A Capitalist Peach Garden Oath
A cart, flipped by a single high-explosive round.
There was a reason the Backscratcher was called the Backscratcher. A thing didn't become a hunter's essential for nothing. If I'd only been able to bring more specialty rounds, I wouldn't be suffering through any of this. Still, it was a relief Clock-out Man had shown up.
Where had that guy even gotten a hunter-grade pistol? More to the point, why was he here?
"Bro! And the guy next to you!"
"……?"
"You! Guy with the spear! You, I'm talking to you."
"The hell is this asshole?"
"Bro, he with us?"
"Not a colleague. Just a guy who lends me weapons."
"That's enough! The rest of the civilians... they don't look so hot?"
Kiek! Kuek! While the monster was busy wrenching itself out of the overturned cart, I thumbed a light on. Click. Mr. Myeong and the Chief were both hurt.
"Feels a little wrong, asking injured people, but—"
"I know what you're getting at. This much is a light wound on me and on the Chief, so don't worry about it—ngh... It's just a headache."
A tentacle had caught Mr. Myeong in the head. It had been a graze, and there didn't seem to be an external wound. A mild concussion, maybe. The Chief had taken his hit in the solar plexus.
"Chief?"
"Hoo... So this is what they mean when they say it feels like your insides got blown clear through?"
"That's not what that means."
Looked like he'd live.
"Bro! Then how about we all start by julienning the squid?"
That worked for me.
Shwick. Sure enough, the moment we closed in, the monster's habits came right back. It burst out of the overturned cart and flung its tentacles toward the ceiling again, but—
"Blow the ceiling apart."
"Roger!"
Boom. Clock-out Man put a high-explosive round into it without a single question asked. Beautiful.
Keek, keek! The monster dropped headfirst. A metal skull meant no concussion, but it looked thoroughly rattled.
"Bro! The ammo cost—"
"Tell Min Yeo-jin you spent it because of me, and bill her."
"Okay. So I can just dump rounds, then."
"High-explosive left?"
"Eight."
"Every time it tries to hide up top, blow it apart."
"Okay!"
"Mr. Myeong, Chief—keep the lights on the walls!"
I reset my grip on the axe and charged, and the General came after me a beat late.
"When did you call in support?"
"Didn't have to. He shows up on his own."
"Hm?"
"That's the difference between a pro and an amateur."
But a boss was still a boss. The moment we closed, it snapped into a defensive posture, spreading tentacles in every direction—tentacles that had already mostly regenerated.
"Tsk. Not a single gap, Doormat."
"Wait for your opening. Quietly."
The charged light still hadn't fully bled off, and the tentacles were as thick and brutal as ever. Its reflexes would be sharper now, too. Same situation as before, in the end. Attacking first was no answer.
And yet—
Krul...
It had no thought of attacking.
"A second ago it was throwing a fit, and now—!"
"It learned again."
It remembered trying to coil around the General, eating a counter, and losing the tentacle. The one mercy was that it wasn't thinking of climbing back to the ceiling, either. Probably scared of cracking its head a second time. It had no way of knowing high-explosive rounds were a limited weapon.
How long did the standoff hold?
"...Bro? That thing's running away right now, isn't it?"
It was creeping backward on its tentacles, slipping off. The torso was so plain it was hard to tell front from back by the body alone, but the way the tentacles were spread made it easy. The mouth stayed hidden, appearing only for the brief moment it bit into a person.
A boss-class specimen fleeing wasn't rare, anyway. I'd seen it plenty in my active days. Unlike the other dim brutes, a boss-class had proper intelligence. It could measure a gap in strength and run when it thought it would lose, which only made it harder to deal with.
"Heh."
The General hung the glaive he'd been gripping all this time across his back.
"It's over. We won."
He was right, but the Chief saw it a little differently.
"Hold on, hold on! We've driven it this far—wouldn't it be better to just kill it?"
He had a station to protect. Once we left, he'd have a miserable time clearing the thing out. But he could talk like that because he didn't know any better.
"Hey, you clearly don't know what you're looking at. That thing? Driving it off is easy. Killing it is what it's famous for being a pain about. Real famous. Boss-class."
Cutting the tentacles was only the start. Cracking the torso was the truly exhausting part. The General knew that, too.
"Chief, putting that thing down for good is a job you leave to active hunters. File a formal request for support with headquarters and it'll get handled."
"I don't know... This project sits entirely under the Ministry of Future Technology. There's no guarantee hunters even get deployed."
I wasn't ignorant of the Chief's situation. Even so, it was a matter that needed a cold eye. I had no reason to overreach and catch the thing.
Through all of this, its retreat never stopped.
"What if I put up a bounty for killing the monster? Could you handle it then?"
The Chief, coming in low. But if money was going to solve this, it would take a truly enormous amount of it.
"Listen. Listen close. Boss-class is a different dimension. You know what it costs to catch that thing? You rich?"
Its torso wasn't merely hard. The torso regenerated, too. To smash it faster than it could heal, you either poured out firepower in the most literal sense, or you used a special clear method.
The number of people who walked around with that method memorized, line by line, was vanishingly small.
"Bro, want me to just show them? We can bill Yeo-jin for the armor-piercing rounds anyway, right?"
Well, seeing it once would be faster.
"Suit yourself."
"You, guy. Watch close."
Bang!
Kuek?
The armor-piercing round buried itself dead center in the torso.
"Watch."
That confirmed two things. One I'd expected. The other, I hadn't.
What I'd expected was that a direct hit from a hunter-grade armor-piercing round barely damaged it at all. Plain evidence of how hard it was to split the thing on firepower alone, with no clear method.
Anyway.
The problem was the reaction I hadn't expected.
Kweeeek!
"Why's the octopus bastard doing that!"
The thing that had been backing away, acting thoroughly like a lesser monster, had suddenly become a greater one. It came on in a charge, tentacles whipping like mad.
Don't tell me this was a learned response, too.
...Waste Disposal Squad?
The ones who'd died after offering up three whole flashlights. If they'd shot the monster, and then dropped the lights while they were being overwhelmed—
That would have been one hell of a motive to learn.
"Mr. Myeong, Chief, fall back! Everyone else, defensive posture! Clock-out Man, ready smoke!"
"Okay!"
"General, get to the very front and hold, whatever it takes."
"What? Where do you get off giving me orders—"
"Get up front, now!"
"You son of a—!"
A blade in each hand, the General took the front. He had to hold. Without that, there was no next step.
"No need to hit back. Just endure!"
"I said all right!"
He put the blades away and took up a shield. A moment later the tentacles came at him without discrimination.
Bang, bang!
"Fuck! It's gonna smash the shield, too!"
"Hold a little longer."
"What are you even trying to do!"
"Shut your mouth and stay put. You're scrambling my head."
The monster had lost all reason and was attacking wild, swinging its tentacles on instinct. This was exactly when a pattern showed itself. What came out unconsciously carried a strong tendency.
Ten o'clock, tentacle five, right side, a downward chop, favors the left, tentacle four isn't used to attack...
I more or less had it.
"I told you it's breaking!"
"Clock-out Man."
"Okay!"
He cracked a smoke grenade at our feet at once.
Krul?
Eyesight on a human level. Inside the smoke, it couldn't see a thing. Well, neither could I, but—
"Doormat! We fall back in this gap!"
"You fall back. I'm going in alone."
"What?"
"Clock-out Man, hold your position."
"Okay!"
If both sides were fighting with their eyes covered, the one who'd read the opponent had the far better of it.
One axe is enough.
I had to fight as economically as possible. I'd secured enough Cores to overturn the odds once, but winning that way would cost my wallet more.
Shhk!
Krul!?
That's one.
In close combat, what mattered most was distance. Wind born from tentacles thrashing empty air brushed the bridge of my nose. That told me how far away it was.
Shhk!
Two.
Shhk, shhk!
Three. Four.
The monster whipped the tentacles it favored, madly, in the directions it favored. One at a time, certain, only the ones I could predict.
Five.
Kuek...
At last it grasped the situation. Not a backpedal this time. It turned all the way around and ran at full speed.
And in that instant, a flashing rainbow drove in through the smoke.
"......"
The General and Clock-out Man would know what that light meant.
When the smoke lifted, severed tentacles lay strewn across the floor.
"...You did all of this alone, in the smoke?"
"I did. While you were whimpering behind a shield."
"An ability that lets you see through smoke?"
"Think whatever you please. So your eyes punch through darkness, but smoke is rat poison to them?"
"Hmph. Think what you want."
Without meaning to, I'd learned one of his weaknesses.
The General took his eyes off the tentacles. What he aimed at next was Clock-out Man.
"A hunter? Active duty?"
The hunter-grade pistol in Clock-out Man's hand. A symbol of an active hunter—but Clock-out Man was former, anyway.
"Quit that shit a long time ago."
"So you're an ex-hunter, too?"
"Too?"
"Doormat looked like an ex-hunter himself."
I'd expected him to say that he had been a hunter. Instead, out came talk of me.
"I was a hunter? Who says?"
"You can fool every other human alive. You can't fool the eyes of a man who was one."
"Tsk."
Well, he was right. The same way I'd recognized hunter footwork in his movement at a glance.
"And not an ordinary hunter, from the look of it. Doormat. Were you an instructor, by any chance?"
He had an eye.
"Wow! Bro, those are some good eyes."
"Hm? You know my core ability?"
"Huh?"
The intelligence might have been a little lacking.
Anyway, hunter habits were soaked all the way into my body, so for another hunter it was harder not to notice. The Old Man had drilled me for a long time before I ever became one. Only later did I learn that everything I'd been taught back then was hunter tactics. That was also the secret to becoming the youngest instructor. All through my trainee days I heard He learns this fast? every single day, and they called me a genius. I'd even acted like a mess on purpose so the head start wouldn't show, and it still wouldn't stay hidden. Every time, all I got from the people around me was that I was sandbagging my strength, or that a genius figured to have no manners.
Anyway. Where had Clock-out Man's Backscratcher come from?
"Where'd you get that?"
"You're asking the obvious. Yeo-jin."
"What'd you butter her up with?"
"Nothing? I said I was working with Bro, and she just handed me one?"
No idea how she planned to handle the aftermath. Get caught skimming one of those, and you could catch a death sentence.
...She wouldn't. It's Min Yeo-jin.
Meanwhile the Chief wore the face of a man whose world had collapsed.
"The monster ran, so catching it's completely shot now, isn't it. It'll have hidden itself somewhere again..."
Mr. Myeong was asleep beside him. His head must have hurt badly.
"Hey, older guy."
"......?"
"Earlier, about putting a bounty on the monster's neck. That real?"
"Huh?"
"Is it still good?"
Clock-out Man's attitude had flipped all at once. He wasn't the only one. The glaive was back in the General's hand.
"If I can get extra pay, gladly."
"Uh... I'd be grateful, but why so sudden?"
Maybe I ought to get a leg in, too.
"Can't be the only one who ducks out of a mood like this."
"The Postman, too...?"
"Then we're all agreed? Let's go find that octopus head right now."
"Leave the tracking to me. So easy!"
The reason every one of them had turned eager.
Because a fight ought to be economical.
That tentacle monster is money.
A monster's regeneration burned the energy of the core inside its body. And like every core, spending energy meant giving off light. But a monster kept its core buried deep, so seeing that light from the outside was difficult.
We got lucky this time.
The armor-piercing round Clock-out Man fired had, by chance, opened a crack in the space where the core lay sleeping. Light had leaked through that slight break.
Rainbow light, no less.
A boss-class specimen always carried a core, but it didn't always carry a good one. Duds were far more common. That was why monsters were still a common sight out in the world. If hunting them had been a fat living, they might have been wiped out long ago.
This one was different.
A rainbow—and light strong enough to show even through smoke.
On extremely rare occasions, a monster appeared that carried more than one core.
This one, we ought to catch.
Clock-out Man took the lead and started sniffing. The General and I stuck close on his heels, while the Chief followed more slowly, supporting Mr. Myeong.
"By the way, Doormat. It's been so long since I fought with guns that I can't get a feel for it. How many armor-piercing rounds to crack that thing?"
"Thirty, at minimum."
"We have that kind of margin?"
"Clock-out Man, rounds left?"
"About ten?"
"If Doormat's holding more than twenty, nothing to worry about."
"I've got five."
The General stopped.
"What are you doing? Keep up."
"You joking right now? How do you plan to catch it with that? I thought we were fighting this with guns."
"What's this talk now? You were the one who wanted the extra pay."
"That was because that crazy guy stepped up, so I figured maybe it was actually catchable. Damn it. I'm the idiot for trusting you people."
"Don't know about the rest, but you being an idiot is correct."
"What'd you say, punk?"
Tsk. Simple man.
"There's a separate advanced technique for clearing that thing."
"You think you were the only one who was a hunter? I know that exists. But that's something you say when active duty runs a standard operation. Right now we don't even have an intelligence analyst—"
"If you're scared, feel free to drop out."
"...You can really use the actual clear method? Do you have the document?"
"That, I don't."
"......?"
It was all in my head.
"Spear guy. Just trust Bro."
"I'm regretting getting mixed up in this. Considerably."
I didn't particularly want to drag along someone who let the air out like that, but right now we were short one body.
"Trust me. We can win."
"Let me ask one thing. Your core ability isn't a combat type either, is it?"
"No."
"From what the crazy guy does, he was a tracker back on active duty?"
"That's right."
"Which is to say that thing's core ability isn't combat-type either?"
"Same goes for you, I'd imagine. If you can see in the dark, you were probably a tracker when you were active."
"That's the problem, damn it all."
As if he couldn't believe it, a sigh and a laugh left the General's mouth together.
"Not even active duty—three former hunters, every one of them with a non-combat ability, and short on specialty rounds. You're going to catch that difficult bastard with this combination?"
"Correct."
"You know what it means, on a real operation, to send this combination out?"
"I've sent them out with my own hands."
It meant they were fired.
"This is enough to drive a man mad."
"You talk like that, and you keep following."
"Shit..."
"Rainbows do have a way of bewitching a man."
"Tsk. That, too. Haah... Fine."
After that, the General only walked in silence. Then once, partway along, he opened his mouth so low it was barely there.