A Five-Minute Walk From Home
What in the world was going on anymore.
Hwang Yoonha's muttered words, vague as they were, summed up exactly how every girl gathered here felt.
They'd scraped together anyone rumored to have some real power, and as a result, the only faces around them were burly, hard-bitten men. Given the shallowness of Park Woochan's personal network, it was arguably unavoidable.
And so, naturally, the girls had gravitated toward one another.
Honestly, it was an awkward scene.
Take Lee Yeeun, for instance, who was here by virtue of being Lee Joongoo's little sister. Of the girls present, she stood relatively close to the others. She and Ryu Jihee had clashed a few times back in middle school, and she'd even been teamed up with Ja Hayeon and Hwang Yoonha before.
Her relationship with Park Woochan was much the same. During a practical training exercise, she had realized that the hunter who'd helped her in an eerily similar situation long ago had been Park Woochan himself, and with that revelation, the wall around her heart came down fairly easily. It was precisely why she had begun to break free of her vague, naive admiration for her older brother and stand on her own.
The one flaw in the story was that Park Woochan, the man in question, remembered none of it. Watching her suddenly overhaul her entire fighting style, all he'd thought was that her brother Joongoo must have finally given her a stern talking-to. It never once crossed his mind that he had been the influence.
Her relationship with Ryu Jihee, whom she considered a friend, followed a similar shape.
To Yeeun, Jihee was a close friend. But to Jihee, Yeeun was, at most, one of the classmates she kept around to camouflage her true identity.
It might have looked as though Ryu Jihee had approached Lee Yeeun with some hidden agenda, but the reality was different.
To hide the fact that she was half-monster, Jihee simply needed to behave like an unremarkable student as much as possible. She hadn't engineered her friendships through some exhaustive scheme.
Being permitted to look down on clueless classmates from atop her throne of blood-cursed anguish was a luxury that expired, at the latest, by second year of middle school.
Which was exactly why Ryu Jihee found the current gathering so uncomfortable.
Because mere moments ago, Lee Yeeun—who had been looking a bit subdued—had cautiously crept closer to her side.
Jihee's inner life was, at its core, that of an utterly ordinary high school girl, and Yeeun's behavior stirred a quiet, gnawing guilt in her chest that she couldn't shake.
The real problem was that idle chatter wasn't exactly on the table either.
No one here visibly disliked anyone else, but conversely, none of them were close enough to fill this kind of silence with small talk.
Needless to say, Park Woochan hadn't revealed Ryu Jihee's unusual background to the other students, and so Jihee kept a certain psychological distance from the other girls summoned by his call.
Hwang Yoonha was in the same boat.
She'd been on the same team as Yeeun last training session. On paper, Ryu Jihee was a student without a single red flag. When Park Woochan had hooked Yoonha up with her job, she'd even exchanged a few words with Ja Hayeon.
In other words: every relationship in this circle was polite, distant, and lukewarm.
Different connections. Different distances.
And yet, at this moment, all three hearts beat as one.
What on earth does our homeroom teacher even do for a living?
It had been a mere two months since the Academy opened its doors.
What could he have possibly done that calling his name alone could summon chains of terrifying-looking men—and this many high school girls who'd all grown close to him?
…Rarely had the saying "a monk cannot shave his own head" fit a scene so perfectly.
Still, what gnawed at them was nothing more and nothing less than this.
For Yeeun, it was "my brother, Lee Joongoo, wants you here."
For Jihee, it was "a classmate has something to discuss with you."
For Yoonha, it was "I have questions about the job."
Ja Hayeon—their own classmate—had gathered them all under an assortment of excuses.
Of course, they'd all suspected there was some kind of relationship between Park Woochan and Hayeon, but none of them had imagined they'd come face to face with the evidence in quite this form.
As for Hayeon herself, rather than answering the question-soaked stares aimed at her, she simply kept her eyes locked on the gate Park Woochan had entered moments before.
…She'd known her homeroom teacher was a little unhinged. According to the tabloids, he'd been a hunter of some renown in the old days.
But even accounting for all that, the current situation felt more than a little strange.
Would she finally get a proper explanation this time?
No one needed to go first; swallowing that same unspoken thought, the three of them, too, turned their eyes toward the gate and sank into a fragile, shared silence.
Meanwhile.
At that moment, I was dredging up a rather old memory.
The day I'd heeded the advice of that lunatic who called herself a goddess and concluded that monsters disguised as humans had taken root somewhere in this country.
Of course, after colliding with the usual organization during my search, I'd ultimately abandoned the hunt for the monster colony.
Because I could feel their fingerprints all over the Association personnel that Joongoo had mobilized privately.
However thorough our investigation, what could we do if every single plan we made leaked straight into their laps? Better, we'd decided, to find something else we could accomplish in the meantime. That was how I remembered it.
But.
There was exactly one thing that I—and, to be fair, Joongoo and Choi Seungjun as well—had overlooked.
The day Hayeon and I first met.
That cramped little alleyway had been harboring not one, not two, but three A-Rank monsters.
Which raised the question.
Why didn't I notice?
I only realized monsters had been living five minutes from my front door after watching them show up in person?
Considering that my senses could comfortably cover a new city this size, something about that had to be wrong. Especially when the subjects in question were monsters.
The space-manipulation tool that hunter from the organization used was clumsy and unwieldy at colony scale, too.
It wasn't as if an entire colony could be huddled together living inside some pocket dimension the size of my warehouse.
And my warehouse, for what it's worth, is a prodigiously high-rank spatial ability.
It strains belief that a disposable mana crystal could sustain a space that massive around the clock.
So where, on any given day, was that organization staying?
Factor in that they were after Hayeon—and that it might even have been them who stashed her in this new city in the first place—and the answer was almost certainly somewhere near this city.
And yet, up until now, my detection ability had registered nothing the slightest bit off.
Which left exactly one possible conclusion.
What in the hell is going on here?!
Only after I'd thrown my fit did the official in charge of managing this gate come scurrying out.
A gleaming badge on his chest—the kind Seoa had once shown me, proof of guild affiliation.
As it happened, it was hardly a rare sight around here.
Because the ground all around me was littered with hunters wearing the very same badge.
Yes, I'd cut them all down.
I mean, I asked for the person in charge, and these clowns kept coming at me. Infuriating.
Had that been the extent of it, I might have held back. But the way they went straight for their weapons the instant they saw me left a bad taste in my mouth.
They were advertising their guilt with every inch of their bodies, and I'm not the sort to let that slide.
Hence the tableau currently spread out before me.
The manager eyed me sourly, mouth twisting at the sight of an uninvited stranger on a rampage. I lobbed a formality of a question at him.
"You the one in charge of this gate?"
"Yes, that's correct. Though, may I ask what this is about—"
"Spare me. So—what was your guild called again?"
"Excuse me? …You mean us?"
Unbelievable. The sheer nerve on some people.
The manager shot me a look like that when I asked for the name of one of the top three mega-guilds in the country. It meant nothing to me. I waved a hand dismissively; a guild scheduled to vanish within a day or two wasn't worth interrogating over details.
I quietly closed my eyes, then opened them again. Truthfully, I'd meant to shut them and concentrate—but it turned out I didn't even need to.
"Doesn't look like it."
"I'm… afraid I don't follow."
"You're not the one in charge, are you."
"Pardon?"
"There's still a manager left in there, isn't there?"
At my gesture toward the building the self-proclaimed manager had come from, the man's face—still awash with the bewilderment he'd been failing to hide—froze over completely.
"I don't know who you are, sir, but if you continue like this, we will have a problem."
"Or what? You'll call the police?"
Knowing them, they'd already called someone—not the police, but the guild's in-house hunters.
My senses, swollen to their limit, picked out the surge of approaching hunters in an instant.
Let's see. Skills: mediocre. Numbers: respectable. But the fact that they were already drawing weapons said everything about their intentions.
Well, it was only natural.
These were men with plenty of practice burying a person alive, after all.
Not just their own guildmates—they'd have dealt with anyone who refused to go along with it the exact same way. Which meant the steadily climbing death rate inside this gate over recent months was, nine times out of ten, entirely their doing.
We both know that I know. So don't waste your strength on theater.
"…Are you with the Hyodo Guild? What is it you want?"
The self-styled manager narrowed his eyes, as if willing to hear me out.
Needless to say, the hunters showed no sign of stopping.
No points for guessing what that meant: it was all a lie.
A guild that would kill me rather than let me walk away with what I now knew—there was never a version of this where they spared me.
Except.
"I'm going to kill you."
"…Excuse me?"
Same here, pal.
I swept a fallen tree branch lazily through the air. The motion was so languid that the manager before me simply blinked, uncomprehending.
But.
The attack was already finished.
Cut Prettily.
My signature flared, and every hunter charging toward me stopped dead in their tracks—because with each sweep of that little branch, their equipment had been cleaved clean in two, armor and all.
And the assault didn't end there.
A crackling shockwave tore through the hunters, now disarmed and unarmored all at once and utterly bewildered.
Their consciousness flew from them in a heartbeat.
I hadn't killed them, of course. Hunters were still people.
Flip that logic around, and it means I had no reason whatsoever to hold back against monsters.
My senses, bloated almost unbearably, reached out and caught sight of the colony at the far edge of my vision.
The end of the gate.
At that place—a place for which the phrase "the end of the world" was no exaggeration at all—there stood a city, as if grown straight out of the earth.
Well. As of thirty seconds ago.
Not anymore. Because I had just cut it in half.
SHRAKK!!
With a sound that turned the blood cold, the city was beheaded.
Half of it, severed in a single stroke—and it was that severed upper half that leapt toward the sky.
But even a city that hurled itself upward in open defiance of gravity could not, in the end, escape the law of universal attraction.
GRUUUUMBLE!!
Buildings painted across the heavens came plummeting back toward the earth.
And in the spray of blood flung around them, I could make out the heads of lizard-folk wearing expressions of pure, dumbfounded shock.
That, in short, was the story.
This guild had been keeping a colony of monsters inside the very gate they managed.
Whether they intended to farm them, or had some other purpose entirely, I couldn't say. But it seemed the guild had poured a staggering amount of effort into the venture.
Literally—the flesh off their own members' bones.
The guild's skyrocketing death toll lately made perfect sense now, didn't it.
The hunter who joined a guild to kill monsters. The one who became a hunter for money but never dreamed of betraying humanity itself. These people had pried open their own members' coffins with their own hands and tossed them to the monsters as feed.
Even if someone refused to play along, you only needed to kill a couple of them as an example, and the rest fell silent. It worked on A+ Rank hunters all the same.
No—it might have been even easier with them. In any industry, the higher you climb, the more you carry on your back.
Subordinates. Comrades. Or family.
Not that it matters.
Whether the organization had orchestrated this, or whether the guild had driven it on their own accord, the answer made no difference.
Either way, this grotesque dog-and-pony show ended today.
The city built inside the gate collapsed. Its severed upper half, returning home by the grace of gravity, crushed the lower half—which had somehow clung to its shape—into oblivion.
Three seconds.
That was the exact amount of time it took to resolve one of Seoa's great worries.
GRRRRRRAAAHHH!!
And then—
While I was busy calming senses gone feral from the slaughter of several hundred monsters, the door of the management office I'd pointed to earlier exploded outward.
With a roar that admitted no other description, a shadow burst through the wreckage and lunged straight at me.
"You— you insane bastard!!"
The manager howled it while tearing at his own hair, but what choice did the man have?
A monster was, after all, a beast at its core.
Or rather—a beast capable of using mana.
Which is why he'd understood, the moment that pulse of mana erupted, exactly what had just happened to his family.
Not that I cared.
I calmly studied the face of the creature baring its claws at me.
Arms flung out savagely wide. Scales gleaming a livid blue. And to top it off, a maw full of razor teeth.
The true overseer of this colony was, in the most literal sense, a monster.
A serpent-man, huh.
In that case, this should be more than enough.
In time with its slashing claws, I swung the branch.
And.
A serpent-man that topped out around B-Rank was more than handle-able with armament this flimsy. Down it went.
Phew. I let out a breath of relief. I couldn't just kill everything in sight this time, after all—I needed to keep at least a few of them alive to secure evidence.
So, let's all just stay calm, hm?
I offered the suggestion in the gentlest voice five years of patience could muster.
But apparently, the creature found me deeply insulting.
Thwip. A glob of spit splattered across my gas mask.
And the very next instant, its head exploded.
"Ah, son of a—!!"
I scrambled backward without thinking. Fortunately, no repulsive monster brains made it onto me.
But wow, this guild was a piece of work, wasn't it?
Monsters or not, had they implanted control bombs in the things?
Thanks to that, it looked like this was going to be another exhausting slog.
Counting down the remaining gates in my head, I wiped my bloodstained gloves on the clothes of the self-proclaimed manager, who had fainted dead away at some point.