Beyond the Fog of That Day
In the end, we had no choice but to accept Moon Youngseok's defection.
The story he told was simply too enormous to wave off and walk away from.
Fortunately, his claim that he'd never once set foot in the Artificial Hunter Development Project turned out to be true. Lee Joongoo, the man who'd lived through it, vouched for him, so that settled that.
What I couldn't wrap my head around was something else entirely.
Hang on—you were in the same research wing. How did you not know?
I'm terribly sorry, but honestly, even if it had been the building right next door, I wouldn't have known.
Wait, seriously?
Moon Youngseok, for his part, just muttered it all with total indifference.
Anyway.
And so we began the journey back to the Academy.
Quite the eventful day, wasn't it?
You're telling me.
Dawn was breaking. Perhaps because we'd stayed until the club finally kicked us out, I could practically feel the inescapable exhaustion bleeding through both her voice and mine.
On top of that, count the number of things we'd learned today alone. The name of that organization. Its true purpose. Even the locations of its members and their various subsidiary facilities.
Granted, it was only what a rank-and-file researcher like Moon Youngseok would know, but to me it felt like someone had force-fed me a lifetime's worth of unfamiliar knowledge in one sitting. No wonder my head felt ready to burst.
Granting my own brain a full pardon, I opened my mouth.
So, the Extra-standard rank, huh.
...Honestly, if I'm being truthful, that wasn't what I really wanted to say. Even so, that was the question I raised first, and Tiamat didn't chide me for it.
How on earth did those bastards even know about it in the first place?
Well, who's to say—perhaps they have someone of that caliber among them.
What a delightful assumption.
Extra-standard rank. Literally, the most closely guarded classification in existence—locked even to S-rank hunters. In this country, it was information accessible only to the sitting President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and maybe the President of the Hunter Association.
In fact, far from knowing it myself, even Choi Seungjun and Lee Joongoo seemed to be hearing about the Extra-standard rank for the first time today.
Which raised the question.
Novus Ordo Seclorum.
Where had they heard it?
Had this country already slipped into their hands without my ever noticing? Or...
Just what the hell are they?
What do you mean?
The gates, Tiamat. Or the monsters themselves. What are they?
I still couldn't bring myself to believe the sitting President had already turned coat. That would fail to explain why Tiamat knew about the Extra-standard rank in the first place.
True, ever since the goddess had gone into seclusion at the very top of the Association, powerful figures had beaten a path to her door seeking her divine counsel. The name "Extra-standard rank" she'd probably picked up from those visits.
But think about it. Would a sitting President or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs actually burn one of their precious audiences with a goddess just to ask whether she knew what an Extra-standard rank was?
To everyone but me, Tiamat wasn't merely a monster—she was a goddess descended upon the earth, plain and simple. They might seek her wisdom for crafting countermeasures, but who in their right mind would ask the goddess herself to define the term?
That'd be like one of those bottom-feeding reporters asking a foreigner whether they knew what kimchi was.
In other words, the odds were high that Tiamat had known about the Extra-standard rank from the very beginning.
And if so, only one explanation remained.
Because she's a monster.
Whatever they called themselves—New World Order or Novus Ordo Seclorum—those bastards were surely the same.
And that implied something new.
Maybe monsters aren't just dumb beasts after all.
Until now, hunters—including me—had taken it as gospel that monsters forming packs was simply natural behavior. Because they were animals. The monsters cooperating with that organization were no different; we'd vaguely assumed that separate monster packs had joined up through separate routes.
But if monsters knew the true nature of the Cataclysm simply because they were monsters...
Then monsters might have some kind of society of their own.
A multi-species civilization capable of sharing objective information. We'd long since left the realm of "packs of beasts" far behind.
Viewed through that lens, the very concept of "monster" started to wobble. Did they truly form a society? If so, had the raids of the Cataclysm been agreed upon internally? Then why had they resolved to attack humanity? Were the gates really a staging ground for invasion?
As I sank into that line of questioning, Tiamat deflated the whole thing with a single remark.
Child, even novice hunters muse on such topics at least once. Weighing them this heavily only now...
God damn it.
Well, yes, obviously!! But for someone like me—who'd always figured you just kill the monsters and move on—it was my first real doubt. So there.
Answering is no trouble at all.
What?
However, this hardly seems the moment. Should you set aside time for it later, I shall tell you then.
...It wasn't exactly wrong.
As we left the club, Moon Youngseok had said this to us:
Watch out for your senior, sir.
Senior? Who? That Pyeong So-woon person you mentioned earlier?
Yes. She's currently in a rather precarious position within the organization.
Oh? Why's that? I thought the summoning ritual was the whole point. Hardly a place for a mana engineering PhD to be sidelined.
It's because of you, sir.
Huh?
According to what I'd heard, the monsters cooperating with the organization fell broadly into two categories. The first were those cooperating fully and willingly—the three dragons that had attacked Hayeon at that first encounter, or the nine-tailed fox and the Succubus Queen. The intelligent ones mostly belonged to this camp.
In contrast, there was a second category the organization itself couldn't properly control: creatures with essentially no intellect at all, monsters that were, for all intents and purposes, pure beasts. As we'd witnessed several times before, the secret organization handled these monsters by managing them one way or another—throwing out bait, or using charm abilities to seize control of their minds.
And nearly every monster recruited this way, Moon Youngseok said, had passed through Pyeong So-woon's hands. To be more precise, her role had been to predict, through mana engineering and the like, which monsters would emerge from which gates.
The problem was that this entire category of monsters had operated under her command. These were the mindless brutes who were already looked down on for lacking intelligence. Now that even their carefully selected specimens had produced results this dismal, talk of Dr. Pyeong So-woon being dead weight was apparently already circulating.
Hence the warning.
There's no telling what your senior might do now, sir.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon was evidently aiming at some kind of one-shot reversal. And even if she weren't, she was already a woman purged by the state. The moment she'd joined the organization, betraying Novus Ordo Seclorum would leave her nowhere lower to fall.
Even that much made it impossible to guess what she might pull next. Though he never said it outright, Moon Youngseok's own decision to defect had surely been colored by anxiety over the situation as well.
Good grief. Just what is going to happen next?
As it turned out, even Moon Youngseok hadn't known the identity of the monster the organization had prepared for the Third Great Cataclysm. Well, of course not. Leak one careless word and there was no telling where the information would trickle out.
If I had to sum up the motive driving that secret organization in a single word, it would be fear. Absolute power. Reverent dread of a creature said to be beyond the combined strength of all humanity. But suppose humanity, after all its terrified gossip, actually succeeded in building a countermeasure? Who could say how suddenly the monsters' calculus might change?
They'd already crossed the line once—what did they have left to fear? Especially with the psychological weight of betraying their own kind this time around completely absent.
But still.
Hayeon, though.
At the same time, Moon Youngseok had said this:
Even so, once you feed the information the monsters provided about Hayeon into the catalyst equations, the probability of a successful summoning comes out remarkably high. He'd even launched into a passionate lecture that not even the material of an S-rank monster, or the creature itself delivered in person, would produce odds this good.
Granted, all under the assumption that the intelligence supplied by the monsters allied with that group was entirely accurate.
Nine times out of ten, it's not.
Moon Youngseok seemed skeptical, but I took exactly the opposite view. With it all but certain that the people who had left Hayeon at the orphanage were that same organization, I found it very hard to believe they'd mismeasured her value.
Besides, a few problems still remained.
Why did they leave Hayeon at the orphanage at all?
I hate to put it this way, but if all they needed was a sacrifice, there was never any reason to entrust her upbringing to someone else. According to the comparatively well-documented traditions of Western black magic, a sacrifice for summoning is actually considered most effective when it's a child.
In other words, their actions had, if anything, whittled down Hayeon's aptitude as a catalyst rather than preserving it. Internal strife?
No way.
Hadn't the orphanage director said it too? That they would come to collect her when she turned sixteen. Considering that, they had indeed intended to use Hayeon as a sacrifice. Then what was the sixteen years for? Was there some reason behind it?
...I couldn't even begin to guess. The information was far too thin.
Well, it was a considerable improvement over before. Though I couldn't deny the rather convenient development that sympathy for her was blooming right about the time I was supposed to kill her.
Even that very first day I met Hayeon proved the point. She'd been fleeing as if something were chasing her. Behind her, three A-rank monsters in pursuit. Thinking back on it now, something must have gone wrong in the ritual meant to deliver Hayeon as a sacrifice. And the fact that three dragons ended up as slabs of Harim Dragon Fried Chicken purely because I happened to be there—well, who cares about that.
But still.
How did Hayeon manage to escape?
That was exactly why I couldn't entirely dismiss the hypothesis that someone inside the organization had felt sympathy for her. A minimum of three A-rank dragons. Considering the enemies she'd run into since, easily more than that. Could Hayeon—who, at that point, didn't even know she was a hunter—have broken through the organization's encirclement and gotten away?
Frankly, I'd say it was close to impossible. And yet.
Hayeon, the person in question, had succeeded in doing exactly that.
At this point, the vast majority of my questions funneled down to the same place.
What the hell is Hayeon?
What is Hayeon, really?
What could she possibly be, to serve as a catalyst capable of summoning an Extra-standard monster? What power did she possess that let her flee from that?
Unfortunately, the answer was out of reach. Perhaps because the situation had been too desperate—Hayeon herself couldn't properly remember what had happened that day.
Even so, I was certain of one thing. The answers to most of the questions weighing on me right now were lying in wait somewhere beyond the fog of that day.
Well, either way, what I could do at the moment was prepare countermeasures against their sudden moves—and, when our hands were free, strike back and smash their facilities in return.
If Dr. Pyeong So-woon moved, it would almost certainly be when our hands were fullest. In other words, there was a good chance it would come around the upcoming midterm exams.
So then.
We move shortly before or after that.
We'd use the midterms as the fulcrum and cut Dr. Pyeong So-woon's scheme off at the root. With that decided, there was no need for me to act immediately. Wait until their movements revealed themselves, then strike back at the source. That was the optimal play available to us right now.
So I shook my head to clear the tangle of worries that had been knotting it up, and kept walking. Toward the Academy, faintly visible in the distance. Chewing over the question of Hayeon's true nature—and the thought of Dr. Pyeong So-woon, the woman who had manufactured Ye-eun.