The Third Method
The weekend passed, and Monday finally arrived.
Perhaps because I'd been busy with this and that, the classroom I returned to for class felt strangely unfamiliar.
The students were no different. An air of restlessness hung over the room, and beyond that, furtive glances darted back and forth, filling every corner of the classroom.
It went a bit beyond simple post-weekend doldrums, but since I could understand where they were coming from, I didn't scold them too harshly.
Now then, quiet. I'm taking attendance. Ryu Jihee?
Yes!
Jung Pilyeon.
Yes, sir.
Hwang Yoonha.
Here.
Monday. Yoonha had come back to school.
*
With Yoonha's sudden return, it was only natural that the kids started whispering among themselves.
It was thanks to how nonchalantly Yoonha had shown up mere days after skipping school entirely, paired with me starting class as if nothing had happened at all.
Of course, from the kids' perspective it must have seemed bizarre, but really — speculating that their homeroom teacher had spent the whole weekend cracking the whip? Wasn't that going a bit too far?
That's hardly the image I project, if you ask me.
Then again, I couldn't exactly sit them down and explain, point by point, what had actually happened, either.
All right, all right. Focus, everyone! Class is starting.
Still, it had worked out quite well, apparently. Nobody had expected her to come back to school this quickly.
The negotiation I'd had with those old men yesterday had, thankfully, gone smoothly.
With the Second Great Incursion over, jobs had dried up — but that was a story strictly limited to hunters.
The old men I was seeing for the first time in a while, far from complaining about a lack of work, were actually grumbling about how much of it they had.
Which made perfect sense.
The absolute volume of supply may have shrunk, but nowadays the disassembly shops all operated under contract with the Association.
Compared to the old days, when each hunter made back-alley deals one by one, there was far less friction to be had.
More importantly, the disassembly shops currently sourced their materials from the gates under each institution's jurisdiction.
Those institutions, needing to periodically cull monsters in order to burn off the densely concentrated mana, were a reliable supply source that could hand the shops a steady stream of monster corpses.
How should I put it — the total volume of materials had decreased, but in exchange, the distribution side had gotten more convenient.
A world apart from when they'd been independent operations.
The real problem was the supply of disassembly workers.
With a few exceptions, most disassembly workers entered the trade as a part-time gig for lower-rank hunters.
If it suited them, they made it their full-time profession; if not, they moved on.
But with gate occurrences having dropped off dramatically since the Second Great Incursion — meaning the number of hunters emerging, affected as they were by that same trend, had also dwindled…
No matter how much mana had dissolved into the atmosphere, its density could never match that of a gate.
Worse still, even the rare few who did awaken as hunters these days almost never found themselves fighting alongside or against monsters anymore.
Ironically, the disassembly shops, having finally secured stable income, had no choice but to admit that this very stability had darkened the industry's future.
Working disassembly techs could throw both hands up in welcome, but with the old legend of striking it rich through a contract with a high-rank hunter gone, disassembly work held little appeal for ordinary people.
Which was why, when I visited the shop for the first time in ages, low-rank monster materials were piled high enough to rot.
High-rank materials still had plenty of buyers, so they were allocated to the working techs first — but low-rank materials, naturally, were not.
That was also how I'd managed to get Yoonha slotted in.
The disassembly trade isn't so soft that you can shove just anyone in on connections alone.
The work intensity was no joke, and precisely because of that, there was no end to the people who'd bolt, crying that they simply couldn't make a living at it.
'Though the pay is pretty decent.'
So we'd arranged that the low-rank monster materials — including those Yoonha processed — would be purchased by our side if no buyers materialized.
Partly to give Yoonha her foot in the door, but more than that, because we needed them to craft the equipment the students would use.
It seemed Choi Seungjun hadn't thought that far ahead, either.
The shortage of low-rank monster materials.
He'd reacted rather lukewarmly to my suggestion of bringing a physical trainer into the Academy, but when it came to this business I'd brought him, he'd marveled at it and actively thrown his support behind it.
Well, fair enough — when would the man have ever dissected a monster with his own two hands?
Needless to say, the actual state of the disassembly trade would never have caught his eye.
So — what to make with all these gathered materials?
You all checked what's on your desks, right?
Yes, it was class.
The students, who'd been giving me questioning looks at the prospect of holding an actual lesson in the classroom for the first time in nearly a month since our first meeting, lowered their gaze.
There, atop the students' desks, lay strange-looking tools and the hide of a bizarre beast.
I'd prepared them before class began, with Hayeon's help. I couldn't be bothered to do it myself.
It's the hide of a Greek monster — codename: Nemea.
At those words, the students' eyes sharpened.
The lion-shaped monster that had appeared in Greece, codename Nemea.
Thanks to the colossal name recognition of its mythological counterpart, it was a monster well known even here in South Korea.
Commonly called the Nemean Lion, this A+ rank monster's hide possessed, just as the myths described, absolute immunity to weapons.
Case in point: stunned students were poking at the lion hide beside them with the assorted tools, and not a single one managed to drive a proper edge into it.
As you all know, some monsters ignore attacks made a certain way… or conversely, some species can't be damaged at all unless an attack is made a certain way. So — when we come face to face with a monster like this, what should we do?
I swept my gaze slowly across the students' faces. Confronted with the absolute defensive capability of a high-rank monster they'd only ever heard about, they seemed rather deflated.
The one frowning hardest of all was, predictably, Jung Pilyeon.
His ability was armament manifestation. In other words, the power to summon, in real time, whichever weapon suited him best.
Standing before a monster that ignored all armaments, how was he supposed to handle himself? Confusion was only natural.
Let's say a monster similar to this Nemean Lion appeared right in front of us. Weapons don't work, and neither do abilities. Then what do we do? Just sit there with our hands folded and die?
We attack bare-handed.
The calm reply came, this time, from Lee Yeeun. Being such a famous monster, it seemed she already knew the answer.
And indeed, the hide of codename Nemea had precisely that weakness.
After wrestling with the beast for nearly a solid month, Heracles — the man who, so the story goes, founded the ancient Greek combat sport of pankration — defeated it with his bare hands.
That detail was also why countless scholars had engaged in fierce debate over the monster's true identity.
Because if it wasn't that, then were monsters really the beasts of mythology?
Like the case of Nemea, there were quite a few examples that were too strikingly similar to brush off as mere coincidence.
Then again, with entities like the goddess Tiamat or the Nemean Lion — creatures already dead within their myths — strolling around alive and well, I figured the truth probably lay somewhere in between.
Correct.
Either way, this was class.
At the straightforward praise, I watched Lee Yeeun lift her chin with a face brimming with pride.
Suppressing the chuckle that bubbled up, I leaned down and planted my hands on the podium, steering clear of the Nemean hide laid out on top of it.
But there are other methods besides that one.
According to legend, when the Nemean Lion charged at him with its jaws wide open, Heracles jammed his signature club straight down its throat.
And afterward, having strangled it to death, he used the lion's own claws to strip away its hide.
It was the same with us.
The second way to breach a defensive capability like Nemea's.
Attack the parts the hide doesn't cover.
Naturally, this was harder than the first method, if anything — by no means the easy road.
Which brings us to the third method — the one hunters actually use in practice.
Forget the tools you're holding. There are more tools inside your desks. Take them out and try.
At my words, the students pulled tools from their desks and wore puzzled expressions.
Because they looked no different from the tools they'd been using moments ago.
But this time, no explanation was needed.
Huh?
Because the student who quickly touched the hide let out exactly that sound.
Unlike the first set of tools, which hadn't managed so much as a scratch on the hide before them, the second set peeled the lion hide away with almost absurd ease.
That is the third method.
Among weapons guaranteed a certain threshold of sharpness, you use ones with a calcium content of 56 percent or higher.
It was the ratio that scholars — who had long suspected that the claw method and the bare-handed method were, in truth, one and the same — arrived at after countless experiments.
Likewise, it was a formula for blending metal with monster materials that generations of scholars wracked their brains to uncover.
You might call it a dream material, boasting hardness and strength beyond mere steel.
If you pierce the hide with a weapon processed like this, you can punch through its defense.
The law protecting the hide arbitrarily judges a weapon carrying such aggregate as the body of a living creature.
This happened to be a topic tinged with a certain love-hate feeling for me.
After all, the folks at the workshop are probably still able to recall my face to this day.
Then what am I supposed to do, Teacher? It's not as if I can swap out my weapons.
What do you mean, what do you do? You practice until you can consciously alter the alloy ratio of your weapons, that's what.
Jung Pilyeon, who had asked with a troubled look, now wore a face of even deeper despair.
Such was the battle between hunter and monster — nothing that could be settled by a simple contest of strength.
Discern the laws a monster wields, and strike at them.
Unlike the distant ancients, the reason we are called not heroes but hunters is precisely this.
We're the ones who have to dig through past records — even the legends of myth itself — just to take down a single monster.
And my own work was no different.
I classify the common threads running through these monsters and organize them so they can be used. Then I drill that compiled information into these kids, relentlessly, until they've mastered the counters.
To put it in extreme terms, there is never any need to become stronger than a monster in order to kill it.
You prepare the means to kill the monster — and then you kill it. That's all there is to it.
Of course, since there are situations where you're forced to fight head-on, slacking on training wasn't an option either.
This time we'd had no choice but to use materials rotting away in my storage, seeing as the contract was so recent — but once we could secure materials on a stable basis, we'd be able to handle ones befitting the students' abilities as well.
The materials we processed that way could then be used when these kids crafted their own equipment.
All in all, wasn't that a reasonably decent virtuous cycle?
They'd build up the skills to handle monsters, and it would earn them a bit of pocket money besides.
I stole a glance at Yoonha, and she was staring at me with a look of astonishment on her face.
Was this much enough to satisfy her, too?
I couldn't quite tell, but it seemed she wasn't displeased.
Hayeon, too, was nodding along as she watched Yoonha's reaction.
Since this is our first lesson, we'll keep it simple and stop here — but from now on, I'll be bringing in materials from other monsters as well. You'll all think about how you'd go about processing them. If you can manage to work the material at all, you pass. If you can't even get your hands on it, you fail, obviously — so practice plenty.
I'm sorry — other monsters?
That's right. Practical training got canceled, so if I don't at least do this much, it's hardly worth the trouble, don't you think?
Wait, isn't that way too hard?!
I'll calibrate things so that question never comes up, so don't worry. I'll help too. And I'll give you whatever information you need. All right — that's it for today's class!
Clap clap. I led the applause, but the students' flustered expressions didn't ease up one bit.
Apparently it had never occurred to these kids that the same teacher who, mere days ago, had done nothing but run them in circles would suddenly hold a lesson like this.
But what could one do. This was what hunters had always been.
To the world, hunters are known as symbols of striking it rich overnight — but at their core, they are, in the end, hunters.
And in hunting, there is no such thing as a flashy finisher move.
Only endless trials and trial and error.
That is what it means to be a hunter.