Chapter 58
Ja Hayeon was not, by any stretch, the kind of person you could call bold — not even as a joke.
Whether that was simply the temperament she'd been born with, or a personality carved into her by the cold looks she'd endured at the orphanage, there was no telling. In truth, there was no way to separate the two in the first place.
And yet, even for her, meeting Park Woochan had come as a considerable shock.
There were more than a few who looked down on her behind their smiles, and no shortage of others who approached her with something up their sleeves. It couldn't be helped. The mere fact that she was an orphan was enough for people to write her off as socially defenseless.
And honestly, they weren't entirely wrong. All the more so once you added that she was a timid girl on top of it.
Which was why, before anything else, Hayeon had learned how to smile. Act composed. Act detached. Take a step back, keep your poise, and most problems could be brushed aside. That was the survival craft Hayeon had taught herself.
But Park Woochan was different.
At first, she couldn't make sense of him at all. Why he would go to such lengths for a girl he'd met for the very first time in his life — she simply couldn't fathom it.
Yet as she spent time at his side and came to understand his heart, gratitude rose to the fore. She had no idea what someone who was nothing more than a nameless orphan could possibly do in return, but she did think that someday, somehow, she wanted to repay everything she owed him.
And then.
Little by little, even that feeling began to change. They say humans are animals of adaptation — had there really come a moment when she started taking Park Woochan's kindness for granted?
No. If that were the case, she might have been ashamed of her own shamelessness, but she would never have come to harbor a feeling like this one.
Loneliness.
Lately, that was the only word for what Hayeon carried inside her.
As far as she could see, the way Woochan looked after her was kindness with not a shred of self-interest in it. And precisely because of that, he extended the very same kindness to the other children without a moment's hesitation.
First it had been Lee Yeeun. Then Hwang Yoonha. From the bits and pieces she'd picked up along the way, something had happened with Ryu Jihee as well — and now Jung Pilyeon was in the picture too.
...Under normal circumstances, she should have been proud of that. For all his ability and character, the hunter called Park Woochan was absurdly under-recognized.
If anything, it was something to celebrate — Hayeon told herself that over and over. It's fine. This is a good thing, isn't it? He's someone who deserves far more credit than he gets...
But in the end, she couldn't bring herself to believe it.
Of course, Woochan looking after the others didn't mean he neglected her. No — even if he had, she'd have had no right to complain. And yet, all the same, Hayeon could not smother the strange heat simmering in her chest.
So she smiled over it instead. Just as she had before she ever met Park Woochan.
Act composed. Act detached. Take a step back, keep your poise, and most problems could somehow be laughed off.
Because that was the survival craft Hayeon had learned.
She could not, however, make herself truly composed.
Not when, unlike at the beginning, the students who could recognize Woochan's true worth kept growing in number. Not when, unlike before, he began looking out for the other children. Not when scraps of articles about him made the rounds, and the sight of students casting admiring glances his way all the same lodged in her eyes and refused to leave.
And conversely, that was exactly why Hayeon stayed silent.
She already owed the man her life. She couldn't imagine ever repaying it by any other means. So at the very least — at the very least — she wanted to avoid becoming any more of a burden to him than she already was.
The pillar holding up Hayeon's heart was, ironically enough, the memory of how she and Woochan had first met.
"I'm different from the others."
Unlike the other children, the way she and Park Woochan had met was not a matter of mere academy teacher and student. Unlike the other students, theirs was a special encounter — one into which petty personal circumstance could never intrude.
It was a rather childish notion. But for Hayeon, it was a matter of desperate importance.
Perhaps because it was the first kindness anyone had ever extended to her in her life.
It was the only way she had to refill a patience that was being whittled away, scrape by scrape.
The fact that she knew about Woochan's private life played its own solid part in that, too.
Hers were days spent precariously balancing the scales of her heart, steadying them with a counterweight called superiority.
Even so, from the moment she became aware of her own feelings, Hayeon threw herself into school life without pause. She threw herself into training, and she raised her marks.
Partly in hope of Woochan's praise — but also because a wish had begun to sprout in her, the wish to someday be of help to him in turn.
In all the time since the day she'd met Park Woochan, Hayeon had never once been told how far the matter concerning her had progressed. Nor how much he was suffering to resolve it.
Of course, thought about calmly, that was only natural. Like the dragon and the demon she had faced that day, the affairs Woochan was entangled in were far beyond anything a mere cadet could hope to touch.
No — even if she could help, she couldn't begin to imagine Park Woochan asking her for it.
Because he was that kind of man.
If anything, he would only clamp his mouth shut all the tighter. So that she could live an ordinary life, the same as any other student.
If that was what Woochan intended, then his wish had been granted — in precisely the opposite direction.
She had no intention of asking him first. If he was swallowing the answer out of consideration for her, then prying it out of him half-heartedly would be an act of pure shamelessness.
So she would raise her strength in silence. So that someday — not now — she could stand beside him no longer as a one-sidedly protected ward, but as a comrade he could rely on.
And so.
The thing that tipped the scales she had balanced with such effort was, as fate would have it, not one of the other students at all — but a stone that came flying in from entirely outside her field of awareness.
"Whoa, Master! So it was true — you actually got a job?!"
Shin Seoa.
That was the name Park Woochan introduced her by, and it was a name Hayeon had heard before. On the day she'd learned that he was a hunter, she had wandered the Association's halls waiting for him after he vanished without a word — and in a magazine she'd come across along the way, that name had been splashed proudly across a feature article.
Her photograph, smiling with elegant poise as the cover model of the Association's monthly magazine, remained vivid in her memory even now.
The High School Girl Hunter.
It was a hopelessly dated nickname by now, but it was the label the media outlet that first discovered her had pinned on Shin Seoa. Literally, it meant a hunter of high-school age — but more than that, what had caught the public eye was that a girl who, until so recently, had been a perfectly ordinary high school student had thrown herself, belatedly, into the hunter industry.
In the interview printed in that magazine, she had said this: that she, too, had never meant to become a hunter. That if her father — a hunter himself — had not died before her eyes protecting her, she never would have.
But the gate had taken her father, and in place of her mother — left so traumatized by watching her husband devoured in front of her that the mere sight of a monster sent her into seizures — Shin Seoa had declared her vengeance upon the monsters.
Fortunately, she had been able to learn her craft from the hunter who saved what remained of her family that day. That, she said, was the only reason she was here at all. That was the kind of article it was.
And yet, even in that article, there was not one word about the man who had been Shin Seoa's savior — no mention that the leading star of the next hunter generation owed her life to one Park Woochan.
Nor, naturally, had Hayeon ever once imagined that the landlady's only daughter at the boarding house where he usually stayed might be this person.
But regardless of what Hayeon had thought, the landlady's only daughter — the one she'd quietly resolved to meet someday — was Hunter Shin Seoa herself. And her master, on top of it all, was said to be Park Woochan.
The landlady's daughter. The master. And the first disciple.
Those words were spinning in a whirlwind through Hayeon's head.
"Have you spent your whole life getting scammed?"
"No, honestly, Master, you've got the face of a man who'd get swindled till the day he died. Why does someone with money live in a dump like this?"
"Hey. Your mother runs this place, you know. What kind of way is that to talk?"
"Quit with the old-man act."
"Shut it, brat."
"Ow!! Master, did you just hit me?! What if that makes me dumber?!"
"Fair point, I'd better watch myself. Any worse off than you already are and you'll be nothing but a mountain gorilla. Now that really would be something to apologize to the landlady for."
"Hoh!! Hohoho!!"
"Crazy bitch. What would I even be getting scammed out of? There's a reason I live here."
"Exactly~ Isn't it because you fell for my beauty, Master?"
"Be grateful to the landlady, then. Once when you were born, and once right now. You owe her your life twice over."
And it was true — the woman in front of her was on even closer terms with Park Woochan than Hayeon herself was.
It was a somewhat surreal sight. A beauty lounging at her ease in the middle of a boarding house that could never be called refined. With a face that would have passed, without question, for a cool, aloof city woman — so long as she kept her mouth shut — she kept firing off one frivolous remark after another, sending her own stock into a bottomless plunge.
And yet.
This place was her family home. And she was Park Woochan's first disciple.
The moment Hayeon came face to face with those facts, she felt, without warning, as if she couldn't breathe. This tiny room she had, until so recently, thought of without thinking as her own home seemed to close around her like a fist.
It was a familiar sensation.
Back when she was still in the children's home, every time she found herself unable — no matter how she tried — to think of the orphanage as her home, this same helplessness had come to meet her.
It was all the worse as she watched Park Woochan chat away, without so much as a blink, at a scene that was utterly foreign to her. Honestly speaking, in this moment Hayeon felt like an uninvited guest who had barged in without reading the room.
"So, Master?"
"Mm?"
"Who's this kid?"
The arrow swung suddenly toward her — toward the girl who had been standing apart from it all, like a bystander.
Just as Hayeon secretly drew a shallow breath at the sensation of those slyly crescented amber eyes taking aim at her—
"Whoa, she's adorable~! Who is she? A new boarder?"
"You're not even gonna ask if she's a cousin?"
"Pfft, look at the difference in looks — no way!"
"Well, our folks would probably think the same."
"No, hold on — Master's the rugged type, so it could work, I mean..."
"Ehehe." Shin Seoa tacked that on in an embarrassed tone, grinning without a care in the world.
At the sight of her, Park Woochan let out a short, exasperated huff of a laugh — and then, in an entirely natural tone, he added:
"Sorry, Hayeon. I meant to introduce you, but she showed up out of nowhere after all this time and it slipped my mind."
"N-no. It's quite all right."
"Right. This here is Shin Seoa — like I said just now, she's more or less my disciple. Her skills aren't worth jack shit, so just remember her as the deadbeat who already left the nest and spends her days giving me grief."
"What kind of talk is that?! Your standards are what's warped here — someone like me is top of the industry, top of the industry!!"
"And this is Ja Hayeon. One of the students I teach."
One of the students he taught.
At those words, which marked out her current place in the world with unbearable clarity, Hayeon lowered her head. Then, so that the motion wouldn't look stiff, she bowed deeper still and offered her greeting quietly.
"I've heard a great deal about you. My name is Ja Hayeon. It's an honor to meet you, Hunter Shin Seoa."
"Hm? You've heard a great deal about me?"
"Yes? Yes..."
"That's weird, though~ Master would never put in a good word for me~ How suspicious~"
"If you know that much, quit goofing off and sit down, will you, brat."
Shin Seoa rolled her eyes away from Park Woochan — who was now outright nagging at her, snorting all the while — and cocked her head as if something had struck her as odd.
"Huh?"
"What now?"
"Then shouldn't we be walking her home? Are we keeping her here?"
"If we're splitting hairs, it's not 'we' — you're the one keeping her here."
"There you go again, always covering your own hide."
"No, seriously, did I ever once barge in on you? You're the one who showed up out of nowhere?"
"Ugh, fiiine~ Your good little disciple will run the errand, then. So? Where do you live? Big sis here will take you home!"
"Forget it. Sit."
"Aw, why not?!"
"Because she lives here."
At those words, dropped so casually, Hayeon — the one with the most at stake — was the one most startled of all.
This was, after all, the same Park Woochan who had fussed over every last detail, saying that if word ever got out that a student and her teacher lived under one roof, the rumors would be anything but kind.
The way he let it slip now — offhand, in passing — was itself enough to hint at the distance between the two of them.
But.
"Huh? What? Hm? Didn't you say she's a student?"
"So?"
"No, is it even okay for a student and a teacher to live in the same house?... Ah — did your housing just happen to overlap? If that's the case, I suppose it can't be helped—"
"I brought her in."
"...Hm?"
"I brought her in, I said. Like a girl that age had two coins to rub together for her own room. She's been living with me, in my room, this whole time."
"Saying it out loud again, it really is a startling story," Park Woochan remarked, and burst into another wry laugh.
But Hayeon could see it.
The sight of Shin Seoa's expression — all easy smiles until a moment ago — changing in an instant.
Eyes blown wide in shock. Then a face hardening, degree by degree. And at the last, an expression sealed shut like a vault.
Hiding away that face, which had turned over in the space of a blink where Park Woochan could not see, Shin Seoa opened her mouth slowly.
"Aigoo, Master! Come on, have some tact when there's a girl involved! What even was that, seriously~!"
"There are circumstances. Circumstances, I told you."
"Circumstances, my foot — then tell Mom! After everything you did for us, sparing one room shouldn't be hard!"
"I'm telling you, there are circumstances. I felt bad enough that I already spoke to the landlady. Paid extra, too."
"That's not the point, though, is it?"
"Phew." Shin Seoa heaved an exaggerated sigh, her expression still perfectly blank.
Then she began to look Hayeon over, unhurried, from the crown of her head down to the tips of her toes.
And then — a snort of laughter.
While Hayeon faltered at that unreadable laugh, impossible to guess what intent lay folded inside it, Shin Seoa added in a bright, cheerful tone:
"Master, you didn't lay a hand on her, did you?"
"Are you insane?"
"Well, I'd have to be able to believe you first~ How am I supposed to trust a man who suddenly turns up with a high school girl he picked up who-knows-where?"
Of course I would. Shin Seoa's murmur was so low, so cold, that not even Park Woochan — whose hearing far outstripped any ordinary person's — could have caught it.
"Hayeon, was it?"
"Y-yes."
"Shall we have a little chat, you and big sis?"
"Don't go dragging some innocent bystander into this?"
"I wouldn't dream of it~?"
She answered with bright, bounding energy, and curved her eyes into crescents once more.
"Right?"
And at the sight of her quietly tossing her hair as if to ask the question all over again, Hayeon, too, could do nothing but nod — slowly, carefully.