A Stampede With Too Perfect Timing
A stampede.
As the word suggests, it refers to a phenomenon in which living creatures overflow and flow in a single direction due to some specific factor.
The primary cause is pressure on an ecosystem—whether from humans, disasters, or the like.
In other words, when the carrying capacity of the place a population originally inhabits can no longer sustain the creatures belonging to that ecosystem.
The creatures within it begin to devour and attack one another in the struggle for their own survival.
It is the ecosystem's self-regulating function.
And.
As part of that self-regulation, certain groups will relocate to places where food is more plentiful.
Most often, those are groups led by an exceptionally capable head.
Precisely because they are capable, they understand better than anyone that there is no future in repeating the same bloody fights every time a situation like this arises.
The same holds true for monsters.
I've already mentioned how creatures adrift within the abundant environment of a gate go on to form dungeons.
However.
For a monster, prey isn't merely the flesh of other living things.
It's mana—thick, concentrated mana.
And.
Now, after two great incursions, mana leaking out of the gates has mixed into the very air we breathe.
So where is the mana concentration higher than in a dungeon? Nine times out of ten, there's only one answer.
The city.
Which is why, when a monster stampede occurs, the sacrificial lambs are almost always the cities located near a gate.
Call it a dungeon break, if you like.
Quite literally, the front line of gate defense—constructed in the form of a dungeon—breaks.
This is precisely the reason hunters must periodically cull the monsters around a gate.
Monsters allowed to accumulate past a critical threshold will one day return as a city's annihilation.
Consider the humans of the post-incursion era, whose bodies exhale mana with every breath after a lifetime of contact with mana-laced air.
Civilians especially—who, unlike hunters, don't know the first thing about fighting—are prey so sweet to a starving monster that it would make their mouths water.
And so the scene had devolved into utter pandemonium.
Had this been a simple stampede, the Gangwon Branch would presumably have mounted some manner of response.
After all, there would be a dedicated manual prepared for exactly this kind of situation.
But.
Expecting anyone to respond calmly under *these* circumstances might be asking a bit too much.
I cast a quick glance around.
The students, frozen stiff at the single cry of "stampede" someone had shouted.
The hunters, too, gathered at this site for field-training supervision without so much as a decent weapon between them.
And on top of it all, Hunter Do Joojin, vanished without a trace.
With that many compounding factors stacked up, frankly, their minds seizing up was only natural.
Nothing for it, then.
Click. I clicked my tongue.
At the same time, I tapped the shoulder of Seoa, who was still floundering, and called her name.
"Seoa."
"Huh—yes?!"
"I'm leaving this spot to you."
"Wha—"
"Watch the kids in my class and keep up covering fire. Just drive off the monsters nearby, so don't push yourself too hard."
"Hold on, Master—?!"
Holding on or otherwise, there was no time for it.
Having finished my words more as a notification than a request, I set off toward the branch coordinator whose position I'd marked earlier.
"Park Woochan, S-rank hunter. You're the Gangwon Branch coordinator, correct?"
"Excuse me?"
Truthfully, I hadn't thrown the question expecting an answer.
I already knew who the coordinator was before I came.
"I understand you're struggling to keep the classes under control."
"Uh, well..."
"The academy's homeroom teachers are all active-duty hunters of at least B-rank from their service days. Leave the crowd control to them."
"No, wait—"
"The training-instructor forces are also on hand, for your reference. Hey! Tia!"
At my raised voice, a head of red hair appeared in the distance as if she'd been waiting for her cue.
Whether she simply hadn't experienced a stampede before or what, her reaction was far quicker than Seoa's, who'd been standing there dumbfounded not a minute ago.
"She's a recovery-type abilities user on par with A+ rank. When you need healing, speak with her."
At my deliberately flat delivery, the coordinator's lips worked wordlessly for a moment—before she eventually gave a small nod.
Perhaps because I'd consciously smothered my intonation?
She seemed to have realized this was no time to be squabbling over who held command.
Granted, the proposal I'd laid out moments ago had probably done its share of the work too.
Boiled down, what I'd said amounted to a simple conclusion: everyone does the job they're actually good at.
An academy whose ranks were overwhelmingly students could not deal with a stampede.
If so, the far wiser course was to push the experts at the Gangwon Branch into a position where they *could* deal with it.
Put a boot under the asses of the Gangwon Branch hunters staggering around in a daze, and supply the manpower they needed.
Leave the management of the students to the homeroom teachers.
Then fight at full strength, worry-free.
Something like that.
Clever strategies that borrow the students' power are, at the end of the day, subculture fiction.
Right now, keeping quietly out of the way was far more helpful.
"So—the important thing is the stampede itself."
"You mean... confirming it?"
Was she talking about that ley-line map blaring its alarm this whole time?
If so, relief.
The real problem, as ever, was over there.
The coordinator's gaze flicked toward the massive bulk bellowing menacingly in the far distance.
...It was a scene that seemed to writhe and struggle for the sole purpose of proving that "climbing the mountain" was an insufficient expression.
A tree giant, quite literally perched atop the mountain, was pouring forth countless trees from its own body.
And those trees, the moment they fell away, took on life of their own and began sprinting down toward the foot of the mountain.
No matter how many times I checked, it was an unreal sight.
Small wonder, then, that Seoa had gone hollow-eyed—probably mostly because of that colossal frame, nearly the size of a mountain itself.
Even for me, who had hunted countless large monsters, experience against a creature literally mountain-sized wasn't exactly common.
Which is another way of saying it wasn't nonexistent, either.
"It seems your forces are insufficient to handle that monster."
At my words, the coordinator made a show of surprise.
To me, of course, it was an obvious deduction.
After all, I'd heard directly, mere moments ago, that Hunter Do Joojin had left his post.
The vacancy left by an active A+ rank hunter was not something you could patch over easily.
Granted, the front line doesn't develop a hole over the presence or absence of a single hunter—but conversely, this wasn't a situation you could call burden-free either.
Which was precisely why I was standing here.
"Then I'll take that one."
"...I'm sorry?"
"No support needed. If the Gangwon Branch has any records related to that monster, provide those instead."
Roughly, that ought to be enough.
The Gangwon Branch had no reserves to spare at present.
The other teachers would be hard-pressed just guarding their own assigned classes.
And with civilian homes across Gangwon at risk of being leveled as they spoke, no one was about to demand a rescue detachment be dispatched for the sake of two students.
It wasn't even that they'd refuse—the thought simply wouldn't occur to them.
Therefore.
I have no choice but to go myself.
Fucking Do Joojin or whoever he was. What a pain in the ass.
With that thought, I checked over my gear.
Under normal circumstances, I'd have been cheering inwardly at the chance to carve up a big monster for the first time in a while.
Honestly, my mood wasn't bad even now.
And yet.
Of all moments, it had to be while the academy was on a field trip to Gangwon.
Of all schedules, it had to be an afternoon itinerary that had split off a handful of students.
Of all times, it had to be right when Hunter Do Joojin vanished on his own.
For a stampede to break out "by coincidence" was contrived to the point of insult.
...Was this what it felt like to step into a bottomless bog?
The sensation of an invisible noose tightening around my throat, inch by inch.
Still, for the moment, all I could do was act and see where it led.
Fortunately, the Gangwon Branch's data proved reasonably rich.
The vegetation of Gangwon. The monsters inhabiting this region.
Sifting through the plant-type monsters on record, roughly three species matched the enormous bulk before me.
And among those three, the one I suspected was, of course, the third.
Duduri.
The wood deity of Gyeongju...?
A monster said to descend from Bihyeongrang, the prodigy who appears in the Samguk Yusa.
Its true nature: a dokkaebi whose body is composed of trees.
In other words, some theories hold that the name derives from the dokkaebi's wooden club.
...Honestly, if all I did was compare traits, there was nothing that put Duduri ahead of the other two candidates.
But.
Even so, deep down I was all but certain this opponent was Duduri.
And the reason was none other than Duduri's particular nature.
Word has it that the name Duduri may be connected to the verb "to strike," or perhaps "to knock." And that Duduri, while a kind of dokkaebi, is also regarded as a blacksmith who came from dokkaebikind. In short, there is a school of thought that Duduri worship itself was tied to construction, civil engineering, or metallurgy.
A race versed in fire and steel, despite being made of wood.
That is Duduri.
And this nature of Duduri's functions as a vicious trap for the vast majority of hunters.
'Because nearly every plant-type monster is weak to fire and steel.'
It's a trait shared by the monsters called the flowering of nature—beings in which nature itself has taken form.
So hunters who bring flame and forged metal to a fight against a plant-type monster find those weapons useless before Duduri.
In fact, the data provided by the Gangwon Branch said as much, in so many words.
Which is why.
Paradoxically, I could be certain this monster was Duduri.
A stampede erupting at far too exquisite a moment.
If someone's intention was woven into this situation, then that someone had a genuinely nasty streak.
And in that sense, Duduri—looking for all the world like a typical plant-type monster—was a truly wicked trap.
Designed to grind into tired gruel the hunters who, in the crush of an emergency, grab whatever fire and steel they can and scramble to their feet.
Which is exactly why.
'It's them.'
I was certain of it.
That this stampede was artificial was something anyone could agree on.
In truth, even the Gangwon Branch hadn't been able to hide its bewilderment at why a stampede had broken out with such suddenness.
A stampede is, at bottom, a function of an ecosystem.
Had the Gangwon Branch been operating normally, one should never have occurred.
They would have culled the monsters capable of triggering one well in advance.
Today of all days was the academy's field trip, no less.
They'd have been policing the surrounding environment rigorously for at least the past several days, minimum.
And by my assessment, the Gangwon Branch was outfitted with a fairly solid system.
Meaning: they were not the sort of blundering fools who'd let a stampede break loose on a day like this one.
In other words—for a stampede to have happened anyway...
'It isn't a stampede.'
I had no choice but to conclude as much.
The outcome, of course, was identical.
A mass migration of monsters.
What the monsters were doing right now—surging forward—could only be described that way.
But.
Pressure on an ecosystem. Depletion of available mana.
At a stretch, a disquieting sense that an ecosystem in perfect working order had abruptly begun behaving abnormally.
Quite literally, as though someone had stepped in and manipulated the monsters' behavior...
'The Manpasikjeok?'
The thought came unbidden.
Drive out the enemy.
More precisely—herd the enemy.
It didn't seem impossible.
The problem was that I couldn't fathom why anyone would take such an action now.
No, seriously.
As a scheme to spirit Hayeon away, it was sloppy to the point of absurdity.
Extracting Hayeon from outside in the middle of all this chaos would be all but impossible—bluntly speaking.
What if, conversely, someone had infiltrated from the inside all along?
Same conclusion.
I had already confirmed Hayeon's position before departing.
And Seoa was with her now—not that I liked it, but so was Tiamat.
Breaking through that formation to abduct Hayeon was, realistically, impossible.
For that matter, if abduction were truly the goal, blowing up the bus itself would make for a better diversion.
Open a window to take Hayeon, and simultaneously denounce the toothless state of the Gangwon Branch?
Please.
That would amount to nothing more than manufacturing enemies for themselves.
True, they'd had some fun with the media lately—but if that were genuinely the plan, there'd have been no need for any of this cloak-and-dagger to begin with.
...And so the immediate objective remained, in the end, an unsolved riddle.
I began walking slowly toward the massive form enthroned on the mountain's ridge.
'The real problem is what comes after.'
I couldn't go rescue Yoonha right now.
I had no choice but to judge it so.
With a stampede in full swing, finding any trace of Yoonha in this chaos was next to impossible.
The lesser dokkaebi that served as Duduri's minions.
Or the young Duduri, said to grow from the Wang-gasu—the royal tree—from which Duduri itself had sprung.
Picking out the traces of two humans amid the multitude of tree-monsters running rampant since moments ago was, frankly, a hard ask.
Therefore.
'For now, I slay Duduri.'
Yoonha and her partner's abilities were, respectively, body hardening and concealment.
As long as they took down the head of the pack—Duduri itself—they wouldn't suffer any serious losses.
I had the top-grade potions I'd packed for emergencies, too.
No real problems, so long as the plan held.
...Drum. Drum.
One drop. Then two.
Beneath a sky opening into pouring rain, I reached my conclusion.
Deliberately ignoring the ominous premonition that prickled, cold and sharp, at the nape of my neck.