The Spider's Core
The training exercise was over. "Is it... finished?" Mina asked, staring at the spider that had gone completely still. Even if it was only pretending to be dead, Seok-jun replied calmly, "All you have to do is extract the core."
With a sharp crack, he twisted the spider's head and pulled the core free from inside its skull. There was no more certain way to confirm a kill than removing a monster's core, but the motion looked disturbingly like prying the lid off a jar and scooping out its contents. It felt unusually cruel.
"Grrraaawr!"
"Ugh, what the—"
The spider might have been dead, but the chimera-like corpses fused to its body suddenly collapsed in a heap and came rushing toward them in a grotesque swarm.
"I wondered why they weren't moving earlier. It seems they were bound by this one's threads and couldn't move properly," Seok-jun observed.
Since things had come to this, he suggested they treat it as extra practice. Mina could only pull a long face in response. She was already exhausted from fighting the spider—now she had to face an entire horde of corpse monsters right after?
"Can't you go a little easier on me...?"
"Don't you still have plenty of mana left?"
"This is exactly why I resent the fact that you can see my mana, Mr. Seok-jun!"
In the end, she had no choice but to wipe out every last one of the charging monsters.
"Ugh, I'm so tired..."
Once the monsters were dealt with, all that remained in front of them was a crystal orb embedded in the center of a rotting tree. They still didn't understand the conditions that caused gates to appear, but fortunately, the method for destroying them was crystal clear.
—Crack!
Wooooong—!
Mina swung her rapier at the crystal orb lodged in the tree. It shattered easily, and the same shimmering distortion they had seen when entering the gate appeared. She didn't understand the principle behind it, but destroying the core apparently created an exit that led back outside.
When they stepped through and emerged from the gate, they were greeted by bright yellow caution tape, safety-first signs blocking the hallway, and the curious stares of several patients and nurses who had been watching from a distance. It made sense, considering the gate had manifested right in the middle of a hospital corridor.
"There are two patients here," Seok-jun said, sounding pleased by the situation.
After moving Seong-gyu to a hospital room and getting Mina's shoulder treated, they returned to the hallway to find the gate had already completely vanished.
"It should be safe now."
Only after he used a measuring device to prove the gate was truly gone did the gathered people finally disperse, visibly relieved.
A few elderly patients lingered until the end. "Young man, are you sure it's really gone?"
Mina shook her head, understanding their concern even though she knew it couldn't be helped. "I keep telling them there's no need to worry when a gate disappears, but..."
Just as monsters had cores, gates had a core deep inside them. Smash or remove it, and the gate would collapse on its own not long after. It was an undeniable fact, yet people still struggled to accept it. It was common for them to keep asking hunters who had just finished a raid, or to avoid walking down the street where a gate had appeared for a long time afterward.
"They're probably still not used to it. After all, it's only been fifteen years since the world changed like this."
It might feel like half a lifetime to us, but to the elderly, it's just fifteen years.
After leaving the hospital, they got in the car and headed to an exchange office to convert the cores they'd obtained from the gate.
"Sometimes I wonder if the world was always like this," Mina muttered, looking at the real estate office with a sign that read Core Exchange Available.
It was called an exchange office for convenience, but because of the unique nature of monster cores, people usually had to go through a licensed broker to convert them into money.
"Here for a core exchange?" the owner asked casually when he saw them. They showed their hunter licenses right away.
"Cha Seok-jun and Lee Mina from HHH. What was the cleared gate?"
"Sangchul Hospital, Rotting Swamp. D-grade."
After a quick confirmation of the core's origin, they exchanged the certificates. Once the buyer contacted them, the money would come through shortly.
But one question still lingered in Mina's mind.
"Why didn't you exchange that core?"
Seok-jun had traded in every core from the monsters for certificates at the office, but he hadn't taken out the one he'd pulled from the spider.
"I'd like to call it a simple souvenir, but it's too conspicuous to dispose of in a place like this."
Mina glanced at the spider's core, which he'd stuck into a paper cup holder. As far as she knew, cores were usually blue, but the higher the grade, the closer they became to red. An E-grade core was blue, while an A-grade core was a deep crimson. But the spider's core was a vivid, ruby-like red that anyone would notice immediately.
She had accepted it with the Steel King since it was an S-grade monster, but she never imagined the spider would drop one too.
"Do you know anything about monsters like that spider or the Steel King?"
"Why are you asking me?"
Seok-jun feigned ignorance, but Mina was already certain.
"Because you don't seem the least bit curious about them, Mr. Seok-jun."
It had been the same with the spider today, and with the Steel King before. Even when he'd been given a chance to identify the Steel King, he'd brushed it off with Lee Jun by talking about something completely irrelevant. She'd let it slide then, but thinking back on how he'd fought the spider today, it felt even stranger. He'd completely subdued the spider using his own mana, yet he showed no sign of wanting to interrogate it or learn anything from it. Even though the spider had been begging in absolute terror.
"You already knew what those monsters were, didn't you?"
And yet Mina herself had never learned about or seen such monsters before.
Seok-jun seemed to ponder for a moment, then pulled the car over to the side of the road and asked her, "Do you really want to know about those monsters?"
"Yes."
When Mina nodded, he closed his eyes. Suddenly something wrapped around her ankle, and all the strength drained from her body. Before she could even process what was happening, Seok-jun was pressing a cold gun barrel against her waist.
"They say curiosity killed the cat, don't they?"
"?!"
The low, sunken voice and breath against her ear made her freeze instantly.
"Well, it's not like I can't tell you..."
"Huh?"
He pulled the gun back, aimed it at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger. Fwoop! A tiny flag unfurled. Only then did she realize the muzzle was bright orange plastic—the universal sign that it was a toy gun.
An A-grade hunter who could shrug off real firearms had been frightened by a toy pistol.
"Y-you scared me!! I really thought it was real!"
First he'd neutralized her with mana, then pointed what looked like a real gun at her. Of course she'd been terrified.
"If you were really planning to threaten someone, wouldn't a more secluded place be better?"
"...Ah."
Only now did she notice the pedestrians and cars passing by all around them.
"Ugh, that's so mean!"
Realizing the truth only made her feel more wronged, and she shot him a glare. But Seok-jun simply continued, "I only learned about it by chance myself, and it's not in our jurisdiction. It's better not to get involved if you can help it."
His words only fueled her curiosity even more.
"Not in our jurisdiction?"
"Just like how Hanshin handles gates, and I handle hunters."
"So there are people who specialize in dealing with those kinds of monsters?"
The more she heard, the more questions she had. Weren't monsters themselves already part of gate raiding?
"You already know the answer, Miss Mina."
"I know...?"
Mina was even more confused. Everything—from the monsters he was talking about to the red cores—had been completely new to her. How could she possibly know people like that?
Then it hit her.
"S-grade hunters?"
The Steel King had been an S-grade monster with a red core. The spider had one too. If that signified an S-grade monster, then naturally it would be S-grade hunters who dealt with them, right?
"It's convenient to think of it that way."
"But you were the one who defeated that spider, Mr. Seok-jun."
Did that mean he was an S-grade hunter too? When she looked at him, Seok-jun shook his head.
"That spider was something you could have beaten easily, Miss Mina, if your understanding of mana had been a little higher and you hadn't been caught in such an unfavorable situation."
"But wasn't that an S-grade monster? I'm barely in the lower ranks of A-grade."
At her words, Seok-jun gave her a strange look before speaking.
"Are you basing that on the ranking system?"
"Isn't that what everyone uses?"
The ranking system was a separate feature on the hunter license app. She'd always thought of it as something that simply showed where you stood.
"I would recommend not using that service."
"Why not?"
"Because rankings are determined by grade, the amount of mana, the quantity of cores exchanged, influence, and similar factors."
"Wait, it's not based on combat ability?"
She had always assumed rankings were purely about fighting strength.
"Ranking people by combat ability would actually be much harder. We already don't have enough time to deal with monsters—wasting it on fights between hunters would be ridiculous."
On top of that, individual condition on any given day and mana compatibility would come into play. Measuring combat power numerically was far more difficult.
"I... see."
After all, Seok-jun was officially only B-grade, yet he'd defeated multiple A-grade hunters.
"Then how do they handle monsters like that?"
Leaving the core's condition aside, the spider had come from a D-grade gate. Even Mina would have been in serious trouble without Seok-jun, and Seong-gyu had been completely overpowered. To other B-grade hunters, it would have been a disaster. How could anyone specialize in subjugating monsters with such high randomness?
"Don't we already call those anomalies?"
"Oh!"
Now that she thought about it, there were indeed A-grade hunters who specialized in handling anomalies.
"What are you going to do with that core?"
"I already have plans to meet an acquaintance who can handle it, so I'll be taking it with me. Would you like to meet them too, Miss Mina?"
"Yes, please."
Mina agreed without hesitation.
"Instructor?"
"Huh? Lee Mina?"
She never imagined she would see that familiar woman's face again.