The Strength Training Room
The Strength Training Room—or the "Training Hall," as we abbreviate it.
The facility annexed to the gymnasium was, in every sense, the Hunter Academy's alpha and omega.
Open the small door beside the gym, the one stamped with the words "Strength Training Room," step inside, and the first thing that greets you is an expanse of floor so vast it borders on excessive.
Every inch of this place was built by lavishly deploying a hunter with top-tier spatial manipulation ability. Whatever modest exterior it presented from the outside, it would be no exaggeration to call it the single largest space inside the Academy.
And the interior went even further. From floor to ceiling, what lined the walls in dense tiles were mana crystals—masses of mana infused with the abilities of illusion-class hunters of A+ Rank or higher.
Unlike the mana crystal that certain hunter gentleman had used not long ago, these were the genuine article. Literally, minerals composed of pure mana.
Inside the training room, rows of machines stood connected to these mana masses. Operate them, and any given room within the facility could project a specific illusion—up to a maximum of A+ Rank.
Any monster below that threshold could be summoned for practice at a moment's notice.
A virtual combat simulator that would be nothing but a pipe dream without the Association's vast data banks and Choi Seungjun's compulsive spending. That, in essence, was what the Academy called its Strength Training Room.
Since the facility had been designed to accommodate all three grade levels at once, it remained remarkably uncrowded for now. Someday, once the Academy had truly put down roots, we might need to introduce a reservation system here too—but at present, an entire grade could split the rooms among themselves and still have room to spare.
And so, this semester's midterm exam would be held here.
Which was why I now stood before the training room, explaining the exam scope to the students.
In the end, it had been decided the midterms would take place here rather than at a gate. There was no immediate prospect of the gates reopening, and with practical training suspended, a fairness problem had surfaced between the students who'd had practical experience and those who hadn't.
The school would set the conditions, and performance under those given conditions—however far a student could push them—would become the grading standard.
Thus the exam: live combat practice inside the training room.
From analyzing information about monsters to responding appropriately under pressure, it was a test designed to measure the students' overall competence, plain and simple.
Oh, and that's fair, is it?
Fair, my foot. What happens when a situation comes up that's biased against me?
Of course, from the students' perspective, complaints were inevitable. Present everyone with the same scenario, and the conditions were bound to disadvantage someone.
Start at long range, and the sword-wielders suffer a penalty. Start in close, and the long-range fighters are the ones in trouble.
That said, we had no capacity to run a different exam for every single student. And even if we tried, fairness complaints would erupt regardless—you could bank on it.
"Look, that's just how exams are. Some of it you'll know, some of it you won't. Which means you should work hard at everything. Understood?"
"Oh, come on!"
"That's so unfair!"
"Settle down. If a real fairness issue comes up, the teachers will work something out, so you just focus on taking the exam. Got it?"
If anything, the content of this exam favored our class, if anything—it certainly didn't disadvantage them. After all, I'd been drilling them on well-rounded skill development from day one.
Only after I'd soothed and cajoled did the students finally quiet down. With that settled, I let out a discreet sigh, clapped twice, and pulled their attention back.
"Alright, today we're just doing light practice, so everyone grab a room. Questions? Ask away!"
At that, the very students who'd been pouting like penguins a moment ago scattered in little groups.
Well, fair enough. At their age, a facility like this would look like magic even just to look at.
Actually, I'd been the same way once. I'd even snuck in to try it, back in the day.
Not that it was ever any use to me.
Projecting monster illusions was all well and good, but every time I did, my senses sharpened further—and that was the problem. Those honed senses would instantly see through any monster that appeared as nothing but an illusion, which meant the training room was, for all practical purposes, useless to me.
And here I'd been planning to hole up in here and just carve up monsters all day... My eyes still stung with the memory of that grief as I rubbed them—when students who'd rushed to activate the equipment ahead of everyone else began to appear. They were easy to spot; their nervousness was visible from across the room.
Watching them, I let out a quiet chuckle.
"Pretty intuitive, right? The panel lists the monster types and their ranks. Match what you want to fight to what's on screen and adjust accordingly."
"Um, Teacher? There's something called autonomous training, too?"
"That's autonomous training in the truest sense—a customized workout tailored to each of you. You're welcome to try it, but fair warning: it's brutal. So be careful!"
Perhaps it was the sheer pull of the words "customized training," but a fair number of students chose the autonomous option without so much as listening to my warning.
...Honestly? I wasn't thrilled about it. That autonomous training was the true heart of this midterm exam—but I couldn't help feeling it might be too much.
"Autonomous training" sounded innocuous enough, but its actual mechanism was for the illusion system to read the trainee's thoughts and reconstruct the enemy best suited to them.
A regimen designed to let users overcome the very thing they feared.
The intent was noble—but by its very nature, it could just as easily scar the mind. These were kids of a generation where being trauma-free was the exception, not the rule.
My own position was that they were still children, and teaching them this kind of training already was pushing it—but I couldn't argue against the counterpoint that what we were raising here wasn't merely students, but the next generation of hunters.
And frankly, that argument wasn't wrong.
We couldn't send people to the front line who froze in front of a monster. I'd have preferred a more gradual approach, but there was no better grading criterion available than this.
How far can you overcome the disadvantages stacked against you? That was the theme of this exam.
"Finished setting up? Then let's ease into it, shall we?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Everyone ready? Then—begin!"
Of course, even this facility couldn't yet be called perfect. Part of the teachers' job, mine included, involved calibrating the training room's systems to an appropriate standard.
The instant the starting signal rang out, pandemonium erupted. Honestly, watching it was a little funny.
"AAAAGH!!"
The ones in true meltdown, unsurprisingly, were the students who'd chosen autonomous training.
Some simply panicked; others had gone genuinely pale. But the most comical cases of all were the students from whom something other than a monster had popped out.
"MY COINS!!"
I tore my eyes away from Yoonha, roaring at the bear market spread across the screen before her. However you sliced it, that was a bit much. At the very least, let the poor girl fight a monster.
Swallowing that thought, I surveyed the other students.
"Um, oppa? It's not working?"
"Shh! Ha-yeon, shh!"
Then there was Ha-yeon's case.
Fortunately, the surrounding students were too busy wrestling with their own unfamiliar illusions to react to the word oppa—and when I scrambled over in alarm, I caught the error message flashing on the screen she'd been operating.
Her setting: autonomous training.
After a moment's thought, I could only conclude the machine had simply overloaded.
The greatest traumas in Ha-yeon's life were, of course, those dragon trio, and the demon that had burst out during the practical training exercise.
Neither of those was anything the system could render at A+ Rank.
"Well, nothing for it. Ha-yeon, let's just have you do something else for now."
"Yes, sir."
Watching the students, it occurred to me that we ought to build a safety measure into what the system could project based on their skill level—something to automatically scale down an illusion that was too powerful, or psychologically destabilizing.
And if it could also train for specific scenarios, so much the better.
Acquiring the data and implementing it would take effort, of course—but figuring that out was the engineers' job, not mine.
I was filing these observations away in my head when a few of the other students caught my eye.
It was their first time using the equipment, so there were plenty of comic moments. Jung Pilyeon, who handled it flawlessly from the start, was actually the exception here. Among the rest were those who, like Lee Yeeun, had thrown dignity and decorum to the wind entirely—screaming cheers as they fled for their lives.
Should've installed cameras.
Utterly unimaginable, considering how Lee Yeeun normally carried herself. If we'd caught that on film, she'd be a running joke for the rest of her days. I clicked my tongue in regret and picked up the pace.
Gradually, even the students who'd panicked at first began adapting to the illusions. A few had already conquered theirs outright.
And yet.
The most eye-catching performance of the day, as ever, was Ryu Jihee's.
Brows knotted in fury, arms and legs swinging with a wildness she didn't usually show.
I glanced at her console—sure enough, autonomous training.
These kids just don't know how to listen to their teacher. With that thought, I studied her training opponent.
And I was a little surprised.
Jihee's opponent was... Jihee herself.
No—wait. Not quite.
Narrowing my eyes, I picked out the differences.
A frame a good hand-span taller than Jihee. Elegantly long legs, and eyes even more bewitching than the rest of her. The snow-white hair and ruby-red eyes were identical to Jihee's own—close enough that nothing about them struck me as odd—but the overall air was unmistakably more mature.
And then there was the outfit, which left every line of her body on brazen display.
Frankly, it was a rather embarrassing thing to witness face to face.
The wings on her back took the same general shape as the pair Jihee had shown in the classroom once before.
In a word: a textbook succubus.
Yet Jihee's movements against that succubus were nothing short of savage. She seized it by the hair, hurled it to the floor, took the mount position, and started pounding away. Judged against her usual tactics, it was barbaric to a fault—and hardly the right approach against a succubus, a monster notoriously resistant to physical interference.
I was still mentally critiquing when her training session came to an end. The fist she'd slammed down had shattered the succubus's skull.
Jihee came back to herself all at once, breathing hard, glancing around—and her eyes landed on me.
Shock. Confusion. Shame.
A procession of emotions crossed her face in rapid succession. But she recovered in a heartbeat, then sauntered over wearing the very picture of composure.
"Oh my. Is something the matter, Teacher?"
Considering I'd been watching from the very beginning, that was rich—but the sight of her putting up such a brave front was almost pitiable, so I decided to play along this once.
Looking away from her burning red ears, I said exactly what I'd thought watching her train.
"No, I was just thinking, my, how lewd."
Gotta add a filter for that next time. As it stands, having something that indecent pop up mid-exam could get awkward.
At my words, red heat spread outward from her ears until her entire face had ripened crimson.
"Wh—it's not—it wasn't me, that was—!"
"Ah, it's fine. Teachers understand everything. Just—don't go around doing that, alright? Monsters get a pass, but you'd get arrested for public indecency. And I'd rather not meet you at the police station."
I'd meant to add one more piece of friendly advice, but judging from the way she flailed her limbs in even deeper panic, she hadn't understood a word.
"Come on. I went out of my way, you know. There's no way I could just say to a high school girl, my, you fight awfully dirty for someone so young—so I chose my words carefully."
"...You're not going to ask?"
"Hm? About what?"
"About, um. What that was. My opponent just now, for example..."
"What, your mother?"
Come on. I don't have face-blindness; of course I recognized it.
Some variety of night-race demon, most likely—a succubus in Western terms, a gumiho in Eastern ones. I couldn't say precisely what species, but I could make a decent guess. And judging from how she fought, like most hybrids, she wasn't on good terms with her parent.
More to the point, I'd assumed it was her mother and told her not to live like that—had I thought she was fighting a cosplaying copy of herself, it would have been plain sexual harassment.
"Relax. What if the other students see you like that? You'll shatter your whole image."
But her wariness didn't ease.
Maybe she suspected I was trying to pry something out of her. Choi Seungjun had said much the same, after all.
However—
There was one crucial gap in understanding here.
What Choi Seungjun and I cared about was the organization lurking behind the Honinhoe—not Ryu Jihee as an individual.
Besides, I'd known she was a hybrid from the very start.
The moment Chairman Choi Seungjun declared he had no intention of blocking hybrid admissions, my obligations on that front ended.
Above all, Jihee was never someone I needed to guard against.
Not for any soft reason like teacher-student bonds—simply because, if I ever truly wanted to, I could kill her at any moment.
Against a target you could eliminate in a blink should you wish it, there was no reason to feel threatened.
"If you must know—your actual technique isn't bad."
"...Huh?"
"Succubi are strong at mental interference but weak physically. That's their defining trait."
"So you shore up the mental interference with your bloodline, and cover close combat with human technique."
"You've got a genuine talent for fighting, too. Practice a little more and you'd have a completely airtight skill set."
Honestly, on raw fighting ability alone, she was already above Lee Yeeun.
"Just watch that your vision doesn't narrow in. Misjudge it, and you could eat a counterattack. Well—keep at it."
I wrapped up the assessment, turned toward the next student—and heard a voice behind me.
"What is wrong with that man...?"
"I can hear you, you know."
"—You can?!"
"Hunter senses. Ears better than an ordinary person's. It's in the job description."
While I nursed my inner wounds at her should've kept your mouth shut tone, Ha-yeon—who'd been dispatching her own monster moments ago—approached, wiping the sweat from her brow.
"Tired?"
"Yes. More than that—my ability alone can't take down a monster."
"Right? Which is exactly why people like us have to think carefully about how we fight. Our abilities are support, always—training wheels, nothing more."
"I'll think about it slowly. Nothing's coming to me right now."
"Good. No rush. Take all the time you need."
"...By the way, is something the matter, Teacher?"
"Hm?"
"You just had this dazed look on your face."
"You didn't have to put it like that..."
While I grumbled about being called out as some kind of creep, Ha-yeon burst into soft laughter beside me. Beyond the fresh sound of it, I caught a hint of mischievous knowing.
No doubt she'd pieced together something of the situation herself—but her tact in not mentioning it put me somewhat at ease.
Well, whatever else, I couldn't very well borrow my students' hands for this particular mess.
For now, I'd leave her be—let her prepare for the exam like everyone else.
And so, the midterms arrived.