A Death Certificate, Nothing More
On the concept of ranks as commonly understood among hunters.
The prevailing wisdom holds that an ability can cover, at most, a single rank's worth of difference. A hunter specializing in firepower could make that firepower count against a hunter or monster one rank above them. A hunter gifted with physical enhancement, in turn, could trade blows with a hunter or monster one rank above their own. And if elemental affinities happened to align on top of that, they might somehow stretch their coverage to two ranks.
Taken to its extreme, it would be no exaggeration to say that a hunter's true skill comes down to a single question: whether they can amplify these factors even further through preparation, countermeasures, and the like. Stack enough of that groundwork one layer atop another, and even an E-rank hunter toppling an A-rank monster is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Giant Killing.
The ability to hunt a monster by any means necessary, rank be damned. What hunters mean when they speak of so-called "skill as a hunter" is precisely this kind of craft.
Which is why I — who could claim, without a shred of exaggeration, to be the finest hunter in South Korea — understood my own capabilities more objectively than anyone else alive.
My hunter rank sat around S. My mana sensitivity was on par with that. But as is so often the case with such abilities, mine was not the explosive type. Worse, I wielded it in a manner utterly divorced from the mana handling of "mages," the class universally touted as the most efficient. In practical terms, then, my objective combat ability was equivalent to an A+ rank hunter.
No — factoring in the physical conditioning I had not neglected for a single day since the Great Invasion ended, my raw combat power might actually be higher than during my active years. After all, even the hours I once devoted to hunting monsters now went into training.
Which was exactly why I couldn't shake the wrongness of the situation I found myself in.
Seconds ago, we had been having a conversation. A surprise attack launched from a blind spot, using the table. And under those conditions, Kim Minchul had evaded my front kick perfectly — with nothing more than a slight tilt of his chin.
...Even if Kim Minchul really did possess power on par with an S-rank hunter, exactly as I'd suspected, dodging that attack on the spot should have been impossible.
As the thought flickered through my mind, the table I'd kicked out to cave in his face went soaring up into the cafe ceiling with a boom. At the same time, my follow-up kick raked across the tip of his chin.
I clicked my tongue without meaning to, but right now I had no choice but to admit it.
The attack had failed.
Still, that didn't mean I could afford to sit on my hands. Putting strength into the arm braced against my chair, I converted the front kick into a somersault kick, sweeping my leg in a wide arc to keep Kim Minchul at bay — then flowed straight into a backflip. By the end of it, a good ten meters had opened up between Kim Minchul and me, who mere moments ago had been sipping coffee face to face.
Ten meters. By a hunter's sense of range, that was not far. But considering my opponent was a hunter, I couldn't exactly wade back in carelessly, either.
CRASH!!
Only then did the table collide with the ceiling and burst apart with a hideous sound. For a brief moment, the other patrons turned toward the sudden noise — but my next offensive had already been underway before the table ever hit the floor.
──Opponent: Kim Minchul. An A+ rank hunter up until his retirement. Numerous clashes with active hunters over the course of his terrorist activities — and having evaded capture every single time, I assumed him effectively S-rank.
──Opponent: Park Woochan. No official record up to the point of his retirement. And yet one of the most widely known hunters in the underworld — the man they call the Butcher. Assumed effectively S-rank.
It felt as though each of us could see straight into the other's thoughts. And at the same time, so we could see the conclusion.
As an opponent: more than adequate. Crush him with full force from the very start.
The next instant, identical mana wrapped around my fingertips and Kim Minchul's alike. Spatial mana, empowered by our gear, leapt clean across the distance and spat weapons into their owners' hands.
──In Park Woochan's grip: his trusty "bottle." A monstrous greatsword far too savage to ever be pointed at a human being.
──In Kim Minchul's hand: an odd staff. A rather conventional design — presumably a tool to assist in the exercise of mana.
In a flash, our gazes crossed and tangled. And because of that, I could be certain.
In this one moment, the advantage in the war of information belonged to me, without question. Unlike me, whose proper combat records simply didn't exist, Kim Minchul's abilities were on file with the Association.
Pyrokinesis. The ability to raise flames anywhere — on his own body, at any place he laid eyes on, or anywhere within his range of perception. A magical fire that burned mana in place of oxygen. Naturally, not even a vacuum could snuff it out. It reportedly fell short of Choi Seungjun's, but its output and total capacity were nothing to scoff at either.
Above all, what defined it was its versatility. Just about anything fire could accomplish, it could accomplish. That was how the Association's assessment read, and having reviewed the man's combat records myself, I had no choice but to agree.
How to put it — it was as if someone had taken my ability and Choi Seungjun's, added them together, split the sum in two, and switched the attribute over to fire. Frankly speaking, of the two of us, Kim Minchul was the more troublesome matchup for me.
All things considered, my informational edge might buy me a single step's worth of superiority. The problem was the venue. A cafe near the heart of the city. Naturally, packed with customers. And my opponent was a terrorist who wouldn't give collateral damage a second thought. Unless I was prepared to write off civilian casualties, seizing the upper hand in a straight brawl would be difficult.
In other words—
'Conditions are about even, then.'
This wasn't like my last fight against a hunter, where raw specs could be leveraged to grind the man down one way or another. Nor was he like the half-blood, an opponent I could whittle away through sheer experience. I had a feeling this would be the ugliest fight I'd been in since taking this job.
CRASH!!
The table slammed into the ground. Wooden shards scattered in every direction — and Kim Minchul came boring through the gap, arm swinging. Flames rippled up in time with his gesture.
But—
Huh?!
Shukuchi. I closed the distance in a single breath. The repulsive fire he'd whipped out, plus the monster advertisements plastered thick across the city — thanks to them, my senses had been honed to a razor's edge, and I trusted them as I stepped forward.
Shukuchi's greatest strength was, quite literally, the ability to step on mana itself. I stomped straight up the wall of flames erupting beneath my feet in one bound. The wavering heat haze held firm under my soles as though it had mass, and the distance shrank to nothing in moments.
To a mage, that gap was as good as another set of limbs. Of course, he was hardly soft enough to die just from allowing a single approach — if that were all it took, the Association would have arrested him ages ago. Sure enough, beyond the body of my blade I could see him moving to do something.
So the choice I made was the thrust. Even if he sensed it coming, he couldn't stop it — and that was precisely what made it such a stubborn, honest strike.
KYAAAAAH!!
Perhaps the surging flow of mana finally clued the customers in to what was happening. Screaming and shouting erupted from every direction; I let it pass in one ear and out the other. With a whirl, the blade spun. I seized the auxiliary grip mounted on the sword and drove forward once more — ramming in shoulder-first behind the flat of the blade, just as I had against Nam Sangwon. And at the same time, Shukuchi.
FWOOOOOM!!
The mana I'd pooled at my feet detonated, blasting Kim Minchul's body away in an instant. An improvised shield bash. No — a shoulder tackle, rather, but the effect was more than sufficient.
The scenery around us dissolved, in a blink, into grains of color streaming backward. Wind shrieked past my ears. And so — before the screams of the crowd had even faded, the two of us came crashing down in an empty lot a good ten kilometers from the cafe we'd started in.
KABOOM!!
Dust rose in thick, choking clouds. But neither of us believed for a second that this much would put the other down.
FWOOSH!!
At Kim Minchul's gesture, the billowing dust vanished without a trace. He had used the shock of the crash to tear open a distance between us in a heartbeat, then activated his ability. Mana warped in step with it — and the next moment, a detonation of flame burst out right in front of me, from beyond the dust cloud where he'd hidden himself.
Quite literally, Kim Minchul had seized the mana drifting through the surrounding air and burned it. Spatial Ignition. According to the records, it was the attack Kim Minchul trusted most after his Signature — small wonder, for a technique that needed not even a single breath between perception and strike.
However.
Not so easy, is it? No — not easy at all.
The flames he had called up with such confidence guttered out in an instant. Because the cold crystal I'd fished out of my stash under cover of the dust had smothered the fire on the spot.
At its core, I understood the mechanism of Spatial Ignition too. It interferes with the surrounding mana and sets it alight with his ability. That's all there is to it. To anyone with half-baked detection skills it doesn't even show, which is the only reason it feels like such a dreadful attack — but to a mana-sensitive, few techniques in existence telegraph themselves as plainly as that one.
I flicked the embers away. It was only a B-rank cold-attribute crystal, but for now, this much was plenty.
Kim Minchul was presumed S-rank. And an attack this instantaneous was bound to lag in firepower and precision. In practice, that made it A-rank. Worse, it harnessed the mana of the entire surrounding area — no matter how you sliced it, that was not a tool to be pointing at a mana-sensitive. With this many conditions stacked in my favor, a one-rank difference was more than recoverable.
I knocked Kim Minchul's mana — which had claimed the whole area — out of position with my own. Pour cold onto the flames of that warped mana, and the counter was complete. Then I shattered the cold crystal I'd drawn in reserve and wound its chill around the mana. Call it a cold coating, if you like. For the rest of this fight, that chill would serve as both armor against Kim Minchul's ability and a dagger at its throat.
For starters, that last exchange had given away my ability. On top of that—
'I've spent every use of Shukuchi, and the Signature will be a stretch too.'
However much Kim Minchul's bullshit grated on my ears, there were limits to what I had left. Laid bare: my mood was no filthier than when I face monsters. What's more, we had pulled away from downtown out of concern for civilian casualties — no doping off monster advertisements to be hoped for out here, either. Realistically, squeezing out even one more Shukuchi this fight would be difficult. The same went for my Signature.
My whole style, after all, was specialized for butchering monsters. The same held for my use of ability, endlessly inefficient in the eyes of any other mage — even feats demanding supremely refined mana manipulation came off without a hitch for me when a monster stood before me. Put another way, my ability had been developed around feats I could never normally perform, calibrated on the assumption of a decisive battle against monsters.
And the obvious flaw of that approach was that when the opponent wasn't a monster, my combat power fell off a cliff.
The odds: five to five. That's what I'd estimated moments ago, but if you actually weighed the chances of victory, it was below that. Now that I'd flung my Shukuchi around without restraint, I'd be lucky to manage three to seven. And if Kim Minchul had developed a Signature of his own? The gap would only widen further.
The one real hope left to me was, once again, my informational edge. Kim Minchul was every bit as ignorant of my Signature as I was of his. If I played my cards right, I might manage to seal away his Signature through mutual deterrence — each of us checking the other's trump card.
"I never once imagined there could be a hunter capable of using Shukuchi in live combat."
"I've been listening to your bullshit so long I'm getting confused — that was a compliment, right? I'll graciously accept it as one for now."
"Yes. A compliment, indeed. Most sincerely so. Which only deepens my puzzlement. Why, then, did you refuse my proposal?"
"Huh?"
"Is it not so? Take a look at yourself. You have surrendered even the advantage you barely held, all for the sake of the citizens, and yet—"
"No, you were planning to kill me the second I said yes, you bastard."
Kim Minchul — mid-flow, unspooling one long-winded speech after another — stopped dead. A moment later, he was scratching his cheek with an air of embarrassment.
"How strange. It has worked until now. Is it really that obvious?"
"Not especially?"
Truth be told, I hadn't thought that way from the beginning, either. I'd simply kept listening until the whole thing pissed me off, and I'd figured I'd land one hit first and think after. But Kim Minchul had defused my ambush far too easily — and that had been an attack targeting his field-of-vision blind spot and his awareness simultaneously. Conditions even an active S-rank hunter would have struggled to slip.
Even so, having traded a few blows, I found it hard to believe any gulf that enormous yawned between Kim Minchul and me. Which left one and only one conclusion to draw: Kim Minchul had come into our conversation in full combat readiness from the very start.
Looked at that way, even that madman's conversation began to hang together. Tiamat had said as much, after all — that Kim Minchul had courted her. Seen in that light, there was no way Kim Minchul had ever taken preaching seriously. The bedrock of monster worship is the veneration of gates and monsters. Not lust. Not love. Kim Minchul likely had little interest in the cult's activities themselves; to him, they were ever and only a means of appealing to Tiamat.
If so?
The answer was simple. That sense of wrongness which had kept poking its head up even in the middle of our conversation. His deranged behavior — prattling on about how the two of them were "together" on the strength of nothing more than holding jobs at the same place. The engine driving Kim Minchul was, in all likelihood, jealousy. Jealousy of me — the man jostling shoulders with her day after day, while he, in his own mind, kept his distance from Tiamat for reasons beyond his control.
Why, of all people, had he come to me instead of Tiamat herself? Why, of all moments, had he shown up precisely when I was at her side? I had wondered — but perhaps the truth was the exact opposite. He hadn't shown himself despite my being there. He had shown himself because he couldn't stomach the sight of someone — anyone — raising a glass with Tiamat. The same logic explained why he'd come looking for me this time instead of her.
Just what the hell was this Park Woochan character, anyway? Could it be that he, too, loved Tiamat — the way he did? If so, he had come to remove me in advance.
'Huurk... fuck.'
'This guy is a purebred lunatic...'
More than anything, the moment I tried to fit that bitch and the word love into a single sentence, dry heaves came welling up my throat of their own accord. Well — thanks to that, I was spared any hesitation. I should have seen it the moment he joined a criminal organization. This bastard wasn't some wayward delinquent. Nor was he some tragic hero whose heart had merely gone crooked along the way. He was a lunatic by nature, plain and simple. A madman who had come to bury a human being for a monster's sake, without so much as a twitch of conscience.
At first I'd meant to tell him to fuck off — none of my business. I'd changed my mind. There was only one thing I could give a piece of shit like this.
"Get ready to die, you sick fuck."
A death certificate. Nothing more.