Half-Divine
Now for what came after.
By the time I opened my eyes again, the greater part of everything had already been settled.
The same went for the colossal gate that had been stitched across the city's sky.
A gate pours every last ounce of its power into supporting the guardian it has chosen. For that reason, a gate whose guardian falls usually cannot withstand the backlash and collapses in on itself. Picture a faucet connected to a water tank and the idea becomes easy to grasp — a gate that feeds mana to its guardian is, in essence, nothing more than a water tank, a tank supplying water to the faucet we call its guardian. But what happens if the faucet is left wide open and the valve suddenly explodes? You can do nothing but watch the water drain away until the tank lies empty at the bottom. In precisely the same way, a gate robbed of its guardian squanders its mana in one continuous outpour until, like a punctured balloon, it shrivels into nothing.
Once it can no longer muster even the mana to sustain itself, a gate left alone simply closes its doors. It vanishes, in the most literal sense. That is why slaying the guardian is regarded as the orthodox way to clear a gate. And this particular colossal gate had only ever been a temporary construct to begin with — with its guardian cut down by my own hand besides, its abrupt closure was only to be expected.
Of course, the damage the city had suffered was nothing to dismiss lightly. The guardian's death and the gate's closing didn't make the monsters already loose on the streets evaporate along with it. Only after the golems felled by the dragon's Fear had been finished off — with the grudging help of hunters barely clinging to consciousness — could the Association finally declare the incident over.
...Yes. Over.
The wounds the monsters had inflicted. The deaths the monsters had caused. With neither of those things anywhere close to resolved, it was only the incident itself that had come to an end. What remained was the wreckage of a ruined city, and the people who would have to go on living on top of it. For the first time in a very long while, this country was remembering what the Great Invasion had felt like.
And then.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon's paper was fully deciphered.
I was in the hospital.
Fortunately, the nations of the world, having weathered two Great Invasions, had long since established protocols for dealing with gates that erupted in the middle of a city. Solidifying defensive formations around hospitals capable of taking in patients was one part of exactly that policy. Thanks to it, I was able to claim a bed of my own — and given the state I was in, that was no small mercy.
As it happened, the damage I'd taken over the course of this fight had been nothing to sneeze at. A body worked to its absolute limit. Mana drained to empty again and again. Potions choked down far beyond any reasonable dose. And finally, a third signature technique wrung out of the dregs of what little mana I had left. If I'd walked away from all that without a scratch, I would have been shocked. I'm no regenerator, to put it bluntly.
What made it all the worse was that horrendous act I'd attempted at the very end. Perhaps because I'd committed something too grisly to say out loud, my body had reportedly started convulsing on its own the moment I blacked out. It had apparently been bad enough to trigger outright seizures — and even now, a certain amount of sensory distortion remained. The hospital's verdict was a minimum of one month of absolute rest. No visible aftereffects, they said, but if I pushed myself any harder than this, I might genuinely be living with a permanent disability for the rest of my life.
Well, that was a chilling thought. Even with a hunter's recovery, it had come to that, huh. Really, now?
Locking the barn door after the horse has bolted, but so be it.
One small mercy was that I didn't need to file for leave. With the city in ruins and half the Academy faculty collapsed along with it, the Academy had had no choice but to order a school closure. It wasn't remotely a situation where anyone could sit around discussing final exams — and besides, the whole experience had been far more shocking than any exam could have been.
The Academy would reopen with the next semester of the coming year. I couldn't help wondering how many withdrawal forms would be waiting on that day. With nothing but that bleak outlook hanging before my eyes, Choi Seungjun — who, like me, suddenly found himself with time on his hands thanks to the closure — came looking for me and brought the matter up.
The subject, naturally, was the gate's appearance and the damage attached to it. And the information that only the two of us could know. In other words, the entire truth of the incident orchestrated under the direction of the New World Order.
How had they known the Academy's structure as if it were the palm of their own hand? And even granting that they'd used Yeeun as a catalyst, how had a monster of that magnitude come bursting out at all? On that question, Choi Seungjun had at last gotten his hands on a proper answer.
Even setting Pyeong So-woon aside, there were a handful of scholars who had majored in mana engineering. Yet even to those experts, her paper had presented an obstacle beyond anything they'd imagined. But the researchers Seungjun had bankrolled without hesitation had finally managed to produce an interpretation of Dr. Pyeong So-woon's findings.
In short—
Lee Yeeun is a demigod.
And the ones who arrived at that insane conclusion weren't Choi Seungjun, but those researchers.
Even I felt my mind go blank for a moment.
"...What did you just say?"
"No, that phrasing carries a certain distortion." Choi Seungjun said, drawing a hand down his jaw.
It was, admittedly, a thoroughly demented story. Well, Tiamat had said as much herself — that this world of ours is one where beings out of myth run rampant wearing the names of Constellations and monsters. So beings that could be called demigods wouldn't be entirely unheard of. Wouldn't be... but still.
What the hell kind of bombshell is that?
I couldn't think anything else. I mean, even calling her a demigod — isn't that just half-Constellation blood in the end? Unlike Jihee, I hadn't sensed a single shred of that from Yeeun?
Bottling up the question, I pressed him for the explanation, and Choi Seungjun slowly opened his mouth.
"It seems we'll have to go back to the beginning."
"Fine. Take it slow."
"You're aware Dr. Pyeong So-woon launched the Artificial Hunter Development Project?"
"Yeah."
"The project pursued a truly varied set of methods at the time."
"Figures."
Not a pleasant story, but Jun-gu had told it with much the same air about him. However — of all those methods, the one Dr. Pyeong So-woon had prized above all was Case C. The third theory.
"The third?"
"Yes. The means by which a hunter awakens mana, you see. The first is contact with a gate. The second, if I recall, was working out mana manipulation entirely on one's own."
"Then what's the third?"
"The third."
In other words—
"A Constellation's blessing."
"Yes. That is, in essence, the story."
The case Dr. Pyeong So-woon had concentrated on in her bid to manufacture hunters artificially was the third. Which is to say, she had referenced the very technique of the Constellations — the beings capable of producing hunters by deliberate design. She had recorded the mana wavelengths of hunters who awakened upon being chosen by a Constellation. With government backing, she had examined the remains of hunters of that kind. Perhaps she had even copied the exact mana pulse generated at the moment of a Constellation's revelation, attempting to reproduce that mana artificially.
"Lee Yeeun, it appears, was that success case," Choi Seungjun said flatly.
I see. No wonder success was so difficult to come by. To put it bluntly, even Tiamat — a Constellation descended to the earth itself — was stingy when it came to making hunters. Or to put it more precisely, she prioritized and hand-picked only those who pleased her. And for Constellations who had witnessed the heroes of the mythic age, it stood to reason that few people of the present would measure up to their eye. Hence, hunters who awakened through a Constellation's choice were an extreme minority among the countless hunters out there. The available samples were bound to be insufficient. The reason Yeeun awakened in the first place was likely no different.
'A simple constitution, or sheer coincidence.' That was how Jun-gu had put it. Meaning that even Yeeun, practically the greatest success of all, was in truth closer to nothing more than blind chance.
Insufficient pilot cases. An ability lacking reproducibility. And yet, despite all that, a success whose ability bloomed artificially — and moreover, unlike Jun-gu's, hers was not unstable but genuinely stable; the only such case on record, if I remembered right. Taking all of that into account, the most probable explanation is simply that Yeeun had some unknowable something about her. That is, unless the researchers of that project had lied to Lee Jun-gu — a man who came to their door bearing the name of humanity's strongest.
Call it the talent of a rickshaw puller born in the modern era. Even if someone possessed the potential to become the greatest rickshaw puller in human history, there would be no use for it today. Surely Yeeun was much the same. A talent that, had she been born in another land or the distant ancient past, might have made her a priestess of the gods — an aptitude that could not sprout in this country, where barely a single proper myth remains. Not because Dr. Pyeong So-woon's research was brilliant, but because Yeeun's qualities were such that her eyes could open even to theory that crude. That was the gist of it.
And so.
Dr. Pyeong So-woon reasoned thus: a crudely imitated revelation of a Constellation, reproduced by mere technique. And a vessel so exceptional that even from that much alone, a stable ability could bloom. That vessel was Yeeun. Therefore—
"There is a tradition like that surrounding the Middle Eastern dragon, you know. Adjust the magic circle a little, and couldn't she serve as a catalyst for the summoning?"
That line of thinking had led directly to this incident. A goddess — or a priestess who received the gods' revelation and answered it by becoming the sacrifice to call the dragon — is a story as old as storytelling itself. Of course, even that degree of compatibility had not been enough to call down an Extra-standard monster.
No, wait — is it the other way around?
Yeeun's overall capabilities sat at the level of a B-rank hunter. Among those capabilities, her raw power alone was roughly on par with B-rank. And yet she had been able to serve as the catalyst for summoning an S-rank monster — which meant that the aptitude we'd just been discussing exceeded all imagining. Naturally, unless one was the directly designated catalyst, there were hard limits even to summoning a high-rank monster. In other words, the fact that Yeeun could summon an S-rank monster without any special preparation meant she possessed the aptitude to reach at least S-rank herself — even factoring in all of Dr. Pyeong So-woon's groundwork.
The problem was Hayeon's aptitude — which surpassed even that of Yeeun...
About that, I had nothing whatsoever to say.
Not for the moment, at least.
With that thought, I closed my mouth. Because although I hadn't spoken it aloud, I too had arrived at a certain guess.
Hayeon's true identity?
No.
'An Extra-standard rank monster,' of all things.
As for the thing that had shown its face, however briefly, this time.
But nothing had been confirmed yet. Not a single thing. And so, for now, I decided to keep listening to his explanation.