WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 15
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The Hounds (4)
Watching the fight between the Dragonkin and the blanket monster, Ian picked up on several odd details.
"Hmm...."
A sense of disconnect from the past came first.
The Reptilians he knew were the kind who could communicate by telepathy, just like the descriptions of them in the conspiracy theories. In truth, that mental interference was an even more fearsome trait than their physical ability.
But the Dragonkin of this era seemed incapable of that kind of communication. He could tell from how stubbornly they kept to a two-against-one formation.
At the same time, they possessed the physical capacity to stay at no disadvantage even in that formation.
Like the phasing Dragonkin he'd met during the E-rank exam, this one also combined a versatile set of supernatural abilities.
'Acidic blood. Monstrous strength. Weaponized body. It's got a bit of everything.'
Still, it didn't seem to be an inexperienced type like that other one. This one looked quite practiced at using the power it had.
Take how it used its acidic blood.
The blanket monster, now shaped like a snake, had something like sharp teeth clustered together at the head end of its cylinder. In other words, it looked like a snake with its mouth on both sides.
And the moment it lunged at the Dragonkin in that very form, its maw melted away. The instant it touched the Dragonkin's green blood, the blanket began to dissolve.
Trusting its own physical ability and regeneration, it lured an attack while its weapons were still hidden, inflicting the greatest wound on its attacker on purpose. A rational way to fight.
The monstrous strength and weaponized body were truly straightforward.
Every time the sharp, sprouting tips of its claws grazed the surroundings, concrete split like mud, and a single punch sent the ground bursting apart with loud pops. Watching that, it was clear that its physical limits already differed from those of ordinary species.
'The only ones I ever saw flaunting strength that openly were a werewolf elder and some ancient Great Tiger....'
Perhaps this was the result of the world's mana density rising. It was an environment where it could pour out, without restraint, mana that once had to be saved for turning a situation around at a decisive moment.
Ian weighed when to step in.
The Dragonkin had already neutralized the blanket monster that had been coiled up and stretched long like a snake. The moment it confirmed that the monster was badly wounded and, on top of that, had one mouth disabled by the acid blood, it had stomped it flat.
Turning its gaze away from the blanket monster, now long and flat like a leech, the Dragonkin faced off against the other, healthier one.
What troubled Ian was the acidic blood. There was no Vatican in this era. The means of obtaining and reconditioning sacred relics were extremely limited.
The dragon-slaying spike was too good a weapon to use as a disposable.
He quickly changed back into his original gear, which he'd hidden well near the empty lot, and thought about what to use to beat the thing down, then finally sighed.
If he wanted to avoid corrosion, there was only one weapon he could use right now.
* * *
"Uh-hahaha!"
The Dragonkin let out a battle cry. A wind pressure so fierce it took visible form swept over the blanket monster's body.
That broad surface area of the blanket monster's was well suited to pouncing on a human and swallowing them whole, but it was a disadvantage against a fellow monster.
Even now, it had been hiding in a blind spot to attack from behind, but the moment the Dragonkin turned its head and cried out, it was helplessly pushed back.
The Dragonkin kicked off the ground. With a crunch, the park's paving stones shattered under its strength and weight, and it leapt twice in great bounds.
At last the Dragonkin seized the blanket monster. The teeth packed along the blanket monster's border raked the Dragonkin's hands.
But the Dragonkin sneered as if the thing were laughable, and gripped both ends of the monster firmly in its hands.
Then it began to wring the monster like laundry being wrung dry. The blanket monster's body thrashed. It could feel every muscle fiber passing its limit of durability and snapping.
The moment of gruesome rupture. Instead of water, blood began to gush out. Drunk on delight, the Dragonkin put its strength into its wrists, and the blanket monster was torn into two pieces.
Hot blood poured out. Between the shredded muscles, the Dragonkin could make out a heart, very thin but beating violently.
"The bloodsuckers' lackeys are rich in nutrition."
Looking at the upper half of the blanket monster torn in two (it was hard to tell by shape, but the side with the heart beneath the skin had to be the upper half), the Dragonkin wore a sneer.
It was a pity it hadn't caught the hunter. As the constellations so often do, the Old Dragon found the offerings that came from humans most satisfying.
But the Old Dragon also looked kindly upon the eradication of bloodsuckers, so the hearts of these monsters would surely be received with satisfaction as well....
The Dragonkin's musings went no further. Weight had suddenly landed near its neck.
"Gghk?!"
Had it been an ordinary human, or even any decent beast of the Common Era, the force behind it would have been a fatal blow, snapping the cervical spine.
The Dragonkin hurriedly looked back. Had the one it had trampled strangled it?
No. At the edge of its vision it saw one more monster, still twitching as it died. It was only emitting intermittent thrashing close to rigor mortis, nearly a seizure.
And, it was thin.
The 'line' around its own neck. It was so thin it felt like a wire.
"Hun...ter...!"
The Dragonkin instinctively knew what was clinging to its back. Generation Zero, those paranoiacs.
Only Generation Zero had madmen who, in the name of a hunt, would loop an executioner's rope around another's neck with their own hands and recreate the gallows with human power.
'Did it follow its companion out here?'
It remembered the one ragged heap that had already died at the blanket monster's hands, once a hunter.
What awful luck. If it had just waited one more move and let that one and the bloodsuckers fight until they destroyed each other, things would have been easier.
Yet the Dragonkin wasn't flustered. The ultra-fine wire of the Common Era, which some Generation Zero hunters used, couldn't kill it.
Its strength was far too low. They might brag about the tensile strength of nano-processed ballistic fiber, but nothing like that could be more durable than mana thread, shaped by magitech and forged by dwarves.
The Dragonkin knew its claws could slice through C-grade mana thread with ease.
That Generation Zero hunter had, of all things, stuck to its back, in a position awkward to knock away with its arms. But if it cut this noose, grabbed it in reverse and swung it, it could finish the hunter off in an instant.
'No. Better to break only the limbs and ship it to the branch.'
The Old Dragon would accept this offering with particular satisfaction.
The Dragonkin's claws reached for the thin thread wrapped around its nape.
* * *
In a contest between monster and hunter, the monster was by far the one at the physical advantage.
A monster is a monster precisely because it is a being humans cannot withstand.
But hunters were the ones who hunted such monsters. They devised ways to hunt monsters that were overwhelmingly 'strong.'
One hunter thought: fight from a place the monster's limbs can't reach.
That was why most hunters preferred ranged projectile weapons to close combat.
One hunter thought: borrow the power of myth and legend.
That was the origin of the old obsession with carrying silver weapons and iron stakes.
One hunter thought: we can use supernatural power too.
There were hunters who used magic and sorcery, and sometimes even the blood of their enemies, to cross the boundary line that reality had drawn.
Ian's mentor had summed it up like this.
'Use everything you can.'
With that way of thinking, there were weapons made by pouring in every means a human could muster. Very unusual lore weapons, forged in the early modern period and after, by methods that had been impossible in the medieval age.
A weapon forged out of hatred and vengeance by a blacksmith who suffered from both albinism and dwarfism. One of the greatest masterpieces the blacksmith ever forged.
"Wha... what!"
The Dragonkin was bewildered. The cord wrapped around its neck was far thinner than any ordinary ultra-fine wire. Its texture was quite different too. It wasn't sharp and stiff, but so soft it felt like silk.
Yet it wouldn't snap. Even though its claws scraped at a single strand almost as if sawing, that soft thread showed no sign of so much as fraying.
Ian pulled harder on the ends of the thread he held crossed in both hands. His muscles screamed. His hands stretched out behind him in an X. The Dragonkin spat out its breath.
It must have been an incomprehensible harmony.
In ordinary terms, this thread had only the durability of something a little sturdy. Throw it in a fire and it burned; catch it on something sharp and it held a while before snapping.
But against mythical creatures, the story changed.
Because this was a replica of Gleipnir, forged by human hands.
The materials of that rope from myth, the one that bound the world-devouring wolf, are all described as 'nonexistent, contradictory things.'
But some of them could be reproduced with the technology of the Common Era.
For example, the beard of a woman.
Collect the beard of a woman who has been given male hormones, record the footsteps of a cat, and capture oxygen from the water at the very moment a fish's gills open and close.
This replica, made so doggedly and desperately, wielded overwhelming power when it came to 'monsters,' and only monsters.
The Dragonkin thrashed. It swung its arms though it knew they couldn't reach, then seemed to think of a better idea and began throwing its body around.
A charge that kept accelerating. At the end of it stood a pillar of a ruined building. Ian realized what the Dragonkin was aiming for. It meant to slam into the building and crush the annoying hunter stuck to its back.
If he knew, he had no reason to take it. Ian loosened his hold on the imitation Gleipnir, which he'd been winding tightly, quite lightly.
This silk thread was considerably long.
So just as the Dragonkin ran at full power and ground its own back against the concrete wall, Ian slipped out near its shoulder blade as if swinging.
The Dragonkin sensed the hunter's presence jutting out from its left shoulder.
But it couldn't see him. Using the Dragonkin's speed and sharp change of direction as a springboard, Ian shot forward with his own body as a counterweight.
The support that had to bear the full weight and speed was the Dragonkin's neck.
And so, this time, its neck did snap.
Crack.
The last thing the Dragonkin saw was the sky. A night sky half hidden by the debris of the building, yet strangely bright with starlight.
The terrifying eyes of the constellations.
Thinking that the starlight watching this moment was unusually bright, it died.
The huge body fell, kicking up dust. Ian got up with some fumbling, waited for a while at a distance, and slowly retrieved the thread.
"Phew."
The old hunter, having let out a sigh, thought about the phrase "the bloodsuckers' lackeys" the Dragonkin had muttered. He approached the two tattered blanket monsters.
Then he raised his silver sword again and poked at them. The one wrung in two by the Dragonkin's hands showed no particular reaction.
But the one that had bunched up long and mutated into a snakelike form....
Sizzle.
Where the silver touched, it glowed as if seared by fire. Ian gave a hollow laugh.
Was it only reacting to silver because this snakelike shape was its true form? Or was there some other reason, something a stranger to this era didn't yet know?
'This won't do.'
Sheol was ill suited to resolving all these questions. In the hunters' world, this place was relatively the rear.
Outside Sheol.
Like London, the capital of the Magic Tower League, where the Princess had reportedly been in seclusion, he would have to go somewhere with 'bigger waters.'
If only to reach New York, where the Half-Dragon Girl had settled, even a little sooner.
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