The Trip That Grew Too Big
No, seriously, what is this.
And so.
On the road heading down to the South Sea, Shin Seoa caught herself grumbling out loud.
Everything was fine right up until she managed to secure her vacation. You could call it a masterstroke of judgment, really. The vast majority of the Academy's faculty were former or active hunters, so the Association naturally provided a system that let them take leave under the pretext of official requests.
That much, at least, had gone exactly as predicted.
The trip she had originally planned and the situation she now found herself in could not have been more different. After all, Shin Seoa had never had the slightest intention of bringing any of the other girls along.
It was only natural. To her, this proposal amounted to nothing less than a fairly bold invitation for a date. No man in his right mind brings another woman on a trip meant to turn things into a fait accompli—much less one of his own students.
But the world was never that accommodating. Or to put it more precisely, the situation Park Woochan found himself in was never that accommodating to begin with.
Ja Hayeon.
Who would have imagined that brash little brat would tag along? Shin Seoa ground her teeth without realizing it, though when she calmed down and thought it through, it had been entirely predictable. A trip all the way down to the South Sea, even if only for a few days. Considering her master's capabilities, that was far beyond any distance he could cover alone. Escort duty or whatever it was—he'd already brought a high school girl home to live at his boarding house, so it should have been obvious.
Of course, Shin Seoa had predicted nothing of the sort. Calm, level-headed thinking? From a woman who'd been fantasizing about wrapping up a fait accompli along with the beach trip? Her head wasn't going to run cold with romance in the mix. Such was the blindness of infatuation.
In any case, Ja Hayeon's joining had thrown Shin Seoa's plans into complete disarray. And in her eyes, that little imp was a rather dangerous presence. This was something only Shin Seoa, with her unusually keen wariness, could have noticed—the way the girl looked at her, and more than that, the way she looked at her master, was anything but ordinary. Feelings whose nature she couldn't even be sure the girl herself was aware of.
Because of that, she had planned to drive a wedge in, to keep her distance at the boarding house where Hayeon lived... only for the girl to follow them all the way here.
At that point, Shin Seoa had no choice but to give up on this stolen getaway. Whatever else, there was such a thing as shame—and scheming for that in front of a high school girl who was, technically, her junior disciple crossed the line.
Still, she hadn't expected things to spiral this far.
Inside the van.
The rental car Park Woochan had secured for this request was packed to the last seat. Filling it were people she had seen before, filed in one after another: every student in the club Park Woochan ran, herself and Ja Hayeon included. And to top it off, the fellow long-term teaching intern from the Middle East, plus Ms. Tia.
The result of asking, in half-hearted resignation, whether there was anyone else worth inviting. For Park Woochan's part, it had simply been a way to settle his karmic debt over the Kim Minchul incident—but naturally, to Ja Hayeon and Shin Seoa, it didn't sound that way at all.
And so, the temporary boarding-house alliance was formed. The same logic applied to why the club kids had been called in. Nobody said it out loud, but what everyone was thinking was painfully clear: we will make that beach date fizzle out by any means necessary!
As a minor silver lining, it made it far easier to book time off under the pretext of club fieldwork.
Well, whatever. Having survived roughly that round of secret warfare, Shin Seoa could only think it once more.
How on earth did it come to this?
This was hardly a situation she could breathe easy about. A sigh escaped her at her own circumstances—reduced to being satisfied with the middle seat of a van instead of a one-on-one date on the shore. Hadn't she just ended up losing out entirely?
The more she mentally washed her face with a dry hand, the more that thought took hold. She had even secretly bought a swimsuit!! A silent scream echoed inside her.
Oblivious or not, the van was barreling merrily down the highway toward the South Sea.
The Hunter Association's defining feature: welfare that's fucking incredible.
Unbelievable. I'll be damned. Who knew you could get time off under the pretext of an Association request?
In my opinion, the Hunter Association is God. Could it be that the word "god" was never an invention of ancient prophets predicting the Association's existence, but a concept created for it? At the very least, it's a lot closer to divine than those monsters calling themselves Constellations.
Muttering that kind of nonsense, we arrived in the vicinity of the South Sea. Who knew the license I got for the sake of burying monsters that refuse to die unless you run them over would come in handy like this?
Should I get a car at some point?
It was a flawed purchase—vulnerable to monster ambushes, and honestly, I'd probably run faster myself—but when occasions like this rolled around, there was no denying how convenient it was. It's not like I can carry everyone on my back. While my mind was busy picturing myself cruising around in a shiny new Ferrari, I pulled out the rental car keys instead of a sports car.
At the same time, I swept my gaze over the group once more. They were clambering out of the van like zombies, one shambling figure at a time. Their expressions were a sight to behold.
I thought it'd just be me and Seoa at first, you know~
Hayeon was understandable, but when Seoa suddenly asked if there was anyone else worth bringing, I nearly fell out of my chair. She'd mentioned she deliberately picked a request near the coast, so I'd assumed she wanted to blow off steam. Turns out she's been doing some serious hunter work. Almost embarrassing, as her master.
Alright, everyone, attention!
Clap clap. A light round of applause, and all eyes turned to me. Normally this job would fall to Seoa, who took the request, but it couldn't be helped. With a group this size, she'd inevitably feel distant from them—and conversely, there was no way to leverage her connections.
What's that? A guild? Haven't you heard? They've all gone to prison!
And so I found myself shanghaied into the role of organizer this time around. Well, Seoa's role was always meant to be oversight and subjugation anyway. Looked at that way, handing the wrangling to someone else wasn't an unreasonable call.
At the same time, I quietly studied their complexions while pretending not to. Working alongside Seoa, one of the most famous hunters in the country right now. Or a formal request that would take up a full line on their future résumés. I couldn't tell which it was, but the eyes of the kids looking at me were glassy and glazed beyond all measure.
You all understand, right? We're not here to play today.
"Uh, we're really not?"
"I even brought a swimming soo-uit~"
"Quiet!"
Ugh, damn it. One breath of "duty as hunters" and I get this reaction. Embarrassment welled up inside me. I knew there was a gap between active hunters and cadets, but I hadn't realized the difference in mindset would be this wide. Seoa was almost painful to look at by comparison.
Well, it couldn't be helped. Most of the girls gathered here were high schoolers, and the request itself had little worth bragging about: investigate and report on an unusual phenomenon continuously observed near the South Sea. A thoroughly boring-sounding job. Of course, in this industry, even requests like these could produce catastrophic damage if mishandled—but that was hard for students to grasp.
Still.
"I can roughly guess what you're all thinking, but remember this: the one who took this request is, first and foremost, the hunter Shin Seoa standing right here."
"Yes! That's me, Hunter Shin Seoa! As I said before, looking forward to working with you all!"
"And also, keep in mind—she may not look it, but this girl is an A+ rank hunter."
"Sabu, didn't you just attach something weird to that?"
"In other words, even this request came in through an A+ rank hunter. Get it?"
Now he's just flat-out ignoring me, this man.
I'd thrown in the jab as banter, but thanks to it, a measure of tension finally began to settle over the students' faces. According to Seoa, this request existed to announce to the whole world that a hunter named Shin Seoa was alive and well. Boring on the surface, but there was no telling how it might actually play out. After all, the Association's upper echelons would never prop up an E-rank request as proof of Shin Seoa's continued existence.
Which meant that even this seemingly simple request might harbor its own trap.
And—according to what I'd heard beforehand, the trap in this request was, nine times out of ten, on the side of things that looked too harmless.
What we'd been assigned was the anomaly occurring in these waters—the investigation of sudden fog and islands that appeared out of nowhere.
"It's probably just someone mistook heat haze for something, no?"
Yoonha grumbled, tossing in her two cents. When I stopped mid-sentence at her words, she awkwardly scratched the back of her head. But the reason I'd cut myself short wasn't to scold her.
Rather, the opposite.
"Over there, you know—the cases where someone misreads the haze settling over the horizon, like..."
"That's certainly possible."
"Oh, right, exactly!"
The problem was that in this world, even such phenomena could become monsters. Legends of exactly that kind existed, too. The most famous might be the phantoms of the Brocken in Germany—or the phantom island illusion from Arthurian legend, the mirage of the wicked enchantress Morgan, the Fata Morgana.
Since ancient times, people had looked upon strange natural phenomena and imagined eerie legends, witches, and spirits. And then—either, as some scholars argue, monsters truly existed in the past, or monsters simply emerge wearing the skin of legend. Either way, monsters tend to be bound to the legends that birthed them.
The giants of the north, weak to lightning, can be felled with electrical abilities. Monsters that take the form of demons can be driven off by reciting the Lord's Prayer.
This case was no different. If I were certain it was a mere mirage, fine—but it might well be a monster born from the mirage itself. The word "mirage" (shinkirou) originally derives from a monster in ancient Chinese legend, after all.
This request followed the same pattern. To put it bluntly, similar cases had already happened. The truth was, this wasn't the first time this request had been commissioned—reports of it had apparently been coming in steadily from the South Sea area for months. Naturally, Seoa wasn't the first hunter the Association had dispatched either.
However—despite sending hunters out again and again, the tangible results were zero. As a result, the Association had formally declared its position that this, too, was just a mirage.
But the locals disagreed. People who had lived their whole lives touching the sea murmured and grumbled that they had never once, not a single time, seen a mirage form the way these reports described.
Eventually, the Association raised both hands in the face of local resistance, and afterwards dispatched an A-rank hunter to avoid being held responsible should anything happen—only for that very A-rank hunter to vanish.
Well, a hunter going missing isn't all that rare, honestly. Even more so for Association-affiliated hunters. Though the Great Invasion had ended, gates still remained scattered across the land under Association management.
They call it a job practically indistinguishable from routine labor, but the opponent is a gate. Following safety protocols doesn't mean you can simply relax. No—if anything, precisely because it's a hunt that feels like routine labor, it might be worse.
It's always the same: the ones who cause safety accidents are never clueless beginners. It's the seasoned veterans who let their guard down, convinced they'll be fine, convinced the job is second nature, who usually become the victims of these accidents.
So my own guess was that the man had been ambushed by a monster that slipped out from somewhere. Either way, missing was missing, and naturally, the Association went on alert. The locals, for their part, were spooked enough at the disappearance of an A-rank hunter. The result: this long-stagnant case had landed in Seoa's lap.
Certainly, solving a mystery that had claimed even an A-rank wasn't a bad way to mark an A+ rank hunter's return. It was a choice that would satisfy the locals, too.
"So, our objective is to identify the anomaly occurring across the South Sea region. Got it?"
"If it truly is nothing but a mirage, then nothing matters and all's well."
"But."
"If it turns out to be a monster?"
"Then of course, we slay it."
At those words, the kids all nodded with rather serious faces.
Good grief.
A snort of laughter escaped me. Honestly—how did I end up out here playing babysitter? No, well, it's good practical training, I suppose.
"If we finish early, we'll hit the beach. Understood?"
"OOOOOHHHH!!"
"Bonuses and time off really are the best for morale~"
Apparently they'd all been idle the entire break. Even the dismantling shop Yoonha was indebted to was the same—I heard they'd gone on a full long-term closure. Well, it made sense. A dismantling shop's customers are hunters, first and foremost, and in today's society, if a hunter was going to die, they'd already be dead—money wasn't the issue. With tourist spots in the middle of peak season, business simply couldn't be good. My side, where all you have to do is kill monsters in season and out, is the weird case.
"Alright, let's get our things settled first. I've booked rooms under my name, so everyone wait in your rooms."
"Yes, sir!"
"The adults will stop by the Association branch first. We need to hear the full briefing. Fine by you?"
Seoa nodded at my words with a somewhat sour look. Naturally, not because she wanted to go rest in her room.
"I'm fine, but is she going to be okay?"
Saying that, Seoa pointed to a corner of the parking lot. Standing there was the goddess who hadn't managed a single proper word this entire ride.
"Uuorgh."
Was it because I'd forced her to dampen her power just to ride in the same vehicle? Or was it simply her nature? The goddess's avatar, radiating barely more mana than an E-rank monster or below, was currently suffering through a spectacular bout of motion sickness.
This is a disaster, an absolute one.
And so it was settled: Tiamat would be joining the students' group. Considering her true identity, that was probably wiser than carelessly showing her face at the Association—but I still couldn't shake the deflated feeling I'd had from the very start.