Academy Acceptance or Twenty Thousand Dollars
The choice was simple: pass the academy entrance exam or receive $20,000. Academy final acceptance. Versus a billion—no, twenty thousand dollars. Were they insane? If this was the offer, who in their right mind would take the twenty thousand? Twenty thousand dollars was barely twenty million won. Meanwhile, graduating from the academy meant earning tens of millions without breaking a sweat. Anyone with half a brain would choose academy acceptance. There was not a single reason to pick the money. In practice, it was as if they were steering the terror victims toward choosing the academy. But survivors at least had that option. The dead had nothing at all. Only a hundred thousand dollars—more than the living received.
“Maybe the dead had it better.” Depending on how you looked at it, that could even be true.
Currently, academy terror survivors made up roughly twenty-five percent of those who had been taking the exam that day. The rest had either never shown up, finished early and left, or died midway through. [10th October Offensive/Academy] The number of academy terror survivors hovered around 2,500. The academy side claimed they were “still confirming the figures.”
Two thousand five hundred was correct. That was what I had pieced together from the nurses’ chatter and my own quiet investigations outside the hospital room. The problem was that while 2,500 was just a number to the nation, it was anything but small for the smaller groups involved. Imagine a prestigious university president going mad and deciding to admit an extra 2,500 students right before the college entrance exam. The publicity and administration offices would spin it as some noble effort to reduce academic elitism. The media would dutifully report it, framing it as a challenge to rival schools and writing their little novels. With that kind of widespread attention, students and parents would inevitably nurse false hopes.
Yet that attention was not the real issue. The real problem began after admission. What would happen to the university afterward? The president would, of course, become a former president. Either the faculty would run him over with a car, or some suspiciously revolutionary professor would lead the charge and impale him on bamboo spears. There was no avoiding it. Once someone caused a scandal that tarnished the university’s honor, the only civilized twenty-first-century solution left was ritual suicide. Admitting an unmanageable number of students made it inevitable. Complaints would pour in from every direction, and they lacked the capacity to handle even one. Overuse of infrastructure would create a level of saturation unseen even on Black Friday. Once the former president vanished while reciting haiku, what would follow? Probably a festival of Molotov cocktails—the kind enchanted in the East—because paying for a mistake with death would not improve the situation one bit. Two thousand five hundred students’ worth of lectures and classrooms would not simply fall from the sky.
It was somewhat exaggerated and unrealistic, but that was the reality Palaestra Academy now faced. Of course, Palaestra Academy and an ordinary university were not on the same scale. If forced, they could probably absorb 2,500 students somehow. Arecibo alone was a city of millions, and Palaestra Academy normally admitted tens of thousands each year. That, however, was under normal circumstances. With the Shareltea campus’s educational infrastructure in ruins, they should have been reducing capacity, not increasing it. Otherwise, they would truly experience an oversaturated academy. That was why the academy desperately wanted to retract the already-announced option and hold a large-scale re-examination. Or rather, I was certain that the chancellor and the board would make the sensible decision to retract it.
So I lay in a large hospital in Arecibo, watching the days slip by. [10th October Offensive/Academy] Palaestra Academy Chancellor Filberto Sabatini… “There will be no change to compensation. There will be no re-examination. Those who have not yet taken the test will have their schedules adjusted and resume…”
Oh, you lunatics. At this rate, your academy really was going to explode. I had no desire to attend an oversaturated academy. Tragically, no retraction ever came no matter how long I waited. They were truly insane people in high places.
“No, wait.” Perhaps they had become completely broke after this incident. Maybe that was why they had chosen the cheapest method—stuffing the survivors into the academy.
[10th October Offensive/Academy] Academy on the verge of bankruptcy… Emergency funding injection incoming?
Why was this actually happening? I was beginning to understand why the quality of the academy had deteriorated so badly at the start of the game. If the academy system collapsed like this, how could it possibly produce proper hunters?
“We’re truly screwed.”
“Our lives have always been like that.”
I looked at Cheon Mari, who was sitting beside the bed spouting nonsense. Just like every other time I had been hospitalized, she had come to my room and laid out her mat. The only difference this time was that she herself had sustained critical injuries and now had her own hospital room. Not that it changed anything—she was still right next door.
Cheon Mari glanced at her wristwatch, declared that it was time, and pulled a pair of sunglasses from her pocket. They were the green alien sunglasses once worn by a game developer infamous for bugs. Her taste was utterly incomprehensible.
“Now then~ Quickly yield the bed to this seat, Cheon Ma-in~”
“Cut the bullshit~”
The bed was already too small to be useful. Why would I move? But Cheon Mari was the type who never hesitated even with male friends. She shoved me aside as I tried to hold my ground and squeezed into the tiny space that appeared. “Cheon Ma hip beam.”
“Ack! You crazy bastard!!!”
She kept bouncing her hips and ramming my rear to push me further. I was about to fall off the bed from the sheer difference in strength when she grabbed me from behind and held on. Her arms wrapped around my chest, her legs around my abdomen. It was a sticky, clinging posture where every sensation from chest to pelvis was transmitted directly. Whether I protested or not, Cheon Mari operated the remote and turned on the TV. Out of countless channels, she landed on the sports channel.
“Even while injured, you’re looking for baseball. You really are something.”
“Of course. When injured, one must watch baseball. The greatest medicine given to humanity is not some elixir—it is baseball.”
I see. Another incomprehensible preference. I clicked my tongue and predicted the future of this foolish creature. Cheon Mari, meanwhile, shouted whether I knew the soul contained within the orange eagle. But I felt neither soul nor spiritual pressure. The team logo at the bottom of the standings was itself a kind of tragedy.
“Ooh, is he catching it? Catching it? Catching it? Aaaaaah!!!!”
“No, no!! Double play, you damn bastard!!! Last round it wasn’t like this!!!”
“You sons of bitches!! How many times are you going to drop it!!! And why the hell haven’t they cut that guy yet?!”
“This team has no mother and no father.”
“—The game is tilting toward the Lions—”
. . . . .
“Baseball lost, but I’m still alive!”
“Idiot.”
Idiot baseball, idiot fan. In the end, that was how it went. Looking back, eighty percent of Cheon Mari’s insane personality clearly came from baseball. There was no concrete evidence, but every circumstance pointed to it, so it was practically certain.
“Failed to advance to the postseason…… flop……”
Good grief. If I ever had children, I would never let them watch baseball. Of course, I also had no intention of dating a woman who liked baseball in the first place. I finished my brief resolution and snatched the remote from her hand. The strength of someone who had lost everything in the world felt far too weak. I immediately switched to the news channel, and breaking reports about the current situation began pouring out. Half bad. Half good. Of course, that was without considering scale or severity. If those two were factored in, the bad still overwhelmingly dominated.
“—Experts judge the possibility of this situation escalating into full-scale war to be very low……”
It was laughable that this reality was not considered war. Both sides kept spouting nonsense about how their military operations against each other were merely that—operations. It was a complete mess, but it had not been entirely detrimental to me. The reason was simple: Cheon Mari had shorted the market, claiming something would happen at the end of the year. She had not explained in detail, and I had not asked, so I had assumed it would bring a small profit around December. Looking back now, it was obvious she had shorted in anticipation of this incident.
“Hey, Cheon Mari. Why didn’t you tell me in detail that something like this was going to happen?”
“Uh…… um…… well……”
Her excuses, however, were on a truly terrible level. She had been confused because she was old and sick, the incidents had overlapped too much for her to remember properly, it had been a terror incident she was not particularly interested in, she had forgotten the overall danger level, it was not something an individual could have stopped anyway, and so on. None of those excuses would work on someone who had nearly died because of the lack of information sharing. Of course, even after hitting her on the head, I could not bring myself to forgive her—
“Still, we made a lot of money. I’ll forgive you.”
Since the money duplication had succeeded, I made an exception. Honestly, it had succeeded so well that I was now worried about how to withdraw the funds. Cheon Mari always left the cleanup to me whenever an investment succeeded. That was why I had learned various methods from her at the beginning of our business. Just thinking about the tax haven maneuvers and all the other shady work I would have to do gave me a headache. Moreover, since I would be using a third party as a shield, I had the distinct feeling I would be pulling all-nighters for a while once I got home. What glory could someone like me possibly achieve? The thought suddenly occurred to me. And then I remembered the glory I had long desired. I looked at Cheon Mari, who was now rolling around on the bed after being hit on the head.
“Hey, Mari. When we return to Korea, there’s one favor I want to ask—”