Chapter 39 - Yarata Scorpion (1/2)

Translator: Athena13

Editor: Silavin

Proofreader: p4553r

Akira was on his bike, heading to the Kuzusuhara ruin. His face looked grim as he was rus.h.i.+ng due to the bad situation he was in.

Alpha, who was flying parallel to him, gave him more information but it only caused his face to turn grimmer.

“Akira, you’ve got another rescue order. This is already the third order.”

“Another one, huh!! I haven’t even arrived at my next destination, you know!? Isn’t that just a bit too many?!!”

“Even if you tell me so, I can’t do anything about it. Let’s just look forward to the reward that we can get from all the monsters that you’re going to hunt today… Since it’s not a normal rescue request, they might even pay you back in the form of Hunter Rank points.”

Akira could not help but make a face saying that he so did not want that to happen.

“Seriously though, I don’t want to lose money after working this hard, you know!?”

Akira, who once again took forward base construction help requests, was a.s.signed to rescue other Hunters rather than taking control of buildings like the last time. It was because he took too long taking control of buildings yesterday that he was a.s.signed for another job today.

The rescue job was a very tiring job. Although he did not have to do much for each order, the rescue orders kept flooding in like crazy.

Akira was planning to do his job seriously. After all, it would not be a laughing matter if he got scolded since he took too long during yesterday’s request and failed miserably in today’s request. Thus he sped his bike as fast as he could to the next location.

The ruin was filled with all sizes of debris and wreckages. With the help of Alpha’s superb control support, Akira would blaze through them, evading them left and right, and sometimes even jumped above them as he was closing in onto his destination.

He got to face all kinds of situations during his job. Sometimes the people in the site already took control of the situation when he arrived, some other time, the monsters had already died when he arrived, and sometimes the rescue request dispatcher had already escaped from the scene after requesting for a rescue, thus leaving the monster for Akira to take care of.

Akira worked really hard and somehow was able to take care of all of the orders until finally, his remaining order came down to only 1.

After he took care of the monsters in one of his orders, Akira could be seen exiting a building while breathing roughly and looking very tired. He then took out medicine that he bought from s.h.i.+zuka’s shop and gulped it down. Although it was just some cheap medicine, it should at least be able to help him recover from the exhaustion.

Akira managed to grumble.

“…It doesn’t feel like it actually works.”

“You can’t compare these with the medicines which you gathered from the ruins, you know. Both their potency and price are so different. You can try to take a huge dose of this medicine to see its immediate effect, but that would need you to consume a huge load of it, you know?”

“I guess this is why most Hunters become dependent on medicines.”

There were all types and kinds of drugs for Hunters sold in the eastern district, this medicine was one of them. There were Hunters who consumed a huge load of medicines daily. Bad medicines could cause bad side effects or bad after effect. But the Hunters were desperate to survive to see the next day, so they had no other choice but to consume a huge amount of medicine daily.

“The next order will be a good place to stop for a while. Once you’re done with it, let’s take a rest for a bit, you can just say that you need an ammo refill at HQ.”

“What should we do if they say no?”

“Like I said before, my first priority is your safety. So I have no plan letting you continue fighting monsters without getting an ammo refill.”

“…You’re right. Alright then, let’s go and finish the next rescue order.”

If Alpha got angry and refused to help Akira in this request, then it would be disastrous for him. He used that as an excuse and decided that he would take a rest after finis.h.i.+ng his next rescue order. He felt more at ease with that reasoning and that was all according to her plan.

Akira arrived in front of an abandoned building which was the location for his final rescue order. As he parked his bike in front of the building and looked up, he could hear gunshots and explosions coming from the 5th floor of that building.

“Over there, huh?”

“It’s good that they’re still alive. It seems that they’re having a hard fight up there. Let’s go before they run out of ammo. I’ll provide you with the route.”

“I’m counting on you.”

“Just leave it to me.”

Akira could see the indicator within his enhanced vision, he ran and followed the route shown by the indicator as he charged into the building. The guiding line for the route was calculated by Alpha, it showed the shortest and safest route to Akira’s destination; after she scanned the area for monsters. Akira knew that it was why he felt at ease as he blazed through an area where he normally should move carefully and slowly because of the monsters that might be lurking around.

Akira could see the aftermath of battles between Hunters and monsters scattered inside the building. At the moment, he did not see any Hunter corpses, while on the other hand, he found a lot of biological monsters’ dead bodies as blood and flesh were scattered around.

Akira took a glance at the monster corpses that were still retaining their original form. They looked like a mix of spider and scorpion with an exoskeleton.

This so-called Yarata Scorpion had a habit of attaching objects from its surroundings onto its exoskeleton. Thus they were able to become one with its surroundings and camouflage itself.

Their exoskeletons looked like metal wreckage or debris to Akira. There were countless bullet marks on their corpses, and the bullets that did not even penetrate their exoskeleton were left around these corpses. Those were a testament to their super hard exoskeleton.

Alpha then ordered Akira.

“Stop. Some of those Yarata scorpions are still alive. It will be dangerous if you go deeper without making sure that they’re dead. It’ll take too long if you use AAH rifle, so use CWH anti-material rifle to finish them in one shot.”

“Roger that.”

Akira immediately stopped and readied his CWH anti-material rifle, but the Yarata scorpions did not move at all even after he did that. It was hard to discern whether they were really dead or not. Some could not move because of a fatal injury, while some might just be playing dead while waiting for their prey to come close enough.

Suddenly, Akira could see some of the Yarata scorpion bodies had turned reddish. Those were scorpions that Alpha judged to be still alive. Identifying all of the scorpions that were still alive among all of these unmoving scorpion bodies in an instant was an impossible thing for a normal human. But Alpha could do that like it was nothing.

It would be extremely dangerous to just ignore these scorpions and continue forward. But shooting each and every single one of them just to be safe would consume a lot of ammo. But of course, it was a whole different case if it was possible to discern the alive scorpions from the dead ones.

Akira aimed his CWH anti-material rifle at the scorpions that were outlined in red and nested one shot for each scorpion. The bullet that was spewed out from his gun’s muzzle penetrated the scorpion’s hard outer sh.e.l.l, wreaked havoc inside their bodies, and instantly killed them. After Akira killed a dozen of scorpions, suddenly one of them sprung up and attempted to attack him. But his bullet reached it first and instantly killed it.

“That should be all.”

“Alright then.”

Akira then blazed through the corpses of the dead scorpion and rushed forward.

***

The Hunters were holding up in one of the rooms on the fifth floor. They were directing their guns at the only door into their room as they were shooting the monsters coming at them while making a grim face.

One of them pulled out his rental terminal and shouted.

“This is number 157!! HQ!! Answer me!!”

“This is A4 division HQ. What’s wrong?”

“Don’t give me that again!! Where’s my rescue?!”

“The rescue order has been dispatched and he’s heading your way now. Just hang on there.”

“How much longer should I wait?!!! We’ve been waiting quite a while and no one is coming, you know!!”

“The rescue Hunters are responding to the rescue orders in turns. There are too many rescue orders, we’re basically flooded with them, you know. If you want to get angry, then you can curse those Hunters who dispatch rescue requests although they are only fighting weak monsters. You’re actually getting the short end of the stick because of those Hunters. So just try to hang on, that’s all.”

“Wha- Wait!!… Dammit!! They just cut the call!!”

He was about to slam the terminal on the floor, but another Hunter stopped him. It was the last still functioning terminal. The others were already destroyed during the fight.

The door to their room was piled up with dead Yarata scorpion corpses. Some of them could also be found inside the room.

The Hunters did not even bother to check the bodies if they were really dead or not. But they also did not have the leeway to shoot them to make sure that they were really dead.

In order to make sure that they were dead, the Hunters would need to spend their precious ammo to crack open their exoskeleton before delivering the killing shot. They also had used all of their grenades and other explosives when they ran away from the monsters to this room. They had no other choice but to hold their position using their regular ineffective bullets until rescue came. Thus, they could not afford to waste any of their ammo.

The Hunters had no other choice but to wait for rescue. They did not have the guts to try breaking through the monsters and getting out from that room. After all, they did not know what was the situation outside that room. In the worst-case scenario, there might be a huge number of Yarata scorpions waiting outside the room. Because of that, they could not work out the courage to get out of that room.

It did not take long before the Hunters there heard gunshots from outside their room. And they noticed that the gunshot’s sound was approaching closer and closer.

“A rescue?!”

“W-we’re saved!”

The Hunters cheered in happiness. But their cheering was immediately stopped. The Yarata scorpions inside that room which were faking death started moving again because of those gunshots. This caused the Hunters inside the room to fight desperately.

***

Akira tried to reach his rescue target as fast as he could, but he was interrupted by the scorpions that were pretending to be dead. Every time he found a pile of dead monsters, he could always find scorpions that were faking death mixed among the corpses. Among them, there were scorpions that were still alive even after losing their heads. Akira would destroy their legs or tails, although it would not kill them, it would be enough to at least render them unfit for battle.

Akira grumbled as he changed the magazine of his CWH anti-material rifle.

“There are just too many of them!! What the heck is up with these monsters?! How many did I kill until now?”

“That last one was your 54th scorpion. This is indeed too many.”

The usual CWH anti-material rifle’s ammo was much more expensive and had higher piercing power than normal ammo. They were normally used for fighting mechanical monsters, thus it was a bit of an overkill using them on Yarata scorpions. But since his normal ammo would not work against the hard Yarata scorpion’s exoskeleton, so he had no other choice but to use the expensive CWH ammo.

Akira frowned every time he pulled the trigger of his gun, it felt like he shot money out of his rifle’s muzzle.

“I have to pay for the ammo with my own money, you know!! If the reward from this request is bad, I won’t do this request again, okay?!”

“This request is basically not a monster-hunting request. So unlike a usual monster-hunting request where the reward is decided based on the type and number of monsters that you kill, we wouldn’t know how much reward we will get until we receive it. Not to mention that from yesterday’s request, the basic pay is only 20,000 Aurum.”

“I already spent more than 20,000 Aurum worth of ammo, you know!! Just how big is my ammo expense today going to be??!”

“Let’s put that aside for now until you finish the rescue order. You’ll get killed if you’re too frugal with your ammo right now, you know?”

“I know!!”

Akira rushed forward while closely gripping his gun. After killing about 20 more scorpions, he finally arrived near the room where the Hunters were holding up. Gunshots echoed endlessly from inside that room.

As Akira carefully stepped into that room with his gun ready, he saw the Hunters fighting 2 Yarata scorpions. The normal ammo that the Hunters used could not deal much damage, they were only able to barely hold those 2 scorpions off from coming closer.

Akira quickly aimed at those scorpions and destroyed their heads and tails. Their limbs were blasted and scattered all over the room. The Hunters only noticed Akira after those two scorpions stopped moving.

“Are you the rescue Hunter…?! T-thank goodness.”

The Hunters slumped on the floor, they were relieved and glad. A Hunter who had not lowered his guard came and asked Akira.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. Did someone else come?”

“No, you’re the only one.”

Akira was surprised to know that he was the only rescue sent to a Yarata scorpion nest. But before he complained to the HQ, he asked the Hunters.

“…What did you say to the HQ when you requested a rescue?”

“I told them that we encountered a group of insect-like monsters, but then they told us to hold our ground. To be honest, it was really dangerous. You really saved us, you know.”

Akira thought that the HQ might have misunderstood and thought that they were attacked by some small-sized insect-like monsters. It was important to inform the HQ with the correct information.

Just like the other Hunters, Akira also wanted to get out of that building as soon as possible. So he shouted at the other Hunters.

“Let’s get out of here before more of those monsters comes. The route that I took to come here should be still safe.”

“Y-you’re right. Hey!! Hey, we’re leaving the place!!”

Akira prioritized escorting the Hunters out as soon as possible. The Hunters would suddenly stop every time they saw a pile of Yarata scorpions’ corpses in the middle of their way out. Only after seeing no movement from those piles after Akira, who was leading the group, approached them, they would finally feel safe to walk past those piles.

After leading the Hunters out of the building, Akira contacted the HQ.

“This is number 14. HQ, answer me.”

“This is A4 division HQ. What’s wrong?”

“I’ve rescued the Hunters and will be returning back to the temporary base now.”

“Don’t return, just send the Hunters to go back by themselves. You should go to the next rescue order.”

Akira’s face turned grim and shouted at the terminal.

“Are you crazy? That building was filled with Yarata scorpions, you know!! I won’t go to the next rescue order without an ammo refill first, okay?!”

Akira waited for a response, but there was no reply from the HQ. He could hear a little bit of ruckus from the other side of the terminal. He then asked for a response while making a puzzled face.

“…HQ? Answer me. What’s wrong?”

When he did that, the HQ staff asked him back slowly and carefully.

“Let me reconfirm. Were they really Yarata scorpions? Is that building a Yarata scorpion’s nest?”

“I don’t know if it’s a nest or not. But it’s true that the building is flooded by a type of monster with a super hard exoskeleton that would even bounce off a normal AAH rifle bullet. If you doubt it, you can go ahead and send someone to check the corpses.”

“Forget what we just said. Go back to the temporary base as soon as possible. The terminals that we gave you are still functional, right?”

“Mine is alright. But as for the Hunters… They are broken except for the one that they used to contact you… Or so they said.”

The HQ staff suddenly shouted.

“Don’t lose them no matter what!! Come back here as fast as you can!! And make sure to not damage the terminal even further!! That’s all!!”

Then the HQ staff ended the call. Akira and the other Hunters looked at each other with a puzzled and worried look.