The Guardian Deity of the Mixed-Marriage Society
"Something's off."
"And that's it."
The moment he'd finished hearing my report, Choi Seungjun delivered his entire verdict with cutting finality. The setting was the principal's office; once our usual counseling session had wrapped up, I'd made a beeline for him and laid out everything that had just happened in exhaustive detail. Partly, of course, to consult on the attack against the Academy — but more than that, because it was the sort of problem I couldn't be bothered to untangle within my own lane.
Thinking it over now, it did occur to me that when they'd approached me instead of Choi Seungjun, perhaps the whole point had been to keep it from him. But I was hardly that crowd's spokesperson, and so what if I wasn't? I decided to shrug the thought off.
"Is that strange?"
"It is."
"In what way?"
"More than anything — the attitude."
Sure enough, unlike me, Seungjun was already picking at what had bothered him.
Tap, tap. He drummed his fingers lightly against the fine hardwood furniture — pieces far too lavish to pass as mere principal's-office fixtures — murmuring all the while. Seen like that, he looked less like the head of an Academy and more like the heir to a chaebol fortune. Which was probably why, when he spoke his next line, I had no trouble following him even though it was the reasoning of a businessman, not an educator.
"In this whole affair, we are, by every measure, the victims. Wouldn't you say?"
"Well, yeah. I suppose we are."
"Granted, we did decide to bury this incident — but that was purely for our own internal reasons, not because we agreed to anything with them."
"So?"
"Their necks are stiff. Abnormally so."
Unexpectedly, he was talking about Jihee's attitude. I hadn't taken him for the type to care about something like that at this stage — and as I was thinking so, he let out a short, dry laugh.
"If it were a private meeting, maybe, but it wasn't. That was hardly the bearing of someone who'd come to apologize."
Fair enough. If they had truly meant to apologize, the least they owed was a personal word of regret to Yoonha — the one they'd actually abducted this time. And yet, from beginning to end, not one of them had so much as spoken her name. Then again, for a committee so devoted to its public image, that might have been a truth too inconvenient to admit. Perhaps they'd simply written it off as the rampage of some fringe cell that had nothing to do with them.
But that was their problem, not ours.
Unofficial setting or not, there was no denying that their manner had been recklessly indiscreet — strangely so, for the representative of an entire organization.
"In other words — their real purpose wasn't an apology, was it?"
"I'd say not."
"Honestly, I don't consider it a bad thing, even so. That's usually how it goes between organizations."
The problem was that I hadn't the faintest idea what that purpose actually was.
"Then what will you do going forward?"
"Prepare, for a start."
"They can't be trusted. They haven't earned an ounce of credit. But taking them at their word costs us nothing."
It wasn't a satisfied expression, but that seemed to be the conclusion Seungjun had settled on. The staff would no doubt grumble about the ill-timed overtime, yet fortunately for him, he possessed more than enough money to smother such complaints where they stood.
"That said, we can't just sit on our hands. They'll be the ones approaching us from here on — dig out what they're after. Feel free to spend my name if you have to."
"Well, that's fine by me, but..."
"Hm?"
"Never mind. Are you okay with this?"
"With what?"
"The half-bloods, to put it bluntly."
Crude as it sounds, my own instinct was simply to kill them on sight — but I couldn't speak for how things looked at the Academy level. Jihee's status, enrolled under false pretenses as a hunter student; the institution's official stance on half-bloods — shouldn't we at least get our stories straight on points like those?
Yet to all my questions, Choi Seungjun offered nothing but a careless shrug.
"What matters isn't their bloodline. It's their capability."
Terrifying bastard.
Nice-sounding words — but they meant that anyone who proved useless would have their human rights tossed out the window along with everything else. Yep, chaebol to the bone. Sometimes I swear the man thought on an entirely different plane. Not that I was one to talk.
"And the political fallout?"
"No need to worry about that. If trouble comes up, I'll bury it somehow. Go on."
"The taste of power, so sweet~" he snickered, waving me off.
Well, it wasn't as if I'd ever dealt with half-bloods before. If someone else would shoulder the burden, that was a kindness. And so began a somewhat delicate alliance of strange bedfellows.
Even after that, Jihee kept showing her face without a trace of embarrassment. Then again, hiding now would only make things more awkward.
Watching her sit through class with her usual playful air, I turned over in my head the information Choi Seungjun had dug up on the Committee for the Advancement of Half-Blood Rights.
The Committee for the Advancement of Half-Blood Rights — the Mixed-Marriage Society, for short. Somehow the abbreviation had ended up sounding like a matchmaking agency, but their actual work was rather conventional: protests, public debates, and the like, all in the name of advancing half-blood rights. They still lacked government recognition, but this wasn't the dark ages; nobody could crush a human rights movement wholesale anymore. So while they were unofficial on paper, in practice they enjoyed treatment on par with an official organization — another defining trait.
And among their number, one Nam Sangwon was quite the celebrity.
His profile roughly matched what Jihee had told me. Except Nam Sangwon himself was far more than a mere firebrand field captain. Indeed, the very reason this country couldn't carelessly rein in the Mixed-Marriage Society was Nam Sangwon himself.
As with any group of its kind, the Society's Korean branch had once been attacked by half-blood haters. You're out of your mind, taking in half-bloods — go help the people hurt by monsters instead. Some of the attackers had even sneered at half-bloods as chimeras. It wasn't hard to imagine what kind of carnage that had been.
That was when Nam Sangwon first made his name. After days of raids on the Society, something in him had finally snapped — and once he turned around and swept the attackers away, such incidents dropped off noticeably. What's more, one of those attackers had, of all things, been a rabidly anti-half-blood hunter, so even the Association couldn't afford to lay a hand on the Society afterward. He was well and truly on his way to becoming the Society's guardian deity.
At the very least, he was no convenient demagogue or ignorant brute you could simply use.
The reason such a man was still filed under the Society's radical wing came down to one thing: his demands. Unconditional citizenship for all half-bloods. An ideology radical to the point of excess. Naturally, given public sentiment, it wasn't a proposal that could be accepted overnight — least of all now, when most half-bloods were children their parents never planned to have.
But Nam Sangwon paid that no mind, striking a spark under an even more radical claim: should the Korean government grant them recognition, he declared, every member of the Society — himself included — stood willing to register with the Association.
It wasn't a bad offer. Governments, after all, hate leaving armed groups running loose outside the military. Even now, were it not for the objections of hunters and civilians, they'd likely love to reel the half-bloods into the Association as well. The sheer gall of it — openly naming this country's hunter shortage. The Second Great Cataclysm had ended, fine. But with the Third Great Cataclysm waiting somewhere down the road, how long could anyone afford to feel safe? It was a question posed with genuine operational sense. And alongside it, the claim that he himself could supply the answer.
Quite the character, this guy.
It was only his radical ideology keeping him out of the spotlight. Polished up a little, he might have set his sights on the political world itself. His platform was much the same — a half-blood rights declaration. People might feel uneasy about it, but who could stand up and openly oppose it?
So much for him being a simple-minded brute.
You could tell as much from the confidence with which he declared he could mobilize every half-blood inside the Society. He knew perfectly well that "hunter registration," nice as it sounded, was state surveillance in practice. And setting everything else aside — this was, in effect, a call to march off to war. The fact that the majority accepted it told me exactly how large Nam Sangwon's faction was within the Society. You don't build a following like that on fists alone.
Which made it all the more puzzling. In short, the Society — Nam Sangwon included — was a decided fringe player even within this industry. And yet he possessed insight keen enough to foresee the Third Great Cataclysm. His political instincts weren't poor either, and the pledges he championed were no idle pipe dream.
And this man was supposedly masterminding an attack on the Academy?
Try as I might, I couldn't make it add up. The Nam Sangwon I'd verified on paper, and the Nam Sangwon pushing an Academy raid by the Society's half-blood force with the backlash be damned — between the two yawned a gap I couldn't put into words. Had someone dangled a different carrot in front of them? It wasn't an implausible theory. The problem was that I couldn't even guess what that carrot might be.
But one thing was certain.
Ryu Jihee.
For starters, that girl coming to me as the Society's representative was, nine times out of ten, a lie. With a man like him in their ranks, the moderates had no choice but to play it smarter — say, by proposing some negotiation with us over hunter business, for instance. Judging by his track record, Nam Sangwon was practically the Society's guardian. The moderates, lucky to command half the membership, couldn't possibly purge him at this stage. Sure, people will do anything once power turns their heads — but even so, that was physically impossible. A figure that big? Even if the moderates tried to take him out unilaterally, word was bound to leak.
Which meant one of two things: that sly little minx Ryu Jihee had simply lied to me — or the matter had been decided at the very top of the moderate faction.
The real questions are Jihee's purpose — and whatever carrot they dangled in front of the radicals.
With that, I finished the arithmetic in my head. All the while, the classroom stayed peaceful. Not one face there could imagine that half-bloods might storm the school before long; the students were busy working themselves into a lather over the midterms starting in a few days.
Fuck. Now that I actually think about it, this is dizzying.
Why was I the one agonizing over this? I'd made my peace with playing a teacher who didn't fit the part, but political intrigue was a bridge too far. The business with Lee Yeeun was still unresolved, and I had no idea what to even say to Yoonha. And now, on top of it all, one of my students had turned out to be a half-blood — and gone and declared that the half-blood group she belonged to was planning to attack the school. For the record, I'd started teaching barely a month ago; two months if you rounded up. The Hayeon situation, meanwhile, hadn't even found its bearings. And in the middle of all that, I was expected to prepare for the Society's raid and run midterms at the same time.
Should I write my resignation letter?
"Whoa, Ssaem, you're resigning?!"
"What brought that on all of a sudden?!"
Apparently I'd blurted my thoughts straight out loud. Wide, rounded stares came flying at me from every kid I'd had anything to do with — Hayeon, naturally, but Lee Yeeun and Hwang Yoonha too, even Jung Pilyeon. Waving my hands to settle the sudden uproar, I let my mouth run on autopilot.
"No, no — it's just, working these days makes a man feel like writing his resignation, that's all."
"Aww, come on~"
"You're not actually resigning, right?!"
Sandwiched among the half-joking complaints, Ryu Jihee cupped her hands around her mouth like a makeshift megaphone and called out the question. Swallowing a surge of rising blood pressure, I forced a smile. I could put up with a lot, but the day stress took my hair, I'd write that resignation on the spot — and as for Ryu Jihee, that girl would not be forgiven. I meant it. She hadn't actually harmed me; if anything, she'd come to warn me. But as the old saying goes, you hate the sister-in-law who holds you back more than the mother-in-law who strikes you.
Gritting my teeth in silent lament, I watched the clamor only swell louder — which left me no choice but to answer in a voice worn thin.
"Hey, you think this hasn't been hard on me? Practical training got suspended, so I had to tear the entire midterm apart and rebuild it from top to bottom."
"So how are we actually taking the exam?!"
"Yeah, tell us already!!"
Heartwarming bunch, really. "I was just about to get to that!"
"Not one of you little punks is worried about me, huh?" I grumbled — and the room erupted in laughter.
Well, if there was one silver lining, it was that the midterm content was finally settled. This midterm would be a situational response assessment. Just as it sounded: a test of how each student handled a scenario the school provided.