WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈
Chapter 101: Behemoth - [4]
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Jeong Jinyeong thought dazedly.
This is a dream.
It had to be a dream. What had just happened couldn't be real, so it had to be.
About three minutes earlier, Jang Byeonggon had died.
He had been lying prone and firing his gun when a Deathclaw dropped from the rooftop of the building next to him. Its hooked claw struck him in the back and killed him.
They shot the Deathclaw dead immediately, but Jang Byeonggon didn't move.
It had happened and ended in an instant, before anyone had time to recognize the danger.
There hadn't even been any warning of the terrible situation to come, yet one of their teammates had died.
It hit him again just how easy and safe their hunts had been while following Kim Geuk. Other Hunters must have faced things like this as part of their daily lives...
And Kim Geuk, who had always done everything he could to shield the team and keep them from dying, wasn't here now.
From what he had heard over the radio earlier, Kim Geuk didn't seem safe either. The transmission had been too unclear to tell whether he was dead or badly injured, but either way, he wasn't in any condition to come if they called for him.
That fact filled him with more fear than he could have imagined...
His jaw, no longer under his control, chattered uncontrollably.
Im Hyeongtaek's sharp voice pierced through his fear and thoughts. He repeatedly struck Jinyeong's shoulder as he shouted.
“What... bastard... run...!”
The explosions rumbling from every direction drowned out the words, but from the situation and his expression, Jinyeong could roughly guess what he had said.
What are you doing, bastard? Run!
There was no time to be surprised that such words had come from the always-gentle Im Hyeongtaek.
Jeong Jinyeong ran.
Monsters had broken through even to the rear. Other Deathclaws besides the one that had killed Jang Byeonggon were charging down the road in the distance.
More importantly, Behemoth had come far too close.
“Retreat... re...!”
Im Hyeongtaek kept shouting through the noise. Retreat. Jinyeong ran as he had said.
The ground shook so violently that running wasn't easy, but he had to run. If he didn't want to die like Jang Byeonggon...
Everyone was running for their lives when a shout rang out.
「D-Don't leave me behind!」
It seemed to come from behind them.
In other words, it sounded like Jang Byeonggon, whom they had had to abandon without even recovering his body!
“Jang Byeonggon? You were al...”
「I'm alive! Seong Munyeong, Lee Jongho! Jeong Jinyeong! Help me!」
There was no doubt about it. His name had been called!
Jeong Jinyeong stopped running and looked behind him.
Jang Byeonggon was still lying where he had fallen, and the Deathclaws hadn't reached him yet.
That meant they might still be able to help him.
By the time he finished making that judgment, Jinyeong realized he was already running.
Jeong Jinyeong ran toward Jang Byeonggon.
As he ran away from the team alone, he felt a faint swell of emotion in his chest even in this crisis.
Neither Lee Jongho nor Seong Munyeong had stepped forward, but he alone was going to help a teammate. Maybe he would be able to brag about it for years afterward... In the middle of an emergency like this, he needed even pathetic thoughts like that to calm his fear.
Behemoth was still advancing. The earth shook in time with its footsteps, and thunderous noise echoed everywhere.
But how had Jang Byeonggon's shout pierced through all that noise and reached him so clearly?
By the time he realized something was strange, it was too late.
Far too late.
* * *
I looked at the explosives laid out in front of me.
The soldiers had gathered them from all over at my request in the short time available.
“Is this all?”
A colonel answered my question.
“For now. Why, isn't it enough?”
I shook my head.
It seemed like it might be enough. More would have been better, of course...
Using all these explosives still wouldn't be enough to kill Behemoth. Even a nuclear bomb probably wouldn't do it. Whether it was a nuke or conventional explosives, neither could erase a four-hundred-meter mountain in one go.
Still, this much explosive could punch a hole through that mountain. It might even take off one of its peaks.
What I intended to do was something along those lines. Damage part of the mountain.
“What are you planning to do with these explosives? No matter how I look at it, they don't seem nearly enough...”
I answered the soldier who asked.
“I'm going to bring down that tail. I'll use every last explosive, starting at its base.”
“The tail? Ah, that would definitely...”
We had to destroy Behemoth's tail.
The tail that had originally fired spikes as a Manticore's tail, but now only spewed Heat Rays.
As I had seen earlier, Behemoth appeared capable of firing Heat Rays from its eyes too. Still, when it shot down helicopters and fighter jets in the air, it only used its tail.
I guessed its face was some kind of fixed gun emplacement with limited movement. Even if it had aim correction, it probably couldn't track such fast aircraft just by moving its neck.
If we could somehow remove that tail, fighters wouldn't explode one or two at a time whenever Behemoth's Heat Ray cut through the sky.
Air support would arrive soon. We had to do it before then.
If we didn't act now, while the bombing had stopped, we wouldn't have another chance to work on Behemoth's body without worrying about friendly fire. And if we didn't want to watch every fighter coming to support us get shot down, it had to be done now.
Before I used Spatial Teleportation with the explosives, I saw a man moving at incredible speed. He was so fast that I could only barely tell a person was moving through my mental net.
Han Hee?
I thought the Special Forces had finally come to help, but that didn't seem to be it.
Han Hee had come to help. He just hadn't come as a member of the Special Forces.
After slicing through Deathclaw after Deathclaw at high speed, Han Hee stopped for a moment, apparently exhausted. When I got a clear look at him, he wasn't wearing a Special Forces uniform but a tracksuit.
It seemed he had rushed over in casual clothes because he was afraid the senior members of the Special Forces would curse him out again if he joined the battle in uniform.
I didn't know whether I should admire his resolve or the Special Forces' determination to make him hide Monster hunting like illegal dumping.
I watched Han Hee start moving again and massacring Monsters, then used Spatial Teleportation with the explosives.
I appeared in front of Behemoth's tail.
Standing atop that colossal Monster's body, I got to work as quickly as possible.
I teleported, in one go, the maximum mass of explosives that Spatial Teleportation could move, then attached them to Behemoth's tail.
If I stayed in one spot for over a second while doing that, I was finished. A Heat Ray would fly in and erase me without a trace.
I couldn't move all the explosives in one or two teleports, so I kept working, desperately repeating Spatial Teleportation as quickly as I could.
Dizzy from teleporting over and over, I confirmed that I had moved every prepared explosive and detonated them.
An explosion erupted from Behemoth's tail. It was a spectacular blast, like a nuclear bomb had gone off... Success!
But once the flames and smoke cleared, my eyes widened.
The tail was still attached to Behemoth's body.
The explosion had done some damage. It had stripped away every rock attached to the tail.
Behemoth's bare flesh was exposed, the skin of its tail almost completely hairless.
There wasn't a single wound on that exposed skin. Not even a scratch. Why?
I forced my mind to work as fast as possible to understand the situation.
Then I reached my own conclusion.
Just as Seok Jangsil did when he formed a rock giant, Behemoth seemed to have traveled with as many rocks attached to its body as possible. That was why it had looked so much bigger than its original size.
Gigantified individuals usually moved with almost as much agility as ordinary ones, no matter how large they got, but now I understood why Behemoth alone had been so slow.
As a Gigantified individual, Behemoth's original body was probably around two hundred meters tall. Then, after becoming a Rock Elemental, it didn't turn its whole body into stone. Instead, it reinforced its size and defense by attaching rocks around itself. It had probably been walking around in armor roughly two hundred meters in scale. This time, the armor on its tail had shattered.
The tail revealed by the blast had to be part of its real body.
That bare flesh was probably far tougher than the armor. Seeing how the blast had done it no damage, there was no doubt.
I continued thinking as I looked at Behemoth's tail, which seemed to be nine or ten meters thick.
Even an Ogre around five meters tall was incredibly tough. The muscles all over its body were hard enough that autocannon rounds couldn't kill it in a single hit.
Gigantified individuals were generally like that.
At that size, an animal's bones and muscles supposedly couldn't support its own weight. It would be crushed to death by its own body, or be unable to move on land at all...
To solve all those problems, the bones of Gigantified individuals grew thicker and harder, while their muscles developed to become tough and powerful enough to support that absurd weight.
Behemoth's muscles had probably developed enough to support and move a body about two hundred meters tall.
Then how hard were those muscles?
Could human weapons even destroy them?
I didn't know. There was no time to find out.
Still, I knew another means of destruction that wasn't a human weapon. A weapon that could work no matter how hard that bastard's body was.
I quickly made a request over the radio.
「Force-field blades! Get awakened people who can use force-field blades here as fast as possible!」
A reply soon came back that they had two awakened people ready in response to my request.
I used Spatial Teleportation to the location they gave me over the radio, where two familiar faces were waiting.
“Han Hee and Park Juheon?”
Han Hee was expected, but Park Juheon was a surprise. I asked him.
“I get why Han Hee's here, but why are you here? You unemployed bastard, you quit being a Hunter.”
There wasn't enough time to snap at him that his Special Forces juniors had refused to come, ignoring orders from above, so I didn't.
Park Juheon smiled awkwardly.
“I'm going to become an academy instructor soon.”
“So what?”
“When students ask, ‘Teacher, what were you doing while Behemoth was rampaging?’ I can't say, ‘I wasn't a Hunter back then, so I was at home taking a crap.’”
Ah, this bastard. He had taken Special Forces work seriously enough to be willing to kill because it was an order from his superior, and now it looked like he was going to take being a teacher just as seriously.
Park Juheon kept rambling after that. It wasn't because he was talkative. He seemed to be trying to relieve his nerves. There wasn't time to chat, but I didn't stop him.
“And you have to understand why the Special Forces guys aren't moving... When I got kicked out, the atmosphere in the Special Forces was ugly. They said everyone had gotten fired for only doing what the Special Forces commander directly ordered, and people were saying you couldn't just blindly follow orders because they came from above...”
“Understand my ass.”
When I finally snapped, Park Juheon snorted.
“Fair enough. I don't need to defend them, do I? I'm here as a former Hunter, not as a former Special Forces member.”
Then I asked him.
“You know there's a high chance you'll die doing this, right?”
“When you work as a Hunter, dying at any time is normal.”
After Park Juheon, I looked at Han Hee.
I asked whether he had a longer sword like the one Park Juheon had brought, since his blade looked too short for this operation. He answered that this was the best he could do. It was the longest sword he could coat with force-field blades.
Well, Han Hee barely had any real hunting experience. He couldn't have developed spiritually as much as Park Juheon.
After exchanging various signals over the radio, I took the hands of the two blade wielders.
The signal we had been waiting for arrived.
「Now!」
I used Spatial Teleportation with Han Hee and Park Juheon.
Footnotes:
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