The Giant and the Cockroach
The very first thing that came to mind at those words was a simple appreciation: what a groundbreaking way to commit suicide.
But as it happened, no terrorist came bursting in through the window the moment she finished speaking. Which meant that I—fully prepared to snap her neck on the spot—managed, just barely, to slow my hand.
Startled as I was, it seemed she'd had no intention of declaring war to my face after all.
Phew. Would've been a real disaster if I'd killed her without thinking~
"How much do you know about the Half-Blood Human Rights Advancement Committee?"
"Hmm... a moderate amount?"
Jihee, in fact, asked that back with perfect composure—as if she hadn't the faintest idea she'd come within a hair of dying not a minute ago.
Good grief. So she really is just a kid.
"Aww, you're worried about me, Teacher~"
"Then shall I explain from the top? Our Half-Blood Human Rights Advancement Committee's Korean branch currently has two factions coexisting under one roof. In short, you could call them the moderates and the radicals."
"Isn't that the same everywhere? There's no group on earth without moderates and radicals."
"Anyway, this Academy has its share of factions too. If I'm the moderate—let's teach hunters the skills they actually need, step by step—then the other teachers, who'd rather start with how to kill monsters, would be the radicals."
"And I'm supposed to treat that as intelligence."
Brushing right past my grumbling, Jihee added a postscript to her declaration of war from moments before.
"Of course, it was the radical faction that planned this attack."
"Right. And that's exactly what doesn't add up."
The Academy's defense network was never something to be taken lightly. It was a project launched hand in hand by the state and the Association, after all.
The reason they'd accomplished so little in the last practical was simply that they'd drawn a terrible matchup—me. If anything, the fact that enemies who knew the Academy's layout inside and out had needed to resort to such tricks only proved, at that point, how sound the defense system was.
Add to that the facilities expanded even further under the pretext of recent events. Couldn't promise anything, but at this level, even against an S-rank monster, it should buy enough time for me or Choi Seungjun to deploy.
And with even Choi Seungjun on high alert these days, any run-of-the-mill attacker would be neutralized in under two seconds. Guaranteed.
"Oh my. So even you have your blind spots, Teacher."
"Huh?"
"Listen carefully. If they stopped to calculate all that before charging in, they wouldn't be radicals."
"...Ah."
But her follow-up left even me nodding along whether I liked it or not. Well, when you put it that way, I can't argue. If they're planning to charge in without weighing the odds even once, what can anyone do. Honestly—this is why radicals are such a pain.
"Besides, their leader is another matter entirely. He won't be easy to deal with at all?"
"The leader?"
"Oh my, you didn't know?"
How the hell would I know?
The only reason I knew the name Half-Blood Human Rights Advancement Committee in the first place was that I'd once wondered whether the centaurs of Greece counted as half-bloods or monsters.
"Even thinking back on it now, it's an endlessly unfair story~"
"Well, be that as it may. He's a fairly strong customer, I take it?"
I could guess as much. The Half-Blood Human Rights Advancement Committee was, to this day, an unauthorized organization—its very existence never officially recognized. In other words, it was no different from an illegal assembly.
There were practical reasons for that. It wasn't as though they'd committed any actual crimes—but neither could the government afford to look the other way.
This was an era where power was justice. Half-bloods, by their very nature, tended to flock together—and recognizing them rashly would mean standing idle while another armed group took root within the nation. From the state's perspective, a perfectly natural call.
The problem, as ever, was that this kind of attitude was tailor-made for breeding resentment.
Look at this—the state still refuses to acknowledge our rights... The ones who thought that way were the ones who became radicals.
"Nam Sangwon. Leader of the radicals—and a rather unusual case."
At my words, Jihee nodded and began to tell me about the man himself. And truly, "unusual" was no understatement.
Nam Sangwon, chieftain of the radicals, forty-four years old this year. Which is to say—an age at which it was physically impossible for him to be a half-blood.
And yet he was treated as a half-blood of a rather peculiar stripe, and the reason was the fateful windfall he'd once come into.
The First Great Invasion.
While fleeing the monsters' onslaught, the man came upon a woman. She was beautiful—so beautiful that Nam Sangwon, who at the time could barely manage to keep his own body alive, found his steps faltering without his meaning to.
And so the man took in the woman—left abandoned in the street as though discarded—and began to care for her. Theirs was a meager household, but it was more than enough for something new to take root between the two of them.
There was, however, one problem.
"The man himself told me, actually. That the woman he met that day was, in truth, a giant."
One day, the woman had confessed her true nature to him. He'd told it in the tone of a man still not entirely convinced, but it was by no means an impossible story. Not every giant, after all, is a hulking colossus. If anything, in Scandinavia and most every other region where giant lore exists, female giants were often as small as humans—or more beautiful than them.
"The problem was what came after. The monsters attacked the settlement where the man was staying—again."
It was an era when humanity had yet to wrest back the initiative from the monsters. And toward the people who had been driven back and back again until they fled to the very edge of the land, the monsters bared their fangs once more.
And then—
"They say he won. Won, mind you."
Her words carried a great deal between the lines. He won. Unless a hunter had materialized among them out of nowhere and swept the monsters away, it wasn't hard to imagine what had actually happened.
Had that been the whole of it, it might have gone down as a rare heartwarming tale from the invasion era.
But.
"Naturally, the man was driven out."
Heartwarming tales always come with an epilogue in tow. Even now, but doubly so back then, monsters were objects of terror and nothing more—even one that had saved your life was not, in the end, something you'd sit down and break bread with. And so the couple, who had traded their own safety to protect those people, were driven out in turn by the very people they had saved.
"And then the woman died, I'd wager."
Whether her injuries had been grave from the start, or whether something else had happened, I couldn't say.
"...Did you know?"
"No."
And so the woman's power passed to the man.
It wasn't a particularly rare kind of story, either. The hero of Norse myth who devoured a dragon's heart and gained strength and wisdom beyond mortal ken; the foremost knight of the Russian epics, who took the strength of a dying giant knight—legends of those who claimed the power of the monsters they felled still circulate the world over to this day.
...In the end, the woman who fought to protect the people—only to be cast off by those very people—was gone, and the man was left holding a giant's power.
It was, you might say, the perfect origin story for the birth of a half-blood-ish radical.
"Being a giant, he's strong, and his experience runs deep. In a head-on fight, who knows—but tying him down from a distance won't be easy."
"Yeah. Figures."
When the story ended, Jihee had held her silence for a while before delivering that in a deliberately cheerful tone.
Certainly, the hallmarks of a giant were physical ability and raw mass that outclassed even body-reinforcement hunters—and above all, hide so thick that blades were said not to bite. In a one-on-one, toe to toe, perhaps anything could happen. From a distance, just nibbling at him, you wouldn't even sink an edge.
More than that, he was a veteran who had survived from the First Great Invasion all the way to the present day. In monster slaying, maybe I'd have the edge—in pure experience, even I couldn't hold a candle to him.
Which was exactly why—
"No, that's my whole point. Why would a man that formidable be attacking us?"
That was what I wanted to know more than anything. It felt a bit low to say, but yes—I understood he had a tragic backstory. What I didn't get was what it had to do with attacking the Academy. If the Academy were running classes on how to discriminate against half-bloods, maybe. It wasn't.
To me it was the only natural question in the world, but apparently not to Jihee. Her face crumpled at once—less anger at my question than the look of someone recalling something else unpleasant entirely.
"It's because of that hunter you fought, Teacher."
"Huh?"
"As I said before, we're not entirely unacquainted with those people."
"Meaning?"
"One: we're worried the information he leaked might sully the good name of our committee."
"And two: you got subcontracted?"
She pulled a woozy face at how blunt I'd put it—but only for a moment. Soon enough, Jihee let out a quiet sigh and admitted it.
"Yes. That's about the size of it."
In short, that was the situation.
The committee's number one goal had always been, first and last, the advancement of half-blood rights. Their reason for joining hands with those people had almost certainly been the same—in practice, those people's reach had been genuinely formidable, stretching into the Academy, tampering with admission paperwork, and so on.
Perhaps, to the committee, that cooperation had felt like their first real chance to finally step out into the sunlight.
The problem was that to those people, the committee had never been anything more than a pawn to be discarded.
Who could have predicted—half-bloods least of all—that in barely half a semester they would loose monsters inside the Academy and abduct its students? Had those people cared even a little for the committee, it would have been unthinkable. Instead of the recognition they'd sought, the committee now stood to be branded terrorists who'd shaken hands with kidnappers.
And of all targets, the Academy? They claimed all they wanted was to be treated as human—so what exactly were people supposed to think of half-bloods who'd abducted prospective hunters and terrorized the very institution that trained them? Being treated as terrorists would almost have been a mercy. It was obvious, without even looking, that they'd be treated as monsters.
For the committee, it was no exaggeration to say the fire had landed squarely on their own feet.
'So they're using this as their pretext, then?'
Armed with it, those people intended to have their dirty work done for them without lifting a finger. The target was that hunter, in the flesh. His skill was one thing, but more than that, the problem was what he knew. He'd have fed the committee the same line, no doubt.
At its core, it was subcontracting, plain and simple. If the recovery succeeded, wonderful. If it failed, the only reputation to bleed was the committee's.
An obscenely lopsided deal—but staring down the barrel of a fall to the very bottom of society, the committee had had no choice but to swallow it.
"So?"
"Yes?"
"What do they actually want?"
That much, I got. I could even see the moderates using this as a pretext to get on the Academy's good side ahead of time—it wasn't exactly a high-percentage play, after all. Or maybe they were seizing the chance to purge the radicals while they were at it.
But.
What did the moderates actually want? They weren't trying to punch through a desperate situation like the radicals were, and they didn't look ready to throw in fully with us, either.
"Who knows? I don't much care for the whole trading-blows thing, myself."
Of course, Jihee didn't answer. I hadn't expected her to. The question that actually mattered was this one.
'Can I trust her?'
I put the question to myself. But the answer came faster than I'd expected.
Trusting her costs me nothing.
Jihee had never once done us any actual harm, after all. At worst, she'd passed along tidbits about goings-on inside the Academy—and even that, from the position of a single student, could only stretch so far.
Considering our enemy was a pack of lunatics who'd gotten their hands on the Academy's defense network and floor plans and thrown a demon at us, the most she could possibly have offered was gossip about the incoming class. And above all, being prepared wouldn't cost me a thing either. A nuisance, at most, if I were being pedantic.
For now, I'd keep her in mind.
"...Oh my. You're surprisingly kind? Honestly, I wasn't expecting much."
Where do you keep picking up this nonsense? "Hey, there's nobody kinder than me."
"Somehow I doubt the man saddled with a grim nickname like 'The Butcher' is the kindest soul around?"
"No, that one's on the monsters."
If I had to put it into words: monsters were cockroaches to me. Disgusting enough to ordinary people, no doubt—but for someone with a full-blown cockroach allergy like mine, far more so.
Half-bloods were the same story. Unthinkable for someone with my allergy, granted, but picture someone who loved cockroaches mating with one and bearing a half-human, half-roach child. That was precisely what they looked like to me.
That said, repulsive as I found them, I couldn't exactly go around slaughtering every pet cockroach in the world. Past that line, you're not discerning anymore, you're just a lunatic. And a public menace on top of it.
And so, to me, a half-blood was closer to a mental patient bathing in cockroach demi-glace. You know—that urge to kill something the instant it touches you?
Murderous intent is an extreme emotion, after all—so at a level of literally half-antipathy, the most it amounted to was a passing thought that putting them down on impulse might not be the worst idea.
I mean, look—I was talking with Jihee right this second without so much as a gas mask on.
"Anyway, if there's nothing else, let's wrap this up."
Drag it out any longer and even Ha-yeon would start to find it strange. At that, Jihee silently nodded.
"Well then... I look forward to working with you, okay?"
I didn't manage an answer in time. Because the moment the words left her mouth, she flung open the classroom door and marched out, her voice ringing down the hallway.
"Ye-eun-ah, my counseling's all fiiinished~!! You're not sulking over how long I made you wait, are you? Hm?"
Unlike me—who had never once seen this coming—apparently this was old hat to her. A voice flipped like a switch. Listening to the nasal whine trailing after her brightly skipping figure, I could only arrive at one conclusion.
Fuck. High school girls are on a whole other level...
No wonder they're the apex species of subculture.