Guns and Wits (3)
The frozen-mantis affair and President Sung's case wrapped up more cleanly than I'd expected. The bounty from the Environmental Division for taking down a carnivorous insect had been pretty generous, and since President Sung hadn't so much as grumbled about the laptop I'd taken as payment in kind, it seemed he'd handled his end of things just fine.
I set up the brand-new laptop in the living room with no small amount of pride. Hana and Poppy's reactions, unfortunately, were lukewarm at best.
"Wow..."
"...What do you even do with this?"
Hana didn't have much interest in the laptop itself, and Poppy just shrugged it off, wondering what you'd need a laptop for when you already had a smartphone.
Well... I guess I'd use it myself, then.
Back when I was in college, a laptop was the mark of a kid from a well-off family. I used to swallow tears of blood every time I had to bounce between PC bangs and the library just to print out my materials — and now kids these days treated laptops like a nuisance and avoided them. You really did live long enough to see everything.
About two weeks had passed since the mantis incident. Apparently President Sung had gone around spreading some strange rumors, because for a while every kind of riffraff in the area showed up at the village hall or my house to make a nuisance of themselves.
The vast majority wanted to buy Magic Stones I might have gotten from the hunt, or monster byproducts, offering cash.
In this day and age, getting caught with that stuff means handcuffs on the spot. You think I'm crazy enough to keep any of it around?
Chasing them off with a "don't even start with that nonsense" was no small amount of work. In the end, I decided that until the scavengers sniffing around for leftover scraps stopped showing up, I'd take a proper break and turn down any hunting requests from the Environmental Division or the police substation for a while.
Every time I said I was going to rest, Hana would look up at me with those innocent eyes and ask,
"If Unnie takes a break, who's going to take care of the monsters?"
"Other huntsmen or Hunters, I suppose."
And that was the truth. The world wasn't going to turn upside down just because I took some time off. These days, the world was crawling with people far more capable than me — the kind who could take down a mere mantis or a water deer with their eyes closed.
The only real difference was that those people were expensive, and I was cheap. If I, the one they'd hired to save a few bucks, started patting my belly and saying I wasn't working anymore, the people who needed the work done would just cough up a little extra and hire some other huntsman or Hunter. That was the cold logic of a capitalist market for you.
But there was exactly one place where this capitalist logic didn't apply at all. Right here, in Dohwang-ri. The village I lived in.
Not because our village was some red-flag-waving, private-property-denying commie town. It was because whenever anything happened in Dohwang-ri, I was the one they called after the police substation.
That day was a summer afternoon, right before the rainy season set in. The weather was unpleasantly hot, and the humidity the coming monsoon had already dragged in, mixed with the dampness unique to the coast, made for the kind of irritating day that could make even mild-mannered Hana want to bite a passerby.
On a day like that, the sight of me being hauled out to the fish farm on the village fishermen's boat was quite the spectacle. Officer Lee, that city bumpkin, was hunched over one side of the boat, retching from seasickness, while Inspector Park ambled slowly across the precarious walkways of the aquaculture farm. The Coast Guard, who actually should have been there, were nowhere to be seen, and fishermen from other areas had their boats floating nearby, just watching from a distance.
The moment the fishing boat touched the farm's platform, I hopped down lightly and went straight to Inspector Park. I had to raise my voice over the roar of the waves.
"The Coast Guard isn't even here and this is a complete mess... why'd you call me?!"
"What?"
"I said it's a complete disaster!"
When I got closer, he was staring down at the aquaculture nets without a word.
"So, why'd you drag someone who hunts monsters on land all the way out here?"
"I didn't call you."
"Excuse me?"
Just then, a shout came from one of the boats watching from a distance.
"Sajeong! The co-op called you!"
"The Inspector didn't call you!"
"For crying out loud... so where's the Coast Guard, and what are they even doing?"
"If you can see it with the naked eye, even out on the water, it's our jurisdiction. The Coast Guard kids are currently duking it out over this whole area."
"Look, what can you even see from up here? We've got to pull it up first if we want to know anything."
"There's this thing called preserving the crime scene."
This guy... he really knew how to leave you speechless. I gave up trying to talk to him and shouted to the people around us.
"Hey! Everybody over here! Help me haul this net up!"
At my shout, even a few of the old-timers on the nearby boats came over to lend a hand.
"Alright, we pull on three! One, two, three!"
Even with me, a Semi-Awakened, adding my strength, a net that should have been packed full of farmed fish ought to have been pretty heavy — but it came up far too easily, practically gliding out of the water. Did I pull too hard? One of the old men helping us lost his balance from the recoil and tumbled straight into the sea.
"Aigoo~ you're splashing water everywhere!"
"Heh heh, sorry 'bout that~"
The old man who'd fallen in swam back up onto the platform like it was nothing, as if this happened every day. What a circus.
The aquaculture net was, quite spectacularly, completely empty. But there wasn't a single trace of it having been torn into by some large fish or monster. That was probably what Inspector Park had found so strange about the cleanly emptied net.
I flipped through the hauled-up net and found that the very bottom had been torn away in a neat, even line.
"Hey! The bottom edge here is torn out. This isn't just rotting from age, is it?"
"We replaced that net this year!"
If what the old man on the boat said was true, this was clearly something someone had done on purpose.
"Inspector, even if someone had a deep grudge, would they really go to the trouble of tearing out the very bottom of the net this cleanly?"
"You'd have to be crazy to put yourself through that kind of hassle. Hold on, keep holding that up for a second."
Inspector Park leaned in close to the net, turned on his smartphone flashlight, and examined the area more carefully.
"...This really was done by a person. Cut clean through with a knife."
"So I can go now, right?"
If this was just a case of damaged aquaculture nets — a dispute between people — there was no reason for me to stay involved.
"No. We don't know yet, so you're staying."
Aigoo... I'm screwed.
"Let's leave this mess for now and head back to shore. Officer Lee over there is about to die."
At my words, Inspector Park finally remembered Officer Lee, who was sprawled out at the bow like a strip of dried seaweed, and hurriedly waved both hands as he shouted.
"Like Huntsman Jang said, let's all disperse for now! I'll pass along any developments through the co-op chairman!"
The moment Inspector Park finished speaking, starting with the old-timers who'd been helping us and including the other fishermen who'd been watching, everyone piled onto their own boats and scattered. First a hunter, now playing detective. My head was starting to throb.
On the boat ride back to shore, Officer Lee kept retching, and I stared blankly out at the sea.
The moment we reached land, Inspector Park spoke up.
"Let's eat first. Let Officer Lee rest a bit too."
Inspector Park, Officer Lee, and I headed to a nearby sashimi restaurant the moment we got off the boat. If Officer Lee, still wrecked from seasickness, got in a car in this condition, he'd probably throw up everything he'd eaten yesterday too — and besides, it was lunchtime anyway.
Leaving Officer Lee still sprawled across the table like a strip of seaweed, I popped a thick slice of sashimi into my mouth and said,
"So, how was it cut?"
"What do you mean, how?"
"Well, even with monsters, you can tell from the bite marks whether it was fangs or molars. Knives can leave different marks depending on how they cut, too."
"You been watching too many movies? Where it was cut is what actually matters."
"And where do you think it was cut from?"
"From directly below. Cut from right underneath the net."
From directly below? Even if it was underneath a fish farm, diving into the middle of a wave-tossed sea to cut a net with a knife was the kind of work only professional divers would take on. Even if the old folks around here had been free-diving and swimming since they were born, they weren't at that level.
"And there weren't any other traces?"
"According to the Coast Guard kids, the nearby fish finders picked up regular sonar pulses around the time of the incident. That's probably why the co-op chairman called you. Thought it might've been a Variant."
"Maybe a pod of dolphins swam through, who knows."
My joke didn't land, but Inspector Park suddenly furrowed his brow and started seriously thinking something over.
"A pod of dolphins? Regular sonar pulses?"
A moment later, he shot up from his seat with an "Ah!"
"I've got it! Look after Officer Lee for me!"
And then, like a man who'd genuinely just figured out something huge, he bolted out of the restaurant in a hurry.
Okay, Officer Lee I can understand. But wait — the sashimi bill?
"Inspector Park? Inspector Park!! Hey!!!"
Despite my desperate cries, Inspector Park did not come back. Damn it. I got stuck with the bill after all. I crumpled the receipt into my pocket as I left the restaurant. I'd definitely collect from Inspector Park next time I saw him.
Officer Lee seemed to have recovered a bit after eating, at least enough that he could walk now.
"Huntsman Jang, I'm so sorry. I should have paid..."
"It's fine. I'll get it from the Inspector later."
"But still..."
"More importantly, what do you think, Officer Lee? About this case."
Caught off guard by the sudden question, Officer Lee stood there blankly for a moment before carefully opening his mouth.
"Um... maybe illegal fishing? Other fishermen trying to steal the fish..."
"If they wanted to steal the fish, why would they cut the net and let them all escape?"
"Ah... that's true."
Yep. Officer Lee was still Officer Lee.