The Monster Worshippers
Monster worshippers.
Known formally as the Monster Faith, it's not actually all that rare a phenomenon when you look at history.
The harsher the region, the more common it becomes — cases where a single deity doubles as both god of harvest and god of famine are hardly unusual.
So why is that?
In ordinary regions, it's mostly a matter of seasonal division. Harvest god in summer, famine god in winter, and so on.
But.
Truly barren land is different. Land so desolate that farming alone could never feed you.
For those people, farming was never anything more than a losing venture to begin with.
And so, the grace of the harvest god means something different too.
In a fertile land, you'd divine the harvest god's blessing by the surplus of grain left over.
In a wasteland, they count the harvest god's grace by the number of people who didn't starve to death.
A situation where three out of ten of the population should have died — and only two did.
For them, nature's grace isn't something given.
It's something that takes just a little less away.
Once a culture like that takes root, the famine god ends up being worshipped as the harvest god instead.
It's the same reason human sacrifice arises. The essence of human sacrifice is a plea: We'll reduce the mouths to feed, and offer you this flesh in place of grain — so please, quell your wrath.
Well, whatever the case.
Even among the people who proclaim that the age of reason and rationality has arrived, there were those of that stripe.
Maybe because life had gotten too hard. Or maybe something else entirely.
Perhaps it was a kind of self-defense mechanism — a way to justify having thrown other people out as feed for the monsters while they themselves escaped alive.
In short, monster worshippers are, quite literally, lunatics who worship the gates, or the monsters that emerge from within them.
Their logic is simple.
Humanity, born of what the gates produced, enjoying the greatest prosperity in recorded history.
Those of us living in this hunter society ought to be grateful to the gates for gifting us such abundant resources!
That's the gist of it.
Obviously, it's not a mainstream faith.
More than that, it's an ideology that gets treated as terrorism in most countries, and rightfully so.
After all, even in South Korea — a country that's handled things relatively well — three out of every ten citizens lost family in the Cataclysms.
And in the middle of all that, the bastards who may well have survived by shoving the victims aside are saying things like that?
They'd be lucky to get away with a beating.
Above all, even if you granted that argument some merit, what people are grateful for is mainly the hunters.
Not the gates spewing out monsters, but the parties who beat those monsters down and convert them into high-efficiency resources.
If Kim Minchul had been nothing more than that sort of lunatic, I wouldn't have said much either.
Truthfully, I might have chided him instead — just call him a psycho, why drag it out like that?
But.
A monster-faith believer, huh.
A sitting terrorist who'd once been close with the goddess herself — the very party in question.
Yeah. That was definitely suspicious.
……Right.
No, wait. I don't know.
Why is this bastard talking like I obviously already know all this?
For now, I decided to just nod along. It wasn't really an important part anyway.
"But until the Association got involved, nobody knows what the goddess Tiamat was doing."
Well, I'd only heard the broad strokes myself.
It wasn't wrong.
The goddess Tiamat, who descended in the Middle East.
Except the Middle East these days is, quite literally, an end-of-days Islamic free-for-all.
Thanks to that, the goddess — who nearly had her skull split open by a holy Smite from an Islamic paladin — barely escaped with her life.
Afterward, she despaired upon realizing that not a single soul in this era believed in Mesopotamian mythology anymore.
And at the end of the foreign travels that followed, the land the goddess chose to settle in was South Korea.
It wasn't that some tremendous secret was hidden in Korean soil — it was thanks to various circumstances that this land's Constellations were absent from their posts.
In a word: squatting in an empty house.
And in reality, the goddess's judgment proved exactly right.
Even a dog eats half its fill in its own front yard.
While the trash gods posing as deities strutted around within each nation's native mythology, South Korea — suffering without a single proper Constellation — welcomed the goddess Tiamat's settlement with open arms.
Granted, the excessively thorough protection turned it into something close to half-imprisonment, but for this country, the goddess's descent must have been like rain after a drought.
However.
"The child the goddess had been keeping even before she contacted the Association. That was Kim Minchul."
Huh.
That, at least, was news to me.
At the same time, it made perfect sense.
A woman suddenly appears in the Association's front yard, claiming to be a goddess?
Who on earth would believe her?
Nine times out of ten, they'd think she was a madwoman.
Even if she demonstrated power worthy of the name, it'd be the same.
They'd assume one of the high-rank hunters had finally lost it — nobody would think a goddess had actually descended.
And so.
Proof was needed.
Evidence to prove she wasn't the self-proclaimed lunatic calling herself a Constellation, but a goddess truly descended upon the earth.
Say, awakening a new hunter right before their eyes.
Kim Minchul had been that key.
What exactly their relationship was, I had no idea —
"Hmm? I don't think anyone ever asked that far. Everyone was too wary to."
Well.
Who would dare second-guess a goddess's actions?
Especially considering how the Great Invasion had gone.
Even if she were just a madwoman deluding herself into thinking she was a goddess, it'd be the same.
Once she could mass-produce hunters artificially, all of that was nothing more than a title.
If flattering her by calling her a goddess was enough to win her favor, it was practically a bargain.
Besides.
Even if I wanted to pry into the child's identity — how?
Excuse me, did you perhaps kidnap that child from nearby in order to prove you're a goddess?
I couldn't exactly ask that.
Going that far would make me not just rude, but a genuine piece of work.
"There was another reason too. For one thing, the two of them didn't get along badly."
Didn't get along badly, huh.
"To put it more precisely, I'd say they got along well?"
Hmm, let's see. That woman contacted the Association around the beginning of the Second Great Invasion, if I recall?
"Right. Until then, Kim Minchul was still a kid."
So he'd have been, what, mid-teens?
"Exactly. Around our age, actually. Apparently he used to call her 'Lady Goddess' and the like."
A shameless way to address someone.
Thanks to that, the suspicion that he might have been a kidnapped child apparently faded quickly.
But even so.
There had been an incident serious enough for Lee Joongoo to describe it as something everyone shied away from.
"And so Kim Minchul came of age, and naturally became an Association hunter."
And then?
"Then one day, out of nowhere, the two of them apparently had an argument."
An argument?
"Yeah. The reason's unknown, though."
I didn't know the details, but it had apparently been a fairly serious fight.
"A while later, Kim Minchul left the guild."
……Well then. So?
One day, Kim Minchul vanished without a word.
Naturally, the Association went on high alert.
After all, an A+ rank combat asset had just evaporated.
The upper brass had every reason to be flustered.
It was only natural that some of the Association's executives denounced the goddess.
At the very least, they'd have begged her to at least tell them why the two had fought.
The problem was that the goddess — the actual party involved — never opened her mouth.
With the goddess maintaining absolute silence, all manner of rumors began to circulate.
The Kim Minchul kidnapping theory mentioned earlier was part of that too.
The idea that the grown Kim Minchul had lashed out at Tiamat, who had kidnapped him as a child and covered it up.
But.
Something even more astonishing happened.
"News came in that Kim Minchul had joined a monster-worship organization."
What a lunatic.
"And not some middling outfit, either. You've at least heard the name, haven't you?"
No, I haven't?
It was the first time in my life hearing it.
Lee Joongoo apparently assumed I'd naturally know it, but how would I?
Unlike the Association, I was just an individual, nothing more.
How would I know the name of some secret organization the government was covering up?
Besides, I had no intention of investigating.
I did think they were lunatics, but I wasn't so eager as to go hunt them down and beat some sense into them.
Just thinking about it made me sick — I'd rather they bled out somewhere I'd never have anything to do with for the rest of my life.
I had no intention of going out of my way to stick my nose in.
I'd rather spend that time slicing one more monster to death.
It wasn't a field I had any real interest in, so I decided to play along vaguely and move on.
In reality, the rest of the story was much the same.
Kim Minchul had joined such an organization, they said — discovered while sweeping up a similar group……
That rumor reached the Association.
Rumors spread in an instant.
Starting with the people who had witnessed the two's argument that day, countless members of the Association pressed Tiamat for answers.
But.
This time too, the goddess stayed silent.
In the end, the Association had no choice but to throw up its hands in exasperation.
The topmost floor of the Association, where the goddess currently resided.
The present structure, where nobody could carelessly approach her, apparently took shape right around then.
Of course, the Association staff back then surely understood at least that the goddess's existence had to be concealed.
But apparently, it was only after they'd produced a top-class ideological criminal that things hardened into the stifling arrangement of today, where even a single outing was rarely permitted.
In fact, Lee Joongoo also testified that after Kim Minchul's departure — or defection — the frequency with which the goddess awakened new hunters dropped noticeably.
But.
That's strange.
At least as far as I knew, the goddess Tiamat wasn't the type to willingly endure that kind of confinement.
The image of her desperate to laze around just a little longer was burned into my eyes.
She wasn't the type to say, I shall withdraw to the top floor as a gesture of penance.
If anything, she'd throw a tantrum.
Or was it really something that serious?
Otherwise……
"That's why my expectations for you are so high."
Huh? What the hell is that supposed to mean all of a sudden?
"I told you, didn't I? After that, the goddess stopped casually awakening others as hunters. And greater blessings even more so."
Skip the creepy talk and get to the point.
"That goddess — for the first time in a truly long while, the hunter she chose to bestow her blessing upon was you."
What?
What?
The goddess Tiamat selected me, personally?
That was another first for me.
Well, I did storm out midway through, so it figures.
Really?
"Really."
First I'm hearing of it.
"And who would there be to tell you?"
Well, fair point.
"The goddess herself, for one. She's got a fair bit of pride, so she wouldn't go posturing in front of you."
No, she absolutely would, though……
But even as I said it, Lee Joongoo only let out a short laugh.
In the end, I decided to just give a noncommittal agreement.
"I don't know what's going on, but if you're thinking of reconciling, I'll help too."
It's not that, so don't get ahead of yourself.
"Oh? Then keep it in the back of your mind. If a situation ever comes up where you need my strength, I'll cooperate as much as I can."
No, what exactly do you think I'm going to do?
"Hmm? At least the you I know isn't the type to sit on his hands in a situation like this."
What the hell is that supposed to mean, seriously.
Honestly, it was a little creepy.
I mean, had I ever been in a position to hear talk like that?
Even racking my foggy brain, every recent contact with Lee Joongoo had been about parenting issues, nothing else.
I'd thought it before, but he's an easy man to con.
What on earth is he basing all that talk on?
More than that — what is this situation, even?
The person who cut off her horns and bolted is now my coworker?
Uh, yeah. Hanging up now.
Of course, refusing if offered is not what this manly man Park Woochan does.
Granted, I was listening mostly out of idle curiosity, but if help was on the table, taking it was the smart play.
Besides.
That lunatic stalker bastard.
Hearing the backstory made it feel all the more suspicious.
He surely hadn't come just to exchange pleasantries.
Above all.
A monster worshipper.
It was too perfect.
Excessively so.
The organization Kim Minchul supposedly joined after parting ways with Tiamat.
Anyone else hearing this could only ask themselves one question: why would Kim Minchul, such a fine hunter, fall into an ideology like that?
Could it be he'd developed sympathy for monsters?
That would also explain why he'd scrambled to lock Tiamat away.
But.
For me, it was different.
Constellations.
Because I know the truth of those so-called gods — that they are, in fact, monsters.
……Kim Minchul, who after parting with the goddess Tiamat joined some strange cult.
Kim Minchul, who suddenly appeared before us and greeted the goddess Tiamat with joy.
I remember that face — brimming with delight far too intense to be aimed at someone he'd long since broken with.
At the very least, it was highly likely to be the opposite of what the Association people expected.
There were a few unnatural threads in the idea that he'd turned to serving monsters as a result of disillusionment with the goddess.
Rather, Kim Minchul's feelings were, even now, still pointed toward Tiamat.
So then.
He said he'd answer anything, didn't he?
In the end, the most important thing was why Kim Minchul and Tiamat had parted ways.
Being steered along like this felt a little strange, but that was the priority, no question.
Once that was decided, the rest moved fast.
I rose to my feet.