The Generation Gap (1)
Behind the Hunter Support Administration stood the Six Progenitors. It was a well-known fact — well-known enough to be set down even among the exhibits in the history museum of the Hunter Support Administration Annex.
The Six Progenitors who brought the Cataclysm to an end came to understand that humanity's fight would go on.
So ran the stories, written in the manner of a comic meant for children. The Progenitors had felt the need to prepare for the disorder still to come, and for the gates that would keep surging up without end.
Each of them offered a different method, yet there was one purpose on which all of them agreed: a system was required to test hunters and sort them by ability. In a hunt, nothing mattered more than grasping the capacity of the hunter and of the quarry. Read those strengths exactly, and both the chance of a successful hunt and the hunter's chance of survival rose together.
That was why the Progenitors created the ranks running from S-Rank down to F-Rank. The organization raised to spread that classification, padded out with one form of support after another, became the Hunter Support Administration as it stood today.
The first-generation support policy, for instance — and in that era there was scarcely anything one could honestly call support — did little more than grant a rank according to the mana one held or the record one had made. Attention then fell less on classifying hunters than on classifying gates and monsters. Make the enemy's strength unmistakably plain, and a hunter's survival could be guaranteed whole.
Then came the second generation. Hunters began to raise organizations far larger than the one-off hunting bands they called parties, and clans and guilds could at last be formally registered with the Administration.
In the third generation, combat courses opened for novice hunters, meant to shore up the strength of those just entering the trade and to pass along the tacit knowledge of elders who had retired through injury.
Bit by bit the system put on flesh in this way, until the 7th Revision Support Policy itself had come into being. And somewhere in the gaps between those shifts of policy, Generation-0 Hunters thrust up like hidden reefs.
In truth, through the second-generation support policy — and, taking a broader view, even through the third — Generation-0 had blended in without particular trouble. A first-generation policy built around rank classification had benefited not only the first-generation hunters who became hunters after the Cataclysm, but the Generation-0 who had become hunters during the Cataclysm itself.
By the time the second-generation policy was promulgated, it was no longer the Generation-0 already accustomed to the first policy who began to draw notice, but the Generation-0 Hunters out of step with the age: those who had drifted inside gates during the Cataclysm, gone missing, and only later returned. Even then the gap between generations was not so wide. It was from the third generation onward that the difference truly stood out.
Reviews of the lectures retired Generation-0 Hunters gave from their own experience began to carry lines like these.
And why had it come to that? The trouble lay in what a Generation-0 Hunter even was. The age of the Cataclysm had been a disaster that unfolded with almost no one aware of it, save for a tiny handful of hunters. Everyone who, in the midst of that disaster, took up a weapon to face monsters and explore gates — to protect themselves, or for some other reason — was counted among them.
But what sort of people were they, the ones who survived and kept fighting in a situation even the leadership of public authority had failed to foresee? Hunters who had already been fighting since before the Cataclysm. Extreme survivalists braced for a disaster on the scale of societal collapse. And conspiracy theorists who believed in a plot to end the world, shouting that the Reptilians had infiltrated society and that everyone needed to wake up. The three groups were hard to tell apart. The overlap of those who were all three at once was vast.
And so the stereotype of the Generation-0 Hunter took shape: people who yanked tinfoil hats down over their heads, declared that the government could not be trusted, brandished a deadly weapon, and set out to mete out private justice. That was also why most hunters of the Cataclysm era, aside from the Progenitors who founded great houses, vanished without leaving much of an echo. Obstinate, anachronistic boomers.
Among the Generation-0 Hunters unearthed from gates, there were often people who flew into a rage insisting that even the present scene of the Hunter Support Administration might be a hallucination. The gates, they said, were in fact cattle-mutilation tools by which aliens sucked living things off the Earth to collect specimens, and they themselves had surely been caught by a hypnotic device and dropped into a virtual world. How else, they cried, could the world have changed like this? To these hunters of a bygone age, Administration staff earnestly explained the distortions of space and time that so often occurred inside gates. Few were persuaded by explanation alone.
There were various efforts to fold such people into the system. If they had family or old comrades, they might enter a hunter guild alongside them, or a program might be founded for a hunter's rehabilitation. Of those methods, the most effective was a contract with a Constellation. The authority and knowledge that supernatural being breathed directly into the soul could deliver a shock capable of overturning even a fixed idea in a single stroke.
The Constellations, for their part, tended to prefer Generation-0 Hunters as contractors, and so the Church of the Constellations stationed scouts in Hunter Support Administration buildings all over the world. Those who caused a scene at the Administration were, as a rule, Generation-0 Hunters, and the scouts approached them afterward to arrange a contract. Put the other way around, a Generation-0 Hunter who did not cause a scene was difficult to tell from an ordinary hunter.
That was also why no particular interest had gathered around Ian. For a Generation-0, he had accepted his situation far too quietly, in a soft and even way. The only person who showed him any special interest at the time was the fairy at the reception desk.
Wow. For a Generation-0, he's remarkably sociable and gentle.
Slipping past the gaze of a church that coveted Generation-0 Hunters, Ian went quietly and diligently about his public-work duties...
"You've filled a record more than sufficient for a promotion. Would you consider applying for the E-Rank promotion review?"
He had come to the Hunter Support Administration Annex as usual, meaning only to take a commission surveying the vegetation of an F-Rank gate, and what he heard was not usual at all.
A promotion review. Ian scratched at his hair. He had already been thinking that he would have to climb to a higher rank sooner or later. He felt no particular contempt for being F-Rank, but the higher one's rank, the more powerful the gates one could enter, and a higher gate led straight to a much larger income. If he was to obtain the various catalysts needed to charge the jade necklace, he needed more money than he had.
Inwardly, he sighed. How in the world is an ordinary horse's hoof more expensive than a kelpie's tail feather?
In truth, the horse Ian wanted was a scarce breed in hunter society as it stood. After the Cataclysm, living things exposed to mana had mutated into fantastical species, and in the case of the horse the changes had been especially varied. Some were reborn as kelpies, water spirits with the heads of horses; some sprouted horns; some grew wings upon their backs. Now and then a super-mutant appeared that could speak, bore a horn, and wore wings besides. Because the world had changed in that way, an ordinary horse had, paradoxically, grown rare.
And yet the traditional methods of charging mana that Ian knew were, for the most part, carried out with parts of ordinary species. On public work in F-Rank gates, that sum would take several months at the least — maybe as long as a year.
He remembered the shock of searching Hunternet, the multipurpose site run by the Hunter Support Administration, for the price of the materials he needed. Most of what had been listed on the auction site had settled into a range higher than anything he had imagined. Materials that did not even hold mana had grown expensive precisely because they held none. Precision experiments conducted in places like the Mage Towers could have their results warped by the mana a material possessed, and to correct that error the towers bought Non-mana Materials at a steep price. The demand of major corporations had driven the cost of supply to a brutal height.
From beneath his hood, Ian smiled bitterly and nodded.
"Yes. That sounds good."
"Oh! Then please come to the Grade Measurement Room on the first floor of the Hunter Support Administration Main Building at nine o'clock this coming Tuesday!"
"Ah..."
Ian scratched his head. A promotion review, and it began the very next week? Wasn't that far too fast?
"Is there anything I should prepare before the review?"
"Oh, come on. An E-Rank promotion review is over once they confirm your record and you finish the safety education."
"Pardon?"
For a moment he couldn't take in what he had heard, and he asked again. Safety education, and that was the end of it? It was absurd. Among the hunter societies he knew, the one with the loosest promotion procedure had been the Order of the Dawn Cross of the Silver Key, a gathering of self-proclaimed mages. Even they, however loose the terms of joining, had been extremely particular about rising in rank.
First came months of continued observation. Then every possession, the clothes on one's back included, was seized, and one had to escape alive from a primeval forest where mythical beasts lay in wait. That was the minimum condition for a novice to be recognized as an initiate. If a person meant to cast off the name of newcomer and say, without shame, that they had taken a single step as a hunter, shouldn't they endure a trial at least that harsh?
"Ah, did you hear about the old exam from someone else? There used to be a written test, but when the 7th Revision Support Policy came in, that was moved over to the D-Rank promotion review. Too many people were getting injured in the D-Rank practical, so they accepted the view that practical exams should only be part of the review from C-Rank on..."
Ian wanted to pass out.