Monsterphobia
In all his life, Park Woochan had never once found it difficult to explain his circumstances. Not, of course, because he was some peerless orator. If anything, it was the era he lived in.
An age when roughly three in ten South Koreans were said to have lost family to the gates. An age when, despite that, people could only bring themselves to think of it as a kind of natural disaster. An age when, unable to truly accept it, everyone still had to treat it as something beyond anyone's power.
And so it was only natural that Park Woochan, throwing himself into the hunter industry in earnest, would end up the subject of just such rumors.
He shared friendship with no one. Nor did he seem to have entered the industry for money. A young hunter who never once set foot in the newly founded Hunter Association, silently hunting monsters and nothing else. Look at him from any angle you liked, and he could only be a newcomer who had resolved to become a hunter after losing his family to monsters.
And so the rumors spread in an instant—that Park Woochan had lost his parents to some monster, his family to some monster. It was a somewhat clichéd character, but precisely because of that, an image that struck home all the harder.
However, that was exactly where the problem lay. Because in truth, Park Woochan had no particular circumstances at all.
No. Really.
It wasn't as though he especially enjoyed hunting alone.
He had simply been a green country boy fresh off the road to the capital, with no way to wedge himself in among hunters who had long since built networks of their own.
It was the same with why he never joined the Hunter Association. He had never once entertained any grand notion about the association's rules getting in his way. Quite simply, no one had ever told him the Hunter Association existed.
Fortunately, his family was all alive and well. Well—recalling his father, who had raged himself into a dead faint at the shock of his only son suddenly babbling about becoming a hunter, you could say he'd 'lost' his family in a slightly different sense.
And so, before anyone knew it, Park Woochan had made a name for himself among hunters as some ascetic avenger.
Granted, the other hunters probably figured no one alive couldn't know what the Hunter Association was, but from where Park Woochan stood, it felt downright unjust.
...Perhaps someone might put it that way. If you had such circumstances, you should simply have confessed them honestly. But for the boy Park Woochan, barely fourteen or fifteen at the time, there was no courage to be found—no way to stand before people unburdening themselves with words like I know how you feel or I lost someone too, and say, actually, my parents are still farming in the countryside to this day...
Ten years, and then three more.
Even now—three years after humanity's victory in its war with the monsters—the Hunter Association still remembered Park Woochan as a slaughterer driven mad by a vengeance with no visible bottom. If anything, that image had only deepened; there was no way it could have worn off.
Because he had retired, effective the very day humanity finally conquered every last gate.
...The sudden disappearance of a man who, mere moments before, had been chatting with a hunter dispatched by the association. If the Hunter Association entertained an uneasy premonition about it, there was nothing to be done.
Of course, the truth was otherwise.
Contrary to what certain association personnel imagined, Park Woochan had not sunk into despair and ended his own life. He had not hurled himself beyond a gate under some corporation's airtight management, nor was he still wandering somewhere in search of monsters. Much less was he roaming conflict zones slicing up people because he could no longer hold his bloodlust in check.
A new city, rebuilt atop the wreckage of one destroyed by a monster rampage—and in a corner of it, there was Park Woochan.
It was a scene that could only be called bleak. A one-room dwelling, left desolate and bare, without so much as a TV, never mind decent furniture. This semi-basement, in which any trace of the word "lived-in" was impossible to find, was where he now resided.
Naturally, not for money. A hunter, as a rule, was a profession that pledged its own life as collateral to subjugate monsters. Needless to say it was dangerous—and for that very reason, money was never in short supply.
Which meant the reason he lodged in a coffin of a room like this was, from start to finish, entirely Park Woochan's own decision. The same went for the missing TV. Because one day, while sprawled out lazily flicking through the remote, he had accidentally landed on the hunter channel.
That day, the dumpster took in one shattered TV and one remote.
Monsterphobia.
That was the name Park Woochan gave his condition. In a word, he was built such that he could not, under any circumstances, tolerate the fact that monsters lived breathing the same air as he did.
This was not about any sense of duty as a hunter. He had no intention of holding forth on fundamentals, either—how monsters were, first and foremost, the enemies of mankind.
He simply hated monsters. Hated them enough to submit to every inconvenience imaginable and bed himself down in an underground room like this, for no reason other than not wanting to see monster advertisements.
The reason... even examining himself, there wasn't one, particularly. He just hated them. It wasn't some untellable history, the kind hunters who heard this would invariably imagine. He really did just plain hate them.
It had been that way from the very beginning. A past experience? A childhood trauma? If he'd had a reason that conveniently legible, it would have been easier on everyone. But Park Woochan hated monsters without a single reason to his name. The very fact that those things wriggled their cells about while styling themselves living creatures struck him as a blasphemy against protein itself.
That, too, was why he had gone up to the city, even at the cost of parting from his parents. If pressed to define it, it was something like an allergy. Just as a man with a peanut allergy who eats a peanut crosses a river from which there is no return, Park Woochan settled on that conclusion while remembering the day he had felt he might lose his mind—not at the fact that he had beaten a monster to death for the first time in his life, but at the fact that he was drenched in monster's blood.
Fortunately, unlike a true allergy, his body did not lock up in a monster's presence. If anything, the suffocation—the feeling that if he did not clear the monster from before his eyes this instant, he would hardly be able to breathe—became the very driving force that had pushed him to where he stood.
Perhaps this, too, was a kind of talent. But the man concerned could never bring himself to see it that way. After all, no one praises a peanut-allergic for his gift in telling peanuts apart.
Put simply: for Park Woochan, hunting was an act as indispensable to living as breathing.
Had he never known, perhaps it would have been one thing—but once he was aware, there was no ignoring it. Try pretending not to see a cockroach cross your path, and all you get back is a heap of cockroaches. In the end, Park Woochan left for the city that very day, leaving behind only the words, For some reason, it bothers me that those things are carbon-based lifeforms.
And so Park Woochan became a hunter.
And then.
Humanity finally succeeded in conquering the gates.
Had that been all, Park Woochan, too, would have raised both hands in praise. Who'd have thought they would truly manage to strike the monsters from the registry! Remembering the things that had overrun the world as if they were so many cockroaches, he had half a mind to sing them a hymn or two.
However.
Twenty long years since the gates first appeared. At some point, monsters had long since taken root as an element that could no longer be pried loose from modern society. In a word, the world was in full swing welcoming the great age of hunters.
Telecom companies, reaching past the information society to bandy about phrases like "the Fifth Industrial Revolution," poured their efforts into building "communications networks untouched by gate interference," while architects pushed "earthquake-resistant engineering that not even a B-rank monster could bring down" as corporate marketing.
The rest of the corporate world was no different. No one could openly spit on the hopeful mood of humanity having finally conquered the gates—but people still remembered the damage dealt by the "discourteous visitors" who had arrived from beyond them.
The gates had closed, beyond dispute. So had the monsters. And yet society remained awash in advertisements wearing monsters' likenesses.
For Park Woochan—who blacked out at the mere fact of a monster's body touching his—it was enough to make his eyes spin in his head. The same went for why he no longer kept in contact with the association. The imprint of the phone he had hurled at it without even realizing, that day, was still carved vividly into the wall...
But above all, the problem was that there was no decent way to quench this thirst.
Back when monsters had existed, none of that had mattered. When the mood turned foul, he could simply beat down whatever was loitering nearby and call it even. But now that humanity had carried the day in its life-and-death struggle against the monsters, he had no choice but to find some other way.
And for a man who had never so much as joined the Hunter Association—who still seized up, one by one, over every last telecom advertisement—there was no crack anywhere for him to wedge into.
Monsters did, now and then, slip out of corporate-managed gates, but in most such cases the matter was wrapped up by the corporation's defense grid or association-affiliated hunters long before Woochan could so much as stick his nose in. It happened countless times.
Calling him a social misfit would almost have been cute, at this point. Who could have guessed the association's worries would come true in exactly this fashion.
Park Woochan, twenty-seven years old. Literally, he was withering away for want of monsters to hunt.
And.
So.
Therefore—
—what in the world was this, now?
Which was why Park Woochan could not, for the life of him, comprehend the situation before his eyes.
One in the morning. In this era, where the word "monster" had become a cultural movement unto itself, he could not dare set foot outside except in the dead hours when no one passed by. Fortunately, thanks to the cash he kept on hand—stockpiled on the strength of the cash-is-king gospel he'd absorbed from his partners back in his hunting days—getting by posed no particular hardship. But that life sat a world away from the glamour the word "hunter" so reliably conjured.
Every day, the same: seize the cover of darkness and, quick as a dawn mouse, scurry out to sweep up groceries and see to them. He remembered shuffling about near the dumpster, lamenting how on earth his life had come to this.
But.
If that was so—then what in the world was this situation?
The trash bag he had been clutching mere moments ago had vanished without his noticing. No—retracing his memory, it seemed he had thrown it out. He was describing it as though it were somebody else's affair, but that was genuinely how it felt, so there was nothing for it.
In its place, he was gripping a massive greatsword.
Beneath the bitterly dark crescent moon, the blade flashed, wreathed in its halo. Steel gleaming with a luster so uncanny it could scarcely be called a thing of this world. The weapon towered well past the height of Woochan—a man no one could call small even in jest—but it was less its size than its brutish silhouette that seized the eye first, enough to make one wonder whether human hands could wield such a thing at all.
The cherished blade the man had carried back when he was still active. And across steel worn familiar to the point of excess, vivid bloodstains remained.
It was an alley.
The moonlight faintly washing over the lightless alleyway was, truly, intoxicating. A curious pocket of night-shadow wedged between streetlamp and streetlamp. A fold of darkness cradled by the night, not even three meters end to end. In that exquisite little stage, the man stood.
Along with a thick, cloying reek of blood.
Were the gobbets of flesh flung carelessly across the wall painted there with that blade-tip for a brush—or had they burst from the mass of meat rolling beneath it?
'Oh, what the fuck.'
Have I finally lost my mind?!
Park Woochan, the indiscriminate hunter—dark-evolving, of all things, into an indiscriminate murderer?!
That was the first thought to arrive. A rapid-fire self-assessment containing not so much as one millimeter of trust in himself.
But Park Woochan, flailing about without even realizing it, at length recovered his calm. Because that meat gave off a feeling he knew intimately.
Monsters.
There was no forgetting. No—there was no being able to forget. If anyone alive would know, it was Park Woochan, and so he could be certain without a shred of evidence. The mounds of flesh strewn thick down there were cloth woven from monsters.
'Huh?'
Monsters?
No, hold on. Something was off here. With a head that had steadied itself despite everything, that was the first thought Park Woochan reached. Monsters, out of nowhere? Had one escaped from a gate under corporate management?
Swallowing the thought, he let his gaze drift. One of the motions ground into him as a hunter. If these lumps of flesh truly were monsters escaped from a certain corporation's holdings, might that not invite a dispute over ownership with association-affiliated hunters?
Of course, he had no intention of wrangling over trifles at a time like this. Should a party concerned come forward to claim these lumps of flesh, he was even prepared to hand them over, no strings attached. Perhaps because he'd hunted monsters for the first time in ages? The pleasure climbing his spine from the soles of his feet was that intoxicating.
And maybe, while he was at it, he could hear the full story... Just as that thought took shape, Park Woochan abruptly registered something tickling at his senses.
Someone was there. At the far end of the darkened alley.
Who's there?
His reaction was swift. Clack—along with the groan of steel, that brutish blade-tip swung to bear on the shadows blanketing the alley.
His voice had, at some point, taken on an edge. Given the circumstances, only natural. If anything, one might have to praise his admirable restraint for not instantly concluding it was monster reinforcements.
But the wrongness Woochan was sensing ran a little differently.
'What is this?'
It was an uncanny sensation. An itch he had no words for. His sixth sense—never exactly easy to explain in the first place—was surging to a degree that defied reason.
Too strange to call a monster. And yet something about calling it human didn't sit right either...
Through the cold night wind, a moment that felt like an eternity came to bear its fruit. And the next instant, the shadow draped across the moon withdrew, right on cue.
If this were a production, you would have to call it a lovingly staged set.
Because there, beneath the moonlight that peeked its head back out—
'A girl?'
—a bright, radiant girl, hopelessly out of place in a scene like this, revealed herself.