My Dog Bites Well. Sometimes It Eats.
“Wolf.”
[...Sniff.]
“Answer me.”
[Whine....]
Well, at least the beast seemed aware it had done something wrong. The wolf, having dropped the unconscious man onto the ground, rolled over and exposed its belly, starting to whimper pitifully.
“Get up. If it makes you feel any better, it's partly my fault too—I told you to kill it if push came to shove.”
[Whine, whine.]
“Are you nodding? So you have noticed you've been getting hit less lately.”
[Whine.]
“Good boy.”
I scrubbed the wolf's belly with all my might, and its face bloomed into an expression of pure contentment.
Anyway.
I'd hauled him back here, sure—but what exactly was I supposed to do with him now?
“Might as well tie him up for now.”
Pulling stakes and chains out of my subspace, I hammered the man firmly into the ground. The equipment had been forged for capturing vampires, but then, a tool's purpose is ultimately defined by the intent of the one who wields it.
Thud. Thud.
As I tapped the stakes deeper with my gauntleted fist, I felt the man's breathing change. Apparently the shock hadn't been too great—he'd woken up at some point without my noticing.
“Hm.”
Still, a job begun should be finished. I had no intention of killing him anyway, so a little playing around before letting him go couldn't hurt.
Since it was a fine chance to hone my edge, I fished out a whetstone too and set to sharpening my dagger. Shhk. Shhk. Deliberately holding the whetstone right beside his ear, I drew the blade across it—and his facial muscles flinched with every pass.
Who did he think he was fooling with acting that thin?
“Open your eyes.”
“....”
“Wolf. Bite.”
“O-o-open! They're open!”
The moment his eyes cracked open and met the jaws of a wolf spread wide right in front of his face, the man began to thrash around like a lunatic.
“Wolf. Close your mouth.”
[Woof.]
“Don't you dare lick your chops. I'm serious. Serious.”
[Huff.]
“S-spare me! I'll answer anything you ask!”
Anything, huh. Nothing in particular came to mind at the moment.
Well, I could think it over for a bit. Idly, I began slicing and trimming the concrete floor with the dagger in my hand, cutting it like tofu. Carving away out of habit—that was the Saintess's form. The figure of the person whose hands I knew best.
“Th-that's incredible. Who is that supposed to be?”
“The person who gave me my name.”
“Ah, your mother...”
“I don't have parents.”
“...My apologies. Please spare me.”
“Tell me—do you want to die?”
“No! Of course not.”
“Then why do you keep acting like I'm about to kill you?”
Being treated like a mass murderer just for staking a man to the floor. Compared to my active days, I'd grown downright gentle, and even so, it stung a little.
I happened to need an outlet for stress anyway—might as well torment him while extracting some information.
“Why were you watching me?”
“Wh-what do you mean, why—”
“The wolf chased off every other human. Why didn't you run?”
“I was just asleep and couldn't get away, that's all.”
“...Really?”
“Yes... Like I said, it's nothing much.”
To sleep straight through all that commotion—that took some nerve, I'd give him that.
“Do you know the Hero?”
“The Hero? You must mean Hunter Baek Siwoo?”
“Don't know the name. Black-haired man, lanky build, face like a plucked chicken—looks like a mop handle. And from what I saw earlier, he can't even swing a sword properly.”
“Well, you have black hair too, don't you? And besides, this is Korea. Even in an age where Awakened are everywhere, the vast majority of non-Awakened are black-haired. Me included.”
Fair point. Left with no alternative, I roughly trimmed down the hewn block of concrete and shaped it into the figure of the Hero I'd seen earlier.
“This is the Hero. That one is the Saintess.”
“I've never seen that armor before, but yes—that's Hunter Baek Siwoo. I've never met the woman beside him called the Saintess, but Hunter Baek Siwoo is famous, so I know of him. He has plenty of fans, too.”
“People like him? Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“There's no reason to.”
Anything, everything—those who possess are bound to be resented by those who do not. The weak fit the strong with bridles called responsibility and discipline, and drag those reins along behind them to ride them at their leisure.
But the Hero Party had been foolish. Even when the reins yanked from all sides dug into the flesh of their necks until blood dripped down, they simply laughed, too dim-witted to feel the pain.
The notion that the weak are virtuous was, all of it, nonsense. The ones who tried to kill the strong who shielded them from wind and rain were never monsters, nor other strong ones—they were vermin too lowly to even be called insects.
Filth who hurled stones at the benefactor who had spared their lives, screamed at them to restore the homelands the demons had burned, and raged at the top of their lungs while brandishing nothing better than pathetic farm tools.
Humans truly were grotesque creatures—impossible to like, no matter how you tried.
“I concede the point. Though people like that do exist everywhere you go.”
“Yeah.”
“But there are more who aren't like that, and that's why society keeps turning, isn't it?”
“That's idealism.”
“Just let it slide, please. A petty commoner like me has to think that way or life gets too bleak.”
Heh. The man flashed a refreshing smile and wriggled his head. Lying on bare concrete was apparently getting uncomfortable.
“Speaking of which—what might your name be?”
“Why would I—”
“Introductions are the foundation of conversation, no? I'm Bae Dohyeon. Bae is the family name, Dohyeon the given name. If you'd rather, feel free to just call me 'old man.' You may not believe it to look at me, but I'm actually in my fifties.”
What was so special about fifty? I was well past a thousand.
“...Arte. No family name.”
“Miss Arte, then. A pleasure. If my hands were free, I'd love to shake yours—but I suspect that's a bit difficult at the moment.”
“Not necessary.”
Perhaps he'd decided to drop the frightened-fawn act, because the man's mouth began running without pause. It started with his complaint about working at the Hunter Management Bureau's head office, buried in overtime lately with the constant spike in Gate reports. Then came the story of the time the political establishment mishandled the hunter community and nearly sparked a riot, and on through international affairs and the stock market.
He had a decent gift for gab, and it was mildly entertaining to listen to, honestly.
“An acquaintance of mine lost a hundred and eighty million in a single day, if you can believe it. And that was Green Wings, mind you—a fairly respectable mid-tier guild, once upon a time. That's when I thought, ah, so this is why people say hunters shouldn't invest.”
“A merchant ship he'd invested in sank.”
“Exactly that! You catch on fast for someone who's never touched stocks. This is just my personal opinion, but I do believe diversified investment across the major guilds is the sound approach.”
For a nap interrupted by random capture, the yield was generous. I'd gotten a rough picture of this species called hunters, and hearing an industry insider's take on Gates and the Tower was genuinely interesting too.
Twisting the fur of the wolf's tail—it had dozed off at some point—I listened until the sun had quietly begun its slide down the sky.
Sunset was the signal that it was time to start looking for somewhere to escape the night dew. Which meant it was time to wrap up the conversation.
“I'm leaving now.”
“Ah, heading home? Then, uh, could you maybe just—”
“Hmph.”
I was not, as a rule, fond of liars. With a topic he could have escaped long ago, no less.
“Too tired. Goodbye.”
“I'm sorry—what? No, now that's just not—”
The reason no soldiers or hunters had come despite all that ruckus was obvious. Anyone who'd made the decision to leave me alone was, naturally—
already here, weren't they.
“If it gets too tight, call someone. Wolf, let's go.”
[Woof.]
The wolf, which had been wearing an expression of utter boredom, swallowed me up, and all that remained behind was a middle-aged man in chains, wriggling pathetically where he was staked.
***
The spot Arte and the wolf had left behind.
A woman in a business suit, materialized out of nowhere, was looking down at Bae Dohyeon as he groaned over the ache in his rigid, cramped back muscles.
“What exactly are you doing, sir.”
“Miss Hwarin, look—honestly, until right now I was playing it cool for the sake of my dignity, but he tied it way too tight. Get this off me. Quickly, please.”
“Couldn't you have freed yourself and come out on your own? What kind of branch director can't even manage that much?”
Bae Dohyeon, Director of the Korean Branch of the Awakened Management Bureau, pulled a face at his secretary's frigid gaze and cracked a joke to paper over it.
“Come on, Miss Hwarin, you try getting old sometime. Stay in one position that long and see how your back feels.”
“I will inform your wife that you'll be staying out tonight.”
“Oh no you don't! Do you know how badly I got chewed out last time a dinner fell through?”
“Then come out.”
“Aigoo, honestly. Every single time. My jokes never land with you.”
Crunch.
With the sound of concrete grinding to powder, the stakes and chain Arte had so carefully hammered into the ground were ripped clean out.
“Mithril, as I thought.”
“Miss Arte must have money to burn. Gold bars, then mithril... Is it really sane to just be scattering it around like this?”
“Well, she is not, strictly speaking, a person of this Earth.”
Watching her banter with her AI secretary, Arte had perhaps let her guard down a little—but the fact remained unchanged: an S-rank hunter had been subdued without managing so much as a token struggle.
“It's a mercy Miss Arte is good-natured. When you think about it, I really did nearly die back there, didn't I?”
“It is a comfort that you seem aware of it.”
“Hard to believe he actually kept company like that. I suppose what Victor said wasn't a lie after all.”
The Hero Party—the group to which the Returnees standing at the very apex of the world had once belonged. A gathering of monsters, each one said to rival an entire nation, whose peerless strength remained unrivaled even as they insisted their power had diminished greatly from before.
“What will you do?”
“What can we do? We can't catch her. Miss Hwarin, did you not see her throw down with the Hero? The moment she starts rampaging, casualties follow in the blink of an eye.”
“According to the community, Merlin has declared they will make a move to meet Miss Arte. And it appears the Fist King has taken an interest in the matter as well—if we secured their cooperation...”
“Pfft. Not a chance. The Hero himself had no real will to fight her, so you think the others are any different? My read is no.”
“Even so, leaving her like this is far too dangerous.”
“True enough. Letting a bomb stroll freely through the city, one that could go off at any moment for any reason—that's a heavy burden even for me.”
As Bae Dohyeon stretched out his stiffened muscles, his gaze landed on the little concrete figurines lying on the ground.
“Well, well. Our Miss Arte happens to be carrying exactly what we need, doesn't she.”
“...You mean the phone.”
“The signal cuts out while she's inside the wolf, granted—but surely better than nothing?”
With the cooperation of the streamer who'd owned the phone and his carrier secured, the Management Bureau could now pinpoint her location. At present she showed little interest in anything besides the Hero, but if she ever crossed paths with some worthless human and lost her temper... that would be a problem. A very large one.
Of all things, the image she'd shown on an internet broadcast had been her handing over gold bars—headache didn't even begin to cover it.
“For now her attention does seem fixed on the Hero, but she's still a bomb that could detonate at any time, in any way. Before those moths fan Miss Arte's temper into flame, we must find the Saintess.”
“But the Saintess's existence is, at best, a hypothesis.”
“Miss Arte exists, doesn't she? Then we find her. I understand the Hero Party bunch wants to keep her hidden—but she's the one being Miss Arte clings to more than her own parents. We can't have her just lying low. We've gone and acquired figurines like these; we may as well put them to use, no?”
According to the Hero, Arte had appeared to have grown stronger compared to the days when she'd traveled with them. He had no way of knowing the exact gap in time, but given that she treated the Hero as a fake, their parting could hardly have been an amicable one.
And yet, so long as the Hero himself had declared that Arte was not some boss monster but their comrade—
then no matter what Arte herself willed, that was what they had to make her.
“Then it's settled.”
“We find the Saintess before Miss Arte causes an incident. Let's move, and move fast.”
Thus declared: mandatory overtime for every last employee of the Awakened Management Bureau's Korean Branch.