She Couldn't Hide It Anymore
* * *
After that, we made it back to the Academy without incident.
Not that we could exactly show up to work in tailcoats and party dresses, so we'd changed clothes partway through, leaving no gaps in the story.
The information Tiamat and I had brought back was genuinely valuable intel.
Even setting aside the finer details, we now knew the location of their research facility.
However.
"I think it'll have to be just you and Joongoo this time."
"Huh? Why? Oh, to protect the school?"
"That too, but it looks like bugs have crawled into the corporation."
Choi Seungjun had no choice but to take a step back from this raid's planning. It was a family matter.
In a nutshell: while he was compiling intel for this infiltration, a whole gaggle of his relatives holding invitations to that exclusive club got exposed.
Apparently, Novus Ordo Seclorum had been trying to shake Seungjun's support base within the corporation by leveraging his cousins.
That explains it.
I'd found it suspicious that a club supposedly reserved for the upper crust hadn't extended so much as a word to Choi Seungjun himself.
In reality, one of those very cousins had been scheming behind his back.
Thanks to that, a bloody purge was in full swing as we spoke.
If the story I appeared in were a political drama, this would be an incident big enough to eat up several whole chapters.
Then again, I'm lucky to be a side character in a hunter novel starring Lee Joongoo.
So those fine-grained operations I left entirely to Choi Seungjun.
And so.
Yours truly was in for a shock.
I dropped by the clubroom one last time to see how my kids were doing—and, true to the phrase, I was genuinely stunned.
No, seriously, what is this atmosphere?
I greeted them in a cheerful tone, but the moment I crossed the classroom threshold, what flew at me was a gaze from my students so frigid it bordered on glacial.
...Midterm stress, maybe?
"It is NOT!!"
An avalanche of noise came right back at me.
"But you see~ I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."
I turned my head slightly, fishing for agreement.
But then.
Flinch.
Whether it was my gaze or some other reason, Tiamat gave a little jolt of the shoulders before finally speaking up, her tone distinctly sulky, eyes slanting away toward the floor.
"Well... yours truly may or may not have the faintest inkling..."
Oh, you little—
What does that make ME look like when you say it like that?
Just as I was grinding my teeth at her, a representative finally emerged from among the giggling crowd.
Glittering silver hair.
But while her hair gleamed as lustrous as ever, the skin that should have shone just as brilliantly was now flushed crimson to match her eyes.
"Sensei!!"
"Uh, yeah. Jihee, you're awfully energetic today."
"Could it be that you two—this?!"
Normally, Ryu Jihee would blow me off with breezy disregard before continuing, and I'd have felt a pang of hurt about it. But this was no time for that.
Because.
Pat! Pat-pat!! Pat-pat-pat!!!
Frenzied hand gestures!!
Gestures no high school girl should ever be capable of making, one after another!!
"No, wait!! Jihee!! Stop those hand motions I can't even describe!! Have some decency!!"
"I AM a fundamentally indecent species, Sensei!!"
I was a little taken aback.
That's how extraordinary the aura Jihee was radiating right now.
Still—a fundamentally indecent species, huh.
Well, I am a practicing teacher. I suppose I figured the day might come when I'd tell her never to deny her own identity... but...
"Honestly, it's all about the s—"
"Stop!! High school girls do not get to finish sentences like that!!"
Who knew it'd come together in this direction?
But listening to all this, even I could roughly piece together what misunderstanding had unfolded.
Two students suddenly vanished from class yesterday!
Gone all night without returning, then came home together!
Wearing the same clothes from the day before, no less!
Oh, you poor souls.
I pressed a hand to my forehead.
Are these kids really high schoolers?
I could vaguely guess how their minds got there, but it felt worlds apart from the high school girls in my imagination.
In the end, it took the better part of an hour to calm everyone down and explain what had actually happened yesterday.
...Suddenly, Ja Hayeon found herself recalling something from long ago.
Just a few hours before she first met Park Woochan.
A night when a halo of moonlight burned beneath a sky so pale that even the shadows seemed blanched white.
Beneath the quiet cover of night, her heart had raced with an almost unnatural fervor.
A strange, creeping restlessness.
She remembered now—she'd been running from something back then, her steps driven forward by a fear that murmured at her heels like a pursuer.
From what?
The three dragons treading behind her?
No... surely not.
Then what?
She asked herself, but no answer came. Only this: something that frightened her far more than any violence lying ahead—something that seemed to well up from deep within...
"I'm sorry. I really don't remember."
"I see. Well, can't be helped."
And so.
Fishing her consciousness out of the murky sea of memory, Ja Hayeon shook her head side to side.
What Park Woochan and Tiamat had uncovered in a single day was, frankly, a treasure trove.
The presumed retired-military hunter they'd met during the last field exercise.
The interview with Brigadier General Cheong Joonpil that had grown from that encounter.
The club known as the New World Order.
The defector hopeful they'd run into inside it.
And all the information that defector had provided, down to the last detail.
Park Woochan had decided to lay every last circumstance bare for the girls.
Personal matters excepted, of course.
For instance: the circumstances concerning her alone, which he'd whispered secretly to Hayeon just moments ago.
Or the fact that whoever might go on a rampage during midterm season was a participant in the Artificial Hunter Development Project.
He hadn't intended to hide either, strictly speaking—but while the former was fine, the latter wasn't Park Woochan's story to tell.
It wasn't the sort of thing to be discussed in a place like this, either.
Thanks to that, it had been agreed that Lee Joongoo would handle that particular matter.
And if Lee Yeeun later decided she wanted to talk, she could tell the other students herself.
Perhaps that was why.
The students were still reeling, drowning in the information Park Woochan had just given them.
Which was fair enough.
The Third Great Cataclysm.
A disaster rivaling—or possibly surpassing—the two Great Cataclysms that had come before.
To put it precisely: an utterly insane plan to summon, whole and intact, a monster capable of triggering a Cataclysm.
Anyone who'd so much as dipped a toe into the hunter industry would have no choice but to panic.
The same went for the mere existence of the Extra-standard Rank.
...A classification that, under normal circumstances, must never be made public.
Information no one at the Association—not even beyond the Chairman himself—was permitted to touch.
And yet Park Woochan had chosen to disclose it to the girls first of all.
He'd make them sign NDAs and such, sure, but still.
It felt a bit wrong to say this, but Park Woochan was a born outlaw.
These days he was technically affiliated with the Association, but at his core he was far more comfortable operating as an unlicensed hunter.
And to a man like him, blinding himself to protect the Association's security was an act of pure, unadulterated foolishness—stepping on his own foot to spare the snake.
"Look, I get why you wouldn't broadcast it to the whole world."
Even granting that, though—most of the students in this club were already effectively targets of that organization.
It might not be praiseworthy, but he'd judged that the people concerned needed to know, here and now.
"Which means, from here on out, you kids are getting worked even harder. Just so we're clear."
"Oh, come ON!!"
That was the addendum Park Woochan tacked on, right on the heels of a conversation that had been in full swing only moments before.
The students promptly let out an even deeper chorus of dying-animal noises.
They couldn't help it.
Park Woochan's training method was, in essence, the ruthless patching of each trainee's individual weaknesses.
He built them up so that no single exploited weakness could ever drop them dead on the spot—strength raised precisely so that one mistake wouldn't be fatal.
Which meant that, effectiveness aside, it was utter hell for the one on the receiving end.
And now he wanted to push them beyond even that?
They'd heard the circumstances, sure—but of course the death rattles came out.
Park Woochan, for his part, didn't blink.
Three years until graduation.
That was exactly how long he could look after them.
Anything beyond that, they'd have to grow by walking battlefields themselves as active hunters.
And so Park Woochan intended to build their skills to the absolute limit while they were still sheltering behind the safety net that was him.
The Academy curriculum aimed for B-Rank at graduation—so at minimum, A-Rank.
Ideally, they'd have the strength to stand at A+ Rank or thereabouts.
Besides, Park Woochan himself was no invincible monolith.
They'd already confirmed S-Rank hunters among the enemy—Tae Siyoung and company, no less, specialists in anti-human combat.
At the Gangwon branch, the stampede had been in full swing, so he'd managed to fight somehow. But in a straight duel, he'd been thoroughly outmatched—it was a fact.
Already feeling the need to sharpen his own skills, there was no way the students' progress could escape his eye.
Watching that scene unfold, Ja Hayeon quietly shifted her gaze.
There stood Tiamat, having likewise stepped back a pace to watch the spectacle.
To be precise, this was right after Park Woochan had roared a full-throated denial at Yoonha for fanning entirely the wrong flames.
Frankly, it had been pitiable enough to make even Hayeon wince.
The expression on Park Woochan's face—a disgust not merely at a lack of interest in Tiamat, but at the very question of whether he'd spent the night with her.
Ordinarily, that would have been a heartbreak-worthy moment.
And yet.
"Are you all right?"
"U-uum. My heart is a little wounded."
In Ja Hayeon's eyes, though, something was different.
...Just now, Yoonha had said it.
That every student here was in love with their homeroom teacher.
And Tiamat had simply waited in deathly silence for the conversation to wash past her.
Not because she had no interest in such talk.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Using the children's chatter as a backdrop, Ja Hayeon was quietly taking the measure of her own heart.
It was true that she owed Oppa countless debts.
Debts so immense she might never be permitted to repay them in an entire lifetime.
On that point, her friends had said:
Because he's our teacher.
That he was probably helping them purely within the bounds of a teacher-and-student relationship.
A perfectly plausible conjecture. In truth, Hayeon had thought the same once.
But.
That strange pervert who'd once kidnapped her had said something else, too.
That she'd seen men like Park Woochan countless times before.
The kind who saw what they themselves had lost reflected in others.
The kind who understood, intellectually, that they had lost something—and yet had never truly accepted it.
And so, without ever realizing it, they wandered in search of that something they'd lost long ago...
That was what her kidnapper-pervert had said.
Then—
When she'd heard those words, how had she reacted?
When she was told that the grace Park Woochan bestowed on her existed only because someone else overlapped in his mind?
Had she thought to fire back, like some morning drama heroine—don't mistake me for someone else!?
As if.
Preserving one's pride was all well and good, but that would have been simple rudeness.
Setting aside all such complications—look at the sheer size of what she'd been given.
Unless this were a genuine morning drama, she had neither the confidence nor the audacity to erupt in righteous fury the way a proper heroine would.
No—quite the opposite, in fact.
'Honestly, I thought... maybe it wouldn't be so bad.'
She'd thought: all the better. Not bad at all.
Why?
Why?
Because at least that way, Park Woochan would never abandon her?
Because it guaranteed she could graduate the Academy without incident over the next three years?
Because her future plans would come together decently enough?
Undoubtedly, all of that was true too.
But.
If that had been the extent of it, she never would have reacted the way she did in the first place.
To speak plainly: the Park Woochan Hayeon knew was not the kind of man who would let go of her hand midway through, no matter what circumstances he set aside.
No.
The feeling that had hovered, blurred and formless, all this time—the moment she heard Hwang Yoonha's words, it took on a sharp, unmistakable shape.
'Ah ha.'
I'm in love with that man, aren't I.
With almost offensively plain candor—borrowing an expression Park Woochan was fond of, so easily it beggared belief that she was a high school girl—
Ja Hayeon accepted the fact.
That she'd found the revelation not bad at all—she knew that, too, was because it could serve as a weapon to tickle Park Woochan's heart.
And beyond that—because something in her made him think of his presumed former lover.
In other words, she suited his taste.
And every time she freshly re-acknowledged that fact, she found it harder to suppress the furtive smile creeping across her lips than anything else.
Which was why.
"Really, Oppa goes too far."
"R-right?"
"Yes. Even if nothing truly happened between you two, saying it like that was going a bit far, I think."
"U-uum. Yours truly thinks so as well."
"So that's why I'm asking—nothing really happened, right?"
"Truly, nothing did..."
Frankly speaking, right now, confirming that fact—which she'd barely wriggled past—mattered far more to her than the Third Great Cataclysm or any Extra-standard monster ever could.