Role (2)
"Why'd I get banned?"
Bihyung had finished his regular classes and gone straight to his homeroom professor to demand an answer.
What came back was this.
"Ah. Said it wrong. Means you can't sit the exam as a student."
So that was it.
"...I can't take the student exam. Then you're telling me to take some other one?"
As far as he remembered, did the Academy's regular exams even have anything else?
...Tch. No. There wasn't.
Not the assistant professor exam, either.
No. He was still a first-year, so becoming an assistant professor... well, it was possible, he supposed.
Now and then the professors did look at him the way a raptor looks at prey it has just spotted!
Even so, there was such a thing as a line, wasn't there?
"What kind of exam is it?"
Depending on the answer, he was fully prepared to challenge the professors to a formal duel.
He didn't think he could win. Still, if he thrashed and howled like a mad dog, maybe they'd take it back.
He was still working out exactly how to raise hell when the professor went on.
"Before I get to that—this regular exam borrows a yokai's domain under the Academy. The point is to make the students understand the fear a yokai carries."
Through that, they would judge how the students handled it, then drill them in special training on the results before break. All of it was to scrape together the bare minimum of data they needed.
"...Why are you doing that?"
"Otherwise the kids're gonna drop dead too easy starting next semester, yeah?"
"...Pardon?"
"Told you last time, didn't I. Got one proposal I'm working on."
Watching his homeroom professor grin, Bihyung thought it through.
Death. If that's what he means... is he talking about missions?
The Academy's missions came in two forms.
One was the abridged kind, meant for the lower years, or for those of low rank.
Facing yokai and urban legends the Association has graded as low-tier.
The other was the formal mission. Unlike the abridged ones, you didn't face low-grade yokai.
But even those, in the end, mostly come down to assisting Association personnel.
Of course, the truly strong—the student council president, or Senior Eunha—sometimes took commissions of their own instead of playing support. Hadn't he gone to the library at the start of term and found Senior Eunha out on a mission that specifically required those barrier arts?
But no matter how much you're only assisting, inside a yokai's domain you never know what might happen.
Not knowing when, or where, or how you might die. That was a yokai. That was an urban legend.
...Especially if contamination sets in.
Contamination—the merging of two or more urban legends, or yokai. Their separate rules warped and tangled together, and exorcists struggled to clear the result. So Bihyung assumed that was what his professor meant.
The assumption, as it turned out—
"Huh? Nah."
—was laughably wrong.
"From second semester on, you lot have to go into the 'Demon Realm,' see."
At those words, one name rose in him on instinct.
Inoemagyeong.
One of the Academy's forbidden grounds. His homeroom professor was telling them they had to walk into it.
"Course, don't worry. Like this."
Snap!
Reading Bihyung's eyes, the professor flicked his fingers and wove a talisman from spiritual power. The white paper was covered in beautiful patterns, as if gold had been melted down and carved into the face of it—a piece you could sell to a museum and make decent money on.
But Bihyung recognized what it truly was.
...That. I've definitely seen it in the game.
A protective talisman written by the Association Head. A consumable, and still a full 9th Rank.
...No. There's no way they'd hand something like that to every student.
So it had to be a lower grade than the one he remembered. Even so, the presence rolling off that talisman was not something you approached lightly.
A talisman of at least 6th Rank.
And he could stamp those out?
...He really is a monster, isn't he?
Bihyung's gaze shifted, just for an instant, in a faintly odd way. Professor Shinhoo waved a hand and dismissed the talisman.
"Want it all you want, suck it up. Starting second semester you'll be sick to death of hauling these around anyway."
"...No. More than wanting it—how did you even get your hands on that?"
"This? Mentioned it to the Association through the Elder Council, and they sent 'em over."
Besides these, he added, there were communication talismans that could pinpoint everyone's location, and Gate-Opening Talismans that could cut in if things went sideways. All of them, apparently, made by the Association Head.
"More precisely, the Association Head's clone is the one making 'em."
"A clone?"
"Yep. So the rank drops. Still, not bad enough you'd die at the mouth of the Demon Realm... so who cares, right?"
"...I feel like I just heard something I wasn't supposed to hear."
"Anyway."
The man was very obviously trying to change the subject. Bihyung's eyes narrowed to slits, but Shinhoo plated his face in iron and ignored the look.
"You can't sit the regular exam on a 'student' ticket. Instead, I wanna ask you to take a different 'role.'"
A different role?
If it's some other role in the exam... what would that even be?
Just as Bihyung's head tipped to one side, a thin, crooked smile touched Shinhoo's mouth.
With that, he had the whole of it, front to back.
Ah.
In a word, he was being asked to play the yokai.
...On the cadets?
This wasn't even a joke.
Time passed, and the day set for the regular exam arrived.
The first-year cadets gathered by class and stood in the Academy's central plaza. Before them, the homeroom professor of each class stepped forward.
"Starting today, the regular exam begins. Expected duration, two weeks. There are two ways to earn points."
"One is to clear the 'domain' we set running in advance with an art formation. If this were a game, it'd be clearing a dungeon."
"The other is to fight the yokai wandering in there, and win."
Of course, they said real yokai would not be used. Hadn't the professors said they themselves would play the part?
...Then why me.
Bihyung, naturally, had been picked alongside the professors as a special event mob, there to deliver despair and fear unto the cadets. Mina, second in the class, was no exception.
"Let's give it everything, Bihyung!"
Eyes bright as lamps, both fists clenched tight, she looked ready to burst with motivation.
...But Mina. If we get fired up, the other cadets won't be able to score at all, will they?
"Mmm. Even so. If the professor's asking us, there must be a reason. So I'm going to try hard!"
Ehehe.
Watching her laugh like that, Bihyung nodded. She wasn't wrong. The professors had pulled the two of them out to run the exam apart from everyone else precisely because the gap between them and ordinary cadets was as vast as heaven and earth.
They were only a single rank ahead of the ones chasing right at their heels, but the wall between Low Rank and Middle Rank meant a great deal. To put fear into those students, and to teach with their own bodies how to move inside the domain of a yokai and an urban legend, there was no better casting.
Ta-da. And of course the two of them just happen to be half-yokai.
Throw Senior Eunha in and they could have staged a half-yokai rebellion.
"So let's not spread our presence around too much."
He simply didn't want their identities exposed. That was one reason. There was another.
Bihyung recalled a conversation he'd had with the professor not long before.
"You—that qi wave? Nah, not that. Anyway, you've got somethin' that puts the squeeze on people, yeah? Think you can work the effect a little?"
"That? Why?"
"Just feels kin to a qi wave, is all. Martial arts has a realm like that too."
Formless Kill.
"Stuff killing intent into a qi wave and drop the other guy—they call that Wounding by Will and Qi. Yours feels a cut rarer than even that."
A realm where the qi wave alone could take a life. Of course, to wield power on that level you had to be at least High Rank—and even then, it only worked on those of lower rank than yourself. Something rather different from Bihyung's presence, which reached even those above him.
But.
"You put out power like that, the kids won't last. Ease it down a notch, yeah? Can you?"
"Yes, well... all right."
That was the conversation they'd had.
Just the right amount... enough that the kids don't pass out.
He thought back to the time he'd suppressed Yeoui and scared everyone half to death. Live long enough, and even an experience like that came in handy.
That level. Enough to startle them and make them step back.
Okay. Review complete.
As Bihyung steadied his breath and tuned his presence, Mina pressed her own down as well. She had grown a great deal as a being of late; leave it unchecked, and she'd end up in the same state he did.
And so, just as the two of them finished preparing—
"All right, then."
Professor Shinhoo, the cadets arrayed before him, grinned and stamped the ground once.
"Shall we begin?"
The Academy's central plaza bucked without warning. Earth surged upward with a grinding roar, and between the rising shelves of soil something like a colossal stone pillar came into view—so like the mouth of a temple that the resemblance was uncanny.
Professor Shinhoo rapped the pillar and spoke.
"The Cursed Sea. Name of the yokai we're about to walk into... and once, one of the yokai that reigned as the terror of that ocean."
A bleak sea wind hissed in.
Bihyung waited until every cadet had gone through, then joined the professors and received a robe that would mark him as a yokai. At the same time, they laid out the rules that applied only to them.
"Every time you pressure a cadet and knock 'em out, you get points."
"Pressure—you mean we just shove them with force?"
"That works too. But remember the bit I called the domain? Standard play is to steer that and make it miserable for the cadets."
"Understood."
"You're only set to show up at night, so when day comes, a device in the robe'll send a signal. Go wherever and trigger the art built into it. It'll move you to your assigned lodging."
With that, Bihyung stepped into the Cursed Sea together with Mina.
Space rippled, and his insides lurched with it. The sign that they had entered a yokai's domain.
Caught in that feeling, Bihyung never noticed.
...A faint thrum.
From his Dokkaebi Bat—a weak tremor that rose, and was gone.