What's This About Yoonha?
* * *
Something about Yoonha, you say?
After that.
As the old saying goes, you strike while the iron is hot — so with that in mind, we decided to head out and buy a phone.
Hayeon finished getting ready first and waited outside the room, and I was tossing out whatever topics came to hand so she wouldn't get bored waiting. She'd clearly started out talking about what happened during the last practical exercise, but somewhere along the way, without my even noticing, we'd drifted onto today's hottest topic of conversation in our class: our resident delinquent.
Hwang Yoonha.
I feel a little awkward saying this, but right up until she so brazenly started skipping school, she hadn't been a student who stood out.
Her grades aside, you might say there was nothing sharp or out of place about her. She got along reasonably well with the other students, had never caused trouble during class, carried no record of prior misconduct, and until recently had even been an enthusiastic participant in lessons.
These days, of course, she was a problem child who skipped school entirely.
Well, whatever the matter, gathering information is essential to solving anything.
Since the topic had come up, I applied the lesson I'd learned with Lee Yeeun and asked Hayeon about it — but the answer wasn't exactly enlightening.
"Hmm, hard to say? Honestly, there's no one Yoonha's noticeably close with. Ah, but no one's on bad terms with her either."
Come to think of it, my own memory agreed.
Frankly, Yoonha was somewhat of an outsider in the class. How should I put it — she was oddly difficult to approach? Not exactly the right word to use about kids not even twenty years old, but she was the type to carry a distinctive aura about her.
Her sharp features only added another stroke to that impression. With her long hair pulled up into a ponytail and her listless eyes rolling this way and that, Yoonha's appearance did, in fact, look exactly like a classic delinquent. Strange and hard to deal with, you might say. I'm hardly in a position to talk, myself, but it stuck with me how even the so-called next generation of hunters would awkwardly avert their gaze around her.
Not to mention, these days it was hard to argue against that delinquent assessment.
She never stepped forward to take the lead on anything, yet never hung back when there was work to be done together. She never spoke first, but if someone addressed her, she'd respond without any real trouble. If I had to characterize her, she was one of those slightly mature, grown-up students every class has one or two of, who had somehow undergone a dark evolution into a delinquent.
The problem was that the cause of it wasn't immediately obvious to me.
Seriously, normally when something like this happens, the guardian gets a phone call at the very least.
'That's just how the Academy works, I guess.'
Yoonha was an orphan.
Well, by now it was such a familiar state of affairs that no one even remarked on it. For that matter, the majority of the kids in our class were orphans in the first place. Should I call it convenient, or should I say the scars left by the Second Great Cataclysm were simply that enormous?
Come to think of it, it made perfect sense once you considered it.
Seventeen at most — what other reason could kids not yet twenty have for setting their hearts on becoming hunters?
Losing their family to a monster and wanting revenge, or having a hunter in the family. For most, it came down to one of those two.
But reasons that tidy are only within reach for those with some breathing room in their lives.
Yoonha was different.
Money.
In all likelihood, she had become a hunter to make money.
The students' personal files I'd roughly memorized flickered through my mind, and pulling out the one documenting Yoonha's family circumstances only lent the guess more weight.
From the time she was old enough to understand anything, Yoonha had had no parents. It happened when she was so young that she couldn't remember the details — but surely it hadn't been a monster attack. Because underneath her, she had not one but two younger siblings.
That was what set her apart from the other orphans: Yoonha was an orphan, and at the same time, the head of a household.
There was no doubt that such circumstances accounted for a fair share of her decision to become a hunter.
It went without saying that hunters earned considerably more than most other professions. Part of it was that monster materials fetched a price, but more than that, the job itself was laying your life on the line in combat.
The kind of thankless post nobody steps up to shoulder unless you pay them a fortune.
That was the public's image of hunters.
In other words, the staggering sums hunters were paid were, in effect, bait. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Cataclysm, when society collapsed and law enforcement crumbled, it was one thing — but in the present day, taking up the profession of hunter was regarded less as an advantage than as a kind of virtue.
And that was only natural. In the early days of gate appearances, the world was crawling with people who wanted to become hunters to protect themselves from monsters. It was in that era that terms like "hunter society" and "hunter class" were coined.
But as society stabilized, the profession of hunter quietly drifted into being somewhat frowned upon. A line of work that required you to throw your own life into a death struggle against monsters. Plenty of people claimed to envy the hunters' wealth, yet even those same people balked the moment the conversation turned to actually fighting monsters.
It's impressive, it's cool — but I'd rather not live like that.
That single sentence summed it up nicely.
There was nothing to be done about it. What's more, whenever a calamity like the Great Cataclysm struck, hunters were the ones forcibly conscripted by the state. East or west, ancient or modern, no one has ever liked conscription. The tug-of-war between unregistered hunters — people who had even awakened but refused to sign their names with the Association — and a government pressing to force hunters into registration under the infamous banner of human rights violations was just as alive now as it had been then.
Not that any of it was more than somebody else's story, as far as I was concerned.
Conversely, though, precisely because they were so shunned, hunters remained one of the few professions in this end of days where a person could secure a comfortable share for themselves. Despite the endless danger of the work, that was one of the chief reasons the profession endured at all: the sense of justice that welled up watching people be helplessly slaughtered by monsters, a modest pinch of patriotism, and more than anything else — a great deal of money.
Gate appearances had dropped off sharply since the official end of the Second Great Cataclysm, but hunters' market value had not. The places that still needed the strength and hard-won know-how hunters had accumulated were far too numerous to count, and a fair number of gates still persisted under state management. Compared to the Cataclysm era, revenues had inevitably dipped — but even so, the fact remained that the sums involved were astronomical.
For a girl who had to provide for two younger siblings all on her own, there could be no more attractive proposition.
Above all, she had real aptitude. Her abilities weren't bad, and considering that — unlike the other students — she hadn't been on an unbroken fast track since middle school, her talent was actually quite impressive. With decent looks on top of it all, if she could make it as a hunter, serious money would be within her reach.
She must have run the same numbers through her head before deciding to enroll.
Fortunately, the Hunter Academy was a state-run program. In an era where "higher education" had become a form of luxury, the Academy did not turn away anyone who came of her own accord hoping to become a future pillar of industry.
And so she became a student in our class.
No, seriously, why the hell did she suddenly start skipping school?!
Good aptitude. Decent abilities. Plenty of nerve, too — with proper training at the Academy, she had the makings to become at least a mid-tier hunter. And as for me, I had no intention whatsoever of letting any of my students — her included — settle for ending their careers at the mid-tier level.
But no matter how firmly I resolved to change that, if the person herself lacked the will, there was nothing I could do.
'Is it money?'
That was all that came to mind right away. Because for a girl who must have weighed everything so carefully before deciding to enroll, that was the only plausible reason to abandon her classes barely a month in.
Maybe she'd needed cash in a hurry and taken up a part-time job?
Even as I thought it, I knew how absurd it was. What kind of household crisis could hit barely a month into the school year?
Had she dabbled in stocks? The thought actually flickered across my mind.
And at the same time, it made me sad. It was true that hunters' work had shrunk since the official conclusion of the Second Great Cataclysm. In that climate, a diploma from the state-run Hunter Academy would help her in the industry at best and never hurt — all the more so the better her grades were.
Which was exactly why I couldn't understand at all why she would behave this way.
Could she have already sized up her classmates and made her estimate? Deciding to coast through and grab the diploma?
It was a plausible judgment call. In a class teeming with kids who'd been on the elite track since middle school, quite unlike herself, whether she could still muster her usual drive was genuinely difficult to answer.
'Maybe I should shoot an out-of-season teen drama at her.'
Don't be discouraged! You can do it! Show them your hard work can beat their talent!!
I amused myself imagining lines like that, then shook my head. I'd said it as a joke, but honestly, at that stage things would still have been salvageable. The real problem would be if she'd simply left her heart somewhere outside this industry altogether.
Say she'd tried it for a month and found that hunter work just didn't suit her. Or that the faint glimpse of monsters during the practical had spooked her more than she'd let on.
Either way, it wasn't a problem anyone else could solve for her.
And what attitude would the Hunter Academy — launched under the banner of a national initiative — actually show to a student who quit partway through?
Handled carelessly, expulsion was entirely possible.
...Well, speculating any further than that would be going too far. If it ever truly came to that point, I wouldn't be able to do much either — but that was all nothing more than conjecture. From here on out, this was a matter to be worked through not via my wild imaginings, but through an actual counseling session with Yoonha.
Reining in my spiraling pessimism and settling on a provisional conclusion, I gave a final nod and finished changing. In any case, it would be rude to keep Hayeon waiting any longer — and I did genuinely need the phone.
There was this practical exercise to think about, too. No matter how I framed it, I couldn't stay glued to Hayeon's side twenty-four hours a day.
Granted, considering how I usually lazed around with nothing to do, "can't" might have been a stretch — but that was my problem, not hers. However you sliced it, having a guy like me shadowing a live high school girl around the clock was bound to feel unpleasant.
And this was assuming we stayed within these cramped little quarters; if Hayeon ever made plans with a friend, I'd actually need to trail after her.
Isn't that literally stalking?
Even I found it sleazy. Well, protective oversight is what it is. By protocol, the Association's protection system calls for short-term surveillance from a distance, without the subject ever being aware of it. With people already crying that even that felt suffocating, this level of close-quarters watch was something else. I could accept that Hayeon and I were both in somewhat unusual circumstances — but surely some effort to improve the conditions was warranted.
It happened that I'd also been feeling the need for a phone myself. After all, there were only so many times I could keep borrowing the café's phone every time I needed to reach Lee Joongoo. Last time, the café owner had even told me someone had called for me.
'I should raise this as a suggestion next time, too.'
Right now, being the early days of the program, nearly all the students carried phones. That was only natural — kids attending high school in this day and age would have at least that much.
But I couldn't guarantee it would stay that way. According to Choi Seungjun, the Academy planned to broaden its intake over time, and expecting every one of those students to prepare their own phone was asking a bit much.
For that matter, it was a safe bet that Yoonha — the very subject of our conversation — didn't own one either.
The sticking point was, of course, budget. Looked at that way, it might be smarter to prepare something simpler than a phone — closer to a basic communicator — so the students could at least stay in contact with one another. Personal phones were currently banned, but the practical exercises would be resuming before long anyway.
Swallowing down these scattered thoughts, I finished changing and pushed the door open.
"Hayeon, let's get going. I'm ready."
"Yes, oppa...?"
Unable to hide the excitement in my voice at the prospect of chewing out Choi Seungjun yet again, I swung the door open — and I felt Hayeon's gaze, which had turned toward me, suddenly waver.
In step with that, I reflexively stopped in my tracks and took in her appearance right back. She had insisted at first that she couldn't possibly accept any more of my generosity, but as if to prove that even in this era, high school girls and phones were inseparable, she was dressed up far more brightly than usual.
How should I put it — she looked, quite literally, like a proper high school girl. Setting aside her riotously multicolored hair, which it was hard to square with that image no matter how you looked at it, that was exactly the vibe.
Yet the face she was making as she stared at me was smeared with an emotion I genuinely couldn't name — all the color drained from my earlier swagger about a "live high school girl," spoken just minutes ago like some lecherous old man.
First she frowned as though she'd seen something she wasn't meant to see, then tilted her head in bewilderment, then scrubbed at her eyes — smearing her makeup without a second thought — as though asking whether she could possibly have seen wrong, until at last her expression settled into one of near-swoon.
"...And what is that?"
Hayeon, having delivered this impromptu display of face acrobatics, asked the question carefully — in a tone that suggested she truly didn't want to ask but had no choice.
I, however, was the one who ended up flustered.
"A NASA spacesuit."
"Huh?"
"What, do kids these days not know what NASA is?"
As I answered, suddenly feeling the gap between our generations, she made an expression roughly mirroring mine.
In other words: she was completely taken aback.