Role (1)
Step.
—Step.
A dark corridor, and a man walking through it.
"Haaahm...!"
He let the yawn spill out, long and loose. His name was Shinhoo—homeroom professor of Class Gap, sole charge of this year's freshly hatched chicks, and—
"Good morning."
—the Elder Council's sworn enemy(?).
BANG!
He kicked some black object aside hard enough to shatter the space around it, and a gloom even deeper than the corridor opened beyond. Matryoshka dolls or whatever you wanted to call it—same idea.
BANG!
The far side answered with a crash louder than the one he'd made kicking the entrance in. A few of the Elder Council's old fossils, unable to swallow their rage, must have slammed the tables set before them. Shinhoo snickered at the sight and set about needling them.
"Whoa, would you look at how dark it is. People need a little light, yeah? You've gotta get some sun, or the depression creeps in. Don't you know you've got to take better care of your health once you're old?"
The old saying claimed you couldn't spit on a smiling face. That, too, was apparently a lie.
"You brazen bastard! Is this the bedroom of your own house!?"
The man was bellowing at the top of his lungs, and—ugh. Spit flying, too. Old men. Fine set of lungs on them.
"Yeah."
In that instant a single voice rang out, and every other elder of the Council shut his mouth.
The Head of the Elder Council looked straight at Shinhoo.
"What business brings you here."
"Nothing so grand, really. I came because I've got a proposal."
The earlier slouch was gone from Shinhoo. At least when he faced this man, he had no wish to carry on that way. The Head, for his part, seemed to know him; he offered a thin smile that sat a little—no, a great deal—at odds with his reputation for cold blood.
"Speak."
"It's about this year's first-years."
"What of them."
"They're overflowing with more talent than I expected. I want to shift the direction of their classes from here on, and give them real combat experience along with it."
A cold stillness settled over the chamber. Even the Head wiped the smile from his face and simply stared at Shinhoo. A brief silence passed, and then he asked in a sunken voice.
"Why?"
The Head—no. Most of the Association would have failed to understand what Shinhoo had just said. And well they might. The educational policy known as the Missions had been devised entirely by the Association President. What Shinhoo meant to do, here and now, was raise his banner against that man to his face.
"You know it well enough yourself. The days before the policy the President devised."
"I know. How could I not."
A faint, distant smile bloomed at the corner of Shinhoo's mouth. It had been long, long ago, when anomalies and ghost stories were tearing down the ground humanity stood on.
"Wasn't that when New Korea rose?"
The Korea of the present was not the Republic of the past. In the rampage of anomalies and ghost stories it had lost territory once, and ordinary people had been robbed of their lives. No—not only ordinary people. The old exorcist powers, built of nothing but clans, had staggered so badly that great numbers of them were wiped out to the last.
The Head of the Elder Council nodded and took up the thread.
"In the past, exorcists could not manage a thing called cooperation. They regarded anomalies and ghost stories as creatures they could hunt down and kill whenever they pleased."
"And so the clans failed to work with one another, and the academy they'd barely managed to found spent every day fighting over whose educational policy was right and whose was not."
"Just so. Then Korea nearly perished, and the present Association President subjugated the Great Calamity, and the system we have now was completed."
But you.
"You would set yourself against the will of that President?"
Hwooooo—!
A dreadful pressure erupted from the whole of the Head's body. It was the life of an old man who had spent long years in the exorcist's trade, and it was his experience. And yet, receiving it head-on, Shinhoo showed nothing but the same unhurried ease.
"Was opposition not allowed?"
There was no fear of high rank in that voice.
"Since when did Korea turn communist?"
"...First-year cadets cannot yet be called exorcists. Only once they have learned basic exorcism and begun in earnest to delve into the domains of anomalies and ghost stories can they quell—"
"Don't chain yourself so tightly to the past, Council Head."
In that moment the pressure pouring from Shinhoo's body began, little by little, to push the Head's back. Not by driving it by force, but warmly, the way one soothes a young child. When the Head's own pressure returned to him, he had taken not the slightest internal injury.
"I know perfectly well you're worried the students will be hurt. Anomalies and ghost stories—in the domains of those two, even a seasoned exorcist is more likely than not to lose his life at a single misstep."
"You know that, and still you persist?"
"This year's entrants are on a different level."
"If you mean the first-ranked and the second-ranked, then merely because those two are exceptional, you would—"
"That's not it."
Shinhoo shook his head.
"I'm saying the level of the cadets as a whole is different."
In that instant the disciples he taught, and the cadets of the other classes, rose in his mind. Every one of them had something they were aiming for. And most had made a target of the back walking on ahead of them.
The top seat.
Looking upon that vast back, they were diligently matching its enormous stride with steps of their own, without even realizing it.
"In point of fact, the first semester has barely even begun. And yet the cadets average 2nd Rank. Even the lowest of them have the next wall right under their noses."
There was not a hair of a lie in it. He could not have lied to people of the Elder Council's standing in the first place.
"Leaving people like that bound up in obsolete, outdated restrictions... as an educator, that looks like dereliction of duty to me."
"...And yet under those restrictions, many exorcists have been raised to this day without dying. Imprinting fear, and through it pursuing safety. That is the foremost virtue of an exorcist."
"That much is true as well."
In practice, the first-year curriculum of the Academy ran as follows. A foundational raising of one's skill as an exorcist. And making them understand the fundamental terror of the strange. Through that, exorcists were kept from reckless folly, and even in moments of danger they cultivated the calm with which to devise a response. It was why Korea's proportion of exorcists stood far above that of other nations, and why a country that had once nearly fallen could be raised again.
But.
"That was only ever how things were in the past."
"And the present is different?"
"It seems the ones who carry fragments of the Great Calamity are on the move."
At those words the Elder Council fell silent.
The Great Calamity. Monsters otherwise called the Twelve Evils, anomalies that had once driven the Korean peninsula to the very brink of annihilation. The Association President had appeared, wielding a majesty that did not seem human, and at the end of his subjugation Korea had slipped free of the hand choking its throat.
"...Is that the truth?"
"Does it sound like a lie?"
"...No. You are not the sort to lie about a matter such as this."
"More precisely, factions making use of the Great Calamity's fragments seem to be stirring in the dark."
"Fragments?"
"I've no idea how they found them, or how they revived them, but... you remember Yu Gyeongsu?"
"...Of course."
"The method he used through the children he kidnapped. It was a Gudok ritual."
"......"
"And within part of that Gudok, I could feel a fragment of the Great Calamity."
For an instant Shinhoo's eyes flashed, as if they might drive the darkness out.
"So if we leave things as they are, the future those children come to face may be a dangerous one."
"...And so you would have us accept the risk, and teach them the means to meet it?"
"Yes. There is no time."
"...Such a thing has already occurred within the Academy. An incursion at any moment would not be strange."
"They will move the moment their preparations are done. So we, too, must change our methods."
"...Then all the more reason we cannot turn the children outward."
"Who said anything about sending them outside?"
Shinhoo's head tilted at a crooked angle.
"I never once told the kids to go outside."
"...Then you are saying there is another way."
"There is. And one that can show the children, indirectly, the threat of the Great Calamity."
In that moment a single word flashed through the Head's mind. It was a truly perilous notion.
"You. Don't tell me—"
"The Magyeong. I'm saying we use it."
"...It was once a place of punishment for those who had committed crimes, and a boundary of anomalies contaminated by the Great Calamity. Do you speak of it knowing that? With the children's present skill... no. With their strength of mind, they cannot endure that place."
"Then how about this?"
Shinhoo had never believed, from the start, that this proposal would be accepted. And so he had opened with something they were unlikely to grant, meaning to seize the upper hand in the negotiation.
"Changing this semester's midterm evaluation. Just the contents of it, a little."
"...Explain. In detail."
The corner of Shinhoo's mouth lifted as he laid out the method he had devised.
"...If it were that..."
"If it were only possible..."
"The effect would be certain, however..."
In truth, several of the Elder Council looked tempted by his words. A fortunate thing. It seemed the Head had torn out the rotten roots. Shinhoo delivered the finishing blow.
"Crack the storehouse open a little. So the children can grow according to their exam results."
And so Shinhoo, having gone to the Elder Council, settled the matter in a single showdown.
The days slipped past quickly.
"Hey, is this the right way to use it?"
"Hmm. Doesn't seem like it."
"At last! I broke through to 2nd Rank!!!"
"What are you even saying. You think that's something to brag about? There are people right on the verge of 3rd Rank."
The new cadets trained each in their own way, and in the end every one of them reached 2nd Rank. The better of them were even looking at the wall of 3rd Rank. Mina and Bihyung, of course, had not fallen into those numbers. A middle rank had no business in a yard where the low ranks were playing.
How should I put it... they're a little fast, aren't they?
Even setting that aside, their growth had startled Bihyung.
Mina and I went through awakening events often enough, sure. They shouldn't have had anything like that.
Their ordinary days must simply have been effort. From the third month after admission, he had never once seen the lights of the indoor training hall go out before dawn. He had wondered whether they might be upperclassmen. In truth, the professor had told him they lived by a strict routine. Students who trained with venom gathering in their eyes like this—their year was the first, and the last. Even as the man said it, he only smiled, thoroughly pleased, and quietly egged them on.
...If it looked like overtraining, wasn't he supposed to stop them? What kind of professor was that.
Anyway!
Over the three months the others had been growing, Bihyung had not simply been idling either. He had worked steadily to melt down the Lore of Hwaan Geumjeong, and he had communed with the Yeoui Spear to widen still further the range of their unity. He had also tried to handle his own Lore—the one the Great Sage Equal to Heaven had named Defying Heaven.
Hard to call it a result of that, exactly, but the range of unity, which had reached one arm and the area around his chest, stretched down along his body until it covered one leg as well. Set the head aside, and perhaps a quarter of the body had achieved unity.
You call that unity?
That was what Professor Shinhoo had said the first time he saw the grotesque shape. Bihyung ignored him. The method wasn't what mattered. Doing it was.
Hwaan Geumjeong. This really does start with the Eight Trigrams.
He had looked up, roughly, what the Eight Trigrams were, and come to understand that he would have to govern the energies of yin and yang at once if he meant to control this power. In the course of it, Bihyung also realized that he had already been governing the Eight Trigrams.
The Five Great Winds, the ones that changed after I killed Yu Gyeongsu. I thought it was simply that some special property had appeared.
It turned out, apparently, that this was the wind of the Eight Trigrams.
Aside from that... he had raised his proficiency to somewhere around the middle of 4th Rank? As expected of the middle ranks, the climb was disgustingly slow.
Defying Heaven still won't come into focus.
Just as the Great Sage had said, it seemed he would have to achieve at least Seung before he could handle it.
"Haaahm~"
At that moment a yawn of pure boredom sounded, and a man appeared. Class Gap's homeroom professor, Shinhoo.
"Good to see you, little chicks... ugh, I can't even call you that anymore."
At his light little joke, warmth drifted through the classroom. If only it hadn't been for what he said next.
"Ah, right. I forgot to mention it. The regular exam's coming up soon, yeah?"
"......"
"Sorry, sorry. I've been busy, and I genuinely forgot. Still, you lot probably don't need to worry."
So saying, Professor Shinhoo grinned.
"Starting this year, the contents of the exam have changed."
No. What was that supposed to mean?
The exam contents changed?
Then everything I know—I can't use any of it at all?
That was when the thought struck him. His eyes met Professor Shinhoo's, and at the same moment a voice transmission flowed in.
...What the hell is this?