Something Borrowed, Something Warm
* * *
Midterms had ended, and autumn had finally settled in for real.
A fair bit had happened in the meantime.
The negotiation between Lee Joongoo and the Association Chairman. Choi Seungjun's courtship of Dr. Pyeong So-woon.
I supposed you could call both of those more or less smooth sailing.
Honestly speaking, it still came as a surprise to me.
There was no question that we needed Dr. Pyeong's abilities.
For one thing, putting her on trial would have been difficult anyway.
Doing so would have shattered the deal Lee Joongoo had once struck with the government.
And considering the enemy organization's reach, even if we had thrown her in prison, it was obvious they'd have her extracted before long.
Which was why Choi Seungjun was the one sweating over her now……
But what surprised me even more was Lee Joongoo's reaction.
Love her or hate her, it was Dr. Pyeong's side that had broken the promise.
I'd fully expected him to blow up about it.
Instead, he'd floored me with: Getting angry won't change anything. Besides, we'll need her power for what's coming.
Seriously?
No — okay, fair. He wasn't wrong.
It was a monumental decision, and a genuinely noble one at that.
But there was no way in hell I could have seen it that way.
Goddammit. Why can't we just crack her open like a piggy bank?
It was a joke. Mostly. But the thought did cross my mind.
That's how badly I wanted the artificial gate formation technology.
Well, reality is always a harsh mistress.
I'd probed the waters on the off chance, and all I got for it was a look of utter disillusionment.
In the end, the technologies Dr. Pyeong had been forced to hand over became bargaining chips in the deal with the Hunter Association.
The negotiation was a success.
Magic refined by the Republic of Korea's foremost theoretical researcher.
That alone was enough to make my mouth water, and the artificial gate generation technology came on top of it?
The research wing would need to be restored, sure — but if we pulled that off, we might be one step closer to making artificial gates commercially viable.
Naturally, the Association had no choice but to accommodate us.
They were probably grinning from ear to ear.
On top of that, despite a gate actually opening during the raid, we'd taken the illegal research facility without a single casualty. That counted as a genuine achievement.
The gate business was hard to make public, granted, but the latter point was unquestionably impressive.
It was only natural for the Chairman's gaze toward us to warm.
Not that the Association had the faintest clue we'd once run a plan to replace the Chairman himself.
And truth be told, that plan was still in motion.
Because if those bastards actually pulled off their grand invasion, the Chairman would be first in line to take responsibility and resign.
A secret organization's tentacle perched in a chair that wielded considerable authority within the Association — what a disaster that would be.
We had no intention of letting that slide.
In that sense, Dr. Pyeong's research had done its fair share of work.
Same went for me, the one who'd stormed the lab.
As I've said plenty of times, I have zero aptitude for magic.
It's a knowledge problem, sure, but there's a more fundamental reason underneath.
The occult is the equal of any academic discipline — packed with doctrine and philosophy.
For someone like me, who just wanted to kill monsters without thinking too hard about it, patient study was never going to fit.
And yet, among the spells discovered in Dr. Pyeong's lab, there were a few even I could plausibly use.
Body reinforcement, the one and only spell I could actually cast, was among them.
It was still as bloated and overwrought as you'd expect from a theorist, of course.
But unlike Dr. Pyeong herself, her sponsors weren't geniuses.
Which meant the lab had been stocked with annotated breakdown diagrams of her spells, prepared to explain them to those very sponsors.
Diagrams simple enough that even I could get my hands on the actual spellwork.
To put it crudely: my everyday piece-of-crap reinforcement spell versus Dr. Pyeong's reinforcement spell that was too unwieldy for combat.
It was far easier to carve the latter down until it resembled the former than to drag the former up to the latter's level.
I had no arcane knowledge to speak of, after all — and the latter even came with a reference book.
And so, for the foreseeable future, I was doomed to be an old man whittling spells down to size.
At the same time, something else was nagging at me.
There'd been no information about Hayeon in Dr. Pyeong's lab either.
Which was only natural.
Intel that sensitive would never be left on paper, not with security in mind.
Even if a document had existed, the moment they realized there was an intruder, it would have been first on the destruction list.
But still.
That was exactly why the question wouldn't leave me alone.
Judging by how relaxed Dr. Pyeong had been, she'd had ample time to contact the organization through their own channels.
And yet, right up to the very last moment, the organization hadn't shown so much as the tip of its nose.
Why?
I couldn't say for certain.
There were a few facts I could piece together, though.
One: they had avoided a direct clash with me and the other hunters.
That was a fairly plausible hypothesis.
Hate to say it, but by the time Lee Joongoo was on-site, the organization was in no position to solve anything with force.
If they'd committed their full strength, maybe — but that almost certainly would have meant the monsters too.
If you wanted to avoid a scenario where you reached for Lee Joongoo and got swept away by me instead, not approaching was the correct answer.
After all, to a group that didn't know about my condition, I was the monster hunter who'd cleared a situation rated at S-rank assault difficulty without breaking a sweat.
Hardly something they'd relish.
Dr. Pyeong was worth a great deal, sure — but was she worth that kind of bloodshed? I remained skeptical.
It would have been nothing more than a gamble with no guaranteed payoff.
And above all, the Association's own hunters had been there.
Push too hard, and there was a real chance the entire Association would swing over to our side.
For them, it might well have been a rock and a hard place.
But then.
There was a second hypothesis.
Namely: that they'd already squeezed everything out of Dr. Pyeong that there was to squeeze.
No question, her abilities were excellent.
She had the knowledge to call herself a lead researcher even within that secret organization.
However.
What if her power simply wasn't needed anymore?
What if their plan was already in its final stages — at least on paper?
In that case, Dr. Pyeong would have become a card they regretted losing but no longer needed to protect.
So they threw her away.
That was the shape of the theory.
……Neither one was something I could state with any confidence.
Still, for now, it was better to assume the worst.
With that thought, I quietly opened my eyes to get ready for work.
Son of a—
And then.
The curse I'd breathed without thinking scattered faintly into the air, somewhere beyond a city still cloaked in the hours before dawn.
I couldn't help it.
In the cramped basement room of this boarding house — home to all of two people — an unfamiliar warmth had crept in.
Blue hair spilling over in waves.
A frame that slotted perfectly into the crook of one arm.
Delicately arranged features.
Right there in front of me as I opened my eyes.
Or to put it more precisely: when I woke up, Hayeon was wrapped around me in my bed.
I'm sorry, Oppa.
As morning broke, Ja Hayeon opened her eyes too.
And the very first words out of her mouth were those.
It was a phrase woven from pure magic — one that left Park Woochan, who had opened his mouth to deliver a lecture, with no choice but to fall silent.
The truth was, this wasn't the first time Hayeon had sneaked into Park Woochan's room.
This made five.
Five times, all within the past little while.
Each time, Park Woochan had tried to call out her recklessly defenseless behavior, and each time, it had ended exactly like this.
The somewhat unusual relationship between the two played no small part in that.
Park Woochan was Hayeon's guardian.
At the same time, he was her escort and protector.
Thanks to the affair entangled with the secret organization's schemes, Hayeon had ended up in a situation that demanded round-the-clock close protection from the Association.
And at the time, Park Woochan had taken an interest in her abilities.
Because their interests aligned, Park Woochan — who had only just set foot in the Association — was selected as Hayeon's personal escort.
Which was how.
The two of them now lived under the same roof.
Specifically, a boarding house run by the mother of Shin Seoa, who had become Park Woochan's first disciple.
It was a tragic story: the shock of watching her husband devoured before her eyes had left Seoa's mother with full-blown PTSD around monsters.
Because of that, at this boarding house — rebuilt on the exact fringe of the city — anything monster-related was kept out with almost obsessive thoroughness.
And that suited Park Woochan down to the ground.
The place where he'd stayed while teaching Seoa the hunter's craft had simply become his base of operations.
That hadn't changed even after the Second Great Invasion ended.
Of all the rooms, Park Woochan — who in a certain sense was even more hypersensitive to monsters than Seoa's mother — had chosen the semi-basement.
His reasoning: he didn't want to catch so much as a glimpse of the monster-themed parades that occasionally passed by outside.
However.
As Lee Joongoo had once quipped, a semi-basement makes a poor environment for raising anyone.
It had seemed like a fine choice at the time. Sure.
And now it was autumn.
The season when an oddly biting chill seeped in with every dawn.
It got a little cold……
And so.
Whenever she said things like that, Park Woochan had no choice but to swallow his words.
A single room barely big enough for a few people to lie down in.
How could he bark at a child shivering from the cold in a place without a single proper bed?
If Park Woochan had been the remotely shameless type, he might have taken the hard line instead.
The girl didn't even have a house to begin with. The fact that I'm feeding and housing her at all is already more consideration than she's owed.
In practice, Hayeon had never once asked him to swap rooms, or made any demand of the sort.
But Park Woochan had a strangely delicate streak in him.
A suspicion, for instance, that she kept her mouth shut about all this because she didn't want to be a burden to him.
And above all, Park Woochan had no practical excuse, either.
Frankly, he had more than enough money to do more than change houses — he could have built a new one outright.
The problem was the construction firms lately touting eco-friendly buildings made with monster-derived materials and the like.
Which meant that, in a roundabout way, his own tastes were forcing Hayeon to endure every inconvenience imaginable.
At the root of Park Woochan's inability to get angry at her lay exactly that guilt.
And.
Hayeon knew it.
Rest assured, she wasn't running some silent protest campaign for a better room.
She simply —
From the conversation Hwang Yoonha had once started, Hayeon had come to a dim, dawning awareness of her own heart.
Her feelings for Park Woochan.
Even the suggestion that he might only be seeing a lover from his past when he looked at her — even that was a sweetness she could take joy in. That was the depth of her longing.
Which is to say, this was Hayeon's own approach.
A single room too small for two people to sleep in — or, depending on how you looked at it, exactly the right size!
Winter creeping steadily closer!
And on top of that, the height difference between the two of them!
Combine all of these conditions, and you got a situation exactly like the one from this morning!!
……You could call it a touch naive, or — as Park Woochan put it — recklessly defenseless.
It wasn't that Hayeon's schemes had no effect.
It was simply also true that her every move rested on the unshakable conviction that Park Woochan would never lay a hand on her.
What would she do if he actually crossed the line?
No serious consideration had gone into that part whatsoever.
Conversely, the reason Park Woochan couldn't raise his voice lay in that very same place.
Shit. How the hell am I supposed to bring this up.
Of course he couldn't say it.
The face that greeted him the moment he opened his eyes.
Elegant lashes sweeping over softly closed lids.
Living in a room this cramped, it was hard to notice — or rather, Park Woochan was making tireless, heroic efforts not to notice.
And yet.
There was something indescribably captivating about the face of a girl who usually wore a loose, easy smile for him, now utterly sunk in sleep.
Frankly, every time he woke to her face mere inches from his own, close enough to feel her breath, it nearly knocked the wind out of him.
Telling himself she's a high schooler didn't help one bit.
The magic of the pre-dawn hour had the power to make even a young disciple look every bit the woman.
Once you noticed that much, the road only got harder.
Because before he knew it, he'd start noticing everything else about the situation.
The slender body that fit so perfectly against his chest.
The wave-colored hair rippling with a faint sheen.
The warmth of human skin, quietly passing into his.
The scent that reached him with every breath she took.
And a softness that frankly went beyond all reasonable limits.
Truth be told, there had been mornings he'd opened his eyes and just stared, dazed.
It was the kind of situation where, if he hadn't long since grown accustomed to the pleasure of killing monsters, something very well might have happened.
Which is why Park Woochan, too, had decided that sooner or later, they needed to sit down and have a proper talk.
But then.
Well, first — eat your breakfast.
Mmm…… okay.
……Still. Five times.
Five whole times mistaking whose bed she was crawling into — was that even plausible?
He had a mountain of questions he wanted to ask, but what would he do if the answer that came back wasn't the one he was hoping for?
No, wait — what would the other answer even be?
Every time his thoughts reached that precipice, Park Woochan jerked awake as if struck by lightning and shoved the whole thing to the back of his mind.
Because it always felt like stepping off some point of no return.
And this morning was no different.
Pink eyes glancing up at him, crinkling into a sly smile.
Wrenching his gaze away from that sight by sheer force of will, Park Woochan fixed his eyes on the table in front of him instead.
By the way, Hayeon — isn't making breakfast wearing you out? You've seemed tired lately, so……
……Oh.
A desperately pivoted change of subject.
Or a resistance bordering on a last stand — crushed in a single stroke.
A soft sigh escaped her as she bowed her head.
At the dull clunk of something hitting the floor, Park Woochan involuntarily checked under the table.
He did it half-wondering whether his heart had fallen out of his chest.
The space beneath the table, naturally, was empty.
Truly a cruel reality.
'Bastard. What even IS this atmosphere.'
His heart hadn't actually dropped, and yet.
In a situation too mortifying for words, Park Woochan couldn't help swallowing the dizzy sensation that was creeping up on him unbidden.
Is it…… not to your taste?
No, no, it's good. I just — I was worried you were pushing yourself too hard, that's all. Mm.
It wasn't a lie.
Hayeon's cooking really was improving by leaps and bounds with every passing day.
Not that he knew it was thanks to skills learned from the boarding house landlady — the very woman who had trained his palate in the first place.
Fufu. That's a relief, then.
It seemed that today, too, breakfast table conversation was a lost cause.
In an atmosphere that tolerated not a whisper of doubt, Park Woochan ultimately surrendered, chopsticks raised in white flag.
And Hayeon watched him do it, her expression practically cooing how cute.
Lately, this was pretty much what Park Woochan's mornings looked like.
* * *