The Second Tiamat
The midterms were over.
By all accounts, the exam had been built around everything the students had learned at the Academy, combined with what they'd experienced during their field training at the Gangwon-do branch. Either way, people said it was a test worthy of the first hunter education institution ever founded in South Korea.
Not that I got to see any of it!
I was busy. What can you do.
I did sneak a glance at the exam schedule at one point, but by then my head was already buried in this whole affair, so no helping it.
On the bright side, the results were pretty much a sure thing.
First, Dr. Pyeong So-woon in custody.
And then the reports she hadn't had time to finish disposing of.
Granted, there were a few regrets. Nothing's perfect.
For instance — the magic she'd used at the very end. The spell that opened a gate using the dragon vein as its power source.
Apparently the magic itself was still a work in progress, or something to that effect. Even the research wing, constructed with all the ingenuity of Feng Shui divination, hadn't been able to withstand the excessive flow of mana and overloaded.
Thanks to that, the magic of my dreams slipped out of our hands forever.
Well, with Dr. Pyeong's person secured, I could always interrogate the details out of her.
Except.
We already knew.
Novus Ordo Seclorum. Those bastards had placed some kind of protection on any core information related to themselves.
In that sense, the intel Dr. Moon Youngseok had provided was actually the exception to the rule — information that sat dangerously close to the core secrets, yet had to be handed out if they wanted to recruit others into the organization.
You could call it a safe call by a hair.
And Dr. Pyeong's forbidden arts had been an out by a hair.
No, I'll freely admit that Dr. Pyeong So-woon is a genius.
But she's not a once-in-an-era genius. Not the kind you're lucky to see a single one of per century.
Though in South Korea, one is probably more than enough.
And the way I saw it, the magic Dr. Pyeong had used was almost certainly built on knowledge those bastards had handed her. A once-in-a-generation discovery, conjured up by a genius grinding away in a back room with not a single proper associate professor to collaborate with? Yeah, no. It made far more sense that she'd simply referenced whatever preparations the monsters had in place for summoning an Extra-standard.
Which meant that, with so much left to pry out of Dr. Pyeong, we had no choice but to shake her down thoroughly.
KRAAAAAAGH!!
That said — full disclosure — I did charge in there fully intending to cave her skull in, and got wrestled to the ground for it.
Fucking bastards.
Who knew they'd take turns stacking their signature techniques on top of me.
Look, I honestly wasn't planning to kill her. The moment I heard what she'd done, my mind just... left my body. Call it force majeure.
"Nobody on God's green earth calls that force majeure."
Shut up.
And so.
Lee Joongoo was off conferring with the Association Chairman over this whole mess, and Choi Seungjun was off hunting for a place to keep Dr. Pyeong locked up. Which left me, in the empty principal's office of the Hunter Academy, sitting across from Tiamat.
...The plan had been for her to tell me about the secrets of monsters and gates once this incident wrapped up. I was getting a sneak preview.
She was offering to go through the trouble of explaining it all again, just for me, purely to keep my attention occupied — probably. I could guess her game well enough. But I couldn't exactly refuse.
Waaah, I'm just a widdle baby hunter, Park Woochan.
All monsters must die.
And to make that happen, I needed to stockpile every scrap of monster knowledge I could get my hands on.
Of course, if we were talking about some run-of-the-mill S-rank monster, I wouldn't need a crash course at this point. Using the word "run-of-the-mill" in the same breath as an S-rank monster is more than a little absurd, granted. Still.
But.
These were Extra-standard monsters.
Even I was hearing about them for the first time.
In a situation like this, I needed to gather intel from anywhere and everywhere, no matter how little.
"Hmm. Where shall we begin, then..."
"Start by explaining what an Extra-standard monster actually is."
"Hmm?"
"They're just, like, batshit strong bastards. Right? That's not it?"
This was my guess, but I figured I was nearly certain of it.
Because the monsters had been scheming to summon an Extra-standard in the first place.
Naturally — once the Great Invasion began, hunting would get a whole lot easier for them too.
But monsters were, at the end of the day, beasts. They might fall alongside their own pack, but not a single one of them would welcome a new alpha rising above their heads.
Which was why simply labeling them "batshit strong bastards" left a bad taste in my mouth.
Tiamat pressed her index finger to the spot just below her lip, brooding — and at last, she nodded. It was an answer to my question, and at the same time it looked like a decision being made.
"Yes. Let us begin right there."
"Good."
"Then this one shall ask you first. In your estimation — what, pray tell, is a monster?"
Oh, come on.
She just up and dropped a heavyweight topic out of nowhere.
What is a monster, she says. Pretty philosophical subject, but surely she wasn't asking for my personal philosophy.
Let's see.
The modern era had two rival hypotheses on the matter.
"Speak, then."
"First — the hypothesis that the beasts recorded in the myths of old are surfacing once more."
Needless to say, one of the most mainstream theories out there.
Long ago, as science advanced, magic and legend were dismissed as mere superstition and faded away. The monsters of myth came to be understood as metaphors for historical events, natural disasters, or the courses of rivers. And the gods of myth were written off as the product of ignorance, relegated to the status of pop culture content.
But.
Through two Great Invasions, humanity found itself facing off against the very beasts that had emerged from its own ancient myths. With help, no less, from the very gods who had walked through those same legends. We'd even witnessed firsthand the monsters in those tales falling for real, using exactly the methods the old heroes had used.
So naturally, this was the first idea anyone would reach for.
"That humankind, in the distant past, battled the beasts even as it does now — beneath the blessing of the gods. That is the tale, is it not?"
"Yeah."
"Then the second?"
"The second — the hypothesis that the monsters pouring through the gates are merely imitating the beasts of mythology."
The second theory wasn't without its own plausibility.
Otherworldly invaders, crossing into this world with some purpose in mind. But something had gone wrong. Maybe the oxygen concentration in our atmosphere didn't suit them; maybe it was something else entirely. And so, the theory went, as they gathered information to adapt themselves into forms suited to this world, they ended up taking the shapes they wear now.
"Then which of the two do you believe is the truth?"
...Hmm.
I stroked my chin for a moment.
Frankly, I didn't much care either way, but.
"About fifty-fifty? If you're twisting my arm."
"Ohh."
"There's one thing that bugs me about trusting the second hypothesis."
During the First Great Invasion, sure, it wouldn't have mattered.
But it had been a full twenty years since that first invasion. So why hadn't the monsters shed their legendary skins by now?
I'd bet my life that far more monsters had died to their mythological weaknesses than had simply been hacked down head-on.
The beast called the Nemean Lion was proof enough of that.
Twenty years already. A good twenty years.
Whether the problem was atmospheric composition or whatever else — if they truly had the power to render mythological information into flesh, twenty years was more than enough time to overcome it.
"Therefore: hypothesis two, discarded."
"Then the first must hold the greater likelihood of being truth."
"In that case, the identity of the Constellations can be explained as well. As I've said time and again — across the various mythologies, it is a remarkably common tale that gods and beasts share the same bloodline."
The gods' true nature wasn't that they were monsters.
A god, at its essence, was no different from a monster — and a beast, by its bloodline, was no different from a god.
Which, come to think of it, meant my old complaint — that monsters were donning the skins of gods and calling themselves Constellations — wasn't quite accurate. It wasn't that monsters were playing dress-up as gods. The more precise way to put it was that from the moment of their birth, gods and monsters were one and the same animal.
"Huh. Doesn't actually sound wrong, though? So the Constellations need killing too, then?"
"That gaze of thine is rather seditious. But then, that would make it not fifty-fifty at all, would it not?"
"Huh? What's that supposed to mean, coming out with it now?"
Tiamat glared at me with a petulant face, but to me it was the plain and obvious truth.
"I mean, let's cut the crap. You died."
Mm-hm. Not one gram of tact in that statement.
The final chapter of the Mesopotamian creation epic: Tiamat, Mother of the Gods, has her belly split open and dies at the hands of the hero-god who became the gods' champion.
The one who slew Tiamat was either Anu, king of the gods, or his heir Enlil, or else Marduk, the chief deity of later generations. In plain terms — the most prominent god of his day, whoever he was.
At any rate, the gist of the legend is that the world itself was shaped from Tiamat's corpse after her murder...
And as you can see, Tiamat was alive.
The Nemean Lion I'd mentioned a moment ago had also been killed by Heracles — and yet it had been trotting around, hale and hearty as ever.
In other words.
The myths and legends could be true.
But to say that, we needed something to bridge the gap between the monsters that had died inside those myths and the world we lived in.
And in the end, every question I had converged on a single point.
What are you?
The goddess Tiamat. A Constellation claiming the name of a goddess who died in the Mesopotamian creation epic. A mere self-appointed title? Or something else entirely?
Every question I needed to answer was distilled down to that.
And then.
"Your words are not wrong."
Tiamat answered with surprising ease.
Tap. Tap.
She had been drumming the principal's desk in a steady, metronome rhythm — and then, all at once, she let out a sigh.
"Well, yes. You are correct. This one is not the goddess Tiamat herself, who appears within the creation epic."
"Then?"
"One would have to say — her successor."
Successor.
A strange word to hear. Not the sort of vocabulary a beast in essence, a mere monster, would reach for.
"It cannot be denied. And yet — myths are written not by gods, but by men."
"What?"
"A simple matter, truly. It means precisely what thou art thinking."
Her voice was like song.
Quiet, yet vivid. The goddess's voice conjured up the old myths themselves.
"Tell me — didst thou not hear it as well? When the First Great Invasion began, where was it that Typhon first opened his eyes?"
"...Mount Etna?"
"Yes. And the hell that lies beneath it — Tartaros."
Suddenly, something clicked into place.
The work of Virgil, the ancient Roman poet. According to his epic, the Aeneid, the souls of the monsters slain by Heracles and the other heroes still lurk within Tartaros.
And just now, Tiamat had said it.
That my words were not wrong.
...Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the myths really did play out in this world, long ago.
Then one question leaps to the front of the line.
When we use Greco-Roman mythology as our example — where, exactly, did the monsters that once ruled this earth disappear to?
And where did the monsters long ago slain by heroes come back from?
The answer had been sitting right in front of my eyes this whole time.
The gates.
Holes that birth monsters. Passages pierced through the world — Gates.
Fuck.
It was that simple.
I don't know who first named them, but there was no denying it was a masterstroke of a name.
A gate is, quite literally, a doorway.
Tartaros, the underworld of Greco-Roman myth. The nine worlds of Norse legend. Or — the door connecting this present world to the cradle of the monsters that populate countless myths and legends.
That was what the gates were. That was the true nature of the world on the other side.
Which meant.
If the myths handed down across the world were truly real...
then what was the identity of this goddess sitting across from me?
...As it happened, I had a fairly good guess about that too.
"The name of the goddess Tiamat is a most versatile one."
She meant it literally.
The Mother of Gods, who birthed countless deities. And at once, the Great Mother of Monsters, who conceived within her own body the enemies of those very gods. The foundation upon which the world was shaped — and the one who bestowed the Tablet of Destinies, by which the king of the gods is enthroned.
In other words — if the myths of this world had truly existed...
"Then would I not be the perfect candidate?"
Ha.
A goddess capable of conceiving gods, and of nurturing monsters. And — who knows — now that the age of myth has ended...
a goddess who could begin the Mesopotamian creation epic once more.
Call it reincarnation across the ages, or the product of one hell of a cosmic coincidence. The recorded death of the goddess Tiamat goes back, at the very least, three thousand years. And beyond the gates, a monster had been born bearing traits strikingly similar to that goddess.
"That one is me."
The second Tiamat.
The goddess of the earth, reproduced once more upon the surface of the world, laid bare her own identity — along with a truth that any researcher alive today would have traded anything to know.