WeTried Translations
Translator: Botanica
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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈
Chapter 22
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The Hunter and the Fugitive (4)
Ian thought it over. The follow-up train would surely be carrying pursuers who used supernatural means.
'Where should I put Barnett to make the best use of them?'
If Barnett had been on par with the hunters Ian used to work with, he wouldn't have hesitated to ask them to wait inside the passenger car.
To be precise, to wait for an ambush.
The dokkaebi headband was most effective in an ambush during a melee, after all.
Lure the pursuers into the car and start a brawl, then have Ian take position behind them and hit them from both sides, and the fight would go far more efficiently.
But...
"Any combat experience?"
"I've only ever run away. Oh, but during my porter, I mean carrier, practicum, I tagged along to an F-rank Gate and cut the throat of a goblin or two."
"What about the revelations from whatever constellation it is? Can they help directly in a fight?"
"...I'm not sure. They tell me where to run and how, though."
Barnett's physical ability was nowhere near good enough to help in a fight. Ian gauged the distance left to the destination.
Greygruin was the very next stop. If this had been a chase in the Common Era, Ian wouldn't have hesitated to leave the tracks and go on foot.
But this was the Age of Constellations. Outside the intercity railway, spatial distortion from the Gates was at work.
Sometimes even inside the tracks. That was the reason the intercity trains accelerated so violently.
For one, if they didn't accelerate that much, they couldn't escape the effects of the warped space, and for another, it let them run down any monsters that wandered onto the line.
With the environment like this, trying to escape on foot was nearly pointless. Ian thought for a moment.
"Barnett."
"Yes?"
"Just to be sure, once you somehow get to Greygruin, your problem is settled for the time being, right?"
* * *
A revelation came to her from within.
Unlike before, it was blunt and brief to the extreme.
Stop him!
Barnett hesitated for a moment. She remembered the advice Ian had given her.
That at the point where the star's will and her own parted, there was no telling where her fate would head.
For once, Barnett decided to follow her own will. She longed for safety and peace.
"...Yes. No matter how much power the Argon Group has, to stir up trouble inside the Pendragon house's sphere of influence and then clean up after it, it takes not a director but the family head to step in."
"I see. Then I'm going with Plan D."
"D?"
Something was off. Wasn't the usual label for a backup plan more like B? And a plan shelved as fourth, not even third?
But everything this hunter had shown so far had been far too professional to doubt him now. Barnett nodded.
And a few minutes later.
'Dear Star...!'
Barnett regretted it.
* * *
The Generation Zero hunter's instructions were so clear that even a kid who'd never studied strategy or tactics could follow them.
Put on the headband, head to the driver's cab at the very front of the train, and wait.
"Why?"
"The announcement said they'd detach the train over a problem in the engine section, right?"
A magitech locomotive's power units were installed in two places, front and rear, so it could be driven in either direction.
So of course, the part that had failed this time, or been made to look like it had, would have been the front engine section.
From Trudian's side, they had to keep the target from running any farther.
Which meant that for a results-driven Generation Zero hunter, the way to carry out the plan of "reach Greygruin as fast as possible" was...
"All right. Shall we begin?"
The textbook answer was to hijack the train!
Barnett didn't understand what had just happened.
Approaching the driver's cab, they saw several ticket inspectors, who doubled as the train's engineers, moving in to separate the driving car from the passenger cars.
Under cover of the commotion of the detachment work, Barnett climbed aboard the driving car. She owed it to the bare minimum of physical fitness she'd built as a porter hopeful.
The inspectors had clustered together to finish the detachment, and now only one was left to board the driving car and take it away.
Suddenly Ian appeared behind the engine room. The inspector hadn't noticed. Ian raised a forefinger in a "quiet" gesture and approached the inspector on soundless steps.
To keep the engine section from overloading, the locomotive was moving very slowly. Just as the inspector was slowly looking around.
Crack.
"Mmph...!"
In an instant Ian clamped a hand over the inspector's mouth and drove something like an iron skewer into the middle of the ribcage. He spoke slowly.
"Speed up."
The moment the inspector started biting Ian's hand to resist, the skewer moved.
Thrust deep toward the abdomen between the ribs, it slipped between bone and flesh with astonishing skill and damaged no organ at all.
Slice.
An iron point cutting very sharply between bone and flesh. A chilling sensation, like being a cut of meat being butchered at a slaughterhouse. The inspector stopped breathing.
Ian thought.
'Durability as expected. By BloodWeb's rank classification, C-rank?'
The body's toughness was at the level of a well-trained human. Even allowing that "well-trained" was being measured by a Generation Zero hunter's standard, it wasn't B-rank, where you'd need real supernatural power just to wound them.
Again he repeated, slowly and distinctly.
"Speed up."
With a glove jammed in the mouth, the inspector couldn't even make proper sounds, but muttered something anyway. To Barnett it sounded like, "You think you'll get away with this?"
Ian snorted.
"Either way, if this job goes wrong, the Director will kill you just the same. Even if it's a bit rough, if it gets the goal done, you do it."
'?'
Barnett felt something off about the out-of-nowhere remark. The inspector seemed to feel the same.
"Cwazy bastahd...! I'm wi' Twudian...!"
"Oh. Friend. You've got the wrong idea. Not that director. The director I serve. The cargo aboard is very precious, you see. And there's someone who couldn't stand to watch Director Trudian monopolize it."
Ian murmured without so much as a flicker of expression. In Barnett's eyes, the inspector was trembling.
He was already shaking with fear. A henchman of another director was aboard the train, and had already secured the important cargo!
"Speed up."
Ian repeated it calmly.
The inspector, chilled by the repetition, sped up.
"Very good."
Then Ian swiftly knocked the inspector out.
A commotion drew near from far away, reaching Barnett's ears. Once the locomotive got a certain distance from the cars it should have stopped moving, but instead of showing any sign of doing so, it only kept gaining speed.
Before the locomotive's speed reached a level lethal to a human, Ian simply tossed the inspector out. Then he shut the door.
"...Is this really okay?!"
"Of course not. But getting to Greygruin first was the top priority, you said?"
'Dear Star!'
Dizzy now, Barnett offered a prayer to the star. But the star kept to silence, as if staging a protest of "Didn't I already tell you?"
"B-but if you throw that man away, what do we do! We don't even know how to drive this thing!"
Ian shook his head.
"We're fine."
He'd gathered information on BloodWeb in advance, and verified it again just now from the inspector's movements.
The way this locomotive operated was nearly identical to what Ian remembered.
The only additions were the switches for running the magitech engine and the emergency stop device, and if those were needed, he could just wake the guy he'd knocked out and tied up.
When Ian began operating the train with practiced hands, Barnett's mouth fell open.
She understood perfectly well now why the star had told her to rely on this person, and why it had told her to stop him at once.
"...H-have you done something like this before?"
"Hm. Something partly similar, yes."
"What kind of hunter has ever hijacked a train?! Even for a Generation Zero...."
Barnett tried to finish the sentence, then sucked air through her teeth and trailed off. Considering the Generation Zero hunters' violent streak, which she'd heard about in rumors and seen often enough herself, it didn't seem strange.
Still, it was strange that the one attempting the hijacking was this person, "Ian." Didn't he lack the violent streak she knew in ordinary Generation Zero hunters?
Seeing the kid's puzzled face, Ian decided to add a little explanation for the sake of his client's peace of mind.
"Hijacking, you see, is a basic skill for any seasoned hunter."
"...What?!"
A plane at high altitude or a ship in the middle of the ocean is a sealed room that others can't easily reach. Which means a perfect environment for the Night Folk to feed on people.
And in an environment like that, the first one eaten is always the pilot.
So to hunt the Night Folk and get out safely, hunters had to learn how to carry out a hijacking ahead of time...
As a result, the hunters on the front lines against the Night Folk naturally became experts in the double hijacking, hijacking the hijackers!
"Every once in a while, a crazed monster turns up that hijacks a plane to infect every passenger aboard."
Ian explained it in loosely simplified terms.
"A plane? You actually saw one!? Weren't they all broken by the time of the Great Cataclysm, unable to even fly?"
"Ah."
Ian let out a low sound of realization. Right, planes were supposed to be very rare for humanity these days.
In the Age of Constellations, the only thing in the sky that people everywhere knew about was Sky Fortress New York.
"They used to be common. Anyway, the most effective answer to a hijacking is a hijacking, so everyone knows how to break into a cockpit and fly it as common knowledge."
In that sense, sneaking onto this magitech locomotive had gone quite easily. For one thing, there was no need to steal the special key required to open and close the engine room door.
"Then let's get going."
* * *
Tachel, waiting on the follow-up train, was flustered.
The bone fragment in their hand shook violently. What this meant was...
'The target is moving away!'
Wham. The door of the compartment assigned to Tachel flew open. One of Trudian's henchmen rushed in and shouted.
"There's been a train hijacking! It looks like someone from another director's faction has secured the target first!"
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