The Goddess Takes a Vacation
The goddess Tiamat had taken a vacation.
Hunter Academy. The principal's office.
I'd been flat-out busy lately — teaching students, refining my magic, drilling my swordsmanship — and in the middle of all that, Choi Seungjun had said it to me with a perfectly straight face.
No, what the hell? That came out of nowhere.
"Is that so?"
"It is. So I'd appreciate it if you could check on the situation."
"Huh?"
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Choi Seungjun's attitude was strange today. The mere fact that he was suddenly explaining Tiamat's vacation circumstances to me was proof enough of that.
"……You're one to talk. What's your point?"
"Hm?"
"She's a goddess, is she not? Or perhaps she had some other engagement?"
What is this bastard on about?
Did Choi Seungjun's corporation audit how each individual employee spent their vacation days, or something? The thought crossed my mind, absurd as it was. If that were actually the case, it would be a completely deranged company.
That said, I could vaguely guess where he was coming from.
To me, a Constellation was, first and foremost, a type of monster.
To put it more precisely: bastard creatures who happened to be monsters and had the gall to put on airs about it.
But what about everyone else? What would they say?
Nine times out of ten, they'd answer that they're genuine gods.
When humanity first faced the unprecedented threat known as gates, beings had descended from beyond a distant starlit sky and reached out a hand of salvation to the human race. That was the popular perception of a Constellation.
All the more so for Lee Joongoo and Choi Seungjun, who had heard the full truth behind the Great Invasion — the transcendent divinity that had once ruled this planet. Of course that's what they'd think.
Well, technically, calling Constellations "monsters" wasn't an accurate description either. It wasn't that monsters had disguised themselves under the name of Constellations — rather, in most myths, the bloodlines of gods and monsters simply belonged to the same lineage. To sum up my argument in a single sentence: Zeus was descended from the Titans, so by that logic he was a monster too.
Anyone who didn't share my particular sensibility couldn't possibly understand it. And Tiamat surely had no reason to go out of her way to explain.
In other words, from Choi Seungjun's perspective, Tiamat really was a goddess who had descended to earth once more. It would be hard for him to imagine her simply taking a vacation.
So this guy's been employing an actual goddess as faculty?
Thinking about it anew, the man was insane.
Still — why was that my problem?
"Who else but you?"
Choi Seungjun shot back as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Huh? Is that so?"
I thought about it quietly for a moment. The place Tiamat usually stayed was the topmost floor of the Association — a sealed chamber. Who could enter it? Only a handful of individuals with Tiamat's explicit permission. Which meant that, in practice, anyone who could actually meet the goddess face-to-face was restricted to the very summit of society, the people with connections to the Association. The reason Choi Seungjun hadn't known about Tiamat's existence until recently probably stemmed from the same thing.
In fact, of everyone in our circle, only Lee Joongoo and I had known about her beforehand. And Joongoo was swamped with his duties as a National Assemblyman, which left…
"You're the one who brought her in, to begin with."
"…Fair enough. Now that you put it that way, I suppose I have no choice."
Reluctant as I was, I could understand why he'd called me here.
Anyway — that damn woman. Running off on vacation without so much as a word?
She should have at least left a message, anything. A wave of weary exasperation hit me, and I found myself rubbing my forehead.
Choi Seungjun added a remark to my reaction.
"Well, I suppose that's what they call the whim of a goddess."
A whim, my ass.
"……Every now and then, it genuinely puzzles me why the goddess opens up to you so particularly."
"Huh?"
"Opens up to me? What are you talking about?"
I frowned at the completely out-of-left-field remark. Meeting my gaze, Choi Seungjun gave an awkward little shrug.
"I've only heard it secondhand myself, but apparently between you and Joongoo, she shows blatant favoritism toward you."
"Ah."
"No — that's just him siding with whoever doesn't revere him, that's all."
Trauma, I suppose you'd call it.
Explaining that would meanlaunching into the whole saga of Kim Minchul, so I chose silence for the moment.
"Either way, it doesn't matter. In any case, you'd best request a formal meeting through the Association."
As if he'd only been making casual conversation, Choi Seungjun wrapped things up there.
According to the paperwork, Tiamat's registered residence was one of the villas Choi Seungjun had provided. But since she commuted via an avatar, in reality the place sat empty. Outside of special circumstances like the Kim Minchul incident, she presumably spent her days conjuring an avatar on the surface and then retrieving it.
Would the supreme deity of the Mesopotamian pantheon bother maintaining a body through the effort of cooking three meals a day? In my opinion — absolutely not.
Which meant that to see her, I would have to present myself at the Association in person.
God damn it.
Park Woochan, your personality has died so many deaths!!
Living this long and still having to carve out time to go visit a monster. Of course, that also meant I had enough peace of mind to afford such abominable behavior.
Following Teacher Jung Ilhyun's advice, I could pester the Academy's underground gate under the pretext of thinning out its inhabitants. Or I could butcher the high-rank monsters the Cult supplied on a regular schedule. Either way, I lacked for nothing — it was an environment of almost embarrassing abundance.
"Fine. I'll stop by when I have time. Just keep that in mind."
"Good."
Part of me wanted to use that same excuse to skip class entirely, but given the current pace of the curriculum, that wasn't an option. And so, once again, I left the principal's office at a lazy pace, planning to ask Seoa for the favor.
* * *
"What?! Again?!"
And so. When I went to find Seoa during my free period to hand Hayeon over to her, she let out something between a shriek and a wail.
To be fair, Seoa surely understood my circumstances too. If this had been back in the day, I might have just strolled off without a second thought, declaring that something like this was no problem at all.
But not now. Kim Minchul's abduction. The escalating, unrelenting offensive from that particular organization. In a situation like this, leaving Hayeon's side carried a weight it hadn't before. Which was exactly why I'd been working Seoa to the bone.
How many times had it been now? Almost a month had passed since the field exercise ended. This would make roughly the third time — so about once every ten days I'd been ditching my post. The club incident. The secret laboratory raid. And now this. Even by my own assessment, it was a bit much. "Serious matter" or not, it was essentially me blowing off my job for personal reasons, over and over.
Which left me exactly one thing to say.
"I'm really sorry. Let's plan a trip or something next weekend, just the two of us."
"You mean it?!"
"Y-yeah, sure…"
I felt a little awkward saying it as the one asking for the favor, but my disciple was such an easy pushover that it honestly worried me a little.
"W-wait, hold on!!"
However — today was different. Seoa had actually begun to object.
Good heavens. Our Seoa, finally pushing back? As her master, I couldn't help but be impressed.
"What's with that look?"
"Well, I'm feeling guilty toward my precious disciple, obviously."
"Oh, really? Hehehe."
Seoa giggled with a loose, easy grin — then suddenly gathered herself, as though she'd just remembered what she was supposed to be doing.
Huh. Her resistance is feistier than usual today.
"In exchange, I have a condition."
"Mmm, fair. You're at that age now, I suppose. Not really in a position to be goofing around with me anymore."
"Not that! Don't make any plans next weekend. I have somewhere to go, separately."
In other words: she intended to squeeze every last drop out of me on the weekdays and stake her claim on the weekend. What a greedy little pig.
Needless to say, I kept that thought to myself — I was the one asking for the favor, after all. And this was already the third time this month alone.
Three strikes in a row is pushing it. Three strikes is pushing it.
Which raised the question of what Seoa would demand. It wouldn't be anything truly serious, probably — but at the very least, given how dramatically she'd opened negotiations, it wouldn't be trivial either.
And in fact, it wasn't. Not a matter of grave importance, but by no means a throwaway topic, either.
"Tia. What is that woman, really?"
Oh, great. Here we go.
So that's what this was about.
"She's not really just some Middle Eastern migrant worker, is she?"
"She's a goddess."
…Which I obviously couldn't say.
Certainly, I'd shared information about the Cult with Seoa and the other students. But the fact that Tiamat was a Constellation descended to the surface was currently known to exactly three people: me, Lee Joongoo, and Choi Seungjun.
There was no deep reason for it. It was simply a matter of privacy. The intel about the Cult had needed to be shared; that didn't mean I was obligated to bare every last personal detail.
Still — as a result, Seoa had apparently been nursing her own suspicions about Tiamat's identity.
"Master, do you realize? This is already the third favor you've asked of me this month alone?"
"Yeah, I know."
"Then what about this? Every time you've left your post recently, it's been because of that woman."
"Huh?"
"What did you say?"
The question that jolted through me escaped my mouth before I could stop it. But Seoa didn't stop. She took a step closer and asked again, and in the corners of her eyes, a faint sheen of tears glimmered.
"You wouldn't know, would you, Master? You're probably the only one who doesn't. You're always — always — looking for her."
"Uh… mm."
"What does she even mean to you?"
"Uh… something I want to kill but am holding back on?"
There was absolutely no way I could answer like that. But honestly?
That startled me.
I never dreamed a question like that would come flying at me. No, really — it was so far outside anything I'd ever imagined that I blanked out for a moment.
Always looking at her? Well — yeah. Obviously.
Because I want to kill her…
Every absence being because of Tiamat — hmm. Come to think of it, from an outsider's view, that might indeed be how it looked. It wasn't, though! I'd brought Tiamat to the club raid as my partner only because there was no one else suitable. And the laboratory raid afterward, I'd skipped because of a connection made through that party — barely anything to do with Tiamat at all. The current situation was about the closest to her fault as it got.
But still.
"Seoa, don't cry."
"I'm not crying?!"
"You're not crying, sure. Your voice is completely soaked through."
Instead of saying that, I dragged a hand down my face. No, I understood the circumstances. I understood, but I hadn't expected this reaction.
Is this really something worth crying over?
It felt a bit wrong to put it that way, but from Seoa's perspective, this whole affair was nothing more than "my master got himself a woman." Hardly grounds for all this fuss at this stage.
Which would mean that she was…
Making eyes at me.
I cut the thought off right there. Honestly — there are limits.
To Seoa, I was, above all else, the murderer of her family. The hatred had diluted over time, but the fact remained: if I had arrived just a little sooner, I could have saved her father. For me to read her feelings, let alone interpret them as affection toward me…
That would be shameless.
I reached out, quietly. Amber eyes, glinting bright. As I wiped the tears beaded there, a thought drifted through my mind.
Back before Seoa had formally become a hunter — back when she was the Butcher's apprentice — there had been a few moments like this too. Compared to then, the baby fat had melted away, leaving the graceful lines of a proper adult woman beneath my fingers. I slowly lowered my hand.
"Well, look. What was it again…?"
Right — how our relationship looked from another person's point of view. And conveniently, the perfect way to explain it came to me.
"I'm her family's murderer."
"…Huh?"
"I killed her family. Once."
"Ah—"
Seoa let out a small sound of realization.
Back when Tiamat had briefly taken refuge at the boarding house, I'd explained her history with Kim Minchul by editing it into a conveniently shaped story. She could hardly have failed to guess that the boy's family situation hadn't been a normal one. Which meant I could simply season that old account and serve it up again. It wasn't even a lie — there had been reason to kill him.
Even the guilt of taking a life had been dulled by Tiamat's authority. It had felt no different from slaying a high-rank monster. And yet the fact remained unchanged: to her, I was nothing more than the killer who had taken her family from her.
"So whatever you're imagining — it's not that. This isn't about my tastes. Could you really harbor feelings like that for someone who killed your family?"
At those words, relief washed over Seoa's face in a strange, visible wave.
And then — the very next moment, the face that had been soothed only seconds ago was drenched in a completely different kind of bewilderment.