bout.
"Why aren't you coming, hyung-nim?"
"Why would I—"
"Come sit, hyung-nim."
Once she called from inside the room, digging in any further was just embarrassing. I really did need a place of my own.
"I heard they call it Huntranet, hyung-nim."
Her fingers blurred, and the signup was finished. I could not understand how a person's hands could move like that, or how a person's eyes could juggle that many windows. She hopped across a few boards, then frowned.
"Hyung-nim. I think you ought to look at this with me."
"What is it?"
The post was up on the N-Rank Hunter board. I knew non-Awakened hunters were called N-rank, for Normal, or for Nobody. A board, in other words, for hunters who had never awakened.
I knew at once whose story this was.
I could roughly guess why they were doing it, too.
I read the thread slowly, all the way to the end, and then looked at Hae-il. I had a fair idea now of what they meant to do.
"Looks like they don't plan on giving us covering fire."
A second who says nothing is already a crisis for a fencer. Non-Awakened hunters doing nothing was, in itself, an attack.
"This is all right, isn't it, hyung-nim?"
She looked more than a little uneasy.
"Back when I was streaming, if bastards like this started griefing as a pack, sending one broadcaster straight to hell was nothing, hyung-nim."
Her work had lived and died by public opinion, so of course it would hit her harder. Truth be told, I was just as anxious, and just as angry.
I had always hated cowards. Then, and now.
I had seen plenty of the sort who asked whether trash like that even deserved to be hunters. Jeong Ho-min, just today, was one of them. But becoming a hunter in this age was not difficult. Right there on Huntranet, ads for Awakening Drug 2.0 were up — discounts, installments, guild-linked loans.
On the stage of a life, facing your opponent is frightening. How easy it is to stand below that stage and point, muttering this and that. Even the national fencing team had seniors like that, all seniority and no skill.
"Once they name a team leader tomorrow, we should tell them—"
"No."
"What?"
"That's worth doing. But something else comes first."
And I was well practiced at shutting the mouths of talentless seniors.
"They're saying they won't give us supporting fire."
"Yes."
We were climbing. Until their existence meant nothing at all.
Lim Chae-beom was an N-rank hunter at the Saetbyeol Guild Demon Realm Branch. The reason he was a hunter of the branch, and not simply a hunter of Saetbyeol Guild, was that N-rank hunters were not regular employees. They were contract labor of a sort. If Saetbyeol ever decided to pull out of the Demon Realm gate, Lim Chae-beom was fired.
Not that he was the sort to live fretting over a thing like that. What worried him was whether some powerful orc would chew through his K2 and come running to split him with that greatsword, or whether some demon would detonate the rifle and blow his hands off. After that came the question of whether he could pull the featured character in his favorite mobile game before he spent the day's wages.
Once upon a time, Lim Chae-beom had been about as far from firearms as a man could be, and just as far from the army. He was the type who stood through reserve training muttering "fuck, fuck," staring at nothing, and then went home. But the world had changed, and Lim Chae-beom had been obliged to change with it.
He worked very close to the people who had changed the most. The Awakened. Eyes and hair shining in every color. Superhumans who twisted the ground or called lightning down. High earners who had reduced pre-Cataclysm doctors and conglomerate executives to ordinary citizens. By now they hardly even felt like the same species. Most of them were heroes who had distinguished themselves in the Ruin Era, so envying them felt embarrassing.
But those bastards.
The only ones who grated were the Rehabilitation Hunters.
Bastards who had been criminals, and who had been handed superhuman strength and freedom for no better reason than luck. F-rank and E-rank trash who would die to a few bullets, yet ran wild convinced they were true superhumans. Lucky sons of bitches who carried guns just like he did and earned money he could not begin to compare. That was what Lim Chae-beom felt toward Rehabilitation Hunters, and what every non-Awakened hunter felt.
Killing a demon on day one? Give me a break. They need a taste of something bitter before they come to their senses.
Still, however weak they were, attacking an Awakened outright was a heavy thing to risk. Even the accidental punch of an F-rank body enhancer carried enough force to pop a human head like nothing. Lim Chae-beom found an outlet for the feeling.
The bond among non-Awakened hunters spread wide, past the borders of any one guild. It was the solidarity of people who did dangerous work and were slighted for it anyway. Through Huntranet messages, tips for a hazing traveled fast. And those tips lifted, perfectly, the burden of laying hands on an Awakened.
Even if an Awakened team leader caught them at it, there would be no hard evidence, so the worst of it would be a warning. Get unlucky and they might all die together, but if you were afraid of odds like that, you could not do the work of a non-Awakened hunter in the first place. A moderate hazing of Rehabilitation Hunters was often welcomed on the team leader's side. Close enough, wasn't it?
A non-Awakened hunter was only a somewhat dangerous day laborer. If the anxiety got bad enough, you transferred to another gate and that was the end of it.
Lim Chae-beom decided he would do it.
Hae-il and I went down to the futsal court in the apartment complex. It had gone unmaintained for a long time. The goal nets were rotted through, and the posts of the netting walls, put up so the ball would not fly out, all leaned at tired angles. No one was going to come ask us to clear off for a game.
"You're saying there really is a way to take on several people by yourself, hyung-nim?"
She turned her cavalry sabre this way and that, looking unconvinced.
"It is difficult."
I loosened my wrist and started in.
"Of course it's difficult. Even just talking with several people at once is hard. Now imagine cutting at several people at once."
"Then what am I supposed to do, hyung-nim?"
Their gall aside, I felt the need for this practice. At today's entrance trial, it was the orcs being numerous that had nearly turned into a crisis. Taking the powerful demon that had been commanding all those orcs had not been so hard. So a many-against-one drill was something we had to do before we went in.
"In cavalry-sabre work there's a motion called the moulinet. Remember?"
"Yes. Didn't you say it was the beginning and the end, hyung-nim?"
Moulinet is French for windmill. It is a technique of drawing great circles with the blade, just like a windmill, feeding in more and more speed, and cutting without a break. How quickly and how cleanly you can unfold techniques like that accounts for more than seventy percent of sabre. The rest is footwork.
"Copy me."
I traced a moulinet with my estoc.
"This estoc has an edge, but it was never a blade made for cutting. It won't do well in my hand. In yours, it will."
Hae-il followed me and drew the circle.
"You need a little more wrist. Don't think of it as a sword. Think of cracking a whip."
She was awkward at first. One or two corrections, and she settled into it.
"Like this, hyung-nim?"
"You're good!"
There was talent there, no question.
"Hmph! For the greatest genius broadcaster in history — one who blasphemes even the gods — this much is merely average, hyung-nim."
"Didn't you say you did those fake-romance streams?"
"Th-that's not the important part, is it, hyung-nim?"
"Anyway, the beauty of this is that attack and defense happen together."
"I thought so, hyung-nim!"
"The parade-riposte I use takes each attack, parries it, beats it aside, and answers. This isn't that."
Talking sword while teaching sword, the mood that had sunk earlier lifted. Before I knew it I was cracking jokes.
"......Stay on the moulinet and keep your footwork clean, and you won't get surrounded. And you're already good with a gun and with grenades. Use them together, and orcs shouldn't be much of a problem."
"Keeping on the move definitely seems like the important part, hyung-nim."
"Right. And that's something I need to practice too, isn't it? From what I saw today, in there I'll have to be able to use the walls and the ceiling."
That seemed to be everything Hae-il needed from me. Now it was my turn.
I set a hand against one of the tall steel posts that held the futsal netting and gave it a light push. It looked as if it would take my weight. I stepped onto it, sprang, turned through a great full circle, and came down.
Acrobatics. It had been a while. Even so, I could feel it clearly: my body was better than it had been in the tutorial.
"Th-they teach that in fencing too, hyung-nim?!"
Hae-il stared at me with her mouth hanging open.
"No. This is from Haedong Kumdo. Over there we even did Eastern-style sword wrestling."
She looked genuinely shaken.
"P-please teach me too, hyung-nim."
"Moulinet first."
I had gone when I was very young and never thought much of it, but looking back, the place had been something of a fraud. Still, considering the footwork that gate would demand, the experience was meaningful enough. Leap, roll, spin, and cut — after so long away, how many times did I run through it?
The status-window ring gave a small buzz. Old memories welled up, one after another. My instructor in those days had said it was a sword art made by interpreting the Native Sword of Joseon's Comprehensive Illustrated Manual of Martial Arts. Whether that was true, I couldn't say. What mattered was that the status system had declared me practiced enough to fight with it.
A fencer's piste lies on the stage. A Saetbyeol hunter's piste can lie on the wall, and on the ceiling.
We kept at the training for a long while after that, then went back, washed, and slept.