Hormones, Obviously
To state the conclusion up front: I failed to kill that nightmare.
Well, it goes without saying.
A nightmare that appears out of nowhere, insisting she's someone's mother. And a homeroom teacher who turns around and asks whether it's okay to kill that self-proclaimed mother on the spot. If anyone could nod along to that, they wouldn't be a high school girl—they'd be a demon.
And so I had no choice but to stand there in silence, watching the nightmare's back as she scrambled away through the gap opened up by the punch that had sent her flying.
Disappointed, at first. But looking back on it now, I was plainly the crazy one here. Teacher or not, asking a girl to her face whether he should go kill her mother? A monster had been right in front of me, sure—but that went beyond losing control. That was something else entirely.
Self-loathing crept up on me unbidden, and I buried my face in my palm.
'I've genuinely lost it.'
...Until mere minutes ago, the street where that nightmare had been sprawled out was, frankly, far too serene to have hosted a clash between an A+ Rank monster and an S-Rank hunter.
The bench nearby. Jihee and I were sitting right there.
A frigid silence. The mood was prickly past bearing, and I had to forcibly strangle the sigh rising up my throat.
'Seoa's going to tear me a new one again.'
She was already angrier than usual over the business at the Namhae branch a while back. Hadn't she asked, point-blank, why I hadn't said anything? From my standpoint, I'd simply concluded that a pincer operation was necessary to take the leader's head for certain—and my reason for not telling her had been exactly the same. I merely figured that keeping her in the dark would make for a livelier performance. Two nine-tailed foxes had, after all, actually shown up on her half of the pincer.
Naturally, hearing all this only made Seoa angrier...
The trouble was, I'd been a lone-operator type since my active days. Adjusting myself to fit the circumstances was one thing; explaining myself to everyone else, piece by piece, was a luxury I'd simply never had.
And yet.
Faced with a situation like this one, even I couldn't help but regret it.
'Maybe I should've studied up on talking, just a little.'
There was Seoa, who'd chew me out for wandering off on my own again. And there was Jihee, silent as the grave this whole time. Either way, things would've been so much easier if I could've wrapped it all up with some dazzling eloquence.
Of course, no amount of sulking about it was going to improve my way with words. So instead of longing for the rhetoric I lacked, I stole a glance at Jihee's complexion.
Thankfully, she looked markedly steadier than she had before. Presumably because her mother had slipped out of sight.
The Queen of Nightmares.
No—every leader, liked or not, exerts a pull on their followers' emotions. All the more so for a nightmare, whose entire trade is playing with the human heart. For all I knew, Jihee had been quietly under the Queen's sway until moments ago. And beyond that, the woman was, first and foremost, Jihee's biological mother. I couldn't say how real that fact felt to Jihee herself, but staying unshaken would've been a tall order under any circumstances. In a state like that, steering someone's emotions is child's play. The turmoil Jihee had worn on her sleeve until just now had surely been part and parcel of it.
At any rate, I knew one thing for certain.
Ryu Jihee. This brazen little brat was well practiced in the art of performance. For all that her heart was a simple high school girl's, she'd once run a proper tug-of-war between the Honinhoe and the Academy. Someone might scoff that all she bought was ten measly minutes. But carving ten minutes out of two organizations, armed with nothing but a high school girl's body, is not an achievement you wave off.
For a girl like that to lay her emotions bare this easily, there was only one conclusion: the nightmare had been meddling.
...Not that the situation itself posed a problem.
'She wouldn't have made it out of this city, at the very least.'
Just the other day—right after she approached me under the banner of being Jihee's mother—I'd put a call in to the guild that covered this city. Without anything resembling evidence, they wouldn't mobilize in force, but they'd have at least taken baseline precautions. I was the one making the report, after all. When a hunter who'd diced an S-Rank nine-tailed fox a month prior speaks up, you don't just file it away.
Granted, a nightmare's gift for concealment is exceptional. I might manage the detection myself, but expecting every last guild member to possess senses sharp enough to spot one would be asking the impossible.
Put the other way around, though—surveillance was possible. Tight enough that slipping through without drawing on a nightmare's power would be no simple feat.
And for my purposes, that was more than enough. So long as she stayed in this city, hunting her down whenever I pleased would be no trouble at all.
Only after I'd squared the situation away to that extent did I notice that Jihee had been sneaking glances at me for who knows how long.
"Feeling a little more settled?"
"Did you know from the start?"
"Yeah."
It wasn't the answer I'd been hoping for, but it was one I could give. Jihee's mother. The nightmare who'd styled herself as exactly that, mere minutes ago. Or perhaps she meant to ask about the things that woman had done—or, come to think of it, about her relation to Jihee. Well, whichever it was, I'd only heard the whole of it yesterday myself.
At my answer, Jihee nodded slowly. Mercifully, my little inquiry—mind if I kill your mother?—seemed to have been swept away amid all the confusion.
"Then what do you think, Teacher?"
"Huh? About what?"
"What she said."
"The part about not being human?"
I was inwardly easing a sigh of relief at my own guess when Jihee abruptly tossed out another line.
"Hmm, let's see..."
'I wasn't listening to a single word.'
But this was hardly the moment to admit that. In the end, I set about scraping the conversation from minutes ago up out of the deepest silt of my memory.
"Something about... how to live as a nightmare, was it?"
"Yes."
That was it. She had definitely said those words.
Was that foolishness on her part, then—or a simple bluff? Thanks to it, I could take a fair guess at why the woman had shown herself so suddenly: she'd come to teach her daughter how to live as a nightmare.
In other words, that woman intended to make Jihee into a nightmare. Not some half-blood—an honest-to-god nightmare, whole and complete.
'Does Jihee even have a knack for the nightmare trade?'
Merely entertaining the question felt like the sort of thing that would earn a formal complaint to the Ministry of Education. I couldn't say for certain, but I had my suspicions. She meant to gather her underlings, presumably.
And from where I stood...
"Well, for one, it's not exactly biologically impossible, you know?"
"Huh? It isn't?"
Whether because that wasn't the answer she'd expected, Jihee blinked at me, wide-eyed, half in protest. Well, fair enough. It wasn't a famous anecdote or anything.
But by the same token, it wasn't rare, either. Take Heracles, out of Greco-Roman myth. Or the flames that appear in the tales of Demeter—fire that sublimated one born of mortal flesh into a god. Much like that rite said to have seeded countless esoteric traditions in later ages, methods for elevating a human into an entirely different species were not, in fact, unheard of. There were even those who'd been cursed into monstrosity, for that matter.
And besides—
'I've seen it with my own two eyes, after all~'
Kim Mincheol. I'd watched the goddess Tiamat's blessing transfigure a man into a monster in the space of a single breath. Though in his case, being a lunatic down to the marrow, far from rejecting the change, he'd embraced it with both arms...
She'd proclaimed she would teach Jihee the nightmare's way of life, which meant a method had to exist. So, strictly on the matter of feasibility: not impossible.
Only—
"That's not really what you're asking, though. Whether it's physically possible."
"Right."
Jihee nodded once more. If that had been the extent of it, I'd have tossed out some quip as usual. The fact that she didn't meant there was something else she wanted to ask—all under the premise that she really could become a nightmare.
"Like what?"
"Well, nightmares are... that kind of species, you know?"
If asked whether I wanted her to spell it out: no, I did not.
"Right. So, anyway—if I did become a nightmare, could I still keep up an ordinary life?"
"An ordinary life, hm. Quite the philosophical topic."
"Um, I meant it in the plain, literal sense, though."
"Mm. So, in other words, you're asking whether you could go on living a life no different from the one you've had. That about right?"
"Exactly."
"Yeah. That'd be hard."
I clipped the answer off clean.
At a reply that blunt, even Jihee wore a briefly dumbfounded look. It wasn't so much disappointment in my answer as a failure to even register it. Understanding caught up a beat late. Slowly gathering her expression back together, Jihee leaned in a little and asked again—unaware of it herself, but with a distinct edge of agitation underneath.
"Why? Why do you think that?"
"Why? Hormones, obviously."
"...Hm?"
And yet.
That was about all I could hand her on the spot.
I mean, wasn't it self-evident? Grit. The power of the heart. Easy enough to say—but in the end, the mind is built atop the body's electrical signals. I wouldn't claim that's all there is to it, but the influence can't be small. It's the very reason the medicines that treat depression and other afflictions of the mind spend their days fiddling with neurotransmitters. A sound mind dwells in a sound body. Every living creature, humans included, is governed by the state of its flesh to a degree that outstrips what we like to believe.
Now—suppose someone became a nightmare overnight. A nightmare's body. A nightmare's biology. Insisting you'd come out of that untouched is, frankly, the real pipe dream here.
Say someone turned into a dog, just like that. Could that someone pair off with another dog and live out its days? Ask most people, and they'd shake their heads. They might manage some spiritual communion with the other dogs—but no, they're still human where it counts, they'd insist.
But honestly? That's nothing more than grotesquely overrating your own willpower. Becoming a dog—having your biological species rewritten—means precisely that. Your ideal type. The being you hold up as your ideal. Every sense you own would reorient itself around your physical kin. You might keep yourself from rolling around with the pack, but your ideal would stop being human and become a dog all the same—because a dog's body only knows desire for other dogs.
Becoming a nightmare means exactly that.
Keeping a human heart even after becoming a nightmare? Sounds lovely, sure.
But even granting it wasn't impossible, it would be a road paved end to end with suffering. Which is to say, as her homeroom teacher, it was a future I could never recommend in good conscience.
And on top of that—
"You, especially."
Jihee's face took on a deeper hurt.
Unlike before, this wasn't overflowing emotion spilling onto the surface. It was a stranger wrongness—feelings she'd failed to smooth over in time, seeping out through the seams of her face. I faltered for a beat despite myself, but Jihee soon recovered her usual face and quietly tilted her head.
"Why wouldn't it work for me, though?"
"Think about it—of everyone around you, how many would actually stop you and say you shouldn't?"
"Ehh?"
At the tail end of that, Jihee let out another odd little sound, looking for all the world like she wanted to demand whether I was pulling her leg.
But I hadn't said it as a joke.
"Keeping a human heart even after becoming a nightmare—for that to be possible, environment is everything."
"Environment?"
"Yep~ People who'd believe you were still human, even after you turned."
"And I don't have that?"
"Nope."
"Then isn't that a bad environment?"
"For most people, sure. You're the opposite."
Because Jihee had come out of the Honinhoe. And by its very nature, the Honinhoe couldn't help but lean friendly toward monsters. Could people like that become something for Jihee to hold onto? Could they give her reason to hold her ground—to insist she was still human, that she had to stay one?
"Well, I'd say that's impossible, you see~"
"Nine times out of ten, they'd just tell you it's fine that you're a nightmare."
"...Ah."
"Steel your heart in an environment like that? Hell, even I would struggle."
"Eh, whatever! Might as well give this whole nightmare thing a shot!"
That was the far more likely thing she'd say.
Which meant—if Jihee truly did remake herself into a nightmare, she would settle into the nightmare's life before the day was out. That was my judgment. And it was also why I would never point her down this road—setting aside, of course, the nightmare's biology that was, realistically, rather difficult to say out loud.
'Because I don't want to kill my student.'
At any rate, I was certain. Certain in the way I'd become while answering Jihee's questions just now. If she took that woman up on her offer and became a nightmare, I would cut her down without a flicker of hesitation.
Hearing that Jihee had become a nightmare would grieve me, sure. I might even voice some regret. But that was that, and this was this. Unlike the creatures born monsters, someone who chose the road to becoming one forfeits every last shred of excuse. Right now it was only a thought—but when the time came, the blade would fall without a moment's pause.
And I wouldn't lose much sleep over it, either.
I knew all too well what kind of man I was.
"So—finished thinking it over?"
"For the most part."
"Then shall we head in? The others must be waiting."
And with that—rather than trust myself to say anything further, I took Jihee and rose from the bench.
In the same breath, my unbound ability stretched itself long and wide. The power that had, once again, spread its dominion over the whole city pierced the nightmare's disguise in an instant.
Found her.
'Guess I really can't let this one slide, huh~'
The one who'd spread the story of Jihee's birth to the newspapers was, nine times out of ten, that nightmare. More precisely, the group standing behind her. Their design was exactly what it sounded like: strip away every last place Jihee had to lean on, and let her fall the rest of the way into nightmare-hood. Bluntly put, it had been a single day since that article hit print. When the whole world was bound to turn odious in her eyes, who on earth would steel their heart and cling to a human identity?
Which was, in all likelihood, precisely what they were counting on.
...I started walking toward the academy grounds in the distance.
The sun rode at its height. The time left before this day ran out: roughly half a day.
And when my thoughts reached that point, my resolve finally set.
Before evening came, I would finish this—today. Kill her or spare her, one or the other; either way, I would make certain she could never work a scheme like this again. Whatever the case, I had no intention whatsoever of leaving that lunatic of a nightmare—the one calling herself Jihee's mother—on the loose a moment longer.