ZZZ: A Hunter's District Zero!

Chapter 303: Promise

When Hoshimi Miyabi came back to herself, Andrew was sitting before the campfire in a state of deep, absorbed focus — carefully leafing through and inspecting his meticulously hand-drawn atlas, occasionally pressing pen to paper to revise the old terrain into something that reflected the current reality.

This was the kind of thing that really should have been updated in real time. But given how long it had been since the last revision, there were already noticeable discrepancies — a path that had once run clear was now sealed off by the fall of an enormous tree, while a stretch previously blocked by rubble had, at some point during a monster clash caught in the crossfire, opened back up entirely.

A map was only useful as long as it kept pace with the world it was meant to describe.

Not that Andrew actually knew when he’d get to use this particular revision. But he had time to spare, and the deep-seated habits of a Hunter meant that the moment he opened the atlas, his hands had already started making corrections to every route he’d passed through — without him consciously deciding to do it.

Might as well bring it back and cash in some Guild Points while he was at it.

Though, now that he actually thought about it and ran the numbers — his Guild Point balance had long since hit the hard cap. Completely maxed out. Nowhere left for points to go.

Still. Something was better than nothing.

And it was right then that the faintest stir of movement from the person in his arms snapped his attention away from the map in an instant.

The small movements Hoshimi Miyabi made as she returned to consciousness were subtle — barely perceptible, really. But subtle or not, she was currently lying in Andrew’s arms, which meant even the smallest shift registered on him immediately.

Snap.

The atlas, which had been lying open in his hand, was closed in one smooth motion with a crisp clap of pages coming together. Andrew looked down —

— and found himself looking directly into Hoshimi Miyabi’s dark crimson eyes, utterly still, utterly unreadable.

"Uh..."

For a moment, a peculiar silence settled over the two of them, thick and wordless, wrapped in the warmth of the campfire.

Andrew, who had a strong and growing sense that this situation was not going in a good direction, hesitated for a beat — and then, deciding that getting ahead of it was better than waiting for her to act first, opened his mouth and carefully, deliberately, began to explain.

"Okay, look — I’ll admit, picking you up was something I chose to do. But if I told you that your arms around my neck, and the way you’ve been holding on this whole time, were both things you started on your own while you were unconscious... would you believe me?"

Even as the words left his mouth, Andrew could hear how absurd they sounded. He almost talked himself out of bothering. But in the end, the facts were the facts — Miyabi had genuinely been unconscious at the time, and the truth was on his side no matter how he phrased it. He planted his feet mentally and committed to the stance of a man with nothing to apologize for.

Whether Miyabi would actually see it that way, he had no idea.

From her perspective, after all, one moment she had been standing on a branch — and the next, she was here, in his arms, with no memory of anything in between. The fact that she hadn’t immediately written him off as a complete degenerate was probably already giving him too much credit.

Bracing himself with a small, uncertain knot somewhere in his chest, Andrew finished his explanation and looked down to check her reaction.

What he found was a gaze with absolutely no turbulence in it. She had been watching him, unblinking, for the entire duration of his explanation — and now she simply continued to watch him, with the same complete, total absence of expression she had worn from the very first moment her eyes had opened.

There was nothing to read in that face. No signal. No tell. No way to determine, from the outside, whether she had accepted what he’d said or rejected it entirely.

A silence hung between them.

And then Miyabi broke it first.

"I believe you."

Simply said, and immediately left behind. She moved on without ceremony, turning her attention to what she clearly considered the more pressing matter, and looked up at Andrew from where she lay.

"I lost consciousness again? How long was I out this time?"

Honestly — her response was a little more than Andrew had been expecting.

Normal logic suggested that any ordinary girl, waking up from sudden unconsciousness to find herself in a man’s arms, would at minimum register some kind of reaction. Alarm. Embarrassment. Something. But Miyabi had accepted the situation with a calm so complete it was almost unnerving. Was it trust? Did she trust him enough that none of the rest of it registered?

They’d been through a number of things together by now, and he wouldn’t deny that the trust between them had grown into something real. But surely it hadn’t grown to the point of this level of ease?

In the end, Andrew didn’t overthink it.

She clearly wasn’t bothered. And if the person most directly involved wasn’t bothered, there was no point in him being the one who got tangled up in it.

He let his attention shift to the questions she’d actually asked.

He glanced through the gaps in the branches above, reading the angle of shadows on the forest floor below, then answered:

"From the moment I found you unconscious on the branch to right now — roughly three hours, give or take. But speaking of which — again?"

He frowned slightly, a note of genuine seriousness entering his voice.

"Miyabi — does this happen to you often? Just... suddenly losing consciousness like that?"

Miyabi shook her head.

"It has happened on occasion. But in the past, it only ever occurred during periods when I was pushing through a new cultivation method. Losing consciousness outside of active cultivation practice — that has never happened before."

She watched the expression on Andrew’s face shift from seriousness to something quieter, something closer to worry, and tilted her head slightly.

"Andrew — are you worried about me?"

The question came out naturally, almost reflexively, and in the same breath she began to fall back on the same reassurance she’d used before — the one she always reached for when Zhu Yuan or Yanagi had witnessed these episodes and said something with concern in their voices.

"Don’t worry. I’m fully confident in my ability to protect myself and anyone I want to protect, under any circum—" freēwēbnovel.com

She stopped herself.

Midway through the sentence, Miyabi realized that the situation she was in right now and every previous situation she’d used that line in were not remotely comparable. They weren’t even in the same universe. The words died in her throat and she cut them off before they could finish.

Faced with Andrew’s quiet, wordless gaze — the gaze of someone who had witnessed everything, start to finish — Miyabi understood in the same instant that opening her mouth and delivering that particular spiel to his face was less ’reassuring’ and more ’getting caught red-handed in real time.’

Something shifted in her expression. A faint, involuntary flicker of self-consciousness that had no business appearing on a face that had remained perfectly composed since the moment she opened her eyes.

A trace of warmth crept into her skin — barely there, barely visible, but unmistakable. And her gaze, which had held his steadily up until now, slipped away to the side almost of its own accord.

It was, admittedly, incredibly endearing.

But this was the Monster Hunter world, and danger lived in every shadow of it. They were in the Ancient Forest — a place where countless monsters roamed, where even Elder Dragons were not an uncommon sight, where the ecosystem itself was built around things that killed and were killed without sentiment or pause.

Even Andrew himself, if he were caught in the open without his Master Rank armor and rendered completely motionless, would be in genuine mortal danger the moment an Elder Dragon turned his way.

And the Ancient Forest had no shortage of Elder Dragon activity. Even now — even with Vaal Hazak long dealt with — encountering an Elder Dragon in the New World was nothing out of the ordinary. And beyond Elder Dragons, the sub-species monsters of this ecosystem were formidable in their own right, carrying power that could not be underestimated for a second.

The danger posed by Miyabi’s episodes of sudden unconsciousness was self-evident. This wasn’t something that could be brushed aside or treated as negligible.

Andrew gathered himself and spoke with clear, deliberate intention.

"So — Miyabi. Do you have any idea what actually caused you to lose consciousness this time?"

Hearing Andrew bring the conversation around to the actual issue at hand — Miyabi refocused immediately.

She knew, with quiet certainty, that when it came to a world she had only just arrived in, Andrew’s depth of knowledge vastly exceeded hers. And Miyabi knew better than most that professional matters belonged to the professionals — that deferring to someone’s expertise in their own domain wasn’t weakness, it was judgment.

If Andrew was this concerned about what had happened to her, then he had his reasons. Good ones.

So she closed her eyes, reached back into memory, and painstakingly reconstructed every detail of what had happened the moment they stepped through the spatial Rift — and then recounted all of it to Andrew, leaving nothing out. Not even the sound of the massive wingbeats she had heard from somewhere above the canopy.

Andrew listened to the full account. And by the end of it, he had a working theory for why simply opening her hearing to its full range had sent her into the same unconscious state that usually only appeared during the most demanding phases of her cultivation practice.

The short version: there was simply too much.

Nature, in its unfiltered totality, produced a staggering volume of sound. And when a mind that had never encountered this scale of sensory input was suddenly confronted with all of it at once — that mind, no matter how formidable, was going to struggle. Miyabi’s brain had received a dataset of an entirely different order of magnitude than anything she had ever processed before, and on the very first encounter with it, it had done the only thing it could.

It overloaded.

This kind of cognitive shutdown was something Miyabi only ever experienced when she pushed herself through the most grueling mental cultivation regimes she’d designed for herself — the kind that involved, for instance, imagining herself cutting down an almost incomprehensible number of enemies simultaneously in a single mental exercise.

"...So that was why."

The moment Miyabi understood it herself, the last faint trace of self-consciousness that had been lingering in her expression was replaced entirely by something harder, sharper, and far more characteristic of her.

Seriousness. And beneath it — resolve.

She gave a firm nod.

"Then I will practice continuously releasing my senses until I can process every source of sound with the same ease and fluidity that Andrew does — without exception!"

If the problem was that she couldn’t keep up with the data, the answer was straightforward: train until she could.

Just as her father had always said.

If a form of training causes you suffering — then you have found the right direction.

The principle wasn’t universally applicable, she’d be the first to admit. But in this specific case, Miyabi felt strongly that it held.

And the moment the decision was made, she began to reach inward, preparing to release her senses all the way open again — right here, right now, for round two.

Andrew’s hand shot up immediately.

"Wait, wait, wait — Miyabi, blind training without a method is not the way to go!"

Miyabi paused.

Andrew pressed on, keeping his voice calm but urgent.

"You know as well as I do that using the right method makes the difference between training that gets you results and training that just eats your time, right?"

"That’s correct," Miyabi said immediately, with a small nod.

And then, the thought following naturally — if Andrew had stopped her, he must have a better approach in mind.

Her eyes lit up, a brightness flashing into them that was distinctly unlike her usual composure.

"Don’t tell me — Andrew, do you actually have a better method for this?"

Facing that expression — that rare, undisguised, almost eager brightness that she so rarely showed — Andrew decided in a single clean beat of thought and nodded.

"Of course."

"Wonderful!" Miyabi said, without a moment’s hesitation. "Then please — teach me, Andrew."

Seeing that complete, unconditional certainty in her eyes — Andrew let out a quiet, involuntary breath of relief.

Good. Crisis averted. He’d managed to keep her from immediately crashing herself back into unconsciousness.

They had time, yes — but that was no reason to spend it like this. If he just let her keep hammering herself with that technique over and over, there was genuinely no telling how long they’d be stuck here before they could get moving again. Getting stalled at the very starting line wasn’t exactly the plan.

And if it happened again, he really would just have to carry her the whole way.

He’d mentioned that possibility to Miyabi — framed it as a practical concern, a reason to find a smarter approach — and her response had, once again, caught him off guard.

No displeasure. No objection. She had received it with complete equanimity and simply accepted it as a workable contingency.

"I understand," she said, in that earnest tone that brooked no argument from itself. "If that situation arises again, then — just as you did this time — carry me and proceed as planned."

"We cannot let my condition delay the journey."

Andrew, who had absolutely no idea how to respond to that, opted for a tactical subject change and moved on to the actual solution he had in mind.

At its core, the reason Miyabi had ended up in this state in the first place came down to a single, fundamental gap: she had grown up in a city. She was a child of New Eridu, from beginning to end, and the natural world — in any meaningful sense — was simply not something she had any real concept of.

This wasn’t ignorance from a lack of exposure. It was more fundamental than that. She didn’t have a framework for it. The category of ’wilderness sounds’ simply didn’t exist in the part of her mind that filtered and classified sensory information, which meant her instincts had no basis for automatically discarding the irrelevant noise.

And that — the inability to filter — was the real source of the overload.

The solution, by extension, was clear: if Andrew spent time with her in the days ahead, progressively familiarizing her with the natural world and building up her knowledge of forest ecosystems from the ground up, the root cause of the problem would resolve itself naturally as her understanding grew.

Miyabi listened to the full explanation. And when it was finished, the trust in her expression was immediate and unguarded — the expression of someone who had decided, in no uncertain terms, to believe completely in what she was being told.

For the people she truly recognized as worthy of her faith, she gave that faith without reservation. And in this world, Andrew was unambiguously the expert.

And so — quietly, without ceremony — the two of them made a pact: for as long as they moved together through the Monster Hunter world, Andrew would do his best to teach her everything there was to know about the natural world and the wilderness.

As for Miyabi’s other statement — the one about being carried again if she lost consciousness — somehow, between the two of them, it passed without anyone actually objecting to it. It simply settled into place, uncontested, as though both parties had already silently agreed.

And then, as though something had just occurred to her, Miyabi shifted the topic with a small, clean pivot.

"By the way, Andrew — since regaining consciousness, I’ve been aware of a unique energy in my body. An energy with an extraordinarily robust, vital quality to it."

As she spoke, she turned her attention inward, attempting to draw on it and guide it outward — so Andrew could sense it directly — while she continued.

"Are you familiar with this energy that has appeared inside me?"

The energy Miyabi released was unmistakable. Andrew knew it the moment it touched him. His eyes widened slightly — an involuntary reaction, a small but genuine shock.

He genuinely had not seen this coming. Miyabi had simply... acquired it? The energy that Hunters used? Just like that?

Was that even possible?!

Was this — could this actually be — a hidden benefit of crossing over from a world where energy flow was already clearly perceptible? An inherent advantage for someone who already possessed the sensitivity to feel it?

The surprise settled quickly, and Andrew collected his thoughts.

"That energy — yes. I know it very well."

"More than that, actually — it’s the threshold you have to cross before you can truly call yourself a Hunter in any real sense. Only when you can perceive it, and consciously guide it through your body, can you draw out the full and genuine power of these combat techniques."

"Because this — this is the source of everything you’ve seen me do in battle."

____

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