The Other Butcher
Fortunately, no bus-rollover accident occurred along the way. Which, honestly, was only to be expected.
They prized efficient, all-around strikes. Winning Jihee over to thin our ranks, waging a media campaign to drag the Academy's name through the mud—that was more their style.
In that sense, a bombed bus would have amounted to a single tragedy and nothing more. Regrettable, perhaps, but that was where it ended. There was no chance they'd make a move now that would cast the Academy as the victim. I'd merely stayed on guard against the one-in-ten-thousand chance, that was all.
And so, the bus carrying us reached its destination without a single hitch.
The Hunter Association, Gangwon Branch.
It was a place that had every right to be called the middle of nowhere. Dense forest filled the eye in every direction, and with gates cropping up and monsters settling in, the land had long since slipped beyond human management—wilderness fit it better than any other word.
And within that wilderness, beyond a leafy canopy that even the eyes of flying monsters couldn't easily track anything through, the Association branch stood tall.
It looked like an unnatural collage. Deep in a forbidden realm untouched even by human hands, the building stood there alone and apart—or perhaps declaring its intent to conquer that very realm—like a vanguard of civilization defying nature itself.
And in truth, it wouldn't be far wrong. The Taebaek Mountains, the spine of the Korean peninsula. The Hunter Association's ambition to reclaim them as the lawful territory of the Republic of Korea was embodied in that very building. The design itself was much the same as the Namhae Branch's, but that faint, odd sense of intimidation probably came from the same place.
Even the students who'd been chattering away until a moment ago kept their silence as we set foot inside the building.
Fortunately, the interior was relatively ordinary. Thanks to that, the students who'd been frozen stiff until just now gradually regained their ease. And honestly, as the teacher in charge, I found the quiet preferable.
"Welcome, everyone. I'm Do Joojin, a hunter assigned to the Gangwon Branch."
Uwah!
Not that there was any need to go around nagging anyone to settle down at this point—because the next moment, cheers burst out from among the students.
Fair enough. As I said, the Gangwon Branch was currently treated as the de facto front line of the Korean peninsula. Hunters dispatched here were, nine times out of ten, outstanding. And in this era, an outstanding hunter meant, in other words, someone with a fandom bigger than your run-of-the-mill celebrity's.
The man before us was no exception.
Do Joojin. These days, he was one of the first names to come up when people talked about the next generation of elite hunters. Ever since Shin Seoa—who until recently had run shoulder to shoulder with him—lost a good deal of momentum, it was no exaggeration to call him the sole, unrivaled number one.
I suppose the same went for his skill.
It showed in a simple count of mana alone. Thanks to the incident that broke out inside her guild, Seoa had spent a stretch of time bordering on a full slump. Do Joojin, meanwhile, had spent that same stretch honing himself in Gangwon. It feels a bit ugly to say, but a gap in skill was inevitable. On top of that, he had a passably decent face. Set that against Seoa, who'd been shadowed by suspicions left and right...
"Ahh, this is just too much~"
"Master, who are you making fun of right now?!"
Seoa huffed and worked herself into a temper. My, my. Flying into a heat like that would only throw the difference in caliber into sharper relief. When I gave a subtle shake of my head, she flared up all over again.
"No, but still."
"Something the matter?"
"What, why out of nowhere—?"
"No, you just seem a little sensitive about it."
I hadn't genuinely angered her, but she wasn't the type to come barreling at me demanding I never compare her to outsiders, either. If she were simply telling me not to compare, fine—but grumbling like this was honestly unexpected. Unless she'd written her opponent off as beneath her from the very start, or there was something about the man that sat wrong with her.
Call me a hedgehog parent for it—quills out on my student's behalf—and I'd have no comeback, but some part of me hoped for the latter rather than the former.
"A little?"
Perhaps that had indeed been the case. Seoa crossed her arms with a faintly sulky air. That said, there wasn't actually any grand reason behind it.
"Our mindsets just don't match."
"Hoh."
"His nickname's 'The Butcher,' you know."
"...The fuck?"
It was a thunderbolt from a clear sky. I was, after all, a duly registered member of the Hunter Association—and The Butcher was the very name I'd been quietly keeping in reserve, planning to switch my own nickname to it one of these days...!!
"So?"
"He fights the way his name sounds, that guy."
"Aha."
Hearing that, I could take a fair guess. The Butcher. A man who'd earn a nickname like that was easy to read, tactics and all. Above all—
It's not as if it's a rare type, either.
Vengeance. Or rage. Whether his bloodlust toward monsters simply ran deep, or he was flailing somewhere between vengeance for his family and the depths of despair—like it or not, those types were self-destructive. In fact, Seoa had very nearly ended up the same way. She, too, had lost her family to monsters. Which was all the more reason she couldn't stand the sight of him, presumably. The dread that she, too, might have become just like him—you could call it a kind of loathing for one's own kind.
Or, huh—a rivalry thing?
Well, anyway.
What a waste.
That was the impression that came to mind first. His skills were solid. He had the talent to make a name for himself, too. But if Seoa's words were true, that was as far as he would ever go.
Our true calling was, first and foremost, that of a hunter. Baring your fangs at monsters, blinded by nothing but rage—that was work for warriors and avengers. A heart ablaze—yet a head kept cold. That, and only that, was how a hunter was meant to fight.
No doubt he had his tragic story. Sorrow-laced tragedy isn't something you can grow numb to no matter how you try—and it isn't something you should grow numb to, either. This was, to begin with, a demented era in which three out of every ten citizens of the Republic of Korea were said to have lost family to monsters. Who didn't carry a story of their own?
Even so. To put it bluntly, none of that was something ordinary civilians—the kind who'd ring for a hunter the second a monster showed up on their doorstep—needed to understand. Frankly, what business was it of people a hair's breadth from death? What a hunter needed were the means to put monsters down without fail, and results to show for it. Swallowing your fury could wait until long after the hunt was over. The first order of business was getting your emotions under control. In this line of work, the first to die were always the ones who couldn't rein in their surging feelings and scattered them to the wind.
And despite all that, he'd lasted this long—did he have the ability to justify it? He did not. That was nothing but empty bravado. He'd survived this long on nothing more than dumb luck, and the day that luck ran dry, he'd meet a miserable end. That was my honest read.
Well, even so, it wasn't as if I could go lecturing the man about that of all things.
A little wasteful, though.
Off in the distance, I caught sight of the young hunter with the amiable face, walking the students through the days ahead. A casual glance—and as if he'd felt my eyes on him, the man inclined his head toward Seoa and me. Seoa, evidently none too thrilled, whipped her head away, but for my part, a wry smile was all I could manage.
And so, once Hunter Do Joojin's briefing came to an end, Hwang Yoonha let herself into her assigned room and flung herself onto the bed. She hadn't even unpacked yet, but she was simply too drained to help it. The fortunate part was that the Gangwon Branch had lodging prepared for the girls—to be more precise, it had probably been set aside in case of a partnership with the military. Either way, sleeping arrangements that wouldn't have been out of place in a hotel were a welcome enough prospect for her, too.
Nine times out of ten, that came down to the schedule. This field training ran three days and two nights. At that rate, it wasn't field training so much as an outright school trip—then again, nobody drew a hard line between the two to begin with.
Yoonha was no exception. If anything, to her—a bona fide high school girl—field training and school trips alike were nothing more than picnics explained in fancier terms.
And so—
Uuuugh...
she couldn't stand what was going on inside her own head right now. Because at least in her book, a picnic was supposed to be thrilling and fun. And yet here she was, wallowing in this grimy, gloomy brooding.
She called to mind the field training itinerary Hunter Do Joojin had presented earlier. Three days and two nights, he'd said—but the actual activities were bunched into day two, since a full day had gone up in smoke just getting to the Gangwon Branch. Well, sure, there'd be a light meal and some manner of after-party, but that was about it. And so Yoonha's mind kept drifting, against her will, toward the second day's schedule.
The itinerary itself was a packed one. The duties the Gangwon Branch handled. An explanation of dungeon concepts arising from those duties. The snags that kept bogging down the mission to retake the Taebaek Mountains. How to flush out dungeons in Gangwon, where unearthing a single proper trace was a struggle in itself. The elements required to conquer a dungeon in the first place. The types of monsters that appeared in Taebaek terrain, and how to counter each one. Hardly the kind of material you could digest in a single morning.
Well, it would help, presumably. For a hunter.
And that was precisely the problem.
"Ah, I'm so fucked."
She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. The chilled skin set about cooling the fever in her skull, pleasantly enough. Thanks to that, Yoonha could size things up coolly, too—namely, just how shameless the thought she was entertaining really was.
In short—
Quit this, or don't.
Hwang Yoonha was agonizing over whether or not to quit the Academy. If Park Woochan—who had worked himself ragged, day and night, to solve her worries—ever heard about this, it would knock the wind right out of him. At least, that was what Yoonha thought. Her younger siblings would feel the same. No—where else was she ever going to find another way to provide for her family?
And besides, say she did quit the Academy. Did she have an alternative? Once again, Yoonha had no choice but to shake her head. Practical reality had her by the ankles, too. The wide-open road ahead. The high-income life that came with the hunter's trade. Even the perk of graduating high school at the end of it. Where on earth was a reason good enough to throw all of that away?
That was what Yoonha thought. In practice, most people would say the same. And it wouldn't be wrong.
But.
Even so, Yoonha thought. She went and thought it anyway. The Academy. No—could she not walk away from the hunter's profession, even now?
There was a reason. The Namhae Branch. It was because of what had happened over summer break. To tell it straight, it hadn't been something that happened to Yoonha alone. It was simply that—
the incident of the yokai seizing the Namhae Branch. The mountain of casualties that came attached to it had driven the lesson in vigilance home all over again, even for Yoonha—who'd resolved to become a hunter for the money, first and foremost.
...Lee Yeeun, who had taken the hunter's profession seriously from day one, steeled her resolve all the further because of it. As for the incident wrought by the yokai—a breed of Eastern nightmare—Ryu Jihee, who carried nightmare blood in her veins, was dragged through anguish after anguish. Ja Hayeon, Yoonha couldn't say. The girl always wore that blank face, after all. She was probably just thinking something along the lines of, monsters really are evil—guess I'll do my best and kill them.
Well, regardless. The fundamental worry Yoonha carried was a different animal from theirs. Not that she lacked those worries either, mind you. I have to work hard so this kind of thing never happens again. Nightmares really are terrifying monsters. But the very first thing Yoonha thought in the wake of the Namhae Branch incident was one thing, and one thing only.
This is so fucked.
That it was all too much to bear. Hunting monsters had been fine. There had even been a thrill in testing just how far her strength would take her. Only—just as Park Woochan had stressed time and time again, the interest she'd taken so lightly came collecting without fail.
Strictly speaking, it had been a perfect clear. They'd stormed the yokai stronghold without a single person so much as scratched. But even so, what had waited for her at the end wasn't a clean, satisfying epilogue. The people the yokai had torn apart didn't come back. The Namhae Branch's losses didn't vanish. There was even talk that the branch's own people would have to answer for letting it fall to the yokai in the first place.
...She knew that much in her head. Half a year ago. The yokai had supposedly begun operating half a year before the girls ever went down to Namhae. The damage they'd inflicted back then lay beyond anything the girls could have touched. It would have been easier if she could have left it at that.
Even so.
It's absurd.
Yoonha couldn't scrub the thought away. No—hadn't they done pretty well? They'd carved through the yokai den without a single person taking real damage. And yet the dead didn't come back. Killing the yokai didn't erase the damage the yokai had done. Topple a horde of wicked evil, and no pleasant end credits rolled—
Yoonha came to feel, in her bones, a fact she'd already known—in the most common and cruelest way the world had to offer. Was that something her homeroom teacher, Park Woochan, had said once?
"No, come on—fuck's sake~"
Even a no-hit, no-death clear, and the ending still had the Demon King's army blowing the royal castle sky-high, your score be damned.
That was why Yoonha felt powerless. She was staggered by the absurd architecture of the world, and in the end, a limp exhaustion crept in.
Could I really bear it?
The thought came naturally. Despite results like these, what had unfolded before her eyes was not a festival but a funeral. Could she shoulder that sorrow that had lingered through the hall? How many more times would she have to face scenes like this—she, who had resolved to become a hunter for no grander reason than making money? The moment that realization landed, Yoonha couldn't help but feel fear.
And at the same time—
Did he see this coming, too?
The thought crossed her mind. What about Park Woochan? Had he been through this kind of thing, too? And if so, had he also anticipated the anguish the girls had carried that day? ...Half of her felt there was no way, surely not. The other half felt that if it were that man, then maybe, just maybe, he had.
Either way. Yoonha felt herself being gnawed at by the very emotion Park Woochan had spoken of so many times. Namely—powerlessness.
In this industry, it was the emotion that held the unshakable number-one spot among the reasons hunters retired.