Work-Life Balance
The hunter work Helena had taken an interest in didn't look all that different from the profession she'd practiced as her main line of work in the other world.
Bounty hunter. If there was a price on it, she'd take the job—everything from putting down petty demons to, in the uglier cases, killing people. Well. In a world where getting shot dead on the street was something you just shrugged off and moved on from, commissions to murder someone over a grudge were dangerous without exception. You went looking for a professional because you couldn't do the killing yourself, whether the reason was a lack of strength or a lack of power.
If Helena's true calling had been a journey of revenge for her parents, there wasn't much I could say about that. Even so, she still needed bullet money and meal money if she wanted to see that revenge through, which meant she had to take jobs that came with a paycheck. So she tended toward the high-paying work, even when the risk ran high, and devoted whatever time remained to hunting down the bandit gang and killing them. The bandits had spent their days committing atrocities anyway, so plenty of people already held grudges—and sometimes those paths overlapped.
Being a hunter wasn't all that different. The main brief was simple enough: we'll pay you to deal with the monsters that come through from other worlds. There were also commissions that put a person's abilities to use in other kinds of work. Hunters who could raise a building with ease apparently moonlighted in construction. Druids often doubled as veterinarians. Fire-ability users went to thermal power plants and boiled water to spin the turbines. Of course, the pay from that sort of thing was supposedly just pocket money.
"Then what kind of side job can someone who's good with a gun do?"
"Hehe. Honestly, I haven't really looked into it myself. You probably couldn't work at an amusement park shooting targets for prizes. Why don't we put our heads together and think about what kind of work we could do?"
"Honestly, even the military's being replaced by magical girls these days, so I don't know where marksmanship would even help, nyang. If you're really that good, maybe you could land a follow-up shot on a wound, but nyang. Asking a human to do that when a machine can make a precision strike is safer and more reliable, isn't it, nyang."
"Machines always break down at the worst possible moment, you know."
"It's not like people don't get hurt either, nyang."
"If a person's getting hurt, you've already failed, haven't you?"
"Why the hell is Miso Cheonsa so desperate to pick on me, nyang."
"Just because Nyangnyangbeam is cute."
"Fuck, nyang."
Anyway, just as Miso Cheonsa and Nyangnyangbeam had said, if Helena wanted to make the most of her specialty, there didn't seem to be any other path. Helena herself seemed rather pleased with the hunter work the two of them had described. In the end, I was the only one at that table with any complaint about her career. Miso Cheonsa had talked me around, and I'd decided to let Helena do whatever she wanted for now—but I still hoped, if possible, that she would do something safe. So I couldn't help picking at even the smallest thing.
"I understand the pay is good because you're putting your life on the line. But that kind of work isn't going to come up every day, is it? These gates—do you know when and where they'll open and just wait around? They connect to other worlds at random, and sometimes people open them on purpose."
After all, I had torn open a dimensional rift myself and come through. Of course I hadn't planned on coming back, and I hadn't chosen this location either—but if I could do it, there was no reason others couldn't.
Anyway, the reason I was bringing this up: Is a hunter's income actually stable? That was what I was asking. No matter how much you made from a single job, if you spent too long sitting idle, the money you'd earned in a burst could all run out. In that case, it might be better to do something safer and more stable, even if it paid a little less.
"That's right. In the early days we had no way of knowing, and the damage was enormous. Large-scale gates would erupt in populated areas and produce a great many casualties, and sometimes a gate would open somewhere so remote that we couldn't respond, and the whole region would become uninhabitable."
"Uninhabitable? Did so many monsters come out that they just claimed the area as their own?"
"The environment of the other world overwrites the whole area, nyang. Lava, or a bottomless abyss, that kind of thing, nyang."
Hearing that sent a little chill through me. If I had come back from some strange world, I might have done that to this one. We looked like humans, but our genes were different. What if Helena and I had brought a plague with us from the other side? If it had been dangerous to the life here, that could have been a real disaster. Thankfully that hadn't happened, which was why we were all still alive.
"But if that had been the end of it, we'd all still be suffering like hell, nyang. Powerless civilians would have to rely on protection apps and just wait for someone to come save them, nyang. Hunters wouldn't know when or where a gate would open, so they'd have to be ready to deploy at any moment and wouldn't get any leisure at all, nyang. I even ragequit a Chamos promotional match once because I had to deploy, nyang!"
"Chamos?"
"That's the game Nyangnyangbeam plays. Anyway, after that, the technology for dealing with gates advanced a bit. Gates form when overlapping dimensions become unstable and the gaps between them collapse. If you can identify places where unstable mana is surging, you can infer where a gate will appear. That's how we became able to deploy in advance."
"That's old news too, nyang. These days they deliberately create unstable locations, nyang. Then the gates that would have opened somewhere else open there instead, nyang."
Mana and all the rest of it wasn't a concept I really understood, but I could think of it as a vessel filling up and starting to crack. Leave it alone and something would leak through the fissures and keep widening them. Punch a hole on purpose, and the contents would drain out that way and the pressure would ease.
"So you deliberately induce gates to open in empty, out-of-the-way places, and call in hunters who can handle them ahead of time?"
"Exactly, nyang. Thanks to that, you almost never get those cases anymore where you ducked into the bathroom for a second and a gate blew and you were late to deploy, nyang. I had to write a statement and I was so pissed, nyang. Bodily functions aren't something you can help, nyang."
"Hehe. Was it really a bodily function, I wonder. Nyangnyangbeam, that time you were having a little private fun..."
"Fuck, nyang, don't slander me, nyang. I was already in a hurry and I couldn't even get my pants on because of my tail, and you know that, nyang!"
The two of them were bickering a bit. Anyway, it wasn't as if Helena's job would be as unstable as I'd worried—which only made me feel worse. If it had been some extreme occupation, I'd been planning to say, why don't you quit that and we open a restaurant. Or, Helena was beautiful. I'd been thinking maybe she could go into a different line of work that used her looks. She wouldn't even need to do anything actually dangerous—she could be an action actress. Especially if it was action that used firearms. Helena would be able to shine there as a real specialist. Then she'd have fans, and more people who loved her, and she'd be able to live here soaking up all the love she never received in that other world.
But things were going too well for Helena. Naturally I kept my mouth shut in a sulk and followed the three of them.
The place we went, splitting up between Yegyeong's car and Nyangnyangbeam's handler's car, was a very large plot of land. The name of the site was Combat Area 8? What a halfhearted name, I thought. Well, they'd probably named it that way to make it easy to tell apart, so I supposed I had to live with it.
"Anyway, thanks to this kind of technology, the really dangerous gates tend to be under control. Of course, even with all this, gates still appear elsewhere. That's why the system's been built out, and why military units and rescue teams stand by."
Miso Cheonsa was explaining the place like a tour guide.
"Ah, I saw the firefighters. There were lizardmen and orcs with them too."
"Those people go in to rescue civilians caught up in the gates as well. Hunters do rescue civilians while they fight, but they can't look after everyone."
"They're amazing people."
"Anyway, the more unstable the mana, the more dangerous the rank of gate that opens. But we're just here for a taste, so we'll open it at the easiest difficulty. Hello, Management Director. We've come to open a C-Rank Gate."
While I answered most of Miso Cheonsa's remarks in place of the taciturn Helena, we arrived near the building at the entrance to the combat area, and Miso Cheonsa spoke to the man who'd come out to greet us.
"Oh, Professor, you've come. Nyangnyangbeam is here again too. I don't believe I've met the others. Judging by the restraints, I'd say this is someone who made quite a name for themselves in another world?"
The Management Director, whose face looked a bit older, offered a good-natured smile and even managed to guess at my situation. I supposed experience let him see all that.
"Yes. Safety first, though, so the lowest rank."
"Here's a C-rank fragment. I don't need to go over the safety precautions, do I?"
"I'll handle all the briefing."
It looked like the kind of thing that would normally require a complicated procedure. Thanks to Miso Cheonsa, we were skipping all of it. The moment we started talking with the Management Director, people in the back began busily filling out paperwork. Sorry. But I hate tedious stuff too. I'm sure they'll take care of it themselves, right?
"A mana stone is a stone that holds mana. You can inscribe magic circles on it, or use various enchantments to employ it as an energy source. We're going to deliberately destabilize this one to generate a gate. Like punching a hole to channel the water when a dam is about to overflow. Would you like to touch it?"
In the meantime, Miso Cheonsa had taken a pebble that glittered with a lovely violet light from the Management Director, and she continued her lecture. Thinking about it, this was probably just an extension of class. She'd volunteered to help us, so there was no reason to refuse.
I was tied up, so I couldn't touch the pretty-colored mana stone. Helena took it with a look of indifference. Little Helena had loved glittering jewels, I thought. Maybe now, to her, jewels were just pebbles that could stand in for money. The lack of any particular reaction was a little sad.
But then something felt off. The moment the mana stone entered Helena's hand, its light suddenly dimmed—and at the same time, everything around us went dark in an instant. Sensing something was wrong, Helena drew her pistol at once. Her blue eyes flooded with gold.
She looked tense, unused to this kind of environment. I'd always thought the way she prepared for battle was beautiful. Now that we'd come to this world, seeing that look on her face hurt a little. Of course our Helena was still the prettiest of all.
Anyway, Helena was tense because this was her first time experiencing something like this. But Nyangnyangbeam and Miso Cheonsa were taking it easy...?
"What the hell, nyang, is this how it normally is, nyang? Environmental changes don't start until B-Grade, do they, nyang?"
"You're right. The mana I felt from the stone was definitely C-rank."
The two of them were calm enough that it didn't seem like a complete disaster had broken out. But they didn't look entirely at ease either, and I could feel the atmosphere on my skin.
Something had gone wrong.