WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 14
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The Hounds (3)
A low-rank hunter reeking of liquor was walking down an alley. The staggering gait made it look like they had lost all sense of balance.
Few people paid any attention to the hunter, who looked ready to collapse at any moment.
On the outskirts of Sheol, a sight like that was common. The Age of Constellations was full of pressures, tangible and intangible, that forced ordinary people to become hunters, and the weight of standing face to face with death drove people toward all manner of refuges.
Many hunters leaned on the Constellation Order.
But it was just as common for those who took no interest in the Order, or those the Order took no interest in, to lean on drink instead.
The hunter, soaked in the smell of alcohol, kept walking unsteadily, heading into a secluded alley, then toward an empty lot where no one passed.
The glazed eyes and wobbling movements suggested that this hunter was in an extremely 'weakened' state.
The hound was watching that hunter. Its master had taught it many things, and among them was how to tell which targets were fine to eat and which were not.
Young ones who had never even set foot in a Gate were off limits. Eating them would stir up a storm far beyond anything a hunter's death could cause.
An ordinary low-rank hunter, someone who wouldn't be surprised to die at any time, whom society and the hunter themself both regarded that way.
For prey, something so common and worthless was just right.
The alley bent. The sound of the hunter's footsteps carried, but for a moment the hunter slipped out of sight. It was no real problem, though. The scent of alcohol was strong.
Slither. The hound moved. Through a gap between two walls, a space measured in centimeters that no person could pass through, it advanced and saw its quarry slumped on the ground.
In a secluded corner of a park on the outskirts of Sheol, where people and surveillance were both scarce. Beneath a streetlamp that flickered because its mana wasn't being supplied properly.
The clothes still gave off a thick stench of liquor. The hound no longer stood upright, but pressed itself flat against the ground and crept closer.
It looked like a rug crawling closer, inch by inch. There was too little sway for it to be fluttering in the wind.
It was quite large. Big enough to wrap a whole person, about twice the size of a decent burlap sack.
But it knew well how to muffle its sounds, and besides, prey in that condition was usually in such a wreck that it wouldn't hear an approach even if it came openly. The hound drew up behind it, gliding in silence.
Being under a mana-element streetlamp was somewhat unsettling.
If it stood up to pounce on the prey, it would be backlit. That could invite needless resistance.
So, as fast and as swiftly as possible. It had to swallow the prey in a single gulp.
The hound rose. Something wide and thin like a sheet of cloth wrapped, without hesitation, around the figure slumped beneath the streetlamp and crushed it.
Pshht.
And blood sprayed.
* * *
'Caught you.'
The old hunter looked different than usual. He was imitating the way hunters dressed these days.
A combat suit made of special fiber, built with magitech engineering. The only Generation Zero gear he wore today was his headband and his necklace.
Ian looked at the thing that had hugged with all its might the heap he'd stuffed full of iron spikes and covered with scavenged clothes.
Hug, they might call it, but to Ian it felt closer to vacuum packing. Wrapping the prey in its own body, then compressing it to the limit.
It matched exactly the feeding behavior he had expected.
'Its ecology is similar to El Cuero's, huh. Just as I figured.'
El Cuero was a monster that lived in South America. Thin and broad like a cowhide, a smooth, wide monster like a stingray.
That one, too, preferred to prey the way this 'blanket monster' just had, by pouncing on its victim and crushing it.
Among the natives, there were two methods known for driving off El Cuero.
One, get help from a machi, a kind of shaman.
Two, trick it into mistaking a cactus for food, and let it punch holes through that wide, flat body until it died.
What Ian had chosen was a variation of the second method. It wasn't a cactus, but he'd made it hug a heap packed full of iron spikes, as prickly as a cactus.
But Ian realized that the blanket monster's vitality, and above all its durability, exceeded his expectations.
A normal El Cuero that embraced an iron-thorn trap head-on would have been riddled with holes all over and taken wounds that bled it to death before long.
Yet fewer than ten of the spikes seemed to have pierced through the blanket monster's body. Its skin and muscle were so tough that most of the sharp iron points had simply snapped off.
'I paid good money to make those, too.'
A large share of the money he'd earned from the Hunter Support Agency's public jobs had gone into that ironwork, and now it was wrecked. Still, Ian decided to think positively.
'Judging by the state of the thorns that came through the skin, it's not corrosive blood.'
That meant the ironwork would be easy to recycle. Ian shifted his focus at once, from the tips of the protruding thorns to the blanket monster as a whole.
There was no sign of it dying.
A shame. The shorter a hunt, the better.
Realizing it had walked into a trap, the creature began to twist its body. Ian took out his next weapon.
It was nothing special. An ordinary one-handed sword, the kind hunters of this era routinely used.
It had just been plated in silver.
* * *
He had to deal it greater damage before the blanket monster pulled itself free.
For now, Ian put speed ahead of silent footsteps. A formless patter of footsteps, tap-tap-tap, rang out across the deserted park.
Just as the blanket monster had taken position behind the heap, Ian took position behind the monster.
Gripping the sword firmly, he swung it at the monster's back, though in truth it was all back.
Krrrk. It felt less like cutting a living thing and more like forcing a blade through some tightly woven rope. Ian clicked his tongue.
'Silver doesn't work, huh.'
Because it was a creature that came from a Gate, after all? The efficacy of silver, which had worked on most man-eating monsters in the Common Era, East or West, New World or Old, was nowhere to be felt.
He shook off the blood. There was no sign of the silver purifying anything, but the blade was still sharp. The wound was real. He could probably kill it by shoving the blade into the hole and stirring things around.
But that would be far too inefficient.
Ian changed tactics at once. He pulled an opaque container out of his coat.
There was one thing he had realized while living as a hunter.
This era.
Crash!
Made it overwhelmingly easy to get hold of dangerous goods.
Ian hurled the opaque container at the blanket monster and struck it with the silver-plated sword at the same moment. As the bottle shattered, a sticky liquid like half-melted tar poured out and clung to the blanket monster.
The liquid Ian had just splashed was a flammable substance sold at a Hunter Support Agency-certified shop under names like "Nutritious Snack Fire Spirits Love."
He lit a sturdy lighter, bought at the same hunter shop. The packaging claimed that thanks to magitech engineering it was durable and long-lasting.
Then he threw it. Ian, who had spent long years handling slings and other thrown weapons, aimed true.
The "nutritious snack" had flowed even into the inside of the holes in the monster. Fire spread along the sticky fuse. The creature's body twisted in convulsions.
Ian recognized that the blanket monster had taken a fatal wound. If only the skin had been scorched on the outside, maybe not, but with the flammable liquid burning all the way through its insides, there was no hope of survival.
From what he'd seen while fighting, its regenerative power wasn't of the strong type either. He was about to slip back into the shadows and watch the monster die.
Suddenly the blanket monster rolled itself up. It was a strange transformation. Just as a rug rolled up turns into a thick, elongated cylinder, the blanket monster bunched into a cylinder-like shape, then stretched out even longer.
In the end, the form resembled a snake.
'Is it trying to cut off the oxygen?'
Had it chosen to transform in order to smother even the flames that had burrowed inside? Ian wanted to click his tongue. A clever monster is a frightening monster.
If it had been a purely magical fire, it would have blazed on regardless of oxygen or any such nonsense, defying the laws of physics, but unfortunately, a magic tool that made that kind of fire cost far more than a newly promoted E-rank hunter could afford.
Sssssss....
Into Ian's ears pierced a faint sound, one that was truly hard to catch, like a snake dragging along the ground.
He could tell what it was because it was one of the sounds his mentor had forcibly drilled into him with the words "if you can't hear it, you die."
It wasn't coming from the one moving now.
There was another.
Countless thoughts rose in Ian's head, then settled into order.
'It always seemed strange to me that, drunk or not, the missing people never got out so much as a scream. So there was another one after all.'
And.
This era, too, was full of monsters that ate people.
* * *
In truth, an animal's territory is not something as strictly divided as a national border.
* * *
While collecting information on the blanket monster, Ian had felt something was off.
Because it was hard for a 'disappearance' to lead straight to death. The most intuitive proof of a person's death was a corpse.
Yet Cozy of the Hunter Support Agency had warned Ian that 'a monster that harms people is roaming around.' That meant the authorities had spotted fatalities.
That faint sense of dissonance had continued even as he looked into the forms of death. Aside from the people missing because of the blanket monster, he had also heard stories of low-rank hunters suddenly dying.
Ian thought.
Not something that crept into urban legends, stalking hunters amid fear.
But 'killers' who openly murdered hunters, hiding in the corners of Sheol.
And he had worked out, at least roughly, what they were.
Dragonkin.
The Dragonkin he had beaten down hadn't managed to kill any hunters.
Ian knew the nature of Reptilians well. They were a race obsessed with rebirth through sacrificial rites.
The Dragonkin were the Reptilians' successors. In the attack on the Agency, they must have meant to kill low-rank hunters and secure their hearts.
But with that intent crushed to nothing, wouldn't they have to harvest hearts even by exploiting the present chaos?
Their heart sacrifice was deeply religious, so failing to fill the quota was both a great disgrace and a sin.
The Dragonkin were surely killing people.
So in Ian's view, the outskirts of Sheol were now a place where the hunting grounds of two monsters overlapped.
That was exactly why he had taken off the clothes that could single him out as Generation Zero. To lure out more monsters.
He recalled what his mentor had taught him about 'territory.'
Just as there are overlapping areas where individual humans meet and brush past one another, so it is with animals' territories.
Unlike a domain that permits no intrusion by other individuals, there are zones that tolerate the presence of others to some degree. These are called home ranges.
There are exceptional cases where the home range is the domain itself. But in general, even when animals run into each other in a home range, they don't rashly pick fights.
In the wild, the risk of a failed hunt is overwhelming.
Yet even within this tacit truce, there are exceptions.
Competition for food.
When survival demands food, when they are already in a situation of having to accept death, the greatest risk a living thing can face, they set out to hunt without hesitation.
Now, here. There is a man-eating monster. The one Ian had named the blanket monster hunted low-rank hunters in teams of two.
And in front of them, there is another man-eating monster. The Dragonkin, who had offered up hearts in hopes of reaching a greater place, had been eyeing the celebratory dinner of a hunter party that had successfully completed a Gate expedition.
Disguised in human form, the Dragonkin saw one of the hunters at the dinner slip away alone into a secluded spot.
The Dragonkin rose very slowly and followed, so the Agency would never link that hunter's death to the Dragonkin's own movements.
Then all of a sudden, flames shot up from where the hunter had been headed. Rushing over in a hurry, the Dragonkin found two utterly bizarre monsters, hissing.
Beside them lay a bloodsoaked, wretchedly mangled thing that somehow resembled a human. Torn clothes and blood were scattered here and there.
The Dragonkin concludes that the hunter had resisted one monster to the end, only to be killed by the newly arrived one.
At this point the problem becomes simple.
The blanket monster thinks. The Dragonkin thinks as well.
'Those things were after my prey.'
The Dragonkin believes that the hearts of such creatures could grant a power far stronger than any hunter's. The blanket monster knows that the Dragonkin is even more cut off from public authority than low-rank hunters are.
Now, when both are desperate for food, each regards the other as the perfect prey.
So it was only natural that the monsters should leap at each other.
And it was also only natural that the hunter should wait for the monsters' mutual slaughter to end.
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