Hostage Rescue Drill (1)
After Blanca finished her story, Lapis seemed stirred by it and told us about her own past.
She said that, since she’d learned our old stories, it felt wrong to be the only one keeping quiet.
She told us she’d been kidnapped once.
Fortunately, her grandmother had smashed the ground to pieces all by herself and rescued her before anything truly terrible could happen...
But after that, she’d become extremely wary of other people, almost to the point of fearing them.
Even when she wanted to get along with others, the memory would surface and she’d scare herself silly, making it hard to form friendships.
Like someone whispering a secret to a doll by her bedside, she confessed it to us.
She’d honestly thought she would go through life without ever having a friend.
“But Blanca took my hand. Thanks to her, I got close to you guys too. Umm. Uh... so... yeah. Thank you...! Guys...!”
Yeonhwa smiled and said, “So that’s what happened,” but then laughed, saying that when she thought about it, it almost seemed like she was the only one who’d never had anything bad happen to her as a kid, and she couldn’t tell whether she should feel relieved or disappointed.
“Of course it’s a good thing. A normal childhood is a blessing in itself, Yeonhwa.”
“R-right?”
It was a perfectly obvious thing to say, but because Blanca was the one saying it, the words carried a weight all their own.
She spoke with such detachment, but no matter how I thought about it, her past was not something she could talk about casually.
There had to be pain in her heart as deep as mine.
And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to fully sympathize with her.
After all, she had confessed so casually that she’d killed people.
Even if those people had oppressed Blanca and used her like a tool, the way she’d killed them and then said she wasn’t even especially sad about it, saying they’d deserved it...
I couldn’t call that righteous.
But she was hard to label as evil, either.
So then, was Blanca righteous, or was she evil?
No matter how long I thought about it, I couldn’t find an answer.
Trying to shake off the heavy mood, Yeonhwa said that if things were like this, then the one person among us who was still relatively normal had better brighten up enough for everyone else too, and she brought up the club, as if to change the subject.
“Hey! The senior who’s teaching me said she got some incredibly juicy insider info! Apparently, we’re going to be doing rescue training soon!”
Yeonhwa built the tension like she was about to reveal some earthshaking secret, then dropped the bomb about rescue training.
“Re-rescue training...?”
“Yep! Apparently the senior went through it in first year too! Out of nowhere, with no warning at all! She said her seniors had to do it too. So naturally, we’re going to have to do it as well!”
“Oh. So it was a secret?”
“You sound like you already knew, Jinhyun?”
Yeonhwa asked me that, sounding surprised. So I told her what I knew.
“Yeah. Blanca probably knew too. Our club senior told us as well. She said there’d be rescue training soon, so we should prepare or whatever.”
I’d mentioned it offhand on Tuesday, but Meirin-senpai had stressed again on Thursday that it was a pretty important drill and we should think about how to handle it.
“Huh? What the heck. You knew before me? Why were you guys the only ones who knew?!”
“You made it sound like it was nothing, so I didn’t think it was that important...”
As I made my excuse, trying to sound wronged, Blanca clicked her tongue and piled on, asking why I hadn’t told her that too.
It occurred to me suddenly that Blanca seemed unusually harsh with me in particular.
Was that just my imagination?
“S-so... what are we supposed to do to prepare...?”
Lapis seemed to think of the drill as some kind of test and asked anxiously what exactly we were supposed to do.
“Well... I’m not really sure either. The senior only vaguely told us to prepare. Hmm. Maybe we should think about how to use our abilities to rescue people?”
Once Yeonhwa brought some energy back into the room, the atmosphere brightened almost at once.
Maybe because we’d all opened up about our pasts.
I couldn’t say for sure, but there did seem to be a slightly stronger sense of solidarity between us now.
“It’s probably going to be a little tough for me. No matter how much I reduce the firepower, it’s still fire in the end. Ugh, using my ability to save people is going to be hard...”
“I-I... um... if I make an earthen wall, would that be enough to protect people?”
“Maybe. Or maybe you could prop up a collapsed building.”
“Blanca, you’re lucky. If you can make all kinds of things, then you can help people on the spot whenever they need something done!”
“Right...? But medicine isn’t something you can just hand out that easily. It’s a little different from what you’re imagining, Yeonhwa.”
No dark expressions could be seen in the way they enthusiastically exchanged ideas about how to use their abilities for rescue work.
If Blanca hadn’t been here, we probably couldn’t have been this happy.
Setting aside good and evil, I was grateful for her existence.
“I don’t think I’d be much use for rescuing anyone, though.”
“Oh, come on. How is creating ice in the air out of nowhere not useful? Have some confidence, Jinhyun. You’ll do great too!”
Yeonhwa cheered me on.
“Oh. Come to think of it, midterms are in a month. Have you guys started preparing?”
Blanca brought up a depressing topic as casually as if she were asking the time.
At once, the atmosphere sank again.
* ＊ ＊ * ＊
Yeonhwa and the senior both made it sound as though rescue training was something serious, but in the original story it had just been an event to make the protagonist look cool.
In the game, they’d basically given it a single line of mention and moved on.
So I honestly hadn’t been thinking about it at all.
Even though they were dividing us into teams, it was such a trivial test that I’d figured I’d just watch, in a relaxed sort of way, how the main characters’ teams were arranged and how they used their abilities.
It was a test that didn’t really require fighting so much as evaluating your ability to rescue civilians in extreme disaster conditions.
But this time, for whatever reason, things had gone completely off-script...
“Team 4. Hero side: Toju Ageha, Blanca. Villain side: Im Changwon, Lionel Morgan.”
“I’m on a team with Blanca-nim?!”
“Yes. It’s a carefully arranged team assignment, taking into account the difference in your skill levels and how well you counter each other. Do you have a problem with that?”
“N-no... I have no objections...”
“Good. Next, Team 5. Hero side: Seo Jinhyun, Lucia Chlimo. Villain side: Lee Yeonhwa, Yamaguchi Fukukin.”
It had been transformed from simple rescue work into hostage rescue training.
I was dumbfounded at first too.
Minho, Lapis, everyone in class—every last one of us looked like we were silently asking what in the world that meant.
But Yustitia finished the team assignments like lightning and immediately moved on to explaining the rules.
And those rules were surprisingly serious.
“This exam will be conducted under the assumption that villains are holding hostages and barricading themselves inside a building when heroes are deployed. The rules are as follows.”
The hero side wins by subduing all the villains within the time limit and rescuing the hostages, or by rescuing the hostages alone.
The villain side wins by preventing the heroes from taking the hostages away during the time limit, or by subduing the heroes.
The hostage roles will be played by dummies, and those dummies will be fitted with various sensors so we can measure how badly a real human being would have been injured.
If a dummy sustains damage beyond a certain threshold, it will be treated as a death.
And naturally, since this was a hostage situation, both the villain side and the hero side had to avoid harming the hostages as much as possible.
Yustitia said that if anyone attacked a hostage and caused a death ruling, that student would receive a zero on the spot.
“Those are the rules of this exam. Any questions?”
When she asked if there were any questions, Im Changwon shot his hand up like a bullet.
“...Wasn’t this supposed to be a rescue drill based on a disaster scenario, not a hostage rescue drill? Why was it suddenly changed?”
It was the kind of question that made it obvious he’d found out something and had no intention of hiding it.
Even so, Yustitia didn’t hesitate for a second and answered at once.
“A good question, Im Changwon. I’m sure everyone here knows what happened on the weekend during the first week.”
“...The villain’s...”
“...attack...”
The class murmured softly, as if remembering that incident.
“Yes. A villain attacked a student at Heros Academy. Fortunately, it ended without any serious injuries. But what about the next time?”
The purpose of this exam is not only to learn how to respond in hostage situations, but also to build your experience fighting ability users at close range.
Yustitia removed her sunglasses, revealing eyes that glowed with a violet light, and continued.
“Heros Academy expects that you will be able to respond even to attacks by villains like that. It won’t directly affect your grades, but since it may still influence future evaluations, I ask you to do your very best. That is all. Are there any other questions?”
No one said a word.
“Good. Then the villain side of Team 1, please enter the set inside the stadium.”
The future heroine candidates and the nameless extra boy took determined expressions and stepped inside the building.
“The teams really got arranged like that, huh...”
“Yeah. I never thought we’d actually end up facing each other. But... don’t hold back, Yeonhwa. Go at it with everything you’ve got.”
“...Yeah. I’ll come at you with maximum firepower!”
Behind us, the game’s duo were chatting along as cheerfully as ever.
On the giant screen floating at the center of the stadium, camera feeds from all over the interior of the building were being displayed in real time.
Were they telling us to watch and learn? Well, if that weren’t the case, there’d be no reason to make us sit in the stands and observe.
I’d been caught off guard by the unexpected event, but if you asked me whether I hated it, the answer was no.
After all, this was an ability-user battle. Who wouldn’t love that?
I’d fought ability users plenty of times before, but watching and doing were two very different experiences.
And on top of that, the very first pair up...
Was Lapis and Minho.
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