It Was This Easy — Academy Arc End
Silence filled the classroom as every pair of eyes fixed on me. Instructor Marcus nodded.
"Pass. First one in three years — since Charlie Weasley."
I dropped straight to the floor.
"All of you, listen carefully. Even if you possessed my body, none of you could have actually captured Sirius Black in that hell. That's why survival alone counted as completion."
"So then…?"
"In that memory, other people died in your place while you survived. Doesn't matter. They're already dead in the past. But if all you plan to do going forward is survive, there's one thing you'd better remember."
Silence settled over the classroom, every gaze locked on Marcus.
"The people who die so you can live… might be your friends, your lovers, your family. If you're not prepared to accept that, then fight back from now on. If you're just going to collapse and cry about losing your family after crawling out alone, then fight with the resolve to die yourself instead."
"Instructor, so the reason you separated completion from a pass was…?"
"That's right, Cedric Diggory. You caught on. In the reality waiting for you, mere completion doesn't get you a happy ending. You have to risk your life, fight, and pass if you want to protect the people around you. Understood?"
"But we don't have hundreds of lives in the real world. If we die, that's it. Shouldn't survival come first?"
"Who said not to survive? I made it clear the primary objective of this training was completion. Survive for thirty minutes, I said. That's an excellent result on its own. But you need to understand this too: there is no path where everyone lives. If I don't die, someone else does. And that someone might be a person I love. So when that moment comes, don't sit there whining — choose fast. Fight, or survive."
Marcus finished speaking and looked down at me.
"Give him a round of applause. Today's first 'pass.' Eugene Kim — go get yourself a cold glass of water."
Applause poured out. Somewhere in the middle I caught the clink of something metallic, but Instructor Marcus glared in that direction and slapped a silencing charm over it. Those lunatics had probably decided to avenge their Hogwarts buddy after I beat the crap out of him. I'd seen them talking about it on Facebook. Idiots. Posting that stuff on public. All the East Asian this, admissions quota that — pure excuses. Those bastards just hated me. I let out a long breath and tried to settle myself, but my chest felt ready to burst and my hands wouldn't stop shaking.
"Ooh, that was kind of cool," Penelope said, clapping me on the shoulder.
"Eugene, you must've been boiling. Drink this." Karina smiled and handed me a cold bottle of water.
"I think Eugene's casting speed got a little faster too. Right, Cedric?"
"Dunno about that, but it was hilarious. 'Watch carefully, and learn.' Absolute nonsense." Cedric walked over laughing. "Eugene, what the hell was that delivery? I was dying. You sounded so dead serious I thought you were Captain America. But what did you say before that? The background noise was so loud and you were muttering so quietly we couldn't hear a thing from outside."
Percy burst out laughing too. I quietly flipped him off.
"Shut up. Karina, hit your boyfriend for me."
"Whyy? How am I supposed to hit Cedric?" Karina looked at him with those pretty eyes. "Cedric, don't be mean to Eugene. Got it?"
"I'll try."
"I swear I want to kill every couple on earth. Can you two get lost?"
Even as I traded jokes with my friends, I knew. I still had a long way to go. Thirty minutes was barely a start. In a real fight I might have to hold out far longer than that. Four years from now, at the Triwizard final — in that graveyard — this level of skill wouldn't be nearly enough to protect Cedric from Voldemort.
After the simulation ended, Marcus called me aside.
"Eugene." Instructor Marcus spoke. "Compared to your peers, your magical creativity is still lacking, and your casting speed is on the slow side."
I nodded. I already knew that.
"That was only the training version, so don't get cocky. The version Kingsley Shacklebolt takes to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement is a thousand times harder — in scenario design and magical sensitivity both."
"If it's Professor Kingsley — I mean, the Department Head — then yeah…"
In my mind's eye I could already see him: the muscular, handsome Black man laughing heartily as he swung his wand, my first Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. That hard-mode-obsessed maniac was more than capable of it. This was the guy who'd made second-years at Hogwarts cast Protego ten thousand times over half a year.
"And frankly, you're strangely unbalanced. I can see that sharp mind of yours and how well you understand spell theory — but with that level of knowledge, you should have been far faster and stronger inside my body in the Pensieve. Even with my physique, you were three or four times weaker than your friends."
His words drove straight into my chest. After living more than thirty years in a world ruled by science, maybe deep down I still didn't trust magic. A wizard who couldn't believe in magic — of course my magical sensitivity would be low.
"But." He set a hand on my shoulder. Heavy, and warm. "Your scientific application is outstanding, and your precision rivals any adult wizard. And more than anything—"
His expression was still hard, but the temperature had changed.
"You don't give up. That's what matters most."
"Instructor, in my eyes Sirius Black kept turning black and flickering in and out."
"I know. It's my memory."
"What was that?"
"How should I know? Later analysis guessed it was some form of Dark magic he learned from his master."
"…Is that so…?"
"Well, Dr. Bathilda Bagshot claimed it was possession by the 'oldest evil' — but nobody seriously believes the stuff that shows up in children's fairy tales. That woman has said her share of odd things over the years. Even the wisest historian in the world has a flaw or two."
"Hmm…"
"Don't 'hmm' me. If you've got energy left for useless thoughts, run a few more laps. Follow me."
"Wait — just one last question. How did Charlie pass? You said he was the only one in the last three years."
"That kid completed the scenario on his third try by rescuing every single civilian. When I told him to rest, he said the money was too good to waste and he wanted a few more runs."
"And then?"
"Then the moment it started, he sprinted to King's Cross Station and just lay face-down on the ground like a corpse. Didn't care what came at him, didn't care about fighting — just lay there. And with one minute left, he kicked Sirius Black square in the groin as the man stepped over him, and knocked him out cold."
"…That was it? No secret, no gimmick? He didn't solve some puzzle?"
"When the body is weak, the mind has to work overtime, Eugene."
And so for nearly two months I was worked like a dog — hard enough to bring back memories of basic training at Nonsan. Spell drills, physical conditioning, simulation after simulation. I died, and died again. My wand darkened with use and my socks wore through with holes. If Percy hadn't bought me socks and underwear, I would've been in real trouble.
Somewhere in the middle, Cedric took off with Karina for Fleur's birthday party. Bastard. He'd sworn he'd stick it out to the end of the academy, but he'd clearly run for it. Every time we ran the Barty Crouch Jr. capture simulation, Cedric had looked miserable — and in the end he must have given up. Couldn't blame him. Barty Crouch Jr. was the one who'd murdered Cedric's mother. It was our fault, really, for not stopping him when he insisted on trying it at least once no matter how hard we argued against it. Percy and Penelope were buried in theory classes, so I only saw them in brief snatches near the end of each day.
"Dead again. Reset."
"Ghk…"
"Go splash some water on your face. Reset."
"Hah… hah…"
"Why do you keep floundering at the start? The point is to catch Black while minimizing civilian casualties. You said you wanted to try for both a pass and a completion like Charlie, so we've been running this one over and over. Tobias… died there, and that fact doesn't change."
"What matters is an unbreakable spirit. You don't seem to get it — I just want to try saving him. That's all."
Marcus's eyes went wide. "What?"
I looked straight into his unsteady gaze and said it.
"I know the past doesn't change. So what? I want to try saving the person dying right in front of me. That's it."
Marcus looked like he was about to say something and barely held it back.
"…Do whatever you want. Your father already paid for it."
"Understood. Right away."
"Eugene Kim. That line… that's a good line."
"What matters is an unbreakable spirit?"
"Yeah. Something you learned at Hogwarts?"
"If I told you it's a phrase people throw around a lot in my hometown ten years from now, would you believe me?"
"……Stop talking nonsense and get in there."
"It's true, though."
It really was a phrase that had been popular right before I died.
Having spoken nothing but the truth, I grinned at him and stepped back into the Pensieve.
Lucius Malfoy. Theodore Seamus. Leo Romulus. The Prime Minister's Guard Battalion. Sirius Black.
Powerful enemies killed me in countless forms, over and over, and I stopped trying to catch them or fight them head-on.
I still didn't know why Marcus Weybridge was putting us through this. Honestly, it barely mattered anymore.
Whatever was fueling this man's hatred, all forty of us in that room had felt it in our bones through the repeated simulations — myself included.
But it didn't matter. No matter what ideology this sharp-edged former Auror tried to drill into us, Cedric, Penny, Karina, Percy, and I were all surviving in our own ways. We were already thinking differently from Marcus inside his own body and producing different results — so none of us were going to fall under his ideology.
There was something more important in this simulation. The MPs, Sirius, the Ministry — they could all go to hell. I had realized there was one key that could change the entire direction of this scenario, and so I kept walking back into death, again and again.
A landscape repeated hundreds of times.
The thick smell of blood and choking dust.
Static crackling over the radio and shouts echoing down the alley.
And the airstrike, ten seconds out.
"Marcus, what are you—"
"Shut up. Get down."
I hurled Tobias aside and stacked obstacles over the East Asian child with Accio, layer upon layer.
BOOM — after the blast faded, I looked around. Tobias was alive, eyes round with shock, and the child was unharmed.
I'd done it. Tobias was alive. With the officer in charge of Zone Three still breathing, the magic-suppression field would deploy as planned, and Sirius's combat power would plummet. Saving Tobias — that might have been the single most important branch point in this insane simulation.
I wasn't stubborn enough to keep trying the same thing over and over until it worked, the way Cedric was.
I wasn't strong enough to brute-force a solution with raw power the way Karina could.
I wasn't smart enough to pull the magic-suppression device from a dead Tobias's arms and activate it myself the way Percy could.
And I didn't have the silver tongue to impersonate a district captain over the radio and convince the Prime Minister's Guard Battalion that Sirius Black was sitting in a schoolyard the way Penelope could.
I was just a guy who knew a little about the original story.
But I didn't stop. Because I wanted to see a route where not a single person died.
So I obsessed over saving Tobias. I wanted certainty from this simulation.
That a no-death route could exist. That I could change things.
The certainty that I wouldn't have to deliver Cedric and Harry to a bald serial killer.
The vow that I would never turn my friend into another Tobias.
"…Eugene Kim. This time you saved all the civilians too."
"Is that a compliment?"
"I can see your spirit doesn't break. And that you're not all talk. But while you were saving civilians, you didn't catch Sirius Black."
"Can't we try saving everyone? Do Aurors always have to beat someone down and make an arrest? I wanted to prove this kind of route exists too. A world where nobody dies, and Sirius Black is captured without hurting a soul."
"You've got a silver tongue. So will you try the Bellatrix Lestrange version for real? Or there's the Dragon Slayers' Hong Kong mafia purge operation."
Sirius alone was this hard, and he wanted Bellatrix. Marcus had truly lost his mind.
"I'd like a full refund, please. Reason: disregard for student human rights."
"Run."
I laughed and ran lap after lap around the field.
Before long Cedric and Karina came back and joined us.
Karina grinned as she showed off selfies she'd taken with Fleur.
In the photos, Cedric looked like he was choking on perfume.
"Jihyun, look at this guy's face. He did not want to hang out with you two."
"Huh? What? I just saw that. You're right. Cedric Edmund Diggory. What's with that face? Was a little shopping that bad?"
"No, that's not—"
And so, in the summer of 2014, still unsure of Marcus's intentions, I was slowly starting to believe in magic.
In Marcus's office, his hand held an old photograph. In the picture, a brightly smiling Marcus stood with Tobias ruffling his hair.
"Hyung… one of our students saved you. In a simulation, but still. In twelve years I never once thought to try."
He wiped the photo, held back his tears, and stepped into the old Pensieve.
Just as Eugene had done.
Marcus moved fast, ushering the child into a building for shelter.
He grabbed the collar of a smiling Tobias, ran like a madman, and cast Protego after Protego across the area.
The airstrike came — and vanished in midair.
"Marcus, you son of a bitch. Let go of me. What the hell are you doing? You're leaving the operational zone. We need to get to Third Street—!"
In the original — in the original, the older brother who had rescued a dazed Marcus the moment he returned from evacuating their mother, only to die himself amid a scene he never could have imagined.
His brother dead. His colleagues dead. Their mother gone from the shock…
He had never once thought to try this. Because it wouldn't change. Because the past was already set.
If the Department of Mysteries still had a Time-Turner left, he might have stolen one — but they said not a single one remained.
The warmth of Tobias's hand seizing his collar felt so dear.
That single touch was something he had missed so desperately.
And so he had hated.
Sirius Black, that piece of garbage who parroted nothing but the name of Harry Potter, the son of the friend he'd betrayed.
Albus Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix, who never deployed to the end, insisting Sirius Black must have had his reasons.
Cornelius Fudge, then Undersecretary, and the department heads who played at justice and competence and stopped nothing.
Minister Bagnold of the Ministry and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who ordered the airstrike without even evacuating the Aurors on site.
The bastards of the Prime Minister's Guard Battalion — little more than the Malfoy family's private army — who followed those orders to the letter.
And those damned MPs who tore an entire city apart trying to catch one man, then announced that all of it was Sirius Black's doing.
He had wanted to pass this hatred down, but he hadn't had the courage.
He had hoped someone else would stand against them for him — and when the Subjugator's daughter enrolled, when Amos Diggory's son and Division Chief Raul's adoptive son enrolled, he had impulsively said those things in the briefing.
The cowardice of hoping the children of powerful houses would carry the hatred and fight in his place.
So he had taken the hand of a giant named Horace Slughorn and opened this academy.
To find a future that would one day condemn those scum in his stead.
And while he was at it, he had planted a small seed of resentment toward Albus Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix, who had stood by until the end.
So quietly, so carefully that Slughorn — Dumbledore's old friend — would never notice. Small and secret, but certain.
His hatred had never been reserved for the high nobility alone, so it had to be fair.
He put every student through this training so they would never regret the way he had.
He knew it was a cruel simulation of absurd difficulty. He knew it well.
But he had hoped those kids would not drown slowly the way he had, endlessly swimming through a past that could never be undone.
"Marcus—! Answer me! Why the hell did you leave the operational zone all of a sudden—"
It was this easy. It was this simple.
He should have tried just once. Instead of collapsing in despair, drinking, and giving up. He should have tried just once.
Knowing it couldn't be changed, he should have gone in just once, following his heart, and tried to save his brother.
"What's wrong with you, Marcus? Are you a kid? Suddenly clinging to me and crying. You want out? I'll talk to the Director for you."
"…No, hyung. Let's go. Let's save them."
"You little… giving orders to your older brother. Fine. Let's go. You're explaining that operational-zone breach later, though. Still — good work stopping the airstrike. Without you, that alley would've been leveled."
It had been a cruel training born from the wish that someone would remember his colleagues. But now, it seemed time to let his brother go.
"Thank you, hyung."
Marcus stepped out of the Pensieve and burned the old photograph.
His face looked lighter.
Just then, Cedric and Percy walked in.
"Instructor, you called for us?"
"Yes. Tell all the students to prepare for an overnight camping trip."
"What? All of a sudden?"
These kids — these children — were far better than he had ever been.
Cedric Diggory had saved the civilians to the very end. Truly, without giving up even once, using the exact same strategy over and over — and he had succeeded in evacuating every civilian in Zone Three through the Underground to the City of London.
Karina Jihyun Yoo had sealed off every escape route for Sirius Black and narrowed the battlefield to a chokehold. Smashing through buildings hadn't been about showing off her fists or clearing airstrike coordinates. That girl had demolished every path so Sirius Black could no longer rampage. Thanks to her, not a single district unit died to friendly fire, and they held the perimeter around Sirius Black until Mad-Eye Moody arrived. If Subjugator Yoo Seongheon had been on site, he might have done the same.
Percy Weasley had lured Sirius Black to the outskirts so the city wouldn't be destroyed, then activated the magic-suppression field himself in Tobias's place. It was astonishing that a boy about to enter third year could cast spells that fast and that precisely — though knowing how dearly Minerva McGonagall doted on him, it wasn't entirely surprising. Arthur Weasley's children had always managed to surprise Marcus, just as Bill and Charlie had.
Penelope Clearwater had poured lies into the radio, impersonating a district captain without pause. Then, mixing false information with true, she had redirected the Prime Minister's Guard Battalion's airstrike from the city streets to an empty football pitch. These kids had pulled off exactly what Charlie Weasley once did. Clever ones. They had grasped that without the airstrike, Sirius Black's rampage slowed and civilian and Auror deaths dropped exponentially. Charlie — Percy's brother — might have tipped them off, but understanding it and executing it was proof enough of how extraordinary they were.
These sharp kids had already abandoned the pass route of capturing Sirius Black alive. Before the MPs ever appeared, they finished everything they needed to do and completed the survival route.
And Eugene Kim. The slowest, the clumsiest — and the one who ultimately saved everyone.
Children who, to a man trying to pass down hatred, had each shown a different path to salvation.
"Shouldn't you go get ready? No — I'll go tell them myself."
"Ah, no need. We'll handle it ourselves."
Bang.
In the faint reflection of the window, Marcus's face wore a smile — slight, very slight.
"Eugene, pack your stuff. We're going camping!" At Cedric's words, a bad feeling settled over me.
"……Somehow I don't think this is just camping…"
"Somebody shut him up!" Penelope shouted, and a barrage of pointed looks landed on me.
"But still, camping out of nowhere is a little—"
"Eugene Kim. What matters is an unbreakable spirit, wasn't it? Breaking this easily over the word 'camping'?"
At the line I'd tossed out without thinking — and at Marcus's low addition as he opened the door and walked in — I had no choice but to shut my mouth.
As I started to say something, Marcus raised a finger.
"Shh. I know you've got questions. Hold them. I'll tell you everything once we're camping."