Why We're Called Hunters
Do you know why you're all called hunters?
In the end, what I need to do right now is raise my students' overall capabilities across the board.
Put another way, you could call it the work of trimming their abilities until the graph of each student's power resembles a circle.
Of course, everyone's aptitude differs, so I couldn't say that every student's graph would end up the same size.
But if you smooth away every rough edge and polish an ability to a flawless finish, then at the very least, no one's going to die screaming in some ditch.
Systematic, rigorous training of their abilities wouldn't be a bad idea either — but as long as they're alive, there will be plenty of time for that later.
That was the philosophy under which I'd been teaching, and yet somehow, time kept running short.
The real problem was how uneven my students' abilities were.
It wasn't just the total volume of their power — the issue was the specialized direction each of them had already taken.
If I wanted to run classes with Jung Pilyeon as the benchmark, I'd first have to refine what he'd awakened as a hunter.
But the majority of the kids needed basic physical conditioning first.
Making Pilyeon slog through strength training that wouldn't strain him in the slightest at my level — the way I was making the others do — was an enormous waste of his time.
For now I was papering over the gap with workarounds — offering optional after-class lessons built around ability practice — but it was plain as day that this, too, would hit a wall before long.
On what basis did they even divide the classes in the first place?
It would have been far simpler if they'd sorted students by their characteristics from the start.
This group only ever spams their abilities, so they're the "Ability Class"; this group did nothing but crank out push-ups, so they're the "Conditioning Class" — that kind of thing.
Granted, overhauling the Academy's policies to match my methods wasn't going to happen overnight.
So I decided to make full use of the counseling hours allotted to teachers.
Unlike an ordinary high school, the counseling period at the Hunter Academy carried a very different meaning.
There was no way a homeroom teacher could sit a student down to advise them about their future prospects or their family situation, the way a normal high school might.
Asking hardened ex-hunters fresh off the industry's front lines to conduct therapy sessions was out of the question.
Well — unlike the staff psychiatrists on permanent standby at the Academy, there were things a student might open up about to a homeroom teacher, given the particular relationship. But that was beside the point for now.
No — homeroom teacher or not, I'd known these students for barely a week. Half a year in, and talking about trust was getting ahead of ourselves.
I'm not sure what you're asking, sir.
Hm? No, I mean it literally. Why on earth did this profession end up being called hunter? Give it some thought — any answer will do.
And so.
What was I doing during these counseling hours, mandatory every semester? Career counseling, naturally.
With one caveat: it wasn't the ordinary kind, musing over what line of work a student might pursue — it was counseling on their combat methods, their tactics.
Which meant that while the classroom next door was presumably deep into its ethics lesson, I sat across from her like this, talking things through.
The setting was the counseling room.
And my partner was none other than the younger sister of Lee Joongoo — a man I knew all too well. Lee Yeeun.
As the saying goes, even an ox horn comes out of a soak in the kimchi brine. The day after Hayeon dropped that line on me, I summoned Yeeun straight away for her counseling session.
I hadn't chosen her on impulse alone, either. Yes, I knew Joongoo, but that didn't mean I had any intention of playing favorites.
The reason Lee Yeeun had been first in line for counseling came down to exactly one thing.
Grades.
Not that I'd known it, but apparently the name Lee Yeeun was famous — among the students, and among the teachers too. Even setting aside the name value of being Lee Joongoo's sister, word was that before enrollment, the saying went: if Jung Pilyeon is the prodigy among the boys, Lee Yeeun is the prodigy among the girls.
This was the first time an official hunter training institution had ever launched, but private tutoring among hunters had flourished for years. The government hated it — hunting talent and hard-won know-how kept getting poached — but there was no way to stop it.
And naturally, a kind of network had formed among those hunters.
Pilyeon and Yeeun were said to be the two most widely known names within it.
Rising stars. The next generation of hunters. A hero's little sister, and a young hunter who brought to mind the hero of days gone by.
Those appraisals had spread quietly among the students as well, so most everyone involved in this Academy project had known their names from before the school opened.
Well, not me!
Heck, the Hunters Association — the single most representative hub of the hunter network — was something I'd only just joined myself.
How was I supposed to keep track of every piece of gossip circulating among kids like that?
And more to the point, rumors like that weren't worth much belief anyway.
Forget everything else — a hunter who brings to mind the young hero?
A snort escaped me before I could stop it. The image of Joongoo's face had popped into my head unbidden.
Well... sure. It was the kind of talk that would get passed around, I suppose.
Setting aside what I believed good hunting should be, the two of them were, in raw ability, clearly a cut above their classmates.
In Yeeun's case, she'd been edged out by Hayeon in the last conditioning drill, but...
Counting her ability, she's beyond her.
How to put it — the total value of what she held was simply on a different scale?
Which was why she carried herself with a certain margin the others lacked.
Hayeon had only recently realized she was a hunter at all and still couldn't handle her own power properly — against that, the gap only widened.
And so, while the other students were still floundering, failing to meet my requirements, Yeeun was the first name I called.
Well — hunting monsters is the job, isn't it?
Correct.
So then.
Frankly speaking, her first impression in that one-on-one setting was... considerably strange.
I've already touched on her looks, which made you wonder where in Korea she could possibly be from — but her expression was the same way. The Joongoo I remembered was a man who wore a needlessly warm smile and radiated an air of eternal, unbothered ease.
The girl before me was nothing of the sort.
Cold — though not quite severe. Something more like... composed.
Seen up close, those sky-blue eyes resembled winter's first frost, nothing like the ones I'd seen in old photographs.
What they held was irritation. Or indifference — or weariness.
With her distinctive elegant features and her immaculately buttoned-up uniform, she didn't exactly fail to look like a delicate young lady when her mouth was shut — but I could not, for the life of me, see her as Lee Joongoo's sister.
That bastard. What exactly has he been doing, that his sister grew up with a personality like this?
No — honestly, that complaint wasn't limited to her personality alone. So I turned my gaze out the window, as if escaping her eyes, and went on.
Right. That's the role people expect of us, in the end. Monster-hunting hunters.
Haah.
It's not wrong. At the end of the day, the work we do is hunting monsters.
And that is why people call us hunters.
Despite having awakened abilities beyond the ordinary, they understood nothing — realized nothing.
They held power beyond any human's, yet could not be called more than human.
Plenty sang the praises of hunters' deeds and made heroes of them, but true heroes were few and far between.
And precisely because of that, for these fledglings, the name hunter suited far better than hero or awakened one ever would.
And yet.
The source of the vague dismay — and the irritation tangled up with it — that I was feeling right now also lay exactly there.
One man became a hunter for vengeance. Another, to make ends meet.
And this one — he became a hunter not for his own glory, but to save the people groaning under the onslaught of monsters, and at the end of that road, threw himself into politics for the sake of the hunters left suffering in his wake.
What on earth had been going through that man's head, leaving his little sister to grow into the person now sitting in front of me? I couldn't begin to guess.
Disappointment.
Perhaps that was the word for what I felt toward him.
Try using your ability.
It was an abrupt instruction, but she nodded calmly. Maybe Hayeon was right, and she'd already half-expected this.
As she rose from her seat, wind began to coil around her body. No — it wasn't wind. It was released mana, and the pure power refined from that mana, drawing in the surrounding air as it swirled.
Telekinesis.
Unlike my own power — generously rated, "not entirely useless" — this was a strength that could truly be called omnipotent.
The ability to wield a formless force with neither shape nor substance. The raw output varied with one's training, of course, but depending on how that force was released and shaped, it could be given entirely different properties besides.
In sheer versatility, it ranked at the very top among countless abilities.
Calling it omnipotent would be no exaggeration.
And yet.
Watching her deploy her power, I found my brow creasing despite myself.
A barrier of telekinesis wrapped around her entire body, like armor centered on her frame.
In other words, she had literally sheathed herself in her own ability.
The technique itself wasn't wrong. If anything, you could call it a legitimate use of an omnipotent power. Telekinesis wrapped around the whole body like that could become armor when needed, or a shield.
It earned the phrase "attack and defense as one" without embarrassment.
The problem was that I couldn't fathom why she was using her ability this way.
It wasn't an output issue. According to the records, she had once struck a target more than a hundred meters away with pinpoint telekinetic force — and her power and precision had supposedly lagged behind in nothing. There was no reason anywhere for her to handle her ability in this manner.
If she preferred telekinetic suppression at range and close-quarters brawling inside a suit of telekinetic armor, I wouldn't have said a word.
But she clung to melee combat with a stubbornness that defied explanation.
Not that she showed any particular talent for it. Her physical abilities were, generously, average. She'd certainly been through a punishing schedule, but after barely a month, she was only just now being caught by Hayeon.
With physical stats at that level, wearing a suit of telekinetic armor would only hobble her — the armor would end up dragging her around.
Besides, the girl herself didn't even seem to like close combat.
If that were all, the story would end with a simple verdict: inefficient ability usage.
In fact, even carrying a penalty like that, her execution was undeniably superb. Among the girls her age, there was simply no one else worth comparing her to.
Which was why the hunters who had tutored her had always lamented her wasteful technique.
If she performs that well with methods this inefficient, what would happen if she actually used her power properly?
And that had led, time and again, to friction between them.
But to my eyes, it was different.
What she was doing was not simply an inefficient use of power.
Inefficient? Of course it was inefficient.
And yet I could see something none of the hunters who had passed through her life ever could.
So — what do you think?
About what, sir?
You're not really asking because you don't know, are you?
Thunder God.
That distinctive method of mana control — the reason Joongoo came to be called by that name.
In other words, one of the special applications of the ability that man had carved into his own body.
A hunter is, first and foremost, a profession that hunts monsters.
...Yes, and so?
And so? Do you actually believe that what you're doing right now is suited to hunting monsters?
At the same time.
That signature — the personal technique only he could use, developed by throwing his own body into the fire a hundred times over.
The Signature that meant throwing himself away.