Entrance Exam (2)
Academy Testing Ground Six.
As a precaution against the unexpected, more than one proctor was assigned to oversee the exam. The outer detail handled perimeter security, while the inner team kept watch for cheating and any friction that might flare up between examinees. Incidents were rare enough that, under ordinary circumstances, the whole shift would have ended with nothing more than standing guard.
But this was not an ordinary shift.
"Hey…! Move it!"
"Emergency! We've got an emergency!"
At an hour when nothing should have been happening, the outer security detail scrambled into motion. There was a reason for the sudden frenzy.
"Why is the Association President suddenly coming here…?!"
"How should I know? Look—his car's pulling up! Get ready!"
A black sedan rolled to a stop in front of the hastily assembled guards. A stern-looking middle-aged man stepped out from the rear door.
"Sir! Thank you for your hard work!"
"At ease. You've all been working hard."
Hero Association President Min Gyeong-ho returned their crisp salutes with an easy, good-natured smile. He clapped the proctors on the shoulders and strolled inside at a leisurely pace, the supervisors falling in behind him at once.
"I can find my own way in. You're free to return to your posts."
"Absolutely not, sir! We'll escort you!"
"Haha. And who watches the outside, then?"
From Min Gyeong-ho's perspective, it was a harmless suggestion—just go back to work and take it easy. But coming from a superior that far above them, the words landed with an entirely different weight.
Haha. So you'd rather wander off than do the job you were given?
That was how it translated inside their heads, and the future they pictured was pitch black.
We're screwed.
We've been marked.
My life's over.
While the two proctors contemplated a second career, Min Gyeong-ho casually went, "Ah," as if something had just occurred to him, and rummaged through his pocket. They were already imagining themselves reassigned to some remote backwater when, contrary to every grim expectation, what emerged from his pocket was a wallet. He slid out a card and held it out to them.
"Once the exam's over, take everyone out for a company dinner. Don't cheap out—get the expensive stuff. If the bill's too small for my liking, you're getting transferred."
He flashed a playful grin as he offered the card. The proctors took it with dazed expressions.
"Uh… ah! Thank you, sir!"
"Good. Keep up the hard work."
Min Gyeong-ho glanced at their blooming faces, looking thoroughly pleased with himself, and walked on into the testing ground.
Damn, that's some real charisma.
A faintly cowardly little thought escaped him as he went.
"Well now… that's something."
What Min Gyeong-ho found upon arrival was Lee Yeon-hui's exam in progress. He had deliberately pushed Park Yeon-chan to the very last slot out of curiosity—yet the one who actually caught his eye was the girl just ahead of him.
Impeccable mana control. It felt like watching someone turn a faucet and dial the water pressure to exactly the strength they wanted, without a single drop of waste.
An unexpected harvest.
He hadn't expected this level from anyone else, but identifying talent early was a gain no matter how you sliced it.
Still riding that afterglow, he spotted Park Yeon-chan trudging out toward the pillar below. They had offered to set up a private monitor for him inside, but Min Gyeong-ho had wanted to see the boy with his own eyes. So he watched from the proctors' overlook—the vantage that commanded a full view of the testing floor.
"Hm…?"
For some reason, Park Yeon-chan's gaze was sweeping left and right. And not randomly—he was focusing specifically on the positions where the proctors would be looking down from.
And then—
"…!"
He knows I'm here?
Min Gyeong-ho erased his presence in daily life as thoroughly as he did in combat. Not with deliberate effort, so it was never perfect—but still.
And that brat noticed?
It wasn't so sloppy that a kid who hadn't even started high school should have been able to pick it up.
"Right. He was never ordinary."
Kim Jae-gyo's recent remarks had stuck with him, so Min Gyeong-ho had looked into Park Yeon-chan—and uncovered more than a few interesting facts.
An Awakened bearing a mysterious pulse of power that the Hero Association had been quietly searching for. Nothing confirmed, but he was the closest known match. He had walked out of incidents that would have burned through ten lives, then revealed himself as the "special Awakened" they were hunting—and vanished without a trace.
Years later, Park Yeon-chan had reappeared and brazenly sat for the Academy entrance exam under his real name. There had to be intent behind it. No other explanation made sense.
"Well. Watching what he does now should tell me everything."
Min Gyeong-ho smiled down at Park Yeon-chan. It did not take long for that easy expression to drain into pure shock.
"Who the hell is that…"
Among the sparse traces of presence drifting down from above, one radiated an especially solemn weight. I might have missed it if I hadn't been paying close attention—but I'd spent far too long around someone who carried the same kind of air.
If he's in the same league as that old man, then he's one of the Seven Heroes.
There was no other explanation. And the one most likely to show up here would be Min Gyeong-ho. Now I finally understood why I'd been stuck in the last slot.
I'd been a little rude without even showing my face. Was this payback? Honestly, given the headaches I'd caused, this was getting off easy.
And besides—
This might actually work in my favor.
I hadn't planned on it, but with Min Gyeong-ho here I could revise the plan upward. Fine by me.
Thinking that, I stepped up to the pillar and rolled my shoulders loose.
"The more spectators, the better."
Today, I needed to stand out.
Lee Yeon-hui was taking this entrance exam so seriously for a reason—the privileges that came with ranking first. The Academy sat so firmly under the Hero Association and Hunter Association that it was practically an annex of both, which meant Academy students enjoyed a range of outside benefits. The most groundbreaking among them was access to the Towers.
Most of Korea's Towers fell under Association management. Ordinarily, students only received clearance starting in their second year, scaled to their ability. Top rank, however, unlocked that access from year one—and that was almost certainly what Yeon-hui was after. Even fully cleared Towers still held hidden pieces worth claiming.
I wouldn't have minded letting her have it under normal circumstances. But I needed Tower access myself, without the bureaucratic runaround. I couldn't afford to yield.
I stretched my arms out fully, finished warming up, and began to prepare.
"Hoo…"
I drew a deep breath and gathered my mana.
The hidden bonus scoring on this exam was mana control—how finely you could handle your own power determined how many extra points you walked away with. In that case, there was no reason to hold back.
A low, resonant hum built around me.
I poured everything I had into it.
"What do you think mana is, anyway?"
That was what Kim Jae-gyo had asked me back when I'd first started training in earnest.
"…MP from a game…?"
"Hmm… not entirely wrong."
Saying that, Kim Jae-gyo had walked over to a pair of similarly sized boulders.
"Use your mana and smash this one."
I'd drawn up a reasonable amount of power and thrown a punch.
A thunderous crack split the air, and the massive rock shattered into several pieces.
"Alright. Let's say the mana you put into that fist was a ten."
As he explained, Kim Jae-gyo gave the neighboring boulder a casual tap with one finger.
A cascading roar of destruction. The rock disintegrated into something closer to powder than rubble.
"How much do you figure I used just now?"
"…About a three."
"Keep it short, you rotten brat. Your mouth might be crooked, but at least the words come out straight. Tch."
He clicked his tongue once and went on.
"Mana can be wrung for absolute peak efficiency depending on how the user handles it. When you run the minimum force at maximum efficiency—and lock that perfectly into the motion itself—"
A soft whoosh of air brushed past. At the spot where Kim Jae-gyo had lightly flicked his fingers, a tree vanished as if a hole had been punched clean through reality, leaving no trace of wood behind.
"—you reach the extreme."
He wore that uniquely punchable smile of his as he said it, and my face twisted before I could stop it.
"Why the hell do you look so sour?"
"Please disregard it."
"I'm not 'disregarding' anything. It pisses me off. Guess I'll have to fix that face for you."
On the grounds that my expression offended him, he beat me senseless for a round—then explained the meaning behind motion.
Mana, he said, responded to movements that were both fluid and forceful. And the ridiculous part was how closely those movements resembled martial arts forms. Everyone had different affinities, but for better or worse, mine lined up decently with that damn old man's.
A deep, building roar.
Mana surged from my body and funneled into my fist. As it concentrated, wind began to rise even in the enclosed space around me.
I settled into the form and called up the old bastard's words.
—Remember what the motion means. Martial arts may boil down to hitting and stabbing in the end, but the way a strike extends carries intent.
—My meaning? Hmm… I just made it because I wanted to flip the sky upside down.
Wrong memory. The next part.
—This form expresses my own powerlessness.
The mana gathering in my fist drove in harder, denser.
A fierce pull of air.
My entire arm vibrated, bones shuddering as if they might shake loose.
—I resented the sky for looking down on my helplessness so calmly. Resented it enough that I wanted to stab it to death.
A roaring quake.
The vibration spread from my whole body into the ground itself.
The sky looking down so calmly… Somehow, I get that.
—Dwelling on that feeling, I coiled my fist like a spear and thrust it at the sky—to stab it dead.
A faintly bitter expression settled deep behind my eyelids. I coiled my fist like a spear.
What rose in my mind was myself that day, staring up at the sky—and the foolish figure who had still gotten back up and swung a blade with stubborn, stupid resolve.
Third Form.
—Swing your fist at the arrogant bastard looking down on you.
"Pierce the heavens and kill them."
Jacheon.
A cataclysmic detonation tore through the air.
A low whoosh of gathering force.
"Ohh…"
Min Gyeong-ho's first reaction to the concentrating mana was surprise. Gathering power into a single point and compressing it—the density of that compression alone spoke of considerable training. At this age, that much was already enough to sort most kids into their proper places, so a mild impressment had seemed sufficient.
Then the pressure kept building.
"He's still going…?"
The compression he'd assumed was finished showed no sign of stopping. Min Gyeong-ho shot to his feet without realizing it. A nameless unease brushed past him—
And then a roaring quake answered it. The ground around them began to shake.
"This lunatic—!"
Park Yeon-chan had already committed to the form. Stopping him now would send the full recoil slamming back into the boy himself, so halting him wasn't an option. The moment Min Gyeong-ho reached that conclusion, his body was already moving. He sprinted straight for the far side of the pillar—the side Park Yeon-chan's fist would drive through.
If I block it head-on, the surroundings get wrecked.
He locked in his course of action and barked at the nearest proctor.
"Open the roof! Now!"
"…Yes, sir!"
The shock of the Association President's sudden appearance lasted only a second. The proctor followed the order at once and opened the testing ground's roof.
And then—
A colossal detonation. From Park Yeon-chan's thrust fist, a razor-edged pressure wave lanced outward. It tore through the pillar like paper and came screaming straight at Min Gyeong-ho.
"President!"
"Hup—!"
With a short, sharp kiai, Min Gyeong-ho caught the force head-on and redirected the shockwave cleanly upward. The attack flowed skyward without a hitch, leaving the proctors staring in mute, slack-jawed awe.
Too clean.
Only Min Gyeong-ho himself couldn't shake the uneasy feeling. Park Yeon-chan's skill was eye-widening, no question—but still nowhere near his own. That the result had gone this way wasn't surprising in itself.
But it rose too cleanly.
The attack had gone up with virtually no collateral effect on the surroundings—far smoother than he'd expected. Almost as if someone had fired it specifically to be easy to redirect, counting on a catcher being there.
As that thought settled, Min Gyeong-ho looked down at Park Yeon-chan.
The boy tipped his head in Min Gyeong-ho's direction and grinned.
"That… insolent little brat…!"
Only then did Min Gyeong-ho realize he'd been used. He ground his teeth. Under normal circumstances he would never lose his temper at a boy young enough to be his son—but that punchable look overlapped too perfectly with a certain friend's face, and the anger refused to stay down.
"Wait, what was that?"
"Did he just make everything shake?"
Murmurs rippled through the examinees watching the waiting-room monitors.
"Holy crap. No way. How do you go from cutting the thing to just straight-up annihilating it?"
"Did he even break it, though? The camera flickered—I couldn't really see."
"The ground shook too, right? That had to be him. If he can shake the ground, a pillar's nothing."
"Yeah, fair point."
Doubt and awe tangled together as the debate rolled on. But the one more stunned than any of them was Lee Yeon-hui, still unable to tear her eyes from the screen.
That's impossible.
She'd known he was poking around Freedom, so she'd already figured Park Yeon-chan wasn't ordinary.
But this strong…?
The martial prowess he'd just displayed blew past every estimate she'd made. This wouldn't do.
I can't just leave him alone.
He was far too dangerous.
When I stepped out of the testing ground, Bae Han-su announced that the first exam was over and laid out the results schedule along with details on the second test. First-round results would go up online tomorrow. For the second exam, proctors would randomly pair examinees for sparring matches. One artifact was permitted—don't forget to bring one if you needed it.
"That's all, everyone! Great work today! Please exit at your own pace!"
With that, examinees began filtering out of the waiting room one by one. Quite a few shot glances my way, but no one actually spoke to me. Having gone last, I was among the final ones to leave the building—
"Park Yeon-chan."
—which was when Lee Yeon-hui called out, as if she'd been waiting outside. The sharp edge in her presence made it obvious she was on guard.
"What exactly are you?"
What am I. Even if I told her the truth she wouldn't believe it, and I didn't have the confidence to explain things I didn't fully understand myself. Better to leave the conversation open for later.
"Beats me. A regressor, same as you?"
"…!"
The color drained from Lee Yeon-hui's face into pure shock.
"Don't wear it on your face like that."
"How did you know."
She glared at me, brow deeply furrowed, looking ready to draw her sword the instant I made a suspicious move.
"Not even going to deny it?"
"Those loaded things you used to say to me when we were kids. I wondered if maybe you already knew about my regressions."
The original story never particularly flagged her as sharp, but then and now, her instincts cut deep.
"I told you when we were little. I'm ridiculously smart."
"Talk straight."
Her voice dropped another few degrees colder. The message was clear: keep joking and she'd attack.
"Does my identity even matter that much?"
"…What are you—"
"Cut suspicion off at the root. Not a bad approach, but read the room."
I flicked a finger toward the street where people were still streaming past. Yeon-hui glanced around. It was still mid-afternoon. Crowds everywhere, plenty of eyes. And this was the Academy's entrance exam site. Starting something here meant losing far more than you'd gain—that much was obvious.
"Stop looking at me like that."
The immediate killing intent eased off, but she still hadn't dropped the piercing stare. I spoke into it.
And then a completely unexpected question came out of her mouth.
"Why did you save us?"
"Save what?"
"Me and Yeon-ah. Why did you save us."
I just looked at her without answering, so she kept going.
"In my memories, you pulled every bit of hostility that should have fallen on me onto yourself—and then disappeared. You put your own life on the line to do it. Why."
Why, huh.
There wasn't really some grand reason. Maybe I'd never needed one—it had just felt that obvious.
But if I had to put it into words.
Probably.
"Then what about you."
"……"
"Then why do you keep looping through regressions trying to save people?"
"……That's—"
"Same reason as you."
Yeon-hui stared at me, dumbstruck.
"Cheap sense of justice and a disgusting need for atonement."
"……"
"Don't worry. I get that I'm suspicious. Just watch for now."
With that, I turned my back on her and started walking.
"See you around."
I left Lee Yeon-hui with that goodbye and headed straight for the station.
Judging by her reactions today, it felt like her childhood memories of living with me and her memories as a regressor were coexisting. The childhood Yeon-hui made sense—we'd grown up together. But—
Regressor Lee Yeon-hui…
In the original story, her life was bleak beyond measure. The helplessness of losing her little sister in every single loop. The crushing responsibility of always being shoved to the front by the destiny of a hero. That life felt uncomfortably similar to someone else's I'd once seen.
In the original, that responsibility and the endless regressions had ground her down.
At the very least, I wouldn't let her live that way in front of me.