Mannequin vs. Dummy vs. Mannequin
I put in a call to my dedicated support officer.
"Hello, this is Yoon Jaeha."
"Yes, Hunter Yoon Jaeha. What can I do for you?"
"Could you get me a single mannequin? The kind you can usually find in a clothing store."
"Understood. Shall I have it sent to the training room?"
"Yes, I'd appreciate that."
One of my benefits was a dedicated support officer assigned to me alone. They'd agreed to handle the full sweep of hunter work—proxying auctions, procuring whatever I needed, commissioning equipment, and the rest.
The officer delivered the mannequin, and I—
Will Imbuement
I finished equipping it as well.
A Lv. 1 dummy procured outside the Tower, and a Lv. 1 mannequin. Their conditions were identical. The only difference was what they were.
"So now the two of them fight?"
"Right. I want to see what kind of difference there is between the individuals."
"This is gonna be fun!"
Sia looked up at me, laughing with pure, innocent delight.
Ghk!
I looked away before I even knew I was doing it. I mean, I couldn't just stare straight back at her, could I?
"All right, start!"
And so it began.
Tat-tat—
Tat—
At first they were even. But as time went on, the mannequin was pushed back. About a minute in—
Crash.
The mannequin rolled and broke into a run. The dummy stuck right on its heels, refusing to let it go. I'd thought this would be settled more easily than that.
"Huh?"
"Whoa!"
The mannequin climbed onto the railing and, in a single surge, hauled itself up to the floor above. When the dummy tried to follow, the mannequin checked it. They ended up facing off. Then the dummy fetched training equipment and started hurling it up onto the structure—but the mannequin batted every throw aside, so it never became much of a threat.
"That's enough."
A meaningful test. Even if I hadn't expected it to play out like this.
"Waaah... Jaeha, this is way too much fun."
"Right?"
Unlike a spar between people, they went all out trading blows, and that made it even more thrilling.
Upload this and the views would explode.
Not that I had any intention of doing so.
"Next. Get ready."
Next up was a Lv. 2 mannequin against the dummy that had just hit Lv. 2 from the fight before.
"Who's gonna win this time?"
"Hard to say."
One was from inside the Tower and one from outside, but the gap between mannequin and dummy might cancel that out.
"Start."
Pat—
Tat-tat—
I thought the opening would look about the same.
THUD—!
"Ah!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa?!"
It went in a direction nothing like what I'd expected. The mannequin threw its weapon away, took the incoming attack with its body, and drove in a tackle. It climbed on top, pinned the arms, and—
THUD! THUD! CRACK!
—smashed the dummy's head apart with a headbutt in an instant.
"Haa..."
"Haaa..."
My own face overlapped the shattered dummy, and the sight made me dizzy.
To think it'd fight like that.
The mannequin's metacognition was airtight. It knew a weapon that amounted to nothing more than a rubber bat couldn't hurt it, and that it didn't have the strength to stop the thing either, so it went for the tackle. Discarding the weapon must have been a judgment drawn from experience. On top of that, it had seen straight through the difference between objects from the Tower and objects from outside. If there hadn't been a gap in durability between the two, the mannequin would have taken damage as well.
That settles it. Even under the same skill's influence, an individual from inside the Tower is superior.
I'd have to get more mannequins from in there.
"Jaeha."
"Yeah?"
I turned my head and found those clear, glittering eyes looking up at me.
What? Why does Sia's gaze feel so scary?
"Let's go train."
"S-suddenly?"
"If you train, the mannequin gets trained too, right?"
"Well, yeah, but."
"Then if I train you, I'll get to watch even more fun fights, won't I?"
"Uh—uh? Does it work like that?"
Sia snatched my hand.
"Come on, hurry!"
And took off at a run.
"Please check off the training you require."
"Yes."
Basics first. Weapons: hand axe, dagger, and hammer. Oh, and rope mobility training would be good too, wouldn't it? There was parkour as well. Learning that properly could only help.
I wanted this and I wanted that, and by the time I finished checking boxes—
A bit much?
Eh, so what? If I ran out of time, I could always learn more next round. That was the careless thought I had, not knowing it was the seed of disaster.
"Good to meet you, Hunter Choi Jinhyuk!"
"Good to meet you, Hunter Yoon Jaeha."
To think I'd actually be trained by the real Hunter Choi Jinhyuk!
Even before I entered the Tower, I'd watched every one of his videos—not just the combat footage, but the instructional ones too. You could fairly say the movements and foundational knowledge I'd shown inside the Tower were built on Hunter Choi Jinhyuk's videos.
"The footage you submitted, Hunter Yoon Jaeha. I watched it. It left an impression."
"You watched my video?"
I'd heard from the team leader that it was going public tomorrow. So Hunter Choi Jinhyuk had reviewed it before it ever went up.
"Yes. Then we will begin instruction immediately."
Huh? That was it? He didn't have any questions? Not even a comment?
"Ordinarily we would begin with basic physical conditioning. Time is short, so we will proceed directly to practical instruction."
That, at least, was a relief.
"Yes, yessir."
"All answers will be 'yes.' No exceptions."
"Yes!"
Noise discipline, night movement, concealment and cover, infiltration. The first round of basic training wasn't difficult. I'd previewed all of it on video, after all.
"Trainee Yoon Jaeha."
"Yes."
"Have you received training before?"
"No. But I have watched every one of Hunter Choi Jinhyuk's videos."
Watched them, and then put them through real combat inside the Tower.
"Excellent. Gathering intelligence beforehand and preparing a response before entering the Tower was sound judgment."
Ah. And here I'd thought he was praising me for watching his videos.
We moved on to weapons training. But after I watched Hunter Choi Jinhyuk's demonstration, a question occurred to me.
"I have a question."
"Trainee. State your question."
"Aren't there more complex movements?"
Watching his videos had led me to special-forces training footage as well.
In the videos I saw, it was definitely more complicated.
Every demonstration he'd just shown was a single motion. At most, a combination of two.
"Because you, trainee, are fighting zombies, not people. A zombie's movements are simple, unlike a human's. Against an opponent like that, complex combinations are waste."
"Aha."
"When you face zombies, you subdue them simply and quickly. You do not give them room to grab you or tangle with you."
Movements that considered nothing but real combat. Yeah—coming to train under Hunter Choi Jinhyuk had been the right call.
The demonstration ended, and we went straight into practice. First, attacks on the dummy.
"One hundred repetitions. Execute."
"Execute!"
A simple motion, over and over: bringing the hand axe down on the head.
"You do not drive it with the arm alone! Brace the lower body! Use the waist! One hundred more! Execute!"
"Ex-execute!"
The more I repeated it, the higher my accuracy climbed.
"One hundred! Execute!"
"Execuuute!"
I could feel myself getting sharper. That was all well and good, but—
"One hundred! Execute!"
"Ex-e-cuuute!"
How long was I supposed to repeat this one motion?!
"Execute!"
"Exeeecuuute!"
I kept going until my arm wouldn't rise anymore.
Yoo Sia, that girl... leaving me here all alone like this!
She'd confirmed I'd come in to train, then gone off to spar with the mannequin. She'd claimed it was to check whether its movements were steadily improving.
She just wants to play with a toy!
No wonder she'd been smiling when I walked into training. She'd known exactly how hard this was going to be.
The only reason I held out was the drinks and pain patches I brought back from the Tower.
Without those, the intensity was enough to wreck my arms. Fortunately the dagger and the hammer got pushed to the next session. Training, however, was not over. We'd only moved on to rope work and unarmed mobility—in other words, parkour.
"Krgh!"
"Trainee. No sound. You climb all the way up!"
"Yes!"
Since when had I gone from trainee to recruit?!
Hauling myself up a rope, or scaling a building with nothing but my body, was hell. And because I was the only one receiving the training, there wasn't even time to rest.
Damn it—all this misery because of the special intensive training benefit!
Hunter Choi Jinhyuk even doped me with coffee and drove me like a demon. The result: the payoff sank in deep enough that I felt it in my bones. The side effect, if you could call it one, was that I'd become a mummy plastered in pain patches.
Damn it, I should've signed up for one a day!
And this was the accelerated course. It ended here, or I really might have died.
"You will report by 0900 tomorrow morning, trainee."
Sorry? Tomorrow too? It wasn't over today?
"Understood?"
"Yes!"
Signing up had been my choice. Graduating me was the instructor's.
Ugh. It's already ten at night.
I'd made Sia wait far too long.
Beep—
I held my card to the training room door.
"Ahahahahaha! Run, run, run!"
"What in the...?"
Sia was tearing all over the place, riding piggyback on the mannequin. It was even bounding up the structures with her on its back.
Oh, that looks fun.
No, wait a second. She said she was going to check whether the mannequin's movements improved in real time! She'd just been playing!
"Ha!"
Sia, who'd been laughing for ages, finally noticed me.
"Oh, you're back?"
"Yeah."
I'd felt bad for making her wait, but apparently that worry had been unnecessary.
"You look like you're having fun."
"Ahaha... this? I-it's just a mobility test...!"
"A mobility test?"
Meanwhile I'd turned into a mummy.
"It's true! You know—back in the Tower, that time I carried you and ran? I wondered if the mannequin could carry someone and run in an emergency too!"
"Ah."
Right. That had happened. A zombie wave about to crash down on us, and Sia running with me on her back. Remembering it brought back how soft she had felt. So that had been Yoo Sia, carrying me.
"H-hm. A meaningful test, then."
Right. She's pretty, so she's forgiven.
"R-right?!"
Sia must have remembered that moment too, because she turned her head away.
"Sorry for making you wait so late."
"No, it's fine. I got a lot out of it too."
"Yeah?"
What kind of help was that supposed to be?
"Yeah! The mannequin's movements kept getting better in real time, so it got harder and harder to dodge. From the middle on, I got hit a bunch of times."
"Wha—you got hit? You okay?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine! This is nothing. It's a rubber bat, so what."
A jolt ran through me. I glared at the mannequin. The thing casually turned its head, pretending not to notice.
What kind of reaction is that? Are you actually a person?
Somehow the mannequin's reaction and mine overlapped. Suddenly I was angry. So that thing had been running around with Sia on its back? Don't tell me the mannequin had been grinning about it the whole time, too.