WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 19
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The Hunter and the Fugitive (1)
Trudian's private soldiers felt no sense of wrongness at the sight of a hunter so far removed from the recent magitech-fiber fashions.
For members of the hunter great houses, refusing modern outfits and dressing in retro gear was by now a custom that bordered on tradition.
They climbed aboard the magitech locomotive without hurry.
Ian cast a single glance at the group that had to be disguised as technicians, then slowly made his way out of the station.
Barnett, clinging to his back, started gasping for breath the instant they were out of the station. Ian felt the warm breath against the nape of his neck.
'Haven't eaten in a long time? There's a sweet smell on them.'
In a way, it was lucky. It meant the people who'd held Barnett hadn't gone as far as feeding them food laced with some particular spice to make them easier to track.
"Hey."
At Ian's low voice, Barnett gave a start and answered.
"Gah, you scared me. What?"
"Hasn't your constellation sent down another revelation?"
Barnett's head shook. They were invisible, so he couldn't see it, but he could tell roughly from the sound of the head moving and the shift in weight. A no.
"Can't be helped. First we get clothes somewhere nearby, and then you take off the headband."
"What?!"
Ian explained briefly. At a glance the headband looked like a flawless means of escape, but if someone was truly determined to track you, it wasn't hard to neutralize.
"They can use animals with a keen sense of smell, or set fire to a wide area where they think you might be and scorch the headband. It's not a very sturdy item."
The catch was that such methods were usually tried only after the pursuers had realized there was a tool that 'made the fugitive invisible.'
So it was wiser to hide the headband's existence as long as possible. A secret's shelf life lasted only until its existence came to light.
"Damn it. Fine. But where are we supposed to buy clothes?"
"A hunter gear shop."
Ian answered without a second thought. The civilization of the Age of Constellations had been built on the ground after a war, so it differed from the Common Era Ian had lived in on many counts.
The most conspicuous of them was child labor, or more precisely, children in hunting.
Hunters of the Common Era would have heaved a miserable sigh at the sight of a brat running wild with one sword, vowing to kill monsters, but in this age there was a mood of encouraging it as "early hunter education."
"How much weight can you carry?"
"...Before things went like this, I was planning to live as a porter. I can lift just about any weight with a smile, you know."
From this answer, Ian gauged Barnett's home environment. It seemed the current head of the Argon family hadn't given their children any particular support.
"Good. I'll get them quickly."
* * *
At a few hunter gear shops, Ian picked up a few sets of clothes sold as children's hunter outfits, a name terrifying enough that just hearing it seemed to melt his auditory cells.
Barnett went into a nearby restroom, changed, came out, and handed the headband back to Ian. As Ian tied it back onto the shoulder of his clothes like an epaulette, Barnett muttered.
"That's an ancient relic, isn't it?"
Ian nodded once. He had never seen any other so-called relics, so he couldn't be certain, but judging by the talk circulating on HunterNet and BloodWeb, this headband had to belong to the relic category.
"...What did you do before this? Is there a Generation Zero hunter so well off they'd lend out a relic like that so casually?"
"Same as the other Generation Zeros. I was hunting, fell through a Gate, and woke up in a strange world."
Barnett looked Ian's outfit up and down. Well-maintained, old-fashioned clothes. There were certainly a few metal parts, but each of them had been treated with soot to suppress reflected light as much as possible.
The know-how of the hunt showed here and there in the clothes. Enough to remind Barnett of the outfits of the great houses, whose members were said to have received the stance of a hunter directly from the Founders.
'When we were talking in the compartment, he seemed to lack any common sense, so I thought he was just an ordinary Generation Zero....'
His skill at shaking off Trudian's pursuit was out of the ordinary.
Ian nudged Barnett, who had sunk into thought, and had them walk mixed in with the other crowds. He started talking in a low voice.
"The city I originally meant to go to was Moonbai, where the constellations of the moon gather."
"You mean that moon slum? I heard there are lots of beastkin. And lots of people into that kind of thing too...."
"Oh, is that so?"
Ian let out a hollow laugh. Come to think of it, even in the Common Era, when the werewolves lived hiding their existence, there had been suspiciously eccentric beastkin enthusiasts all over the world.
If there was a place where real beastkin lived together, it was only natural for them to flock there.
"I was going to see the werewolves said to live there."
"...Just so you know, in case. You know you can't just go killing demihumans these days, right? If you have a grudge from the past, it counts as a mitigating circumstance, but you'd still be locked up in an Agency prison."
"And if I tried to break out?"
"An enforcer from the Pendragon house would come for you."
"Oh."
"What's 'oh' supposed to mean?"
"Think about it. What you asked of me was to help you defect to the Pendragon house, wasn't it?"
"Yeah?"
"Then the fastest, surest way to bring someone from the Pendragon house to us right now would be for me to commit a crime and then attempt a prison break, wouldn't it?"
Barnett was about to retort with 'Are you crazy, Mister?' but caught sight of Ian's eyes, faintly visible between the hood and the cap.
The corners of his eyes were curved into arcs.
"...You're teasing me right now!"
"Yes. Do you think I'm crazy enough to kill someone? I have no such intention."
His tone as he answered was quite calm. For Barnett, it was a surprising attitude. While working as a porter apprentice, they had seen quite a few people belonging to the Generation Zero.
But those people always had a hunted air and showed their sharp wariness plainly. Unless they'd received a constellation's blessing, Generation Zero hunters were rarely welcomed for their character, whatever their skill.
And yet this hunter, in his own way, actually knew how to make a joke.
"Have you thought about how to make contact with the Pendragon house?"
"Their main house is, of course-"
Ian expected to hear "London." Even the original Elric had come from the London slums. The world had changed a lot, but settling down in one's hometown....
"In Camelot."
"...?"
'Camelot?'
The city from the King Arthur legend?
'Oh, buddy....'
Ian recalled Balden, the first hunter he'd met in the Age of Constellations. A man who, even when Ian said something odd out of unfamiliarity with the times, had shown a tolerant, generous patience with an "Ah, that's your concept, huh?"
And here Ian had wondered how he could have such a generous heart. It seemed the Founders themselves had gone in for concept-play on the scale of an entire city.
"But getting to Camelot is hard. It's not as tight as New York, but Camelot has rank restrictions too. Mister, you could probably get in, but...."
"I probably couldn't get in either."
"What?"
Ian showed his hunter registration card. E-rank.
Barnett shook their head. A Generation Zero hunter usually ended up in one of two ways.
One, get in touch with the Constellation Order or the like and become socialized.
Two, throw themselves into hunting to an excessive degree until the local Hunter Support Agency said "Please, just go already," bumped them up to C-rank, and packed them off to the front.
Honestly, even the word "packed off" was a bit off the mark. It wasn't shoving the Generation Zero hunters away so much as opening a road for those addicted to hunting.
But Ian didn't seem to belong to either one.
'What on earth was this hunter doing before?'
"Anyway, fine. If we can't go to Camelot, I assume you've thought of another way?"
"...Yeah. Um. The Pendragon house takes on a lot of work for the Agency. Whenever there's an A-rank promotion exam, at least one of them always gets dispatched."
The moment he heard that, Ian logged on to HunterNet. A high-rank promotion exam like this always announced the exam date and venue in advance and recruited participants.
True to its nature as a public institution, HunterNet had organized the promotion exam schedule into a neat table.
"The A-rank promotion exam being held in Tintagel is one week from now, it says."
"What?"
Ian tossed the terminal to Barnett. Barnett handled it gingerly.
The movements looked somehow awkward.
"Hm? Don't you have one of these?"
"...There are lots of cities the Agency's hand doesn't reach well, you know. In places where a great house or a corporation is the real ruling class, yeah. Even getting one of these is hard."
Ian clicked his tongue. The cities run by corporations, which reminded him of some sci-fi dystopia, were one thing.
But the people called 'hunter great houses' neglecting the care of the talent that would become hunters?
As Barnett studied the schedule, Ian laid out two options.
"One. We wait in Tintagel for a week. Then on the day of the A-rank promotion exam, we hand you over to the Pendragon enforcer who comes."
"Uh, isn't that the only option?"
"Two. We take the next train to a bigger city within the Pendragon house's territory."
Ian explained his calculations. Not much time had passed since Barnett got off the train.
In other words, it was about the time Trudian would still be searching the Moonbai-bound train they'd already gotten off.
With Trudian's attention focused on the Moonbai-bound train, at a moment when the possibility that they had 'escaped from the train' hadn't yet been examined, it was possible to choose to use a different train and slip the pursuit.
"Well, with bad luck they may have already thrown a cordon around the train station. But if it works, we could secure your safety much faster."
Waiting in Tintagel meant the chance of pursuers latching on right now was low, but Trudian's private soldiers would most likely end up concentrating here.
Given the timing, Tintagel was the only place Barnett could have escaped to.
"So, what'll it be?"
Just as Barnett was about to say something.
From somewhere high above, starlight whispered to her.
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