Hunters Union

## Overview

The Hunter’s Union is one of the 3 main organizations in the magical community recognized worldwide, along with the Magical Association and the national military representatives. The hunters are combat mages who take on commissions from a wide variety of clients ranging from individuals to government groups. The cases usually involve the eradication of magical beasts or solving complex problems involving magic. The difficulty of the case will determine the price of the commission.

Information brokers are a key cog in the operation of the Hunters Union. Often hunters would sell bits of information in auctions. The information may be of no worth to the hunter who collected the intel but could be vital to the commission of another hunter. Likewise, hunters would typically invest a lot of money to get accurate information, especially high value commissions. Highly intellectual hunters are often more valuable than highly cultivated magicians on a commission, as shown Ling Ling, who dominates the hunting scene however lacks any magical ability and is as fragile as a piece of glass.

## Operations

The hunters can typically be split into two individual groups, those who work for the Hunters Hall directly and those who work for private hunters organizations, such as the Clear Sky Hunters Organisation.

### Hunter's Hall

Each main center typically has a local Hunters Hall which take on the majority of the general commissions. This is an incredibly busy and important hub for many of its members to gather in the organization. Most of these commissions do not have a high difficulty and deal with monsters of the level of the servant or the level of the warrior. Since these commissions deal with low-level magical beasts, they are typically in high volume and therefore the majority of Novice and Mid-tier hunters take on these cases, providing an income and opportunity to get combat experience for newcomer magicians, such as Mo Fan when he was in high school. Almost everyone in the Hunter’s Union at this level form squads because there aren't too many individuals who can fight against magical beast alone. Usually stronger magicians move on to higher difficulty commissions.

The hunter hall also operates as mediators and guarantors on certain commissions, usually those with a high chance of death. In the event of the hunters die while performing the duty, the payment of the contractor will go to the family of the hunter.

### Private Hunting Organizations

Private Hunting Organizations are much smaller than the Hunter's Hall, and typically only take on high-risk high value commissions. They also only hire quality hunters with a strength higher than the average hunter of the Hunters Hall. When Mo Fan joins the Clear Sky Hunters Organisation in Shanghai, they told him that the smallest commission they would take was 1 million RMB and that was only for their juniors such as Mo Fan.

For a private hunters organization to thrive they have to build a reputation of success by completing difficult commissions. The higher the prestige of the organization, the more high value commissions would be brought directly to them as opposed to competitors. In the case of Clear Sky, they were already very prominent when Mo Fan joined and he automatically had access to relatively high income cases.

### Network of Hunters

This is an international information network, which is used
by hunters throughout the world. This network is based on secret
convolutions, and can be used to find operational information about magical
beasts, various organizations, historical events and magic items. The Hunter's
Union uses this network and constantly updates information. This network
is more extensive than any national information agencies.

### Payment

Payment of a commission scales with the difficulty of the tasks involved. Some extremely difficult commissions can be available to any takers and have a pool of funds that accumulates over time. These commissions only have the opportunity to accumulate due to the number of people who are affected by the case and the fact that many hunters fail to execute the task. In the end these special commissions work as a lottery of sorts, which each failed 'prize winner' the pool grows larger for the next attempt. This value has shown to sky rocket to over 3,000,000,000 RMB in the case of the tears of the gorgon.

Sometimes Hunters of a higher rank would hire hunters of a lower rank to execute some of the smaller tasks for them and can choose to offer 'Hunting Authority Points' as a reward. These points are required for promotion to a higher rank and are much more valuable than money to hunters. However if a high rank hunter pays out too much of their own points , they themselves can get demoted if they go below a threshold. The hunter who hands out these points must be at least a 1 star hunter master.

However it was stated that low level hunters value ranking points just as badly as money and are more than happy to suck up to much higher ranked masters as good relations often result in more jobs. This was shown when ling ling hired over 60 senior hunters and upwards and every single one arrived ahead of time and took proper time to dress themselves.

### Unofficial Rules

although they are not rules enforced by the law, Hunters tend to follow these rules for the sake of safety.

* In the event of the death of a teammate, the remaining hunters are to adopt any children left behind.
* **NEVER, EVER,** take the babies of a creature while the mother is still alive, as the mother would often go and track them down, leaving destruction in their wake. (Although for some reason, no one seems to abide by this rule)
* Think twice about kicking out or rejecting an application to join from a: healing, mind, sound or blessing mage
* Make outsiders pay a security bond.

## Rankings & Rewards

The hunter union also assigns rankings to hunters based on their accumulated 'Hunting Authority Points' which are distributed with each commission. Challenging commissions supply more points.

Ranking points are automatically attached to commissions, the amount of money the hunter is payed by their employer, whoever they may be, the difficulty of the mission is not actually taken into account. The rewards are listed in rankings below:

* D rank: the highest value D rank reward shown was 200,000 RMB
* C Rank: no information is given about this rank, but it's lowest is likely to be 300,000 RMB, since the clear sky hunting group accepts no lower commission what so ever.
* B Rank: the highest reward shown for a B rank was 24 Million
* A Rank: the only A rank reward listed so far was 50 million
* S Rank reward: the lowest reward of this rank was stated to be 300 million, the highest was 3.5 billion.
* SS Rank reward: the only suitable reward for this kind of assignment is more than 1 full star ocean vein

Based on these rankings, it is likely that the highest rank D reward is 300,000 and that the maximum for each rank afterwards is increased by a factor of 10.

S rank rewards work a bit differently than the others. While the other rank rewards are commissioned directly, s rank rewards are either handed out by governments or setup in a price pool. A Price pool is where victims or relatives of victims or charities donate money to a giant fund to find a solution to a disaster level problem. Who so ever finds the solution first collects the entire price pool.

SS Rank rewards are handed out from contractors, most commonly full forbidden curse mages, in exchange for incredibly difficult assignments.

Revealed ranks so far are:

1. Hunting King
2. 7 Star Hunter Master
3. 6 Star Hunter Master
4. 5 Star Hunter Master
5. 4 Star Hunter Master
6. 3 Star Hunter Master
7. 2 Star Hunter Master
8. 1 Star Hunter Master
9. Senior Hunter
10. Venerable Hunter
11. Hunter
12. Novice Hunter

The ranks 2-12 are based entirely on hunter points, but the exact number of points is not given, but certain references have been made:

* 1.5 years in the city hunter squad gave mo fan a ranking of hunter
* 1 year working with ling ling gave him a ranking of senior hunter
* Resolving the Chongming distaster made mo fan go from senior hunter to a ranking of 2 star hunter master
* Solving the drowning curse made mo fan go from the ranking of 2 star hunter to 6 star hunter
* Collecting some medusa tears made mo fan go from the ranking of 6 stars to 7 stars

The rank of Hunter King is not handed out on points but on merit. It involves doing a massive accomplishment that somehow relates to solving a massive problem for humanity. But this only qualifies your for competition. Every 10 years, there will be an international competition held to determine the next hunter kings, where certain countries have to power to promote a certain number of hunters to Hunter King from among their 7 Star Hunter Master