The Youth Who Was a Hunter (2)
Truthfully, what struck Ian as even stranger than the people shouting Status Window was the sight of most of the surrounding hunters directing envious glances at those who had one.
Reproachful stares aimed at the chief culprits of the noise pollution, he could have understood. But envy? Jealousy?
After puzzling over it for a moment, Ian found himself recalling what he'd heard from the Hunter Support Agency official just before.
'Contract with a Constellation, and a Status Window will be granted to you — that was the gist of it, wasn't it?'
Could the "Status Window" they kept shouting about be some kind of mark of having been chosen by a Constellation? If so, the envy the crowd kept letting slip made a certain sense as well. Longing and jealousy for some special thing one didn't possess — emotions Ian was familiar with himself.
'If that's the logic, then wanting to show off the special thing you've acquired does carry some persuasion...'
Ian tried to make himself understand the new generation of hunters — and eventually shook his head.
'No. Even so, can this really be right?'
He could just barely comprehend the people who envied the Status Window. The people who boasted about theirs, he could not. Openly parading one's abilities in front of any stranger who happened to be standing there? With no way of knowing when or how that information might leak? He had a feeling that if hunters of this era overheard such a sentiment, he'd be written off as an out-of-touch old-timer on the spot.
After a few minutes of dwelling on Status Windows, Ian shook his head hard. Burning mental energy on something that had nothing to do with him, here and now — wasn't that just a waste of time and stamina? Rather than agonizing over a problem he couldn't crack, it would be more efficient by far to spend those minutes learning about the public job placement program instead.
Having swept the stray thoughts away, Ian headed for the annex of the Hunter Support Agency. The path to the annex was quieter than the one to the main building, and he studied the attire of the hunters around him with care.
'Their outfits are a touch more modest than the crowd out in front of the main building.'
The mana ripples he could sense from the individual hunters were on the faint side as well. Apparently this "public work" business wasn't the sort of assignment that strong hunters favored.
Which was precisely what put Ian at ease. In the time he'd been gone, the hunter industry had undergone an irreversible tectonic shift. With Earth's mana density now overwhelmingly higher, charging blindly into a hunt could end in any manner of misadventure. It was better to handle relatively safe missions while he confirmed for himself the true state of the industry.
'And above all...' Ian drew out the necklace he'd stowed beneath his clothes. Halfway along its leather cord hung a jade ornament. The stone, which should have been giving off a soft glow, had lost its luster and now slumbered in silence.
The Jade Necklace was one of the few magic tools Ian possessed, and the power granted to it was the tracking of Nightkin. It could pursue only a single target at a time — but even that made it an incomparably useful tool for a hunter.
Ian fingered the jade a few times. The missing glow, it seemed, meant the thing lacked the mana to function at all. Recharging it was simple: it only had to drink in the blood of the Nightkin. The moment he secured mana at the Gate, he intended to reactivate the tracking mark lodged within the necklace.
Because this necklace had been attuned to track the Nightkin who had last crossed blades with Ian in 1999 — the Vampire Princess.
Neither the Princess nor Ian had won that fight. Each had entrusted the future to their comrades, and together they had plunged beyond the edge of the Earth.
If he had come back, then the Princess must have returned to this world as well. Perhaps far earlier than he had — she had commanded vastly greater mana than Ian himself, and breaking free of the seal would have been all the easier for it.
She had been a vampire so powerful even on an Earth whose mana was pitifully thin; there was no telling how strong, how cunning, she might have grown in this age. An intelligent enemy is feared because it learns from its failures, and among the children of the night, vampires were blessed with the keenest minds of all.
The Princess was a seed of calamity the past had handed down to the present. To Ian, hunting her down was the final duty left to him.
Ian's plans for the future were one thing; reality was another. He quietly made his way to the Agency annex and received a briefing on the public jobs on offer.
The commission's name was dry as dust: the F-Rank Gate Ecology Survey. Work meant for brand-new hunters — a job that required no direct engagement with the monsters inside the Gate, only the gathering of the surrounding flora and fauna before heading home.
Ian held out his hunter registration card to sign up, then took a look around. Most of the hunters in the annex gave off mana ripples about as faint as his own. A few, however, radiated something altogether different, and Ian covertly studied the hunters whose signatures ran stronger.
'Even the fabric of their clothes is in a different league.' You'd never notice at a glance, but look closely and the material was plainly expensive. Ian ran the clichés of Constellation novels through his head, and it didn't take him long to guess what these people were.
'Scouts, lying in wait to recruit promising prospects into their organizations?' People hoping to claim the rising stars early — the newcomers who'd distinguished themselves during hunter registration. Memories of novels he'd read long ago came drifting back. In those stories, the scouts invariably did their part by shouting exclamations like "The Measurement Crystal Ball just shattered!" and reporting it up to their superiors.
Picturing countless scouts swarming him with offers of a handshake, Ian let out a short, hollow laugh. Whether the hunter organizations of this era were called guilds, clans, or something else entirely, he didn't know — but he had no intention of getting tangled up with any of them. After all, the rank he'd been sorted into was F-Rank. There wasn't the slightest chance of catching a scout's eye at that grade.
'Still, it was a fun daydream while it lasted.' With a light step, Ian headed for the staging point where the applicants of the F-Rank Gate Ecology Survey were to gather.
"Man, now that's a look. Some fine gear you've got there."
They were inside a Hunter Support Agency transport bound for the F-Rank Gate. The clean-cut, neatly featured middle-aged man in the seat beside him had struck up the conversation.
Ian scratched at his cheek. His equipment was a style of dress that had been treated as old-fashioned even among the hunters of his own day: a coat hanging to his calves, a neatly groomed hat, and a face covering over his mouth — a getup that would have felt stifling even to hunters of the early modern period.
Judging by the man's tone, though, it didn't sound like an attempt to pick a fight. It was closer to idle chatter — the easygoing kind meant to build a little rapport. So Ian gave him the plain truth.
"It's an antique. I inherited it from someone I knew."
The items had come from the Master who had led him into the world of hunters. The Master himself, for the record, went about in cutting-edge body armor woven from special fibers, and no matter how Ian turned it over, he couldn't shake the impression that the man had simply dumped a piece of clutter he couldn't bring himself to throw away onto him.
"Oh, I knew it! That look was never anything ordinary! Do you have ties to one of the prestigious hunter clans? Or are you an ascetic of a Constellation Order?"
For an instant, Ian's brain stopped dead. Words that could not possibly be joined had just arrived bundled together in a single breath.
"Hunter... clans, did you say?"
The wrongness was so severe he could barely force the two words together.
'The only ones he'd ever known were bastards who, the moment they had their enemies by the throat, were champing at the bit to throw this fucking job away?'
No hunter wanted to hand a blood-for-blood grudge down the generations. They wanted, by any means necessary, to end their sworn enemies within their own lifetime and bequeath their descendants nothing but a peaceful daily life. This middle-aged man was telling him the precise opposite of everything Ian knew about being a hunter.
"Aw, come off it — don't play coy like everyone doesn't already know this. I'm talking about the hunter families with real roots, the ones that stretch all the way back to the Cataclysm! From what I hear, those clans favor traditional hunter gear over the mass-produced artifacts of today."
Ian gazed at the far-off sky beyond the window. Where in the world was there any "root" to be had in hunting? People the Nightkin had drawn blood from, who clenched their teeth and took up a weapon — that was what a hunter was. Nothing more.
'Adapting to this really is hard...' He fudged the matter, telling the middle-aged man that he'd inherited the gear from his master and didn't know its proper provenance himself. The man nodded along, satisfied.
"Aha. So it's a concept thing, then?"
Snickering, the man held out his hand.
"Name's Valden. Good to have you aboard."
As he made to return the introduction, Ian was quietly taken aback. The name Valden carried a distinctly Western flavor, yet the man's features looked about as Korean as they came.
'Is this the Cataclysm's doing as well?' He'd seen as much in the section of the Agency's guide pamphlet headed The History of the Hunter Support Agency. The age of the Cataclysm, it said, had seen truly momentous upheaval; tectonic shifts had scrambled the very layout of the continents, and a great many things had changed from the era before. Somewhere in that churning, it appeared, different cultures had mingled — and names, along with everything else, had taken on all manner of new shapes.
Ian affected a show of calm and nodded.
"I'm Ian. It's my first Gate survey, so I'll be counting on you as well."
"Oho, Ian. A variant of 'John,' was it? Hmm — less a scion of a prestigious clan, more an ascetic of one of the Orders, maybe..."
Valden murmured on, half to himself. Ian curled a wry smile beneath his face covering.
In truth, he was a native-born Korean of the Lee family — his given name, Ahn, written with the hanja character meaning "firelight."