The Monster That Weeps
In the ruined laboratory stood a woman who looked every inch the hunter. By anyone else's standards, her looks would have earned nothing but lavish praise — sky-blue eyes like a cloudless sky, luminous gray hair, and a crisp, impeccably tailored suit, the whole of it coming together like something out of a painting.
And yet not a soul on earth would have dared strike up a conversation with her just then. Not with the mountains of monster corpses heaped around her, the longsword drenched to the hilt in their blood, and an expression that looked ready to tear a man apart on the spot.
"Fuck. So what you're telling me is that one of the monsters got out?"
"Y-yes, ma'am... it's just... the barrier doesn't seem to have taken effect on that one monster..."
"And you're telling me this now? Fine... sure, a barrier malfunction happens. Then how does a monster that size come tearing out of there without a single person noticing?!"
Whether any of that showed on her face was anyone's guess, but Lee Yoon-seol — Guildmaster of the Gwangmyeong Guild and an S-Rank hunter — was, at that moment, working very hard to keep her temper on a leash.
An official directive from the Association had confirmed that human experiments were being forcibly carried out in that laboratory, and she had stormed the place in a rescue operation. What she had found inside, however, were corpses that looked as if monster and human had been grotesquely spliced together — along with monsters ranging from C-Rank at the low end all the way up to A-Rank.
Search as she might, no survivors turned up — nothing but shattered test tubes and the traces of a single monster that had slipped away. Concluding that everyone inside must already be dead, she had spent the better part of two hours carving her way through the rest of them, and finally judging the job done, she'd been on the verge of heading home, mentally running through the work waiting for her back at the guild.
Phew... finally over. First thing I'm doing when I get back is a wash...
She was just preparing to head back when a guild member came sprinting from the distance with the report: one of the monsters had escaped.
Ah, fuck. Even thinking about it again pissed her off.
Escaped was escaped, though. She had to track the thing down, and fast.
"Pull the CCTV footage and find out where it bolted. Now."
"That's the thing, ma'am..."
"Haah. Now what?"
"The monster appears to be intelligent. It slipped past every camera with almost artful timing — we couldn't even get a clear look at what it actually is."
"Ugh, this is so fucking frustrating. So what, we can't find it?"
"All the cameras caught was one of its arms. The one piece of luck is that the footage shows it entering a building in a residential district."
When a monster drew near, electronic devices went on the fritz — which was why CCTV systems were built around mana circuits. But mana-circuit hardware cost a small fortune, so ordinary households made do with electric door locks. As a result, monsters breaking into people's homes was an almost routine occurrence.
Which meant that whoever was inside that building was already dead.
"I'll handle this one myself. A few of you, come with me and stake out the area near the scene. The rest of you head back to the guild and get started on your disciplinary reports."
"Y-yes, ma'am..."
For one thing, any monster with the wits to dodge CCTV — and the strength to push through a barrier rated to stop lower-tier A-Ranks — had to be at least a mid-tier A-Rank, if not higher.
Which meant that anyone besides her would only be in the way.
She was a hunter who had awakened to the S-Rank class — the Sword Saint. The Sword Saint was ill-suited to fighting off crowds, but pit it against a single opponent and its prowess swelled to utterly overwhelming heights.
Which meant that in a one-on-one duel, I — the Sword Saint — held every advantage.
Scrub, scrub, scrub.
Hm? What am I doing right now, you ask?
Right now, I am washing my underwear and my pants.
As for why... well, I have my pride too, so I won't be sharing that particular detail.
But once the washing was done and I stepped back out, a problem presented itself. My old body had been male — and a fairly well-built male at that. There was no way those clothes were fitting my current, far slighter frame.
"Something that big does NOT fit! (Because the clothes just slide right off, that's why!)"
Aside from what I'd been wearing when I came to, there was nothing in this house I could actually put on. Fortunately, my top hadn't gotten wet, so it had needed no washing — but the bottoms had just come out of the rinse, still soaked through, and were unwearable.
That's right — as of this moment, I was a trailblazing pioneer of the "missing bottoms" look!
It wasn't as if I needed pants indoors, granted, but bare from the waist down just felt too indecent. A-and besides, the top wasn't exactly covered underneath, either...
I only realized after getting home that I had no underwear up top, either. I mean, if you're going to dress me, at least give me a full set!
Still, it seemed better than nothing, so I'd thrown on a pair of baggy pants — and with nothing underneath, I was so conscious of them that every brush of fabric felt impossibly noticeable.
So there I was, sitting leaned against the living room wall, debating whether I ought to buy some clothes — and then it hit me.
Oh, right. I'm broke.
Hic, hic... This is exactly why being poor makes life so bitter you could cry!
Not that I could exactly go out and earn any. My body had changed, and I currently had no legal identity to speak of — so finding a job was a pipe dream.
Sure, someone might pipe up here: "Why not just sell the house and move into an apartment?" But the house sat on the ragged outskirts of town, so it likely wouldn't fetch anything close to its proper price anyway. And honestly... I couldn't bring myself to sell the place that held all my memories of Mom and Dad.
And just as I was wondering whether some money-showering angel might descend from the heavens—
Physical Enhancement
Shff!
A slicing sound — one I somehow felt I'd heard somewhere before — split the air, and in the same instant a familiar gray-haired figure came hurtling at me like a bullet.
Physical Enhancement let me read it in time. I wrenched my head aside, the blade grazed me by a hair, and the sword that had failed to skewer my skull buried itself in the wall instead.
And when I raised my eyes from that wall, there she was — the hunter with the sky-blue eyes I'd last seen in that laboratory, staring straight at me.
The world bled red at the edges.
It was better than last time, but my heart — already hammering — took off like it meant to burst straight through my ribs, and the strength drained out of my legs.
Psssshhhh...
From below came the sound of running water. From my eyes, tears began to pour as well.
And then—
"Huwaaaahhh!"
"...Huh?"
I burst into tears, and the hunter's flustered sputtering filled the room — though, to be fair, most of that noise was my wailing.
It was summer.
There, before Yoon-seol's eyes, stood a crying little girl.
Hair like her own, only a shade brighter; a dainty, finely drawn face; and a small, endearing frame to boot — a child so cute that anyone who laid eyes on her could only think one word: adorable.
But that impression lasted all of a moment, because the first thing Yoon-seol did was look — yet again, though she'd already looked any number of times — at the girl's arm. Attached to that tiny body, natural as anything, hung a massive monster's arm: so grotesquely out of place on a child that cute that "grotesque" barely covered it.
And then there were those eyes. One black. One red.
Plenty of hunters carried every color of iris imaginable, but in all her years Yoon-seol had almost never seen red among them. Red eyes, fine — she could accept red eyes. But heterochromia, with a pupil all but identical to a monster's?
No matter how she turned it over, something was deeply wrong with the picture.
Granted, there were documented cases of awakened hunters manifesting animal body parts. But this girl was something else entirely — the distinctive aura of a monster was rolling off her, plain as day. A monster's aura was one thing no human could ever produce.
Then what, exactly, was this child?
Truthfully, the answer had been sitting in front of her from the very beginning.
To have something so horrific done to her at such a tender age...
There was no doubt about it: this child had escaped from that laboratory.
Yoon-seol wrestled with what on earth she was supposed to do with her.
What snapped her out of that spiral was a jolt of shock that seemed, by her standards, surprisingly small. When she came back to herself, the girl — still trembling, though her sobs had all but run dry — was glaring up at her with everything she had.
And what the child said, in a quavering voice, was this:
"G-give back my parents' mementos, you demon!"
It was more than enough to bring Yoon-seol's thought process to a complete, grinding halt.