WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 13
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The Hounds (2)
Wecoop frowned.
The hounds he had set loose were wandering without results. The news that they had devoured low-rank hunters to recharge their mana seemed to be slowly turning into a rumor.
'This much is still within tolerance.'
That held true both circumstantially and emotionally.
The Followers of the Comet. Among them, the lineage of the Old Dragon, despicably, despite having already failed, was scheming every which way to stand on the same stage as the Crimson Order, which had been chosen by the 《Lord of Unquenchable Thirst》.
The bishops did not welcome their petty tricks, but the chaos those tricks caused had considerable value to exploit.
The Dragonkin had overloaded the Hunter Support Agency's suppressors. Thanks to that, for the next few weeks the hounds' activity and resupply could continue without anyone sensing anything amiss.
Emotionally, it was a relief that the dead were low-rank hunters. From Wecoop's standpoint, the lives of humans who were neither Bloodstream nor worth recruiting were of no concern whatsoever.
In truth, even Wecoop was a moderate among the bishops.
Among the Crimson Order's hardliners were those who considered everyone who had not witnessed the truth of the star, that is, everyone who had not taken a bishop's seat, to be sacrifices who could die without consequence, even if they were Bloodstream.
Wecoop opposed such hardliner thinking. Because someday there would come a day when every Bloodstream knelt and worshipped before the truth of the star....
'No. That's not what matters right now.'
Tonight, too, the hounds had come back with nothing. Wecoop was going out of his mind with frustration.
What if, on the one-in-ten-thousand chance, that Generation Zero intruder was a restorationist trying to drag this era back into the age of savagery, back into the lightless Common Era?
If special-class dangerous primordial species like the Princess banded together and stirred, or even if not, if a Generation Zero fundamentalist provoked the Princess too far and made her show her might of old.
Deep cracks would be carved into the Crimson Order's grand plan.
'Damn it, I have to find them as soon as possible.'
Wecoop's plan was simple. Have the hounds identify the intruder.
Of the Generation Zero, were they the type that belonged among hunters, or the type that belonged among monsters?
If a hunter, how strong? And if a monster, how old?
Get at least a rough outline of this fearsome being, and then.
Next.
'Pass them off to some Constellation Order and support their reintegration into society...!'
As far as Wecoop knew, Generation Zero's greatest weapon was obsession. Call it madness if you liked. Some even called it antisocial personality disorder.
By nature, the more a sapient being gathered with others, in other words the more it had to protect, the more careful it became about rash behavior.
This principle held for the strangers of another age who had just returned from beyond the Gates. They might rage as if they alone had been left behind in the world, but with society's warm attention and care, they adapted and lived well enough.
There was no better way to tame Generation Zero's frenzy.
'A Generation Zero of a stature that a Sovereign of the Royal Blood would greet in person. Most likely a mythical species. Given that they got in using invisibility, could they be a werewolf elder? In that case, the 《Fickle Shadow Moon Halo》 side would...'
The 《Fickle Shadow Moon Halo》 was an order that mainly bestowed blessings on werewolves and others connected to the "moon."
If the one who had made contact with the Princess was a werewolf elder, they would be a resource the Moon Halo's priests would welcome, and they would take them into the Order with both hands.
Wecoop, mulling over plans for each possible identity of the intruder, finally let out a deep sigh.
Whatever the case, wouldn't the plan only move forward once the hounds found out who this mysterious Generation Zero was?
And then, at last, new word arrived.
A hound had died.
* * *
The reason the hounds couldn't find Ian was simple.
He had always been someone who managed his scent.
Of course, the "lingering fragrance" left behind by someone like the Princess didn't mean merely a physical smell.
The traces of mana stemming from the Princess's mighty authority were part of that lingering fragrance too, so it was only natural that an ordinary deodorizer could never wipe it all away.
But Ian was a hunter. Among his prey had been creatures with supernatural noses, able to catch a scent carried on the wind from a thousand paces away and tell the age of every single hunter in a party.
That was why he'd had to become practiced at erasing smells.
The day he faced the Princess had been no different. He had thoroughly shaken off the vampire's presence that clung to him.
It could be seen as a traditional habit handed down from the old era, or a stuffy one.
Thanks to that worn-out habit, Ian slipped out of the hounds' tracking net. After that, the situation began to move in the opposite direction.
From the moment an urban legend reached the old hunter's ears, and he sensed the 'real' thing that must lie behind it.
He moved.
* * *
In truth, Ian was not very sociable, contrary to this era's assessment. The type who liked drinking but didn't enjoy drinking parties.
Still, when necessary, he could put on a sociable face.
Ian naturally slipped into the group of low-rank hunters heading home from the Gate vegetation survey. He added a word or two among them to start the conversation flowing, and collected the rumors going around.
One F-rank hunter said that a colleague who had gone home dead drunk had vanished.
An E-rank hunter rattled off a sighting of their own. They had seen something long and sleek like a leather belt vanish into the darkness.
Another F-rank hunter recited a rumor about a strange creature that was wide and thin like a blanket. Only, if it had been a real blanket, the place you'd call the seam, the edge, had claws, they said.
Ian mixed in among people over several occasions, gathering rumors. A few days later, he had become familiar enough to be invited to the after-party dinner following a Gate survey.
Then as now, the first stories to spread among hunters were about death, so the rumors Ian wanted came into his ears quickly.
Ian sorted the rumors carefully. There could easily be cases of mistaking memories swayed by drunkenness for a monster, or of inflating some trifling event just to give others a few words of war stories.
In such times, a hunter first tried to pin down the "shape of the death."
Rumors of a monster that killed people could be wildly inaccurate. Fear changed its own shape at will. But stories about the dead person were different.
Because the people who had been close to the deceased would testify about the death.
Among the many deaths drifting around as hearsay, Ian found the ones likely tangled up with the 'real' thing behind the urban legend.
It wasn't long before he noticed one peculiar fact.
There were people whose bodies had not been found.
Three hunters had vanished without a body. From the first to disappear to the last, the span was ten days.
'The second went missing four days after the first, and the third lost contact six days after that.'
The first disappearance had happened after the Dragonkin's raid on the Hunter Support Agency.
'If these disappearances are the work of the monster I'm after....'
Ian reasoned out the ecology of the creature hunting people now.
There were about three possibilities that came to mind right away.
One, like a venomous spider species, it paralyzes its prey and drags it back to a nest.
Two, like a snake, it swallows its prey whole.
Third, there was the case of abducting humans to use as sacrifices, somewhat removed from predation, but.
'That's unlikely.'
For one, if it were gathering sacrifices, it would have done so in a far less conspicuous way than this. This era had Gates, spaces cut off from reality, didn't it?
Inside a Gate, sacrifices could be procured far more covertly. There was no need to reach into reality and draw attention.
Unless it intended to show off death to the whole world, shouting "Fear is my strength" like the monsters of the Common Era.
After thinking for a moment, Ian shook his head. On closer thought, even the first hypothesis, dragging them to a nest, was hard to make hold in the Age of Constellations.
The monsters of this era were presumably breeds that had leapt out from beyond the Gates. But was it easy for them to set up a nest near a city where people could be kept safe?
Even in the 1990s that would have been difficult. Only monsters of high intelligence, like vampires, could turn an entire building into a blood-bag farm. For a monster whose intelligence was close to a true "beast," making a hideout in a modern city was hard.
On top of that, the fact that most of the population in the Age of Constellations were hunters was also a problem.
Even in the Common Era, hunters in groups had shared tokens so they could tell each other's positions. Would the hunters of the Age of Constellations, especially those in guilds or parties, have no such means?
'Low-rank hunters might not have magical tokens.'
But phones were widespread in this era, weren't they? If they had come out of the anesthesia even a little, they would have hit the emergency call right away.
Which left only the kind of monster that swallowed its prey whole and digested it instantly.
Ian pieced together the missing hunters' last movements and the idle rumors about the monster he'd collected over the past few days.
The creature mostly acted at night. The last sighting testimonies of all three missing people had come at night.
The missing people had been dead drunk. Did it prefer the smell of alcohol? Or perhaps it knew that prey with such a smell was in a state that made it easy to eat.
Ian reviewed the testimonies about the "blanket." A wide, thin monster. It could hide between alleys and pounce on prey from behind.
'Weren't there people who described it as a blanket with claws?'
The list of monsters from the Common Era surfaced in the old hunter's mind. From that long list, Ian filtered out only the monsters whose ecology and appearance resembled the present case.
A few similar examples came up in his head.
'Since it's a monster that must have originated from a Gate, I won't be able to apply the extermination methods in full.'
But they would do well enough as a guide for the hunt.
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