15. S급 헌터
The instant we stepped through the gate, the world around us transformed.
We had been standing inside a building — of that much I was certain — yet what stretched before our eyes now was a dense, towering forest. Trees several times taller than a person packed the land so tightly that the light itself seemed to drown among the trunks, leaving the undergrowth dim and close.
"It's easy to get lost in a place like this, so stay close."
Five people, Chae Ju-ah and Ga-eun among them, plus one small bird perched on Ga-eun's shoulder, fell into a traveling formation. Chae Ju-ah took point. Haruka, a warrior-class hunter, covered the rear. Ga-eun slotted in directly behind Chae Ju-ah at the front.
"No need to be so tense, everyone. It's not even a high-rank gate."
She was right. This was a D-class dungeon. On the ranking scale that ran from A-class down to E-class, D-class sat firmly among the lower tiers. There was S-class as well, of course, but that was treated as an exception unto itself.
Anyway.
Having an S-class hunter like Chae Ju-ah in a dungeon like this was, by any measure, complete overkill.
"Just do as I say and we'll be fine. All right — let's move."
The five of them and I advanced in formation. Because the terrain was forest, monsters kept bursting from the undergrowth. With so many trunks to hide behind, the place was built for ambushes.
But an ambush only works if the gap in power isn't absurd. A person with a sword jumping a bear might get somewhere. An ant jumping a bear all by itself? Completely pointless.
That was exactly the situation we were in.
"Oh — undead on the right...!!"
Haruka spotted the ambush and shouted at the top of her lungs. A skeleton, nothing but bone, came charging in with a rusted sword clutched in its fingers. It was a close-range strike — the kind that would have caught an ordinary hunter flat-footed.
However.
A whisper of steel.
Chae Ju-ah drew her sword and cut the skeleton down. Upper half and lower half came apart in a single, immaculate line. The severed surface was so clean that not even a puff of bone dust drifted from the cut.
"As expected. Not just anyone can be S-class."
There had been no flash of a skill, no sign of any special technique. One swing. That was all it took. Ga-eun couldn't help but stare in open admiration.
"Hmph. I could do that much myself."
"Weren't you a mage, Master Crow Tit?"
"If you're an archmage, that much is easy."
"……"
Ga-eun simply shut her mouth and looked at me with that particular expression of hers. Something between that's so pathetic and I am so over this. Hard to put into words, but roughly that.
"Aigoo, I can't even show you, that's the problem."
"Why have I never actually seen you do any of the things you talk about, Master Crow Tit?"
"The time and the place just haven't been right yet."
"Ah. Right."
"No, I'm serious. You don't believe me?"
If I went around slinging magic however I pleased, Earth would have been destroyed ten times over by now. Do you have any idea how hard I've been working to make sure that doesn't happen? And this kid who's supposed to be my disciple doesn't even appreciate the effort.
Waaah. This is so unfair. So unfair.
After the crocodile tears came the Crow Tit's tears.
"Waaah."
"……"
"Waaahhh."
"……"
Ignoring me? What a cold-hearted brat.
And so we followed Chae Ju-ah around the gate, from one stretch of forest to the next. A believer in learning by doing, I suppose. Her lessons inside the gate were genuinely useful — the kind of hard-won know-how you can only pick up by putting your own feet on the ground.
"All right, shall we head back?"
"Yep yep, sounds good~"
"Yeah. We've definitely been in here a while."
We turned around and started back the way we had come, following Chae Ju-ah.
"You all did well today."
"Not at all. Where else would we ever get field training from you, sunbae?"
"Ahaha, is that so? Thanks for saying that."
Chae Ju-ah scratched the back of her head and laughed, looking genuinely bashful.
"Someone who can't take a compliment, huh?"
"A little, yeah."
From the glimpse I caught of her face, the corners of her mouth were climbing all the way to her ears.
We held formation and walked back along the path we had taken in. We were nearly at the gate's entrance when it happened.
The change came in an instant.
A low, hungry crackle of flame.
In a forest that had been dense and quiet a moment before, the sound of burning wood rolled toward us. Far ahead, black smoke and a wall of enormous fire came into view.
"A-a double gate? All of a sudden?!"
"Wh-whaaaaat?!"
There is a term for it: double gate, or overlapping gate. Exactly what it sounds like — a gate appearing inside a gate. It was not a phrase people used often, because the odds of one occurring at all were vanishingly small.
When one did occur, though, the damage was enormous. Inside a double gate, things changed fast. At the simpler end, the terrain shifted, or a different breed of monster started spawning. At the worse end, the gate's rank itself could jump dramatically — or entry from the outside could slam shut entirely.
This was one of those cases.
Originally, this gate had been nothing more than D-class.
But now...
"B-class... I think."
Chae Ju-ah said it with a slight frown. It wasn't an exact reading, but by her instincts the mana saturating the gate now sat somewhere around B-class.
A B-class gate was high-rank. Practically a disaster in its own right — setting aside the mythical S-class, there was only a single rank above it.
"I think I can clear it, but..."
With an S-class hunter on site, a clear itself was possible. The problem, such as it was, stood in a neat little row behind her.
Chae Ju-ah looked back at her juniors. She was the one who had brought them here today. She had wanted to play the part of a proper sunbae, and that impulse had become this field exercise. Walking off to kill the boss and leaving them behind...
She agonized between the two choices, and the more she turned the problem over, the bigger it grew, like a snowball rolling downhill.
"Ugh......"
While she was still sunk in it, Ga-eun and Haruka stepped forward.
"Sunbae, go ahead. We'll just hide."
"That's right. The trees are super thick — they'll take forever to burn through."
Behind them, the two guys nodded along with Ga-eun.
"Hmm. All right. Then you stay hidden somewhere decent, okay?"
A rolling snowball melts eventually. Chae Ju-ah drew the sword from her hip, and crimson mana spilled from her hand to coil around the blade. The compressed red light dyed the steel a deepening, dark crimson. The golden gleam it had worn before was gone without a trace. In its place remained only black metal, cold as bare steel.
"I'll be back quick."
"Yes. Take your time if you need to."
The instant the words left Ga-eun's mouth, Chae Ju-ah shot forward. In the time it took to blink, she was gone. The ground where she had been standing was cracked and gouged from the force of her launch. A swordsman-type hunter, and it showed — her physical ability was monstrous.
"Shall we find a place to sit tight, then?"
"Yeah, let's do what Gaeun-chan said."
"Agreed."
The four remaining students scanned the surroundings. Somewhere that wouldn't draw the eye, but would still be easy to bolt from in an emergency. A picky set of conditions. Whether it was the density of the forest or just dumb luck, we found a suitable spot almost immediately.
"How long do you think we'll have to wait?"
"She is S-class Hunter Chae Ju-ah. It won't take long."
"Haruka thinks so too."
The students huddled together at the base of a tree, crouched low.
"But hey. Sunbae won't get hurt, right?"
"No way that happens."
The guy shook his head at Haruka's worry. Chae Ju-ah had said the gate was about B-class. For an S-class hunter, that should have been simple.
"But still... it'll really be okay, right? I'm kinda worried..."
"Same here."
"Gaeun-chan..."
Haruka looked at Ga-eun with shining, moved eyes.
"She'll come back safely, though."
"That's a total flag, isn't it?"
"What? There's no way something like th—"
The moment Ga-eun started to say it—
A colossal explosion tore through the forest. KWAANG. The ground they were sitting on shuddered under the shockwave.
"Kyaaaaah!!!"
"Kyah!!"
"Ugh!"
"Hey. Now what."
That was a flag after all.