WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 11
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The Founders' Design (1)
Ian took off the headband in a deserted empty lot. It was a spot he had scouted out back when he'd been shuttling between the library and the Hunter Support Agency annex.
'No wonder the vampires showed no sign of ambushing me, even though I kept walking through the very places best suited for it.'
To think the Bloodkin were gone.
The vampires of this era, who had never been Bloodkin to begin with, no, the vampire-kind, had no reason to take an interest in him. Ian sat slumped in the lot for a long while.
The thought 'So what do I do now?' drifted through his mind.
Originally, Ian had been considering mutual destruction with the Princess, the greatest hazard the past had dumped on the future.
He would die fighting her, and she would die devouring him. That way, the two pieces of flotsam from the past would vanish forever.
But the prey he'd had to hunt was already stuffed and mounted. The worn-out hunter tried to simply let the time pass where he sat, then shook his head.
'I'm not dead, and that's a good thing!'
Ian was quite resilient!
Partly, it was the effect of the magic the Elder of Memory had worked. Thanks to the countless deaths he had lived through vicariously, Ian could face all manner of hardship and still get up, thinking, 'Better than dying.'
He folded away his regret and confusion over the sunset of an age, and turned over the information he'd heard from the Princess.
'She said to start with BloodWeb, right?'
The Princess's whereabouts had come to light, but that didn't mean every question Ian held about this world had been answered.
The Dragonkin, for instance. Those strange creatures that seemed to be an extension of the Reptilians, yet different somewhere.
The Hunter Support Agency called them the Followers of the Comet. And wasn't the Agency a group founded by the Six Founders, his comrades?
There had to be a good reason the name had been attached to them.
Ian stretched once and logged onto BloodWeb.
It was time to find out what had happened in this era.
* * *
The history board on BloodWeb held a fair number of posts about Generation Zero.
Surprisingly, a considerable number had been posted by the Princess herself. Among her posts, the one that had drawn especially many views was a write-up organizing the relationship between the Reptilians and the Followers of the Comet.
The post began with the preface 'I do not know everything exactly, mind you,' and its contents held clues that were just what Ian's guesses needed.
When the Reptilians summoned Nibiru and upended the shape of the world, their true aim had been to reach the realm of the "Dragon" through the power of the star.
But for some reason, the ascension into dragonhood had failed. The Reptilians were left as half-formed dragons, that is, as Dragonkin.
The story went that when the Reptilians' mental network was wrecked by the aftermath of the incomplete ascension, humanity's counterattack began, with the Six Founders as its vanguard.
Ian felt he could tell what the truth left unstated in the Princess's post was.
The Half-Dragon Girl. She must have interfered in the Tailed Star's ascension ritual and stopped the Reptilians from winning completely.
'And the remnants left over from that are still aiming for ascension?'
Ian read through the other posts one by one. The appearance of the Gates had been something not even the Reptilians foresaw, and the intervention of constellations other than Nibiru had likewise been an event beyond their predictions.
The gist of one analysis was that the greeting now widely used among hunters, 'May the stars' blessing be with you,' came from this same historical current, in which the blessing of the constellations had let them bring down the curtain on the Great Cataclysm.
Ian nodded slowly. Then he recalled the most frightening element he'd felt in his conversation with the Princess.
The blessing of the constellations. The contracts with the constellations.
What was their essence, really?
The Princess had murmured, 'Even if the Bloodkin were revived in this age, they would die with nothing to drink.' As a metaphor, the sentence had been tolerable enough, but Ian hadn't been able to understand the explanation that followed.
Because it hadn't been a metaphor.
The Princess had spoken on the basis of attempts by Bloodstream to feed on humans.
Just as not every hunter was a good person, not every Bloodstream was either. There had been cases where an evil Bloodstream devoured another constellation's contractor to gain their power.
Yet the blood of other hunters gave no magic, no power, not even a feeling of fullness.
This was something the Princess had heard when she'd personally executed a Bloodstream who had harmed people.
But Ian had felt a deep sense of wrongness from that story.
The Bloodkin had been closer to natural enemies of the "human species" than of "humans." For example, the Bloodkin could slake their hunger even on the blood of demihuman races, like werewolves and the half-kin.
Even if they weren't something to breed through, they were still something to prey on.
Ian racked his brain over why the Princess hadn't felt this wrongness, and then his thoughts reached her station.
To the vampires, the Princess was something like a strategic weapon and a high priestess combined.
A top-tier vampire in a princess-like position, who rarely went outside on her own unless something truly major happened.
She was a treasure cherished so dearly that the vampires wouldn't let her out of the old castle unless it was a decisive moment, such as a critical battle where the hunters of the day, Ian himself included, had gathered, or a ritual like Dracula's descent.
To put it another way....
'She would have only taken the blood others offered her, so compared to an ordinary vampire, she lacks knowledge about how feeding actually works in practice.'
She was a lofty personage who'd wet her throat only with blood the elders brought on a golden tray in a crystal glass. It was no wonder she was something of a layman when it came to fieldwork.
The wrongness of this absurd situation, where vampire-kind couldn't drink human blood, must have lain buried in a blank spot until Ian himself appeared.
Ian came up with two possibilities.
One. The 《Lord of Unquenchable Thirst》 had drawn a limit on feeding in advance, to prevent a clash between the Bloodstream and the human species.
Two. Those who contracted with constellations had stepped outside the boundary of humanity.
'That would mean....'
It would mean that a contract with a constellation brought about a change at the level of the soul.
* * *
At this point, Ian couldn't help thinking of Elric.
One of the Six Founders. Humanity's first constellation contractor.
Elric was rather eccentric and obsessed with relics, and a type who couldn't resist a sword, but he wasn't the sort of person to give up being human of his own accord.
'...And it hasn't been confirmed yet that a constellation contract brings a change to the soul.'
As Ian tried to deny his own conjecture, a few pieces of circumstantial evidence came to mind. The Constellation Order, which was said to prefer Generation Zero hunters as contractors, of all people.
The story that once-raging Generation Zero hunters turned quiet after their contracts, as if they'd become different people.
There was no knowing whether that silence came from understanding and acceptance, or whether some far more terrifying force had imposed it.
This ominous possibility made the third prophecy of the end rise in Ian's mind.
Unlike the end-of-the-world prophecies of 1999 and 2012, the timing of the final one had never been precisely known.
There were stories that it would arrive overlapping with the other prophecies, and a hypothesis that it would come only in a far future, more than a century later.
But everyone knew the name attached to that prophecy. It had been taken from the scripture of the most famous religion of the Common Era.
The Apocalypse.
Interpretations differed from prophet to prophet, but it was the final prophecy in which all of them cried with one heart and one mind that 'the third end exists.'
Some of the interpretations of the Apocalypse were quite astonishing.
Since the conventional terror of vampires had been followed by the modern terror of Reptilians, they argued, shouldn't the last one be something even more futuristic?
This school of future interpretation read the Rapture, in which the righteous are lifted up to heaven and saved on Judgment Day, as abduction by alien UFOs.
The Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind that came before the aliens' massive invasion was the true identity of the Rapture, they said, and the great catastrophe to come afterward was a fight against aliens.
If so, then right now, the third end might be bearing down in real time.
After all, the constellations were themselves incomprehensible, transcendent beings from outside the Earth.
Ian made up his mind to look up information on the Constellation Order, the suspicious organization that supported Generation Zero hunters' return to society by brokering contracts with constellations.
"...?"
And he came upon some shocking information.
Just as Ian had surmised from the name, the Constellation Order was the term for a polytheistic union formed by the contractors of the various constellations.
And the one who had gathered the contractors of each constellation and convened the council, effectively the first pope, was Amun-Aten.
A hunter of the Egyptian line with powers so great they were praised as a pharaoh's.
And one of the Six Founders.
* * *
Ian raked his fingers through his hair. Had a Founder taken the lead in brokering constellation contracts and making them commonplace?
In his view, it was possible that one of the Six Founders might have had their soul taken by a constellation. He had often seen traps of fate that nothing could be done about, no matter how strong a person's will.
But there was no way all six would sell their souls to betray humanity. Hunters were very good at the doublethink of trusting and doubting one another at once. If even one had shown signs of going rotten, they would have been beaten down at once.
'If Elric made a contract with a constellation, and Aten led the way in making it commonplace....'
It made more sense that the other four, too, had seen a "reason" why constellation contracts needed to be spread far and wide.
Ian let out a sigh.
'If even one of those guys is still alive, I'd just go and ask them in person.'
Hadn't Balden told him on his first day adrift that 'Elric died and his soul is held in Excalibur'?
Without much expectation, he typed in keywords like "Six Founders survivors."
By a rough calculation from what he'd picked up so far, it seemed more than a hundred years had already passed since the Great Cataclysm. A hunter who'd lived through all that time, well.
'Rare, I'd guess.'
But to his surprise, there was a record.
Seeing a record that far exceeded an ordinary person's lifespan, Ian let out a stunned remark.
"I really can't get used to this...."
A hunter's life expectancy could be this high!
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