The Indomitable Hunter
"I'm no good at fighting while protecting other people. More than that — I've never once managed to pull it off properly."
Following behind Park Woochan, Lee Yeeun turned the words she had just heard over in her mind. He had mentioned it so casually that she had nearly nodded along before she caught herself. There was no way he could truly be indifferent to it. She pictured him again, speaking as though it were nothing more than a passing remark.
...Just how many partings had he tasted, and how much sorrow had he swallowed? How many tragedies had he lived through, that he could speak of giving things up so naturally?
Only now, at last, could Lee Yeeun grasp it in the truest sense. The back walking ahead of her belonged to no mere acquaintance of her brother's. He was a retired hunter who had come through two Great Cataclysms and grown accustomed to loss; a hunter who took it for granted that his wounds should never show — so thoroughly that a person might carelessly wonder whether nothing had ever happened to him at all. Park Woochan was a comrade-in-arms of Lee Joongoo, the man the world called a hero.
"I don't want you to turn out like me."
She remembered that her brother had once said those words to her — and it wasn't even a distant memory. Just recently, when she had come home during the practical training period, Lee Joongoo had said exactly that. And in the same level voice, he had explained why he hoped she would never imitate his technique: the true nature of his signature move, and the risks it carried. How poorly its properties meshed with her own ability. And then—
"You already know it too, don't you?"
Even the thing that had happened to her when she was a child. Yes — Lee Yeeun knew it all now. Back when she and her brother were still living in different houses — an orphanage, or had it been a relative's home? — she had been left alone in a place like a library. A monster had come lunging for her. And last of all, the back of a boy hunter who cut that monster down with a single stroke. She knew. An experience so similar had pried the memory loose from where it lay buried at the base of her brain.
...Of course, her admiration for her brother had never been simply because he had saved her. And yet — the hunter she had wanted to become was not Lee Joongoo. It was Park Woochan.
At first, there had been nothing but confusion. After all, a truth she had believed for years was being denied root and branch. How long had her brother waited, she wondered, to make her accept it? She could see him as he'd been when she was small — shaking his head when she told him he must have been glad to have saved her. No doubt she had burst into tears back then, unable to bear the sight of her brother wearing that sorrowful smile. So she really had been an absurdly stubborn child from the very beginning. No wonder he had never been able to tell her the truth. It was almost embarrassing.
It was the same with why she had given up on the ability she had clung to so stubbornly. It wasn't that his explanation had convinced her, or that Park Woochan had talked her around. She had simply been too embarrassed to look Park Woochan in the face. And as it happened, with every passing day it grew clearer that the technique she had always used simply didn't suit her body.
And so, one day, as time quietly slipped past, another chance came to Lee Yeeun as well — the club period that had begun rather abruptly. There, she had chosen Park Woochan's class over every other subject. Why, she couldn't have said even to herself. There had been a bona fide celebrity right in front of her, no less — Hunter Shin Seoa. She didn't know. Perhaps it had been nothing more than contrariness, a flare of defiance at being told out of nowhere that the technique that suited her was some other one entirely.
Two things had taken her by surprise. One was that Park Woochan's club lessons proved more useful than she had imagined; the other was the faces that gathered for them. Apparently, without ever realizing it himself, Park Woochan had extended a helping hand to any number of students. Half of her thought, well, of course. The other half found it a little absurd. Honestly, it had flustered her too. And why, she wondered, had that fact stirred such a strange restlessness in her chest?
Watching Park Woochan resolve the affair entangling Hunter Shin Seoa, Lee Yeeun found herself thinking it once more. Certainly — seen that way, he was a man you could respect. And at the same time, she understood.
"The one you want to be like isn't me — is it."
How many years had he practiced, just to say that one line? She pictured her brother adding those words with a naturalness he had never managed at any other time. Yes. What she had wanted to resemble was never the technique. Her brother. Or Park Woochan, whom she had mistaken for him. What Lee Yeeun had wanted to emulate was that heart: someone who could set others at ease. Someone who could give people back their smiles. Someone who, like a hero out of a fairy tale, you could simply watch and feel safe. Just as she had felt once upon a time, Lee Yeeun wanted to become that kind of person for others as well.
But. Now she knew. What her brother had truly been thinking when he said those words. And — if he didn't want her to be like him, then who he had hoped she would be like instead.
Lee Yeeun could see it now. There was no conveniently timed villain, and no guaranteed reward for clearing the stage. The world went on without end long after the grandest ending credits had rolled, and there was no great Demon King whose defeat would settle everything. And so there was no invincible hero, either — no hero who never met failure, whatever came.
Instead. To fight. To protect. Someone who could see people off to their deaths without despairing over it for all eternity; someone who cursed their own weakness and still never knelt. Someone who was not fine at all, yet never once let it show. Someone who ground their molars down until their gums bled and still said they were fine. Someone who had truly, genuinely grown used to it — and who, even so, was still reaching out a hand to save someone.
...In this world, there was no such thing as an invincible hero.
And just the same, Lee Yeeun no longer admired an invincible hero. Like that hunter who had once saved a girl left crying all alone and vanished without a single word — someone who, even staring at the laments overflowing the world, still fought for the sake of people's smiles. She wanted to become an indomitable hunter.
What's with her all of a sudden?
Yeeun, who had been spilling out one story after another until only moments ago, had abruptly gone quiet. The way she had snapped her mouth shut made it look as though something had her deep in thought. Well, that suited me fine. Careful not to prod at anything unnecessarily, I quietly quickened my pace.
There wasn't so much as a rustle from behind me — there never had been. Half a year since the Academy opened its doors. Half a year was only half a year, sure, but it had been enough to hammer at least the bare fundamentals into them. Even walking across grass, at this point there was no chance of them leaving a trail. I stole another glance back. Sure enough, Yeeun wasn't making a sound either. She was even choosing her footing so that the grass she pressed down sprang back to its original shape before long.
Originally, I had been planning to show her, from this point on, how exactly to go about tracking a monster... Maybe I'll just leave her to it for a bit.
You could almost mistake them for veterans, watching them move, but these little brats were, first and last, on their maiden sortie. They may have fought monsters before, but most of those had probably been things that happened to spill out of gates. A real hunt — the kind where everything, from start to finish, has to be prepared at your own expense. What's more, actually tracking something down was likely a first for them. Right now things were fine because I held the initiative and was deliberately making a big flashy show of it, but if one of them snapped out of the daze at the wrong moment, they might just as easily blunder into a mistake instead.
This was a headline-worthy catastrophe — an entire branch delivered into a monster's hands. Honestly, part of me felt like I'd been dealt a losing hand. If I'd known it would come to this, I never would have brought the kids. But what could I do? The water had been spilled long ago. All that was left to me was to close this incident out as swiftly as possible.
And so, here we were, in the mountains. Not exactly prime territory for investigating a mirage phenomenon. Granted, mirages that bloom in the mountains — like the Brocken spectre — aren't unheard of. But according to the Association's report, the locals unanimously pointed to the sea as the place the mirages appeared. The odds of the mirage's source lying in the mountains seemed low. Then again, judging by the sorry state of the Namhae Branch, I'd best not get my hopes up that the report was worth the paper it was written on.
Still. Something about it just doesn't sit right~ That was the feeling I had. The problem was the mana of charm that had been eating away at the Namhae Branch. I knew the lore as well as anyone. Mermaid legends from every corner of the world — voices that bewitched sailors, the sirens of the West foremost among them. But every legend has some underlying phenomenon at its root. Take the mermaid legend I'd just been thinking of. Chase down the biological motif and you arrive at the dugong and its kin — probably grounded in aquatic creatures nursing their young at the water's surface. But that wasn't the essential motif.
Half-human, half-fish beings who lure sailors in with beautiful faces and beautiful song, then drag them down into the sea. The mermaid legend is a symbol of the sea's beauty. The sea, so lovely on the surface. The men who fell for its pull, put out onto the water, and never came home. The lore of mermaids was born from precisely those drowned men. In other words—
Something doesn't add up.
Say a mermaid had somehow seized the Namhae Branch, worst case. Then what should have greeted us wasn't a charm-struck Namhae Branch — it was the corpses of the branch's staff. That is how a mermaid's charm works. It is, first and last, a means of killing people. A different beast entirely from the methods of dream demons and their ilk, which drain a person's vitality while they live.
And there was another problem besides: the Namhae Branch was a building raised on dry land. No, I'm quite serious. Because a so-called mermaid is, in the end, half human and half beast — a creature closer in kind to a centaur or a minotaur, if you like. Which is to say, half of it had better be fish. And humanity, as it happened, was a species that could feel charm toward a mermaid — human above the waist, fish below — but nothing but revulsion toward a fish-man with a fish's head. In a word, it meant mermaids had no means of approaching the Namhae Branch at all. According to one of the most famous fairy-tale writers the world has ever produced, it is no simple feat for a mermaid to come ashore. "Ahem. My sincerest thanks, Andersen..."
So I tried turning the thing on its head. Strip it all the way down — what if the mirage was nothing but a decoy? What if the real problem wasn't the sea at all, but the Namhae Branch built on land? Not that the mirage might not hold something too — I had, after all, been sent to look into it — but right now, what needed investigating was the area around the Association branch. Partly, admittedly, because on a more fundamental level I had no means of investigating the sea. Ability or no ability, the ocean is simply too vast. For a proper survey we'd need a boat.
So the first thing I did was analyze the whole stretch of land around the Namhae Branch. First, I struck anywhere suspiciously close to the branch. Sloppy as they were, there was no chance the hunters attached to the Namhae Branch had failed to notice a monster nesting that near. Conversely, anywhere suspiciously far was out as well. By the time I reached the branch, every last person inside was already charmed. It was called an Association branch, but there was no way the patrol radii of everyone assigned to it all overlapped. In other words, the odds were that a monster which had gotten its hands on the Namhae Branch would instead have had to fall upon the Association's people wherever they stood — unless, over these past six months, it had gone around personally casting its charm on each and every member of the branch staff. Naturally, considering the time that would take, that was effectively impossible.
Which left two possibilities. One: a heavyweight capable of taking the Namhae Branch single-handedly. Two: a swarm numerous enough to outnumber the branch's entire personnel. A large monster, or a colony of considerable size. Either way, it would necessarily be burning through serious resources. I excluded every area that couldn't sustain such an appetite. On top of that, considering the incident had been disrupting things for over half a year, I gave priority to routes that saw little human traffic. Factor in the positions of the nearby gates, and roughly three candidate sites remained.
And then. A small rustle reached my ears. My senses, whetted to their absolute limit, began running wild all on their own. Looked like I'd drawn the winning ticket on the very first try.
"Hyaak?!"
Still thinking exactly that, I jabbed Yeeun in the side, and she let out that sound. A rather cute noise, all things considered — not quite befitting her image. But this was no time to be trading jokes. And in fact, it truly wasn't. Because the very next moment, beyond the rustling brush, a pack of foxes came charging through.