The Trouble with Fox Demons
Fox demons.
Legends of the so-called fox-type monsters are found far and wide across the three great nations of East Asia. The fox demons of China are defined, above all, by a sheer diversity of legends built upon their broad range of habitats. Those of Japan, meanwhile, could be said to possess a taxonomy far more systematic than one would ever expect.
And what of Korea's fox demons?
Their defining trait, without question, was that they were worshipped as objects of faith. Right up into the pre-modern era, after all, a scattering of regions still served the fox as a living god. Not a fox merely called divine within folktales, but a real, breathing fox cult.
Because of that, Korea's fox legends wore a markedly different face from those of its neighbors. In China and Japan, the fox was seen as a divine messenger at best and a sinister monster at worst. Korea's fox demons, by contrast, tended toward the human-friendly: they wanted to become human, and if anything they strove to melt into human society.
...And that, originally, was where the story should have ended.
The trouble began after the Great Invasion. What had been nothing more than a cultural difference between three nations started squeezing the government by the throat. In short—
The monsters built upon Korea's fox legends were vicious to the point of revulsion.
As I've said before, a monster passing itself off as human is harder to pull off than anyone imagines. An entirely different species. An entirely different way of thinking. It has to bridge that gulf and play at being human anyway. For starters, there aren't many species out there intelligent enough to even comprehend human society. Pile on top of that the magical ability to take human form, and—unless a species or individual was born specialized for transformation—the only ones who check both boxes are, quite literally, dragons. And considering that even dragons are hampered by their trademark lofty pride, it's no exaggeration to call the practical count zero.
But these goddamn fox bastards were different. They were precisely that vanishingly rare exception. The magical ability to take human shape. The intelligence to grasp human culture. And on top of it all, a burning zeal to become human. As it happened, Korea's fox demons were, by pure coincidence, the perfect species for disguising themselves as people.
Of course, fox demons weren't transformation specialists the way doppelgangers were. In practice, most of them—unlike doppelgangers—were fated to have their disguises seen through in the end. But this time, that was exactly the problem. In other words: a monster whose transformation skill ranked just beneath a doppelganger's also came armed with combat power. At that point, having a slightly leakier disguise than a doppelganger stopped being a weakness and became a weapon instead.
And so, spewing curses at the fox pack that came swarming out of nowhere was, frankly, beyond my control.
"Fuck's sake."
Granted, I'd seen some of it coming. Charm, after all, is not a particularly efficient ability in combat. Say a succubus pops up right in front of you mid-battle—which comes out first, the blade or the lust? However potent the Authority of Charm might be, very few people surrender their lives for the sake of lust. History agrees: didn't even China's realm-toppling beauties fall helpless before spear and blade the moment their kingdoms crumbled? Jihee, who honed her hand-to-hand combat as her core strength and wields Charm strictly as a way to pry open gaps, is the genuinely rare case.
Which meant the situation we'd walked into at the Namhae Branch felt off no matter how you sliced it. For one thing, there was the branch's sheer size. Given its mandate to manage every gate in the Namhae region, it ranked among the very largest of all the branches by raw scale alone. And a Charm powerful enough to swallow a facility that size whole? Even thinking simply, several conditions had to be met. A surprise attack, for instance—charming every single member of the Namhae Branch while they were completely off their guard, before any standoff or battle could even begin. Which meant the monsters behind this incident had to possess some ability capable of lulling hunters into complacency. So the moment I laid eyes on the carnage at the Namhae Branch, I figured the odds were nine out of ten that a monster capable of mimicking humans was involved.
If a single powerful individual had charmed the entire branch, at least one person would have failed to show up for work that day. Conversely, if a horde of monsters had attempted a frontal charm assault, it would have been all but impossible unless every last one of them outclassed the branch's hunters.
The problem was that even with my prediction mostly on target, these revolting furballs were anything but pushovers.
D-Rank monster: the fox demon. Quite literally, a fox-shaped creature stuffed to bursting with mana. And yet, as luck would have it, its appearance made it impossible to mistake for any actual fox. Nobody on this earth was going to look at a monstrosity standing nearly three meters tall and think fox.
Monstrosities like that came charging at us, maws stretched wide. Where in the world had they been hiding bodies that size? The fact that no local had ever spotted them was, if anything, the more astonishing part. Of course, easy for me to say—in practice, neither Yeeun nor I breathed a word. Apparently they'd had some fox-specific illusion art running, or something to that effect. Either way, that sort of thing could wait until after I'd shredded every last one of them.
I'd already read the ambush. Fox demon this, fox demon that—at the end of the day, a monster's a monster. And none of them escape my ability. My greatsword, swung level at the onrushing fox, blazed through the air. A monstrous fox of impossible bulk versus a single human man. Going by size alone, a hopelessly one-sided matchup—but the result said otherwise. The blade aura I loosed split the fox's gaping maw clean in two. From snout to tail, bisected along a straight line, the fox demon dropped. I batted away the scattering spray of blood with precisely controlled mana. A process I knew all too well by now.
The problem was—
WUAAAAK!! KRAAAAAK!!
"Teacher?!"
—the smell of the foxes' blood.
Legend has it that fox demon blood carries effects close to a potent stimulant. The same held true for the monsters that turned up wearing a fox demon's hide—it was the work of the Charm mana carried in that blood. And the blood of the fox demons I cut down—or, to be precise, the mana inside it—began to vaporize the instant it touched open air. Naturally, I had no choice but to smell it. Of course, the Charm of a mere D-Rank fox demon had no power over me. It simply smelled vile. So with every fox demon I cut down, I only felt worse—the exact opposite of how killing usually left me feeling, and it flustered me more than I care to admit.
F-fuck...!!
I should've paid attention in middle school biology!! If I had, could I have filtered the stench of fox blood out at the olfactory-cell level? Along with the pointless thought, my trembling hands fumbled through my coat.
Gas mask, gas mask!!
For all these reasons, fox demons weren't opponents I was particularly fond of either. Killing them wasn't difficult. They just made me feel like garbage. A gas mask would have settled that, but there was also the cost-efficiency to consider—frankly, they ranked below mixed-bloods. I'd honestly have felt more at ease staking the nation's fate on a single-round showdown with an S-Rank monster than facing down a hundred fox demons.
Fuck, we're at the coast—what the hell are fox demons doing here...!!
That was exactly how it felt right now. My fingers were shaking so badly I couldn't get a grip on the mask inside my coat. And the fox demons lunged at me all the same. D-Rank or not, they were more than enough to open the throat of a hunter who couldn't even wield his own mana properly. So for the moment, I had no choice but to fight back. Except—
"Teacher!!"
Once more, a voice cried out my name. In the same breath, the fox hurtling toward me was shredded to ribbons. It came with a roar that was less blood-curdling than magnificent, as the fox demon lunging before my eyes was quite literally torn apart.
GWAAAAK!! GYAAAAK!!
"A-are you hurt anywhere?!"
Thanks to her I was unharmed—but my mind was already past its limit. If anything, it felt worse than the fox demon that had just been reduced to rags. Fuck, what bastard is inflicting this trial on me? Was it that Tiamat bitch? I glared up at the sky as I grumbled. Park Woochan, a man among men, was having the first day since becoming a hunter that he'd wanted to cry.
But then. Tap—a light footstep. Whether she'd taken my wailing in some other sense entirely, my view filled up with brilliant lemon-colored hair.
"...It's all right. Don't worry."
The same words as our exchange moments ago, yet meaning something else entirely. Yeeun's back, as she said it, looked remarkably dependable. The problem was that she, too, probably had no idea why I was in this state. That she said it anyway was genuinely endearing, but it did precious little to resolve the situation I was actually in—because the very next moment, Yeeun's telekinesis, unleashed at full power, ground the fox demon pack to pieces.
TCHYAAAH!! MMAAAH!!
Naturally, the mana released by the freshly shredded fox demons only drove me that much crazier. But she didn't stop. With my mana sensitivity, I could see it all too clearly: the blades of her telekinesis honing themselves even sharper in time with my screams.
A whip of mana. That was the only way to describe the waves of telekinesis wreathing Yeeun's body. Vmmm—the air trembled. The sound of surging telekinesis churning the atmosphere was vivid enough to raise goosebumps. To an outside eye, it might have looked like a scene where the monsters ringing one fragile girl would shortly begin a bloody slaughter. The reality was the exact opposite. This entire area was dominated by the staggering volume of telekinesis Yeeun was pouring out—and the same went for why the fox demons were faltering.
...Moments ago, Yeeun had said as much. That perhaps the one helping least right now might be herself. To give my honest assessment, that was nothing more than a bout of self-doubt—a suspicion born of how often her grades had been caught up to as of late. Yeeun's worry amounted to, frankly, exactly that much and nothing more. All the more so when you remember that the two who'd stood out most on the final exams we'd sat not long ago were Jung Pilyeon and Lee Yeeun. And watching Yeeun fight now, even the strictest of teachers could only hand down the same verdict.
Telekinesis flowed faintly over her skin. Unlike before, she wasn't cycling it within. Her body couldn't keep pace with her own telekinesis, and I'd judged that circulating it would only burden her. Instead, she put the far more solidly layered armor of telekinesis to work as her offense. In other words, she wasn't releasing telekinesis at all. The armor of telekinesis—and its extremities. The layer sheathed over her fingertips stretched out long and cracked like a whip. That was Yeeun's new technique: Telekinetic Armor. A style that unified what had once had to be split in two—the armor cloaking her body and her attacks. Quite literally, offense and defense fused into a single ability. Granted, it had its flaws: the trajectories were easy to read, and each strike carried a delay before it landed. Even so, against D-Rank monsters it was more than enough.
Natural talent. On top of that, the fine control she'd honed by running two or more streams of telekinesis at once. And the delicacy that came from focusing all of it into a single point. If I had to compare it, it was like a storm. The telekinetic whip that had diced one fox demon chased down its next target without a hint of fatigue. Monstrous efficiency—rather than burning mana on every attack, she swung telekinesis whose form was already built. Thanks to that, the total volume Yeeun had exerted so far could by no stretch be dismissed as the output of a mere student. Her raw ability had always been on par with an active-duty C-Rank hunter. Now that she'd adopted a technique worthy of it, she might well be capable of hunting a B-Rank monster solo.
A lunging fox demon split in two. A snarling one ground away until not even its hide remained recognizable. A tail-wagging one pulped like dough. One with its bones twisting. One wrung askew like a dried rag. And then, over that mountain of corpses, a fox demon finally closed the distance, claws extended.
KRA-CHAK!!
Enormous mass. Even braced by telekinesis, Yeeun's body slid backward. Blood welled from her arm in a burst. Even so, all Yeeun did was furrow her brow slightly. And the next moment—
KYEEEEAAK!!
A fox demon's shriek tore out. The telekinetic armor that had just clashed with it had changed shape in an instant. Plain telekinesis alone couldn't turn back a monster's assault. She had quit wielding her close-combat technique on my advice, yet the unreasonable demand of martial skill remained—and Yeeun covered the gap with her own exceptional instincts. Telekinesis packed dense as thorns bored in beneath the claws of the fox it met. Then, transformation—awls. Or, like a hedgehog, she manipulated in an instant the mana that had bored into the fox demon's body. The needles of telekinesis that erupted through the fox's inner mana hollowed out its brain. Claws pried loose. Hide peeled away. Bones stripped, flesh carved free. And so the fox demon that had lunged at her was undone by the spearhead of mana surging up from within its own body, reduced to rags—its entire form, organs included, torn out from the inside. Far too cruel a price for a single strike at Yeeun.
But it hadn't been a wasted move—because three fox demons, aiming for that very opening, came lunging at Yeeun once more. She'd shown an instant's gap while dealing with the one that had closed in. She'd devised her own countermeasures, but that couldn't resolve the fundamental problem she carried—namely, judgment at close-combat range. That wasn't a domain instinct alone could cover. What she needed was effort to shore it up, and enough time.
An opening pried open only after sacrificing kin after kin. The near-simultaneous leaps of the closing fox demons did, in truth, differ by hair-thin margins. The moment she moved to answer even one, the other two sets of claws would tear her body apart in the same breath. A trap worthy of a fox, truly—and I couldn't even be sure Yeeun had noticed it. Unfortunately for them, they'd picked the wrong opponent. Tricks like that only work on a foe of matching caliber. They may have thought they were cleverly managing the spacing by minutely staggering their timing, but against someone who could swing a blade hundreds of times within a single instant, all it did was offer up an opening in return. The next moment, the leaping foxes were slammed into the ground—at some point I'd snared their forelegs in chains, and I hauled them straight down.
KWA-CRUNCH!!
The fox demons' heads, smashed against the earth, shattered under my strength. Just as before, charm mana seeped faintly from the wreckage. I couldn't have cared less now. Thanks to the time Yeeun had bought me, the gas mask was already on. It was a custom-built piece, made from the ground up to filter out poison gas composed of mana. Naturally, not a whiff of the fox demons' stench reached me. Not that its makers had ever imagined this particular use, mind you.
"My thanks, Yeeun. Those fox demons' mana was getting on my last nerve anyway. Now is the time for the Butcher Park Woochan to make his return!!"
"Oh, it's nothing! That was a thank-you, right?!"
"Verily."
Geez, is it just kids these days? To think she wouldn't know a classic masterpiece like that.
Her baffled reaction had me scratching the back of my head—but only for a moment—before I slowly raised my sword. Fox demon or not, they were D-Rank monsters in the end. Things might have been different without the gas mask, but right now they were hardly any trouble at all. In fact, from that point on, it took a mere ten-odd minutes to finish clearing out the fox demon pack that had appeared out of nowhere and surrounded us.