WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈
Chapter 8: Rock Spirit - [1]
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“Spirits, you've all seen them in fantasy novels or games, right? They're romanticized. They protect nature, bless swords, and all that...
“The spirits that come out of Gates aren't like that. They're just bastards obsessed with eating people, so I don't know why anyone bothers calling them something as fancy as spirits. I guess people overseas called them Elementals, and someone insisted on translating it that way. But let me say it again, these bastards are just obsessed with eating people.
“And there's something more important than their diet. If you ever spot an elemental, don't even think about trying anything. Hide. Run, no matter what. You can't kill one with the small arms you'd be carrying around.
“On the other hand, elementals can kill you with a single glance.
“Look at ice ability users. People call them iceheads. They can't kill Monsters, but they could kill a person or an elephant just by looking at them, right? Elementals are the same. They can burn your brain out just by looking at you, or generously pump your blood vessels full of oxygen. You need to avoid getting caught in their line of sight at all.
“Ah, Kim Geuk, you don't have to avoid their line of sight. Awakened people can't use their abilities directly on each other's bodies, right? The abilities used by elementals and Monsters work the same way, so they can't do that to awakened people. Just like ice ability users can't freeze a Monster's insides or freeze an entire body part and make it necrotize...
“Uh, Kim Geuk, you have something to say? Why do I keep using ice ability users as an example... Sorry. What should I use from now on? Rock ability users? They're too strong for anyone to relate to them as an example...”
* * *
On the day of the Hunter exam, I was honestly nervous.
The academy had spent no small amount supporting me so far. What if I failed and became a burden to them? I turned on my phone to ease my nerves.
Ⓐ BabyBerserker : Is da Hunter exam reawwy easy? If I faiw, Director will spank Baby MushroomT_T
Anonymous : Easy. Not exaggerating, it's as easy as enlisting.
Ⓐ BabyBerserker : Baby Mushroom is tiny and young, so Baby Mushroom couldn't enlistT_T
Anonymous : Baby Mushroom? Are you insane?
Anonymous : You must've done alternative military service, but it's still the same. Once you show up at the Hunter exam site, you can consider yourself passed. Those Association bastards have no intention of failing anyone.
Anonymous : I'm a guy attending a Hunter academy in Bupyeong, Incheon. I think I know who Berserker is. Could you stop with that act? It's terrifying when someone clearly over two meters tall talks like that...
I frowned for a moment. Over two meters? I was two meters and eleven centimeters. Was that bastard blind?
Ⓐ BabyBerserker : Baby Mushroom is a 111cm baby! Baby Mushroom is tiny and cute like a hamster!
Once the exam began, I realized every senior Hunter's testimony had been true.
I didn't even want to explain the physical test we took that morning. If I had to, I'd call it an hour and forty minutes of government-sponsored time wasting.
I asked the gathered students as if I were asking whether they'd eaten breakfast.
“Everyone passed, right?”
Twelve people from our academy had taken the exam at the same time. There was no way any of us could have failed.
“Could anyone fail unless they took a nap halfway through? It felt less like a fitness test and more like checking whether you had at least one or two properly attached limbs.”
That came from Im Hyeongtaek, who became half-dead after a little time on the treadmill because of his age.
Kim Jinjun, who had always been confident in his stamina, added his own comment.
“I heard the physical test for the Hunter exam used the same standards regardless of sex. I worked out like crazy because of that. But after taking it, I got the feeling they were determined to pass everyone, young and old, men and women alike.”
“If they're going to do it like this, shouldn't they just mail us a license after we apply to be Hunters? Why call us in to take an exam?”
“Then they couldn't collect application fees. The Association must make a nice profit from this, so they won't give it up.”
The written test wasn't much different.
As I filled in the answer sheet, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to punch the criminal-law instructor. I couldn't find a single one of those difficult legal terms that instructor was always rattling off.
Even a foreigner who couldn't read Korean could easily get a perfect score on this test. That wasn't an exaggeration.
As if they had prepared for the possibility that someone who couldn't read Korean might take the exam, every question came with a picture. If you picked the number with the character wearing a vicious expression, the answer was obvious.
You couldn't fail this unless you were determined to. That was a certainty guaranteed by me, a middle-school graduate who got expelled on my first day of high school.
In the end, we all passed the first round of the Hunter exam. Naturally, I couldn't feel any sense of accomplishment.
After that came residential training for first-round passers. It had supposedly been a one-month curriculum at first, but after an astonishing crash diet, it had been reduced to one week.
“This is such a sweet deal, seriously. After a week, we have the Hunter Job Performance Evaluation, right? If we pass that, we can start working as Hunters and making money right away.”
When the young student Lee Jongho said that, Im Hyeongtaek shook his head.
“It's not something to be happy about.”
“Why not?”
“If they're passing people so recklessly, that means active Hunters are dying left and right. They're dying in those numbers, yet the training period was shortened. That means they don't care much whether we live or die...”
“I guess so.”
“They say the exams and training were grueling when Hunter licenses were first issued. What is this now? Even this residential training feels like Reserve Forces training.”
I had never attended Reserve Forces training, but I got the gist. He meant it was a complete joke.
This residential training was so relaxed that it barely deserved to be called training. The instructors didn't care whether trainees used their phones or slept face-down during training hours. Now I understood why we had needed to learn shooting techniques and study materials about monsters at the Hunter academy beforehand.
Im Hyeongtaek spoke in a still-angry voice.
“Seeing how everything is this half-assed scares me to death. What will happen to my wife and daughter if I die? They say your family doesn't get a damn cent in bereavement compensation if you die working as a Hunter.”
“Exactly. Why isn't there compensation if you die working as a Hunter? We'd be dying while protecting the country.”
When Lee Jongho grumbled, Seong Munyeong jumped in. He was the friend who had introduced me to Huntweb and liked to act as though he knew a lot about the industry at the academy.
“The Hunter system exists because they don't want to pay compensation in the first place. If they were going to compensate people who died fighting, why not exploit active-duty soldiers? Why create some organization with no legitimacy like the Hunter Association, subcontract the work, round up unemployed people, call them Hunters, and hand them guns?”
“So they don't care if Hunters die because there are plenty of unemployed people anyway?”
“Except for awakened Hunters. Awakened people are such valuable assets that governments recruit them from overseas for huge sums of money, so a local government goes crazy the second one gets hurt. I saw on Huntweb that awakened Hunters can keep working even if they commit crimes, getting acquitted or receiving a suspension of indictment. Apparently, the local government where the awakened person operates pressures the district court.”
“I'm jealous of awakened people, anyway... What was it, S-rank? That crazy bastard acts like he's above the law itself.”
As a former human-rights activist with the Korean Awakened Solidarity, I had more than a few things I wanted to correct, but I held myself back.
My expression must not have looked good as I listened. Seong Munyeong stopped talking, looked at me as if he had suddenly realized his mistake, and hurriedly said,
“Ah, Kim Geuk, sorry. I wasn't trying to take a shot at you. You know that, right?”
* * *
Once even the residential training, which had amounted to an even longer waste of time, ended, only the final procedure remained.
The Hunter Job Performance Evaluation.
It was the final practical exam, where examiners watched how we acted when dispatched as Hunters and assigned scores accordingly.
The sleepy expression on the middle-aged man serving as our examiner told me we would probably pass unless something went terribly wrong.
“That doesn't mean we should half-ass it. I hear a lot of examiners pretend to evaluate you casually, then say you failed to meet the standards at the end and demand a bribe.”
I looked over the people taking the final exam with me.
Kim Jinjun, Im Hyeongtaek, Lee Jongho, Seong Munyeong, Jeong Jinyeong... Eight people from our academy, along with twelve strangers. Twenty of us would be taking the exam together.
Everyone had a K-1 Rifle slung over their shoulder.
The examiner spoke in a voice that made it clear he wanted to finish up and go home as quickly as possible.
“All right, everyone has their guns? Don't point your muzzles at people... Let's go.”
Our academy students then set out after the examiner.
Before long, we arrived at the final examination site.
It was a large, eight-story building. Like many buildings outside Seoul, it had been abandoned after everyone moved away.
As he led us up the stairs, the examiner explained the scenario for the evaluation.
“All right, there's a Monster in this building. A search team conducted reconnaissance beforehand and informed everyone that the Monster's location had been confirmed on the sixth floor. Now, show us how you'll move to the target location as a strike team.”
It seemed we only needed to make our way to the sixth floor like Hunters. In other words, passing required little more than taking up a basic tactical stance and having enough stamina to climb stairs.
Sure enough, everyone climbed with not the slightest trace of tension on their faces.
Apparently, I was different.
“Kim Geuk, why are you so serious by yourself? Are you worried because you have to undergo an awakened-person assessment alone after the exam?”
“No...”
“You're guaranteed A-rank anyway. Why? Are you sick?”
I shook my head and gritted my teeth. Damn it, it was hard to explain what I was going through.
Silently, still frowning, I continued up the stairs. Third floor...
Déjà vu. Intense déjà vu was clouding my mind. This place felt familiar, and so did what we were doing now, as though I had done this exact thing before.
It had already been four months since the déjà vu first began. Ever since I started intense exercise, I had barely felt it for some reason, but today it continued at the same level I had experienced before. Why?
Something felt wrong. Fourth floor.
Yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do just because I had a bad feeling. I didn't even know the cause of this déjà vu myself.
I couldn't tell everyone to treat the expensive application fee as a donation and go home just because I felt uneasy. All of us would starve to death if things kept going as they were.
On the fifth floor, I asked,
“There aren't any live rounds in our guns, right?”
Im Hyeongtaek answered.
“Of course not. It's training. We only have a few blank rounds.”
Then we reached the sixth floor.
The examiner, having reached the destination, declared,
“Target location confirmed! Strike team, move in...”
Following the command, the examinees entered the sixth floor and uniformly took positions guarding every direction.
I didn't have time to imitate them.
“Kim Geuk, what are you doing? I said not to half-ass it.”
I couldn't even pay attention to Seong Munyeong's reasonable criticism.
I looked at the floor of the sixth story.
That floor. The bare concrete where all the wallpaper and flooring had been stripped away was far too familiar.
Was it because of the déjà vu? Yes. But I didn't think that was the only reason...
I had seen that floor over and over. When?
Probably in my hallucinations...
“We're done, right? My stomach's hurting, so let's hurry back-”
I was speaking hurriedly.
A series of heavy thuds sounded behind us. Thud, thud, crash. Something heavy kept falling.
I turned around and my eyes widened.
The ceiling directly above the emergency stairwell we had climbed had completely collapsed.
The emergency exit was blocked. As though deliberately, a pile of concrete had fallen only around the exit, sealing it off perfectly.
Then the examiner's voice came from ahead. The stupid, dazed voice of someone seeing a situation they couldn't understand.
“Huh?”
I looked forward again and saw it.
I saw a Monster from beyond a Gate, a being from another world armed with all kinds of bizarre supernatural abilities and an overwhelming size.
The partition walls in the middle of the sixth floor had already collapsed, leaving nothing but concrete debris.
That concrete debris rose into the air on its own. The floating fragments gathered together and began to form a shape.
A human shape? No. The shape of an ape that resembled a human.
If I had to compare it to something, it looked like the goblins we had learned about before...
“What is that?”
The four-meter-tall concrete Monster looked at us. More precisely, the tiny face wedged between its absurdly broad shoulders looked at us.
The concrete Monster opened its mouth.
「I love you. I won't hurt you.」
A voice that wasn't spoken aloud echoed directly inside my head.
「I love you. Walk over to me. I'll hug you.」
We had learned the traits of countless Monsters at the academy. We immediately knew what kind of Monster it was.
“It's an elemental. A Rock Elemental...”
As if finally grasping the situation, the examiner backed away. Was he trying to run? Had that fool not even turned around when he heard something collapse earlier?
The concrete Monster, the Rock Elemental, smiled at that foolish attempt. It was probably a sneer.
「Free Hug Declaration! Free Hug Declaration!」
Along with that grotesque mental wave, I was overcome by the sensation of being pulled somewhere.
It was my first hallucination in three months.
Footnotes:
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