WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈

Chapter 5

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Generation Gap (1)

The Six Founders had helped establish the Hunter Support Agency. You could learn as much just by visiting the history museum in the Agency's annex.

After all, there was an exhibit written in the style of a children's educational comic: 'Having ended the Great Cataclysm, the Six Founders realized that humanity's fight would continue from here on.'

They felt the need to prepare for the chaos still to come, and for the Gates that would keep rising without end.

The Founders argued back and forth over their respective methods, but there was one purpose they all agreed on.

That a system was needed to verify and classify the abilities of hunters.

Because a hunt begins with understanding the capabilities of both hunter and prey. If you accurately grasp your own abilities and your target's, the success rate of the hunt goes up, and so does the hunter's survival rate.

From this came the current ranking system, running from F-rank to S-rank. The Hunter Support Agency of today was what you got when various kinds of support were layered onto the organization created to spread that ranking system.

For example, the first-generation support policy (honestly, there wasn't anything you could really call "support" in this period) went no further than assigning ranks according to a hunter's mana capacity or track record.

In fact, at that time the focus was on classifying Gates and monsters more than on classifying hunters. The idea was to make hunters' survival more certain by laying out exactly what the enemy could do.

And then the second generation. Hunters began forming organizations on a far larger scale than the one-off hunting groups they called "parties." Organizations like clans and guilds could now be formally registered with the Agency.

In the third generation, combat courses for novice hunters were established. So that newcomers entering the hunter industry could have their combat strength reinforced, and so that the tacit knowledge (暗默知) of veterans retired through injury and the like could be passed on.

Flesh was added bit by bit like this, until things had now reached the seventh support policy.

And in between these policy changes, Generation Zero hunters kept jutting out like hidden reefs.

Actually, through the second-generation support policy, and broadly speaking even the third, the Generation Zero hunters had blended in without any particular trouble.

The first-generation support policy, centered on rank classification, directly benefited not only the first-generation hunters who became hunters after the Great Cataclysm, but also the Generation Zero hunters who had become hunters during it.

By the time the second-generation support policy was promulgated, what had gradually begun to surface was not the Generation Zero hunters already used to the first-generation policy, but the problem of the "out-of-step" ones: those who had drifted through the Gates, gone missing during the Great Cataclysm, and then returned.

Even so, the generation gap hadn't been very noticeable up to that point. From the third generation on, it came into full view.

Reviews of the courses taught by retired Generation Zero hunters, drawing on their own experience, started to carry comments like these.

'Nobody uses that anymore!'

'Out of touch with the field.'

'Old and sickly hunter.'

The reason this happened came down to the identity of the Generation Zero hunters.

The Great Cataclysm had been a disaster that, apart from a tiny number of hunters, nobody had seen coming.

Everyone who, in that time of disaster, took up arms to protect themselves or for some other reason, fought monsters, and explored Gates was counted among the Generation Zero hunters.

But then...

Who would you expect to survive and fight in a situation that not even the top of the public authorities had predicted?

Hunters who had been fighting since before the Great Cataclysm. Extreme survivalists who had prepared for society-collapsing disasters. And conspiracy theorists who had believed in end-of-the-world plots, who cried out for people to wake up because Reptilians had infiltrated our society.

It was hard to separate these three groups cleanly. The overlap of people who were all three at once was considerable.

And so, the stereotype of the Generation Zero hunter was.

People who wore tinfoil hats, insisted the government couldn't be trusted, brandished weapons, and went around carrying out vigilante justice...!

This was also why most of the hunters of the Great Cataclysm, apart from the Founders who established the great houses, vanished without making any real impact.

Stubborn, anachronistic old fogies.

Among the Generation Zero hunters dug out of Gates, there were often some who raged, insisting that even the sight of the Hunter Support Agency today had to be a hallucination.

They claimed the Gates were really tools for cattle mutilation, aliens sucking up living things to collect Earth specimens, and that they themselves had to have been caught by a hypnosis device and dropped into a virtual world.

How else could the world have changed this much? the old-era hunters shouted. Agency staff earnestly explained the spatiotemporal distortions that often occur in Gates, but few people accepted their situation on explanation alone.

Various efforts had been made to bring such people into the system. If they had family or comrades, they could join a hunter guild together with them, or the Agency set up programs for hunter rehabilitation.

Of all those methods, the most effective was a contract with a constellation.

The power and knowledge a supernatural being like a constellation breathed directly into a soul could deliver a shock strong enough to overturn even a person's fixed ideas all at once.

The constellations also tended to prefer Generation Zero hunters as contractors. For that reason, the Constellation Order sent scouters to every Hunter Support Agency building around the world.

The people who made a scene at the Agency were almost always Generation Zero hunters, so the scouters would approach them and then arrange a contract.

Put the other way around, a Generation Zero hunter who didn't make a scene was hard to tell apart from an ordinary hunter.

That was why no one had paid Ian any particular attention either. For a Generation Zero hunter, he had accepted the situation far too softly and quietly.

The only person who had shown Ian any special interest at the time was the fairy receptionist.

'Wow, for a Generation Zero hunter, what a sociable and gentle person!'

Slipping out from under the gaze of the Constellation Order, which coveted Generation Zero hunters, Ian had been quietly and diligently carrying out his public job duties when...

* * *

"You've built up enough of a record to be promoted. Why not apply for the E-rank promotion exam?"

He'd come to the Agency annex as usual, meaning to take on an F-rank Gate vegetation survey commission, and instead heard something out of the ordinary.

'A promotion exam, huh.'

Ian scratched his head. He'd been thinking anyway that he'd have to move up to a higher rank at some point.

There wasn't any contempt to speak of for being F-rank, but the higher the rank, the stronger the Gates you could enter.

Higher-rank Gates meant higher income.

Ian needed more money, if only to buy the various catalysts for charging the Jade Necklace.

Ian sighed inwardly.

'Seriously, how does a plain horse hoof end up costing more than a kelpie's tail feather?'

The truth was, in hunter society now, the "plain horse" Ian wanted was a rare species.

After the Great Cataclysm, living things exposed to mana had undergone mutation into mythical species.

The kind of animal Ian was looking for had an especially wide range of changes.

Some became kelpies, water spirits with horse heads, some grew horns on their heads, some sprouted wings on their backs. Sometimes a super-mutant even appeared that could talk, had a horn, and had wings.

Because the world had changed that way, "ordinary horses" had instead become rare.

And since the traditional mana charging methods Ian knew mostly relied on parts of ordinary species...

'On F-rank Gate public jobs, that was a sum that would take at least several months to earn, maybe even a year.'

Ian remembered the shock of searching for the price of the materials he needed on HunterNet, the multipurpose site run by the Hunter Support Agency.

Most of the materials listed on the auction site were priced far higher than he'd imagined.

Materials with no mana in them had become so expensive for one reason: they had no mana.

In the precision experiments conducted at places like the magic towers, the mana in a material could distort the results, and to correct for that margin of error, they bought mana-free materials at high prices, apparently.

In other words, demand from the big corporations had pushed the supply price up outrageously.

Ian nodded with a wry smile beneath his hood.

"Yes. That sounds good."

"Wow! Then please come to the Rank Measurement Room on the first floor of the Hunter Support Agency main building at 9 o'clock next Tuesday!"

"Uh..."

Ian scratched his head. A promotion exam, and it started as soon as next week? Wasn't that too fast?

"Is there anything I should prepare before the promotion exam?"

"Oh, come on, the E-rank promotion exam is just a record check and then completing safety training."

"What?"

Ian asked back, not understanding for a moment. Safety training was the whole thing?

That couldn't be right. Of all the hunter groups he knew, the one with the loosest promotion procedure was the (self-styled) magicians' society, the Silver Key Dawn Cross Society.

Their "loose" promotion procedure went as follows.

Basically, after monitoring on a monthly basis, they confiscated everything you had, clothes included, and you had to escape alive from a primeval forest where mythical creatures lurked.

That was the minimum requirement for a "newcomer" to be recognized as an "initiate."

Didn't you have to go through at least this much of an ordeal before you could proudly say you'd stepped out of newcomer status and taken a step as a hunter?

"Oh, did you maybe hear about the old exam from other people? There actually used to be a written exam, but when the seventh revision of the policy came in, it was moved over to the D-rank promotion exam. Because the D-rank practical exam was producing too many injuries, the view of those who wanted the practical exam to start at the C-rank promotion won out, so..."

Ian felt like fainting.

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