Hunter Academy’s Battle God

The peak of Mount Everline, with a clear view of the entire mountain…

“Th-this is…” mumbled Sumire, looking down at the greenery lining the sides.

“So that we can get a better idea of where we are, right? Not bad for a starting position.”

EunAh was correct. Setting the mountain peak as the starting location was one of Mei Lin’s considerations.

From their vantage point, they could see three lakes. All three were large, and their depths couldn’t be determined.

“How are we supposed to know which lake has the lake dragon, though?”

—EunAh’s question.

YuSung looked at the lakes one by one before giving his answer.

“That’s why I think the most important thing we need to do is to figure out where the habitat of the lake dragon is.” 

“S-so we have to split up?”

Sumire glanced at YuSung. To be honest, she wanted to travel alongside him. But this was an actual job they had to perform, and they were on a time limit. 

‘I-I can do it!’

She clenched her fists in determination.

EunAh squinted towards Sumire, then spoke up. She looked annoyed.

“I think it’s that lake over there. The one in the middle.”

It looked like she had some sort of gut feeling about it.

“Th-then I’ll go to the one on the left…”

Sumire chose left.

The only one left was the lake on the right.

YuSung nodded. Right after all party members had selected which lake to inspect, he designated the midway point between the three lakes as their campsite.

“We need to choose a location in advance so that we don’t get lost later. …Also, we can use our Pockets to share coordinates and also contact each other, so report to the others immediately when you see the lake dragon.”

Sumire slowly raised her hand after he finished his explanation.

“Then… that means we can walk together until the campsite, right?”

“Mhm.”

She seemed rather happy about the answer.

She and YuSung led the way to the campsite. Meanwhile, EunAh gave a languid yawn and took up the rear.

‘…It’s really humid here. Must be because we’re on a mountain.’

The air quality itself was good, but that wasn’t enough to endear her to Mount Everline. Walking around in the wilderness was an alien experience to her, someone who had always been treated like a princess—a limousine usually drove her around everywhere, even short distances.

‘…He told me he lived on a mountain for 12 years. Just how did he endure that?’

EunAh looked at YuSung, who was walking in front of her, fascinated. The boy in question wasn’t paying attention to EuNah at all and was instead talking with Sumire.

“Sumire, what did you bring along in your Pocket? They checked your belongings for a good while.”

“Oh! It’s all, uh, cooking devices, utensils, and ingredients. We’ll get hungry sooner or later, so I…”

Sumire laughed bashfully as if embarrassed by the question. 

EunAh watched the two converse with each other. 

“Hmmm…” ‘They sure do look close to each other… Well, not that it’s any of my business.’

She glanced away from the two for a moment.

At the same time, YuSung was inspecting Sumire’s Pocket with a serious expression on his face.

‘Looks like I won’t have to catch any wild animals,’ he thought.

Delicious food was highly valued by him, someone who had treated food as nothing more than sustenance up to that point.

His culinary skills extended no further than the ability to roast wild game or mushrooms on a fire, so the fact that he was performing the request with Sumire was a huge relief to him.

‘Thank god.’

To YuSung, who had no talent in cooking, Sumire was an incredibly reliable member of his team. The two walked alongside each other, creating a heartwarming atmosphere. 

Suddenly, EunAh twitched.

‘…Why does my body feel so itchy?’

She had worn thick, long-sleeved clothes for the excursion. Despite that, something felt wrong. EunAh’s hand began brushing her shoulders; then, face paling, they moved up to her pasty neck.

Tap.

“…Huh?”

The thing under her finger had a hard exoskeleton; its many legs squirmed in place in an effort to escape from her hold.

“Hieeek!!”

Freaking out, EunAh instinctively flailed her hand away from her body. The identity of the thing that had crawled onto her body was a giant yellow centipede.

“C-centipede! Centipede! Centipede! Guys!! A centipedeeee!!” she cried out. She aimed a barrage of electricity at the insect that had fallen on the ground.

Bzzt! Boom!

Suddenly, chaos.

Sumire desperately tried to stop the panicking girl.

“H-hiek! EunAh-ssi! Please calm down for a moment!”

“Eugh! C-centipede! My neck! Crawling! Hieek!”

EunAh’s words devolved into meaningless babble.

Her body trembled violently. A girl who normally didn’t even flinch in the face of a rank 4 boss monster cowered against a centipede. Insects with many legs were her fear.

Bzz– Scuttle!!

The giant centipede, sensing danger, bolted away.

Sumire tried to console her teammate.

“P-please calm down! It’s just a regular centipede!”

“How am I supposed to calm down?! Aren’t you creeped out by it, too?”

EunAh couldn’t stop her heart from pounding out of her chest. In contrast, Sumire’s reply was calm.

“D-don’t you see them all the time, though?”

She was the picture of nonchalance.

Sumire had grown up seeing all kinds of insects in her life. A centipede was nothing.

“What?! What are you talking about! Where the hell do you see centipedes ‘all the time’?”

EunAh seemed to be disgusted at the prospect, however.

The effect the centipede had on the two girls, who had lived in completely opposite upbringings, was night and day.

“…Ugh, what a huge bug. We gotta finish this mission, quick.”

EunAh rubbed her arms in an effort to settle the chills running up and down her body. Right then, YuSung stopped walking.

“Let’s designate this as our campsite.”

Woosh.

—Flat land with slight winds.

The campsite that YuSung had chosen seemed quite suited for the purpose.

“I’ll be doing the preparations, then…!”

Sumire carefully took her ring and a lock of YuSung’s hair out of her Pocket. It seemed like she was going to leave the work of setting up camp to her undead.

EunAh lowered the zipper on her jacket and took it off, then hung it up on a tree near the campsite. She then turned towards her designated lake.

“I’m gonna head off now, alright? I’m getting a good feeling about it.”

With rarely-seen enthusiasm on her face, EunAh took heavy strides towards the lake.

* * *

* * *

The meeting room of the Association’s Academy City branch…

Mei Lin, its manager, was receiving and going over various details related to her work in the middle of the room—signifying her place as the one in charge.

“Manager, the A-11 portal has been cleared.”

“…Good thing we sent in those rank 5 hunters. Did anything out of the ordinary come up?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. Next.”

She kept the meeting running smoothly. The reason why someone as relatively young as her was assigned to be in charge of Academy City was due to her ability to efficiently handle her work.

Right when the meeting was about to wrap up, one of the attendees carefully raised their hand up.

“Er… nothing’s for certain yet, but I do have some info to give you about A-32. The portal that the students entered earlier today.”

Mei Lin’s expressionless eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, nothing’s for certain?”

The speaker displayed a document on a hologram.

“These are the results we’ve gotten after inspecting the soil on Mount Everline… there are residual elements from the lake dragon’s scales that don’t match up.”

“…Isn’t it obvious that any scale samples picked up from the ground will have some degree of contamination to them?”

The speaker began to sweat nervously at her question.

“I-it’s too big of a difference to dismiss it as just that. We think that… the lake dragon that will appear in that area has a high chance of being a subspecies.”

“…A subspecies, huh.”

Mei Lin glanced towards the researcher next to the speaker, asking for their opinion. The researcher fiddled with their glasses, then adamantly shook their head.

“The chance of a subspecies of the lake dragon appearing is a mere 0.03%. Considering the margin of error present in our current investigation, you could say it’s even lower.”

“B-but still, you can’t know for sure, right? We sent some students to take care of the dungeon… what if it actually happens to be a subspecies?”

—Opposing factions between the researcher and the speaker.

Mei Lin carefully read through what was projected on the hologram. Shin YuSung, Kim EunAh, and Sumire were the ones who had entered the A-32 portal.

‘…A subspecies.’

The woman let out a small laugh as she recalled YuSung and the prowess that she had witnessed.

“It’s alright. Let the raid commence as usual. The manpower we sent into A-32 should be enough to handle it, even if a subspecies were to appear.”

She stood up from her seat at those words, bringing the conversation to an end. Her ability to pick things up quickly was one of her greatest assets that helped her gain her current position.

Thanks to it, the skill that Mei Lin was most confident in was her ability to determine someone’s worth.

‘Subspecies or not, he isn’t a student who would lose to the likes of a rank 4 boss.’

And the manager of Academy City valued Shin YuSung higher than anyone else.

* * * * 

The dense forest of Mount Everline…

The sunlight seeping through the leaves bathed the view in a mesmerizing green. EunAh was fascinated.

“…Oh, damn. It really feels like something’s gonna appear.”

The air grew more and more chilly as she traveled deeper into the forest, towards the lake. EunAh took the time to talk to herself.

“…Why is it so gloomy in here?”

–Gehhhhh!

Right then, an unfamiliar sound, resembling a whale’s cry, rang out from the direction of the lake throughout the forest. EunAh, surprised, instinctively crouched.

‘I-is this actually…?’

She slowly approached the location where the sound was originating from. If what she was thinking about was correct, then her hunch really would be scarily on the nose.

Peek.

EunAh carefully peeked her head out over a bush. The first thing that reached her eyes was the humongous lake that she had seen earlier. Right after, she saw a massive creature near the lake, ripping an unidentifiable hunk of meat into shreds.

“Chomp! Crunch!”

Massive teeth…

A body covered in yellow scales…

Shaped like a mix between a lizard and a snake…

‘It’s the lake dragon!’

EunAh immediately recognized what the monster was.

‘No wonder I was getting vibes from this place earlier!’

Whether it was due to fate or coincidence, EunAh’s instincts were as sharp as ever—especially considering the fact that the lake dragon only rarely hunted above land. The sight of it tearing apart its meal outside of the water was rather rare to see.

EunAh also didn’t know this, but lake dragons were originally supposed to have blue scales, not yellow. Thus, she had found the lake dragon subspecies, hitting the 0.03% chance.

EunAh sent off a message to Sumire, too flustered to clean up any typos she made along the way.

[KimSilverA: BGI NWES! Big news! Lake dragon wheer i am!]

[すみれ: ʕ •̀ o •́ ʔ !!]

[すみれ: ᕕ༼✿•̀︿•́༽ᕗ]

Sumire’s replies were entirely made up of Japanese letters and emoticons. EunAh placed a hand on her forehead and sighed.

“…She’s coming over, right?” she muttered.

Next was YuSung’s turn.

EunAh focused on sending another message to the boy, but only for a moment.

“Grr…rrr…”

Her fingers paused in her frantic typing as she heard a certain sound right next to her ear.

“Grr…”

She could see hot puffs of something’s breath out of the corner of her vision.

“…Well, no helping it, then.”

EunAh laughed as if finding the situation she was in absurd. Lightning crackled in her palms.

“I’ll just have to beat you myself.”

Bzzt!

EunAh spun her body around to face the lake dragon.

The monster bared its fangs and confronted her.

“…Krrk.”

—The ruler of Mount Everline, a subspecies of the rank 4 boss, the lake dragon.

…Versus 2nd place in Gaon Academy’s student rankings. 

The two glared at each other.

“…You’ve got a lot of nerve baring your teeth at me, water lizard.”

It was the wilderness, where only the law of the jungle applied. The strong survived, and the weak died.

All that mattered to them was determining who the stronger of the two was.