WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈

Chapter 7

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Blood Web (1)

Ian confirmed that the Dragonkin's breathing had stopped. Even so, he didn't walk straight up to its front.

He moved carefully at a slant, using the Dragonkin's maw as his reference point.

It was a habit from hunting Reptilians in the Common Era.

Some snakes can keep moving for over an hour after their heads are cut off. And if the beheaded snake is a venomous one, it's even more dangerous than when it was alive.

A severed snake head reflexively tries to spit out all the venom in its glands the moment it bites down on something. It was a final act of revenge, prepared by the last flicker of a nerve circuit that hadn't yet gone out.

And the tenacity of Reptilians was far stronger and more stubborn than the flicker in those venomous snakes.

Ian had even fought a Reptilian that kept firing a submachine gun after its head was cut off.

So Ian's approach was quite cautious.

Even if it really did move again, its body had half fused with the wall and it could barely twitch a finger, but it might still attack, say, by suddenly spewing venom from its mouth.

"Huh...."

But, making his tension look pointless, this greenhorn Dragonkin seemed to be thoroughly dead. Ian blinked.

'Less staying power than the Reptilians I knew.'

He figured this was down to the lack of training that had shown even in the fight just now.

The Reptilian Empire seemed to have lost a good deal of the tacit knowledge passed down from generation to generation.

'The aftermath of the Empire collapsing during the Great Cataclysm, I guess.'

Ian approached the Dragonkin's corpse, carefully lifted the Jade Necklace, and soaked it in the blood.

Hummm-

A point of light bloomed from inside the necklace. It was small and faint, as if it might fade at any moment, but mana was definitely being charged!

For an instant he nearly broke a hunter's taboo. An exclamation like 'I'm lucky today!' surged all the way up to the tip of his throat.

If you speak of your luck out loud, misfortune comes. It was an old superstition handed down among hunters.

Enduring the impulse with a hunter's patience, Ian steadied himself again and looked into the Jade Necklace.

The mana was charging quite slowly.

In the Common Era, individuals with special abilities like phasing through matter were treated as fairly high-ranking Reptilians. Yet this Dragonkin's blood charged mana even more slowly than an ordinary Reptilian's.

What was the difference between the Dragonkin that had appeared now and the Reptilians of the Common Era?

'Seeing that lore weapons work on it, unlike on that goblin, it must be connected to the Night Folk I knew in some way.'

At that moment, the F-rank Gate came to his mind. The Star of David hadn't had any particular effect on the goblin that appeared from the Gate.

But this was the Hunter Support Agency. Outside a Gate. He pondered as he retrieved Saint George's Thorn from the Dragonkin's eyeball.

'Is there a separate standard for when lore applies?'

Several hypotheses flashed through Ian's head.

Maybe whether lore took effect was decided not by a difference in species but by a spatial difference, inside versus outside a Gate.

Or perhaps that "goblin" wasn't a being based on Earth's lore at all, just an imitation that looked similar on the outside.

These two seemed the most persuasive inferences at the moment. Ian wanted to put more weight on the former.

If it was the latter, it would mean there was another enemy out there, one that made things resembling the monsters of Earth's lore, wouldn't it?

...Though considering that the goblin inside the Gate couldn't even charge the Jade Necklace, the odds of the latter had gone up.

To an old hunter whose mind was already crowded, a new enemy was not a welcome thing.

Just as Ian was lost in thought.

[Identity verified.]

"Hunter Ian!"

Cozy burst into the examination room in a hurry. Ian calmly nodded to the examiner, whose face was full of alarm.

"I'm fine. We can continue the exam."

"No. That's not what matters... I mean, it does matter. Yes."

Cozy hastily trailed off. Raising his voice at someone who had just fought off an attacker wasn't a good way to behave.

Since Ian himself had attested that his condition was fine, the first thing to do was confirm what had happened.

He looked back and forth between the Dragonkin's corpse buried in the wall and Ian.

"How did you do this?"

Ian explained in a light voice.

"I heard something trying to come close, so I hid where I couldn't be seen. Then, when it was halfway through the wall, I ambushed it and gave it a good scare. It panicked and lost control of its phasing."

Ian's explanation was so concise and accurate that Cozy felt rather dazed instead.

It was a very different sight from the Generation Zero hunters he'd seen so far, who were still tormented by the nightmares of the Great Cataclysm.

"This is impressive.... You might even be able to fill all the record requirements for the C-rank exam."

This time, Ian nearly shouted 'I'm lucky!' for real.

* * *

But that was where Ian's good fortune ended.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think we can finish the safety training right now."

"Pardon?"

Cozy explained with a sheepish look. Apparently the attack had caused all kinds of errors in the Agency's systems.

"These bastards launched an electronic warfare attack too. The time records from when you took the training program earlier were all wiped out."

According to him, even that emergency announcement from before had only been possible because an Agency employee had barely managed to restore the line.

"Do I have to take the safety training over from the beginning?"

"Of course not. I watched you complete the training with my own eyes. It's just that restoring the computer system and refilling the data will take time, so we can't update you to E-rank right away."

Cozy explained that the rank update would be done in three days at the shortest, and a week at the longest. Ian nodded.

Waiting for the right moment to come was, by trade, what hunters did. Waiting a mere week was easy.

"Thank you for sitting through the training, and...thank you. Thanks to you, the people in the other examination rooms weren't hurt either."

Hearing "thank you" felt rather unfamiliar to Ian. Hunters of the Common Era were more likely to hear curses than thanks.

Even other hunters would often swear at him. A few times he had saved someone's life, only for them to rush him shouting, 'That was my prey, how dare you!'

He understood the wish to avenge kin with one's own hands, but all the same, every time he heard words like that, Ian felt a little glum.

Not today.

Today looked set to be one of those rare days when the aftertaste was good even though he had seen the blood of a sapient being.

A rather mild atmosphere. With a natural smile, Ian tossed out a line.

"Then could you tell me what BloodWeb is? I only know about HunterNet."

Cozy scratched his head with a deeply flustered expression. He began by saying, "This is something an Agency employee isn't supposed to talk about."

"Um. HunterNet is the Hunter Support Agency's official site. But since it's an 'official' site, how should I put it.... Free exchange of opinions among hunters is difficult. BloodWeb is a place for the talk that's hard to have on HunterNet."

Ian pictured something like a black market from the constellation novels he'd read, where hunters made secret contacts with one another, but the words that followed made him realize it wasn't that lawless a place.

"The one flaw is that the site's owner picked a really strange concept. But it's been running since the early days of the Age of Constellations, so there's all sorts of material worth consulting. If you get the time, do take a look at the best tips."

Ian nodded. Maybe BloodWeb had the very material he needed.

There was just one thing that bothered him.

'BloodWeb, huh. Sounds like a place where mosquitoes would be flying around.'

The old hunter didn't like the site's name.

* * *

Elsewhere, the Followers of the Comet were lamenting their misfortune.

Because the raid had failed?

No. They rated this raid on the Hunter Support Agency a "modest success."

They had confirmed that, even though they'd used only one of the security weak points they'd uncovered, the hunters' response was markedly slower than in the previous raid.

The purpose of this raid had been to verify the reliability of the security weak points gathered so far.

As preliminary reconnaissance ahead of the full-scale war to come, it was an excellent result.

For a while after this raid, the Agency's alert posture would grow tighter, but the Followers still had plenty of cards left to play, so they could allow for that.

Despite the success of the operation, the mood among the Followers was bad.

That was because, quite apart from the raid, they hadn't been able to carry out the mission the Bishop had ordered directly.

"...That rookie. What on earth did it do? Couldn't kill even one low-rank hunter, and ended up dead on the floor instead."

The crimson-scaled Dragonkin let out a sigh.

A few days earlier, new orders had come down from the Bishop in charge of Sheol, their territory. Beneath the seal of a letter stamped with the Bishop's insignia, a short, terse text ran on.

Timing. The day of the operation.

Targets. All low-rank hunters taking promotion exams at the Agency.

Disposition. Secure or eliminate.

It was the kind of order that came down often enough. The work of recruiting in advance those who might grow into formidable hunters, or else nipping them in the bud.

The Followers called this "culling."

Hunters chosen as targets for culling were usually those with outstanding talent and little experience. Since they hadn't yet fully bloomed, they could be dealt with easily.

For Dragonkin, who ate hearts, this was a rare chance to get quality hearts with little effort.

So the Followers had picked a promising rookie as the star of the cull, looking out for them so they could gain real combat experience and take in new power.

And that promising rookie had died in the most absurd way. Without harvesting so much as one F-rank hunter's heart.

The green-scaled Follower sighed. This one was a spy well versed in the Agency's internal affairs.

"They must have been unlucky."

"Unlucky? Is this something a bit of bad luck can explain? It's not misfortune, it's incompetence!"

"One of the hunters taking the promotion exam was a Generation Zero."

"...Ah."

The crimson-scaled Dragonkin let out a deep sigh. Of all the people to run into first, it had to be that vicious breed.

Generation Zero hunters.

A mad collective that had butchered the Dragonkin's elder generation without mercy during the Great Cataclysm.

"That's. Bad luck, then."

The Followers observed a brief two minutes of mourning for the rookie.

'Poor thing. To run into a lunatic of all things.'

As the crimson-scaled Dragonkin prayed for the rookie's soul to return safely to the Old Dragon, one small question surfaced.

Which hunter had the Old Dragon been watching?

Ordinary constellations would have turned their eyes to that Generation Zero hunter, but between the Dragonkin and the Generation Zero there was an irreparable gulf.

If it was a Generation Zero hunter on the Dragon's scales, it would have been not recruitment or elimination but elimination, no question.

The crimson-scaled Dragonkin erased the Generation Zero hunter from their mind. Then they gave the sensible order to obtain the list of the others who had taken the exam that day.

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