The Anomaly Hunter Wants to Retire

"How dare you raise ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a hand against the Vice-Commander!!"

"You damned monster! I will never forgive this!!"

At the sight of Tiellan being ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠slaughtered, the knights erupted in fury all at once. Before I could so much as raise a hand to stop them, they were already drawing their swords and hurling themselves at the deer.

"Wait! If you attack it now, every one of you will die! Its rule is that neither itself nor that boy may be attacked!"

"Silence, hunter! You expect us to stand by and watch our commander die?!"

"No, you lunatics, we can't beat the thing anyway—so for once in your lives, listen to me before you charge in!"

Even screaming myself hoarse, I could not hold the knights back. Reason had already abandoned them, and in the blink of an eye they closed the distance and swung their blades.

The Aura-wreathed steel was a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hair's breadth from touching the deer—

Horrible screams tore open the air from every direction. From the mouths of every knight who had declared his intent to attack, a human arm had erupted. The limbs that punched up through their throats ripped each man's head open in a long, ugly split—exactly as they had done to Tiellan.

Before the anomaly's instant-death mechanism, no amount of training meant a thing. Flesh tore with wet shrieks all around, and blood sprayed in fountains. And still the knights did not come back to themselves.

They simply attempted suicide by another method.

"Hold still, you damned beast!!"

One of the knights tore the Magic Snare from his belt and hurled it at the deer. The snare was an enchanted tool that moved as though alive, coiling around its target of its own will. It bore a special enchantment—no ordinary means could untie or cut it.

But no anomaly was ever going to be inconvenienced by something like that.

"What the—?!"

The snare, striking like a serpent for the deer's throat, passed through it into empty air and dropped limply to the ground. It had clearly wrapped around the deer's neck, and yet it had fallen away on its own, like trying to lash liquid down with rope.

"Aura is useless! Until an anomaly takes physical form, it's immune to every kind of attack! Fall back if you don't want to die like dogs!"

Only when I bellowed at the top of my lungs did the knights finally grasp the situation. Of the twenty or so knights, eight had died—Tiellan among them. The rest, pale as corpses themselves, staggered backward at the sight of their comrades butchered so horribly.

"Impossible... Aura doesn't work...?"

"We've lost nearly half our number..."

Even as the knights' fury curdled into fear, the deer never moved. It simply cast one slow look around, then turned toward the boy. And when it carried its arm-bone antlers to him, something grotesque occurred: the arms of the knights slain moments before were severed cleanly away—and in the next breath, they were sprouting from the boy's body.

So that was it. It slaughtered anyone who attacked it without mercy, then transplanted the dead men's arms onto the boy. The limbs already fused to the boy must have belonged to the count and his soldiers.

"Hey, anomaly hunter! What are we supposed to do now?!"

"That's right! You're the expert—do something!"

What a convenient time to ask. If they'd lent me their ears a little sooner, eight men would still be breathing.

"Now that no one is attacking, it has no interest in harming us. Its rule likely applies only to those who move against it."

"So we're simply to leave the thing be...?"

"No. Thanks to a certain someone just now, I've found a proper solution. It won't take long, so pull back."

Under normal circumstances, I would have gone it alone—poking at the anomaly with every means at my disposal, mapping out its rules piece by piece until a countermeasure revealed itself. This time, however, the knights' reckless assault had done the grunt work for me and flushed the answer out into the open.

It wasn't a pretty method, but in the end, the count's "support" had proven a genuine help.

I fixed my gaze squarely on the deer and spoke.

"I don't know why you're so obsessed with arms... but regardless—you only harm those who would harm you, and you repaid the one who helped you. I've decided what name to give you."

I drew a dagger from my coat and slit open my palm. The shadow-black blade parted my hand, blood welling forth, and once a sufficient amount had flowed, the wound sealed itself shut in an instant. The spilled blood drifted in the air, suspended as though gravity had simply forgotten it.

"Bl-black magic! You were a black magician all along?!"

One of the knights recoiled, aghast. I would admit it wasn't a pleasant sight. But it was nothing so crude as black magic.

I stretched my hand toward the floating blood as I pushed back.

"This isn't magic. It's a ritual that belongs to anomaly hunters alone."

"A ritual...?"

"To inflict harm on an anomaly, you must first shackle it to the laws of this world. And every anomaly hunter carries a ritual of their own for binding them into those laws."

The ritual passed down to me by my Master is called Consanguinization—a rite that bestows a name upon an anomaly, using blood as the medium. Every anomaly is, by its nature, nameless; and an anomaly given a name through Consanguinization becomes a being no different from my own child. By binding it in blood to me—a human of this world—the anomaly, too, is caught fast in the world's laws.

Of course, I couldn't simply attach any name I pleased. It had to be a name the anomaly itself could accept—a name that fit what it was.

And from every clue I had gathered, I had found a name that fit it perfectly.

As I cried the words out at the deer, the blood hanging in the air began to assemble itself into letters. At the same instant, the deer locked its gaze onto me, and I stared straight into that face of stacked human hands as I drove the rite home.

"From this moment, your name is 'Grateful Deer'! Grateful Deer! Take form!"

The very next instant, the suspended blood rearranged itself into the letters of the name I had spoken. The characters shot through the air, whirled in an orbit around the anomaly, and then sank into the deer-shaped creature—no, into the Grateful Deer itself.

And immediately, as though to prove that it had at last claimed a shape within this world, vivid liquids of every color came seeping out of the ground, the air, the trees, pouring themselves over the stag. The colors—the laws of the world given form—coated the deer layer by layer, and the Grateful Deer took on a hue far more vivid than anything it had worn before.

Which meant that this side, too, could now fight back.

Perhaps flustered by the unfamiliar sensation, the deer lifted one foreleg, then whipped its body around. It meant to bolt for the forest, no doubt.

"Like I'd let you go."

A heartbeat before the Grateful Deer broke into a full sprint, I thrust forward the black dagger in my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠grip. The blade stretched out long and thin, coiling itself into the shape of a rope.

"……?!"

The transformed blade wrapped snugly around the deer's throat and hauled it back toward me. And yet no arm burst out of my body.

The deer's rule triggered only when one attacked it with a bladed weapon—a spear, a sword—or attempted to kill it. Merely restraining it with a rope violated nothing, a fact the knight with the Magic Snare had already demonstrated for me.

Its brush with agony and terror at the hands of spears and arrows, right before it became an anomaly, had probably blinded it to everything else.

The deer thrashed, its palm-shaped muzzle gaping wide, but my dagger's grip was the stronger. Once the thing had been dragged to my feet, I spoke to it in a level, unhurried voice.

"Grateful Deer. I will not kill you. But neither will I hide you away."

"In exchange, I shall keep you—so that no one may ever harm you again, and so that you may never again taste freedom. You have taken your name from me, so you will obey."

With every word, the deer's struggles grew weaker.

Every hunter's ritual carries its own character. In the case of my Consanguinization, the bond of parent and child compels anomalies to heed my words. Just as no parent can ever truly control a child, I couldn't command an anomaly with total authority—but it did grant me the upper hand in any negotiation.

What the creature wanted was absolute safety: to never again be attacked by anyone. But if I had simply helped it, I would have earned one of its "grateful" repayments, exactly as the boy had. So by offering it my aid while stripping away its freedom, I removed any grounds for gratitude altogether.

As if to prove the plan had worked, the creature ceased its resistance at last and bowed its head meekly toward me.

It had accepted its captivity.

I let out a long breath of relief and gave it its first order.

"Good. Grateful Deer—return the arms you gave the boy to their rightful owners. Then I will send you somewhere safe."

The deer glanced back once at the boy, then raised its head high. The arm-bone antlers twisted in a grotesque motion, and the arms sprouting from every part of the boy's body vanished in an instant.

That meant the count had his arm back as well.

Once I confirmed that the corpses of the dead knights had reclaimed their missing limbs, I drew a single ticket from my coat. The moment I tossed the ornate, gold-trimmed ticket toward the deer, it vanished without a trace.

"……! Hey! Where did you send that monster?!"

A knight who had been watching from nearby shot forward in alarm. I answered him flatly.

"Somewhere safe. That deer will never harm another soul."

"That's not the point! It killed the Vice-Commander and our brothers-in-arms! It cannot be allowed to live!"

"I'd advise you to drop it. I told you, didn't I? That thing carries a rule: you must not try to kill it. Break that rule, and you'll end up just like the Vice-Commander. Isolating it somewhere safe is the best possible outcome."

At my words, the knights made no further objection. But the unease hadn't fully left them, and they pressed me once more.

"And if it tries to escape from this 'safe place'? What then?"

"You needn't worry about that. The place where it's confined cannot easily be escaped. And frankly, the deer isn't going to enjoy it there very much."

With that said, I walked toward where the boy stood. The child, restored to his original form, bore one trait that set him apart from ordinary children.

The boy was one-armed, his left arm missing.

Now I understood why the Grateful Deer had been so obsessively fixated on arms. It had stolen other people's limbs because it wanted to give the boy who saved it the one thing he lacked.

Feeling a complicated tangle of emotions, I lifted the boy into my arms and turned back to the knights.

"It's finished. Let's go report to the Lord of the estate."