The Confession at the Riverside
And the result?
"Aaagh!! W-wait a moment. Spare me, please spare me!! I'll talk, I'll talk!! Just let me talk!!"
That was how it went.
Midnight by the riverbank. I stood at the water's edge, dangling my blade from its tip like a fishing rod. Granted, what I was trying to catch wasn't a fish but information, and the bait I'd used wasn't a worm but an orphanage director — still, the results spoke for themselves.
"Please, please!! Just spare my life and I'll tell you everything. Yes?!"
"Aw, now that's a cold thing to say. Anyone listening might think I'm threatening you or something. Ain't that right?"
"Ah, yes!! That's it, exactly right. This is entirely voluntary cooperation, cooperation in good faith!! Yes!!"
"Ha! You certainly know what's what."
A truly peaceful negotiation, if I did say so myself.
Reeling in the outstretched blade, I made a show of shaking my arm dramatically. The director, who had been dangling helplessly, let out a half-dead shriek at that, and I couldn't help snickering as I watched him flail. Before long, he was allowed to plant his feet back on the asphalt.
"Hah... hahh..."
Though "planting his feet" might have been a generous way to describe the rather ridiculous sprawl he ended up in.
The director lay flat on the ground, gulping down air, and as he looked up at me, his eyes carried a question — why are you doing this to me? — along with a small, simmering resentment.
Naturally, I had something to say back to him.
"And *why*, pray tell, did you go leaking my student's personal records?"
I clicked my tongue as I said it, and the director — who had been brimming with indignation only moments before — deflated at once. Apparently he knew exactly how shameful his own conduct was.
"W-well, at first I only meant to ask around a little, you see..."
He may have *intended* that, but the stories the director before me had poured out were so utterly devoid of substance. She was a quiet child, he said. Never caused so much as a single problem, he said.
None of it was wrong, exactly. It just wasn't anything I wanted to know.
More to the point, this orphanage itself was suspicious in its own right. Frankly, going on instinct alone, I was more than half convinced it was a front for the other side.
It was obvious the moment you stopped to think about it. Ever since the semester began, the people after Hayeon had been stirring up trouble roughly once a month. And yet, there was a stretch when they'd gone conspicuously quiet.
The period from when Hayeon and I first met until he enrolled at the Academy.
Considering that these were people who had gone on to drop an S-rank monster into the middle of the Academy and abduct a student just to separate us, it was hard to believe that a group bold enough to throw three A-ranks and an S-rank at us on first acquaintance had simply, stubbornly chosen silence for all that time.
According to my earlier reasoning, at the very earliest they'd only caught on to my identity after I butchered the demon that showed itself at the Academy. Which meant there was no way they'd withheld monsters out of wariness toward me back then.
So why had they made no move against Hayeon during that window?
On that point, I decided to think as simply as possible.
*They just didn't know where the kid was. That's all.*
Framed that way, the whole picture snapped into focus. After all, hadn't they stirred up trouble right beside me before, without caring that I was there?
Even granting that my interference explained the early incidents, these were the same lunatics who dropped an S-rank monster into the heart of the Academy I attended, and kidnapped a student in a bid to pull me away from everyone else. The theory that they'd rated me so highly they held their hand was, realistically speaking, an assumption not worth the trouble of considering.
Which raised one important problem.
Then how had they learned that Hayeon enrolled at the Academy?
Yet they had known — or at least acted like it, sending a monster at him during practical training.
The wrinkle was this: back when Hayeon and I first met, Lee Joongoo had recognized the gravity of the situation and personally imposed a gag order. By the time the report submitted to the Association had been appropriately doctored, only two parties could possibly have learned that Hayeon had entered the Academy.
The first was the Association personnel who had cooperated in disposing of the dragons' carcasses. The second was anyone who could lawfully request the civil authorities to look into where Hayeon was and what he was doing.
In other words — the director of the very orphanage Hayeon had depended on.
So, having left the investigation of the Association-side personnel to the other two, I made straight for this orphanage... and after casting my line a few times, I managed to persuade the director, whose suspicious behavior was frankly impossible to miss.
"Well, that worked out nicely."
"So. What exactly is going on here?"
I'd combed through the place, but the orphanage itself didn't seem to be the problem. At least, nothing suspicious stirred within the range of my senses.
In that case, the next step was digging into the director himself, thoroughly and without mercy.
Fortunately, the man maintained a thoroughly cooperative attitude. Really, there's nothing that can't be settled with an honest heart-to-heart. Sincere conversation is the best policy.
"Truth is, that child wasn't an ordinary orphan."
"Show me an ordinary orphan anywhere in this day and age..."
*Ahem.*
"Right, right. I hear you. Go on with your story."
At my beckoning jerk of the chin, the director warmed to his subject and began spilling things I hadn't even asked about, one after another.
"W-well, you see. It was a snowy day, and a few young men come up to me, saying they'd like to leave a child in my care. Can you imagine?"
"Mm. And then?"
"What was I supposed to do? Caring for children is my trade. So I took the child in. Now, if it had been the parents themselves, I might've put up a token protest on principle — but it wasn't, you see."
"Hm? Not a married couple? How would you even know that?"
"The ones who came were men. Only men."
"Ahh."
An uncomfortably evasive answer.
"W-well, there was a child about to freeze to death if I did nothing, wasn't there? So I said yes — but something about the whole thing struck me as odd, you see."
"No, I can't read your mind, so explain it. What was so odd?"
"They didn't act like people leaving a child behind, that's what. At first I figured they'd maybe scooped up an abandoned baby somewhere. But no — they went and asked about every last trivial detail."
"Trivial details, you say?"
"Like, *you'll look after him until he's sixteen, yes?* Are the facilities here up to standard? Things of that sort."
It was admittedly a rather peculiar story.
I mean, people do surrender a child under unavoidable circumstances now and then, so taking an interest in the facilities wouldn't necessarily have been strange...
But the story that shabby old director spilled was nowhere near finished.
"After asking that a few times, they say — satisfied — that they'll leave him here after all."
"Wasn't that just polite window dressing?"
"That's what I thought too, at first. But it wasn't."
"It wasn't? What do you mean?"
"They gave me money."
An utterly shameless thing to hear.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. But the old man in front of me seemed entirely serious.
"Now, it's not unheard of, this sort of thing. *I'm abandoning him, but raise him well anyway,* that kind of talk. Whether they mean it sincerely or they're just salving their own conscience, I couldn't rightly say."
"You're surprisingly cynical."
"It's the world we live in."
"So? By your telling, that's hardly anything special."
"Right, that's what I thought. But those men didn't say anything like that. They said, *we would like to employ you. We trust you to raise him well until his sixteenth year.* That's how they put it."
"Suspicious."
"Isn't it? So I asked whether there was some circumstance I should know about, what sort of treatment they were expecting — and they said no, nothing of the sort. Told me to treat him exactly like the other children."
Taken on its face, that was all there was to it.
But the strange business hadn't stopped there.
"Hold on, none of that struck you as suspicious? It's creepy as hell just hearing it secondhand."
"Now, look — forgive me, but when you run an orphanage in times like these, you've seen every horror there is save a rare few. Chairman's illegitimate child slipping through the door, that sort of thing. I figured this was one of those, too."
And so, though not a soul explained anything to him, the director understood.
*We would like to employ you.*
That was what they said on the day they left Hayeon with him. In other words — it was their way of paying the caretaker for his trouble.
Personally, I thought anyone should be suspicious when strangers who'd never once shared a bank account number started wiring him money — but then, they'd said *employ*, so what could I say to that?
Truth be told, I couldn't come up with any better explanation myself. Perfectly healthy young men appear out of nowhere, leave a child in your care, and vanish. From that day forward, every single year, an enormous sum lands in an account they were never told about.
Look at it any way you like, it could only be hush money.
"Anyway, nothing untoward ever happened. And that was that, for sixteen years now. Those gents never said a word about it, so naturally Hayeon aged out of the orphanage too."
"And then?"
"And then I thought, well, that's that — until one day, the phone rings."
I straightened up despite myself.
Years and years had passed, yet the inflection hadn't changed a whit. The same tone as when they'd said *we would like to employ you* — and over the receiver, that voice had invoked a fact only they could have known, and asked the director for his cooperation.
"So? You handed over Hayeon's records because *they* told you to. That about the size of it?"
"...When you put it like that, I've no defense — but I only thought there'd been some mix-up at first, you see."
"A mix-up?"
"I figured, well, he's sixteen now, they've surely come to take him home to his people at last. And then somehow the plan went sideways, and they had to scramble and reach out to me."
Of course, leaking a ward's personal information without authorization was wrong, plain and simple. But that didn't mean he could have kept his mouth shut, either. In the worst case, wasn't it possible a student's entire life could have been ruined by his silence?
That was the director's story — but what was the truth of it? Maybe he'd meant every word. Or maybe, confronted with a mysterious figure of unknowable power, he'd simply been scared out of his wits.
Either way, the old man had rationalized conduct that couldn't remotely be called honorable.
No harm done, he told himself. After all, it had amounted to nothing more than a single phone call from a nameless stranger — a call that had come after sixteen years.
And yet.
Even knowing that his own actions had set hunters in motion, not a trace of guilt showed on the director's face. If anything, he looked positively baffled — as if he couldn't fathom why he was being bothered over something so trivial.
*He doesn't seem to be lying.*
Rather than adding anything to that, I decided to let it stand as my conclusion.
Through him, they had learned of Hayeon's enrollment — and a chain of incidents had followed, bringing us to the present.
Still, the situation remained as murky as ever.
Why had they left Hayeon at the orphanage in the first place? And why, after sixteen years, did they want him back?
A young stepmother struggling with childcare? That explanation didn't hold water anymore.
Clearly some circumstance existed — I simply had no idea what it was.
I'd come to this orphanage seeking answers, and yet I left feeling like I'd come back empty-handed. All I had was the vague sense that Hayeon really did have *something* about him.
I'd investigate the yearly "childcare payments" too, but eight times out of ten it would lead nowhere worth the effort. I'd file it away in my head and keep my expectations low.
Still.
"Right, enough of that. Now go pull the full list of every foundation and what-have-you currently funding this orphanage, and bring it to me."
"N-now? This minute?"
"Well, when else? Now or never."
If I were the ones who had orchestrated this affair, I wouldn't have left my freshly acquired orphanage sitting idle. Just as they'd clothed the dragons that had taken root in human society, they'd have racked their brains for some other use to put it to.
Granted, I didn't fully understand their circumstances either...
*But there's no doubt something's going on.*
I was nearly inclined to agree with the director — that somewhere along the line, a misunderstanding had occurred. Frankly, even their attempt to take Hayeon back had been wasteful and clumsy.
If it were me, I'd have simply gone to Hayeon before his aging-out, when his future was a blank page, and coaxed him along. Cornered like that, he would have had little choice but to follow.
Of course, their circumstances were none of my business.
How was I supposed to know the mind of lunatics shaking hands with monsters, after all? For now, my job was to hunt down whatever suspicious details I could and cram them into my skull. Someday, even this would prove useful — or so I told myself.
And so, that day's orphanage investigation drew to a close, with an eye toward the future.
However.
The next day. At school.
"Teacher? I have something I'd like to discuss with you."
Sooner than expected, the first probe had come calling.