Hero Academy (3-1)
"Bom, I won't be coming back for a while."
"Huh!? Why!?"
Panicked, Han Bom latched onto me and unleashed a barrage of questions.
What was the reason?
Was it because of her?
What had she done wrong…?
"Hold on!"
"Ugh…."
I managed to calm her down first and only then could I pick up the conversation again.
I explained the part about not returning in as much detail as possible.
My surface goal right now was to find Han Yeo-rum.
And to find him, I told her, locating their hideout one way or another was crucial.
The deadline I had set for myself was roughly three days.
I would expand the search radius over those three days and secretly tail the Red Summoners.
"If I keep coming and going from here, our hideout could get exposed instead. For now I'll roam around for a few days and take a good look at the surroundings."
"B-but…."
Han Bom wore an expression drowning in anxiety, clearly desperate to stop me from leaving somehow. I kept persuading her, and in the end she let her shoulders droop and nodded.
"This is a safe zone anyway. Even if someone breaks in, they won't be able to do a thing inside."
"Yes…. Ajeossi…. You have to come back."
"Yeah. And no matter how late I am, you absolutely must not go outside. Got it?"
"Haa… okay."
I laid down the law with her. If she wandered around out of worry and something happened, I told her firmly, we would break up on the spot. The word "break up" carried the same weight as severing all ties. Cowed by my hard line, Han Bom swore she would never leave this place.
"I won't go out… I know. I know I'm useless…."
"It's not that. We have to minimize the risk. There might be a Red Summoner out there stronger than me, after all."
I finally talked her around and stepped out of the cave.
"Ajeossi."
"Yeah."
"…You have to come back."
I pulled Han Bom into one last hug and whispered into her ear.
"I'll come back even if it's just because I want to drink your milk."
"Hey! You old pervert!"
Han Bom laughed helplessly, smacking my back as she saw me off.
Once outside the cave I gave the Crimson Crescent members waiting there a stern warning.
If anything happened to Han Bom, they would die without question….
The ones who knew my strength showed both resentment and fear in their eyes.
No matter how rampantly they had run wild on the upper floors, their levels were currently nerfed, so they had no choice but to watch themselves.
On the way to the Crimson Crescent hideout I spoke into the channel chat.
"You've been awfully quiet these past few days."
Ever since I had slept with Han Bom, GayCockGuardian had not typed a single message.
Seeing the hundred thousand points from the successful mission arrive cleanly, though, I could tell he was still watching even if he wasn't chatting.
I had been so focused on Han Bom that I had completely forgotten about him until now.
"GayCockGuardian?"
"Something wrong?"
The guy who normally never shut up was this quiet, so I started to worry.
Honestly I did not care much about the points.
Having him around just made things less boring, that was all.
At my concerned question GayCockGuardian stayed silent a moment, then let out a lament in chat.
"…You've been quiet this whole time because of that?"
"…."
I had worried for nothing.
From GayCockGuardian's perspective, ignorant of the regression, Han Bom's behavior had been completely outside his expectations.
The fact that she had been able to choose the Healer class upon arriving in Yggdrasil meant she carried deep faith within her, he said.
For a woman like that to get conquered in a mere week left him utterly speechless.
"What kind of nonsense is that…. If I had, I would already be a Red Summoner."
GayCockGuardian explained that he was depressed over missing the mark in a field he had once been confident in.
What, just because he had been gay while alive he thought he understood women's hearts?
I ended up delivering even more unfortunate news to the dejected man.
"Sorry, but I think I need to close the channel for a while."
"Don't worry. I'll open it again in a few days. Just think of it as me catching a bout of homesickness and needing some alone time."
"Stop talking nonsense…. I'll reopen the channel in three or four days! See you later!"
I closed the channel on that final message.
'Well then… time to leave a word with Boris and head out.'
After returning to the ship I rested for two days, then headed for the Hero Academy.
While undergoing the academy's rigorous entry inspection I grumbled over the comms.
'This is bullshit… if I were a full instructor they wouldn't treat me like this, right?'
Even full instructors are required to undergo thorough inspections.
'It's annoying every single time I go in.'
While I was still in the middle of the inspection, a luxurious sedan rolled up to the main gate. I recognized the passenger at a glance. The rear door opened and Seo Ji-eun stepped out, dressed in a neat black-haired cadet uniform. She chatted with the driver for a while, then smiled softly and approached the school gate.
'Is she close with that driver?'
I had watched Seo Ji-eun in the Magic department for some time, yet I had never once seen her smile like that. The smile she had worn while talking with the driver vanished as cleanly as a calm sea path. With her expression wiped blank, Seo Ji-eun approached the main gate and was about to undergo inspection when—
"Ah, you may go right in."
The words were not directed at me.
"…Thank you."
The moment the guards saw Seo Ji-eun they waved her straight through. She passed the gate without so much as a glance in my direction.
…So a rich young lady ranks above a full instructor?
….
Armonia had no reply to my grumbling.
Just how rich and famous did you have to be for a face alone to grant free passage?
Only after enduring a thoroughly demoralizing inspection did I finally make it through the gate.
The place I headed for directly was the campus cafeteria.
When I arrived at the cafeteria building, someone was standing at the entrance looking around.
Casual formalwear, a skirt that fell just past the knees, naturally wavy hair, and a fresh smile.
"Ah! Instructor Sung Su-ho."
"Hello."
Seong Sua greeted me warmly.
After exchanging the usual start-of-the-week greetings we went inside together and ate.
Being morning, the cafeteria was relatively empty, so Sua and I could talk in a quiet atmosphere.
"Instructor Sung Su-ho… you go out a lot on weekends, don't you?"
"I have important business."
"Ah… it's your day off, though. You must be tired."
A mixture of pity and concern colored Seong Sua's expression. That made me suddenly curious. What had she done over the weekend?
"What did you do over the weekend, Instructor Seong Sua?"
"I… just rested."
"In the dorms? You didn't meet anyone?"
"…No."
I could not understand it.
Seong Sua was popular enough that plenty of people should have been hovering around wanting to spend time with her.
More than that, she ought to have been meeting Cho Kang-hyun….
Yet she dodged my words and steered the topic elsewhere.
"Th-that reminds me, I heard they fixed the academy's internal network."
"Ah, that's a relief."
It really was.
If it still had not been fixed this week, I would have been the one stuck listening to Cho Seo-hyun's complaints.
"But that also means we have to be more careful."
"About what?"
"Once the network is fixed, the cadets will want to go out on weekends. That means more things to worry about."
Cadet outings were not something instructors controlled one by one.
Even if something happened to a cadet who had gone out, the responsibility did not fall on the instructors.
Instructors were hired solely for matters inside the academy.
They were not like school teachers who tried to take responsibility for every incident that exploded outside. Seong Sua, however, was different.
"The kids are still young. When they run into a freak outside, they sometimes get fired up with a sense of justice and charge in first."
"That would be a problem."
She always genuinely worried about the cadets.
"Today I think we should focus the class more on instilling a sense of caution rather than practicals or theory."
"Sounds good. That's exactly the kind of thing that matters most when they're still students."
I finished discussing the day's lessons with Seong Sua and wrapped up the meal.
Just as we finished eating and I was about to head for the Archery department faculty office for morning classes, Seong Sua called me to a stop.
"Um, Instructor Sung Su-ho."
"Yes."
"That…."
She looked at me with a meaningful gaze, then opened her mouth.
"How are things with Instructor Cho Seo-hyun?"
"What do you mean by 'how'…?"
"Just… whether you're getting along without any trouble."
At her question I spoke only of Cho Seo-hyun's good points as much as possible.
"Yes. It was a little hard to approach her at first, but she's a really good person. Her passion for teaching is incredible too."
"I-is that so. That's a relief."
"…?"
"Th-then I'll see you later."
Seong Sua gave me a bright smile in farewell and hurried off toward the Magic department building with quick steps.
The moment I stepped into the Archery department faculty office I could check on Cho Seo-hyun's condition right away.
'Huh? She's not sleeping?'
Of all the times I had seen Cho Seo-hyun in the faculty office so far, she had been asleep nine times out of ten.
The one exception had been when a sudden schedule change forced her awake….
Wondering if something else was up, I approached the Cho Seo-hyun sitting at her desk and greeted her.
"Hello."
"Ah… you're here."
Cho Seo-hyun glanced at me, returned the greeting once, and then fell silent.
She was a woman who usually stuck to silence anyway, yet today she gave off a distinctly different atmosphere.
After a stretch of quiet she made an awkward face and opened her mouth.
"Th-that reminds me, I heard the network is back to normal."
"Yes, I heard earlier. That's a relief."
"…? Who did you hear it from?"
"Instructor Seong Sua told me."
"Tsk…."
"…?"
Cho Seo-hyun furrowed her brow and began muttering to herself.
"She's from the Magic department, which has nothing to do with it, and she's talking about that…."
"Pardon?"
"It's nothing."
With a prickly expression Cho Seo-hyun shot up from her chair and grumbled as she spoke.
"Alright, let's go to the classroom."
Cho Seo-hyun gathered every cadet from Archery Class 5 into the VR virtual training machine room and began her explanation.
"Today's class is virtual training."
The training they would do today involved climbing into VR capsules to face monsters that were hard to encounter in person and practice how to deal with them.
Most of the cadets stared at the capsules with excited, wondrous eyes.
To students who rarely even saw VR headgear, the VR capsules held the same light as humanity first laying eyes on an alien.
Cho Seo-hyun issued a warning in a heavy voice to the excited cadets.
"Don't go poking around out of idle curiosity and break anything!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
After a long rundown of the precautions, Cho Seo-hyun gave the order.
"Alright, listen to the specialists waiting beside you and get in."
The cadets began climbing into the capsules under the technicians' instructions.
Cho Seo-hyun watched them enter for a while, then turned her head and shot me a sidelong glance.
"Come to think of it, will you be alright? I heard until now all you could do was log in…."
Before the network recovery these capsules had only allowed simple logins.
And thanks to those logins I had been able to admire Seong Sua's beautiful figure, but….
I shoved the image of Seong Sua's body that had floated up into a corner of my mind and told Cho Seo-hyun I would be fine.
"Ah… I'll be fine. There's a VR headgear in the dorms, so I've logged in and used it a few times."
"Huh? You have a VR headgear?"
Cho Seo-hyun looked at me with a startled expression. VR headgear was extremely expensive for an ordinary person to buy. She seemed unable to easily accept that an assistant instructor like me would own one. I offered a rough explanation.
"I didn't buy it myself. I received it as a gift."
"…A gift? That?"
But the moment the words left my mouth, it stopped being an explanation.
Who in their right mind would gift something worth five hundred million won?
The situation was awkward.
'If I say Seong Sua gave it to me, things will get even more tangled….'
I fell silent for a moment, fretting over how to explain. Fortunately, though, the explanation could end here. All the cadets had entered their capsules, and one of the administrators approached us.
"All the cadets are in. Your two seats are over there."
"…Alright."
Cho Seo-hyun entered her capsule while still eyeing me with suspicion, and I quietly climbed into the one beside hers to wait.
Once inside, the administrator outside began operating the controls with focus. And then—
Flash!
My vision blacked out and I was sucked into the VR device.
I frowned and slowly opened my eyes.
Before me I saw cadets milling about in confusion inside a black void.
Some were grinning, some fretting alone, some chatting with friends.
They showed every kind of reaction.
Standing among them with arms crossed and a stern expression was one person.
"Alright! Everyone focus!"
"…."
The cadets all turned into mute statues and stared at the woman—no, the little girl—who had raised her voice. While everyone else gawked blankly, I recognized the girl's identity at once.
Huh… that's the Cho Seo-hyun I saw in a dream.
It was Cho Seo-hyun from her cadet days.