The Young Man Who Was a Hunter (3)
"Mr. Walden."
Ian decided to use the lull to take in what he could of the world that had changed around him. He meant to stop by a library when he had the time, but there was a difference in bearing between knowledge set down in print and a story heard from a living mouth.
"Hm?"
"There are quite a few renowned hunter houses, aren't there? Is there one you're particularly fond of?"
The corner of Walden's mouth lifted, just slightly. Ian did not miss it.
So the impression these so-called great hunter houses leave isn't such a bad one...
This was precisely the difference he had meant. A vividness carried by something other than words—the quiet feelings written into the way a person moved.
"Well, well. You angling to play a riddle game with me?"
"Nothing like that. I was just curious. I've always liked the ones who fight with swords. They look impressive."
Ian cast out a line that could be taken any number of ways, depending on who heard it, and waited.
"Hoh. Swords, is it? Then it has to be Pendragon, doesn't it? The house that owns that holy sword, passed down from before the Cataclysm!"
Ah...
The urge to blurt out And what is any of that supposed to mean? shot up in him, and Ian held it down. He knew the legend of Excalibur, of course. There had even been a hunter who made finding it his life's vow.
A man who had lost his entire family to fairies. The vicious part was that the fairies who murdered that family had adopted him, the better to mock a human who took his own enemies for parents. Once he learned the truth and cut down the fairy who had played at being his parent, he swore he would carve fear into fairies that did not flinch at the sound of church bells, and he scoured England for its greatest holy sword.
Elric. A friend who was English, and yet more at home in the fairy tongue than in English.
But the desperation of a search does not guarantee a successful find. As far as Ian knew, actually recovering a weapon out of a story was vanishingly rare, which was why most hunters contented themselves with gear that merely borrowed from old lore—silver bullets, iron stakes, and the like. Hunters willing to burn their lives away chasing a true weapon of legend were few.
I hope he found it.
He hoped the wish of his old friend Elric, whom he would never see again, had been fulfilled. Hunters would have had to keep hunting even after 1999 passed, and in the course of that long, grinding fight, Excalibur would have been a tremendous help.
"For the likes of me, there's no knowing whether it's true, but I like that legend in particular. The one where the soul of the first patriarch, Elric, dwells in the holy sword and judges the character of his descendants."
"...Pardon?"
"Mm. Talk of souls gives you the chills too, does it? There's even a wild rumor that Pendragon's first patriarch takes over his descendants' bodies."
Walden launched into stories Ian had never asked for, fervent assertions of his own among them.
"But Elric Pendragon, the Star Knight, is a noble man! He'd never stoop to something so low as stealing a descendant's body!"
That, at least, gave Ian time to set his thoughts in order. He chose his words with care, so that even if a who? slipped out, he could still smooth it over.
"Then what do you make of Sir Elric's comrades? You know—the one who fought with his bare hands, for instance."
"Ah. You mean Seo Hong?"
Another old comrade's name came tumbling out.
What in the world happened in the time I was gone?
"He left a fair mark of his own, in his way. They say the Mana Training Methods hunters learn now started with him. Still, set beside Elric Pendragon, I'd say he comes up a notch short."
So those body drills of his actually worked?
The origin of the mana training methods. Of all his hunter comrades, the one who had been written off as the wildest rogue of the lot had gone and risen in the world.
Ian listened closely as Walden went on. Elric, Walden preached, had been chosen by the constellations, whereas Seo Hong had never once had a constellation step forward and offer a contract first—and on that ground he argued for Elric as the strongest of them all.
At that, another hunter who had been listening in silence opened his mouth.
"Aw, come on. That's not right. If you're naming the strongest among the founders who built the Six Great Families of the Beginning, it's the Heart-Eating King, isn't it?"
"Now, hold on. What are you saying? There's a holy sword, I tell you! The strongest artifact, handed down from before the Cataclysm!"
Ian listened to the hunters lost in their who-would-win game and laughed, hollow. He could guess well enough who these founders of the great houses really were.
Honestly. What happened while I wasn't around?
And at the same time, a few things felt wrong.
Hadn't the hunter careers of Elric and Seo Hong run all the way down from the Common Era? Their idolized life stories remained, and yet nothing had been passed on about how they had actually worked in those years. The Six Progenitors seemed to survive in hearsay not as hunters who had been active since before the Cataclysm, but only in the image of the leading figures who overcame it.
The list of things I'll have to look into just got longer...
"Everyone, please step down."
The hunters moved at the Hunter Support Office staffer's direction. They looked thoroughly used to it; a gate ecology survey was clearly something each of them had done more than once.
"The entrance to the gate you'll be surveying today is straight ahead."
"Oh, come on. A forest type? There's hardly anything worth bringing back from those."
"Please finish your gathering and return before the time limit on the watches we've issued runs out. The Support Office does purchase monster mana stones as well, but there's no separate hazard pay, so we recommend you avoid combat as much as you can."
The staffer looked them all over and left a last farewell. May the stars' blessing be with you. The same greeting Ian had heard from the fairy receptionist.
"Oh? You. You didn't bring a weapon of your own?"
Deaths on an F-rank gate ecology survey were exceedingly rare. Even an F-rank hunter could put down the lightweight monsters people commonly called trash mobs without much trouble. Even so, a monster was still a monster. People rarely died, but they were hurt often enough.
For that reason the Support Office, mindful of the hunters' safety, issued activity guidelines for ecology surveys and recommended that they search in pairs. Of course, as with most things merely "recommended," the guidelines were very rarely followed—all the more so because no supervisor actually went into the gate with them.
Walden and Ian were one of those rare cases. Walden himself had never paid the recommendations much mind, but once he heard this was Ian's first gate survey, he volunteered to team up. Part of it was consideration for a newcomer. Part of it was curiosity about a hunter he could not place.
From that standpoint, it was strange that Ian had not brought so much as a single weapon. Whether he was a son of a great house come to sample life at the bottom, or an ascetic of the Constellation Church, a hunter was, at bottom, one who fought. Carrying at least one weapon was only natural.
Don't tell me he's an unarmed fighter? He doesn't look it. I don't even see a metal gauntlet...
"Ah. My weapon is right here."
Ian undid the epaulet bound to the upper left sleeve of his black coat. The two-strand cord that had fixed it to a soot-blackened buckle was, before Walden quite noticed, already caught in Ian's hand.
"Hm? That's a weapon?"
Ian nodded, picked up a stone lying at his feet, and set it into the epaulet. A scrap of leather fixed between the two cords, and a stone clamped at the center of that leather—the ranged weapon hunters of Ian's own time had favored most, for the simple reason that the shot was easy to come by and easy to hide.
A sling.
He took the cords and began to turn them, slowly at first. The sling picked up speed, and the noise grew with it, a rushing shear of wind that swelled and swelled until, at a certain moment, it grew no fiercer. That was when he let go of one end.
Shwip!
A sharp crack of parted air, and right on its heels a blood-hot scream tore out. Kerrk!
"Wh—what?!"
"I've got one. Shall we go look?"
Ian caught Walden, dumbfounded by a weapon he had not expected, and pulled him along to confirm the prey.
A frame smaller than a child's. Spindly limbs. A belly shoved out round, and a hooked nose.
"A goblin, sure enough. Well, in an F-rank gate, if anything shows up it's a goblin or a kobold."
"If you want the mana stone, you start by opening it around the heart."
So saying, Walden showed him how.
"But don't get your hopes up too high. Mana stones come readily enough from the strong ones. They rarely turn up in weak monsters. In an F-rank gate, you're better off collecting herbs like a sensible fellow. More efficient."
Ian let out a short laugh from under his hood. The notion that stronger specimens yielded better items was pure constellation-serial logic.
While Walden split the goblin's ribcage with a hand knife, Ian stepped up to the pool of blood the creature had made and held out the jade necklace. There was no reaction at all.
Damn it.
He had thought, for a moment, that this might go easily. A bitter smile crossed his face. Even before entering the gate, he had guessed it might turn out this way. What powered the jade necklace was blood shed by the Night Kin.
But were the monsters inside a gate kin to the Night Kin? It was a question Ian could not answer for himself. And the answer that had just come back was no.
Right. I thought the feel of that sling-stone was a little light.
On the inside of his epaulet was a six-pointed star formed where two triangles crossed—the mark commonly called the Star of David. A measure meant to draw on the lore of David felling the giant Goliath with a sling. Against an ordinary person or an animal, it hit with about the force of a normal sling. Against a race that belonged to the night, it brought to bear a destructive power beyond ordinary physical law. If a vampire took one of these stone shots, for instance, the regeneration of the struck flesh dropped for a time. Against giant-kind, the wound was especially fatal.
David's mark doesn't amount to much against races with no real point of contact with monotheistic lore, but...
The goblins he knew were mythical beings rooted in European tradition. By cultural sphere, a symbol of monotheism ought to have taken. Once again, what Ian had taken for obvious was denied. If the mark had worked, something more unreal should have followed than the ordinary sight of a head breaking under a stone. The place that was struck should have charred, or something of that kind.
He had not let go of hope to the very end, and had even soaked the necklace in the blood, but the necklace, sure enough, gave no response. Charging it, it seemed, would take some other method. The first had failed, but Ian was not impatient. He had a second plan ready.
"Oh! Ian! Come over here! A mana stone came out!"
"Oh! I'll be right there!"
"You did all the work. Splitting the money with me like this isn't right, is it?"
Walden was rather thrown by what Ian had proposed. Even after the first goblin, Ian had spent less effort pulling the gate's herbs than finding goblins and cracking their skulls—and then he had suggested they divide the payout from the mana stones those goblins yielded, half and half. A generosity that was startling.
As I thought. If he's a son of a great house, this much is pocket change to him?
Ian shrugged.
"You taught me how to butcher a goblin. Please think of it as tuition."
"That's an awful lot to pay for a slapdash lesson..."
Ian headed off Walden's attempt to refuse his share and asked the Support Office staffer to divide the settled sum exactly in half. In truth, it doubled as payment for the stories about his friends. Hearing them had let him lay his plans from here on in far more concrete terms.
"If it really weighs on you, then look after me the next time we meet, too."
With that, he stepped off the Hunter Support Office transport. A voice followed him from behind.
"Come on—with skill like yours, do you even need to be taking work like this?"
Ian laughed under his breath. Of course he did. He was doing it to charge the jade necklace.
After that, Ian's days became very simple.
The moment he was up, he walked straight to the library, timed to arrive exactly at opening. He read books on the era of the Cataclysm in the reading room until the assembly time for a gate ecology survey, then moved to the Support Office annex and went out on the work. If the library was still open when he returned from the gate, he went back to it. If it had closed, he returned to the public rental housing set aside for gate returnees and brought the day to an end.
A life like that was regular in the extreme. Watch him for a single week, and anyone could have memorized the pattern. His routes always included places where people were scarce and the shade lay deep. He took no particular care to hide his own existence, so if someone had paid close enough attention, they could have realized that a Generation-0 hunter by the name of Ian was at work. A little more attention, and they would have grasped that most of the public-work jobs he handled were F-rank.
In short, the Ian of the present had a fixed place to live, a regular way of moving, and a degree of force that would pass for that of an ordinary F-rank.
Three weeks passed that way. By the time the books he had worked through at the library climbed into the double digits, he muttered, hollow.
"Honestly. Why aren't these bastards attacking?"
Had the age changed so much that even the vampires had let their discipline go slack?