Chapter 21
Time slipped by in a flash. Two weeks after that, the practical training was finally right on top of us.
In the meantime, Lee Yeeun had kept a surprisingly low profile. She hadn't come looking for me again even once within days of that, nor had she gone around serving up trash talk about me and souring the mood. If anything, she seemed determined to make good on her own words, throwing herself into class with even more earnestness than before.
Granted, there was no dramatic improvement to point to just yet. Even so, the fact that she'd begun showing interest in the areas she'd half-neglected all this time — the ones she'd trusted her raw power to carry her through — was unquestionably a good sign.
Objectively speaking, Lee Yeeun's physical abilities weren't bad. She'd actually posted top-tier results in conditioning, for that matter. And yet. Measured against her power, they had to be called relatively lacking — lacking enough, in fact, that she'd fall behind even Ja Hayeon, a girl who'd only just become a hunter.
If I had to rank things: her ability sat at the very top. Her fitness was upper-tier among the students, while her pure close-combat skill hovered around average, maybe a hair below.
The problem was that the single most important element of the tactics Yeeun currently employed was close-combat technique. Fitness came second. Power ranked dead last. Laid out in order of importance, that was the list — in other words, a style that ran exactly contrary to her aptitudes. All the more so once you factored in her mismatched powers of lightning and telekinesis. No wonder the whole thing felt like a suit of clothes cut for someone else.
In any case. Now that I was the one in charge, I had no intention of providing an environment where she could shove her way to a forced victory on raw ability, the way she had back in middle school. Against monsters, that approach was a non-starter to begin with.
Which is to say, whatever her private reasons, the changes she'd made so far weren't bad at all. The problem lay somewhere else entirely.
"Will it be all right?"
"With what?"
The field.
With the full-scale practical looming, every student in the academy had gathered on the grounds. A somewhat restless sight, but there was nothing for it. Calibrating and managing a gate was no simple matter — no one could promise it was safe to begin with, and this was a thing of that caliber they meant to use for training. If anything, the way I saw it, this level of bustle was exactly right. Choi Seungjun himself was standing by atop a platform against the worst-case scenario, after all. If anything went wrong, his first order of business would be getting the students evacuated, fast. The entire formation existed for that purpose.
Fortunately, nobody had complained. However much the age of peace had supposedly returned, a gate was a gate. One thing gone awry, and the whole affair could snowball into a mass-casualty catastrophe in the blink of an eye. The schedule that crammed every practical into a single day existed for the same reason. Bluntly put, better to blast through the itinerary in one lightning sitting than hold a gate open for days on end. A hassle, certainly — but hassles don't weigh much against lives.
And so I, too, had led my class down to the field. Even with the entire student body assembled, the academy grounds felt relatively sparse — partly an unavoidable consequence of the project's design, given that even the hand-picked cream of the next hunter generation probably didn't crack a hundred heads. The wind drifting across the desolate field carried a distinctly ominous chill.
The one calmly fielding my questions in the middle of it all was, naturally, Ja Hayeon. Since we could always talk properly back at the boarding house, this was less a counseling session than small talk conducted under its banner. Then again — it had been barely two months since she'd even learned she was a hunter. For her to suddenly face a practical against monsters, worry was only natural.
And yet Hayeon was oddly calm. No — she looked so utterly composed that she was leisurely running through warm-up stretches.
"No, but it's your first practical. Aren't you worried?"
Of course it would be. This industry, after all, never told you what was coming. It was the very reason an S-rank hunter like Choi Seungjun was being parked over a mere E-rank gate — a world where even an A-rank hunter who let his guard down could end up as an E-rank monster's freak-show exhibit, torn limb from limb.
Besides, she'd stood face-to-face with the genuine article before. It would probably be easier going than those lizard whelps we'd seen last time, sure... but the human heart has never been such a simple thing. Frankly, there were plenty of hunters out there whose bodies locked up at the mere sight of a monster, all because of an experience being caught in a gate. In the end, those folks inevitably retired — the only question was whether they hung it up early and went on living like people, or lost an arm and a leg before the lesson landed. That was trauma for you. Overcome it, and nothing in the world could be better; but there was no guarantee, none at all, that it could be overcome. It had never been my lot in life, but I couldn't help worrying all the same. At least she looked fine on the outside. What went on underneath was anyone's guess.
"Don't worry. There won't be anything for you to worry about, Oppa."
"Hey, hey. None of that here."
I answered gruffly at the endearment that had popped out of nowhere. Thanks to circumstances beyond my control, I was currently sharing a roof with the girl — a situation practically begging for public condemnation. Pile on the teacher-student dynamic, the jobless layabout and the high school girl, and it only got worse. This was the first job I'd ever had, after all — and one that, these days, supplied me with monsters like clockwork once a month. A workplace straight out of heaven. For a man who'd spent right up until yesterday making the rounds of the gates under the pretext of inspections, I had to be careful, however remote the chance of trouble.
At that, Hayeon burst into a snort of laughter. Well, well, was the first reaction that came to me. The way she smiled now, so easily at ease, was a far cry from the girl I'd first met.
Then again, who was I to say anything.
If she said she was fine, then fine, I decided, rubbing the back of my neck. Fortunately, the gate itself looked to be in perfectly decent shape. Well, it had better be — otherwise there'd have been no point to my rolling around in it these past few days. Selfish as the motive was, the gate had been discharging its mana nonstop in the form of monsters, and it now sat in a remarkably stable state.
Which meant the problem, as ever, lay with the people rather than the gate.
This test would be run in pairs, or teams of three. Mind, I'd have loved to organize them into squads of four or five, just like a real deployment... but with barely twenty students to a class, there was no helping it. As things stood, fielding bigger teams would require cooperation across classes — and the trouble was, they'd rarely so much as practiced coordinating with their own classmates. I could hardly disagree with the observation that it would be asking too much of chicks who couldn't yet handle their own abilities. Which meant this practical was, in truth, little more than an appetizer. Its real meaning, you might say, lay in the experience of meeting a monster at all. The genuine training would begin only after they'd drilled coordination with their classmates a few times — and once they'd grown reasonably proficient, we could start mixing classes and shaking things up. That's simply how this industry works: unless you've locked in a fixed party, you can never count on deploying with the people you want. And even then, this business has a talent for punching holes in a roster when you least expect it. Hunters dying is one thing; a person can hardly make it through life without a single complication.
Team assignments, therefore, had been left entirely to the teachers' discretion. Close friends and middle-school cliques were deliberately split apart. To keep the teams balanced, homeroom teachers weren't even permitted to lay a finger on their own class's roster. Fair to say that, for an ad-hoc distribution, it had achieved a respectable degree of fairness.
And. To any teacher unaware of the situation behind the scenes, Lee Yeeun was, first to last, an exemplary student. There was the name value of being a hero's little sister, too. Her polished looks and brash confidence had never earned so much as a wrinkle of criticism. More than enough to call her, alongside Jung Pilyeon, a pillar of Class A. The perfect profile, say, for guiding a classmate-turned-hunter who'd only awakened two months ago.
And so Lee Yeeun and Ja Hayeon had been assigned to the same team for this practical — as I said, under the official justification of pairing Class A's finest student with its newest hunter. It wasn't a lie, to be fair. On paper, it was a perfectly sensible arrangement. Beyond skill and track record, their abilities complemented each other nicely: telekinesis, with its near-universal versatility, and curse magic, which by its very nature had to be wielded by whittling enemies down. I'm the one doling out these armchair critiques, but even so, the pair should pass a trial run like this without breaking a sweat. Hayeon's skills had genuinely come a long way lately, after all — her baseline fitness had always been decent, and she was growing steadily more comfortable with her ability.
Therefore, I must reluctantly issue a correction. The problem was the person. The problem was the pairing. Or, to put it more precisely, the problem was Lee Yeeun. A young lady who, unlike her brother, had climbed the elite track step by careful step — only to be shaken of late by a defeat she never saw coming. And perhaps because I'd twisted the knife on top of it, there were unmistakable signs of a certain confusion. Best case, she was simply devoting herself to practice; but even granting that, whether she was capable of cooperating with a partner was a question that worried me deeply. Of course, this practical was partly designed to flush out exactly those problems... though I very much doubted Hayeon herself saw it that way. I stole a glance at her profile. I suspected that, from where she stood, it looked like I was using this practical as a convenient excuse to hand the burden off to her. We had talked about Yeeun these past few days, after all, whether we liked it or not.
Well — going by everything I'd observed so far, Hayeon didn't seem to care much either way.
"Have you two talked?"
"With whom?"
"You know — your partner, over there."
"No, not yet. She hardly speaks up in class these days to begin with."
...I had meant to offer a word of encouragement, and instead walked away with something that only deepened my unease. A faint sigh. Part of me didn't much feel like saying anything anyway, but more than that, anything further would have been downright pathetic, so I shut my mouth. Good grief. I'd gone and become a full-blown pushover.
Among the students, some had eyes shining at the sight of a monster for the first time in their lives, while others staggered about, utterly deflated. The teacher actually leading them, meanwhile, was a bundle of nerves. Fair enough, really. He might never have carved up a monster in his life — and this was his first time teaching students, too. I snorted at the sight.
"We'll be starting on our end shortly, too. Alright, everyone — get ready!"
At the sharp crack of my clapping hands and the bark of my voice, even the students who'd been half-slouching until that moment began pulling themselves upright. I surveyed them slowly. Some burned with fighting spirit, some checked over their gear — each steeling themselves in their own way. Quite a few were trying rather too hard, mind you.
Then, all at once, my eyes met Lee Yeeun's. The sky-blue gaze that had been staring blankly into the air moments before took on a sharp, chilly gleam. And then — well, well. Who knew what thought had struck her, but strength flooded into the arms she'd been letting dangle. No — now she'd outright snapped her head around. Good grief. How was I supposed not to worry.
I barely managed to swallow the sigh boiling up my throat. Either way, the practical itself would go off without a hitch. Same for the equipment, same for the gate. With both Choi Seungjun and me on site, the odds of anything going wrong were slim to none. No — I was confident enough to make certain that nothing did. And yet, despite it all, a strange premonition — one insisting this would not end peacefully — left the back of my neck tingling.