The Butcher's Declaration
Now that's a jackpot.
And then.
Shock aside, having confirmed his reaction, I found myself idly entertaining the thought. Aw, shit. I did it without even meaning to. I forcibly steered my mind back on track—not because of anything else, but because if this deduction of mine was true, there was one thing I couldn't make sense of.
Then what the hell are you?
Hmm?
No, politicians I could understand. Hearing that the Cataclysm was beginning all over again could be enough to drive even the steadiest mind out of its orbit. The First Great Cataclysm, born beneath Mount Etna in Sicily. The Second, unleashed from South America's Atacama Desert. Either one, a disaster that had ravaged South Korea beyond measure. Told you'd have to face yet another on top of all that, even the strongest will might snap.
But the man before me was a hunter. Not some helpless civilian doomed to be swept away by an unprecedented calamity—a hunter. So why would a man like that be cooperating with them? Money? Work? Or, like them, survival?
"Well, I have my reasons, various and sundry."
"Oh my, do you now?"
"Besides, it's hardly your concern to begin with."
"Huh?"
"If a country could collapse just because a handful of humans chose to cooperate, it would've collapsed without me all the same, wouldn't it?"
Aha. So he's a lunatic after all.
I nodded. Still, thanks to that, I did learn one thing: so the military has nothing to do with this, apparently.
Crack. Or at least, it felt as though I'd heard such a sound. The man's face, the very picture of composure mere moments ago—a vivid split ran across that mask-like expression. A brief hesitation. And when he finally opened his mouth again, coolly feigning that nothing had happened, I could sense a curious agitation beneath it.
"...My, how strange~ Did I ever say any such thing?"
What? Is he being serious right now?
From the very start, the weapon he carried had made the truth crystal clear. These days, what hunter bothers with a gun? We live in an age where even the philosopher's stone recipes left behind by medieval alchemists can be recreated, so long as you have the mana. Firearms, which had never managed to spawn so much as a single legend of their own, were hardly a hunter's weapon of choice—so those who used them were, for the most part, soldiers or military-affiliated hunters, nothing more.
The gun's own nature said as much. Unlike cold steel, it was a weapon anyone could handle with ease. Its power stayed constant regardless of the wielder's strength. Infuse it with mana ahead of time, and anyone at all could hunt monsters with it—that was the gun. If hunter and ordinary citizen alike could bring down a monster with one, then obviously it was more efficient to put it in the latter's hands. The catch was that the mana had to be loaded in beforehand, which made it a burden for any individual hunter, while the military—able to meet those conditions without breaking a sweat—embraced it as a staple. Such was the gun's place in the world.
Of course, there was always the chance the man before me simply preferred firearms. But I could tell. His movements alone had already caught my eye. Nine times out of ten, that man came out of the military. Judging by the smell of his speech, a discharged soldier, perhaps?
Damn it.
In the end, the man clicked his tongue and was all but forced to admit it. Apparently he hadn't known that I once ran an operation alongside the military. Who would have guessed that burying a matter far too illegal to ever mention publicly would pay off like this?
"So, what will you do? Do you plan to announce it to the press?"
No way. Even he wouldn't have meant that seriously.
The Third Great Cataclysm. Having weathered two of them already, humanity had long since come to treat the very word as a wound best left untouched. In a climate where even the fact that the Academy existed to prevent the Third Great Cataclysm had to be kept under wraps, going public? Nothing good could come of it. At worst, people might start whispering that the upper echelons of this country had one foot already dipped in the Cataclysm. And once that started, an epidemic of suspicion would only be a matter of time—which was precisely what they were after. Hide themselves in the cracks of a fracturing society, and build their power atop the suspicion.
"Hmm. I'd heard you were a hothead with nothing but hunting on the brain, but that doesn't seem to be the case."
"Huh? Who're the bastards spreading that kind of bullshit about me? You wanna die?"
"My apologies. He is my superior, after all."
The man let out an easy laugh. The whole exchange had the air of idle small talk.
"On that note, there's a little proposal I'd like to make."
Out of fucking nowhere, huh.
"Haha, truth be told, I only just thought of it this very moment."
"Oh, thanks for the thoroughly unexpected introduction."
"Cutting to the chase, then. I've begun to covet your abilities."
What?
And then.
In that very same breezy tone, the man had dropped it out of nowhere.
"So what you're saying is—you want to scout me. Right now."
"Yes, precisely as I said. Though my superiors opposed it, of course, insisting it was impossible."
"Your superiors do seem to have the better eye for people, I'll give them that."
"Hmm, is that so?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
The man asked it back with such perfect placidity that the reply rising in my throat slammed shut.
"Hoo. May I ask why you refuse? Is it because we were enemies?"
"Uh, that's part of it."
"It doesn't matter. The damage you dealt us was considerable, certainly, but not beyond recovery."
"No, what exactly would I stand to gain by coming over to your side?"
"And what would you gain by refusing?"
He's not some brat nitpicking my every word...
"I mean it sincerely. That's what my superiors told me, you see. That no amount of coaxing could ever sway a hunter like you."
With a light shrug, he went on.
"But I believed the opposite."
"The opposite?"
"Yes. I thought that being a hunter, you of all people would understand the value of this offer."
A hunter, is it.
"Isn't that right? The government may be working overtime to dress you all up as heroes, but at your core, you are a hunter."
With that, the man brought his pitch to a close.
...And then.
Honestly speaking, his proposal was a tempting one. It wasn't as if he'd said anything untrue. Had I ever even had a reason to refuse an offer like that? I think back on those three years I spent holed up in the boarding house's basement, living like a dead man. Now that it's all behind me, I talk about it as though it were some fond memory, but strip away the nostalgia and it wasn't a particularly pleasant time. If anything, there had been days I actually prayed for another Cataclysm.
In that light, the man's offer wasn't half bad. All he was saying was that one word of agreement, right then and there, and I could set the third Cataclysm in motion. Sure, coming clean and admitting that I'd spent all this time slaughtering monsters not for any grand cause, but simply because their stench pissed me off—that would be mortifying. Put the other way around, though, it meant that swallowing a single moment's embarrassment would let me return to a life of tearing monsters apart, no agonizing required.
Deliberation. Anguish. At the end of a span of time stretched out to something like eternity—
Like hell I will, fuck that~
I made my decision. No, really, I did give it honest thought.
Why had I spent those three years avoiding any clash with the Association's hunters in the first place? Because Lee Joongoo would obviously pitch a fit? Because "don't hit other people" is right there in the first-grade ethics textbook? Neither was wrong. But at the root of it, the reason was simply that my own values sat squarely at the level of an ordinary, unremarkable person.
...It was, by all accounts, the age of loss. Sorrow and farewell, grief and lament—an era where human death had become a matter of course. An era that, for the next hundred years, would be hailed over and over as the worst there ever was. Because I had made it this far without losing a single thing, I understood: it was pure, dumb luck that I'd been born into an era like this at all.
Wasn't that self-evident? A mere twenty-three years since the First Great Cataclysm, and the world already had monsters aiding humanity under the name of Constellations, and people whose bodies were mingled with monster flesh. If so, what would things look like a hundred years from now? Two hundred? For now, for the vast majority, monsters were beyond any doubt an indelible enemy—mortal foes through and through. But ask whether it would stay that way forever, and even I could only shake my head.
Come on, as if~ I'd love to argue that, but realistically, there was no chance. Different values. Different languages. Different cultures. And yet monsters were already cooperating with humans, and hybrids born of monster and man already walked the earth. This one won't be easy.
Which was why, in truth, I had always known. Born into an age of loss gone mad—and all the more so for having reached this age without losing a thing—I, who had become a hunter simply because I wanted to kill monsters, without ever knowing want or parting, was at my core no different from a psychopathic murderer. A killer born, by pure chance, into an era that allowed the hunting of monsters; a murderer whose targets simply happened to be monsters. Had I been born in an age where monster-human cooperation was taken for granted, I would be nothing more than a deranged criminal. Was it really any different even now? They called me a hunter, but that was as far as it went. Perhaps one day, a hundred years from now, South Korean society would look back and see me as a madman no different from a white slaveholder.
That was why, rather than slaughter the Association's hunters and hurl myself into a Gate, I had quietly holed up in a back alley. Even though Hayeon had been brought along to serve as bait, I had never once thrown her into the Gate—because no matter how you sliced it, that would have been going too far. Honestly, I wanted to kill them every time I laid eyes on them, but my reason for restraining myself around the hybrid and Tiamat was exactly the same. The cost-to-benefit was dreadful, sure, but more than that—running wild just because someone displeased me would make me nothing but a lunatic.
Morality, or a hunter's sense of ethics. Call it whatever you like. For someone who had never known loss, never grown numb to it, crossing even the bare minimum of lines could only mean one thing: I'd gone out of my mind. Which was exactly why I made a point of holding that one minimal line.
Think about it. Everyone harbors the hope that some rich man on his deathbed might one day leave them a ten-billion-won inheritance. But no one seizes a wealthy stranger off the street and stabs him until he stops breathing—not even if a perfect crime were guaranteed. For me, the rich man was this era itself, and the monsters were the fortune worth ten billion. I'd be glad to have it, but that didn't mean I wanted to drive a blade into a world that had already weathered two disasters. These times were hard enough as they were.
As the man had just pointed out, I was, in the end, nothing more than a hunter. Contrary to what others believed, I was no vengeance-mad avenger, and a hero was further beyond me still. So I decided to call the whole thing off. Because these times were far too painful for me to stir up calamity for my own benefit alone—and my values sitting exactly at ordinary-person level meant this, too.
A sorrow that passed like a shadow. A grief that came and went. Watching an era shed tears, of course an ordinary heart would ache. Of course, what had made me decide to become a hunter in the first place was nothing more refined than bloodlust, and it was true that bloodlust still claimed the lion's share of my reasons, even now. But—
Seeing people who had lost family to monsters grieved me. When they begged me for vengeance, I wanted to grant it. Watching them fail, again and again, to pull themselves together brought tears to my eyes. And whenever I wondered whether the damage had mounted because I'd been too late, my chest would tighten. Conversely, seeing people grateful to me... felt good.
Isn't that just human?
Just as he'd said, I was no hero. And that was precisely why—a few plain words of thanks, one modest token of gratitude, and I could turn my heart around just like that. For a man who had resolved to become a hunter out of pure bloodlust, that much was plenty to make him care about other people. Unlike a protagonist, unlike a hero—I had never needed some sweeping tragic backstory, nor a shock big enough to remake my values.
So, well.
"...Hmm. How unexpected."
Everyone who gets to know me says the same thing. I'm the kind of man who only grows more charming the longer you look.
"Might I ask the reason?"
You little shit. He isn't even pretending to listen.
"Well, even so—we're hardly close enough for me to stand here laying out my reasons."
"That's disappointing to hear. No, well, it is true."
"Still, if you must have a reason—it's because you reek of shit."
"Uh, what?"
Let him curse himself for choosing, of all things, to clock in at the same workplace as monsters. As I spoke, the man's gaze tracked the point of my moving blade. The faintest tremor.
Wearing a somewhat sour smile, the man countered with a sly look.
"You mean to fight, then?"
Did you think I'd just let you walk away? Truthfully, until a moment ago, I had. But having heard the words Third Great Cataclysm, there was no way I could let this man go free.
I could say this with certainty: if the Third Great Cataclysm came to pass because of them, I would rejoice beyond question. I'd rampage with glee even as I reckoned the oceans of blood and sacrifice that would follow. And that was all the more reason it could not be allowed. Precisely because I was that kind of creature, I could never lend my blessing to their plan.
"That is—if you live long enough to make the trip."
Well, fortunately enough, a few of the rumors circulating about me happen to be true. For instance, the one about me being the finest hunter in all of South Korea.
...I had the information. I knew their objective. And if so, I could kill them. That organization, which until now I had written off as nothing more than the ones shipping monsters our way—in other words, this was my own declaration of war upon them.
No longer were they some monster supply house that merely sent humans across in their place now and then.
Enemies.
From this moment on, it was a declaration: to me, they were nothing but prey.