The Hunt Begins
What in the world was happening right now?
As it happened, no one here could have answered that question — not a single soul present fully grasped what was unfolding before them. And yet even so, it was easy enough to tell that something extraordinary was underway.
That was how utterly overwhelming the presence that had descended before their eyes was.
Crunch. A sound beyond chilling rang out across the field. Ironically, not a single scream of pain followed. One strike. The monster that had so abruptly revealed itself bit down and crushed the skull of the guardian that had come scrambling out of its den — so easily, in fact, that the debate they'd been having mere moments ago, over whether the thing could be hunted at all, now felt utterly foolish.
Pure violence — utterly alien even in an age where the impossible had become mundane.
She couldn't even remember when her legs had given out. A sudden earthquake; a tremor far too abrupt to be any natural phenomenon, and for a moment she'd looked around, wondering if something had gone wrong somewhere. What filled the vision of her — midway through gathering her mana — was a horde of monsters surging up like a tidal wave.
It was a number overwhelming enough to make her wonder whether every last monster in the gate had come flooding out at once. The sight of them blanketing the horizon from edge to edge was, truly, a spectacle — enough to turn her mind white for an instant.
And for that overwhelming vista to collapse took barely a second.
Why, in the first place, were so many monsters moving as one? If they had come to attack, why approach so blatantly — making no attempt to hide, their footsteps ringing out for all to hear?
The beast that had risen so suddenly beyond the horizon was the most intuitive answer to that question. Every time it swung a limb, a hole tore open in the horde. Every sweep of its tail cracked the horizon and laid the plain bare.
The gate had supposedly been suppressed already. But what would it feel like, she wondered, to be driven from your own den?
As it happened, she had no knowledge that could answer that. She simply understood — not with her head, but with her heart.
Why their homeroom teacher had preached, above all else, that surviving mattered most.
Watching that sight, even she couldn't help but feel it in her bones. Wasn't it obvious? Ample strength. Honed skill. Accumulated experience. A hunter's standing... Before violence that overwhelming, what good were any of them?
Bitterly enough — contrary to the intent of the teacher who had trained her — she was the first to think exactly that. And at the same time, she understood why those who had lived through two Great Invasions averted their eyes, with such effort, from the possibility that the monsters might one day return, and sang the praises of a peaceful age instead.
Confronted with the brutality before her, she felt it viscerally — and so, just as the pioneers who had once stood exactly where she stood had done, she couldn't help but give voice to the question that rose of its own accord.
What in the world was that thing?
Before that violence wearing the shape of a living creature, what could a human being possibly do?
A mere twenty years. Twenty years already. The question that had surfaced countless times back when people still hadn't grown used to their unfriendly neighbors from beyond the gates now rang out like an alarm.
And at the same time —
It's not too late yet.
She realized.
A mere twenty years. Twenty years already.
How had humanity — from the first gate's appearance, through two Great Invasions — somehow failed to perish?
Against monsters this unspeakably vicious, what could humanity possibly do?
The answer to that was standing right there.
Yes.
A Hunter — the one who slays the monsters.
Fortunately, I'd managed to make it in time — more or less.
Tracking down the girls from the footage I'd just been watching hadn't been all that difficult. They had been making an excessive racket, after all. The real question was whether they could hold out until I arrived... but apparently, thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of the monsters themselves, that hadn't been much of a problem either.
This is why a man should live diligently. See? I come by every single day to play with them, and now they're repaying the favor. Right?
Muttering a joke that didn't even land, I stole a glance at the two of them, still slumped where they'd fallen. Truthfully, I hadn't needed to check. Eyes glazed and unfocused. Mana seeping out in uncontrolled ripples. No matter how you looked at it, neither of them was going anywhere.
So-called Fear.
Literally, the roar of a high-rank monster. It locks the human body rigid and makes even the control of mana impossible. There's no sorcery behind it — it works on the same principle as an ordinary person freezing solid at the cry of a beast of prey. The call of a creature sitting in the predator's seat of an ecosystem is, all by itself, enough to suck the soul clean out of its prey.
The most famous example is Dragon Fear — a dragon's glare. Dragons sit at the very apex of the ecosystem, monsters included, and so every dragon species carries the power to bring other living things to their knees on sheer presence alone.
It's not for nothing that the kings of countless legends sent only small bands of elites to assault a dragon's lair. Against a dragon, a well-drilled army means nothing. The only ones who can move without hesitation before a dragon are the strong whom even the dragon cannot help but acknowledge. An army that's all bulk and no nerve is, at best, a single meal.
In other words, the only one who could move right now was me, alone.
Snap, snap. I flicked my fingers lightly in front of the two of them. Their gazes shifted in response — but it looked like it would take a while yet for them to come back to themselves.
"Teacher...?"
"That's right. Just rest a while."
With that eminently reassuring answer, I slipped the coat from my shoulders and draped it over them. For all it looked like a mere fashion statement, every thread of it was spun from legendary minerals — true silver, dark iron, and the like. A direct strike might be another story, but it would at least keep out the stray shockwaves of blows landing nearby.
"Now, then."
What to do about this?
The problem was that bastard over there.
I turned my gaze slowly. Whether by fortune or misfortune, it didn't lunge straight for me. No — if anything, it kept its wary eyes fixed on the hunter who could still move just fine with it standing right there. You'd never have guessed this was the same creature that had been savagely tearing monsters apart only moments ago.
Which gave me plenty of time to study it in return.
Legs planted solid as a bull's. A tail thick as a whip. A muzzle like a beast of prey's face twisted out of true, and a flat slab of a skull. And above it all, horns whose very curve radiated savagery.
But what dominated even that were the wings jutting from its back. They twisted this way and that in directions where flesh that size simply could not exist — grotesque to the point of being hard to look at, masses of meat far too vast for even that enormous body to carry. Membranes clattering like the legs of some luminous spider. For all I knew, it thought it was folding its wings with perfect grace; no matter how I looked at it, all I saw was something revolting.
Fortunately, that made its identity easy to deduce.
A demon.
Like the Constellations, monsters differ in nature depending on their cultural sphere. Even among demons, the Eastern variety tends toward what you'd call asura or rakshasa, while Western demons carry a distinctly Christian flavor. By that measure, the monster before me leaned Middle Eastern. A bull that walked on two legs — the first thing that came to mind was Moloch, famous even from the Bible.
The hallmark of Middle Eastern demons is versatility above all else. A resilient body, eyes gifted with strange powers, and on top of that, abilities both typical and terrifying — breathing fire, or laying frost across the ground in high summer.
In a word: a genuine pain to fight unprepared. Some consecrated holy water would have made things easier, but this was hardly the moment to complain about not having any.
But.
What the hell is this thing?
Even I couldn't think anything else. The situation was confusing past all reason. What on earth had happened? The wrongness I'd sensed from the very start had now swollen until it could no longer be ignored. The Middle East? Here, on Korean soil? Had it moved its lair, like that goddess did?
The presence rolling off it told the same story. Even before we'd come face to face, its aura had been close to A-Rank; now it had already surpassed even that. A+ at the very least — possibly higher. Stronger, at any rate, than the three lizards I'd crossed in that alley the other day.
The problem was that I hadn't the faintest idea how a bastard like this had popped out of an E-Rank gate.
A gate's rank is, at bottom, determined by the strongest monster that gate can conceive — its guardian, in other words. A monster up to this strength may emerge from this gate. Exercise caution. That's what the rank means. And right up until yesterday, this gate had been nothing more than E-Rank.
Had it climbed a rank in the span of a single day?
It wasn't impossible. That was, after all, the very reason hunters staked their lives by the thousands on clearing gates in the first place. The wider a gate's inner territory grew, the more mana flowed out of it; consuming that released mana, the gate conceived monsters; and the monsters thus born became spear and shield alike, repelling the hunters who came to clear it. And with the time bought that way, the gate expanded further still... a damned vicious cycle.
But as far as I could see, there was no mana flow dense enough to conceive a creature like this one. And in truth, judging by the gate's appearance — and I'd been running wild inside the thing for days now — it hadn't changed all that much.
An A-Rank-or-better Middle Eastern demon, out of a Korean E-Rank gate.
A combination you wouldn't even see in a third-rate movie.
Well. That's that.
Having thought that far, I cut the thought off by force. In the end, unearthing a tidy explanation for this was the job of the esteemed researchers, not of a hunter like me. Worst case, the opponent in question was a gate — a monster beyond its rank happened to pop out, that's all — and the world would simply have to nod along.
Which meant my job was, purely and simply, to resolve the situation.
Or to put it another way: not tracing where this monster bastard had come from or how it had gotten here, but tearing the thing apart and fashioning a drinking cup from its skull.
I took stock, slowly. The only combat power currently able to face it was me, alone. Lee Yeeun and Ja Hayeon couldn't move — and even if they could, they'd be no help, that much was obvious.
The same held even if I could get outside. Among the faculty, the only one who'd be any use against this thing was Choi Seungjun — and he was currently pouring every ounce of his strength into containing the chaos beyond the walls. Asking him to take on a monster on top of that would be, frankly, beyond shameless.
Besides, his ability was, at its core, specialized in sweeping away monsters by the dozen. A one-on-one wasn't beyond him, either — but if that monster bastard could punch its way through me... it would probably be a struggle.
In short: if I went down, everyone died.
The two girls crouched behind me right now, certainly — and every last soul belonging to the Academy besides.
In the present situation, I was the front line and the final line of defense, both at once.
That was the position I found myself in.
Shit. Takes me back to my active days.
Knowing that much was enough.
The situation was, admittedly, the worst. No other armor to speak of. The suit I had on was, like the coat, respectable protection in its own right — but as with any battle against monsters, it was nothing to relax over. No fire support. No data on the enemy. And naturally, no countermeasures prepared.
But.
If you asked whether this was the most hopeless situation I had ever faced in my life — no. It wasn't.
Which is to say: this was a mess I could clean up, if I played my cards right.
──────!!!!
The demon loosed its roar. That howl peculiar to beasts — a battle cry to whip itself into a frenzy and cow its enemy — burst across the field.
Then again, I suppose things were every bit as shitty from its side. It had presumably wanted to massacre the humans in its own quiet, peaceful way. Viewed that way, the roar almost sounded like a wail: I only wanted to kill a few people, so why are you getting in my way?
Same here, you bastard.
It's fine. I understand completely. Because I, too, want to kill nothing but you, without a single other thought in my head.
There was nothing left to prepare, anyway. The opponent was a demon — its true habits and patterns unknown. A monster pushing A+ Rank at minimum, and not a drop of holy water on hand. I could retreat, but then the Academy would be effectively annihilated... not a choice I could even entertain.
Can't run. Didn't get the traps set.
Which left, as always, exactly one thing to do.
All-out war.
Well. There was my conclusion.
Time to get started, then.
Commencing the hunt.