Breaking News: A Rival Enters the Race
Dangerous.
Watching the way recent events had been unfolding, that was all Shin Seoa could think.
She genuinely couldn't begin to understand what had happened, or how it had come to this.
How did things end up like this?
Honestly speaking, she'd have to call it carelessness on her part. It felt wrong to say, but Park Woochan was not a man of ordinary temper. With a personality like his, no woman in her right mind would ever set her sights on him...
Except me!
Shin Seoa sincerely believed that. Unfortunately — call it a warped eye, call it what you will — the man they called the Slaughterer carried a kindness no one could ever have imagined from his image. She had believed herself the only one capable of noticing that brusque, roundabout consideration of his.
It was the same with her reasons for joining the Association and settling into a guild. To take revenge on the monsters that had killed her father. To broaden her experience as a hunter. To earn a living as the head of her household. And to keep her distance from Park Woochan — the man who saw her as nothing more than a snot-nosed kid!
Except that the very incident that brought her back home happened to involve that guild of all things. And the one who resolved the matter was, once again, her master — Park Woochan.
Seriously, what the hell!!
Who could have guessed the disciple he hadn't seen in ages would turn up looking this pretty! She had aimed for exactly that situation — and instead, it was she who fell for him all over again. Not that she hadn't already fallen long ago, but that was beside the point! Getting counter-shot while trying to make him fall for her — fine, she'd count it as a win.
But thanks to all that, what kind of image did she now have in the eyes of the man himself? A disciple who, after all this time, had grown pretty to the point of suspicion...
Contrary to Shin Seoa's hopes, though, that was probably asking too much. More likely he saw a kid sister who, at her age, still couldn't sort out a single problem of her own. Wasn't that exactly how it looked? And it was a fact even Shin Seoa couldn't deny.
Hence the recent stretch of endless worrying. How was she ever going to claw back the points she'd conceded!
The problem was this: Park Woochan was no longer a premium good that only Shin Seoa knew about.
"Aigoo, you silly girl. When on earth are you going to grow up?"
"Ugh, Mom, what is it this time!!"
"What is it? It's because you still don't get it that you've ended up in this state, you hopeless child!"
Her mother, who'd wailed that at this rate she'd never lay eyes on a son-in-law before she died. Was she off again, parroting gossip she'd picked up about somebody else's daughter? But at the words that followed, even mid-lament, Shin Seoa's eyes flew wide open.
"That Hayeon girl — saying she was grateful to Woochan, she learned cooking from me and now makes it for him. When on earth will you ever grow up?"
"What did you just say?!"
To think she'd been making moves like that without Seoa knowing a thing. Ja Hayeon, that terrifying girl... Shin Seoa shuddered. All the more so for having tasted the girl's cooking firsthand. Worse, cooking was territory that quick-witted girl had already staked out; even starting now, Seoa would be nothing but a latecomer. Such were her thoughts as she mooched breakfast off the enemy — strictly, she told herself, to monitor her rival's movements.
So then. A differentiator only she could offer. What charm did she have that could appeal to her master?
At the very moment Shin Seoa sank into that worry with a groan, the students of the club Park Woochan supervised turned their backs at Hwang Yoonha's bombshell of a remark.
And so — the instant Shin Seoa glanced around, her own problem still unsolved—
Now what is this.
—she became aware of the girls' gazes: hawk-eyed stares locked onto Park Woochan...!!
It was happening this very moment, in fact. Park Woochan had been away these past several days. Fortunately, midterms were close enough that classes had somehow limped along under teaching-intern Seoa's watch. From here on out, though, even that would be a stretch.
Everything Park Woochan had taught his students so far amounted to thorough foundation-laying. Build their stamina, round out their experience in the training hall. Sharpen their combat instincts through practical drills while hammering in every manner of monster knowledge. Field exercises on top of that — how to handle specific terrain, the hard-won know-how of dungeon work. The club classes opened mid-semester had even rounded them out in weapon arts, hand-to-hand combat, and the like.
Which left, naturally, one thing: nothing but basic ability training.
And as he supervised the class, Park Woochan found himself thinking that next year, students really did need to be sorted by ability type rather than overall skill. He felt he could finally understand why the other teachers drilled their students ability-first for an entire year.
To state it as a maxim: Park Woochan was, if anything, somewhat advantaged when it came to ability-centered training. Mana sensitivity — not a sharp talent, but a broadly versatile one. Techniques honed around countermeasures against monsters. And on top of that, fine-grained mana control, even if only against monsters. Whatever the ability, he could teach it with a reasonable degree of generality.
Even so, when it came to ability classes, even Park Woochan had no proper playbook. The students' gifts were wildly different from one another to begin with. All he could do was have each student demonstrate their ability, then walk them through how to train it — then make the rounds periodically, watching whoever was struggling and offering fixes. That was the extent of it.
Had every student's power been the element-radiating kind, he'd have focused on raising total volume and output. Had they been body-reinforcement types, he'd have covered how to distribute and weight the enhancement, and the tricks of concentrating it in a single body part. But that was as far as it went — even with Dr. Pyeong So-woon's reports for reference. The other homeroom teachers hadn't boldly sacrificed a full year to ability-focused training for nothing. This was a massive undertaking, nigh impossible without devoting an entire year to it.
Not that he thought his own method wrong. But given the Academy's current standard for splitting up classes, it was an undeniable fact that this was a curriculum only Park Woochan could run. Diverse experience. Tactics specialized for fighting monsters. Versatile abilities. Dr. Pyeong So-woon's reports on top of that. A teaching method possible only for an S-rank hunter with every one of those boxes ticked — adopting it as the official way was out of the question.
Which is exactly why they need to sort by ability type...
Unless they planned to burn an entire year, every single year — or to staff their faculty with S-rank hunters — the standard had to change. He jotted it down in his mental notebook and drew a line beneath it. He'd made the point three or four times already, but he hadn't expected things to be this bad. If they didn't want next year's classes wrecked by whatever happened to be in their teachers' wheelhouses, he'd have to insist on the change. No exceptions.
Fortunately, it didn't look like it would be a hard sell. The other teachers, who'd spent this whole year juggling the Academy curriculum against ability development, had to be having a miserable time of it. It would pass unanimously, he'd bet.
And if it didn't — I quit. Seriously.
Grumbling without quite meaning to, Park Woochan moved along.
"Will this do, Teacher?"
"Good, Pilyeon. Now think through your tactics — how exactly you want to fight."
"Tactics, you say?"
"Yeah. Your ability manifests weapons specialized in blades, so let's start here: are you fighting with a sword in your grip, or using swords as projectiles?"
"Swinging them feels like the better fit for my hands, Teacher."
"Then you'll have to choose — swap in the right blade as the situation demands, or commit yourself to a single sword."
"If you'll be swapping blades constantly, you train around how fast you can form them. If not, you train around how refined each blade is when it forms."
Of the two, Jung Pilyeon had chosen the latter, and so his practice began with carving out the shape of the sword he considered ideal. Once that finished blade existed, he drilled drawing that exact form on demand, any time, anywhere. Only when the sword came faster than an eye could blink would he finally count as the finished article.
Taking his eyes off Pilyeon — still honing his blade's shape — he walked on.
Gyaaaaak!!
The first to let loose a shriek was, as ever, Ryu Jihee. Her drill was simple in the extreme: a cup of milk set before her eyes, a tangerine perched on her head to be steered with mana. Perhaps because of the nightmare race's trait of mistaking a cup of milk held before them for someone's tender affection, Jihee was having a spectacularly hard time. Specifically, she couldn't hold her mana steady for more than ten seconds. Ever since the truth of her half-human, half-nightmare blood had been dragged into the open a while back, she'd been shrieking hard enough to forget she'd spent all that time a stranger in her own class.
...To be perfectly honest, there was nothing wrong with Ryu Jihee's ability itself. She simply hadn't made it her own yet — inside her slept the mana the Queen of Nightmares had left behind. If she could properly digest that inheritance, Jihee's ability would rank at A.
That said, as he'd told her before, casting charm mid-battle didn't amount to much. The heat of the battlefield washes that excitement clean away. Why else had history's countless nation-toppling beauties met their ends on the eve of war? So even if Jihee did digest the Queen's mana, it would remain, at best, an outlier talent. In rank terms, the ability itself was A; her main fighting style — her martial arts — sat at C, and even that could be turned against her. Let an enemy exploit her half-blood nature, and even a D-rank monster might slip past her guard.
That was why Park Woochan had spent his time first and foremost shoring up Jihee's weaknesses. Her ability would grow wildly on its own soon enough, so long as she could handle the Queen's mana.
"No, wait — this is actually working, right?!"
"You can say that, looking at the state of you? If it weren't working, you wouldn't have been shrieking in the first place."
"That's not what I'm asking! I mean, can I actually overcome it?!"
"Hmm. Who knows? Honestly, no idea."
"Well — there are plenty of cases of half-bloods overcoming the limits of their instincts. Nam Sangwon said as much, too."
Well, it stood to reason. A feral monster might be beyond help, but Jihee was half human. In other words, half of her could hold her instincts in check. Sure, even humans couldn't suppress instinct under extreme conditions — but nobody trails after a total stranger just because there's food in front of them, do they? Education and learning. In other words, it was a fact that instinct could be overcome with practice.
It was just that—
in the end, the fact of her half-blood birth never changes.
Overcoming instinct was harder for her than for a pure human. That much was ironclad. There was a chance she could manage it in practice, sure. But asked whether Jihee specifically could, he had no certainty. And if she couldn't overcome that instinct, then frankly, a half-blood becoming a hunter was a nonstarter. No — she could do it, technically, but she'd die a dog's death somewhere, guaranteed.
At that, Jihee's face crumpled a little.
"Ugh, I hate that."
"See?"
"Yes. Because, you see~"
And with that, Jihee leaned forward at the waist, just slightly. With the hushed whisper came a scent particular to the night race — fresh and sweet, and to Park Woochan, revolting.
"If I'm going to die anyway, I want to die by your hand, Teacher~"
...Whatever the words meant, it was the sort of tone and content that, aimed at a classmate, would have invited some very dangerous imaginings. A maneuver instinctively mastered by virtue of her nightmare blood? Either way, watching her retreat with a giggle, it clearly wasn't that she couldn't control herself. Only, Park Woochan couldn't keep the displeasure off his face — he'd never been the kind of target a nightmare's charms or techniques could work on in the first place.
"Ah, Teacher. You just got flustered, didn't you? Admit it."
"Yep."
"Huh—wait, what? Ah, um. Sorry, what? Wait, seriously? You too, Teacher?"
Flustering all on her own one moment, working herself into a huff the next — that was Jihee. Whether or not he understood her heart, Park Woochan's expression soured once more. Well, hearing it put that way, maybe she had a point...
"No — against you, at least, I'd win for sure."
"Hold on — are you discriminating against my species right now?"
"It's your behavior I'm discriminating against..."
The memory of the wild hand-flailing Jihee had treated him to a while back flickered behind his eyelids. Jihee, who'd been cocking her head at his expression in puzzlement, went beet-red in an instant.
"Th-that!! Y-you, honestly!! I know exactly what you're thinking!! But we agreed to ask and let it go — you can't just bring it up like that!!"
"I didn't say a single word, hey."
"Fine!!"
With that, Jihee whipped her head away. Watching her force her focus back onto the fruit perched on her head, Park Woochan shook his head slowly.
After that—
"Look, I'm doing it 'cause you told me to, but seriously, is this even doing anything?"
"It's working. Judge it by the mana."
"Ugh, damn it, this guy. Not planning to explain a single thing, is he."
With a quiet sigh, he turned his gaze to Lee Yeeun and Hwang Yoonha, still bickering away at each other.
Hwang Yoonha had been instructed to put her memory of taking gunfire to use and learn to harden her entire body as fast as she possibly could. Harden the whole body, then concentrate that hardening into one part of it. Then release it. Running the ability through that cycle strengthened her hardening speed and her transitions between states — in essence, like stretching to loosen the joints and widen the range of motion.
Lee Yeeun, by contrast, remained in a league of her own — at least where her ability was concerned. She was running cat's cradle on repeat, mana-woven string looped between her fingers. Sustaining the pattern while manipulating the telekinesis: a drill that forced her to keep both in mind at once, without pause. Grow accustomed to it, they said, and you could handle multiple strands of telekinesis simultaneously. Even veteran telekinetics tended to train by nothing more than raising their output with each use, so for juggling multiple threads this was, surprisingly, essential — and punishing, by all accounts. Yet Yeeun spun her string without the slightest hitch, carrying on a leisurely conversation with Yoonha besides.
Forming string from mana while simultaneously working the cat's cradle meant operating two telekinetic processes at once. Attack and defense, diffusion and focus — that sort of pairing. And Yeeun, who could hold a conversation on top of all that, could probably run at least three at once.
No. Four, at the very least.
So thought Shin Seoa, standing in a corner of the classroom as a teaching intern and watching the lesson — watching Lee Yeeun wink at Park Woochan.
What on earth had actually happened, and how? It had been barely a few days. She hardly wanted to say it, herself now a teaching intern and all, but...
That face of hers looks like a bitch in heat...
As expected, it was a situation that left Shin Seoa no other way to put it.