The Inefficiency of a Cassette Player
Min-jeong scowled as she slung her blood-caked hammer over her shoulder. "Inefficient? What the hell do you mean by that?"
Even though Mina knew she was a B-grade hunter, the sight still left her feeling completely overwhelmed. It reminded her of the scary older girls she'd occasionally glimpsed smoking in alleyways as a child. She remembered those days of deliberately holding her breath and quieting her footsteps whenever she passed by them.
'Ugh! Of all the stupid mistakes to make!'
She mentally kicked herself, scolding her own carelessness. Under normal circumstances she would have been more cautious, but maybe the string of unfamiliar situations had thrown her off. She'd blurted out whatever came to mind without even considering lowering her voice or keeping her thoughts to herself.
The other hunters who had been fighting the Frenzy Bisons alongside Min-jeong were also shooting her sharp, disapproving glares. As Mina struggled to find the right words, Captain Jeong seemed to sense the strange atmosphere and started walking over. But—
"Huh?"
Before he could reach them, Mina felt a sudden weight settle on top of her head. She looked up to find Seok-jun's hand resting there. A strangely calming feeling washed over her as she gazed up at him. He spoke.
"In times like this, it's better to show them directly. Prove that you're someone qualified to say those kinds of things."
Mina blinked at his words.
"You're right."
It was an unfamiliar situation, but her job hadn't fundamentally changed, had it?
"Could everyone please step back for a moment? I'd like to handle the monsters by myself."
The hunters' eyes widened as they stared at her.
"What? No matter how you look at it, that's—!"
"Everyone, clear the area."
As the hunters buzzed with shock, Min-jeong shouted in surprise, but Captain Jeong spoke up first to calm them down.
"Wait, Captain Jeong! You actually think that makes sense?"
"You'll understand once you watch."
"That's the same as saying we'll just stand here and watch her die!"
"It's because she's more than capable."
Min-jeong kept trying to argue, but when Captain Jeong responded with firm conviction, she finally shut her mouth.
And so Mina found herself standing alone with Seok-jun in the wide open space in front of the ruined village.
"The people here seem to listen to the soldiers pretty well, huh?" Mina remarked, surprised by how readily the hunters had followed Captain Jeong's orders without much complaint.
"When the person most concerned with safety says something like that, they figure there must be a reason."
"Still, it's pretty amazing."
The hunters Mina knew—even B-grade ones—tended to look down on soldiers, dismissing them as people who couldn't even handle monsters or calling them nothing more than unawakened civilians.
"Mr. Seok-jun, how many Frenzy Bisons can you lure at once?"
"If you want, I could bring all of them."
"Even so, that seems like too many... Ten should be enough."
Now that she was an A-grade hunter, it probably wouldn't be impossible, but she thought it would be better to fight with some breathing room.
"Ten, huh."
When she made the request, he walked over to his motorcycle, opened the seat compartment, and pulled out what looked like a speaker.
"What's that?"
Mina asked, wondering if it was some kind of special equipment she didn't know about.
"It's a cassette player."
"...Excuse me?"
Her mind went completely blank for a moment at his answer, but as she calmly searched her memory for the term, she realized she had seen one before. The problem was that it had been back when she was in elementary school.
While she was thinking, Seok-jun attached the cassette player to the front of his motorcycle.
"Does it have some kind of special effect?"
She couldn't understand why he would use something like that now, so she asked just in case.
"There's nothing more useful than sound when it comes to drawing monsters in, is there?"
At the same time, he pressed the play button, and music began to echo across the plains.
"That—that idiot!"
"Oh my god."
"Pfft! Isn't that the one?"
The sound naturally carried all the way to the hunters hiding and watching from the ruined village, and their voices drifted over. But what caught her attention more was the identity of the song blasting from the speaker.
"This song is..."
The early electronic-style tune that seemed to have been popular quite a long time ago felt somehow familiar to Mina as well.
"Love Under the Bodhi Tree. It's more famous for its lyrics than its title."
Mya~ hi~
Mina's mouth fell open at the singing voice coming from the speaker. She had never imagined she would hear this song—one that had once been famous but whose lyrics hardly anyone actually knew—the lyrics right now.
"I'll be right back."
"W-wait a second!?"
-Vroooom!
She tried to stop him because she hadn't expected him to actually play music to lure them, but he was already riding off into the distance with the music trailing behind him. Yet he returned almost immediately after leaving.
Of course, with the music blaring like that, it would have been stranger if they hadn't followed. Mina quickly pulled herself together.
"Aaaah! What on earth are you thinking?!"
Confirming the roughly ten Frenzy Bisons following right behind him, Mina gathered mana into her hand and created a sword. Since her mana had already recovered, it wasn't the small blade she'd made during the Gu Gang-woo incident.
"A sword? Is she some kind of manufacturing type?"
Min-jeong's surprised voice came from behind. It certainly looked like the type of mana that created something, similar to her own.
What soon formed in her hand was a longsword with a long, straight blade and a hilt about two handspans long. As she stood there gripping it and waiting, she saw Seok-jun turn his motorcycle in the distance ahead.
-Bang!
Startled by the sudden gunshot, she looked over to see Seok-jun steering the motorcycle with one hand while firing a revolver with the other.
"Whistle, no matter how many times I see it, it's still impressive."
"Impressive my ass. Guy must have nine lives or something."
Mina half-listened to Cheok-jeong and Min-jeong's conversation behind her as she watched him drive and couldn't help but admire him.
"Wow, he can do that..."
Seok-jun was skillfully maneuvering so that the Frenzy Bisons would graze past her and the village at an angle rather than charging straight into them.
Then he finally began heading in her direction.
"Huuu..."
She took a deep breath and recalled the strategy for dealing with Frenzy Bisons. Back when she was in college, she had frequently cleared low-grade gates under the command of an A-grade hunter instructor. Although she had tackled a high-grade gate this time, low-grade gates still felt more familiar to her since she had only recently become an A-grade hunter.
The procession of red bulls growing larger by the second looked threatening, but Mina didn't feel particularly nervous. On the contrary, in this familiar situation, even her heartbeat seemed to settle into a calm rhythm.
"Pfft, this feels kind of silly."
Mina couldn't help but laugh at the sound of the song mixed with the motorcycle's engine noise as it drew near.
"Moooo?!"
One of them finally spotted her and breathed flames from its nostrils, but she kicked hard off the ground and leaped above them. It probably wouldn't work anyway, but anything that reminded her of Gu Gang-woo made her feel sick.
"Moooooo!!"
The creatures seemed to realize she was more dangerous than the Seok-jun they had been chasing. They skidded to a sudden stop and tried to locate her, but that was their mistake.
"Moooooo!!!"
Slash. As she fell, Mina swung her longsword in a wide arc and severed the neck of one of them. It wasn't her favorite sword, but for large monsters where delivering power mattered most, there was nothing better.
The reason large monsters were difficult to hunt was, above all, their size. Regardless of rank, their massive bodies and the power that came with them made it hard to target vital points.
It was practically a blessing that among monsters of D-grade or lower, the Frenzy Bison was the only large one. Still, if you could reach their vital points, they became much easier to deal with.
"Mooooooo!!"
One of them spotted Mina standing on its dead comrade's corpse and charged at her with its horns raised in excitement, but all it did was offer her its neck.
"Moooo?!"
When Mina brought her longsword down on its neck, the head was severed cleanly and another one lost its life. The first one she'd killed had conveniently served as her foothold.
Even with a quick glance around, the Bisons' backs were close enough that a small jump would let her reach them. While they were certainly infamous monsters among the lower grades, they still had bodies similar to bison. That meant their physical limitations were nearly identical.
"Moooooo!"
After she beheaded yet another one that came charging at her, the creatures seemed to realize the problem. They began spewing flames from their nostrils to burn their comrades' corpses. But Mina wasn't about to let them do that undisturbed.
She kicked off one of the burning corpses, leaping onto another while simultaneously manipulating the mana that formed her blade to change its shape. This time it was a rapier, similar in length to the longsword but designed for one-handed use. She slashed at the nose of the one breathing fire.
"Moooooo!!"
Mina cut the throat of the creature writhing in agony, then continued using their backs as stepping stones to kill them one by one. A few of them tried to run away at one point, but—
-Bang!
"Moooo!!"
In those cases, Seok-jun, who had been circling the area on his motorcycle, would fire his gun to provoke them and prevent their escape.
"Moooooo!"
Finally, even the last one let out a death cry as its head was severed and collapsed. Mina let out a light sigh from atop its body.
After dealing with Frenzy Bisons for the first time in a while, Mina felt how much easier it had become—like she'd simply gone for a walk. It was probably partly because she was no longer a B-grade hunter but an A-grade one now.
"It's definitely different from fighting inside a gate."
It likely had something to do with the fact that this was outside the gate. Inside, the space was filled with a strange mana different from what people possessed, making it feel like fighting underwater with less resistance.
"She took all of them down by herself?"
As Mina caught her breath, she could hear the hunters murmuring in the distance.
"Is she really the same kind of hunter as us?"
"Crazy, isn't that something you only see in dramas or movies?"
'Why?'
That was a reaction she hadn't expected.
"Mina."
"Ah, Mr. Seok-jun. Why is everyone reacting like that?"
Noticing that Seok-jun had approached the Frenzy Bison she was standing on, Mina crouched down and asked him.
"It's because what you did was impressive."
"What? But this is something I used to do even when I was a B-grade hunter?"
After all, this was something she and her classmates had done together back when she was still B-grade. She hadn't been able to do everything alone like this, but it hadn't been impossible.
"You know that not all hunters of the same rank are equal, right? Even if the technique or tactic exists in theory, knowing about it and actually putting it into practice are completely different things."
The fact that there were far fewer hunters who could actually do it came as quite a shock to Mina.
"The reason you deliberately lured them one by one was..."
"Even if there's a method and it's possible, it's too much of a burden for people who have to earn a living day by day."
Hearing that, she felt as if she had been living in a completely different world from everyone else. Her energy drained away and she lowered her head, only to realize her weight was shifting forward. She quickly lifted her head, but—
"Ahh?!"
In the end, Mina slipped off the back of the Frenzy Bison.
"Shouldn't you be a little more careful?"
"Ugh, I'm sorry..."
Fortunately Seok-jun caught her so she didn't fall into the pool of blood, but the woody scent brushing against her nose and the firm sensation supporting her made the embarrassment impossible to shake off.