Turning the Siege Into a Hunt
Watching the horde of ghouls widen the distance once more, Shin Seoa quietly let out a breath of relief inside.
What the hell was this, first thing in the morning? She wanted to grumble, but even that was hard to manage — a throbbing pain was burning up her side.
Ugh, damn it. That really hurt.
It was a wound one of the ghouls had given her moments ago, when it lunged at her. And of course, Seoa knew exactly what she was dealing with — thanks to the knowledge Park Woochan had drilled into her head whether she liked it or not.
A ghoul was no mere zombie. It was a corpse-eating fiend whose versatility rivaled that of vampires or werewolves. And among ghouls, there were occasionally individuals gifted with shapeshifting. The one that had attacked Seoa this time was no exception.
Had Park Woochan heard of it, he would have found it utterly absurd — but then, a ghoul's disguise was always half-baked. Even when it cloaked itself with magic, a ghoul's transformation could never hide the beast's hooves. To Woochan, being taken in by a lie that conspicuous would be beyond comprehension.
Still, Seoa had a defense to offer this time. The situation had been the situation. Holding a single building as their stronghold and intercepting ghouls swarming in from every direction, she'd had no spare moment to determine whether the legs of the woman pounding on the back door, begging to be saved, were human legs — or goat legs.
Which was why she'd paid a rather expensive price. Perhaps thanks to the herbs she'd kept stocked following her master's example, mixed together in whatever combination she could manage, she could still — thankfully — draw her bow.
The problem was that she had no time to rest. The chills from the poison lodged in the ghoul's claws. Her wavering vision. And through it all, the ghouls that had been pressing in without pause since morning. It felt as though her mind was being shaved away, layer by layer.
How much longer could she hold out? Doubt was beginning to creep in. Her hands hadn't dulled to the point of failure yet — not anything she could see, anyway. But the number one cause of hunter deaths in this industry was never some overwhelmingly powerful Dragon's Breath. It was falling into a lesser monster's trap while careless, or getting caught in a ambush that used the terrain against you. Schemes. Tricks. What always hunted hunters' lives was the unpredictable, unanswerable strike from out of nowhere.
It was the same now. One mistake, at any moment, could lead straight to death. The sensation of standing on the knife's edge had crept up to the base of her neck.
A dry laugh escaped her. It was nothing new. Ever since the Second Great Cataclysm, hunters had always stood on that line — turning their own lives into ammunition to throw against monsters. Suicide soldiers in all but name. That was the truth of what hunters were.
Seoa knew that too. A culture of investigation and countermeasures had taken root precisely to reduce that risk — and of everyone, Park Woochan was the most extreme adherent of it. Naturally, following such a master, Seoa had developed her abilities around thorough preparation and response as well.
And yet.
So this is the kind of situation that comes anyway, once you're actually fighting.
Shin Seoa did not think of herself as weak. If she had truly been weak, she never could have claimed the title of A+ rank. But in the end, she had only ever hunted specific monsters, over and over, within controlled circumstances. Ever since the Second Great Cataclysm ended, she'd had only a vague sense of what her master had meant by that. Who would have thought she'd be facing death right in front of her own home?
A helpless little laugh slipped out of her.
"My, my, someone's feeling awfully relaxed. Laughing and everything."
"Huh?!"
But apparently, she had resigned herself to death a little too early. At the window — a spot where no one had been mere seconds ago — a masked figure in a gas mask was suddenly sitting there.
A question bloomed in the minds of the ghouls as they surged toward the boarding house once more. The mana arrows that had come flying every time the vanguard showed itself had, for some reason, gone conspicuously quiet this time. Had the poison finally spread?
The ghouls knew as well — that one of their pack leaders had approached the hunter guarding the door resolved to die, and sunk its claws into her. Perhaps that venom was only now taking hold. Thinking this, the ghouls pressed forward, to carry out the orders handed down to them.
How many of their kin had died trying to seize this one tiny building? This time, at last, was the moment to complete the mission.
The problem was that, contrary to the ghouls' expectations, there had been no lapse in preparation this time.
Tik.
With a light sound, the leading ghoul vanguard collapsed to the ground. That wasn't quite the right way to put it, though. What had gone sprawling wasn't the ghoul vanguard itself — it was the vanguard's legs.
"Kyaaaargh!!"
High-tension steel wire. Wire that hadn't existed there moments before had neatly severed the lead ghoul's legs. Uproar spread through the horde at the sudden turn — an understandable reaction. The ghouls were no fools, even if they had fallen back. Primitive as it was, they possessed the intelligence to try deceiving hunters in return, and had naturally stationed sentries to keep watch even during the retreat.
And according to those sentries, the archer had never once come out this far to lay a trap. Then what in the world was the trap right in front of them?
Only three ghouls had fallen to the severed legs. And yet the horde stopped in its tracks — because the thought struck them that this leisurely march might not have been a march toward their objective at all, but a walk toward their own dismemberment.
They were right.
Watching their reaction, I let out a soft whistle. Not bad, these things.
Seoa stole a sidelong glance at me. I'd told her to rest, but apparently dozing off in this situation was beyond her. Which meant my hands were free for the moment anyway.
"What is that, Sabu?!"
"What do you think? Magic, obviously."
I clicked my tongue and tapped my temple. I could practically see Seoa's expression curdling.
"Magic? You?"
"That's right. Seoa, hate to break it to you, but from today onward your Sabu is an intellectual. Sorry for being so brilliant."
"You hired a wizard just to save me, Sabu...?"
You little brat.
It was only natural Seoa couldn't believe it. Everything I'd used until now amounted to physical reinforcement — and even that was the crude method of simply coating my body in mana. Manipulating mana directly might technically qualify as "magic," but it was nothing like the magic Seoa was imagining.
That said — what I'd just used was the real deal. The source, of course, being Dr. Pyeong So-woon.
In other words: alchemy and financial magic — Trinka.
"Come again?"
One of the magics Dr. Pyeong So-woon had combined was precisely that: a fusion of Western-style alchemy and the gypsies' financial magic. Alchemy was the art of combining various materials in pursuit of the philosopher's stone; financial magic was the gypsies' craft for multiplying capital. Fusing the two, Dr. Pyeong So-woon had added a revolutionary idea.
First, you prepare the materials and mana required to craft the magic tool. Then you apply an alchemical process and reinforce it with financial magic — substituting the labor and other costs of production with that same financial magic.
Ordinarily, financial magic is a magic for making money. But it also functions as a rite of offering: sacrifice the necessary funds, and results proportionate to that capital will answer. In other words, you consume mana proportionate to the labor required and skip the work entirely. Through this, the user obtains the finished product instantly.
Say you want to fold a paper airplane, and you have a single sheet of A4 in front of you. What you need to prepare is your envisioned level of completeness for that airplane, the skill it would demand — and beyond that, the mana proportionate to that skill. Spend the mana this way, and the user folds the paper airplane in an instant.
The name for it: Instant Alchemy. A magic that deserved exactly that title.
It was also why I'd been able to rejoin Seoa without any trouble earlier — I'd simply activated Instant Alchemy on the scattered debris of the surrounding buildings.
I'd explained this to Yoonha before: in the construction industry these days, gargoyle is the material drawing particular acclaim. A monster whose body shifts between living flesh and stone under specific conditions. Using it, I could process building fragments on the spot into rope anchored to a neighboring building — a route straight in.
Of course, it had drawbacks. Mana consumption, for one. Running two magics in parallel made the cost nothing to sneeze at. Above all, because it converts labor into resources, the larger the scale, the more the mana consumption grows exponentially — you're paying for labor that would take hundreds of people days to perform, out of a single person's mana. Which inevitably means the only things you can make are structurally simple tools.
And the magic itself still isn't polished. Unless the user has proper knowledge, the tools they produce are half-baked at best. I'd mentioned it briefly earlier, but it took several attempts to process gargoyle material into usable rope. I had time to experiment, but deploying it in the moment was still a struggle. The performance of the finished tools was middling, too.
By its very nature — drawing the finished product out of mana — it's less crafting and more hammering the raw material into shape with brute force. For someone like me, with no real fabrication skills, that alone was something to be grateful for. But because of it, even when the magic succeeds, the tool falls apart before long. And once it collapses, the material is nearly impossible to reuse.
The rope made from gargoyle hide was the same. Then again, if you could reuse a rock that had been pressed and flattened into the shape of a rope, that would be a miracle in its own right.
Even so — the versatility was more than enough.
That arrow Seoa had fired a moment ago, as a probe. All it took was triggering the enchantment carved into it after the fact, and we were laying traps without any preparation at all. Unfold the arrow's shaft, melt the arrowhead, and spread it over the top for reinforcement — and in an instant, the arrow became wire. With those traps scattered all around us now, holding this boarding house would be no problem at all.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Seoa had successfully repelled their assault, and now the ground was seeded with traps. You could call it nothing less than a hunting ground built for hunting ghouls.
Not an incursion. Not a defense. A hunt.
And if it's a hunt, then the quarry is just a handful of C+ rank monsters. There wasn't a single reason left to panic.