WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Arsène

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◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈

Chapter 73: Spatial Ability User Kim Geuk - [2]

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The hunt went much the same way as before.

Once I located the Monsters with my mental net, the Hunters headed over, set up overlapping fields of fire, and killed them together.

There was one extra step this time. After killing a Monster, I used my mental net to thoroughly search every object in the surrounding area.

I expected that if I put in an hour or two of work like this, I'd find something.

My Spatial Teleportation range and the range of my mental net had both increased drastically. Thanks to that, even my speed at finding Monsters to hunt was on a whole different level from before. The Incheon Recovery Project was progressing faster with each passing day too.

So I thought finding one little girl would be easy.

But two hours passed, then four, and there were still no results.

I found neither the girl nor any trace of her.

It was frustrating. I thought I'd find her quickly if she was alive, and that even if she was dead, I'd at least be able to find her body soon.

By then, I was determined to find her out of sheer stubbornness. I focused on searching for the child the entire time we hunted and rested.

I barely touched my lunch and didn't chat with the other team members during our breaks. I kept extending my mental net to inspect the surroundings, but nothing changed. All I found were a few more Monsters worth hunting that afternoon.

I must have looked pretty grim after getting nowhere.

Maybe the other Hunters could tell I was upset, because they helped with the search that afternoon.

“Mirae, can you hear us?!”

They had been doing this that morning too, but Naito and his team members shouted the missing girl's name.

They were probably still filming YouTube videos. Normally, I would've cursed that non-awakened piece of trash for pulling every stunt imaginable just to make his videos look good, but I was grateful even for that now.

The other delinquent-looking Hunters weren't completely clueless either. Whenever they subdued a group of Monsters, they searched through the nearby brush to help me. Still, nothing turned up.

“Where the hell is that kid?”

“Was she really taken in the first place?”

Despite me pushing myself harder than usual, and despite Naito and his team shouting themselves hoarse, the hunt ended without finding seven-year-old Shin Mirae.

As we left the danger zone around nightfall, the woman who had asked us to search for her missing daughter was waiting for us.

Im Hyeongtaek watched my reaction before speaking.

“Kim Geuk, you look more tired than usual... Should I go tell her instead?”

I silently nodded, and Im Hyeongtaek approached the woman to tell her the day's results in my place.

In other words, he told her we hadn't found so much as a single hair from her daughter's head.

The woman seemed overcome with emotion. She approached me with an expression like she was about to cry, but stopped just before speaking.

She only watched my reaction before trailing off.

“You must have had a hard time because of me today. I'm so sorry...”

Why was this woman acting like that? As I stood there blankly, Seong Munyeong muttered.

“Your face must look terrifying right now...”

“What’s wrong with my face?”

“You look really bad right now. Dambi?”

My ring girl took a mirror from the makeup kit she usually carried around and held it in front of me.

That was when I saw my face.

My eyes were bloodshot and red. The veins in my face bulged everywhere, making me look grotesque.

I had worked much harder than usual while searching so carefully today. My nervous system must have been overworked.

Still, I didn't feel like comforting myself by saying I'd worked hard enough.

“Good work, everyone...?”

After everyone cautiously dispersed while watching my reaction, I pretended to head home with the other Hunters. Then I said I had somewhere to stop by and slipped away alone.

I returned to the place where we'd hunted together all day.

Then I resumed what I'd been doing all day. I spread out my mental net and searched everything within a three-kilometer radius over and over.

The other Hunters had risked their lives enough today, so I couldn't ask them to work any harder. Some people might have tried to stay out of caution around me, so I did it alone without telling anyone.

I didn't know why I was so obsessed with this. Was it because I was annoyed that something I thought would be easy hadn't worked out? Or because I'd expected Naito's YouTube video to be titled something like, ‘Kim Geuk Rescues a Missing Child!’ and that hadn't happened?

The reason didn't matter.

Obviously, Incheon was my land.

I couldn't sleep peacefully after losing even one of my sheep on my land. Never.

But no matter how determined I was, determination alone did nothing.

I continued searching until it was completely dark, but I still couldn't find seven-year-old Shin Mirae.

* * *

When we gathered to hunt again the next day, Seong Munyeong took one look at me and said,

“Geuk, what happened to your face?”

“I stayed up all night playing Dungeon Fighter for the first time in a while.”

“That’s not the face of someone who played a game all night. Geuk, did you...”

Everyone watched my reaction again, so I waved a hand.

“Enough. Let’s get to work.”

We passed the woman who had come looking for her daughter again and entered the danger zone.

The old district was empty after everyone had left. With my eyes closed, I spread my mental net and mapped out the Monsters hiding in abandoned buildings as if they were caves.

Then my mental net caught a living thing, and I opened my eyes.

I told everyone what I'd detected.

“I see a strange Monster.”

“What kind of Monster?”

“A painfully skinny bear? That’s about what it feels like...”

As usual, whenever we didn't know how dangerous a situation was, Baek Dambi took the lead.

She walked forward with a light machine gun, followed by the other non-awakened Hunters. A few gunshots rang out, and the situation was over.

“Uh, I’ve never seen this thing before...”

I looked at the Monster's bleeding corpse.

Just as I'd seen through the net, it resembled a bear.

It was emaciated and nearly hairless, but its frame was unmistakably that of a bear. At a glance, it didn't look all that different from an animal from Earth.

“What the hell is this thing? Does anyone know this Monster's name?”

“Looks like nobody does. Then maybe it’s a new species?”

Finding a Monster that had never been reported before wasn't particularly unusual.

That was because of Gates.

The moment a living creature entered a Gate and became a spiritual body, everything from aging to metabolism stopped. Monsters that would otherwise starve to death or die of old age could avoid death simply by entering a Gate.

That was why it was common for a Monster to stay inside a Gate for decades or even centuries before emerging into the world. Gates were filled with creatures from species that were practically extinct, so unfamiliar Monsters often emerged from them like artifacts dug out from beneath the ground.

While the cameraman filmed the Monster's corpse, Naito murmured as if he were narrating.

“It really does look like a bear. That’s ominous...”

“What’s wrong with bears? It died when we shot it a few times. It doesn’t seem as dangerous as a Deathclaw.”

“Still, bears are frightening in their own way.”

Naito began explaining, as expected of a Japanese person.

He said bears killed a lot of people. Bears didn't always wait to kill their prey before eating it either, and people were sometimes eaten alive by bears. Seong Munyeong got annoyed halfway through listening.

“Why are you saying something so horrifying when a child has been kidnapped? There’s already one person here who's worrying himself sick about it...”

Seong Munyeong glanced at me as he said that. Only then did Naito read the room and apologize to me.

We continued hunting and searching after that, but I only grew more exhausted.

Well, not just me. My team members and the other Hunters seemed tired too, probably because they all kept watching my reaction.

Maybe Baek Dambi couldn't stand seeing this any longer, because she made a suggestion.

“What about looking for that child inside a Gate?”

As far as I knew, opening a Gate was quite difficult.

“I didn't hear that she was an awakened person. Non-awakened people's souls are almost impossible to see from even a short distance away, aren't they?”

“Even so, I'll at least try.”

After hesitating for a moment, I nodded. Baek Dambi began opening a Gate, then entered the purple space that soon appeared.

Several dozen minutes later, Baek Dambi came back out of the Gate.

With an ominous expression, she shouted.

“Kim Geuk? Come in and look. Hurry!”

It looked like she'd found something. I immediately entered the Gate, and the purple world accepted me.

Ahead of me, I heard not Baek Dambi's actual voice, but her mental waves.

「Follow me...!」

I followed Baek Dambi, who had become a glowing silhouette like me, or rather, a spiritual body, through the Gate for some time.

Then, after walking for who knew how long, I found several enormous Monsters sleeping inside the Gate.

They were Monsters like the bear we'd seen today.

There were several of them, but the largest bear caught my attention.

It had a little girl's head in its mouth while its massive body crushed her small body beneath it...

「Mom? Mom, I’m here...」

That young, weak voice, no, those mental waves, seemed to come from the girl trapped beneath the bear.

I'd finally found her. And she was alive!

I was overcome with joy at the thought that I could finally bring the girl back to her mother, but then I felt the negative emotions still flowing from Baek Dambi and looked up.

Baek Dambi asked me.

「Can you move that bear off the child’s body?」

I was about to immediately say that of course I could, but stopped.

A hallucination I'd seen before suddenly came to mind.

Baek Dambi preparing to leave for Sword World. Me grabbing her wrist to stop her from leaving, but failing to hold onto her in the end...

It was difficult to physically affect anything inside a Gate, where everything had taken spiritual form.

And if I couldn't even hold onto my little ring girl, then what chance did I have against that bear bastard?

「Fuck!」

I shoved it with all my strength, but the bear Monster's silhouette didn't move an inch.

Naturally, Shin Mirae, trapped beneath it, didn't move either. Still, perhaps she sensed the external stimulus, because the child murmured.

「Mom, I’m here. Save me, okay? Save me...」

The terrible feeling I felt then couldn't have been coming from Baek Dambi alone.

I knew I wouldn't be able to take that child away. I knew I'd have to tell her mother that her daughter had become some bear's emergency food supply that would never rot, condemned to suffer like this forever.

* * *

“What if we open a Gate in front of those bear bastards? You know how Monsters inside Gates always rush out whenever an elemental opens a Gate near itself, so they don't miss a chance to hunt?”

“I already tried. Those bastards didn't move whether I opened a Gate or not. They've already got emergency food prepared, so they don't seem to have any reason to rush... Something like that.”

“What if someone wandered around nearby while the Gate was open? If we use bait to lure them out of the Gate...”

“I tried that too. Dambi said that as an ice ability user, Monsters would go crazy if they saw her, so she came out alone and wandered around. Even then, they didn't move.”

After leaving the Gate, I discussed every possible idea with the Hunters gathered there, but none of it got us anywhere.

All I did was confirm again that I couldn't bring the girl back to her mother, or even pull her out from under that bear's body.

The frustration I had felt turned into something horrible.

If I'd found the child's corpse, I wouldn't have felt this terrible. I could've told myself I'd done what I could, shed a few tears, and soothed my sadness. If I got some sleep after that, maybe I could have a fairly pleasant day the next day.

But I couldn't do that now.

I'd done my best in my own way, but the situation wasn't over. I had no idea when it would end.

Maybe I'd never be able to forget this, even after time passed.

Because even as time passed, that child would still be alive, and her tiny body would still be trapped beneath that bear's body.

The child would stay alive without being able to die. Then, one day, when the bear decided to bask in the sun, she'd finally be able to crawl out from beneath it.

Then the bears would tear her apart and eat her. Maybe alive. Maybe while she screamed one final, “Mom!”

That would be the final moment of her life as living emergency food. She would be swallowed by Monsters and become their shit.

When would that day come? Decades from now? Or centuries?

I didn't know. I didn't even know whether I should hope that day came as soon as possible, or as far in the future as possible...

I tried to think of a way to break through this disgusting situation.

Footnotes:

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