Just Give It Up
Sure, I'd agreed to do it, but it wasn't as if I had any clear plan of my own. In any case, my usual workload alone kept me plenty busy. Part of that was simply that I hadn't yet grown accustomed to the teaching profession — but more than that, the job itself was far busier than I'd anticipated.
On top of that, whatever else you could say about her, Lee Yeeun was a top student. With the other kids still needing to build their fundamentals from the ground up, singling out Yeeun — who was already managing reasonably well — for special attention would, no matter how you sliced it, be plain favoritism. Well, there was plenty of time. I'd put the squeeze on her in my own way, but she still had three years ahead of her to make something of herself.
...That was how I'd been thinking, anyway, but the opportunity came knocking far sooner than I'd expected.
Huh?
My eyes met Lee Yeeun's, wide and bewildered. She seemed unable to grasp what had just happened, and her utterly dumbfounded expression was quite the sight.
Tearing my gaze away from her, I shifted it across the ring. The girl standing opposite was no different. Huh? What on earth just happened? — the thought was written so plainly across her face that it all but stabbed me in the eye.
But a short while later, I could see dazed joy beginning to bleed into her flustered expression.
"Match two. Winner, Ryu Jihee. Loser, Lee Yeeun. Next pair."
"W-wait, just a moment!"
Yeeun cried out, her face a picture of panic. Of course, I had nothing particular to say to that. This was hardly a situation where she could openly contest the result. The outcome had been unambiguous; raising objections here would be nothing more than a child's tantrum. Above all, it would be an insult to the girl she'd faced.
As if that thought had caught up with her too, Yeeun flinched and stole a glance at her opponent's expression. Fortunately, the rabbit-faced girl seemed not to have heard the words Yeeun had blurted out. She was too busy holding hands with the friend beside her, hopping up and down — a rather adorable sight. Then again, I vaguely recalled hearing that she'd never once taken so much as a point off Yeeun back in middle school.
Well, no wonder she's thrilled...
Swallowing that thought, I went on applauding for the pair of them. Even if she was the great hero's little sister, venting her grievances in this atmosphere was a nonstarter. In the end, Yeeun could only trudge off the practice floor, shoulders slumped in defeat.
Truthfully, a protest wouldn't have gotten her anywhere. It might have felt unjust from where she stood, but from where I stood, not so much as a foul had been committed — which made it doubly pointless. Yeeun herself knew that better than anyone. Which meant the reason she'd raised her voice was none other than this: not because anything about the match had seemed suspect, but simply because she'd been caught off guard. In other words, the sheer shock of being caught up to — by an opponent who had never once conceded a point to her, all the way through middle school — had simply gotten ahead of her.
Hunter Academy, two weeks after its founding. This had all taken place during class.
Naturally, hunter or no, it was far too early for any of the students to show real progress. And so, just as before, class time was devoted mainly to physical conditioning. The bout I'd just witnessed was part of that, too: for students who finished their training quotas early, I was running improvised combat matches — a way to gauge their actual skill, separate from raw physical ability. More than anything, they needed to grow accustomed to moving their bodies under pressure. Accordingly, I'd instructed them to set aside winning and losing for the moment and focus instead on figuring out how best to move.
There was exactly one condition: the moment I judged someone subdued, the bout was over. It was an unrestricted match — no limits even on vital-point strikes — something I'd pushed through on the promise that I would intervene if anything went wrong. And in that improvised bout, Lee Yeeun had suffered a crushing, unambiguous defeat.
As I'd stressed time and again, this was, at bottom, a simple spar — a one-on-one, single-round match that took no account of the difference in abilities or circumstances between the two. Which was why I'd repeated, over and over, that there was no need to fixate on the result... but judging by the look she kept shooting me, I had a feeling it wouldn't end there.
Swallowing an inward sigh, I let the class run its course. Dodging a stare that was practically boring a hole through me, I brought the lesson to a close.
She's going to come find me before long, isn't she.
And sure enough, that was exactly what happened. Once that day's classes had fully wrapped up, Lee Yeeun came looking for me personally.
"Excuse me — do you have a moment right now?"
Her words were polite enough, but her manner was all but lunging at me. Honestly, who had she taken after, to be so lacking in manners? In any case, I nodded. Truth be told, it felt like a long-postponed assignment finally coming due. But since she'd sought me out herself, I couldn't very well brush her off. And watching her face light up at my single word of assent, I found I didn't have the heart to turn her away anyway.
"I've got time. Hmm — shall we take this to the lounge?"
"Yes, sir."
I wouldn't have minded talking right there, but she clearly had no appetite for it. Fair enough — no matter how you dressed it up, what Yeeun wanted to discuss was, at bottom, a complaint about a match that didn't even count toward her grades. She'd be mortified to air that in front of others, I supposed. Sure enough, she didn't open her mouth until we'd reached the lounge.
"It's about what happened in class today."
"The sparring match, you mean? Impatient as ever, aren't you."
Her blunt opening, without so much as a preamble, wrung a snort of laughter out of me. In any case, from where I stood, it wasn't much of a problem to agonize over. But then again — that was precisely the problem, and only that. Lee Yeeun, who alongside that Jung Pilyeon boy had been hailed as the undisputed top two of her middle school, was already wavering a mere two weeks into the Academy's existence. And from what I could see, those results would keep sliding — with no sign whatsoever of climbing back up. Not the way things were going.
"Did you, perhaps... tell Jihee something before we started...?"
Naturally, Yeeun herself had a fair inkling of the truth. She didn't know the exact reason, but she could guess the shape of it. She simply couldn't bring herself to admit it yet. And so her voice — which had been spouting the most transparent nonsense — gradually trailed off. She seemed well aware that her excuse was laughable even to her own ears. If she'd genuinely meant what she'd just said, even I would have had no choice but to read her the riot act.
"Tell her? I did tell her — the know-how. The same stuff I gave you."
At that, Yeeun's head sank lower still. And fair enough — I hadn't exactly given her nothing. The Academy had been open all of two weeks; it was hard to imagine any eye-catching change in the students' abilities that quickly. So before the bouts, I had shared a few pointers with the class. What ability your opponent possessed, and how they were most likely to move. How moving in such-and-such a way might prove effective against it. Simply thinking differently from your habits — moving in ways you wouldn't normally choose — widens your range of options.
And so. The girl facing her had followed my instructions to the letter, while Yeeun — so complacent against an opponent she'd never once lost to — let my advice go in one ear and out the other. The result? You saw it. For the first time in her life, Lee Yeeun had recorded a loss to Ryu Jihee.
It was only natural. After all, with Jung Pilyeon and Lee Yeeun standing as the best of the class, the gap in ability among the students wasn't nearly as wide as one might assume. There was no ecosystem-wrecking invasive species like Choi Seungjun in the mix, and whatever the future held, the abilities they could bring to bear right now were, frankly, a matter of measuring acorns — all within a hair's breadth of one another.
Of course, that didn't mean there was no difference at all. Assuming most of the students sat at E-Rank — the bare minimum for a hunter — then in one respect, at least, Pilyeon or Yeeun might well rival an active C-Rank hunter. By the Association's own standards: C-Rank.
However. Looked at from the other side, that advantage had almost no room to manifest in a bout like this. Neither hard-won experience hunting monsters nor the raw output of one's ability translates neatly to an unfamiliar setting. On top of that, Yeeun never made proper use of her greatest strength — her ability. If anything, she had a marked tendency to favor close combat, the very thing she was worst at. Judged on pure skill rather than raw numbers, the moment she closed the distance she was roughly D-Rank. In other words, a telekinetic worth C-Rank turned into a physical enhancer worth barely D the instant she entered melee.
At that point, the gap was a single rank at most — and a gap that small was more than recoverable. In fact, the method I'd taught them was no secret technique. Acknowledge that your opponent is stronger than you, read their clumsy movements, and turn them against them. Regrettably, Yeeun was clumsy in close quarters. The gulf between her aptitude and her preferences had been laid bare for all to see. Thanks to that, her opponent had been free to turn Yeeun's own clumsy attacks against her and take her down.
Gather information on your opponent, then counter it. In short: she won because she deserved to win, and Yeeun lost because she deserved to lose. That was the full extent of the assessment I could offer.
Then again, did I really 'tell her' anything~?
At the very least, that wasn't a line Yeeun had any right to say. She enjoyed a richer environment than anyone else in that room — and wasn't it she, and no one else, who'd let the advice of more than ten instructors slip past her ears?
So then, what has the young lady come to say this time?
She surely hadn't come just to hear that. She must have her own reasons. Not that I believed she'd turned over a new leaf in a matter of days... As I waved away the mental image of Lee Joongoo's smug mug, Yeeun spoke, slowly.
"Teach me."
"Teach you what?"
"How to properly handle this ability."
And then.
What came out of Lee Yeeun's mouth was, in one sense, exactly what I'd expected — and in another, completely beyond anything I'd imagined. Naturally, she hadn't come to hear me tell her to ditch the clumsy imitation and simply rain down barrages from a distance. If that had been what she meant, I'd have gladly obliged, of course~
"The way to control that power... you wish to know it, do you?"
Recalling one of the lines I'd always dreamed of delivering, I licked my lips.
"So what you're saying is — you want to get stronger while keeping that fighting style of yours?"
"That's right."
Well, it wasn't an impossible request. I'd told her before that the style didn't suit her — but that was then. Who was to say the talent of a genius fighter wasn't sleeping somewhere inside her? And yet.
"Why?"
"I'm sorry?"
"No — why now, of all times?"
That was the part I genuinely could not understand. From everything I'd observed, Yeeun's temperament was not one you could call 'easygoing' even as a joke. For all her born-lady looks, she had the tenacity of a wild horse. Which made it all the more incomprehensible. If she simply wanted to grow stronger, she could change her style right now and be done with it. If she couldn't bring herself to compromise on the style, she could raise her own skill instead. But neither path led to the teacher who'd been griping about her technique just days ago.
Truthfully, that much was obvious. If she could have compromised that easily on the question of her style, I would never have needed to launch into this wildly premature parent-teacher conference in the first place!!
And yet she had come to me — without the slightest intention of changing her style, not now or ever.
"Was losing a single spar really that galling?"
Somehow, that explanation didn't sit right. I hardly had the face of a friendly man, and I doubted I'd won her trust in a mere two weeks.
"It seems the problem lies with me, you see."
But it appeared this young lady was laboring under some manner of misunderstanding.
Well — sure, there's a problem. Where the hell were your eyes when you decided to copy that damn style of all things? I wanted to fire that back at her, but what she meant seemed to be something a little different.
"Everyone has always said the same thing. That this style is wrong. That it doesn't suit me. But I know."
"Know what?"
"This technique is strong. It has results to prove it. So if there's a problem, it must lie with me."
Her matter-of-fact confession left me feeling, for a moment, as though I'd been clubbed over the back of the head. It was as if someone had dragged the gulf in perception between me and her — and, by extension, between Lee Joongoo and Lee Yeeun, brother and sister — and shoved it right in front of my eyes.
Right. I knew the truth. So did Lee Joongoo. So did Choi Seungjun, for that matter. Joongoo's signature technique was, at its core, nothing more than a desperate stopgap — something he'd cobbled together to wring some use out of an ability that was, frankly, useless. But to Yeeun, it was something else entirely. Because it was the technique her proud older brother had used. The signature technique wielded by humanity's strongest hunter. The moment that thought landed, everything made sense.
No wonder she never listens to a word anyone says.
From where Yeeun stood, hunters who hadn't even reached A-Rank were cursing the fighting style employed by Korea's strongest hunter. For all I knew, in her own mind, merely trading words with us — instead of writing us off as second-rate B-list hacks — counted as a form of mercy...
The problem was what to do about it now. Honestly, my first instinct was to gloss over the whole thing. At this rate, we were well past the level of simply correcting an inefficient technique.
Sure, your brother might be humanity's strongest, but that technique of his is a piece of dog shit. Your brother never had anything to do with the word 'talent.'
Was I seriously supposed to persuade her with that? Now of all times? A curse tickled the back of my throat. And yet.
"That's exactly why I said it."
...Fuck.
Having sworn under my breath, I raised a hand to my brow like a visor and covered my eyes with it. And then, flashing my squeezed-shut eyes back open, I slowly steeled my resolve.
"Because it's Joongoo's technique?"
A brief silence. No answer came. Perhaps she hadn't expected that name to surface here of all places — or perhaps it was something else entirely. Rather than pick apart the silence, I lowered the hand from over my eyes.
"Just give it up."
"I'm sorry?"
"Give it up. That guy — talent in that department is the one thing he's never had. Same goes for that technique of his."
One emotion after another began layering themselves over the heavy air. Shock. Bewilderment. And then, fury. Even so, there was still no answer. By that point, I had no choice but to lift my gaze as well.
And so — barely ten seconds after making up my mind, I came to regret it. Because the face staring back at me was not one any active high school girl should have been capable of making.