Hehehe! Love for Classmates, Love for Country!
I pulled my gaze off Seo Rina, who was staring at me in a daze.
Chuck a pack that heavy and suddenly the world feels livable again. What the hell did they even stuff in there?
I stood at the mouth of the cave and shook out my arms, rolling my shoulders. A cool wind slid over my sweat-slick upper body and wicked the heat away.
The old folks up front. The trainees at my back. A clearing packed wall to wall with goblins seething with bloodlust.
Perfect.
The fight was already mapping itself out in my head. This body wasn't going to bruise from those cheap clubs. Dive the Hobgoblin, recycle that shockwave from earlier, and then—
"Oh my, sweetheart. How can you go around taking your clothes off like that? It's indecent."
A huge camouflage jacket came down over me like a dropped curtain.
"Huh? Wait—what is this?!"
Aagh! Only my face is even sticking out!
"Hwaaaah... th-this isn't it, dayo! My strength is draining away, dayo!"
Oh my gosh! This is a disaster, dayo! It's so long I can't get it off, dayo!
The grandma who'd thrown the jacket on me even ran the zipper all the way up and shoved me backward.
"You go stay in the back, little one."
"That's right. When things get dangerous, you just lean on the grown-ups."
"N-no, this is my awakening timing, dayo! D-don't pull meee!"
"Quit your bullshit and get back here! What the hell does a porter think he's doing?!"
"I'm not a porter, dayo! I'm a Barbaria—"
Soft-squishy-boobies-I-love-it-heung—okay, I like it, but I can't see! Get this off me!
A huge ash-gray goblin shrieked itself hoarse, a raw, furious howl.
The heat of war rolled in. The thick, clinging stink of sweat crouched low over the clearing.
Goblins with their clubs clenched tight poured out in a flood.
Kiraaaaah!
Kiiiik!
Hundreds of small feet hammered the dirt like a war drum, a rolling thunder that wouldn't stop.
The old folks facing them waited in perfect stillness, even as the goblins closed to three strides.
Two strides.
Let go of me! I have to help—
"When grown-ups tell you something, there's always a reason for it."
A sharp crack. A shockwave fanned out from the palm that met the charge.
The goblins that had bunched up staggered as one and went down in a heap. The ones closest to us rolled their eyes back and became a living barricade.
"Watch close. This is the work you'll be doing yourselves one day."
A flick of the wrist seated the sword in his grip as if it had grown there.
He tapped the ground. His body vanished.
A whisper of steel. Then a delayed fountain of blood burst in every direction.
A single sword-line painted itself across the tangle of goblins as if they were paper. Then two lines. Three. Four. No hesitation, no waste—like a brush that already knew the stroke. From one living body to the next, he threaded dozens onto a single thread. In a world gone slow, the elegance of following that line burned itself into afterimages.
A long breath—
The sword dance that had strung together dozens of goblins came to a stop.
"Hah— hah— Backup."
"Hwaaah... that was so freaking cool, dayo."
"No way..."
"You watch too, young lady. This is how you use magic."
She flicked her staff as if shooing a fly. Mana lanced into the corpse heap, where blood was still running. Blood-vines and a frozen sea began to sprout from the dead.
A grinding crack, then a shattering roar. A sudden spike-wave of ice punched straight through the second rank.
The pierced goblins screamed as one. Bellies torn open, they folded. Arms and legs skewered, they crumpled. The ones coming up behind them stopped dead in their tracks.
Dozens of goblins were still on their feet. But the army that had been so sure of victory was already dead. One exchange. That was all it took.
Another crack. A shockwave slammed into the graveyard of spikes. The ice burst apart and carpeted the ground in shards.
The enemy milled helplessly at the edge of a swamp of blades.
This was a hunter.
My heart was hammering.
"Kh—hack... hh..."
Grandpa Seokhyeon suddenly coughed and staggered.
"Eeeek! Grandpa is dying, dayo!"
"That's the price of pushing too hard. Early-stage Mana Exhaustion just hit him."
Tears sprang to my eyes.
"That's... because of us!"
Boobies Girl must have felt it too; she sniffled.
The Hobgoblin went berserk, shrieking and driving the goblins forward. Eyes that had been wandering the air locked onto the old man fighting for breath. Feet that had hesitated climbed over the bleeding barricade.
Grandpa dragged in a breath and took up his sword again. The other two old folks reset for another combo. Every one of them had gone deathly pale.
This is actually dangerous! The grandpa and grandma are all going to die!
I steeled myself. I'd never used it in a real fight, but I was sure. If it was me, I could flip this whole situation.
I sucked in a breath—
"Grandpa, Grandma, hang in there!!!"
Battle Cry
A colorless wave sank into those bent old backs. Into the adults standing their ground.
"The little one says to hang in there. Guess we'd better put our backs into it."
"Well now, would you look at that. Kids these days are terrifying!"
"Heh. I feel about twenty years younger."
Watching the old folks laugh like a cool wind had hit them, I relaxed. We were going to win this easy.
"Let's go."
The Hobgoblin screamed.
Eight people dragged their spent bodies out through the gate.
"Finally..."
"We lived..."
"Haaah."
"Hwaaah~ I lived, dayo."
I really had come back from the dead. I didn't even have the strength left to peel off the camouflage jacket.
When we'd put down the Hobgoblin, I'd thought it was over. The way out had been packed with traps. Gates are so, so scary!
Grandpa Seokhyeon suddenly folded and rolled onto the ground.
"Aigoo... I'm dying~"
"Kyaah—! What do we do, what do we do! Does anyone have a potion?!"
"Kyaaah! Grandpa can't die, dayo! What is this, dayo! Why does he come all the way out here just to die, dayo!"
"Easy, easy, step back. His Mana Exhaustion just got worse, that's all. You feed him the mana stabilizer from the survival kit. That's the whole of it."
Grandpa Donggu finished the explanation at a leisurely pace and handed over the stabilizer with a canteen. Grandpa Seokhyeon gulped it down.
"He's fine for now. If anyone ever takes a real injury, there's a stretcher in the porter's pack. You just carry them out."
"Then Grandpa isn't going to die, dayo? He'll get better soon, dayo?"
"That's right, that's right. Still, you can't ever really relax about it. The more often you go through Mana Exhaustion, the more it wrecks your circuits."
"Hegh!"
"First-generation hunters like us got wrung out by Mana Exhaustion during the Break and dropped two ranks or more. You lot had better be careful too, hear?"
"That's..."
"Then Grandpa and Grandma also..."
They used to be A-Rank and B-Rank?
Grandpa Donggu smiled, a little bitter around the edges. Grandpa Seokhyeon, still sprawled on the ground, answered quietly.
The calm in that sentence punched the tears right out of me.
"They're war heroes who protected the country, so why doesn't anybody know, dayo? That's too much, dayo."
If this job was supposed to be their reward, it was a cruel one. They were going to keep grinding like this every day, getting cussed out by kids like Boobies Girl.
The tears kept falling. Grandpa and Grandma were just too pitiful.
The old folks looked at each other and smiled, warm and pleased.
"We enjoyed everything there was to enjoy. Our time already went by. If those days get forgotten, that's just fine."
"Aigoo, hyung-nim, you say that, but you just want to look cool in front of your boy, don't you?"
"Good grief... I wonder when these tiresome old men are ever going to grow up."
Then—
"Um... excuse me..."
Boobies Girl, who had been hovering at the edge of the group like she didn't know where to put herself, stepped forward.
Here we go. She's about to say something stupid again. Not this time!
"I... I really, really acted like an idiot."
Seo Rina's head dropped. Her voice shook. The venom from before was gone.
"When I received an A-Rank, I thought I was the greatest thing in the world. So I looked down on my seniors in my head for being nothing but C-Rank, D-Rank... and with no experience at all, I just dug in and did whatever I wanted."
Tears hit the backs of her hands, one after another.
"I ignored the classmates who'd come in here staking their lives right beside me... and I even took it out on the kid carrying the heavy bags, and treated him however I felt like."
A wet sniffle carried across the clearing.
"When I saw my seniors step out in front to protect us... I was so ashamed of everything I'd done. I acted like a fool and put the party in danger. I am truly sorry..."
Silence held for a beat. Everyone stared at Seo Rina as she broke down crying.
"Well now. That mouthy young lady talking like this—I can't quite get used to it."
Grandpa Donggu scratched his head and laughed, a big rolling laugh.
"Heh heh heh. Young blood does that sometimes. If you figured it out before anybody got hurt, that's enough. Isn't that right?"
"Hunters grow by making mistakes and being embarrassed by them. Don't lose heart, dear."
Grandpa Seokhyeon from the ground and Grandma Sujin both chimed in, wearing the kindest smiles in the world.
"Snf... hhk... waaaaaah—"
In the end Seo Rina just wailed.
"Hhk, hhk... I'm sorry, I'm sooorryyy...!"
"Waaaaah! Oh my gosh... it's too moving, dayoooo!"
Tears poured out of my eyes. When the other trainees edged in one by one and joined us, the feeling multiplied by a hundred thousand. Everyone here was so warm. I really needed to reflect on myself.
Honestly, I'd thought the others were weird too. Standing there with their arms folded like emotionless psychos while people were fighting. Grandpa looking like he was about to die and them only looking out for themselves. Constantly asking for contact info, asking which guild I was going to.
"Waaaaah! I'm sorry I thought you were weird, dayo! I was the bad one, dayo..."
I hugged the trainees one by one and apologized. In the end, there was warm love in everyone's heart! The devil in my mind had been looking at a twisted world. I was the bad person who'd doubted my classmates!
"Waaaaah! Our classmates would never be like thaaat!"
"No, that's... it isn't."
"Ah shit, what do we do about this."
"I dunno. He'll figure it out later."
"I don't know what you're saying but thank you, dayooo!"
Seo Rina came over too, so I hugged her. I rubbed my face into that soft give and reflected some more.
"I'm sorry. I kept treating you like a porter and being awful."
"Hhk... it's okay, dayo! I forgive everything, dayo! Boobies Girl is a whole new person now, dayo!"
"B-Boo...?"
Love and peace, everybody!
Ppii!
We took a group photo, swapped contacts, and went our separate ways.
A family restaurant near the Hunter Association.
Yoo Ai, in a chick-yellow cardigan, gulped down his cider in frantic little swallows. His shining eyes looked ready to spill over again at any second.
"That's how I went through this huge adventure and got my completion certificate, dayo. They said they'd give me a commendation too, and I'm going to keep it forever, dayo. Grandpa Donggu even taught me the shockwave technique, dayo."
"I see..."
Every time those clear eyes sparkled, her conscience twinged.
Hunter work was rough and desperate. The longer you stayed in it, the more strange people you collected, as a matter of course. Treating porters like dirt was common, and there were even cases of people actively sabotaging teamwork inside a gate.
"Porter work is just a memory now, dayo. A porter is a precious person who does the hard jobs, dayo. I'm definitely going to treat our party's porter really well, dayo!"
A special-blend Hunter High, formulated to melt hunter hearts into goo.
The modern hunter's north star, packed tight with gate hazards and hard-won knowledge: Our Hunter Nutrition Special.
Refined every year by psychologists working with the major guilds: The Serotonin Bomb You Can't Dodge Even If You Know It's Coming.
That was the adaptation training course.
And of course the instructors were Association agents "on record as C-Rank." In truth, they were hunter recreation instructors.
She'd figured that if he spent that much time on the galleries, he would have known.
"Nom nom... now that I think about it, why did you tell me to look at the Awakener Gallery, dayo?"
The child who knew nothing of the world, eating his pork cutlet.
Did she really have to hand him the bright-red truth? Wasn't it better to let a good thing stay a good thing?
Thanks to all of it, he'd even gotten the contact info of instructors people would kill to know.
"I just said it because there are a lot of useful tips. Have you tried messaging the instructors?"
"Unghuhu! I text Grandpa and Grandma every evening so they won't be bored, dayo. Did you know? They are so good at using smartphones, dayo! I was so surprised, dayo?"
They drive Teslas and use iPhones, so...
Well. As long as they were healthy.
"Unghuhu. I got my certificate, so now I can join a party, dayo."
"Ah—there was something I wanted to talk to you about regarding party matching. Have you happened to contact the Tanker Association?"
"Huuh? What's that, dayo?"
Yoo Ai's eyes went perfectly round.
A little flutter ran through her chest. He really was too pure. The child needed help. The help of a reliable adult—someone like her.
"Do you know what a tanker certification is?"