WeTried Translations

Translator: Botanica

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◈ I Became a Generation Zero Hunter ◈

Chapter 9

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Blood Web (3)

Having steeled his resolve, Ian activated the Jade Necklace, and for a long while he couldn't accept reality.

He wandered in a daze, caught in a double shock.

The first was the truth that the BloodWeb admin, "the Princess," was the very Princess he knew. The second was that the Princess really was in this city.

Having realized where the Princess was, Ian drifted through the city's shadows all night, thinking.

The odds of winning were infinitesimal. Even so, did he have to take up the challenge of hunting the Princess?

He had agonized over this question since his first day adrift in the Age of Constellations, and perhaps long before that.

And every time, he had given the same answer.

"Yes."

The coming daytime would be a fitting time.

* * *

The Princess smoothed her ashen hair. One of the royal line must always keep the dignity that suits her station.

The manager came over and chattered beside her. The usual praise, something about how beautiful she looked today as well.

The Princess found the person assigned by BM Entertainment, which was to say the Crimson Order, rather uncomfortable.

That didn't mean she personally disliked them.

It was only that the Nobles of the Night, newly born into this age, still felt strange to her.

"By the way, is there a reason you're staying in Sheol so long?"

It was the manager's question. The Princess was someone who normally lived in seclusion at a villa in the Magic Tower League's London.

The Princess didn't lay out everything in her heart. It was too personal.

"This city holds memories of its own for me."

In truth, back when she had made those memories, this city's name hadn't been Sheol.

Once, this place had been called Seoul. During the Great Cataclysm the pronunciation had been passed along inaccurately and become what it was now.

Had her old rivals heard the changed name, each of them would surely have remarked that if it had to change, it was a rather ominous name to change into....

"Is it not the way of the old to live chasing after memories?"

The manager burst into giggles.

"Old? Please! You're so beautiful."

The Princess laughed along, but she herself knew best that it wasn't so. Her hair had not originally been this ashen gray, but a glossier silver.

The Princess closed her eyes.

"Ah."

"Yes?"

"I hear the café down below is delicious. Coffee for two... no. Three cups, mine included. And would you fetch some sweets to go with them? A guest is coming."

She had realized that the guest she had waited for so long, the one who had drawn her to Sheol in the first place, had finally arrived.

The brand she had carved into her archrival's heart was drawing steadily closer.

* * *

The manager, opening the suite's door, tilted their head for a moment. There was no trace of the "guest" anywhere in the corridor.

'Haven't they arrived yet?'

Leaving the Princess alone was a little unsettling, but what could be done? To carry out the duties of a manager without a hitch, one sometimes had to stay apart even from the person under close watch.

Excessive attention made people uneasy. Besides, she had ordered three cups, counting the guest's, so she didn't seem to be hiding the guest's identity. After weighing it all, the manager played the part of business as usual and walked off.

The door the manager had left through closed.

"Hmm. Your skill hasn't rusted that much, it seems."

The Princess spoke without even turning around, feeling the presence of the hunter who had taken position behind her.

In the brief instant the door opened and shut, the hunter had slipped inside, more subtly than a shadow.

"But, archrival. Even if you have become more gentlemanly, you still fall short of true refinement. Hiding yourself before a lady? I give you four points."

"Gentlemanly" referred to what had happened when the two met in Seoul in the Common Era.

Back then, too, the Princess had been staying in a hotel suite, just as she was now.

Ian had smashed through the window with a technique close to a rope-assisted rappelling assault and faced her.

The battle at the Seoul hotel had ended in Ian's defeat. He had barely escaped with his life only because his other comrades had burst in just as the Princess was about to take his heart.

'...Maybe I should have settled it then.'

"So you knew."

"Naturally. Who do you think carved that brand?"

Just as expected. This was why Ian had come with nothing but invisibility, no other means of concealment.

As long as the brand existed, he couldn't hide his presence from the Princess.

In a suite at Hotel Glooscap in Sheol, the Princess welcomed Ian with the same relaxed expression as back then.

"Won't you sit and talk? I imagine we each have much to say."

Looking at the eyes that fixed precisely on his position, Ian took off the headband and sat.

"The one who just left?"

"...I see. So even you couldn't properly tell."

The Princess answered with a bittersweet smile.

"A Bloodkin, no. A Bloodstream."

* * *

Bloodstream. It was an unfamiliar term. Ian waited for what would follow.

"It is what we call those who did not remain bound to a parent through living blood, as I was, but who became vampires anew through a contract with a constellation."

They were people who had been granted power in exchange through a reciprocal contract, so rather than a family (族) who shared blood, they merely belonged to the same current (脈). Hence, Bloodstream.

"Are they the next generation of your kind? They didn't smell of human blood, though."

"That, too, is only natural. They can keep their youth even by offering monster blood instead of human blood."

Ian took a moment to breathe deeply, then finally asked.

"Is that even a vampire?"

"I would prefer to call them Nobles of the Night, but let me answer your question first. What reason is there for them not to be?"

They had made a contract with the great Progenitor Dracula and been granted power. There was no disqualifying reason to keep them from being counted among the nobility.

In a sense, the Bloodstream stood closer to Dracula than even the Princess did.

The Princess had been brought into being when elders of different factions gathered to reproduce the "King," Dracula, pooling the living blood of every elder to shape her. In other words, a generation of elders stood between Dracula and the Princess.

But the Bloodstream had made their contracts directly with the constellation 《Lord of Unquenchable Thirst》, so they could also be interpreted as a generation closer to true blood.

Ian thought again. Beings closer to Dracula than even the Princess? How could that be....

"For what reason did my comrades let you live? And why did you all stay so quiet?"

"Ah, it is simple. In the chaos the lizards stirred up, how many do you suppose made contracts with the various stars?"

Lizards. A slur for Reptilians. So the root of the Great Cataclysm had been the Reptilians after all. Ian listened closely to the Princess's words.

"Suppose they had sifted through the constellation contractors one by one and ferreted out those who had become Bloodstream. Do you think your comrades could have purged every last one who chose to become Bloodstream just to survive?"

Ian shook his head.

They hadn't killed anyone on the spot, and wiping out every hunter who had become a vampire through no fault of their own wasn't his comrades' way.

"While I was gone, you exterminated the Bloodkin. But my great Progenitor has cast his shadow in a new and better way."

Ian sensed a strange melancholy in every word the Princess spoke. That frightened him more.

The Princess was.

"Why that look on your face? Are you afraid, perhaps?"

The Princess, who as sovereign of the new age's vampires should have all but won a perfect victory over the hunters of the Common Era, was.

"If so, how very disappointing, archrival. That my likeness, my opposite in will, should return so dulled!"

Not happy.

"What nonsense are you spouting?"

"In any case, were we not the most extreme creations the Bloodkin ever bore? I was a masterpiece, and you a calamity, though that was the difference in our directions."

What the Princess spoke of was a kind of urban legend. An oral tale passed among the Night Folk about how Ian himself had awakened as a hunter.

Ian's career as a hunter had begun with the death of a single vampire elder.

* * *

He was called the "Elder of Memory." It was thanks to a special seasoning he laid over his victims before slaking his hunger with their blood.

The taste of blood a vampire savors is closely tied to the victim's life, and further, to the soul.

Therefore the Elder of Memory, in pursuit of the finest delicacy, had thought this.

'Living things have souls that turn and turn again. If I awaken past-life memories through the blood, might I taste even richer flavors?'

The idea, inspired by legends such as the incarnation of Heracles or the reincarnation of King Arthur, made the Elder of Memory's table far more bountiful.

Through steady gourmandizing, the Elder of Memory even developed an eye for blood that housed an old soul. It was the discernment of a chef who can tell good ingredients at a glance.

And Ian had been the main course the Elder of Memory had chosen for his feast, with all his heart and care.

But that night.

The one who became a corpse was not Ian, but the Elder of Memory.

The Night Folk feared it, saying the Elder of Memory had awakened the memories of a terrifying vampire hunter.

* * *

'The truth was entirely different....'

It was true that the Elder of Memory had awakened memories, past lives or whatever they were.

But the Elder of Memory's cause of death wasn't a counterattack from Ian, who had awakened as a super vampire hunter, but....

'Food poisoning.'

That magic, which at best could surface memories of one past life, or at the outside the life before that, had for some reason had a different effect on Ian himself.

Countless past-life memories had surfaced all at once.

But most of those memories had no nutritional value for a vampire.

They were, if anything, poison. Ian's memories were studded with sudden deaths.

Memories of getting past the three-month wall were rare to begin with, and apart from the life he was living now, he had made it past twenty only once.

The Elder of Memory, who had consumed far too much of blood layered with such endless deaths, simply died.

Leaving behind only a dying scream: "It's gone off!"

This remained a secret known only to Ian and his mentor.

Even the vampires hadn't been able to detect the poison latent in Ian from the few drops of blood spilled in combat.

For Ian, the ultimate weapon for hunting vampires was himself.

That was also why, even stranded alone in the Age of Constellations, he had resolved to find the Princess at once and settle things.

Vampires commemorated a human who had fought them admirably and lost in their own distinctive way.

Naturally, that way was drinking blood. Unlike ordinary feeding, though, it meant swallowing the entire body whole, bones included, in one go.

It was their own "dignified" ceremony.

In truth, dignity and commemoration were just words. By the hunters' analysis, it was closer to gobbling down the nearest high-calorie food to quickly recover from wounds and spent blood.

Thanks to this habit of vampires, Ian was as good as a poisoned wine that could kill any vampire.

...Though only once.

Ian was certain he could not defeat the vampire Princess alone.

At the same time, Ian was certain he could hunt the vampire Princess alone.

So he had meant to meet the Princess as quickly as possible and, even as her prey, wipe that creature off this world forever.

But what was this?

Why was even that creature, not him.

Acting as if worn out by the present age?

The Princess read the confusion in the eyes looking at her. Without hesitation, she told Ian the answer he wanted.

"Hmm. Archrival. Do you wonder why I am so cooperative? Why, instead of lording over the Bloodstream to rule the world, I wait for you alone in a place like this?"

"...Yes."

"Think on it. There are no Bloodkin left on this earth."

The Princess's own kind had been wiped out. Only people similar to them, yet somehow different, remained, stirring nostalgia for the old age.

"When I returned from the deep chaos into which I fell with you, the Bloodkin were already gone and only the Bloodstream remained. What do you suppose I thought on seeing them?"

"'I shall lead my subjects and conquer the world'?"

The Princess shook her head, saying there were similarities but the conclusion was wrong.

The Princess remembered that moment.

When she had thought she had finally found her own kind in this chaotic age.

When she had faced subjects who could neither join the mainstream of hunter society nor, like the Bloodkin, stand wholly against the hunters.

They had trembled at the sight of the Princess's power, but the Princess had....

"'We have failed.' That was what I thought."

Seeing the Bloodstream, she had realized it.

That they were the successful work born atop the failure of the Bloodkin.

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