Blessings for the Association's Plan
"Hayeon, are you doing all right?"
"Hm?"
"You know. The mood in our class lately."
"Ah, that."
It was the semi-basement of my boarding house. Only after getting home from the Academy could I finally ask Hayeon about something that had been nagging at me for days — namely, the incident at the Namhae branch.
Ever since then, the gloomy atmosphere that had settled over the club had eventually bled into the classroom as a whole. Not just Yeeun, but even Jihee, who normally never stopped chattering, had been caught up in the fallout.
Of course, they weren't the only ones who'd gone down to Namhae.
Still — Tiamat, self-proclaimed goddess and, at the end of the day, a monster proper, couldn't care less. And Seoa, a hunter through and through, rotten or not, wouldn't go soft on herself now. Whatever was going on inside her, at least on the surface.
But the students were different.
Then again, the situation on-site had been beyond anything I could have imagined. Frankly speaking, I hadn't expected an entire branch office to fall, either. Things like that weren't supposed to happen every day.
So I had my reasons for checking Hayeon's color. She'd been one of the ones who actually visited the Namhae branch, after all. Of course it would weigh on her.
"It's been a little awkward lately."
Hayeon didn't deny it, either. Well, she'd know better than I would — or at least she couldn't know less. It was mostly the girls who set the tone of a classroom. That was true everywhere, but doubly so for ours.
Among the boys, Jung Pilyeon. Among the girls, Lee Yeeun. Those were the only two you could really call the center of the class — and Pilyeon wasn't the type to give a damn about classroom vibes in the first place.
My personal guess was that at this rate, Pilyeon was headed down the same solo-hunter route I did.
Poor kid.
"Oh, really? Apparently the girls are saying the same thing."
"Hard not to notice."
Yeeun, of course, wasn't much different. Honestly, she had no aptitude for that sort of thing — she was contributing to the gloom herself at the moment. But unlike Pilyeon, Yeeun had one weapon in her arsenal: her innate poise. In other words, people gravitated toward her even when she did nothing at all. That was exactly what I'd been counting on.
The problem was that, unlike usual, even Jihee sitting right beside her had gone silent. At this rate, there was no way the mood was going to clear up.
"Well, part of it's the Namhae branch thing."
"Ah, it is?"
"Yeah. Honestly, it was just far too shocking a story. I'm reflecting on it. I promise it won't happen again."
"You should issue a formal public apology, then."
Hayeon burst into a short, rippling laugh. She'd said it like a joke, but my apology had been genuine.
Which brought us to the real question: why did Hayeon — one of the actual parties involved — show no trace of that gloom herself?
"I think they all had their own things to think about."
"Hm?"
"Mm, would you call it worry, exactly?"
I almost asked whether Hayeon herself had no worries or thoughts of her own, but held my tongue. Fortunately, Hayeon was quick to add a qualification — while sneaking a sideways glance at me. In the end, she gave a light shrug and opened her mouth again.
"I mean, think about it. One of them is your little sister, Teacher—"
"And one of them is a half-blood."
"Don't sell yourself so short."
"I thought you'd say that."
I gave Hayeon a light warning, and at the same time sank into thought. In short, Yeeun and Jihee had been in a position where the incident could actually strike something in them.
If so — what about Yunha?
"Mm, let's see."
It felt a bit low to say, but among the club members, Yunha had the relatively lightest motivations. No, I couldn't dismiss worries about making a living as shallow — but it was also true that hers was a problem that could be solved at any time.
Because Yunha would be a hunter.
Wanting to become like me, or bearing the burden of being born half-blooded — compared to those, hers was a goal within comparatively easy reach. Simply graduating from the Academy and becoming a hunter would be enough to support her family. As a result, once she had a bit more breathing room, it was Yunha who'd joked about maybe becoming a professional dismantler instead.
"So she's not without worries, but…"
No idea whatsoever~
Still, I didn't think she was the type to agonize over what happened at the Namhae branch. It had always been true: I understood absolutely nothing about high school girls' psychology.
Come to think of it, hadn't it been getting suspiciously common lately for me to be tormented by my students' troubles? When I'd first entered the Academy, I figured all I'd need to do was kill monsters, one after another.
And then — call it diminishing returns, maybe. Only a few months ago, I'd been wandering around looking for a single monster. Now, taking down one monster meant getting entangled in my students' personal baggage, and honestly, it was starting to feel like a chore.
Was it a windfall of a life, or was it that getting used to things is the scariest force of all?
"And you, Hayeon — you're okay, right?"
"Hm?"
"Well, you went to Namhae too. I heard you were fine, but I wondered if maybe you had some worry or another, like Yunha."
"Oh, no? I was just thinking that slaying monsters really is the best medicine—"
"S-sorry, what?"
Well. It had been Hayeon who came to me just before the break ended, asking whether there was anything she could learn from me, too. At the time, I'd figured it was simple rivalry over Yeeun, so I'd handed over Kim Minchul's techniques, all neatly bundled up. But thinking about it now, I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to learn the skills of the very man who'd kidnapped her out of mere competitive spirit.
No wonder she'd grimaced like that.
Even so — 'slaying monsters is the best medicine'?
There was no way that line belonged in a high school girl's mouth. Who on earth taught Hayeon to talk like that? I felt like filing a protest on guardian's behalf.
Of course, Hayeon's homeroom teacher was me. So I was going to blame the club advisor — but on reflection, that was also me. Which left exactly one person I could reasonably accuse: the director of Hayeon's orphanage.
Dammit, what kind of orphanage director teaches kids this stuff?
Swallowing my fury at the true state of South Korea's childcare institutions, I got through the rest of the day.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Fortunately, nothing out of the ordinary happened right up until the day of the field trip.
Mindless monster dumps. Academy student abductions. Monster farm construction. Flinging filth at Namhae while flinging tabloids at the Academy. The organization that had attacked us by every conceivable means had, for now, let its grip slacken. Whether that was because it planned to blow the field trip bus sky-high, or for some other reason entirely, I couldn't say.
"Ugh, there it goes again. There it goes again."
"What, kid?"
"You've been circling like a dog that needs to pee ever since the other day, Teacher~"
"At least call me a cat."
"Does that matter? Anyway, there's no bomb stuck to the bottom of the bus, so relax."
For the record, I had not. I'd only double-checked, just in case.
And so the day of the field trip arrived, and Seoa and I rode in the front seats of the bus as the supervising teachers. Honestly, it hadn't even crossed my mind that Seoa, a student teacher, would tag along — but apparently she wanted to scope this place out and that, much like the Namhae trip. My memory of being run ragged by Seoa and Hayeon all weekend was still vividly fresh.
Well, it wasn't as if I could leave the student teacher behind and go alone. If it was unavoidable, then it was unavoidable.
With that thought, I pored over the field trip itinerary. Our destination was the East Sea coast just outside New City — more precisely, the Hunter Association branch out that way.
"The Association again. God."
"Teacher, come on!"
"What, did I say something wrong?"
Granted, if it were truly just somewhere we happened to pass by, I wouldn't have said a word. But knowing that the trip was the fruit of lobbying by an Association whose image had just been wrecked by recent events, it was hard to hold back at least one sour remark.
Not that I couldn't understand. The Association had taken a PR beating on a massive scale thanks to that guild incident, and this partnership with the surging Academy was its attempt to claw back ground. I, for one, had had no real way of checking the public's reaction, so I'd simply stopped looking after a while — the incident went straight to the heart of the Association's credibility itself.
According to Choi Seungjun, the aftershocks hadn't stopped yet. The Association was still being thrashed from every corner of the industry, he said. There was a chance the whole organization would be purged outright — though knowing the way of these things, whatever moved in afterward would be something only nominally different from the Association. That was how dire the situation had become, how badly a laundering was needed.
And hearing all that, did I feel even slightly sorry for them?
My ass. Not one damn shred.
'Sucks to be you? Then don't do bad things~'
"Say that in front of anyone else and they'll think you held a knife to your parents' necks and forced them into crime."
As it happened, the Association's upper brass were the perpetrators in this story, not the victims. Sure, some individuals among them were innocent — but that was exactly why they got paid the big money: accountability comes with the territory. If they didn't like it, they should have audited themselves properly.
"Look at the state of that schedule. The state of it. There's a reason nobody's saying a word."
"…That part I can't argue with."
Seoa couldn't deny it either. For all I knew, even military indoctrination wasn't this blatant.
The reality of hunters' work. The grueling nature of the job. The danger of facing monsters. An inspection of the hunter branch holding one front line of the Republic of Korea. It was all genuinely necessary content — and yet it was impossible to shake the propaganda feel of it.
"Every time I see stuff like this, honestly, it bugs me."
"What does?"
"It's like an ad saying you need the Association to be a hunter. From what I can tell, you don't really."
I was about to say as much, but caught Seoa's glare and let my eyes slide away. Fine — that's all I meant, anyway…
"Still, you can't say they aren't the ones working hardest out here, right?"
"That part's true."
And besides, no matter how you sliced it, I couldn't entirely dismiss what Seoa had just said.
The Hunter Association Gangwon Branch — called the outermost edge of the former southern half of the peninsula, the middle of nowhere squared. Its defining feature was the sheer intensity of the work.
Gangwon was a land of mountains, steep and rugged terrain in every direction. Because of that, whenever a gate opened in Gangwon, flushing out the monsters that lurked in its folds was next to impossible. There were even statistics showing that since the end of the Great Invasion, more monsters had been discovered in Gangwon than anywhere else in the country.
Naturally, these weren't stray monsters wandering out of fresh gates like elsewhere — they were ones that had gone undetected all this time. In other words, every last ridge of the Gangwon mountains currently amounted to an untamed dungeon. That was why hunters dispatched to the Gangwon Branch were uniformly skilled: this was the one place in this era where genuine dungeon-clearing experience was forged.
A posting where raw recruits soon became veterans whether they liked it or not. That was the Gangwon Branch.
Seoa, too, would have been dispatched to Gangwon if not for that incident. Her skills certainly would've grown, then. A place where even an A-rank hunter could still hope to improve. A place that faced wilderness of that caliber on a daily basis. Put simply, the Gangwon Branch was where the most capable hunters of the former southern region gathered.
Thinking of it that way, I could also guess why Choi Seungjun had accepted this proposal so readily. There was no chance the man had fallen for a bit of lobbying. Schemes aside, he must have judged that the field trip itself would genuinely benefit the students.
Admittedly — grudging as it was — I might have to concede its usefulness on that front.
However.
'It won't help. Not them, anyway.'
That was the thought that came to me. Well — it would help our side, of course. What being a hunter actually meant, what a real front line looked like. We weren't going to take students into an actual dungeon, but they'd get a taste of the atmosphere at least.
But from the Association's standpoint, this was propaganda for the cameras, nothing more. In other words, a means of reversing its bad press by riding the Academy's steadily improving image.
That being the case, I couldn't quite call the Association's judgment anything but rash.
Why?
'Mountain country. Monsters galore. Dungeons scattered deep in the ranges. The very front line of the industry.'
Every condition, assembled in one place. Was anything supposed to not happen?
No — knowing that organization's nature, something was bound to go down. The setting was tailor-made for it.
…Control over the monsters.
That was how Choi Seungjun and I had guessed at their goal. And if we were right, then the Gangwon Branch was the single most perfect environment for them to run wild.
Granted, Seungjun had flatly dismissed me, saying that if you fussed over every little detail like that, nothing would ever get done…
'This is a disaster waiting to happen.'
That was all I could think.
And so, as the bus barreled down the highway, I quietly offered a prayer in advance for the Association's plan.