Another Star Sets
This has become rather troublesome, hasn't it.
Honestly speaking, it had never been a gamble without foundation.
Persuading him was impossible. Countless superiors had said as much, and the man had genuinely believed it too.
There were complex reasons he had gambled all the same. He trusted his own eye for people, for one — and he had inwardly looked down on the man beyond his half-lowered gaze.
Of course, that man's skill was worth singling out.
The Butcher.
In a world that had weathered two Great Cataclysms while countless avengers sprang up like weeds, the fact that he alone carried notoriety of that caliber was no joke.
And yet.
Call him an avenger or what have you — at his core, he was nothing more than an amateur ruled by his emotions. The man had assumed that merely prodding at his identity as a hunter would be enough to steer him wherever he pleased.
At this rate, there would be no escaping the verdict that he had needlessly picked at a sore and only made it fester.
...In that case, what now?
Fight?
Have I lost my mind?
Naturally, the raccoons who had posted him here would be delighted to see Park Woochan dead. But he had no intention of sticking his head between a tiger's jaws.
It was only sensible.
He had failed to win Do Joojin over. Worse, subduing Do Joojin had burned through his own reserves. Even the hostage play he had engineered as a hedge against the unknown had been rendered useless.
No — was that even all? The student he had positioned solely for that hostage scheme had blocked his surprise attack on Park Woochan, plunging the battle back into a fog of uncertainty.
Who would have thought they were that close? The Butcher, playing at teacher against all sense, and a mere student — he had assumed that was the extent of their bond.
The answer from moments ago was one thing; Park Woochan was a man with far too many surprises in him.
Especially now, when even Duduri — the asset he had pinned his hopes on — had failed to inflict so much as a scratch. Even feeling generous, the man put his own odds of victory at a little under ten percent.
It wasn't that he lacked confidence in his abilities. Even against an S-Rank hunter, he was certain he would hold the edge in a duel between humans.
But. Adversity this heavy. And on top of it, an opponent who was the very monster that had punched through Duduri without a single wound. If he couldn't guarantee victory in peak condition, there was nothing more to say about a situation like this.
The instant their eyes met, it was the man who seized the first move.
The reason was none other than a difference in weapons. A greatsword against a pistol. And at this range, even if his opponent was a monster of humanity's strongest class, he could take the opening strike.
Tch...!!
Quick Draw.
The fastest shot there is — an attack loosed in under half a second without spending a single wisp of mana — spat fire. A bullet keen beyond measure. The first target of the man who had opened the battle was Yoonha, still sprawled on the ground where she had fallen.
Park Woochan clicked his tongue before he knew it and swung his guard around. At the same instant, the incoming bullet met his greatsword, and his body was knocked soaring into the air.
A simple probing attack. That was what Park Woochan believed — but the truth was otherwise. Or, more precisely, he had been steered into believing it.
There was no reason on earth to squander a precious first strike on Yoonha in a situation like this. The purpose had been, from first to last, a probe. Let him misjudge it that way — and bring out the trump card from the very start.
A bullet with mana coiled tight and quiet inside it. A single shot that even an A-Rank monster could not have escaped with its life hurtled straight for Park Woochan.
Fuck!
If it had ended there, he could have understood it. The man had merely put a little distance between them — but he had thrown away the initiative all the same.
But making that choice in this situation, of all times...
That plague-ridden bastard!!
Just as he'd expected. At the far edge of his vision — the moment his decisive shot left the barrel, the man was already whirling, back turned, and running.
Growling low like a beast, Park Woochan set about the next stage of the work. A thrown weapon — impossible. The odds of the man escaping in the time it took to open his warehouse were far too high. The greatsword — impossible. The bullet's force had left his stance still uncorrected.
Then what?
"DIE!!"
VWOOM!!
The next instant, the weighted end of the chain Park Woochan hurled flew straight for the man's shoulder blade. With a dull, spine-chilling crack, the man's shoulder caved in.
Even so, the man did not stop. No — matching his body's tilt to the ruined shoulder, he even slipped the chain that came chasing after.
In the end, Park Woochan, too, was left with no choice but to decide.
And then — the man felt it. The mana across the entire area, turbulent until seconds before, snapping into perfect alignment in a single instant.
An indescribable chill. Relying on an instinct he could not have put into words, the man wrenched his posture aside.
It was the right call. Had he not, his body would have been cleaved clean in two.
Cut Prettily
From the tip of the foot that kicked wildly through empty air, a light of pure severance burst crackling into being. Both arms thrown up against it, his back even slamming into the ground. And his opponent wasn't even a monster. Even so, with the stampede still raging at full tilt, the single strike swung with the man included among its targets was viciously, terribly lethal.
"Gahh, AAAAAGH!!"
KRAKAKAKAK!!
The arm burst open. The right arm — the one that had just given up its shoulder — split lengthwise in two. There was no other way to describe the strike.
An invisible slash?! A blade of air?! No — it's different!!
The searing pain blurred even thought. But one thing he could intuit: this was no technique of so ordinary a grade. There wasn't even a sensation of being cut. If anything, it was as though his arm had simply split apart of its own accord...!
Pain, rampaging like something mad. That was as far as thought could go.
Outside the watchtower. Reaching the end of the ridge in one headlong sprint, the man threw himself down the mountainside.
CRASH!!
And so, with Park Woochan's voice echoing even beyond the ridge as its final note, the ill-timed engagement at the watchtower came to an end.
Total engagement time: under a second, all told. Objectively, the result wasn't bad — but for Park Woochan, it was an ending that refused to go down smoothly.
Naturally, the Gangwon Branch was in an absolute uproar. The one who had gone up the mountain vowing to take the ringleader had come back down with Do Joojin's corpse in tow — it could hardly have been otherwise.
Fortunately, though, I never came under suspicion. That was thanks to the note found in Do Joojin's room.
A note left behind at the last moment, before he climbed the mountain, deceived by the Rite's enticements. In effect, it was his last will and testament. And that testament set down, in careful detail, exactly how Do Joojin had come to leave his post.
Apparently, the Rite's guide — the man who had just crossed blades with me — had approached Do Joojin right after lunch ended. The guide had made some offer calculated to win Do Joojin's favor, but as their talk went on, Do Joojin apparently sensed something wrong in the man's words and manner.
Might this stranger be a spy slipped into the Gangwon Branch? That suspicion was written into Do Joojin's note.
And so Do Joojin had pretended to go along with the guide's proposal. The condition the guide had named was one: come up to the mountain ridge by a set hour, and breathe a word to no one. The note closed with a single request — that whoever found it carry word to the Branch Chief.
...Call him a fool, and that's the whole of it. Trusting his own strength too far and failing to sound the depths of his opponent was, unquestionably, a mistake. But from where he'd stood, it was a judgment reached reasonably enough. Who on earth could have imagined that some passing guide was an S-Rank combatant who outclassed him? As for a coordinated assault by the numbers lying in wait at the summit — he'd have been confident he could hold out until the Branch, having found his note, sent reinforcements.
Looked at from any angle, Do Joojin's judgment was rational.
Which meant — if anyone had to be blamed — it was this world that wasn't.
There are factions that would sell their country down the river if it lined up with their own safety. There are bastards who betray humanity itself, thrashing for a chance to be the only ones left alive. An unreasonable world. Unreasonable thinking. In this unreasonable era, we hunters are forever pressed to make judgments in place of those who cannot fight — and if a judgment goes wrong, it is our own heads that fly. It was a common story.
Anyway.
Thanks to that, Yoonha and I weren't hauled over the coals either. Same went for Yoonha's partner, who'd spent the entire stampede in hiding. The field training schedule, of course, was scrapped without remainder, and what plans remained were whittled into half-hearted time-killing for a day. At last, it was time to go home.
Man, the other kids won't have a clue about any of this, huh.
And then — just before we boarded the bus, Hwang Yoonha opened her eyes.
Thankfully, she showed no ill effects either. If you could write off a hole punched through her side and filled back in as simply healed, that is. Whether it was the top-shelf potions or the Gangwon Branch's truly devoted care, Yoonha was so full of life you'd never guess that until literally yesterday, her life had been pouring out through her side.
The question from moments ago proved it. They wouldn't know. And I meant that literally.
The other kids hadn't been told the details of what happened during this field training. They could guess a stampede had occurred, and that the abruptly canceled schedule was part of it. Maybe they'd even read the next day's news and marvel that, miraculously, not a single civilian had been harmed.
But that was exactly where it ended. That the stampede might have been a man-made incident, someone's fingerprints all over it — and beyond that, the fact that Do Joojin had died in the course of it — would run in no newspaper.
His colleagues and family would grieve. But in this demented world, the death of one mere hunter was neither such a strange thing, nor a thing to be treated as one.
Before long, after we departed, the Gangwon Branch's funeral would begin. Those who had bitten their tongues — unable to speak of a death in front of students — would finally be free to weep. The Association would promise compensation for the bereaved. Given Do Joojin's record, there was more than a fair chance even that would never come.
And so, another Star — one hoisted by human hands to say that hope still remained for us, too — sank below the horizon.
As it always had.
Just how many stars would we have to see off before this endless night burned away, every last inch of it? With no one alive who knew the answer, people would cheer the newly risen morning star again today. Because it was a world so harsh that cheering and looking away were the only ways to keep on living.
In the immensity of the universe, the death of a star was a shabby, shabby thing.
And Yoonha felt the truth of it, too.
"Ssaem."
"What."
"Actually, I was about to drop out."
"Why?"
"I was going to quit being a hunter."
"Is that so."
It was a march of a conversation, devoid of any nourishment. At my reaction, Yoonha stuck out her lips in a pout.
"Wow, look at that disgustingly flat reaction."
It wasn't as if I could burst into tears and snot right there, begging her to stay.
"Why not?"
"Because it's a matter your whole future hinges on."
So it isn't mine to approve or condemn, one way or the other... I shut the mouth about to say exactly that.
Why, though? An appropriate answer, a decent answer — instead of some safe, middle-of-the-road reply, the next moment I was spitting out the truth.
"And?"
"Because it's a garbage job."
At that, Yoonha gave a wry smile. A rebuttal, though, she had none.
It was probably a truth she had felt keenly somewhere along the way, too. Something at the Namhae Branch, maybe — or something else entirely. Perhaps seeing this incident had only deepened it. The details, as ever, were beyond me. Not that knowing would have changed much.
This was a mad era of loss. I get by fine, cackling my way through it — but this is a world where a hunter doesn't need to go looking for a reason to feel disillusioned. That was the cutting edge of the age we lived in.
"Honestly? I'm a little surprised."
"Surprised by what this time?"
"That you'd try to stop me."
"Why would I?"
A snort of laughter burst out of me. I mean, I had gone to various lengths for Yoonha's sake — the part-time job she held now, for one, was something I'd arranged specifically to keep her from dropping out.
But. If she said she was quitting because her life was too precious to risk, even I couldn't talk her out of it. I'd be disappointed, sure.
"Huh?"
"What's with that reaction? Yoonha, just how cold-blooded do you think your teacher is?"
"No, that's not it. ...You'd be disappointed? Why?"
"Because you've got talent."
Yoonha's expression turned even more dubious. Fair enough — even said outright, talent wouldn't land right away. The talent she was picturing probably belonged to the same breed as Yeeun's. Well, Yoonha's ability wasn't bad, but set beside the way Yeeun handled hers, it fell short — that was simply fact. But the talent I meant wasn't that kind.
"Yoonha."
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for helping me. With this fight."
"Huh? Oh, that?"
Yoonha scratched the back of her head, looking sheepish. She clearly didn't see what the fuss was about. Fair enough — from where she stood, maybe it did look that way. She'd charged in believing it was a dire situation, and the man at the center of it all turned out to be standing there without a scratch. And seeing herself unharmed too, she might well figure there was never anything to worry about in the first place. Of course, had the ambush actually been allowed to land, things would have been very dangerous indeed — but setting that aside.
"You knew, didn't you? That he was stronger than you."
"Uh, well, yeah."
"And you ran out anyway. And you saved my life."
That I had potions on me. That I might possibly hold out. That the enemy's target was me — and so that she herself faced almost no threat of being attacked. Yoonha had moved without knowing a single one of these facts.
...That was no judgment reached after long deliberation. It had almost certainly been pure reflex.
Honestly speaking, as a hunter and as her homeroom teacher, it's not something I should be praising.
And yet.
That sense of duty — not the kind that leaps in only after weighing everything and finding the odds good, but the kind that hurls itself at a rescue on pure instinct. That heart, more than anything, is the measure of what makes us hunters who hunt monsters, not monsters drunk on blood.
Not that the man who lectured them that a single mistake leads straight to death is one to talk. But it was also the reason I'd noticed Do Joojin's precarious state of mind and still hadn't pulled him aside for a lecture. In this world, even the finest hunter dies helplessly the moment their judgment fails them.
But.
Without that kind of heart, even becoming a hunter won't make you capable of saving anyone.
"Pfft, haha, PWAHAHAHA!!"
Yoonha, who had been staring blankly at me for a while, suddenly burst out laughing. I had no idea what was so funny. As I waited, her laughter gradually subsided.
And then—
"Aw, damn it. That does it!! I've heard you say your piece — might as well give this hunter thing a damn shot!"
"...You sure you'll be alright?"
"Nope, that kind of question is banned. It shakes my resolve."
"Aigoo. Look at that — business is booming."
"What's wrong with that? It's not like this is an era where you find a job to match your major. If I happen to have talent, all the better, no?"
It wasn't wrong.
"Besides, I heard it too, you know."
"Heard what?"
"Something about the Third Great Cataclysm, blah blah?"
"...You were awake for that?"
"Half out of it, but still."
"Yeah. That's what they're saying."
"Damn bastards, the lot of them."
Yoonha grinned, the corners of her mouth curling up.
"My little siblings are actually middle schoolers, you see."
"I know that much."
"Ah, right, you said you saw them yourself. Well, anyway. During the last Cataclysm, they were complete little kids."
"And you?"
"Aw, I was already the girl head of the household back then, too."
Thump, thump — a light bump of fists. An utterly comical gesture. And so I, too, decided to pretend not to see Yoonha's fist quietly trembling in the middle of it.
"Still, there's no way I could tell them to go experience a Cataclysm for themselves."
"No. I suppose you couldn't."
"It's not exactly good experience, is it?"
"It is not."
Past that point, there was only one thing left for me to say.
"Yoonha."
"...Yes."
"Don't you dare die before your teacher does."
There was no answer. The fact stung a little — but it was just about time for the bus to pull out.
"Alright, let's go. Bus is leaving."
Tap, tap. I rapped Yoonha lightly on the shoulder and started walking. No answer came this time either — but the quiet footsteps trailing behind me rang in my ears instead.