I Prepared an All-Out Date Course for the Leopard Beastkin (3)
Tearing a wolf apart with her bare hands was one thing. She was a proper A-Rank Hero, after all. But it wasn't the raw strength that startled Arang.
Her speed is abnormal. It blew past the average for an A-Rank Hero. Anything too fast for the human eye to follow belonged to the realm of an S-Rank Hero with a body-type trait.
An extra like this existed, and she barely had any presence? She wasn't even hard to look at. Her abilities weren't garbage, and her personality wasn't warped. With the racial bonus of being a beastkin, she was exactly the sort of character who could have been a heroine, and no one would have questioned it.
And the game didn't even have animal-type beastkin. Not among the heroines, anyway. Transcendent and long-lived heroines only appeared in the later stages, yet for some reason ordinary animal beastkin never showed up at all. You could write it off as simple taste... but it sits wrong. Far too wrong.
That discomfort wasn't the kind a single answer could clear. There was no information, and no lead.
Reshi wiped the blood from her face with the back of her hand and pressed on. Arang only followed. The hunt wasn't over.
In the meantime, we hunted a great many animals—small game like rabbits and birds, and middling herbivores too, deer and roe deer among them.
After the wolf pack died, the stink of their blood still clung to her, and not a single predator rushed us first. This stretch of forest must have belonged entirely to the wolves. If it hadn't, the mere fact that the pack was dead and she reeked of their blood would have been no reason for anything else to back down.
She didn't leave those animals in peace. Wild boar, bear, monkey—whatever entered her sight, she ran it down and slaughtered it without mercy.
Watching her like this, she doesn't even look human. She was no different from a beast. A stranger could easily have mistaken her for a cheetah-shaped Kaijin.
Once the kill count clears twenty, it's a hundred and fifty dollars a head... The wolf pack alone had already filled that twenty. Everything hunted afterward came to nearly a hundred animals, so call it fifteen thousand dollars. Good thing Yuyeong earns as well as she does. Money was coming in by the hundreds of thousands every month, so a sum like this wasn't much of a burden. It wasn't pocket change, either.
The hunt went on. She was no longer a blur the eye couldn't follow, but she was every bit as fast. ...At least she looks like she's enjoying it. She was smiling while she hunted. Animal-type traits had a way of pulling you toward the habits of the animal itself, and the hunting instinct couldn't be helped. That was exactly why carnivore traits were such a headache. They were hard to rein in, and if the urge to hunt went unmet, a civilian could end up as the prey.
"I think we've hunted everything worth hunting. Shall we head out?"
"...No. There's still one left."
"Still one?"
Arang asked it while she stood at the heart of the blood-soaked woods, ears pricked. Her tail swayed, as if she were waiting on something.
Then the ground gave a faint shudder, and he felt something coming. This was no ordinary beast. If it could shake the earth, it was that big.
"What is an animal that size doing in a place like this...?"
"Beats me. Nothing's impossible these days, right? Gene-spliced it, probably."
She shrugged and dropped into a stance, eyes fixed on the dark beyond the trees, coiled as if she might launch herself at any second.
In that instant, something hurled itself at them on a blast of wind.
"Kh—!"
Arang felt the threat at once, tore his wings free, and shot into the sky. She did the opposite and sprinted straight at whatever was sprinting at them.
The impact was enormous, and only then did the thing that had come charging out of the trees resolve into a shape he could actually see.
...A tiger?
It was a tiger. An ordinary one would have been shredded alive by a single charge from her. This one didn't care. It scratched at the head it had just slammed into her and glared at Reshi, and Reshi glared right back.
...Since when are tigers the size of a truck? She wasn't bothered in the least. Arang couldn't help it. A tiger the size of a small truck had every right to shock him.
"Most of the predators in a place like this were made by genetic modification. Built to match the game. Aggression dialed all the way up, and engineered so they never leave the grounds."
She must have caught his alarm; she said it with a grin. The tone was still rough, but it felt a little gentler than the moment they had first met.
"Will you be all right taking it alone?"
"Obviously. Just wait there. I'll finish this and be right back."
She flashed a confident grin and slid her claws free.
"Graaaah!!!"
The tiger seemed to take that for a challenge and charged again. Reshi charged to meet it. They collided and sheared past one another, and the instant each arrived where the other had been, the tiger pawed at its right eye and howled in pain. The eye that should have been there was gone. Blood poured down in ropes.
That eye was clenched in her fist—an eyeball the size of a small fist. She squeezed. It burst like an overripe persimmon, mashed into pulp.
The tiger would never use its right eye again. A skilled healer could have regenerated it, but nobody here was about to do that favor for a tiger. Unfortunately for the tiger.
"Yeah. The big ones really do taste better when you tear them open."
Reshi shook the mess off her hand and turned to watch the suffering tiger.
"You're kind of fun. So I'll send you off nice and clean. No pain."
"......"
The fight ended quickly. Honestly, calling it a fight was generous. It had been a hunt.
The moment it was over, Arang dropped from the sky and hid his wings. She was already skinning the tiger, tearing off a strip of the meat beneath and chewing with noisy relish.
"...Do you really have to taste-test it like that?"
"Instinct. It's instinct. Can't help it..."
For something she couldn't help, she was eating remarkably well. He wanted to say more, then let it go. She wasn't going to listen, and if this was a side effect of her trait, it was better to let her burn it off.
"Either way, everything in here is dead. Did you enjoy the hunt?"
"...I did. Honestly, I think I've gotten a little more comfortable around you."
"Comfortable?"
"Yeah. Soft as you are, you're still my senior's boyfriend. So it was awkward. Turns out nothing takes the awkwardness out like a hunt."
"......"
Did beasts usually smooth over an awkward relationship by hunting together? He had his doubts. Still, if we've actually gotten closer, that's real progress. He could call it a net gain. He hadn't expected hunting alone to loosen things this far. He'd figured that kind of ease would come only after they'd gone through the whole date course.
Simple. She's definitely simple. The recklessness had been a problem, but in the end that simplicity had paid off.
"Shall we head out, then? As I understand it, they hand out a prize if you hunt every animal in the place."
"A prize?! Let's go, right now!"
At the word prize, Reshi's ears shot straight up and her tail whipped wildly as she sprang to her feet.
"......"
All that rampaging, and she was still overflowing with energy. He'd chosen a course that gave out prizes on purpose. According to Yuyeong, Reshi loved having some reward waiting at the end of a job. He didn't know the exact reason—something about catching even a hint of the feeling of finishing her master's orders and receiving a treat. I still don't understand it.
Arang shook his head and followed the delighted girl.
The prize was an enormous scratching post. She was a leopard, a cat through and through, and she was thoroughly pleased. Her old scratcher had worn out and she'd been meaning to buy a new one; the timing could not have been better. The post went straight into her subspace.
With science and superhuman ability as far along as they were, a subspace was practically essential gear for a Hero. The size you were issued still depended on the Hero, of course.
There's still plenty of time left... so this is only the start. Six date courses remained. He'd built every one of them around the hour and the setting, so as long as he hit the timing, nothing else mattered.
If I make my play on the last course... They'd shed the awkwardness sooner than he'd planned. Handle it well, and he might get a great deal closer to her before the day was out.