Top of the Class (1)
My estoc drove true into the Jack-o'-Lantern's neck.
Crunch. The recoil of something tough and solid giving way raced, sweet, up my wrist. The beast twisted those hideous features and shuddered, and the thrashing of a body over three meters tall hauled me along with it.
Press in and take the risk, or fall back and stay alive? I watched the part of me that wanted only to tear in like a storm, and made the call.
A light step back — and the estoc drawn free.
A will to win is a fine thing. Greed is not. This was a stage, not a real hunt, and there was no need to overreach against an opponent I was seeing for the first time. That I had chosen right became clear the instant I withdrew.
Shwick!
"————!"
In a last frantic spasm the Jack-o'-Lantern writhed and lashed all four of its thorn-whips in every direction. Linger inside a five-meter radius of the thing, and there wouldn't have been bones enough left to gather.
Then the orange light leaking from the eyes, nose, and mouth of that pumpkin-lantern head began to blink — once, twice, three times — with an ominous flicker, and the detonation followed. BOOM. Shards of the pumpkin skull sprayed outward like grenade fragments in a game. I started into a guard and threw myself to the floor instead. Far too many pieces. This was not an attack a blade could answer. Fifteen meters clear, at least, before you could call yourself safe.
I let the breath go. With a heavy thud, the headless Jack-o'-Lantern staggered and went down.
"Was that a success?"
I turned to Hong Si-yu and Ji In-hwi.
Hong Si-yu said nothing.
Ji In-hwi's eyes flew wide.
Both Hunters wore deeply troubled faces. The moment I saw that look, I understood. I had seen it often enough on my coaches, back in training.
Er, Jae-ha. You did well. You did. It's just...
In the sparring drills run all-kill, when I had swept the entire opposing side alone and the ones lined up behind me finished without ever getting a swing in.
"...Well done."
So it seemed I had been fortunate, then and now, in the instructors I drew — people with an eye for these things.
"The repeated hit-and-run. The attacks meant to draw out a knockback. The evasion of the final blast. All of it was excellent."
Hunter Ji In-hwi managed a smile and nodded.
"In return for leading by example, I will award you five attitude points."
The attitude points came through, just as promised.
"Thank you."
I bent deep at the waist, set the estoc down, and stepped off the stage.
"You think he watched hunt footage?" Ji In-hwi murmured.
"If watching were enough, would rookie death rates be that miserable? Someone who's never done it can't. Not ever."
"But he just did."
"The swordsmanship itself, he'd be used to."
Snippets of Hong Si-yu and Ji In-hwi's whispering reached me.
"Damn! That hyung is the real thing!"
"Scorpion boy ran his mouth about how he'd win, and it was all bullshit? This one doesn't even move the same."
Those voices were soon drowned under the roar of the gathered Awakeners.
They chanted my name. Whistles rose from every side. I lifted a hand in answer. The sound of my name, the envious eyes turned on me — it was intoxicating.
"Fucking terrifying. So that's the skill he used to carve people up?"
"Isn't he the only murderer in here? Since when do murderers come in model-inmate editions?"
"The ones who died back then... I knew them..."
There was no small whisper of condemnation, and even that I could ignore. It felt like I had gone back to my days as an athlete.
That was when I felt a gaze clinging to me, strangely persistent. Slightly wavy, deep-black hair. A pretty face. The one who had been running with Kim Kang-oh's crew was staring at me as if bewitched. The look was so blatant that our eyes met before I meant them to.
Eyes like sunlight shattered against the waves.
They flinched and turned away.
"Huh?"
That was when I saw it. In the turn, the telltale band of a sports bra showed along the side. Did that make any sense? They had been sorting us by sex since the detention center — that much was certain. We had been in the same place for months, at least. I couldn't see how it had gone uncaught. Or maybe they were simply a pervert. Given the pedigrees of the people in this room, that was far and away the better bet.
"All right. From here we begin anti-beast swordsmanship in earnest. As Athlete Jeong just demonstrated, the thrust is the foundation."
Of course, I had no room to wonder what story that one might be carrying.
"A demonic beast's bone and muscle are hard to cut even with a decent body-enhancer's strength. So with a longsword, you thrust for the joints, the nerves, the lungs..."
If I meant to reach Saetbyeol Guild, I had an obligation to listen closely to these lessons.
"...The Tutorial is one month out. By then, you need to be able to take a Jack-o'-Lantern with a blade alone. Once those things start drinking in flame and detonating, there is truly no handling them."
A creak. Midway through the practical, Kim Kang-oh came back. The infirmary must have agreed with him.
"Fuck."
He couldn't even look my way.
This cohort of the Rehabilitative Hunter Service numbered a little over a thousand, split into five groups of two hundred and sat through a range of classes. First among them was Social Adaptation Education, meant to tell us how the world had changed while we were in prison.
"Now, everyone. Why shouldn't we deceive others..."
I had expected something on the level of an elementary-school morals lesson, and that was exactly what it was. Then again, thinking of the likes of Kim Kang-oh, more than half the room probably did need to start from precisely that. I couldn't fault it too loudly.
"Good work last period. Use that hour to push the material and you'd all get hired faster and start bringing in magic stones."
Every other class was useful.
"Anyway, those Gate Management Bureau bastards all popped out of here. So. Today we learn how to pop things back in — a slipped bone and a slipped mind both. Kim Kang-oh. Up front."
"What?"
"Now. Before the practical, I will start by popping Trainee Kim Kang-oh's shoulder out."
"No, no, no— AAAAAGH!"
There was an emergency-medicine period covering reduction — setting broken or dislocated bones — stopping a bleed, and a handful of other field techniques. The instructor was a Hunter dressed like a plague doctor, and he ran the class using only the violent offenders as teaching aids.
"Lee Hae-il."
"Number 244, Lee Hae-il!"
"Good. Nicely set."
Among them, that pretty-faced one — the one I had down as either a woman passing for a man or someone with peculiar appetites — turned out to be an unexpected ace. I did fairly well myself.
"Athlete Jeong did well too. Have you studied sports rehabilitation?"
"Yes."
"National team really is different. One attitude point!"
In any case, I had spent more than three years drilling the heart of modern rehabilitation medicine under a physician. Familiar work.
"A Gate is a subspace from which demonic beasts emerge, each with its own rules and its own method of clearing..."
There was hunting theory as well — demonic beasts, magic stones, Gates — and the swordsmanship class I actually liked. Perhaps because Hong Si-yu had stressed it again and again, a fair number of Awakeners were showing real zeal.
"Agh!"
Lee Hae-il was one of them. He or she — I couldn't tell — that it stayed after class, swinging a metal practice blade, and slammed it hard into a knee. With a live sword, that mistake would have taken off at least half the leg. A glance told me the grip on the hilt was the problem. My mouth itched to correct it.
"Uh..."
How welcome, a person working hard at the thing I love. Of course, this one had looked like part of that thug Kim Kang-oh's crew. But it was my creed that no one who loves the sword is a bad person. Kim Kang-oh didn't count. He wasn't a person. So maybe this Lee Hae-il had a chance at rehabilitation too?
"The grip."
"Yes?"
"Ease off. Wrap the lower end, like you're cradling it."
I tossed it over my shoulder on the way out of the gym.
"Yes, Hyung-nim!"
"Since when am I your hyung."
The answer came back full of zeal. It didn't feel bad. If the muscles around my cheekbones were climbing like that, I was probably enjoying it more than I meant to.
"All right — fire!"
Rat-tat-tat-tat!
The last class was marksmanship. Unusually, it wasn't taught with service rifles like the K2, but with submachine guns like the MP5.
"Rifles like that are for the civilian Hunters coming up behind you."
They even had us shoot left-handed, not right.
"Why are you learning to shoot? So that when you're mid-swing and a pack of little ones suddenly pours out, you can hose them down. It can't get in the way of the blade."
That was the one class where I couldn't earn a point.
"So there's something even Athlete Jeong can't do?"
No. It wasn't merely that I failed to score. I came in dead last.
"No, seriously. How do you even get it to look like this?"
The instructor took one look at my submachine gun during the strip-and-assemble practical and laughed, awkward.
"I couldn't do this on purpose if I tried."
My submachine gun had taken the shape of some ancient god's twisted idol. I felt wronged. I had followed the PowerPoint floating at the front of the room, exactly as the manual said. So why was this the result?
"I'm sorry. I'm hopeless with machines. I don't trust myself with anything more complicated than a fencing mask."
I threw both hands up. A trigger, I could pull, more or less. Maintenance — taking the thing apart and putting it back together — was beyond me. Come to think of it, I had wrecked more than a few BB guns as a kid, too.
"Nothing to be done."
In the end I gave up on marksmanship. In truth it was closer to marksmanship giving up on me, but I decided to say, at least aloud, that I had been the one to quit. My allies would be safer if I never laid a hand on a gun. I could always claw the points back in swordsmanship.
Two weeks passed like that.
"Was it in here?"
I worked the app at a crawl and pulled up my score.
"Whoa. Hyung-nim. How many points have you stacked up?"
"Thirty from the medal, five from the first day of swordsmanship practical, three from emergency medicine, one from theory, and more from swordsmanship class... forty-three in all."
I had already gathered half of eighty-five. Kim Kang-oh had ten. Of course I couldn't grow careless. I had all but forfeited every point on the marksmanship side. To be truly at ease, I needed more.
That was when the app chimed, and a note came through.
"You sent for me?"
I had come up to the top floor of the center.
"How has the leg been lately?"
"I expect it will improve, in time."
"With skill like yours, Athlete Jeong, you'll recover quickly."
Hong Si-yu was seated on a large sofa in a wide room. The short red hair looked wonderfully lively, but I remembered the sight of her breathing fire.
"I've been launched around often enough to know. Take down a few dozen demonic beasts and it gets a lot better."
On a monitor at one side of the room, my dossier was up.
"Watching you take the golem down this time, I don't think it'll take long. Finish the Tutorial, stay active a month or two, and if you just hunt a hundred Jack-o'-Lanterns, that leg will be fully healed."
"I sincerely hope so."
"And if your luck runs hot and you bag even something like a lesser dragon, you might genuinely recover in a single go."
She glanced at the monitor, then brought up my leg. At first I had taken it for small talk, something to break an awkward room. The more I listened, the more it sounded like serious advice.
"It doesn't seem to be in terrible shape even now. Am I right?"
"I can keep pace with training well enough. Even an all-out sprint is no trouble for about five minutes."
"That's a relief. The truth is, I had a proposal for you."
"What kind of proposal?"
It seemed this would run straight into the real business.
"From where you're standing, Jae-ha, there must be at least a few trainees with a knack for the sword, no?"
"Yes. There are a few."
"Gather them from every group and you'd clear a few dozen, wouldn't you?"
"I believe so. More than that."
"Could you gather just those ones and run something like an after-school program in the afternoons? Honestly, your swordsmanship itself is far beyond our instructors', isn't it?"
The proposal felt very, very good. Back when I went to prison, plenty of people had condemned me. An athlete raising a weapon against ordinary people — was that right, no matter what? Whether gangsters counted as ordinary people, I couldn't say. What I could say was that subduing a number of armed opponents alone and bare-handed was, for all practical purposes, impossible. To protect myself and my younger sibling, I had truly had no choice.
They had argued that even if I were released, I should be barred from coaching, and privately I had thought that the likely outcome. Wasn't it an age when the mere fact of a controversy became the controversy?
And yet now a remarkable Awakener leading a government program was asking me to teach someone how to use a blade. For me, the situation itself was deeply satisfying.
"Ah — of course I'm not saying I'd work Athlete Jeong for free."
Hong Si-yu even seemed prepared to pay me what I was worth.
"Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Two hours after dinner, each of those days. 250,000 won an hour, so 1.5 million a week. How does that sound?"
A weekly 1.5 million won came out close to eighty million a year. That was popular-instructor money at a major fencing club. Even a formal booking of gold medalist Jeong Jae-ha would have been worth about that. And as things stood, I had neither house nor home. My house was in Seoul, and Seoul, at present, had been overrun by demonic beasts. If I meant to find Chae-ha and live together, I would need at least a studio. Earning close to three million won over the two weeks left before the Tutorial would be a genuine kindness.
"And I'll add some points on top. You don't have a Hunter record, so I have to set you at an outside instructor's level. It's a little embarrassing, honestly."
Points, on top of the pay. A chance to fill, completely, what I had lost in marksmanship.