WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈

Chapter 2

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The Youth Who Was a Hunter (2)

What struck Ian as even stranger than the people shouting "status window" was that most of the hunters around them were casting envious, resentful looks at the ones who had one.

Disapproving looks aimed at the ringleaders of the noise pollution, he could have understood. But envy and jealousy?

After brooding for a moment, Ian recalled what he'd heard while talking to the Agency official earlier.

'They said something about getting a status window if you contract with a constellation.'

Was the "status window" they were shouting about some kind of proof that a constellation, one of those contract-granting beings, had chosen them? In that case, the envy people were quietly letting slip made sense, too.

Longing and jealousy toward some special thing you didn't have. That was a feeling Ian was familiar with.

'If that's the context, wanting to show off the special thing you got your hands on is kind of understandable...'

Ian tried to understand the new-generation hunters, then eventually shook his head.

'No. Even so, is this really okay?'

The people who envied status windows he could just barely understand, but the ones flaunting them were beyond him.

Openly displaying your abilities in front of an indiscriminate crowd?

Did they even know when or how that information might leak?

He figured today's hunters would call him an old fogey on the spot if they heard that.

* * *

After thinking about status windows for a few minutes, Ian shook his head. Spending mental energy on something that had nothing to do with him right now was just a waste of time and stamina, wasn't it?

Rather than agonizing over a problem he couldn't understand, it was more efficient to start looking into the public job placement program, even a few minutes sooner.

Having shaken off the stray thoughts, Ian headed for the Agency's annex.

The road to the annex was quieter than the main building. Ian watched the hunters' attire carefully as he went.

'Their outfits are a bit plainer than the people in front of the main building.'

The ripples of mana he felt from each hunter were rather faint, too. Apparently, public jobs weren't the kind of assignments strong hunters preferred.

That, if anything, put Ian at ease.

In the time he'd been gone, the hunter industry had undergone an irreversible upheaval.

With the mana concentration on Earth now overwhelmingly higher, there was no telling what kind of disaster he might run into if he headed out hunting recklessly.

It was better to take on a relatively safe assignment and get a feel for the true state of the industry.

'And above all...'

Ian pulled out the necklace he'd tucked beneath his clothes. A jade ornament hung from the middle of the leather cord.

The jade, which should have been glowing softly, had lost its luster and lay quietly dormant.

The Jade Necklace was one of the few magic tools Ian owned. Its enchantment let it track the Night Folk.

It could only track one target at a time, but even that alone made it an immensely useful tool for a hunter.

Ian rubbed the Jade Necklace a few times. It still wasn't glowing, which seemed to mean it had run out of mana and couldn't function at all.

Charging the Jade Necklace was simple. It had to absorb the blood of the Night Folk.

The moment he got his hands on some mana in a Gate, he intended to reactivate the tracking mark within the necklace.

This necklace had been tuned in 1999 to track the last of the Night Folk Ian had fought: the vampire princess.

Neither the Princess nor Ian had won that fight. Each had entrusted the future to their comrades, and the two of them had plummeted together beyond the Earth.

Since he'd come back, the Princess must have returned to this world as well.

Perhaps far earlier than he had. The Princess had possessed far greater mana than Ian, so breaking out of the seal would have been easy for her.

Even on an Earth where mana had been vanishingly scarce, she had been such a formidable vampire. There was no telling how much stronger, and how much more cunning, she'd become in this era.

An intelligent enemy is frightening because it learns from failure, and vampires were the most intelligent of all the Night Folk.

The Princess was a seed of calamity that the past had dumped on the present.

Ian considered finding and hunting the Princess the last duty remaining to him.

* * *

Ian's plans for the future were one thing, and reality was another.

He quietly headed to the Agency annex and received a briefing on the public jobs.

The request had a dry name: F-rank Gate Vegetation Survey.

It was an assignment for fresh rookies: there was no need to fight the monsters inside the Gate directly, just collect the surrounding plants and animals and come back out.

Ian handed over his Hunter Registration Card to sign up, then glanced around once.

Most of the hunters in the annex had faint mana ripples like his own.

A few of them, though, gave off a different amount of mana. Ian discreetly observed the hunters whose mana felt stronger.

'Even their clothes are made of different material, huh?'

It was hard to tell at a glance, but up close, the fabric had an expensive look to it. Ian ran through the clichés of constellation fiction in his head.

He had no trouble guessing who they were.

'Scouters waiting to recruit promising talent into their organizations?'

People trying to snap up rising stars who stood out during hunter registration before anyone else could.

Memories of novels he'd read long ago came flooding back.

The scouters in those novels would always shout in amazement, "The rank measurement orb shattered!" and then report to their superiors.

Ian was picturing scouters offering him countless handshakes when he let out a wry chuckle.

He didn't know whether the groups of hunters in this era were called guilds, clans, or something else entirely, but he'd never get tangled up with any of them.

For one thing, Ian had been classified as F-rank, hadn't he? No scouter's eye would ever land on that rank.

'It was fun to imagine, though.'

With a spring in his step, Ian headed for the meeting point for applicants to the F-rank Gate Vegetation Survey.

* * *

"Well now, that's one hell of an atmosphere. Nice gear, too."

Inside the Agency's transport vehicle bound for the F-rank Gate, the neat, handsome-looking middle-aged man in the next seat spoke to him.

Ian scratched his cheek.

His gear was an outfit that had been written off as outdated even among hunters of the old days.

A coat that fell to about the calves, a neatly kept hat, and a hood to cover the mouth. It was a getup that even hunters of the medieval and early modern eras would have found stifling.

But judging by his tone, the man wasn't trying to pick a fight. It sounded more like casual chatter meant to build a little rapport.

Ian told him the plain truth.

"It's an antique. I inherited it from someone I know."

It was something he'd received from the mentor who had led him into the hunter world. The mentor had gone around in high-tech bulletproof armor made of special fibers, so no matter how Ian looked at it, he couldn't shake the impression that he'd been handed something the mentor hadn't known what to do with.

"Oh, I knew it. That sheen was no ordinary thing! Did you have ties to some hunter great house? Or are you a devotee of the Constellation Order?"

Ian's brain stopped for a moment.

Words that could never possibly go together had been bundled up and thrown at his ears.

"Hunter...great house?"

The sense of wrongness was so strong that he could hardly put the two words together.

'All I ever met were people who swore they'd quit this fucking job the second they got their hands on their enemy.'

No hunter wanted to hand down a grudge from blood to blood. They all wanted to finish off their nemesis in their own generation and leave their descendants a peaceful life.

This middle-aged man was now saying the exact opposite of Ian's hunter common sense.

"Come on, don't play coy about something everybody knows. The venerable hunter families that go back to the Great Cataclysm! I hear those great houses prefer traditional hunter gear to the mass-produced artifacts of today."

Ian looked out the window at the distant sky.

What "venerable lineage" could hunters possibly have? Hunters were just people who'd been bloodied by the Night Folk, gritted their teeth, and picked up a weapon.

'It's really hard to adapt to this...'

He fobbed the man off by saying he'd inherited it from his mentor and didn't know the gear's proper origins. The middle-aged man nodded repeatedly.

"Ahh. That kind of concept, huh?"

Chuckling, the man held out his hand.

"The name's Balden. Pleased to meet you."

Ian, who'd been about to give his own name, was taken aback. The name Balden had a fairly Western ring to it, yet the man's looks were closer to Korean.

'Is this the Great Cataclysm's doing too?'

He'd seen it in the "History of the Hunter Support Agency" section of the Agency's guide pamphlet.

A great many things had happened in the Great Cataclysm era, and the upheavals had even rearranged the structure of the continents, making much of the world different from the previous era.

Apparently, different cultures had mixed together in the process, and names had changed in all sorts of ways as well.

Ian nodded with feigned calm.

"I'm Ian. This is my first Gate expedition, so I look forward to working with you as well."

"Oho, Ian. Isn't that another pronunciation of John? You might be closer to a devotee of the Order than a scion of a great house..."

Balden muttered something. Ian smiled bitterly beneath his hood.

In truth, he was a native Korean, surname Lee, with the character for "light" (㷳) in his given name.

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