The Mister Isn't a Bad Person
"Whew. Would you look at that?"
"Right? I bet we're the only guild that could take down an imugi."
Park Deokgu and his crew had come through the gate, and even from a distance the enormous corpse dragged a whistle of awe out of them. It wasn't a dragon, but an imugi—close enough—lay dead with blood still pouring from its body. The so-called A-rank imugi subjugation had succeeded.
Short of a true dragon, an imugi still carried magic nearly on that level and a body just as tough. They were brutally hard to hunt, and yet the Starlight Guild, the guild Park Deokgu belonged to, had finally brought one down. He and his team hadn't taken part in the kill themselves, but pride swelled in them all the same just for sharing the name. Belonging to the guild was enough, on its own, to make a man stand a little taller.
"All right. The main assault team just busted their backs on the hard part, so we'd better do our job."
Park Deokgu clapped his hands as he said it. The guild's main force had finished the grueling work. He and the others, stuck with the comparatively easy assignment, could not afford to fail.
"Just leave it to us."
Once a raid succeeded, sweeping the surrounding ground was their task. An imugi liked expensive, precious things, so a thorough search of the territory where one had lived stood a good chance of turning something worthwhile up. Scouting the area after clearing a gate had long since been written into standing orders. So long as they didn't wander too far, they'd be fine. Hunters still passed around the legendary rumor of some guy who'd been rummaging inside a gate, picked up a massive lump of gold, and turned his whole life around.
"Anything looks off, you report it right away. And don't forget the comms in your ears!"
With that, Park Deokgu and the others split into pairs and scattered. This was an A-rank raid zone. They needed to stay sharp while they searched. In a low-rank zone you could pick your nose and stroll. In a high-rank one, nobody knew what might crawl out, so a healthy dose of tension was mandatory.
He was pushing through the dark undergrowth when something reached his ear—the sound of footsteps.
"Hey, Jeonggu. You not hearing that?"
Park Deokgu looked at Jeonggu and lifted a hand: hold up.
"A sound? Hang on."
They stopped walking and listened toward the noise. Someone was trudging along. An ordinary person couldn't have caught footsteps from this distance, but Park Deokgu was Awakened—a hunter—with a body far past human limits. Like an animal, he could pick out the sound of someone walking from far away.
"Move. Radio the other pairs. We box it in. Footsteps sound like a small one, so don't let it bolt."
"Yessir!"
Coordinating over the comms, they adjusted their positions until they'd closed a ring around whatever it was. The unknown creature must have sensed them. It stopped walking and began darting this way and that. Park Deokgu got close enough to see it, and froze at how small it was. A humanoid monster—the kind you almost never saw—and from the look of it, the body wasn't even ten years old. At the sight of something so tiny, the tight tension of a moment ago went slack.
Most monsters carried strength to match their size. This one probably couldn't even outmuscle a rabbit. With his guard down, Park Deokgu walked toward the little figure waving its arms and scampering around. He still kept a firm grip on his knife, just in case, and closed in ready to strike the moment anything went wrong.
Then the dark lifted. Moonlight poured down, and the whole stretch of ground came clear: green hair, green eyes, a little girl. Whatever tension he'd been clinging to evaporated completely. No matter how hard a man tried to stay on edge, the sight of something that frail undid it. Park Deokgu let the knife hang and approached the child. First priority was taking her in. He moved carefully. She wore a frightened look and muttered something under her breath, but it wasn't Korean. Some language he couldn't place, and he couldn't understand a word of it.
In the end he caught the child who had been trying to flee to the last, slung her at his hip, and made it back. Leave her here and the other monsters would kill her. Still, for a raid zone where they'd just taken down an imugi, the haul felt thin. Humanoid monsters were rare, though. If she had some special ability, this might turn out to be a decent find. Looking at her, he doubted she had anything special at all.
I rolled my eyes this way and that, trying to get a read on the situation, and strained to eavesdrop on the men talking among themselves while they carried me tucked at someone's hip. Fortunately, they didn't seem intent on killing me. And judging by how easily one of them hefted me in a single hand, my body had gotten smaller. This was not the frame of a grown man who had finished his military service.
"We putting the Mana Restraint Device on this one?"
"Rules are rules... We ought to, shouldn't we? What're you gonna do if she goes berserk?"
"I know, I know. But look at this little thing and I start thinking of my girl back home. Stings a bit..."
"She's a humanoid monster found inside a gate. We do it by the book."
"Yeah. Rather that than get our asses chewed for not listening."
From the sound of whatever they meant to put on me, it wasn't going to be good. I could understand every word they said, but the moment I tried to speak, some strange language that wasn't Korean leapt out of my mouth. My brain formed Korean. My mouth produced something else. Even I was confused by my own words.
Weren't hunters legally obligated to protect ordinary people? These ones seemed to have forgotten the law existed. I shrieked and thrashed, but they didn't seem to care. If anything, they took it for a tantrum and laughed among themselves as I flailed.
How many dozens of minutes did we walk? A brightly shining gate came into view. Cross through there, and I could get back to my old home. I went still, biding my time. The moment they loosened their grip—the moment their guard dropped—I would sprint for that glowing gate. Back in the real world, I would show the hunters who had tormented me exactly what a sharp legal reckoning looked like, and then I would return to the comfort of my own house. Of every plan I had ever cooked up, this was the most perfect.
My perfect plan collapsed in an instant. We reached the rally point, and a shaggy hunter whose face was all beard fastened a metal chain around my neck: a collar, with a long leash trailing from it.
"Ah... uh..."
I tried to yell at them to stop, but again no words came. The hunter who had collared me glanced at the others, then stroked my head.
"They'll take this off once we get you to the guild lab, so just behave till then, yeah?"
I felt as if I'd been turned into an animal. I couldn't speak, sure, but I was still a person. Was it really all right to treat me like this? The shabby handling nearly brought me to tears. I actually felt something wet sliding down my cheek.
Life felt hollow. Only yesterday I had been an ordinary person. Now a massive ordeal had dropped on me. I had been living in a studio apartment, scraping by on part-time work, barely keeping myself alive—but even then, I had been free. Now I was nothing but loot with a restraint locked around my neck. The world had turned upside down in a single day, and my head was overloaded.
Hunters had a duty to protect ordinary people. That duty, it seemed, did not apply to me. Piecing together what the hunters around me were saying, I had woken up in the body of a little girl, which was probably why none of them thought of me as a threat. They weren't wrong. This body was small and frail, incapable of doing any real harm. Even if I had gotten my old body back, I couldn't have done anything here anyway.
Surrounded by grim-faced men with swords, my presence only kept shrinking. I wanted to throw it all away and go home. I was so cornered that I missed the comfort of the old, uncomfortable bed back in my old place.
But they did not undo the cold, scratchy restraint cinched tight around my neck. Like a dog out for a walk, I was dragged out of the gate on a leash.