Who Is Ja Hayeon?
Ugh, damn it.
The fight was over.
As I stretched out lightly to match it, I could feel every joint in my body creaking. Well, it couldn't be helped. This time the opponent wasn't a monster but a hunter—and one who was more or less A-rank at that.
Most of the exchanges had gone my way, sure, but compared to how I usually carved through A-rank monsters, the gap was enormous.
Of course, hunter and monster ranks don't map one-to-one by any means, but judging from the way the guy fought, he was almost certainly the kind of hunter who killed people—one of those trained specialists in anti-human combat, so to speak.
Taking that into account, the effective difficulty was high A-rank. And even then, the man hadn't launched a single ambush despite having an entire tropical rainforest as his stage. I could roughly guess his objective, but even granting that, his performance was hard to call impressive.
Block his moves, grind him down with my specs. Win while taking an injury, with a hidden trump card and favorable matchup on my side. It felt like I'd done exactly as much as I should have.
Yoonha, you okay?
A dwoya angyeo…….
Oh, great. Paralysis toxin. Hold on.
Finishing my self-assessment, I walked over to Yoonha, who had mumbled the words through slurred lips.
Apparently it was a paralytic that attacked all five senses. I cut the ropes binding her limbs, then cracked open space with my own gear this time. There was no chance to brew an antidote piece by piece like I usually would.
Alright, chug it down. All of it.
Ulpb—urbebubebe.
It's an antidote the Europeans make. It'll handle just about any poison, so keep it in your mouth and then swallow. It's grape-flavored, so it won't even taste bad.
Hearing me out, Yoonha clumsily did as she was told, her cheeks puffing up like balloons. Before long, I could feel the life returning to her eyes.
I-it's working!
Yeah, told you.
Her tongue, frozen stiff only moments ago, was moving again—the stuff had clearly done its job.
I collapsed onto the ground beside her, making noises like a dying man, then—just in case—poured the rest of Yoonha's antidote over the wound on my flank, right where the knife had carved its mark. As if on cue, Yoonha's recovered gaze landed on it too.
T-teacher. That wound…….
Hm? Ah, yeah. It stings a bit. That bastard got me good.
I said it with a snicker, and Yoonha's face only grew darker.
Part of me wanted to ask what all the fuss was about over a single knife scratch—but then it struck me that these kids had never once been through real combat. That thought passed through my head like a cold wind.
Wh-what do I do, this is because of me. Teacher, I'm sorry. How do I—how do we fix this…….
H-hey. Don't cry. Stop! It hurts me more when you do. No, seriously, this is nothing!
She looked like she was one second away from a full-blown panic, so I hastily grabbed one of the potions piled up in the storage shed and splashed it over the wound without checking what it was.
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—the one I'd grabbed was the type that burned the user's own mana to heal injuries. No useless side effects, which was nice, except the sudden wave of dizziness turned my vision hazy white. Mana exhaustion. The warning signs were unmistakable.
Well, I had pushed myself back and forth through that whole brawl. Now, of all times, I found myself regretting the mana I'd wasted on nothing. When you're fighting a person, there's just no telling how much you'll actually need to burn.
See, look. It's already healed. Yoonha, you watched me fight, didn't you? I'm actually pretty strong. Stop worrying.
Christ. Look at me, comforting kids way out of my league. If my active-duty self had seen this scene, I'd have laughed myself sick at the sheer absurdity.
After all that desperate coaxing, Yoonha finally seemed to calm down—barely. In exchange, the sound of her sobbing filled the space around us.
This is a mess.
An endlessly awkward silence settled over us.
In my heart of hearts I wanted to snap, what kind of hunter wails like she's dying over a scratch like this—but there was absolutely no room for that. For a twenty-seven-year-old man, the creature known as a high school girl was a force of terrifying power…….
Thankfully, someone arrived to break the silence between us.
Feeling pretty pleased with yourself, are we?
Truthfully, I wasn't thrilled to hear it.
The bastard I'd beaten unconscious not five minutes ago had come to and was spouting off at the mouth. Man, this guy's built like a tank, I muttered without meaning to. Well, an A-rank hunter had kept pace with my movements—nine times out of ten, he was a physical-enhancement type.
Anyway. What now? The practical problem was staring me in the face. Yoonha, paralyzed and bound until moments ago, had legs like wet noodles, and I could barely be bothered to stand. And on top of that, there was still business left unfinished. Of course my sigh came out heavy.
That's right. Savor your little victory for now. But tell me—has it never struck you as strange? Why would anyone insist you come all the way out here alone?
Hey, Hayeon. Give me a hand here, will you?
You fool. How do you feel now, I wonder? Like you've won? Well, it hardly matters. The objective has already been achieved. By now, my comrades will…….
Yes.
And then.
The man, who had been muttering to himself for the past minute, clamped his mouth shut the instant Hayeon materialized out of thin air.
Well, uh…….
Hey, I'm no idiot, you know.
Sure, I only have a middle school diploma—but even so, I'm not dense enough to mistake this for a plan aimed at me.
The dragon assault, the demon incursion—every single incident had erupted in a place where Hayeon had been.
Which meant, if this kidnapping of Yoonha was the third case in the series, the target had always been Hayeon from the very start.
That, too, was why the man hadn't ambushed me. His role, in short, was to hold my attention. More precisely: to split me, the bodyguard, away from Hayeon.
So instead of striking first, he'd revealed himself. Drawn my eye with exaggerated theatrics—all so that, worst case, I wouldn't simply abandon Yoonha and run.
The opponent was an A-rank hunter, rotting or otherwise. Even an organization like theirs couldn't mobilize assets of that caliber without limit. From their perspective, a critically wounded me escaping and writing off Yoonha was the last outcome they wanted.
At any rate, once they'd committed a top-tier piece like an A-rank hunter against me, their remaining manpower was finite. At best a few C-rank grunts—or maybe nothing more than the paralytic toxin they'd used to snatch Yoonha in the first place.
Which, needless to say, would never be enough to take me down, injured or not.
Therefore, their side needed to abduct Hayeon while my feet were tied up here.
In other words, Yoonha's kidnapping had been nothing but a stepping stone for exactly that. A way to transmute a profoundly unnatural instruction—come alone—into something that looked natural.
Well, once you've figured that much out, there's no obligation to play along on their terms.
What Hayeon had been wearing until a moment ago was a cloak imbued with the power of the cobalt, the spirit of German folklore.
Yes. A cloak of invisibility, as they say.
Wrapped in it, rendered literally transparent, Hayeon had been trailing behind me from beginning to end.
If the enemy had been a detection type, things could have gotten hairy—thankfully, that was never in the cards.
And so the kidnapper friends who would have been scrambling all over creation to snatch Hayeon were left to the tender mercies of the Goddess. The bulk of the operatives, too, must have instinctively sensed that something had gone catastrophically sideways, because they'd slunk off with their tails between their legs.
If anything, what truly boggled me was that the Goddess—whom I'd assumed would stay neutral—had actively lent a hand.
Whatever else was true, if they'd really been after me, they never would have sent a second demon my way.
The moment they dispatched a monster despite my name sitting right there on the Academy roster, their target stopped being me. More likely, only after the demon they'd trusted with the job collapsed and croaked did they bother to look up what kind of man this Park Woochan actually was.
Impossible. Against a single hunter, this is just—!
Shut it and get some sleep, will you?
I had no further interest in listening.
With Hayeon supporting me, I delivered a clean soccer kick. The hunter, who had climbed back to his feet without a hint of fatigue and started rambling on his own terms, finally fell silent for good.
Might makes right.
You came with empty hands; you'll leave the same way.
That suit of nakedness suits a defeated man best.
Of course, none of it changed anything overnight.
No matter how strong my suspicions, without evidence, no one could be punished for anything. All the more so when the other side was powerful enough to track our every move.
There was a witness. We'd seen him summon monsters with spatial-type abilities, too. But had he prepared for exactly this contingency? The tool the man had used was single-use. Not a shred of proper evidence remained. The monster corpses would be written off as nothing more than proof of a gate rampage.
At least for now, the testimony of the Butcher—one who'd spent recent months at odds with the Association—and a single cadet changed absolutely nothing.
The political burden. The risk of reminding the public of the monster threat just as an age of hard-won peace had finally arrived. The expense and suspicion that would erupt if we publicly declared that someone in the Association's upper echelons was in league with monsters. Internal strife…….
I like to think I'm fairly indifferent to that kind of thing, and even I had run through every possibility—despite the guy being a kidnapper.
Even with Choi Seungjun's money and Lee Joongoo's name value, the answer was the same. Because the enemy had money and power to spare, too.
But if you asked whether there was truly nothing to be done—well, that wasn't quite it either.
First, we'd succeeded in mapping the outline of this incident.
And I laid it all out before Joongoo and Seungjun without hesitation.
The reaction was explosive. That went without saying for Joongoo, whose little sister had been caught up in it—and equally so for Seungjun, who despised nothing more than some peasant tracking mud into his own domain.
The moment those two grasped the situation, the scales were bound to tilt hard in our favor.
They couldn't tip their hands yet, of course. The enemy was positioned to stonewall even Joongoo's investigative work. How else could a case opened before the semester even began have made zero progress? That was precisely why we hadn't asked for Joongoo's help on this kidnapping operation either.
So we chose silence, for now.
How much do they know? Who have they pulled into this? Our own ignorance would become a weapon in its own right.
Accordingly, Joongoo decided to keep pouring his time into the polymorph dragon case, results be damned. The sight of him grinding away at his investigation, playing the oblivious fool, would make a flawless smokescreen.
Same for Seungjun—except he'd move to tighten Academy security beyond current levels. If anyone came to raid the Academy after this, they were in for a very rude awakening.
As for our hunter friend, Seungjun's side would take him into custody. Illegal, obviously. So what? Seungjun has money.
Besides, the man was a suspected agent with no official identity whatsoever. The stage where this could become a problem had long since passed.
Naturally, with Joongoo involved, nothing so crude as torture was on the table. Frankly, I doubted that three men who'd never been taught a single legitimate interrogation technique could squeeze anything useful out of him anyway.
So this time, I volunteered.
Buying a mind-reader or a mind-reading tool with traceable funds risked a money trail, so it fell to me—the guy with connections to the black market and the like—to procure the goods.
And so, until I got my hands on something, the prisoner was granted a brief reprieve as well.
Which left the cleanup.
Thankfully, Yoonha said nothing about the incident either. If anything, she seemed even more rattled from the moment Hayeon appeared. A strange mutant kidnaps her out of nowhere, her homeroom teacher shows up to save her—and it turns out her own classmate had been tagging along the whole time.
On top of that, from what I gathered, she'd somehow concluded that she'd been kidnapped because of that classmate in the first place.
It was only natural she'd be too bewildered to pass judgment.
Pfft, I figured as much. Some kind of, you know, special mission? That's the deal, right?
Yoonha's face, as she said it, was anything but light.
She must have understood on some level that she'd been swept up in something enormous. She'd watched a hunter summon a monster with her own eyes, after all.
Yet instead of pressing for answers, Yoonha managed a bright, sturdy smile.
Don't worry! I won't breathe a word to anyone! In exchange, you're marking me present in attendance. Deal?
……In the end, I could only answer with an embarrassed laugh.
Same as it went with Lee Yeeun. I never once manage to close anything out properly. Lately it feels like my homework just keeps piling up.
And so.
With the monsters written off as anomalies within the gate, the investigation directive from the Association came to a close. Lingering any longer around the dismantling facility was more than I cared for.
In the free time that had somehow landed in my lap, I found my feet carrying me somewhere entirely by choice.
The chain of events that began with my first meeting with Hayeon.
Their objectives had finally begun to bare their teeth at the students around her—and to understand them, I needed to start asking myself some questions.
Ja Hayeon.
A girl entering her first year of high school this year. A cute face. Hair of a color so unique most hunters had never seen its like. Eyes stranger still. A humble nature. Smart, and surprisingly tenacious. Decent talent, too. She calls me oppa. I'd assumed she simply had a constitution that drew monsters—but there was an entire organization hunting her, something far beyond that──.
Who exactly is she?
And why do they want her?
To find out, I had come here.
An orphanage.
A place she had lived sixteen years—longer than the time she and I had shared…… Hayeon's old home.