Like Mother, Like Daughter
To be perfectly honest, it had never once occurred to me that this could become a problem.
There was no doubt that the Covenant's hands had touched Jihee's admission to the Academy.
But Choi Seungjun had already declared his policy to the media, loud and clear: even half-bloods would be welcomed.
The reason they'd left Jihee alone was, I assumed, exactly the same. They simply had no moves left to play.
And so, the next morning.
Even after word broke that Jihee's bloodline had been exposed to the whole world, I thought nothing of it.
Frankly speaking, it was because I hadn't believed it would matter. If anything, my only question was what had taken them so long.
But.
Sob. Hic... sob.
The moment I saw the state Jihee was in as she came into the classroom, I finally realized something had gone seriously wrong.
A face flushed crimson with shame.
Tears brimming over it.
Contrary to my expectations, this whole affair was no light matter to her at all.
...Of course it wasn't.
No political damage, no practical consequences? That's the kind of thing only someone in my position—or Choi Seungjun's—could afford to say.
How many times had I hammered it home? These kids were closer to high schoolers than to hunters.
An age where the sound of a single falling leaf could break your heart.
If merely hearing some bitch called a whore stings, imagine hearing that your own mother was one, and that makes you a half-blood whore by extension. Of course it would crush her.
Christ. Unbelievable.
Which is why, barely moments after the first-period bell had swept me out of that classroom—
—when the teacher running the class abruptly announced that Jihee had bolted, all I felt was a grim sense of finally, here it comes.
Teacher, please handle my self-study period!!
Don't worry, go on, Park Woochan. Goodness, suffering right at the start of the new term.
Fortunately, there were colleagues willing to cover my class.
Thanks to them, I could sprint out of the teachers' office without a shred of worry.
Roughly half a year since the Academy opened its gates.
The sight of me charging out of the school over some student crisis had, at some point, become embarrassingly routine.
The guard uncle shot me a knowing look and launched into his usual who ran away this time patter; I gave him some vague nods, and then—
—free of the school gate at last, I slowly stilled my mind and honed my ability.
Where exactly Jihee had gone? No way to know.
But I could predict.
There's no such thing as coincidence. Not with timing this perfect.
The mana wavelength I'd been deliberately ignoring until now snapped into razor focus in an instant.
And then.
After that, the rest was simple.
Shukuchi.
The moment I savagely stomped down on the mana sleeping in the earth, the Succubus Queen revealed herself right before my eyes.
Eep?!
The succubus opened her mouth to say something.
Didn't matter what.
The next instant, the greatsword I'd drawn in a flash smashed its grip into her flank.
Kugh?!
She crumpled to the ground with a strangled moan.
Without pausing, I gripped the auxiliary handle of the greatsword and leveled it at her limbs.
Finding Jihee wasn't hard.
So for now, the right move was simple: kill this succubus—whose game I couldn't fathom—and think after.
Beneath the brilliant blue sky, sunlit steel glinted a vicious grin.
...Teacher?
The hand that yanked my arm to a dead stop was, obviously, no trick of the succubus.
My instincts were hardly so soft that I'd fumble against a mere succubus.
A voice familiar, and yet somehow not.
The tremor of tears bleeding through that voice which always crackled with cheerful jokes—it could not have been more bewildering.
A choked tone. And woven through it, a thick nasal stuffiness.
After a brief war with myself, I ground my teeth and, compliantly, put the greatsword away.
I didn't know the full circumstances, granted—but no matter what, I had a hard time stomaching the idea of tearing a parent apart in front of their own child.
Only.
You're dead now.
One thing I was certain of.
Timing this convenient? Come on.
There was no way luck had stacked on luck so that Jihee arrived at this exact spot the very moment I was about to take the succubus's head.
In other words, nine times out of ten, this whole tableau was something the succubus in front of me had staged.
The command ability a Succubus Queen holds over her lesser kin.
Or something beyond even that.
That was all I could think of off the top of my head, but either way, the one who had engineered Jihee's choices was unmistakably this woman before me.
Truthfully, that actually put my mind at ease.
Had she spouted some nonsense about repenting after seventeen years, that would have been awkward—but now I could kill her with a clear conscience.
Having settled my thoughts, I turned around the rest of the way.
The first thing that caught my eye was a pair of eyes puffed up, red and swollen to the point of being almost comical.
From behind them came the sound of sniffles.
But the expression filling the better part of that face, right now, was pure bewilderment.
Well. Fair enough.
Their homeroom teacher, appearing out of thin air.
And then—
—Jihee's face crumpled all at once.
It was like a volcano erupting.
Except this time, unlike before, the emotion brimming in her chest was not grief but an anger beyond all words.
And so, the succubus who had just barely raised herself up, and Jihee.
Two pairs of eyes, so alike it seemed almost excessive to call them mother and daughter, met.
*
For Ryu Jihee, this entire situation was completely, utterly unexpected.
She was already frayed half out of her mind from everything that had happened these past few days.
And then, the moment she opened her eyes that morning, she'd been confronted by the media mauling her alive.
How? No—who?
Her first thought had run along exactly those lines.
Of course, had she been given the time to think calmly, things might have been different.
People who knew she was a half-blood.
Among them, someone capable of broadcasting it to the press overnight.
And beyond that, a faction with motive enough to target a mere student and run a story like that.
The list of people who satisfied every one of those conditions without exception was, in truth, vanishingly short.
But.
Ask whether a single high school girl could think with a cool head in this situation, and the answer could only be a shake of the head.
And so, from morning until now, Jihee had been gnawed at by a relentless spiral of paranoia.
What if someone betrayed me?
Was it the kids from my club?
Or the ones in the Honinhoe who never liked me?
Every thought chased its own tail, cramming her skull to bursting.
It felt as though the entire visible world had turned hostile against her.
Naturally, in reality it was nothing more than a delusion.
The media had run the story, sure—and that was where it ended.
To the vast majority of people, a half-blood wasn't an object of discrimination so much as an unknown quantity.
After all, the very fact that monsters and humans could have children together wasn't exactly common knowledge.
Few people knew, and even those who did generally knew it only as dry trivia on a page.
If anything, curious stares probably outnumbered contemptuous ones.
Inside the Academy, all the more so.
Its chairman, Choi Seungjun, had publicly declared the Academy's wholehearted welcome for half-blood students, after all.
The teachers, naturally—and the students, who all knew well the reputation Choi Seungjun carried as a hunter, raised no objection either.
Had this been mid-invasion, perhaps things would be different. But with the Great Invasion over, even more so.
To a generation whose memories of the invasion had already gone fuzzy, half-bloods weren't monster vanguards—they were just slightly unusual neighbors.
But Jihee, the person concerned, could not possibly see it that way.
And so.
The exact moment one of the students cautiously reading the room let slip a somewhat careless question—
Ryu Jihee heard something inside her, something almost like reason, snap.
By the time she came to, she was wandering the streets with the school somewhere far behind her.
Her head was a fog.
She couldn't even begin to think what she was supposed to do next.
If anything, only the dark thoughts grew louder, running rampant.
Withdrawal. Expulsion. Discrimination. Kidnapping. Live experiments.
She knew, of course, that they were nothing but absurd delusions—and still they clawed their way out of the depths of her mind.
And so.
Jihee's feet, walking wherever her steps carried her—or perhaps wherever someone led—came to a stop.
Because of the scene that appeared before her, puzzling in more ways than one.
First off, she had no idea why her teacher was here.
Had he raced ahead of her, somehow?
She didn't really know, but she supposed a man like her teacher just might manage it.
However.
Even so, the identity of the woman standing before Park Woochan was beyond anything she could have anticipated.
A tall, gracefully slender figure.
Silver-white hair that shimmered nearly as bright as her own.
And above all—those deep crimson eyes she saw so often in the mirror.
...She didn't need anyone to tell her.
The blood sleeping inside her body.
The half of her that made her her had cried out on pure instinct.
Mother.
A word carrying a meaning slightly unlike anything humans used it for bored into her heart like a curse.
And then—shock.
She flinched, her shoulders jerking before she knew it.
...Humans?
A corrosive wrongness.
The way one might say the ants, or the cats. That same sensation—of describing a species that had nothing whatsoever to do with oneself.
A stinging vertigo swept over her vision.
And so, quite naturally, Ryu Jihee turned her gaze away from her, and toward Park Woochan.
...Teacher?
Oh, hey. Jihee. Long time no see.
You saw me literally yesterday.
Did you? Must've missed you too much. Hallucinating.
The same inane back-and-forth as always.
With a person who had known all along what she was—and who plainly didn't give a damn.
That alone felt like it washed some of the anxiety pooled in a corner of her heart clean away.
But.
Click. She forced her teeth together.
And slowly opened her mouth.
Why are you here, Teacher? And who is that woman?
She already knew the answer, of course.
And yet—had some part of her been hoping for a different one anyway?
The question slipped out before she could stop it.
At the same time, doubt began to billow up like smoke.
Ever since she'd laid eyes on that woman, she hadn't been able to control her emotions—it was almost uncanny.
Why is Teacher here?
And why, of all things, with that woman?
Could it be... that I was betrayed—
Suspicion, hanging over her like a thunderhead, drove itself into her heart like a thorn.
Come to think of it, it flashed through her mind—Park Woochan also knew her true nature, didn't he?
Shouldn't I be the one asking? You—didn't you suddenly bolt out of class?
Ah. Sorry.
Look, I get it. Still, skipping class isn't okay.
One small mercy: her homeroom teacher, Park Woochan, was not the type to dance around a situation like this with polite hemming and hawing.
At bottom, the reason Park Woochan was even here boiled down to nothing more than chasing down a truant student.
Bluntly put—whether her half-blood status had been exposed or not was a conversation for later.
Had the person standing here been anyone but Jihee, Park Woochan would have acted exactly the same.
As that truth registered anew, she felt her heart—which had been thrashing wildly, almost past all reason—gradually still into calm.
No matter how diligently you watered and tended, if the seed itself could never take root in the soil, there was nothing to be done.
Put simply, the change stirring inside Jihee's chest was a situation of exactly that kind.
And yet.
I told you already—I said I would meet her.
Said what, you hag? I never heard any of that.
You did too say it?!
Still, there was one thing she could absolutely never get used to, no matter how many times she saw it: the sight of that woman groaning in agony right beside him.
Deathly pale face. A flank clutched tight in both hands.
For reasons she couldn't guess, the woman looked even frailer than Jihee had imagined—and she opened her mouth, slowly.
What do you think? Of this situation, right now.
Where Jihee was doing her utmost not to acknowledge the woman's existence, the succubus strode boldly, step by step, straight into the depths of her heart.
The way she flung both hands wide and spoke with theatrical flourish, paired with that signature beauty, made her look every bit an actress on a stage.
Brushing aside, in one grand gesture, the entire battle for survival that had surrounded Jihee's birth.
A voice steeped in maternal love.
It couldn't be helped—circumstances allowed no other way. We had to part, with tears in our eyes...
That was the tone she carried, word for word.
And so I came all this way to find you. So that my daughter might never be persecuted in human society.
As a mother.
Without a flicker of hesitation, the succubus declared it.
Daughter.
And mother.
The words the succubus used peeled quietly at the lining of Ryu Jihee's heart.
It was a strange feeling.
Until this very moment, words like those had been nothing but bitterly foreign to her.
Like pronouncing the name of a capital in a tongue she had never once studied, of a country she had never once visited.
And yet.
And still, the succubus's words sank into her chest with an almost uncanny depth.
As if a hand were reaching in and fondling her heart directly.
That's right. I intend to teach my daughter how to live as a succubus—
Ah, for fuck's sake.
KYAAAAAGH!!
And so.
Even as that dainty, upturned nose was flattened and the woman went flying a good hundred meters—
Ryu Jihee thought, fully aware of how absurdly out of place it was: should she not, at a time like this, be crying out her mother's name?
Goddamn, you're LOUD.
Naturally, none of that was Park Woochan's concern.
Having shut up the succubus who'd been squirming and scheming noisily for the past minute, he casually turned his head toward Jihee.
To the succubus's misfortune, this wasn't some thug instinctively checking his daughter's reaction after carelessly laying hands on her mother in front of her.
Oh, right, Jihee. You heard all that just now, yeah? Turns out that one's your mom, apparently.
Y-yes?
So here's the thing. Mind if I kill her?
...I'm sorry, what?