Not a Hunter — a Hero
Yeeeaaang!!
Lee Yeeun's voice echoed through the sprawling mansion.
Not a single soul was home.
A residence so vast that its silence crossed over from grandeur into something faintly desolate.
Yeeun hated that quiet — the quiet that settled over her like a melancholy shroud every time she finished her day's schedule and came back to an empty house.
It was, in a manner of speaking, a kind of routine.
Her parents were gone.
The loneliness of being left behind was hardly a rarity in this day and age.
No — if anything, with a brother like hers, she probably had it better than most of the other students.
But complaining had never been a privilege reserved for the world's most pitiable soul.
And besides, grief like that — grief that seeped into the marrow — was not something a person could ever grow used to.
Which was why, despite her young age, Yeeun had become remarkably adept at smoothing her own expression into place.
It couldn't be helped that her brother, the man the world called a hero, was busy.
Every hour he squandered was an hour bought at the cost of other people's suffering — the more time he spent away from duty, the greater the harm the people endured.
And so she had wrapped her feelings up in pride.
Whenever the loneliness pressed in, she reminded herself that somewhere out there, others were being saved by him.
In her place, so that his little sister wouldn't have to wait.
……The number of times the words do you really have to go? caught in her throat was beyond counting.
Just as many were the times she'd wanted to scream, aren't there other hunters?
And yet.
Instead of saying any of it, she had pressed a smiling face over her own.
Because she already knew that whenever she wore a sullen look, her brother's face would contort as if a thorn had lodged itself in his throat.
That was the kind of person he was.
Which made it all the more remarkable that today was, in effect, the first time Yeeun had ever been grateful her brother hadn't come home yet.
What the hell is wrong with that teacher?!
Her voice rang loud and hollow through the empty house.
To be honest, even as of today, Yeeun hadn't held any particular opinion of her homeroom teacher.
No — more precisely, she hadn't been able to.
Park Woochan.
Despite introducing himself as a former hunter, her homeroom teacher had no proper record to his name whatsoever — as if the very absence were deliberate.
She could understand it, of course.
Because she knew.
During the First Incursion, the devastation the monsters had wreaked upon society had been truly staggering.
In response, the government had begun aggressively, proactively publicizing the achievements of hunters.
To plant hope in people's hearts.
That was precisely when the so-called star hunters were born.
But.
She — the younger sister not of a manufactured hero, but of a true 'hero' — knew the truth.
The vast majority of hunters scrabbled along the bottom of the industry until they simply died.
Or worse: even the ones who debuted in dazzling fashion, gracing the front page of every magazine, died just as feebly, just as meaninglessly, when their time came.
The same logic explained why the government propped hunters up as 'heroes' — a profession all too prone to warlordism.
The government was desperate enough to shoulder that risk, and the hunters they elevated were, more than anything, men who might at any moment end up as corpses rolling in the gutter.
In any case, she and Jung Pilyeon had felled monsters before.
But that amounted to nothing more than stumbling across a monster by chance and knocking it down.
Not victory wrested from a tide of monsters pouring through a gate.
Measured against active hunters — men who prepared methodically from the very start and staked everything on a battle against a gate's lord — she knew they inevitably fell short.
Her ability. Pilyeon's swordsmanship.
That was about the extent of what could stand comparison to a working hunter.
Which was why, right up until yesterday, she had genuinely been taking the classes seriously.
Her naturally earnest temperament played its part — but there was also the fact that watching him subdue Jung Pilyeon at the very first assembly had struck her as oddly satisfying.
And yet.
So what? You actually think the way you are now is suited to hunting monsters?
Grrrragh — she bit down on her pillow.
Hardly a moment after letting out a moan that wasn't even a proper scream.
'Honestly, why does that man have to put everything so damn infuriatingly?'
Having only ever known teachers who cooed our Yeeun this and our Yeeun that with unfailing kindness, the thought came to her entirely unbidden.
The problem was that his attitude wasn't born of mere insolence.
Teachers had raised objections to how she used her ability before — more than once.
But to her, her current manner of wielding that power was one of the few things she absolutely could not abandon.
So she had pushed back against those teachers.
She had cut the ties herself, on occasion.
But.
Park Woochan — her homeroom teacher — was saying something different.
What the other teachers had questioned was, at bottom, the method of using her ability itself.
A nuance of this particular application is somewhat inefficient for you.
She understood that point too, in truth, and because she had nevertheless resolved to hold her course, she had always been able to refuse with conviction.
But what Park Woochan had put on trial was not her ability. It was Yeeun herself — the one who wielded it.
……She still remembered it.
A voice threaded with a strange, quiet disappointment.
Instead of saying that application is inefficient, he had demanded: is what you've trained truly a technique meant to hunt monsters? — and the eyes that had pressed the question.
She'd had no answer.
It was as if he had dredged up every shallow thing hidden beneath her surface and laid it all bare.
The truth was, the title of hunter meant nothing to her.
What she wanted to become was not a hunter.
He had answered her before she could — as if he'd seen straight through the churn of feelings she kept buried.
You are hunters.
At the very least, what I intend to raise are hunters.
Don't think excuses like that will fly.
His little dissertation on what a hunter was.
Why, out of all the glamorous names — hero, awakened one — are they called something as plain as hunters?
That was the first thing Park Woochan had lectured them on.
Haaah…….
Anyone who knew the girl who habitually played the composed, cool-headed young lady would have been unable to hide their shock.
She'd torn at her hair like a mangy dog and shrieked, and now here she was, shoulders slumped, sighing in great heaving breaths.
And at the same time, she couldn't deny it.
Park Woochan.
Her homeroom teacher was somehow, in some way she couldn't quite name, different from every teacher she'd ever met.
Perhaps it was thanks to the name value of being the hero's little sister.
From childhood on, she had met a great many people from the industry.
And.
Every single hunter who'd ever stood before her had told her they looked forward to seeing what kind of hunter she would become.
It hadn't taken long to learn that these were not mere pleasantries.
Truly the hero's sister, aren't you?
A gift beyond any ordinary ability — already a match for active hunters.
A prodigy who'll claim a seat among the top hunters before long.
Countless hunters had showered her with such words.
They marveled that, despite having such a towering brother, she had declared without a moment's hesitation that she would become a hunter herself.
They sighed in admiration that with talent worthy of such courage, of course she could afford to boast so boldly.
Presumably the teachers who had instructed her until now had thought the same.
In any case — talent like hers.
Patch up a few flaws, and she'd be a prospect ready for the front lines tomorrow.
It would be a waste, they all said, to abandon such an uncut gem over something as trivial as clumsy ability control.
And so every last one of them had tried to lay hands on how she used her power — and every last one of them had been forced to lay down the mantle of her teacher and walk away.
But.
Park Woochan was different.
Unlike the others, he never appraised her talent.
He never betrayed even a flicker of the hunger to shape such a gem to his own liking.
No — he didn't seem interested in her talent to begin with.
That wasn't to say he neglected her.
Certainly, like every other teacher, he gave advice aimed at making the most of her gifts.
Only.
About how she actually used her ability, this was, in essence, his verdict:
If that's how you're going to do it, quit.
God, it makes me furious. Genuinely.
A feeling like her insides were smoldering.
And not merely because she felt dismissed.
……The standing of being the hero's sister. Striking looks. Talent to match.
And yet, of all the people who had ever looked at the girl guaranteed to become a star hunter someday, exactly one person had ever spoken so slightingly of her.
Yeeun-ah. You don't need to become a hunter too.
Her brother. Her brother alone.
Which only deepened Yeeun's restlessness.
Because it felt as though the very path she'd chosen had been denied.
Where on earth did Chairman Choi Seungjun dig that man up from? — before she knew it, she was grumbling aloud.
She knew it was childish. She couldn't help it.
It wasn't a relationship she could sever with a petulant I don't want your classes anymore, the way she had with all the others.
The name of the hero's little sister was useless here.
No — to begin with, her brother was hardly the kind of man who'd lend his name to something like this.
Which was exactly why Yeeun respected him.
When she was still a child — a thoughtless brat who, craving tteokbokki from a street cart, had thrown her brother's name around.
The image of him kneeling before the cart owner, who protested she'd only scooped out an extra cup because the boy was cute — what would a child know, honestly — was seared into her eyes.
That was the kind of person he was.
These were rare times indeed, when hunter arrogance had become a genuine social issue.
And though her brother stood at the very apex of that society, not once in his life had he ever traded on his name to lord it over anyone.
Not in the days right after the Second Incursion, when being a hunter itself was treated like a rank of nobility. Not after he came to be called a hero.
He had never once permitted anyone to sell his name on his behalf, either.
Frankly, in Yeeun's eyes, her brother sometimes seemed to loathe the swaggering leeches who puffed up their chests trading on their names even more than he loathed the monsters.
And honestly, that wouldn't have been far wrong.
That was who Lee Joongoo was.
The essence of a hunter lay, in the end, in chance.
A person who, one ordinary day, suddenly found great power in their hands.
An ordinary civilian who, in this mad age, happened by some twist of fate to acquire the strength to stand against monsters.
That was what a hunter meant, as Joongoo defined it.
And so Joongoo despised those who wielded violence under the banner of the name.
Having power doesn't make hunters superior to anyone else.
Just as having power doesn't oblige anyone to shoulder the duty of fighting monsters.
It was his old refrain.
The title of hero was the same in his eyes.
If anything, to him the epithet 'hero' looked like a shop sign that justified violence even more easily than the trade of hunter ever could.
And so.
Contrary to what other hunters so often said, Yeeun had not been surprised when her brother — now a hero — announced he would throw himself into politics.
To a man like Lee Joongoo, the violence he held was always something to be guarded against.
Now that his name had swelled beyond even his own control, more than ever.
……And so.
She had wanted to become someone like him.
A man who never flaunted the fact that he was a hunter.
A man who, carrying the title of hero, could still kneel without hesitation before a street-cart ahjumma.
Some sneered that he took himself far too lightly — but the girl who had knelt beside him that day had never once thought so.
To put it with a measure of exaggeration: for Yeeun, her brother was the standard of how to live, and the standard of what was right.
As it tends to be with siblings of a significant age gap.
And she was, after all, a high school girl for whom even a single year's difference could feel like a mountain.
Above all, her brother was a man whose greatness bordered on excessive even accounting for the years between them.
Perhaps that instinct simply hadn't worn off yet.
To tell the truth, the reason Yeeun had wanted to become a hunter was precisely this.
My brother is an extraordinary man.
My brother is a man worth honoring.
My brother is the man I want to become.
To Yeeun, her brother was an idol — an object of longing.
And so.
Yeeun hated Park Woochan.
What you want to be isn't a hunter. It's Lee Joongoo, isn't it?
She hated how he casually raked through a heart she had never once laid bare even to her brother.
If that's what it is, then just give up. You're a burden to everyone else.
She hated how he'd declared the dream of becoming like her brother a nuisance.
But.
What vexed her even more than all of that was her own foolishness — that she hadn't managed a single proper rebuttal to his words.
Because she knew the truth.
Yeeun did not want to be a hunter.
She wanted to be someone like Lee Joongoo.
Because.
Thank goodness.
……Because even now, Yeeun remembered the way he'd looked that day.
The terror of facing a monster alone, as a child, in a house her brother had left behind.
And the sight of him — who nonetheless came tearing back in a heartbeat and saved her.
She could summon it as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.
And so it was only natural that Yeeun had come to think the way she did.
Because the fear of that day, the dread of that day, was so overwhelming — because she never wanted it to happen again — because she couldn't understand why she'd been left in such a position — because she resented it, purely resented it — because she hated him, hated him for why her brother had abandoned her — even though she knew perfectly well that he too must be fighting somewhere at that very moment — and still, somehow, it felt as though he had abandoned her — as though he'd gone to save someone who wasn't her — and that stung, that infuriated her.
And for that very reason she understood better than anyone — because she knew what it felt like to be abandoned by the only family she had left in this world — because the look on her brother's face when he'd found her in that moment had made her happy — because the line of his mouth, trembling harder than hers, had stayed with her — because she remembered eyes shedding tears of gratitude more profound than her own — because the tremor and the sorrow soaked into the voice that said thank goodness were carved sharp and clear into her memory — because the fact that her brother had been worried about her too still ached, stiffly, in her chest.
Because she'd heard that such things still happened, everywhere, in this world — because a truth she'd known only as a story had been pressed into her own flesh — because she'd been told that children like the girl she'd been that day still overflowed across the earth — because she'd realized that, even so, she was one of the lucky ones — because it had struck her all at once that not everyone's family could be a hero — because it ached unbearably to imagine other children who, in place of the relief she'd felt at the sight of her brother that day, might have known nothing but endless, unbroken despair.
Because she had wanted to give someone — anyone — a share of the relief she had felt that day.
Let's become a hunter like my brother.
Let's become a hunter as fine as he is.
So that, just as she had felt watching him that day —
She could give people not admiration, but relief.
That was what she had decided.
And so.
I won't.
I want to become a hunter like my brother.
That's why I resolved to fight like this.
And when she had shown him the technique she had built on that resolve —
The pained expression her brother had worn was still, even now, engraved deep behind her eyelids.