A World Apart
The world beyond a gate was dizzyingly wide, and vaster still than that. Though rare sights these days, only a few years ago gates had revealed themselves anywhere and everywhere—calamities that tore open the empty air like punched holes and spewed out monsters without end. Like the mark left behind when reality's laws of physics shattered, a gate blown clean through space looked, quite literally, like a scar this world would never shed.
Who had first thought to set foot inside one, no one could say. One could guess it was one of those earliest hunters, blind with vengeance—but even if that guess were true, it was easy to imagine they hadn't been left in any state to yield so much as a single bone.
Everyone who stepped within came away thinking the same thing. The world beyond the gate. A rift severed, quite literally, a dimension away from reality—and the first thing to greet a hunter entering that fissure was a landscape of unrelenting desolation.
Seas whose surfaces knew no end. Depths whose floors no one had ever found. On occasion, a gate even opened adrift in the distant sky. And yet, for all that variety, every scene beyond a gate was alike in one respect: withered, twisted, and barren. The earth was parched and split with cracks, and as for the seas, it was doubtful the stagnant stuff pooling there had ever been water at all. Even the sky would sometimes shift its color into hues no one had names for, and the disorientation was beyond all telling.
Inside, no law of physics kept its meaning. The fancy that the rules of the world outside—our world—would apply out of simple courtesy found no purchase there. Gravity vanishing was routine; there were even places where the sun rose and set in the wrong direction.
Worst of all were the spaces that carried a concept or property of their very own. Moisture freezes on contact with the air—at that level, a gate was almost cute. The worst it meant was a scratch turning fatal. There were even gates that hung up rules like all living things die.
That was why so many researchers came to call the world beyond the gates by another name. The Otherworld. Quite literally, a separate world where entirely different laws held sway.
The trap lying in wait for hunters beyond a gate was precisely that kind of thing. The world you faced was the enemy. And so, clearing a gate naturally devoured enormous manpower—countermeasures, research, layer upon layer of it—before hunters could finally set foot inside.
Even then, nothing was guaranteed. However many preliminary experiments observed the far side, it was all but a given that some unforeseen order lay coiled within. Of course, all of that effort was merely the price of admission. If a gate's peculiar nature was a nasty trap, what was tested beyond it was nothing more—and nothing less—than pure skill as a hunter.
A gate was the cradle that birthed monsters, and their nest besides. The number of them lurking inside was beyond any comparison with the outside world. That was exactly why, when clearing a gate, they dispatched hunters a full rank or more above the gate's rating.
Inside gates where—day and night aside—it was anyone's guess whether the concept of time even existed, hunters cut down the monsters that came surging like waves. If the monsters' flow was a wave, then each individual monster was a single droplet of water. Clearing a gate, in other words, was the trial of standing against a crashing surf without letting one droplet strike you.
And so—when even slow, forward steps became a struggle, when the skin wrapped around the whole body felt nothing but heavy—hunters witnessed the end of the world.
It was a landscape like some tacky conspiracy theorist's utopia given form. The edge of the world, the kind flat-earthers always imagined. Was there anywhere else the phrase fit so precisely?
Countless hunters described the sight in much the same way: the sea that had stretched boundless, the sky that had run endless, the earth that had crumbled to dust—and then, at some point, a place where it all simply cut off. Strangely enough, even at that final moment the sea went on receiving the current that poured over from beyond the empty boundary, folding it into its own body.
Anyone who found that odd might just discover an interesting fact: even in the very moment hunters set foot inside, the world within the gate was still expanding. Quite literally, beyond the gate—little by little, the world was revealing itself past the empty void. That, too, was why the hole that strewed monsters across the world was called a gate. A gate: a doorway joining one world to another. A gate was, to the letter, a world unto itself.
The place Lee Yeeun and Ja Hayeon had stepped into was no different. Beneath the Hunter Academy. The gate nestled past the corridor that linked to the training field was, in that sense, an exceedingly safe one. Its quirk: the monsters that appeared within changed according to the temperament of those clearing it. Back when it was first conquered, it had been infamous as one of the hellish gates, but these days it was little more than a mild nuisance. With the monsters culled on a regular cycle, the best that popped out was a D-rank at most.
Of course, given its nature, things would turn ugly if control ever failed. That was half the reason the Academy had been built right on top of it, of all places—hunters had to be stationed on-site against the unlikely worst. And for all anyone knew, the reason an S-rank hunter like Choi Seungjun had taken office as principal was tied to it considerably as well.
Not that any of it mattered anymore, thanks to a certain teacher who culled the monsters with a diligence so unwavering it was almost eerie. It was no exaggeration to say the place had next to no chance of running wild. And so nothing hindered the two girls' advance. Three monsters that had been lunging at them only moments before had just burst apart inside Lee Yeeun's grasp.
Which left Ja Hayeon free to observe Lee Yeeun at her leisure. Honestly speaking, in Hayeon's eyes, Yeeun cut a rather ambiguous figure.
She had heard the stories, of course. More precisely, stories about the hero—Yeeun's older brother—rather than about Yeeun herself. No, as for the latter, she had even seen him with her own eyes. It would be no exaggeration to say she knew far more about Yeeun's family than any run-of-the-mill rumor. And yet even she could find nothing sharp or unkind to point at in Lee Yeeun. She was a doll of a girl. In the good sense, and in the bad.
The long golden hair that rippled down to her waist, the eyes that sparkled a pale sky-blue—none of it looked out of place on her. Unlike Hayeon, who mere months ago couldn't have imagined attending high school at all, the uniform sat on Yeeun as if it had always belonged there. A young lady raised in a fine house. A nobleman's daughter. That was the impression. Compared to an orphan like her, the girl simply seemed to live in a different world. She wasn't sure the word was fair to use about someone her own age, but elegant suited Lee Yeeun to the letter.
Her personality was much the same. In a sense, you'd have to call it fitting. To borrow Park Woochan's phrasing, she had the kind of face that made "she's Korean" sound like a punchline. As if the exotic features weren't enough, she carried herself, always, with an air that discouraged approach.
Hard to get close to. That was the only verdict she could reach.
...Not that she would go so far as to say Yeeun spurned everyone who came near. Only, she seemed reluctant to mingle with people any more than necessary. It wasn't that she quietly looked down on others, or held them at arm's length. Nothing like that. She simply looked, quite literally, like a woman with better things to do—as if she had no particular wish to spend her time on the people around her. That was the feeling, if it had to be put into words. The sort of relationship where, had Hayeon never become a hunter—or never been assigned to the same team this time—they might never have exchanged a single word.
And so. Ja Hayeon could not understand why Park Woochan paid Lee Yeeun such close attention.
To tell the truth, she hadn't thought much of it at first. But even so, a few days together were enough to notice certain things. That Park Woochan was gathering information on Lee Yeeun, for one. He seemed to be trying not to make a show of it, but to her eye it stuck out all the same. Then again, with talk going around that Mr. Park Woochan had clashed with student Lee Yeeun in the staff room, she couldn't have missed it if she'd tried.
What had caught her attention above all was the rumor that Park Woochan had called Yeeun all the way to the lounge and, under the pretext of her grades, made some unsavory demand of her. Naturally, she hadn't believed a word of it. If anything, she'd nearly laughed every time the story made the rounds—because it brought back her old self, the girl who had once entertained thoughts like that even while receiving Park Woochan's help.
Only, she was curious. It felt a little wrong to say, but among hunters, Lee Yeeun was a genuine celebrity. The hero's younger sister. An air of distinction that made her look like a young lady of even rarer polish. So Park Woochan had to have known as well—known that getting close to Lee Yeeun would set tongues wagging one way or another. All the more so for a man who, right up until his appointment at the Academy, had agonized over everything from having no career to write in the experience column of a résumé.
Hayeon herself was a case in point. Wasn't he forever looking after her in one way or another, on the pretext that rumors of a student and a teacher living under one roof would do no one any good? And yet, despite all that, Park Woochan kept an oddly close watch on Lee Yeeun. Why?
That, more than anything, was what gnawed at Ja Hayeon. It felt a little wrong to say, but surely he wasn't trying to do the girl some favor on account of her being the hero's sister. This was the man who had spewed outright abuse at the hero's face when they crossed paths that day. Besides, the Park Woochan she knew wasn't nearly sharp-eyed enough to pull off that kind of political maneuvering.
And so what remained in her chest was a strange disquiet, and no small measure of discontent. Wasn't it self-evident? In this society, Lee Yeeun was as strong as they came. It had been a good twenty years since the word "connections" evaporated—since hometown ties and bloodlines came to mean one thing only: knowing a hunter. In that world, Lee Yeeun had a brother hailed as humanity's strongest, and thanks to him she had grown up without a single hardship. You could call her a sheltered young lady, plain and simple. Who knew—unlike Hayeon of a few months ago, she had probably never once lain awake wondering how she would feed herself going forward, or whether she might have to sell her body. Before any of that, she had likely taken her enrollment at this Academy for granted, too.
Unlike me.
In Ja Hayeon's eyes, Lee Yeeun was a creature living in a different world than her own. The question began exactly there. It felt a little wrong to say, but if you asked which of the two had it harder—Ja Hayeon or Lee Yeeun—nine out of ten would have named the former.
...It was true that she, too, unlike most, had met the stroke of fortune called Park Woochan and won her life back. These days she could even stand at the Academy, training to become a hunter. Even so, if you asked which of the two was in greater need of someone's concern, it would still be her, wouldn't it? And yet Park Woochan brought up Lee Yeeun even at the dinner table. Worse, he used her own counseling hours to fire off his questions about Yeeun.
Not that she didn't understand. She could have those talks at home well enough. No—from the very start, she had no standing to demand anything extra from Park Woochan. Until recently, her future had been pitch-black, and he was the single lamp let into that darkness. She hadn't become shameless enough to forget that even this was his grace. She knew, too, that her circumstances ranked among the best of any orphan living in this era. Which was why no amount of thanks could ever repay the man who had built her this place to stand on her own as a hunter.
Only. There was no reason she owed Lee Yeeun a shred of that gratitude. And so the sullen feeling naturally turned not toward Park Woochan, but toward Lee Yeeun. At least as far as she could see, Yeeun showed no sign of being a problem. Impeccable conduct. No family complications. Ability beyond question. But ever since that counseling session with Yeeun a while back, Park Woochan had been watching her, steady and unblinking. Was it, after all, just the banner of being the hero's sister? Or was there some other reason? Thought through coldly, it had to be the latter. She wanted to believe it was.
Personal opinion, but she didn't think her own looks fell short. Skill, she could cultivate with time. But the banner reading hero's sister was the one card no one could play against. Therefore, that was the answer she had given. Be careful, he'd told her. Keep her guard up. Or—was she truly going to be fine, placed on a team with Lee Yeeun? To Park Woochan asking after her like that, she'd been able to reply, perfectly composed, that it was nothing. Because Ja Hayeon had been watching for her chance to take Lee Yeeun's measure from the very beginning.
In that sense, this practical exercise was the perfect opportunity. At least for her, that was the only thing that mattered right now.