WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 17
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Train Journey (2)
The interior of the magitech locomotive, built by making full use of magitech engineering and monster materials, was surprisingly ordinary.
The one difference was that each seat was far bigger. A space that would have been split into two seats in his memory was classified here as a single-passenger seat.
On top of that, every seat had a modest door and partition, so "compartment" suited it better than "seating section."
By the standard of the trains Ian remembered, they'd assigned the space of four seats to one passenger.
'Is it because of the hunters?'
There probably weren't many people who could relax with an armed stranger sitting right beside them. Ian nodded to himself.
Thanks to a seat design that catered to its main customers, he got to take a wide seat all to himself, so what was there to complain about?
[Good day, esteemed passengers. This train is an inland-bound magitech locomotive. Thank you for using the fast and comfortable intercity railway today. Our crew will....]
Along with a very familiar announcement, the locomotive began to move. Ian felt an echo of the past and snorted a laugh.
Through the window he caught a glimpse of Sheol. Watching the city where he'd stayed, if only briefly, slip away gave Ian a strange sense of emotion.
The unfamiliar announcement began right around then.
[In a moment, we will enter the area outside the Gate suppressor's range. Passengers are advised to brace for noise and vibration.]
'Huh?'
Kieeeeeng. A jet-like roar, as if from a rocket engine, reached his ears.
No. Not just his ears. Vibration was running through his whole body.
[Accelerating. Accelerating. Accelerating. Passengers, please take care that your belongings and bodies are not destroyed.]
An announcement that should never come out of a train. Ian gasped and sucked in a breath in alarm.
With a thunderclap that tore the air apart, overwhelming gravitational acceleration slammed down on Ian's body.
* * *
'It's fast, sure, but it's not comfortable....'
The locomotive's merciless acceleration settled into a stable pace before long. By counting his own heartbeat, Ian worked out that it had lasted a little over a minute.
But even that short burst of acceleration was enough for the locomotive to proudly claim first place in Ian's mind as the transport with the worst ride quality.
Ian looked out the window. The scenery outside was strange.
Part of it was that the locomotive was so fast the landscape blurred, but there was another reason Ian found it strange.
The scenery had no sense of unity. The area near the tracks was simply a monotonous, colorless gray, but in the space a little way from the tracks, colors of every hue were mixed together and wavering here and there.
Ian knew that each of those uniquely colored points of light was a Gate's precursor. They were only being held down by the railway; at any moment, they could pour out monsters.
If it looked like this just a little past the zone of survival the Gate suppressors provided, what kind of place could the "front line" be, where even stronger Gates were said to lurk?
Ian felt anew that the present world had once come to ruin and been rebuilt.
He stayed silent, gazing out the window, then suddenly spoke.
"Are you here to check tickets?"
The presence he'd sensed on the other side of the partition withdrew at once. Ian had deliberately brought up something completely unrelated, but he'd already realized the presence that had just approached was unlike a "proper" person such as a compartment attendant.
'A train pickpocket, huh.'
Even in the Common Era, pickpockets had been nearly an endangered species, and now he was running into one on a train in the Age of Constellations. Ian was dumbfounded.
He'd sat in his seat without saying a word, so maybe the thief figured he'd blacked out from the locomotive's opening acceleration.
Well, true. An ordinary hunter who had just gotten a D-rank license and was heading off to another city might well pass out for a moment from that murderous acceleration.
A pickpocket preying on people like that. It was a peculiar breed of human you could only find in the Age of Constellations.
Ian was about to grumble that this sort of creativity truly knew no bounds, a brand-new crime for a brand-new era, when-
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!
The footsteps that had just left were rapidly closing in on Ian again.
'Don't tell me they're going to rob me on a train?' Ian thought, bewildered, but he got ready to draw a weapon all the same. A hunter's enemy had originally been monsters, but monsters with intelligence knew how to use people.
For a hunter of the Common Era, fighting humans wasn't especially difficult.
Clatter! The door rattled. Ian calmly advised whoever was shaking the compartment door.
"If you make a fuss, the crew will come."
At the same time, he clinked a few pieces of ironware he'd brought along, making a metallic noise. It let whoever was outside know that the person inside was well armed.
'What's with this one?'
Normally, if a pickpocket failed, wouldn't they look for another target?
'A robber who targets low-rank hunters?'
If they'd happened to see Ian's Hunter Registration Card, they'd have found out he was an E-rank hunter. Then it was only natural to think he was an easy mark.
'Then this one's next move is either trying to break down the door or backing off, but....'
But whoever was outside the door picked an answer that wasn't among Ian's expected options at all.
In a hushed, small voice.
"Please help me...."
'What is this kid doing?'
The moment Ian started to wonder, a commotion seemed to rise from somewhere farther away. Not one or two people, but the stir of a crowd.
As a hunter, Ian had always put safety first. He had no intention of getting mixed up with this unidentified something.
"The star! The star told me to go to you! Please...!"
'A constellation? Me?'
Ian opened the door.
* * *
"Ticket check. Would you open the door, please?"
A man dressed as a locomotive crew member knocked on the door. Ian stood up from his seat and opened the compartment door.
In the brief moment the door was open, the man scanned the interior of the compartment. Beside the seat where the young hunter had been sitting, he saw a bag holding assorted odds and ends.
'Not big enough for a person to hide in.'
He looked back at Ian. The young man was dressed rather old-fashioned, like the scion of some hunter great house heading for the inland front to take his first real step into hunter society.
"Here you go."
The man looked at the ticket and nodded. Then he added a word of caution.
"I'm told pickpockets targeting hunters on the locomotives have been rampant lately. Seems kids who failed the porter exam have fallen into bad ways, so if you see a suspicious child, please be sure to report it."
Ian nodded. The man dressed as crew moved on to the next car and kept checking tickets.
The hunter's index finger rose to his lips.
'Shh.'
There were still plenty of people around. Several of them seemed to be peering into compartments under the pretext of checking tickets.
Ian took out a notepad and pen. It was for talking in writing.
He wrote calmly.
『You're saying I promised to help you?』
The kid, who had been handed Ian's headband and put it on, felt a chill run down their spine as the hunter turned his gaze exactly to the spot where they were hiding, even though they should have been invisible.
『They said "the first person who talks to you" would help you.』
Ian frowned at the characters the kid had written. Not because he couldn't understand the writing, but because he understood it far too well.
The kid's handwriting was clearly a script Ian didn't know. Yet the moment he looked at it, the meaning had somehow come to him.
Come to think of it, what Ian had just written was in English, too.
『Do you know this script?』
The kid started to shake their head, then remembered they were invisible right now and picked up the pen.
『...Thanks to the Founder's grace, the language barrier between people is gone, isn't it? Even if I look like a wreck right now, I'm not some clueless bumpkin who knows nothing.』
After thinking for a moment, the kid wrote a few more lines.
『Mister, you're a Generation Zero hunter, right? You're using the old script instead of the common tongue.』
Ian rubbed his chin. This kid seemed to have a pretty quick mind.
『First, why don't you tell me who you are? I hid you because I heard a star is looking for me, but you don't look like some important person with the authority to get me into an Order right away.』
Ian decided to pass himself off as something like "a Generation Zero hunter hoping to join an Order." If there was a reason to show goodwill toward someone connected to a constellation, it would be the right way to earn trust.
He had no idea why the mysterious constellation behind that kid had singled him out. Was it just because he happened to be nearby...?
The kid picked up the pen and hesitated. The ballpoint's ink smeared on the notepad, and then, very slowly, words began to appear.
『I carry the blood of the owner of Hotel Glooscap, I mean, the Argon Group.』
Hotel Glooscap. The hotel where the Princess had stayed in Sheol.
'So it isn't only in Sheol. It's a hotel brand that's spread across the whole world?'
『So you're a rich man's son.』
『...No. My father scattered his seed among lots of people to build a stronger hunter family, and I was just one of the countless children.』
『Then why are you, of all his many children, the one being chased?』
『Because of the inheritance.』
Ian couldn't make sense of the kid's situation. With so many children that the kid's place in the line of succession was too far down to matter for control of the company, what would anyone gain by kidnapping them?
Just as Ian was about to write something more, the kid added one sentence of their own.
『The Founder's inheritance.』
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