Apologies and Report Cards
"I'm sorry."
The next day.
Only after every last incident had been wrapped up was Jihee finally able to get me alone, and she bowed deep at the waist as she said it. Her cascading silver hair spilled forward with the motion, and I had to admit it looked rather splendid.
"Uh, uhh. Right."
Honestly, it was a little much for me. This bore no resemblance not only to the way she usually clowned around at school, but even to the side of her I'd seen in that classroom at sunset that day.
Well, I suppose this whole affair had left her with feelings of her own to sort through...
"Well, don't go carrying too much guilt over it."
Truthfully, from where I stood, it had all seemed beyond anyone's control. That was largely thanks to what I'd heard a while back, when we succeeded in winning the Honinhoe over.
There was a reason Nam Sangwon—a man who prized the Honinhoe's public image above nearly everything—had been willing to swallow the stigma of something like an attack on the Academy to see this through.
In other words: the compensation offered by those who had instigated the attack.
Namely—
"They promised to bring it up in the National Assembly," or so the story went.
The ones who had ordered this attack had, apparently, made exactly that promise to Nam Sangwon: should he lend his strength to the affair, then outcome be damned, they would see matters concerning the half-bloods raised in the National Assembly.
For a man who believed that letting the world know what half-bloods truly were had to come before all else, it must have been an offer impossible to refuse. Of course, now that he'd thrown in with our side, that promise was worth exactly nothing.
Then again, if you asked whether people who treated the Honinhoe like a subcontracting outfit had ever genuinely intended to keep Nam Sangwon's request in their hearts, skepticism was the only honest answer.
However. Flip the question around—did they actually have the power to make good on it?
That was rather harder to deny.
Their track record alone said as much. Frankly, it left me wondering whether a single bill existed in this country that they couldn't touch.
The problem was that I couldn't for the life of me figure out what people of that caliber would want with abducting Hayeon.
On that point, the Honinhoe itself had known precious little. They'd actually turned around and asked us who this Ja Hayeon person even was.
Reading between the lines, I suspected their organization ran on a cell structure. They had fed information about that hunter of theirs to the Honinhoe—whom they'd planned to use and discard—while never so much as mentioning Hayeon. Short of that, it made no sense: an outfit with the manpower to infiltrate the Academy itself, yet not one word spared for her? Nothing about it added up.
Presumably, the ones who had pushed this operation forward were the party now staring down serious losses, what with that hunter bastard in custody.
Given how they'd handled the Honinhoe, theirs clearly wasn't a flat hierarchy—but neither, Choi Seungjun and I guessed, was it a structure tight enough for them to micromanage every piece. Which meant that, in a way, they'd dodged a bullet. Had it been that tight, their plans would have leaked straight through Nam Sangwon and the others.
And so, we decided to grant ourselves an ill-timed break.
It had only just been that they attempted their media offensive and got slapped down by a counterattack in return. With our side racking up wins at an unusual clip of late, they had no choice but to keep their heads down for the time being.
They might seethe at the Honinhoe for turning on them, but to strike at the Honinhoe, they'd have no choice but to show their faces in political circles.
Which, from where we sat, meant the Honinhoe now served as a shield—one that made pinning them down considerably easier. Frankly, if they bared their tails to go after the Honinhoe, that would be nothing but good news for us.
Conversely, that was exactly why I wasn't holding my breath.
The ones actually at war with them were, first and foremost, me—and by extension Joongoo, the Academy, and the rest of my circle. Not the Honinhoe.
"So don't let it weigh on you."
These were people who could toss out bait that size without batting an eye. It felt a bit wrong to say, but this was simply beyond what a relatively minor outfit like the Honinhoe could hope to handle.
Above all—everything had turned out fine in the end.
If things had gone wrong, that would be one thing. When they work out, they're nothing more than a funny story to trade later.
Besides, Jihee had agonized over it far more than I ever had.
I'd heard straight from the horse's mouth what she'd been thinking when she pulled that stunt.
Sure, I'd been pissed when it happened—and honestly, I was still a little pissed now—but when her reason was that she couldn't bear to see her teacher and an uncle she knew crossing blades, what else was there to say? Heck, the actual damage I'd suffered amounted to wasting all of ten minutes.
She really does sweat the small stuff. Looked at that way, it almost felt like Jihee was the one making a mountain out of a molehill.
Choi Seungjun, and now this girl—usually such shameless characters, and yet they always got worse at moments like this.
I thought back to the other day, when Choi Seungjun had come by to apologize, saying that as things stood, the Honinhoe might well escape punishment altogether. It was the same then as now: honestly, being told that just left me in an awkward spot.
Punishing the Honinhoe wouldn't net me anything in the first place. Maybe it'd be satisfying for an hour or so, but doing it purely to sweeten my own mood seemed a touch pathetic, no?
So, to Jihee—who had deflated even further—I decided to toss out something a little different.
"Anyway—now that you know better, next time try consulting some of the other adults too."
Even in a world turned upside down, a high schooler was, at the end of the day, a high schooler. Superhuman strength or not, these were kids who had only just entered their growth years.
Which is to say: impatient, and with no head for weighing things properly.
Jihee's little episode was a textbook case. If she was that scared of me and Nam Sangwon coming to blows, she should have just told me from the start instead of posturing with a hand she couldn't win.
Physically forcing me and that Nam Sangwon fellow apart, or single-handedly mediating between the Honinhoe and the Academy from the position of one ordinary high schooler... Whether she'd overestimated her own abilities or what have you, either way the result was a spectacular, resounding failure. In the end, it was me and Choi Seungjun cleaning up the mess.
If it was going to end like that anyway, wouldn't it have been far better to simply tell me from the beginning?
"...Do you genuinely think that?"
"Obviously!"
At my words, Jihee pulled a somewhat complicated expression—then promptly deflated with a long, hopeless sigh.
Tsk, tsk. At the sight, I clicked my tongue without meaning to and rapped the desk with the bundle of papers in my hand.
"Don't give me those eyes. This isn't something we can just wave through. Look—what exactly are we going to do about this?"
"Ugh."
What I spread across the desk as I said it was, of course, Jihee's report card.
Jihee made a noise like a dying animal before she could stop herself, but the truth was her grades were roughly average. Call it clever juggling—for someone who'd been syncing up my schedule with Nam Sangwon's, they weren't half bad.
The problem was the practical exam. In other words, the very thing Jihee had thrown away this time around.
"No, Jihee. In all my years on this earth, you are the first exam no-show I have ever seen."
"Well, you haven't been a teacher all that long, so..."
"Ahem!"
Not wrong, but not what she needed to be saying right now either. Nor was it the answer I'd been hoping for.
And yet, for all her easygoing cheek, the moment Jihee laid eyes on the gaping hole in the middle of her report card, a groan tore its way out of her.
"Jihee, are these grades for real? A zero on the practical is genuinely legendary."
"Come on, there were, uh, extenuating circumstances..."
"You think that makes this go away?"
In the end, Jihee had missed that day's exam. Naturally, it had been recorded as a zero.
Partly because our usual training dovetailed with the exam's criteria, our class average sat higher than any other class's—which made her score stand out all the more. Excluding Jihee, we ranked top of every class in the year. Including her, dead last of every class in the year. With barely a dozen-odd students per class, the impact was bound to be enormous.
Right.
This little sit-down was, quite literally, a grade evaluation. A time for each class's homeroom teacher to go over the midterm results and offer students advice on shoring up their weak points.
With Jihee, of course, there was nothing to say beyond "show up in the first place"—hence the pleasant chitchat. To any other teacher, the whole thing would look like she'd had some sort of problem and bolted right before the exam, so I'd opened this conversation largely for appearances' sake.
"The way I see it, your first-semester grades are toast. Jihee, let's just write them off."
"I-I'll work hard!"
"Right. Of course you will. You'll have to do far better than that."
I unfurled, in all its glory, the repertoire of the teachers who used to hound me back in my own school days. A combination attack that dismantled a student's psyche the way one butchers a monster. Jihee, too, lost her footing and quietly wilted.
"No, I never really planned on graduating in the first place."
"Oh?! Congratulations, Jihee!! Have you awakened your second ability?"
"...Huh?"
"It must be some kind of explosion power. My patience just went boom, Jihee!!"
Bang, bang—I pounded at my chest in theatrical frustration, and Jihee's face crumpled into an even deeper picture of misery. Watching her like this, she really did look like nothing more than an ordinary high school girl.
Hoo. With a short sigh, I tidied the paperwork into a stack. Jihee hunched her shoulders briefly at the sound of my breath, but I had no intention of scolding her this time.
"It's about time you started thinking about graduating."
"......"
"Choi Seungjun said as much, didn't he? He has no intention of standing in the way of your graduations. Starting next semester, your juniors will be admitted as the new freshman class too."
"The principal said that?"
"Uh, uhh. Right. Principal Choi Seungjun. Uhh, hm."
Seriously—why was it so hard to say anything polite about that bastard? As I grumbled under my breath despite myself, Jihee, watching me, broke into quiet giggles. Unlike the smile I'd witnessed in that classroom two weeks ago, this one was fresh and unguarded.
"Tell me about it."
"Right. It wasn't exactly a pretty way for things to start, but they wrapped up decently enough, didn't they? It'd be a shame to throw away an opportunity like the one you've been handed, no?"
At words to that effect, Jihee gave a small nod.
Pfft—my own suppressed chuckle lasted only a moment.
"Well, if you'd actually shown up, your scores wouldn't have been bad. I don't have much else to add."
"Hm? Really?"
"Yep. You did test it out on that Nam Sangwon fellow, after all."
A fighting style that fused her nightmare-race abilities with Ryu Jihee's own martial arts. I'd only mentioned it in passing, but the results had apparently been quite good—so good that Nam Sangwon was still hamming it up about how sore his shoulder was from where she'd nailed him.
As I caught myself picturing the Honinhoe members who had, somewhere along the way, landed jobs as the school's security guards, Jihee nodded once more.
"Yeah, I think it works pretty well."
"Right. Your mana manipulation isn't bad, but at the end of the day, we're hunters."
Nightmares commanded a colorful array of abilities, but their direct combat power was weak. Mental interference, mana manipulation, resistance to physical interference—they enjoyed every advantage under the sun, yet it was no exaggeration to say they had virtually no means of dealing direct damage to an opponent.
But what if you could cover for that with other means?
The nightmare's weakness—a total lack of direct offensive tools—could be sublimated into a strength: specialization in every species of support.
Struggling against physical interference became an edge in close-quarters combat, when the opponent likewise had no physical means of attack. Being able to touch the mind only through charm—unable to attack by scrambling a psyche—became the power to force openings in an opponent mid-fight. The same went for the nightmare's signature mana manipulation. And she even had wings, which put aerial combat on the table as well.
For however much time remained, this was the direction Jihee's training should take. Assembling the plan in my head, I gave her a light tilt of the chin.
"Alright, counseling's over. So put that face away and go bring in the others, will you?"
True enough, things had gotten somewhat tangled along the way, but the matter of the Honinhoe had, for now, come to a close. Which meant it was time for Jihee to go back to being a student of the Academy—not a nightmare half-blood belonging to the Honinhoe—and for me to go back to being its teacher.
"Okaay~!"
With far more spring in her voice, Jihee left the counseling room behind.
Watching her retreating figure, I found myself remembering that I'd once held a very different impression in this very same room. All things considered, these were good days.
The shadow war with that faction, whose true purpose remained anyone's guess. The tangled political maneuvering, the positions we each occupied.
But having come through a week snarled with a dozen complications, the midterm exams had finally, at long last, drawn to a close.