04
Hunting grounds existed from F Grade to S Grade.
The place the party Ki Ja-hyeon had joined was heading to was an E Grade hunting ground among them, the Rat’s Den.
This hunting ground was home to a variety of monsters, from Small Rats, Big Rats, Ratmen, and so on... monsters much larger than ordinary rats, and even monsters that walked like people and used weapons.
The large rats were powerful, while the walking rats used ranged weapons and poison in a cunning manner.
If one were to compare them to a game, would they be around the position of goblins?
That was why it could be called a difficult hunting ground even among E Grade hunting grounds, and one where one could never let one’s guard down....
Or so it was written on Hunter Wiki.
A small mountain near Seoul that had been left unattended for a long time during the Monster Break.
The Rat’s Den was a “managed” hunting ground, where the monsters living in burrows dug into that mountain were not deliberately exterminated, and instead their population was controlled as it was used.
That was why the floor surface, while not exactly paved road, had been leveled to some degree. That was also why the crudely wired-together LED lights secured a certain amount of visibility.
The lights had mainly been installed near the ceiling in case the monsters gnawed on the wires, but although they could not climb up and eat them, there were quite a few sections where the lights did not come on, as though the monsters had thrown something and broken them.
There were no monsters on the “main road” where light was pouring out.
That was probably because the monsters mainly inhabited the side passages inside the tunnel, or areas where the ceiling was low enough for them to completely gnaw through the lights, leaving no illumination.
If one entered those places, pitch-black darkness waited.
Of course, in preparation for that, the roof of the pickup truck was equipped with lights that emitted strong continuous illumination.
When those lights turned on,
Flaaaaash!
The surroundings brightened at once.
Visibility distance: fifty meters!
The center point passed through the eerie, damp place.
Such strong light attracted monsters, but that was exactly what the hunters wanted.
Sure enough, beyond the fifty-meter range of visibility, monsters began gathering one by one.
Two rats as huge as bulls, and smaller, quick-looking rats surrounding them as if guarding them.
It was a basic combination of two Big Rats and six Small Rats.
Screech.
The truck stopped, and the five-member hunter party came out.
As she closed the door last, one female hunter looked at Ki Ja-hyeon sternly and said,
“You must absolutely not come out from here. Understood?”
“Yes!”
Was her name Cho Yun-a?
She was the female hunter who had been munching with her mouth full of his cherry tomatoes earlier.
Ki Ja-hyeon smiled and nodded.
Naturally, he had no intention of going out.
Hunting was the hunters’ role, not his.
***
The battle that began like that had a proper system to it.
The party consisted of one close-range tank, two close-range damage dealers, and two ranged damage dealers. When the tank took the vanguard and faced the two Big Rats, the two close-range damage dealers each handled the remaining Small Rats, while the two ranged damage dealers focused fire on one of the Big Rats the tank was handling. That was how the battle worked.
It was certainly a style of battle one could not see in F Grade!
‘Oh, they’re well-organized.’
Most F Grades worked alone. Or in pairs. At most, most parties had three people. The reason was simple and one-dimensional: the more people there were, the harder distribution became, and the more traitors there were.
But a party properly bound together as one team was this different.
Because they moved organically, two E Grade monsters and six E- Grade monsters were being steadily sunk without getting even one proper chance to touch the tank.
‘This’ll be over in five minutes, won’t it?’
The battle was comfortable.
They would probably receive a large distribution as well.
Of course, nothing would fall to him as an odd-jobber, but just the fact that the hunt was this safe was already a sufficient benefit for an odd-jobber.
He felt a little regret.
‘Should I have run E Grade sooner?’
The monsters were stronger than in F Grade, but if the hunters facing them hunted this well, he should have come to E Grade earlier and comfortably worked as an odd-jobber.
Of course, he could simply play around in E Grade from now on, but....
‘I’ve Awakened now.’
He was merely regretful that he had not been able to suck up this kind of honey(?) all this time.
“Hmm?”
Just as he was watching the systematic hunt as if he were watching a movie, he felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
Whooooosh.
Something was being conveyed to him.
It was not a voice, but a strange sense of déjà vu.
And it was so sharp that he could not help turning his head in that direction.
“Hmmm...!”
He frowned and examined the area carefully.
Beyond the reach of the light. There was only darkness there.
He could not see anything, but something was definitely there.
But as he stared carefully, there was something caught by Ki Ja-hyeon’s senses.
How should he put it?
Should he say something like a haze was rippling there?
As if a fish were reading a sudden movement of water in the sea, he had caught some kind of sensation.
It was a sensation he was feeling for the first time in this life.
But in his previous life, he had felt this kind of sensation as routinely as eating meals.
The moment Ki Ja-hyeon realized that, he stomped on the accelerator.
VROOOOOOM!
It was truly a sudden launch!
The car shot forward rapidly.
The light moved, revealing the dark place.
There stood a rat like a human, and while it had a large stone tube in its mouth and was focusing on something, it was exposed to the sudden high beams and squeezed its eyes shut.
“...It’s a Ratman!”
SCREECH!
The poison dart of the Ratman, which had been blinded by the flash(?), split the air, and it began to flee.
Ki Ja-hyeon shouted through the loudspeaker.
[Please hold out with the auxiliary lights for a little while!]
VROOOOOOM!
Ki Ja-hyeon pressed the accelerator even harder, and,
CRASH!
The Ratman, struck by the pickup truck whose bumper had been reinforced with steel, was flattened without even being able to make a sound.
It was a perfect traffic accident that no insurance company could avoid rating 10:0!
Of course, since the victim was not human, the perpetrator had no responsibility.
Instead, a storm of applause poured down.
“Wow... The truck’s performance is reliable, isn’t it? It just got turned straight into a pancake!”
At the amazed ranged damage dealer’s words, Ki Ja-hyeon simply smiled gently.
“Though our company is small-to-mid-sized, we are quite serious about odd-jobber equipment.”
“Where did you say it was again? Jeongbyeong Manpower Office?”
“Yes. The boss is also a very good person!”
Ki Ja-hyeon, who would soon be leaving the office, kept his loyalty.
It was not as though he had lied, and every bit of it was true.
“No, but how did you think to press the accelerator there?”
“There are times when I can see angles the hunters cannot. It does not work on large ones, but if they are small, well, I usually just press the accelerator and ram them.”
“Woooow......”
That, too, was true.
He was not a veteran odd-jobber for nothing.
“By the way, how did you know? It was definitely somewhere the light did not reach....”
“It was in a really tricky spot, so it was an attack someone would have had to take no matter what.”
They were veterans in their own right even among E Grades.
They had also been to the Rat’s Den dozens of times.
It was, in every sense, a familiar hunting ground!
However, there was a situation that did not become familiar no matter how often one came here: a Ratman’s snipe from outside the field of vision, like just now. No, from even farther outside that.
Still, it was a very rare situation, and even if one was hit, as long as one had an antidote, one would not die in a single shot, so they had endured it grudgingly. But an ordinary odd-jobber who was not even a hunter had noticed such a situation, so they could not help finding it strange.
“Something glittered in the darkness, so I moved a little.”
“...Thank you. Someone almost got hurt!”
Naturally, an injury during a hunt was fatal.
A delay in time. The cost of medicine needed for treatment. If efficiency fell because morale dropped due to that, everyone’s share would decrease that much.
“In that sense, I’d like to count the Ratman as Mr. Ki Ja-hyeon’s share. What does everyone think?”
At Cho Hyeon-a’s words, no one shook their head.
If Ki Ja-hyeon had not discovered the Ratman, they would have been the ones in danger, and it was also Ki Ja-hyeon who had killed the Ratman.
It was an extremely obvious principle.
But Ki Ja-hyeon was surprised that they accepted that obvious thing as obvious. In fact, even in similar situations until now, Ki Ja-hyeon had only heard a few words of thanks and had never received a distribution.
“Thank you.”
“Come on...it’s only natural!”
The atmosphere grew warm.
Like that, the battle ended, and everyone looked tired.
“I will begin dismantling now.”
Ki Ja-hyeon took the dismantling tools out of his bag.
Their battle was over, so now it was time for Ki Ja-hyeon to fight(?).
***
Pulling a magic stone out of a dead monster was disgusting, unpleasant, and not easy.
In most cases, magic stones were located near the heart.
That was because it was efficient for mana to form near places where blood flowed.
However, there was no exact place one could point to and say, “It is here.”
The location differed for each individual, and the larger the individual was, the larger the margin of error became.
Sometimes, there were cases where the monster did not have a magic stone, so there were times when all the rummaging proved fruitless.
If the monster’s hide was worth money, it was common to draw the hunters’ displeasure.
That was why extraction work was the most nerve-racking process among the things an odd-jobber did, and the same was true for Ki Ja-hyeon.
So....
‘I need to make the incision as small as possible and rummage around inside....’
As he thought that and focused on the Big Rat’s carcass, something astonishing happened.
One part of the Big Rat’s carcass looked especially dark and swollen.
‘Black light?’
Black light made no sense.
But before Ki Ja-hyeon’s eyes, there truly was a part shining black.
A little above the heart. Rather, a place that seemed closer to the stomach was shining black even at that moment, like a bruise.
‘Could it be?’
Ki Ja-hyeon made an incision there, broke the visible bone with a chisel, and brought the forceps inside. After rummaging around a few times, he felt something catch in his hand, and when he carefully grasped and pulled it out, a magic stone shone brilliantly at the end.
“Oho....”
To think the light he had suddenly seen was the light where the magic stone was located?
Come to think of it, when he had discovered the Ratman, he had also found a black haze inside the pitch-black darkness.
All of these were changes that had happened after Ki Ja-hyeon Awakened and became a druid.
‘Now that I think about it, it’s similar to plants.’
In the case of those creatures, it had been a blue-green haze.
The plants Ki Ja-hyeon raised emitted natural mana. These creatures emitted a black haze. When he dug by following that haze, a magic stone came out.
It was a difference from his previous life.
The Ki Ja-hyeon of his previous life had never seen a black aura.
It seemed to be a specific color of the monsters here.
Which meant...?
‘This is one hell of a jackpot, isn’t it?’
He could sense monsters in the dark.
He could also know whether they had a magic stone or not.
He, an F- Grade, had become able to do something that only scouts, who were said to shine only around C Grade or higher, could do!
“Which means...?”
He looked around at the remaining carcasses.
From the carcasses of one Big Rat and six Small Rats, haze like dark swellings was rising.
Ki Ja-hyeon did the same thing he had done just before.
He made an incision, broke the bone, inserted the forceps, and extracted the magic stone accurately.
It was truly one hundred shots, one hundred hits!
Every time he tried, a magic stone came out, so the hunters had no choice but to stare blankly at Ki Ja-hyeon’s skilled hands.
“Are magic stone locations normally all different?”
“Right... I heard that even among the same species, the location differs from individual to individual, so how are you getting it right in one try...?”
Eyes filled with pure curiosity.
Ki Ja-hyeon merely shrugged once.
“It’s all experience.”
“Huh....”
Of course, it was the experience of a druid from a previous life, but there was no need to say that.
This time, Ki Ja-hyeon approached the limp Ratman.
A Ratman whose lower body had been reduced to a rag.
Everyone’s gazes followed Ki Ja-hyeon’s work knife to the end.
Their eyes seemed to expect whether Ki Ja-hyeon would find the magic stone’s location in one try again this time!
Ki Ja-hyeon’s work knife moved differently from before.
It passed the pit of the stomach, passed near the heart as well, then moved up the neck to the crown of the head.
SQUELCH.
Then he cut into the temple, used the chisel to make a hole in the skull, and with a small pair of forceps, pulled out the magic stone as casually as picking up something he had left in someone’s care.
“This time, it’s in the head.”
“Uh...wow....”
“Huh...!”
They were veterans who had done countless hunts in E Grade.
The Rat’s Den was also a hunting ground they had been to dozens of times.
But they swore they had never seen an odd-jobber extract magic stones this artistically.
On top of that, his eyesight was good enough to point out things the hunters could not see, and when push came to shove, he even had the judgment to slam on the accelerator.
Even his driving was smooth!
Even though they knew they should not, everyone had fallen fast asleep throughout the trip to the hunting ground!
.
.
.
After that, there were three more hunts, and they caught five Big Rats and eighteen Small Rats, carefully securing the magic stones and byproducts.
Before they knew it, the truck was seventy percent full.
If they went a little deeper and caught more monsters, it seemed they might be able to fill the entire rear bed of the truck.
“Wow... Looks like we might fill the whole truck. Isn’t this the first time?”
“It’s not the first time. When we got greedy and said we’d leave after filling it all the way, then almost died after getting surrounded by seven Big Rats, we filled it right to the brim too, didn’t we?”
“...That did happen, didn’t it?”
It was a story from their early days, when they had been full of greed. They had overdone it, hunted for too long, loaded too much, used up all their fuel midway, and narrowly survived thanks to the help of another party.
“...Back then, we ended up distributing more than half to that side, so nothing was left for us anyway. We nearly died in the first place, didn’t we?”
“Except for that time, this is the first! And we still have half the fuel left too!”
“Mr. Ki Ja-hyeon. Please keep working with our party from now on. Let’s really go together for a long time. I’m begging you!”
Hearing the words from beyond the driver’s seat, Ki Ja-hyeon gave a small laugh.
“Thank you for looking favorably on me.”
No matter how much odd-jobbers were the most looked down upon in this field, he still had a certain pride, and being recognized by E Grade hunters rather than F Grade hunters could not help making him feel good.
Vroooooom.
And so, at some point as the pickup truck burrowed into the darkness without a single point of light,
the surroundings that had been nothing but darkness began to glow in a luminous color.
It was not something like LED light.
What was attached here and there to the walls were mushrooms that emitted light by themselves.
The moment Ki Ja-hyeon confirmed that, his eyes widened as if they might tear.
‘Why is that here?’
Apparently, Ki Ja-hyeon was not the only thing that had crossed over from his previous life into this place.