14. Melting Point (33)
14. Melting Point (33)
There is a folk belief that a skilled hunter steals the likeness of his prey. It is less a proverb than a precise description of a hunter's nature.
Imitating a quarry's behavior came naturally to a hunter. In the course of the chase, a hunter absorbed its habits and instincts, and what he learned became so ingrained that before long he was thinking and acting like the animal without conscious effort.
Draping himself in the hide of his prey was equally natural. The leftover pelts were simply too good not to fashion into hats, scarves, gloves, and coats.
Seeing a hunter wrapped in the skins of beasts he had killed, walking with their gait, people came to believe he had stolen their very shape.
That superstitious belief led directly to the blessing Miletus, the God of Hunting, bestowed upon his followers.
A cap sewn from a lion's scalp would lend a lion's force to the hunter's voice. An ornament carved from a rabbit's foot, hung around the neck, would warn him of any hostile presence nearby. Boots made from the hide of a mountain goat would let him anchor himself firmly against a cliff face.
The blessing the God of Hunting was said to confer upon a hunter's trophies was called a Mascot. Its power only inhabited objects crafted from prey the hunter had killed personally.
Every day, countless hunters dismantled their kills to fashion tools, hoping to gain the power of a Mascot, but only a tiny fraction ever received a genuinely supernatural effect.
Earning Miletus's acknowledgment was no small feat. Simply killing a powerful creature was not enough. Miletus valued how cunningly a hunter devised his strategy, how thoroughly he saw through his adversary's strengths, and how he overcame a disparity in power.
Ferenc's prized horn bow, "Crescent Moon," was one of those rare cases. He had fashioned it from the horn of a shadow wolf he had killed in his twenties. He had only managed to bring down that creature, which moved through the dark without leaving a sound or silhouette, after a desperate battle that lasted an entire night beneath a crescent moon.
True to its name, the black bow curved like a sliver of moon. He nocked an arrow and drew back the string.
The projectile vanished the moment it left the string. That was the blessing Miletus had granted this weapon. An arrow loosed from this bow was not merely invisible—it produced no sound at all. Ferenc called this technique the "Crescent Arrow."
His target was the soldier standing watch in the cliffside tower. At this distance, a veteran hunter like himself could make the shot with ease.
The problem was that even the bow's owner could not trace the arrow's flight path. After crafting the Crescent Moon, he'd had to spend months laboriously learning to visualize its trajectory in his mind.
Ferenc watched the soldier's head snap sideways as something punched through it. The man never realized what was happening, even in the moment of his death. The arrow revealed itself only after it had already struck.
"Wh-what the... enemy atta—gurk!"
The soldier beside him scrambled to sound the alarm, only to topple as another silent arrow found him.
He had drilled plenty against incoming arrows. The instant he saw his comrade hit, he reflexively raised his shield and swept his gaze around, but there was no answering a shot you could not see. The hand he had stretched toward the bell slid limply down the post.
"Success."
A thin smile crossed Ferenc's lips. With this, the garrison stationed at the Imperial Retreat would be delayed by at least five minutes once the real chaos began. That margin alone would dramatically improve the assassination's odds.
He lowered his bow and descended the rocks, already anticipating his subordinates' expressions of admiration at his handiwork. Instead, he saw that they were all staring in an entirely different direction.
"What is it?"
"That... my Rabbit's Foot..."
Ferenc glanced at the man's necklace. The friend who boasted of having essentially waged war on every rabbit burrow on an entire mountain just to bag a single rabbit had earned a precious Mascot for his obsessive perseverance: a charm that alerted him to the position of nearby foes.
The Rabbit's Foot twitched, pointing deeper into the woods. When Ferenc turned to look, he saw something emerging from the darkness—a shape that was impossible to definitively classify as either beast or man.
"Grr. Didn't expect one of you to be carrying a detection-type magic tool."
It was unquestionably speaking a human language, but the voice carried an undertone of animal growl. In the lamplight, its silhouette looked as though a tiger's face had been stretched over a human skeleton.
"Wearing?"
The hunter with the Rabbit's Foot murmured the word as if a memory had just clicked into place.
Wearing. Another of Miletus's blessings. True to the name, it was the power to steal a quarry's very form, allowing the user to partially transform his body into that of a beast.
It was precisely because of Wearing that anthropologists traced the origin of the beastmen back to the worship of Miletus.
Ratmen, Lycans, Mayeke—these were not simply separate species. Their bone structure and physical makeup clearly shared a common origin with humanity. The academic consensus was that they had branched off from mankind through Miletus's authority during the Paleolithic hunting-gathering era.
"Could it be... are you a priest?"
Wearing was understood to be a power obtained through a more codified ritual than that of a Mascot. Every year at the Hunting Festival, hunters saw the regional priests who presided over the rites and offered sacrifices to Miletus. None of them exhibited the full half-beast form of the man standing before them, but each bore some animal part on their body.
"Grr. The fact you're talking about priests means you lot are hunters yourselves, then?"
Ferenc checked his pocket watch. He could not afford to squander the precious five minutes he had just bought on this. He drew his sword and leveled it at the tiger-man.
"I don't know what this is about, but there is no full moon tonight. You seem in full command of your speech, so it doesn't appear you're in a blood-frenzy, either. How about we pretend we didn't see each other—fellow believers in the same god—and go our separate ways?"
The tiger beastman let out a dry snicker.
"Grr. Can't do that. The person you're after has ties to the one I serve."
"And you know who it is we're after?"
"That sword in your hand—it's cursed, isn't it? Thing is, I know the Madosa who made it quite well."
Ferenc gritted his teeth.
'Those Madosa bastards we hired a few days ago! No wonder they threw in with us so quickly. They had enemies of their own.'
Trying to persuade this creature that they were not allies of those Madosa seemed pointless now. Worse, there was no time to even attempt it. The operation was supposed to begin right now.
"The rest of you, get down there and commence the operation as planned."
"But, Captain..."
"Go! I'll hunt this beast myself."
If the man could project Wearing over his entire body, he was certainly a high-tier Madosa at minimum. Ferenc could not guarantee victory.
His instinct was to leave this opponent to his men and descend the cliff himself, but the operation needed to launch simultaneously from multiple directions. Their group—the command element—could not afford to be pinned down here.
Ferenc kept a careful eye on whether the enemy might ignore him and go after his subordinates. Thankfully, the beastman's gaze remained fixed solely on Ferenc.
"One question. Are you from the Tylops Region, by any chance?"
Ferenc nocked an arrow onto the Crescent Moon as he asked. If he could land a sudden Crescent Arrow as his opening move, he could wrestle the momentum onto his side.
"My homeland is Mikelteun. But I hear one of my comrades hails from that region. Something about marinated salmon being a local specialty?"
"Ah, that gives me an idea of which corner you're from. A shame—my neighborhood prefers soy-sauce pickling."
The arrow left the string. The tiger beastman flinched at the sensation of a projectile that had vanished from sight, but he had already read the bow's aim and reflexively twisted his body to the right.
Thunk. An arrow materialized out of nowhere, embedded in his left shoulder—exactly where his heart had been a heartbeat earlier.
'A bow Mascot. Conceals its presence until the moment of impact...'
An ordinary Madosa might have panicked at such an ability, but this man had received combat training in the Voodoo Cult, where hundreds of Madosa with wildly varied powers gathered. There, he had learned to respond calmly to the most bizarre and unpredictable abilities.
Ben Sullivan yanked the arrow from his shoulder. The numbing fog spreading from the wound made it clear the arrowhead had been poisoned.
"Come on, then! Let's see how one hunter fares against another."
The moment he saw Ferenc whirl around and sprint into the forest after loosing the arrow, Ben recognized that he was dealing with a formidable opponent. This was not going to be an easy takedown.
***
Wonderstein received Sullivan's call right around the time he stepped in front of the Crown Prince to defend Anais.
He had ordered Sullivan to patrol the hotel perimeter each night as a precaution. Tonight, Sullivan had spotted a suspicious group, shadowed them, been discovered, and was now in a standoff.
Wonderstein used the Sound Room to issue Sullivan instructions, while simultaneously feeding the Crown Prince information tempting enough to bargain with.
The true culprit behind the attempted imperial poisoning.
The whereabouts of the Imperial Slush Fund.
And a secret related to the Crown Prince's birth.
All of them were facts that had appeared in the original story.
-I'll pursue him, then.
-Yes. Please do. If it feels too dangerous, retreat immediately.
-...Understood.
Just as the communication ended, the attack began with the howl of wolves. Wonderstein saw an assassin hidden within the Crown Prince's entourage drive a blade into his chest, and in that moment he grasped exactly what sort of men these hunters allied with the Voodoo Cult were.
"Let's get out of here first."
Their targets were the Crown Prince and Anais. Having both of them in the same place only raised the odds of drawing concentrated enemy fire.
Wonderstein took her and Nika and slipped out of the hall. Fortunately, all the Imperial Guards were occupied with protecting the Crown Prince and made no move to block their path.
"What's happening?"
"Is that a wolf howl?"
"A real wolf pack didn't actually attack the hotel, did it?"
They pushed their way through the panicked, milling crowd. Just then, Anais, who had been glaring daggers at Wonderstein for a while now, shouted at him.
"What on earth were you thinking, saying all those things back there?"
"Hm? What things?"
"That—the talk of assassins and slush funds. Do you even know what you were implying?"
"That? I was simply throwing out topics that might grab the Crown Prince's attention."
He could hardly admit he knew the future, so he brushed it off with a vague excuse. But his nonchalant reply nearly made Anais's blood boil.
"So—so you truly spouted all that... just to divert his attention from me? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how politically explosive those issues are? The Crown Prince could have had you beheaded on the spot!"
"Ah..."
Was that why the Crown Prince had shouted at him at the end?
He'd been in the middle of talking with Ben at the time and hadn't been able to gauge the full reaction.
He had simply assumed the information was so vital to the Crown Prince that it was enough to strike a deal...
"That didn't occur to me. I apologize."
Anais's lips twitched as if she had a dozen more reprimands ready, but then she let out a deep sigh. The artless smile on his face sapped the anger right out of her. It was ridiculous—she couldn't even bring herself to properly thank the man who had rescued her, and now she'd made him apologize instead.
Behind Anais, Nika clicked her tongue in regret. She had hoped the woman would press him further on those topics.
'Just what is this man?'
Every piece of information Wonderstein had offered her was far from ordinary.
The attempted imperial poisoner.
The Imperial Slush Fund.
Comprachicos.
The first two she could understand if they had slipped out carelessly. One was still a swirling conspiracy theory among the empire's subjects, and the other had been the front-page scandal dominating the daily newspapers for weeks.
But the name he had spoken last—Comprachicos.
How had that word come out of his mouth?
That he knew the name itself was not strange. Among those in certain circles, it was known as a fairly notorious human-trafficking ring, after all.
But the fact that he had offered it to her as a bargaining chip meant he possessed information well beyond that.
Nika felt a sharp spike of interest. Wasn't rooting out evidence of contact between the Third Consort and Comprachicos the very reason she had infiltrated this hotel in the first place?
'I need to learn more about this man.'
Nika carefully concealed her thoughts and followed behind him.