No One Lasted Three Months
Of course, that didn't mean I could keep running them into the ground forever.
Naturally, for every student short on stamina, there was bound to be another short on ability. And my goal, first and last, was to mold my students into hunters capable of performing above average in any field—to be precise, to bring them to the point where they could display skill on par with a C-Rank hunter even outside their own specialty.
Which meant, obviously, understanding where each of them currently stood and shoring up the gaps. Not mindless laps on end, but having the ones short on stamina keep running while instructing those whose ability development lagged behind to broaden the ways they put their powers to use.
The only thing that nagged at me was that it would inevitably take time.
It wasn't as though they were hopeless, but on the flip side, they leaned on their teacher's abilities to an almost excessive degree. Assess each student's powers, patch the weaknesses, accentuate the strengths? Sounds lovely—except it meant the whole process, start to finish, rested on the teacher's discretion.
I could manage it. But ask whether the other teachers could, and I doubted you'd hear anything but skepticism.
If only I could get a few of those devices in here, everything would get a whole lot easier.
That thing they kept at the Association. A mana measurement device, wasn't it?
Not that I held out much hope—this was very much a shot in the dark. Thanks to its knack for roughly gauging a hunter's rank, the state kept the thing under round-the-clock surveillance. Even with the government lending a hand to this project, getting one through the door would be next to impossible.
After all, to purchase one in the first place, I'd fundamentally have to prove that my teaching methods were suited to the next-generation Hunter Academy.
Which, in other words, meant at least three years before the students under my care could take the field.
I had confidence. At the very least, the conviction that my methods would contribute the most to fostering the next generation of hunters the nation wanted.
But from the government's standpoint, they couldn't exactly nod along and say, "Why, yes, of course."
And so, even now, teachers in the same boat as I was were shouldering a responsibility gift-wrapped in the pretty name of "autonomy," drafting their curricula with all the blind desperation of men headbutting bare ground.
"What do you think?"
By that measure, I was in a better position than most teachers. I had an informant living under my own roof, after all.
Yet our student-side spy—Ja Hayeon, in other words—only answered my question in a flat, curt tone.
"About what?"
"Nothing. I was wondering how the kids are taking it."
"They're all badmouthing you with one heart and one mind, Oppa, so don't worry."
"Huh? Seriously...?"
It was a bit of a shock. Not because of what she'd said, but because of the quiet disillusionment written across her face as she admitted, without a shred of embarrassment, that they spent their free time shooting the breeze at my expense.
"Did you really think you could run those kids ragged and not get cursed out even once?"
"Of course I did. This is all the heaven-sent grace of a teacher, you know."
"Sure, it's disorienting at first, and sure, they'll curse. But later on, they'll realize there's nowhere on earth they could pay to learn this."
When I shot back with that magnificent shamelessness, she could only let out a low sigh.
"Actually, they're not saying anything in particular."
"Huh? Why not? If it were me, I'd have cursed them out twice over."
"...It's not that they're nicer than you, Oppa. It's because of that sparring match a while back? With Jung Pilyeon?"
"Ah, him? His skills were decent."
"I think watching that settled it for everyone. He has real ability. Jung Pilyeon most of all."
From the sound of it, the boys needed no worrying. Well, at that age, the guy with the hardest fists is king, plain and simple.
"And the girls?"
There it was—the real problem lay with the girls.
Of course, measured against her classmates, it was hard to imagine that girl—only just made a hunter, brand new to it all—had much leeway to look around and take stock of her surroundings. And yet there was exactly one reason I was putting this question to her.
She learned fast.
Part of it was that she'd always been sharp. The way she devoured every scrap of knowledge I fed her could be explained no other way. But even granting that, the fact that this girl—setting foot in this industry for the first time in her life—never once slacked off, even with brutal training looming, could only be chalked up to raw nature.
Thanks to that, contrary to my early worries, she'd managed to carve out a respectable place for herself in the class.
Granted, the badge of having endured my mindless grind to the bitter end, right alongside Jung Pilyeon, probably did its share of the work too.
She was, frankly, impossible not to notice. A total unknown—a rookie whose name no one had ever heard—calmly digesting a regimen that left even the so-called elite of the next generation flat on their backs?
And on top of that, the visuals weren't half bad either.
More than enough to make her a central figure of the class.
If the others could manage even a fraction of that, my job would get a great deal easier—but that was probably asking too much. Which was exactly why I was grinding them the way I was.
"Come to think of it, there was something I heard."
"About what?"
"You know Lee Yeeun? In our class?"
"Ah, her? I know of her."
Perhaps because the girl had drawn eyes in more ways than one, Hayeon had apparently caught wind of something too. Twisting a strand of hair around her finger with a troubled look, she began to spill it.
Lee Yeeun, huh.
I didn't need to dig through my memory. Few new students had burned themselves into it that vividly.
If Jung Pilyeon was the name among the boys, Lee Yeeun was the name among the girls.
She was one of the next-generation hunters who'd been hailed as such even before enrollment. As it happened, Ja Hayeon had since stolen the spotlight, but under normal circumstances, Yeeun would have been the most-watched girl in the year.
No—truth be told, she still stood out plenty.
Lemon-colored hair spilling all the way down to her waist. Sky-blue eyes holding a calm, unhurried presence above that ripe wheat-field gold. And on top of it all, a poise that didn't belong on a student.
In a word...
"She looked fucking hilarious, I'll say that. A Korean girl with that face, apparently."
At my snickering, her eyes narrowed, quiet and slow. No—not just that. She went further, seizing a fistful of her own distinctive hair like a brush and whipping it back and forth.
Faced with that non-threat of a threat, I found myself playing innocent without meaning to, and she, too, shoulders sagging in resignation, carried on with her story.
"You're not seriously only thinking that, are you?"
"Well. Yeah."
That much was honest—but it wasn't the whole of it.
This was me, after all, the man who hadn't even known Jung Pilyeon's name. I hardly had a habit of memorizing promising rookies' names for fun.
"She's Lee Joongoo's little sister, you know."
Lee Joongoo. The strongest hunter humanity had to offer.
In other words, Lee Yeeun was the younger sister of that son of a bitch who'd dumped this whole mess in my lap.
"They look nothing alike, that's for damn sure."
"...And which one were you looking at when you decided that?"
"I'll exercise my right to remain silent, for the sake of someone's honor. Anyway, that aside—what about her?"
"I can't swear to it, but there's a rumor going around that she has some kind of problem."
"Huh?"
At that, I couldn't help tilting my head.
"What kind of problem?"
Knowing Lee Joongoo as I did, it made no sense. Whatever else you could say about the man, he was absolutely not the type to stand by and let his sister become a hunter while something was wrong with her.
Fortunately, though, by what Hayeon had heard, no physical impairment seemed to have been left behind on the guy's sister.
Which, for me, might actually be the bigger problem.
"I only heard it secondhand, so I don't know the details, but apparently she took instruction from other hunters back in middle school."
"Huh? So what?"
"It feels a bit wrong to say this, but she's Lee Joongoo's sister. I doubt she has much talent, but with the name value of 'the hero's little sister,' there'd be no shortage of people lining up to lick her boots."
Above all, Lee Joongoo himself wasn't the type to pinch pennies on that kind of thing.
Thinking that, I silently urged her on.
And then—
"Apparently, not one of the hunters who's taught her has lasted three months."
Fuck.
I barely strangled the curse before it could slip out on its own. No matter what, I wasn't about to go spewing profanity in front of a kid.
That said, if the girl in front of me hadn't been there, I'd have wanted to hurl a whole bowlful of it.
No, it wasn't an impossible story. Naturally—for hunters at the very peak of the industry, money was the kind of thing that piled up until it rotted. At least it had been that way for me, and for Lee Joongoo—an Association man and the officially recognized strongest of humanity—it would be doubly so.
Maybe that was the cause. More money than anyone could spend. And a brother who was both a hero of the Republic of Korea and humanity's strongest hunter. Prime conditions for a personality to curdle.
And yet.
Something doesn't add up.
No matter how I turned it over, one point refused to sit right.
Lee Joongoo, of all people, quietly tolerating a little sister who threw his name around to throw her weight?
Inconceivable.
The Lee Joongoo I knew would have snapped his sister's legs that very day—or donated his entire fortune "back to society" on the spot.
The devilish sight of the man storming to my door to read me the riot act, after civilians took damage from things unregistered hunters had done, was still vivid before my eyes. We managed to untangle the misunderstanding eventually, but my own habit of lecturing about hunter professional ethics definitely owed something to what I'd witnessed an enraged Lee Joongoo do that day.
A man like that wouldn't go soft spoiling his own family.
I found myself recalling the day we'd joined forces to put down that band of criminal hunters—the sight of Lee Joongoo planting unregistered hunters into the earth like flower stems.
Not that I was ignorant of the curse of the so-called goose father—the breed of man who barked loudest out in the world and turned hopelessly meek behind his own front door...
Even so, it wasn't entirely beyond belief that Lee Joongoo of all people belonged to that breed.
"For one thing, her student records were spotless, far as I remember. And with that bastard Joongoo having gone into politics himself, if his sister had ever pulled any high-and-mighty stunts, there's no way I wouldn't have heard about it..."
"Oppa, we don't have a TV, remember?"
"Ah. Right. Let's buy one later. Anyway—is there any talk about why it happened?"
"There is, but I only heard it secondhand, so I can't vouch for it. Are you sure you want to hear?"
"Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Think of it as helping me out and spill."
At my words, Ja Hayeon sank deep into thought.
Good grief. So my teaching career only stayed upright thanks to a ward this devoted. How on earth were the other homeroom teachers managing? Watching colleagues worn down by unfamiliar teacherly duties, decaying into corpses one day at a time, I felt a growing tenderness toward them all. Maybe I ought to set aside some time later to trade war stories and commiserate.
Just as I was chewing over our miserable working conditions like that, she finally seemed to remember something and let out a small gasp.
"From what I heard, they all tried to lay hands on her fighting style."
"Fuck."
This time it escaped before I could stop it. Her sullen stare made me clap a lid on my mouth, but my opinion didn't budge an inch.
Because what I was planning to do from here on was, precisely, the sum total of that very criticism.
Patch the students' weaknesses. Sharpen their strengths.
...If the previous teachers had simply lacked the skill, fine. No harm done.
But what if her fighting style was such a wreck that every hunter who taught her, without exception, had felt compelled to call it out?
And what if she'd indiscriminately driven off every single one who did?
Unbelievable. Honestly.
Seconds after pitying my fellow homeroom teachers, I felt as though a mountain of rock had materialized right in front of me.
Lee Joongoo, you bastard—what the hell are you even doing? Family or not, you keep your own house in order.
Something's tangled up badly here.
I forced myself to cut off the grumbling that had leaked out unbidden. I had a feeling I'd just been handed a first-class headache of an issue, but even granting that, there was nothing I could do about it right this second.
With a crisp click of my tongue, I switched mental gears. After all, I couldn't afford to fixate on her alone just yet.
"Thanks for telling me, Hayeon."
"Mm, it's nothing. Was it helpful?"
"Sure was."
"Then next time, go a little easier on them. Do you have any idea how it feels, sitting in class listening to everyone trash-talk you, Oppa?"
"...Fine. I shall show mercy."
In the end, that was all I could manage, in a tone that betrayed exactly how grudging it was.