The Butcher's Clean Record
To Ryu Jihee, Park Woochan was a strange man.
And it wasn't merely a comment on what he was — the face he showed as a teacher was no different. Knowledge so encyclopedic it bordered on excessive, set against a record that yielded not one proper credential. He made no effort whatsoever to hide what he could do, so when she heard he was called the Butcher, it had almost made sense.
A hunter who had surfaced in the wake of the Second Great Cataclysm. Death to monsters. The most dangerous hunter of them all. So why was a man like that playing teacher at the Academy? Jihee couldn't begin to fathom it.
A strange dissonance. Whenever Jihee looked at Park Woochan, she sensed that same subtle wrongness hanging about him.
It was why she had been the first to object when the commission came down. Survival craft, drilled into her by years of living as a half-blood: against a man like that, the safest play is to never show an opening from the very start.
Nothing changed after Nam Sangwon's decision made acceptance final, either. She couldn't have persuaded Nam Sangwon on her own, and she had no hope of talking down the Honinhoe members who had stepped forward prepared to die. The reward on offer was that enticing — and a mere high schooler like Jihee had nothing better to put on the table.
Nor could she help the Honinhoe. Nam Sangwon had vetoed it outright: it was one thing for the half-bloods joining this operation, whose identities were already public, but for Jihee — who was living a good, quiet life — to expose what she was was a risk far too great to take.
Truthfully, if you'd asked her what she could even have done with Nam Sangwon's blessing, she was rather skeptical.
Whatever the case, she was just a high school student. A hard life as a half-blood doesn't suddenly awaken political instincts you never had. One extra body wasn't going to transform the operation's odds, and her standing as a mere cadet was far too powerless to leverage her Academy enrollment into anything at all.
The reverse was just as true: she couldn't ask her homeroom teacher, Park Woochan, for help either. Naturally. The man was the Butcher himself. What if she reported the Honinhoe's base to keep the casualties from climbing, and something spiraled beyond anyone's control? As a mere schoolgirl, Jihee couldn't trust herself to live with that……
And so the best she could manage was putting on the bravest front she could.
She had once pressed Nam Sangwon — why throw yourself into something with odds like that? — but Jihee, too, had had no choice but to throw herself in. Leak a thread of the Honinhoe's plan, and quietly steer things so the two men never crossed paths. If Nam Sangwon could be subdued within the time she bought, the rest of the Honinhoe would have no choice but to stand down.
However ready a person is to die, no one wants to throw their life away on something with truly no hope.
If she could pull it off before the terror campaign began in earnest, the battle might yet be avoided. Nine times out of ten it would smell fishy and rouse his suspicion, and the Honinhoe might even come to see her as a traitor — but that was the limit of what Jihee could do.
And yet even Jihee couldn't get a read on one thing: Park Woochan's attitude.
She'd written herself a script and rehearsed it, tried every trick to look composed — but actually declaring what she was had still taken real courage. She'd chosen her words to sound like she was hiding something, but honestly, she'd thought it wouldn't be strange if her head left her shoulders on the spot.
From everything Jihee had heard — and as a half-blood with one foot in society's back alleys, she had heard plenty — the Butcher was exactly that kind of man.
Deploying without orders just because monsters happened to be there. A bottomless rage that had reportedly made a telepath faint dead away from the killing intent alone. She'd even heard that once, at a meeting with high-ranking officials arranged by the Association, he had cut a man down and walked out — for no reason other than that the man's abilities resembled a monster's.
So for Jihee, this had been, in effect, a gamble with her own life as the stake.
And yet Park Woochan hadn't cared in the slightest. He'd looked genuinely surprised when she revealed she was a half-blood, but that was all — no reaction beyond it. Contrary to every expectation, he hadn't lunged for her horns or come at her wings with a blade. If anything, he had passed by with an air of perfect calm and tossed her a piece of advice.
There was no telling what went on in that man's head.
That quiet wrongness — the sense that one day, out of nowhere, that smiling face might swing a blade.
That was exactly why Jihee had never been able to lay her circumstances before Park Woochan.
"Hey, Jihee. What are you doing here? Well, you're fucked — the exam literally just started. Your grades are toast, kid."
And yet.
The one person Jihee had least wanted to see at this moment had just strolled in without a care in the world, spouting complete nonsense.
She couldn't grasp what had happened. Just as he did in the classroom on any ordinary day, Park Woochan was looking down at her collapsed body with a flippant grin. It wasn't mockery — there was a strange lightness in it, as if he genuinely found the scene in front of him funny.
"Huh?"
Slowly, she stretched out her hand and managed, just barely, to catch his sleeve.
It was the only thing Jihee could do. Her scheme — if it deserved the name — had failed miserably. She hadn't even been able to keep Nam Sangwon and Park Woochan from meeting.
In the end, as always, all that was left to Jihee was a prayer no one would answer.
"Please. I'm begging you. Teacher, please. Sir — please don't kill him."
"Huh? Sure."
And then.
Just as he always had, Park Woochan answered with a face carrying no weight at all.
He looked so clean saying it — so utterly wrong for the name "Butcher" — that before she knew it, Jihee burst out laughing.
"Whoa, what is with these people……"
Honestly? I was a little shaken — because of Ryu Jihee, who had passed out cold right in front of me after spitting out the strangest request. Seriously, anyone who walked in on that would think I was a serial killer. I mean, actually killing her here would leave blood everywhere. Not that I'd be the one mopping it up, but stack that on top of everything else and the gate's unlocking really would get shoved back to next semester — the one outcome I absolutely could not allow.
More to the point, I genuinely had no idea what was going on. What was this — a falling-out over pay? I'd wanted to ask, but Jihee's voice had been so resolute that I'd been a little cowed and never did.
I know it's a lousy thing to say, but I kind of wish they'd gotten all that heavy atmosphere out of the way before I arrived.
Well, I could roughly piece it together. No idea why, but the intel Jihee had passed along did have holes in it. Somewhere in the time I'd wasted, the two of them had collided after linking up — and Nam Sangwon had come out on top. In other words: when the muscle comes up short, the brain pays the price.
"My, my. This is why your teacher keeps telling you to train properly~"
Not that I minded — one opponent instead of two actually made my life easier.
"Still, looks like I made it in time."
A sidelong glance confirmed the gate was still quiet. I'd set up at least the bare minimum of defenses, but against an opponent this far from ordinary, I couldn't say I trusted them much.
With a low grunt, I straightened my knees and rose once more. Part of me wanted to lay the collapsed Jihee down somewhere more comfortable, but I figured touching her would only creep her out, so I left her be.
"Man, that gave me a scare. Ah — and much obliged for waiting."
"Hardly. That's my line. The Butcher's reputation precedes him. The bond between teacher and student, shall we call it? Either way, you clearly mean Jihee no harm. Thank you for that."
"Good grief. Anyone listening would think I was the one who came here to attack."
At the remark I'd tossed off, Nam Sangwon pulled a wry smile of his own. Well, it wasn't wrong, was it? The assailant was over there and the defender over here — so why was he giving me grief about it?
"Eh, whatever. So — care to surrender? The rest of your gentlemen are already flat on their backs, for what it's worth."
"Conveniently enough, had that been my intention, I'd never have come this far in the first place."
"Fair. I was just saying it for saying's sake. Poking at a persimmon I couldn't eat, as they say."
Ugh, fuck. I knew it'd come to this. A sigh welled up before I could stop it, and I shook my head.
"Anyway — so? Come on, then, let's hear your side of it. What is all this bullshit actually for?"
Honestly, I couldn't have cared less. But I might need the full story later, and there was plain old personal curiosity, too. What on earth was a man that caliber being paid to come all this way and put on a stunt show?
To my question, Nam Sangwon wore a wry smile yet again.
"Considering what it would do to the Honinhoe's image, I can't very well say…… You're not expecting an answer anyone could work out with ten minutes of thought, are you?"
"Well, signing on as an Academy terrorist over a single tabloid story nobody can source doesn't exactly pencil out."
"Not wrong. Which leaves only two reasons I can give. One: the pay is nothing to scoff at. Two: frankly, this was the better option."
"Huh?"
To that baffled response of mine, the man — harder-featured than the photo in his file, and haggard well beyond it — answered in a low voice.
"There are such things as half-bloods. Lives created when monsters assault human beings. 'How dreadful,' people say — and that is precisely the extent of the regard people hold for half-bloods."
"Hm."
"In truth, aren't you much the same? You wear the face of a man with little patience for games of ideology."
"Not wrong, but don't judge a man by his face. I'm an intellectual, I'll have you know. A proper egghead."
"My apologies. But that is my honest heart. Better that the word be spoken at all than that half-bloods be passed around as small talk — gossip about some other world's affairs. That is the conclusion our Honinhoe reached."
That made me scratch at my ear, awkward. The Nam Sangwon I'd come to know through the files drifted back to me. I could guess at it — how a man who should have been nothing more than a university student came to carry convictions like those. Perhaps because, on the very day he lost the people precious to him, he swore it over the blood staining his hands. Even if it meant rivers upon rivers of blood, perhaps he simply could not find a better conclusion.
Such is the era. Like my students — an age where hardly a soul escapes without trauma. Perhaps this side of Nam Sangwon, too, was a piece of his.
The struggle of a man who lost something so precious that day that he has never found a single thing to take its place. Unlike Jihee or the others drawn to him, this is the roar of a man still unable to bear the hole punched clean through his chest. That is why Nam Sangwon keeps turning those words over — not to be heard by anyone, but murmured for himself alone. Because otherwise, what meaning would be left in the life of the one who survived alone?
The man who still cannot forget the weight of what he lost that day demands of himself something worth more than that loss. Maybe it's nothing more than a compensatory urge. No — maybe that's the word that fits him best of all. Well, either way, it's none of my business.
"You know the old saying — take a slap in Jongno, go glare at the Han River. Venting at whoever happens to be standing in front of you. Suits you to a tee, I must say."
"Not wrong."
Argue it back and forth however you like, and the Academy still hadn't done a single thing wrong. And despite that, Nam Sangwon had chosen to hammer the Academy rather than the organization that had handed him an unjust order.
"In that sense, I'd say it's almost a mercy that you're the one standing across from me."
"Hah?"
"Then let me ask the reverse. How many half-bloods have you cut down in your time? How many have you felled under the fine banner of 'subjugation'?"
Nam Sangwon let out a short, booming laugh. The words had an edge, but it seemed turned not on Park Woochan — on himself. A lament for a world that spends the word "half-blood" without a shred of weight. Hatred for a mad era where even that outrage fails to qualify as a decent way to pass the time. And the value of a life grown cheap to the point of insult — nothing like the days when this man still dreamed of becoming a teacher.
And on top of that—
"It seems I, too, was once a child of man. Have I simply worn myself out, raging at each of those things one by one? If anything, there's a part of me that's relieved — relieved my opponent is someone I can be furious at without holding back."
As if drunk, Nam Sangwon poured it all out as he settled into his stance. For a man who had once chased his own idea of justice, his situation — slapped in Jongno, glaring at the Han River, exactly as the saying went — must have struck him as downright funny. The heartache he'd kept bottled up all this time, and the lament to match it, were bleeding into his every word.
But even I couldn't hold my tongue — not now, on the eve of a fight to the death.
"Look, sorry, but……"
"What is it?"
"I've never killed one, though?"
Dead stop. Without warning, silence came down between us.
This is exactly why I hate talking things out, I couldn't help grumbling to myself. But having opened my mouth, there was no taking it back now.
"In my entire life, I have never once killed a half-blood. Not a single one, I tell you."
And then.
An awkwardness neither of us could have put into words began to settle between the two of us.