The Guardian of the Gate
How was she supposed to earn points during the practical exercise?
In truth, it wasn't a question that warranted much deliberation. A gate of this caliber could only test so much. She could guess without looking — the examiners would simply be checking whether the students kept their composure inside the gate, and whether they showed any deficiencies when dealing with monsters.
And if that was all there was to it, Lee Yeeun was confident she could earn a passing score right this very moment.
It wasn't as though she'd actually be fighting for her life, after all. If she'd been ordered to clear a real gate on the spot, that would have given her trouble, but her opponents here were monsters that had been thoroughly culled in advance. She was confident she could hold her own against them until the end of this practical session.
The problem was the condition that had been imposed on her.
More precisely — the bet she'd made with Park Woochan.
The terms Park Woochan had set were maddeningly vague. Score well on this practical, and I won't say those things anymore. No — in fact, I might even apologize. If you want, I'll even teach you to fight that way...
It was a tantalizing offer. At least, it was to her. Because she remembered. A single exchange. Park Woochan, at the entrance ceremony, felling that Jung Pilyeon with one blow before anyone even understood what was happening.
And so she could be certain of one thing. Perhaps thanks to having such an extraordinary older brother? Her discerning eye, honed since childhood by watching countless hunters, told her plainly that that scruffy homeroom teacher was one of the most formidable fighters she had ever laid eyes on.
But that very fact was precisely what made her uneasy. There was no question that Lee Yeeun was an excellent hunter. The ability that had her hailed, alongside Jung Pilyeon, as the vanguard of the next generation of hunters was no hollow boast. And it was precisely because she was who she was that she knew a truth better than anyone.
Among the boys, there was Jung Pilyeon; among the girls, there was Lee Yeeun.
That was how they were always spoken of — yet in truth, she had never once come out ahead of Jung Pilyeon.
The conditions were equal. No, they had favored her, if anything. Her opponent was merely some sword-dojō graduate, while she, with a hero for an older brother backing her since childhood, possessed conditions better suited to becoming a hunter than anyone else alive.
And yet, she still couldn't beat Jung Pilyeon.
The truth was, her neglect of close-quarters combat owed something to Jung Pilyeon himself. Rather than pour everything into a melee duel she had no hope of winning against him, she'd instead leveraged her versatile power to pressure everyone else...
The words Park Woochan had used to call her out were, in a sense, painfully accurate. Cruelly so. He had aimed, all at once, at her brother, at her standing, and at the inferiority complex she harbored toward Jung Pilyeon.
Which was exactly why it gnawed at her all the more. Her opponent was Park Woochan — the man who had tossed even that Jung Pilyeon aside in a heartbeat. In the eyes of a man like that, would merely holding her own during this practical count as a "good grade"?
Absolutely not.
She didn't know about anything else, but even Jung Pilyeon could manage that much. Conversely — could she, at the end of this session, stand tall and claim she deserved the vanguard's position over Jung Pilyeon? Frankly, Lee Yeeun was skeptical. The terms of the bet were vague enough that she could probably argue her way into it, but she would never be able to accept such a hollow victory.
I need to take the Guardian.
Lee Yeeun's declaration had sprung from exactly that line of thinking.
The Guardian — in other words, the master of the gate. The apex predator within a given gate, designated by the gate itself as it spewed mana and radiated its countless monsters. Guardian-class beings carried vastly more mana than any of their lesser kin; they were, in essence, the heart of the gate. From the monsters' standpoint, they were their commanders; from the hunters', the chief culprits behind a gate's difficulty rating.
If she hunted down the Guardian, even Park Woochan would have no grounds to fault her grade. The same would hold even against Jung Pilyeon. There was only one Guardian per gate — and Jung Pilyeon hadn't yet taken his practical. Which meant that if she could slay the Guardian now, the top grade of this entire practical session would be hers, and hers alone. That was the calculation.
Indeed, none of the other students had managed to hunt a Guardian so far. No — most of them were still gaping in a daze at the alien scenery inside their first gate. Some had blundered repeatedly out of sheer panic, fumbling against monsters they should have dispatched easily. If she took the Guardian, the bet was as good as won.
So what was the problem?
The problem was that this practical was conducted in pairs.
The Guardian hunt was, strictly speaking, entirely Lee Yeeun's personal affair. The others had already earned grades more than sufficient for them — grades they didn't, in truth, desperately need. Convincing them to go along with it was going to take considerable effort.
Had she been paired with anyone else, it wouldn't have been much of a concern. Ryu Jihee, for instance, would have read her intentions — the desire to settle the score with Jung Pilyeon — without needing to be told, and even the others would hardly have raised serious objections.
The hero's little sister. At the same time, a rising star hailed as the next generation of hunters.
To her fellow aspiring hunters, Lee Yeeun was something of a charismatic figure.
The problem was that her partner, of all people, had turned out to be Ja Hayeon.
To Lee Yeeun, Ja Hayeon was an uncomfortable presence. How could she not be? This was the name that had topped the girls' rankings from the very first class, edging her out.
Yet only now, paired together like this, did she learn certain things she never could have otherwise.
Perhaps if that hadn't happened, Lee Yeeun might have simply kept feeling awkward around her.
Her skill was not lacking. If anything, it made Yeeun wonder why she'd never even heard the girl's name before. Her teacher's instruction must have been exceptional. At least in Yeeun's eyes, Ja Hayeon's raw physicality, her mindset, and her versatility with her ability were all already at passing level.
The teachers surely hadn't intended to pair their own daughter-figure — a girl whose name nobody had ever heard — with her. But honestly, it felt like cheating.
For one thing, she was calm. She didn't panic, no matter what happened. Even Lee Yeeun had flinched involuntarily at the sight of monsters she'd never seen before in her life, but Ja Hayeon hadn't shown a flicker of disturbance — she'd simply weakened the monsters with her ability and asked Yeeun to lend a hand.
Her ability was excellent too. Curses. When she'd first heard of it, she couldn't quite picture what kind of power it was, but it seemed nearly as all-purpose as her own telekinesis. Strength, agility — and beyond those, it degraded even reaction speed and durability, a whole gift set of debuffs. And Ja Hayeon's mastery of it was beyond question; even in the chaos of a melee with friend and foe tangled together, she pinned down exactly the right targets, every time.
Not as good as me, but better than the average for our age.
That was the assessment Lee Yeeun could give of Ja Hayeon.
Maybe her own suggestion to hunt the Guardian had been, in part, a response to her, too. The thought occurred to her belatedly as Lee Yeeun slowly lifted her gaze.
"About what?"
If she asked that, Yeeun would inevitably have to hesitate. Not because she wouldn't know how to answer — but because the answer was simply too embarrassing to give.
In Lee Yeeun's eyes, Ja Hayeon seemed almost divorced from the mundane world.
Decent skill. And yet, despite that, no reputation whatsoever. Perhaps it was the combination of those two facts that made her pay more attention to Ja Hayeon's shadows than necessary. But the girl carried a strange atmosphere that left Yeeun no choice but to see her that way.
If Lee Yeeun was the charismatic one, then Ja Hayeon was the mysterious one. At least as far as Yeeun could tell, Ja Hayeon showed no interest whatsoever in the things her peers cared about — she seemed to keep even her life at the Hunter Academy, the very place that would decide her future, at arm's length.
Granted, if you asked the girl herself, she'd probably say she was simply grateful to be able to attend high school at all. Still.
An immortal, more than a human. The feeling was like watching a butterfly that had shed the mortal world to drift on the wind. And her looks made it all the more striking — features rare even among hunters. Pearl-colored eyes that were said to be impossible in ordinary humans. And hair of that vivid bluish-pink, a shade you'd sooner find in nature than on a person...
Yeeun's own prominence was, in the end, the work of her brother rather than herself — but whether people liked it or not, most had no choice but to shrink before that radiance. Thanks to a rigorous upbringing from earliest childhood, she never exploited it, but even so, such an environment could hardly help shaping her character.
She had her own gifts to boot — her ability as a hunter, and her natural looks in equal measure. As a result, she'd grown into someone not quite arrogant, but undeniably overbearing.
Which was why, before Ja Hayeon, Lee Yeeun found herself strangely — shrinking.
Ja Hayeon paid her almost eerily little attention. Despite being neck-deep in the hunter industry, she acted as though she'd only just learned the name Lee Yeeun. If anything, she seemed to give no thought to Lee Jun-gu's name any more than to Yeeun's own.
In the end, he's just a person. And a hunter.
That was the attitude she seemed to carry.
Had the other party been some celebrity off the television, that supreme nonchalance would have had Yeeun anxious on her behalf. On the days she barely suppressed the urge to grab the girl by the collar and lecture her — how can you be so oblivious? How do you expect to survive in society? Shall I tell you exactly who my brother is? — she'd find herself privately deflated, wondering if she'd always been this insufferable.
That was the kind of person this strange classmate was.
Always wearing that blank, what is any of this face — yet despite that empty expression, more detached than anyone. And bold enough to stride right across the distance everyone else found so hard to approach.
She'd never dealt with a type like this before.
That was why she found Ja Hayeon so difficult.
There's really no need, is there? The teacher said so himself.
The words chirped like jade beads rolling, just like those pearl-colored eyes of hers.
It wasn't wrong. This was, after all, a training exercise. They were to treat it like a real situation, but it remained an exercise through and through. As a real situation, a two-person attempt on the Guardian wasutterly reckless; as an exercise, there was no compelling reason to do it at all.
In the end, Lee Yeeun let out a quiet sigh. It was a sound of concession — of acceptance.
It's just that I have some... personal reasons.
That didn't mean she intended to walk away empty-handed. In other words, that sigh had meant exactly that: awkward as this is, I suppose I have no choice but to persuade this girl.
Of course, whatever her personal reasons were, they were none of Ja Hayeon's concern.
"Like what?"
"...Huh?"
"Your personal reasons. What are they?"
"...I have those. Personal reasons. I told Teacher Park Woochan about them too."
It wasn't a lie. At least, Lee Yeeun believed it wasn't. Having staked a bet on earning a good grade in this practical, she figured a somewhat bold gambit on her end was only fair play.
But Ja Hayeon said, flatly:
"Liar."
"Wh-what?"
"Teacher would never say that. He's the type who puts survival above everything else. That person gave you permission to attack the Guardian with only two of us? Really?"
She was exactly right. In truth, Lee Yeeun, hearing those words, could only nod with a pricked conscience. But what stirred in her chest in that moment was the peculiar certainty woven into Ja Hayeon's words.
They'd known each other barely a month. So where did that certainty come from? No — rather, where did that emotion come from? Beyond the conviction that Park Woochan would never say such a thing, there was something else — a look that regarded Yeeun, the girl who'd spouted such nonsense, with something dangerously close to...
Scorn?
And then —
"...What now."
"Don't talk about the teacher so casually. He's not the kind of person to say things like that — or to hear them."
At that clipped, biting tone, the corners of Lee Yeeun's eyes twitched.
What leapt into her heart in that instant was a small flare of alarm, and beneath it, a certainty far larger. Awkward as it was to admit, wasn't it practically a given that students rag on their homeroom teacher? And yet here was this girl spouting such strait-laced nonsense.
No — it went beyond that. Pure, simple displeasure. Or something that surpassed even that: a warning. The emotion Ja Hayeon had let slip just now was unmistakably personal.
Absurd.
The thought carried her there, and before she knew it, the words had left her mouth. She could see Ja Hayeon's brow furrowing at a glance, but at this point she didn't care anymore.
Park Woochan and Ja Hayeon knew each other. And privately, at that — probably.
When the thought reached that point, Lee Yeeun felt a surge of something unpleasant she couldn't suppress. She had no idea how the two of them had come to know each other. But having just heard something bordering on a provocation said to her face, Ja Hayeon looked to her like nothing more than a watcher Park Woochan had stationed at her side.
Under normal circumstances, she'd have scoffed at the idea outright — pure paranoia. Awkward as it was to admit, her opponent was merely a student, and this session was just the once-a-month training exercise. What possible reason would anyone have to assign a watcher for something like that?
If she had to name a reason, it was, once again, that the situation itself was bad.
Lately, Lee Yeeun had no room in her heart. Three years of nursing a quiet sense of defeat against Jung Pilyeon. Then, at the Hunter Academy she'd finally entered, she'd met a teacher who had subdued the very Jung Pilyeon — who hadn't even been able to lift a finger against her — in a single move.
And just as she was thinking fortune had smiled on her, that the teacher was her own homeroom instructor no less — that very teacher told her the technique didn't suit her, and to give it up.
Worse, Park Woochan knew perfectly well that this technique belonged to her brother, Lee Jun-gu. Yet despite its proven track record, he had pressed her again and again to abandon it.
Why?
Was she insufficient to wield it?
Unqualified?
The moment those thoughts surfaced, Lee Yeeun was swallowed by a feeling she couldn't put into words. A feeling as if the thread that had connected her to her brother since her childish days had been denied. She'd thrown herself into practice harder than ever to look away from it — but no positive results had come.
Someone would surely say it: hoping for results in a mere two weeks was far too hasty. And besides, even if Ja Hayeon had been keeping watch over her at Park Woochan's behest, she'd never actually gotten in her way.
But while that might have held on any ordinary day, right now Lee Yeeun's circumstances were far too bitter for such reasonable thoughts.
"Forget it."
"What?"
"So either you stay here, or you head out on your own — I don't care. I'll take the Guardian myself."
"Are you insane?"
Even Ja Hayeon couldn't just stand there after hearing that. It was true this was only a training exercise, but knowing Park Woochan's temperament as she did, splitting up when there were only two of them was a surefire path to a terrible grade. And if that happened, Ja Hayeon — who lived under the same roof as Park Woochan — would never be able to hold her head up again...
She couldn't allow it to go that far. Thinking so, she reached for Yeeun's shoulder — and in the next instant, Yeeun's hand whipped out and struck sharply at the back of hers.
Then Ja Hayeon could hardly back down either. Their gazes collided in the empty air, and without needing to decide who went first, both of them curled their noses in a sneer.
The ambient mana blanketing their surroundings began to bend, each girl dragging it under her own control — a situation poised on a knife's edge, one breath from ignition.
It was at exactly that moment that the gate began to tremble.