Three Strikes and You're Out
With a rumble of settling debris, I picked my way slowly across the ruins of the collapsed building.
It was a scene of utter devastation — so complete that I could hardly believe a luxury hotel had been standing on this very spot until moments ago.
By a stroke of luck amid the misfortune, there had been no casualties. That was thanks to the succubus driving out the hotel staff before we raided her — though, granted, her own decision to book out an entire hotel for herself had helped matters along……
Honestly, though, I didn't feel much like thanking her.
And so, at the very bottom of the sunken wreckage, I came face to face with the Succubus Queen once more.
Khh... khh-hk...
To be precise, I suppose "dying succubus" would be the more accurate term. Perhaps because I'd diced that bug monster to pieces earlier, the blow that had slammed into her had veered just slightly off its mark — and thanks to that, she'd lost her legs instead of her neck. The result was a sorry sight indeed.
The succubus's physical resistance was never built to withstand power on that scale.
Three strikes and you're out — performance confirmed.
One arm lost in the fight inside the hotel, both legs gone to that last blow — she looked for all the world like a torso. Exactly the state I'd promised her the second time we met: limbs.
Naturally, I had no intention of stopping at limbs now. This was already our third meeting, after all.
The third time is the neck.
Park Woochan, a man among men, does not lie.
Well — I do, actually, but only when it's called for. And no matter what, I'm not about to tell a lie for the sake of keeping a monster alive. The reverse, maybe.
Huk... huk-hukk...
Looking up at me, the Succubus Queen quietly shed her tears.
Working it, isn't she. Working it hard.
I clicked my tongue before I could stop myself. A succubus hallmark: the moment death shows up, the waterworks come on. No exceptions. All on the off chance you might spare them.
Needless to say, I had not one reason in the world to fall for a sympathy-baiting gambit like that.
Which is why —
The next moment, the words out of my mouth were there for an entirely different purpose.
"You're about to kick the bucket, lady. Anything you'd like to leave behind?"
……?
"Come on now, say something. Anything."
Naturally, I hadn't suddenly developed a soft spot for granting succubi their dying wishes. Her reaction was much the same — the gaze that had been begging for mercy only moments ago now curdled into sheer disbelief.
But.
Before long, mana began to gather above the succubus's head. Disrupting it would have been simple enough, but I decided to let her be for the moment. Because this was exactly the reaction I'd been waiting for.
And so, after a time, the mana that had been pouring out of her finally took on a distinct shape.
A small orb.
A mana crystal — the lion's share of the Succubus Queen's power, condensed into a single sphere.
'Well, that was easy.'
Well, of course it was. Succubus this, monster that — strip away the labels and their essence is that of dumb beasts. Back one into a corner where it's about to die and its pack is collapsing, and it will put the survival of its species above all else, every time. In this woman's case, with death staring her in the face, her first thought had been to find a successor to hand her power down to.
Not that "first thought" had anything to do with it — I'm the one who steered her there. But that's the gist.
The Succubus Queen had named Jihee as her successor. And she had chosen her teacher — me — as the intermediary through whom to transfer that power. Even if I was the very man who'd killed her, everything she'd seen of me up to that point had apparently been enough to convince her I could be trusted with the job.
'Revolting, really~'
The good of the collective. A judgment rendered as a member of that organization. Or put another way — she had chosen to pass her power to Jihee ahead of nursing any grudge against her own killer.
Call it a monster's own brand of maternal love. By any ordinary standard she'd been a genuinely garbage excuse for a mother, but the point is, in her own twisted way, she had cared for Jihee. By succubus standards, that is.
Then again, if she hadn't, why else would she have gone to the trouble of trying to drag Jihee into the fold?
In fact, having vomited up every last drop of her strength, the Succubus Queen now radiated nothing beyond E-rank monster levels of power. Not that either version made her any less disgusting to look at.
And so, orb in my gloved hand, I wrapped my fingers around my sword once more. What there was to receive, I'd received — which meant it was time to finish what there was to finish. Neck or heart? I gave it a moment's thought —
BOOM!!
Gah — fuck!
The next instant, the Queen's head exploded.
Fuck, that scared me. What the hell now?! I swear I did not blow it up this time! Not that I've ever blown one up in the first place!
……I say that, but truthfully, it was only to be expected. When a moment like this arrives, a monster puts the good of its species above the good of its collective. And if that's so, then fastening a leash on them in preparation for exactly such a moment is an equally self-evident move.
The problem was —
'They're out of their minds.'
The one on the end of that leash had been the Succubus Queen. Damn it all — they could impose constraints like this even on an A+ rank monster? That capability alone was staggering, but the real problem was that a queen-class monster had swallowed such a leash without a fight. In raw power alone, a whole squad of S-rank hunters wouldn't have been enough to force her.
'What the hell are these bastards?'
The thought forced itself on me before I knew it. I'd already rated that organization's strength pretty highly. Turns out I needed to adjust that estimate upward. Again.
Well, whatever — that was that.
"Khh... how could this happen!! Despicable, the lot of you!! Have you no human hearts at all!!"
For the record, that's what I hollered at our surroundings.
Phew. Crisis averted, I suppose. I'd been racking my brain over how on earth I was going to explain this to Jihee, after all~
And with that —
As it turned out, the fight never became major news. The reason was simple: there were no clear victims. If you absolutely had to name one, it would be the hotel's owner, but a brick of cold hard cash smoothed that over well enough. Truthfully, the compensation this time wasn't exactly pocket change for me either, but thankfully the Association had a system in place that covered a fixed percentage.
Goddamn, the Hunter Association is a god. And insurance is invincible.
Effective today, I, Park Woochan, hereby withdraw my support for the Hunter Association.
From this day forward, the Association and I shall be regarded as one and the same body. Any propaganda directed against the Association shall be regarded as an attack upon me……
That's the statement I put out — though, if you pressed the point, the Association was probably the relieved party here.
Their opponent had been an A+ rank monster. The kind of creature that, at full strength, could literally wipe a nation off the map. And its species was succubus, no less — a breed famed as ideally suited to eating society alive from the inside. During the Great Invasion, there had in fact been nations torn to pieces by succubus schemes.
And we'd brought down a monster of that caliber with damages amounting to one building? Granted, it was before she'd truly begun to rampage, but by any measure, that was a damn fine result.
And — I hadn't been the only one moving. We hadn't coordinated, but Choi Seungjun had gone after the rumors just as aggressively. Thanks to him, the matter of Jihee's identity was more or less squared away as well.
The Academy hadn't failed to identify a mixed-blood student. They had known in advance — but weighing the social fallout that disclosure would unleash, they had chosen to bury it! That was the story.
And technically? Not a lie. Fact: Jihee was mixed-blood. Fact: we knew in advance. Fact: we decided to bury it. Not a lie, any of it.
Then why, the press demanded, had it been kept secret until now? To that question, Choi Seungjun answered with a click of his tongue.
"To prevent precisely the sort of circus you're staging right now. Because of people who pry into other people's private affairs out of vulgar curiosity."
Strong wording, admittedly. But all the more effective for it — after all, all the press was doing was flinging out articles with the fervor of a mob trying to bury a single student. Thanks to that, the Academy, which had styled itself the bastion of the next generation of hunters, shook off the stigma of being an institution that couldn't even identify one mixed-blood in its ranks. If anything, it emerged as the hero of a heartwarming tale: an academy that had buried the truth out of consideration for its student.
Backing that up was supporting fire from the Mixed-Blood Society, which had since come over to our side. Everything Chairman Choi Seungjun said was fact. Burying the mixed-blood student's identity had been agreed upon from the very start. And while the Academy had since stated its official position on mixed-bloods, it could hardly ignore the eyes of the world……
Besides, the friction between the Mixed-Blood Society and the Academy had been over the student's treatment from the beginning. That was the narrative.
Likewise — technically not a lie. Yep, not a lie. Not a lie at all. Jihee had been in contact with the Society before we ever came to open blows with them, and that much was fact.
Thanks to that, the conflict between the Society and the Academy, murky as it had been until now, got more or less tidied up through this incident as well.
The Academy discovers a mixed-blood among its students! Learning that the student belongs to the Mixed-Blood Society, it resolves to lodge a formal protest! The Society pushes back — was there not, in fact, no clause denying mixed-bloods admission?! After countless rounds of negotiation, a dramatic settlement is reached……
Something like that. That was the picture.
Had that organization not backed off here, the mudslinging would have gotten a great deal uglier. But that wasn't the situation anymore. The Succubus Queen was dead — and given the leash they'd fastened around her neck, there was no way they didn't know it. In other words, whatever their goal was, for the moment they lacked so much as a single means of drawing Jihee in. With the board in that state, muddying public opinion would win them nothing.
And so this incident, too, fizzled out to little more than a hiccup. The press, swarming like hornets only days before, went quiet in an instant.
Plenty of people clucked over such an anticlimactic ending. Most of it was nothing but worthless conspiracy theorizing. Of course, even those people didn't believe the whole affair had died with a whimper because of a hotel collapse buried in the corner of a newspaper.
And so, our shadow war with that organization came to an end.
The full account of the incident. What they had been after in approaching Jihee this time. And the new facts we'd uncovered along the way. There was plenty we needed to put our heads together over — but before any of that, one thing first.
I had business of my own to settle.
Doing my best not to think about the orb sitting in my pocket, I headed for the rooftop. Someone had apparently beaten me to it — the iron door was already standing open. It was surely kept locked under normal circumstances, but come to think of it, a single iron door was never going to do its job against a hunter.
'I should have them swap it for an anti-monster blast bulkhead later.'
Zap — one invoice, finger-gunned straight into Choi Seungjun's account. Not that his fortune could be dented by anything so trivial.
With that thought settled, I threw my gaze forward.
"Did I tell you to get back to class, or didn't I?"
"Heehee. Sorry~"
And there, under the merciless glare of the afternoon sun, beyond silver hair fluttering bright and radiant — the succubus's daughter smiled up at me, mischief written all over her face.