WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈

Chapter 4

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The Youth Who Was a Hunter (4)

Ian recalled the diligence of vampires. Even among the Night Folk, vampires counted as the most troublesome kind to deal with.

First of all, there was the problem of their sense of kinship.

High vampires called the flock under their command their Bloodkin (血族).

The word meant a family bound not by the seeds of filthy lust, but by pure blood.

Later-generation vampires trusted and followed the elders who had granted them blood and graciously raised them into the noble Bloodkin, as if those elders were their true parents.

Actually, saying "as if" they were true parents wasn't accurate.

From a vampire's point of view, the parents who bore them were the false ones, and the elder who bestowed the pure blood was the real parent.

Armed with cunning intellect and a tight sense of kinship, the vampires had carefully built what, in human terms, you could call an emergency contact network.

They ran espionage and instant communication through familiars like the bats they commanded, and up through the early modern era, their information assets had held an overwhelming advantage over humans.

As communication technology developed, the information gap between humans and vampires had narrowed somewhat.

But vampires could use technology too, so no matter how well humanity prepared, the best it could hope for was to match the vampires' intelligence capabilities or trail slightly behind.

With that in mind, Ian had started preparing his plan the moment he filed his return report as a missing person with the Hunter Support Agency.

What if he couldn't charge the Jade Necklace with the blood of ordinary monsters inside a Gate?

Then he'd just make the vampires come find him.

If he used vampire blood, he could charge the Jade Necklace right away, without worrying about compatibility.

And now, Ian's plan had gone completely awry.

Given the intelligence capabilities of the vampires he knew, and the pettiness of a race that never forgot a grudge from hundreds of years ago and took it out even on an enemy's descendants, he'd expected an attack within a week at the latest.

'Strange.'

No matter how he thought about it, he couldn't figure out the cause.

'Don't tell me every single vampire has become overwhelmingly strong since this Age of Constellations arrived, so they don't even treat an old-generation hunter like me as an enemy?'

From the beginning, the Night Folk, vampires included, had handled mana far more freely than ordinary humans.

In this era, where mana was so abundant he could feel the density of it in the air on his skin...

'No. That doesn't make sense.'

As much as the vampires had grown stronger, the hunters had grown stronger too. All he had to do was look at his old comrades, who had raised the standing of hunters so high that a bizarre phrase like "hunter great house" passed for common sense.

'If anything, a hypothesis in a different direction would be more convincing.'

The ones called the Six Founders of the Beginning, Ian's comrades.

What if they had wiped out the vampires during the Great Cataclysm?

According to the materials the Hunter Support Agency had published, the first officially confirmed contractor with a constellation was Elric, so the hunters of that time might have been able to overwhelm the vampires with the constellations' backing...

Ian cut off the train of thought that kept trying to stretch further. What kind of life the vampires were living in the Age of Constellations was, for now, something he could only guess at.

To get a firm read on the present situation, he had no choice but to charge the Jade Necklace and find the Princess.

'Tsk. Do I need to look into a way to build up mana the traditional way...?'

Thinking that, Ian closed his book.

It was nearly closing time at the library.

He borrowed a few history books and left.

* * *

Although Ian had been haunting the library for the past several days to lure out vampires, that didn't mean he'd been reading half-heartedly.

To find out what had happened while he was gone, he had to diligently go through the records of the past.

But there was no book that covered what Ian wanted to know, "what happened from 1999 until the Great Cataclysm ended."

There was only a superficial line like, "There was once a time when humanity counted its years with four-digit numbers, and even then a small number of hunters existed."

As for the period after the Common Era, meaning books on the Great Cataclysm era, there were at least a few.

Though their content was uniformly simple.

A story that somehow felt like propaganda, in which the hunters drove out the forces of evil that had tried to take over the Earth by exploiting the chaos of the upheaval.

Even so, that heavy-handed propaganda tradition gave Ian a sense of déjà vu.

He tried to mend the tattered cloth of time by combining what he had known with what he had learned.

'Let's start by organizing the eras.'

He decided to divide history into three periods, as several general-interest books presented it: the Common Era, the Great Cataclysm era, and the present Age of Constellations.

Ian already had a guess at the cause of the Great Cataclysm.

Among the hunters of the Common Era, three end-of-the-world theories had circulated.

Honestly, it was embarrassing to attach the word "theory" to them. There was no real scientific evidence behind them.

So the more accurate name was three prophecies of the end.

The first prophecy. 1999, the end of the century.

An ominous warning that, just as heaven and earth turn over when a century changes, the order between humans, Earth's current dominant species, and the Night Folk would be reversed.

No one knew exactly which race the Night Folk in question referred to. But the vampires believed that if any race was "superior" enough to rule humans, it could only be themselves.

That was why they appointed themselves the leading players of the apocalypse.

While waiting for 1999, they had created the Princess, their ultimate weapon for the decisive battle between hunters and vampires, and prepared a scheme to use her as a primer to resurrect the dreadful Dracula.

That was when Ian had vanished.

At the very moment the Princess tried to revive the king of the vampires.

To stop the ritual of great destruction, Ian had seized the Princess and thrown himself out beyond the collapsing reality.

'And next.'

The second. 2012, the Tailed Star.

A prophecy that a meteor falling to Earth would cause a mass extinction. Just as there had been vampires who believed in the prophecy of 1999, there were also Night Folk who worshipped the prophecy of 2012.

'The Reptilians, right.'

Reptile-humans who claimed to carry the blood of the Old Dragon. They believed that on the day the meteor fell and modern society collapsed, the starry sky would open and they would ascend as true dragons.

It was an oral tradition passed down in secret among the Reptilians.

The reason Ian had learned of the reptile-people's secret wish was simple.

A traitor of their race had joined the hunters' side. The Half-Dragon Girl was a hybrid not of human and vampire but of reptile-person and human, and she styled herself a dragon lady.

Ian had figured the Great Cataclysm came around 2012, the backdrop of this second end-of-the-world theory.

He recalled the ritual of 1999, carried out beneath a full moon dyed red. As the ritual progressed, the scenery of reality had crumbled, and beyond the shattered sky, an ominous chaos had swirled.

Had the ritual been completed, chaos would have poured out into the world from the collapsed boundary.

If the Reptilians of 2012 had plotted more covertly, taking the vampires of 1999 as a cautionary example.

And if that meteor really had struck the Earth, it was only natural that the world had ended up the mess it was now.

The Reptilians had succeeded in breaking down the boundary of chaos and completing a grand magic to summon the meteor, and the meteor that came from beyond the metaphysical had changed the very shape of Earth's continents.

Ian looked down at the atlas spread open before him. The continents he had known didn't exist there.

Only a single Unified Continent remained.

The "Earth" he remembered could only be found in the names of the great cities scattered across the Unified Continent.

In names like London, the capital of the Magic Tower League, or Sky Fortress New York.

Honestly, an impact strong enough to plow the continents into a new shape should have wiped out every living thing on Earth, as a matter of course.

But the meteor the Reptilians worshipped, Nibiru, was a celestial body summoned and made to approach through magic, not science.

The shockwave of the impact must have been magical as well.

Ian organized the timeline he had been drawing in his head so far.

1999, the end of the century. The first apocalypse resolved when he and the Princess vanished together.

2012, the Tailed Star. For some reason, the hunters failed to stop the Reptilians. The second apocalypse arrived.

The outbreak of the Great Cataclysm.

The era of the Great Cataclysm. A war with the Reptilian Empire, led by the Six Founders who had contracted with constellations. A hunter victory. The Hunter Support Agency established during postwar reconstruction.

"And after that, the Age of Constellations opened, is what they're saying..."

Ian wondered what might have become of the vampires amid the torrent of this tangled hunter history.

It made sense that they could have been swept up in the unprecedented disaster of the Great Cataclysm and wiped out, and it made just as much sense that they could have expanded their power by taking advantage of it.

Ian turned the puzzle over for a while, then shook it out of his head.

Either way, the Princess's survival was certain. If he found that brat, he could get a perfect picture of the vampire race's current state.

In truth, even without the Jade Necklace, Ian could tell whether the Princess was alive or dead.

He couldn't know her exact location or condition. But it was clear that she was alive and breathing on the same star at this very moment.

That she was alive was proven by the burning sensation he felt in his heart.

It was heat seeping out of the brand the Princess herself had carved.

After the two of them fell together in 1999, Ian had realized at some point, while buried in the chaos, that the heat carved into his heart had subsided.

Back then he had thought the Princess's soul had faded away, unable to endure her endless hunger. But now he knew.

The Princess had returned to Earth ahead of him, back then.

The moment Ian set foot on the Earth of the Age of Constellations, the brand that had been dormant for so long began to pulse again.

An alarm bell announcing the Princess's survival. It was the moment Ian resolved to hunt her down.

And even now.

The brand was pulsing.

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