Watchers at the Gates
Of course, this was strictly a matter between Seoa and the guild she belonged to.
Had she actually asked me for help, that would be one thing — but as things stood, anything I did would be jumping the gun.
The best I could manage was standing watch under the flimsy pretext of being a fellow resident of the boarding house, just in case something unexpected happened. In other words, the only role I was permitted to play in all this wasn't Seoa's teacher — just her housemate.
That girl. It would've been nice if she'd leaned on her teacher a little more.
Or maybe there was a reason she couldn't.
For instance — a watcher attached to her.
I replayed the sharp-edged exchange we'd had just a moment ago. It wasn't an impossible scenario.
Well. Either way.
Speculation ended here. I wasn't a mind reader, and I couldn't dig out secrets she never spoke aloud.
She wasn't a little kid anymore.
So... this was going to be easy.
And so.
I made her talk.
Empty glasses scattered across the table, a sharp bite of alcohol hanging in the air. Nothing loosens the tongue quite like a drinking session.
Time required: roughly three hours. That was more than enough to strip Seoa's story bare — everything tangled up in her past, all the way down to the soap opera of resentments playing out inside her guild.
Frankly, it was so easy I felt deflated.
Oh, Seoa. Your teacher worries about you...
Waaah...
There, there. Sleep it off.
When I tickled the underside of her chin as she started mumbling, she let out a soft purr and dropped right back off. Truth be told, it was only natural. I was the one who offered her the drinks, after all — but from the moment someone decides to lean on alcohol, that already means they have something they want to say.
Not that I cared about any of that. All I'd been after was the smell of monster.
Feeling my head swim pleasantly from the drinks, I sorted through the information Seoa had let slip just before passing out.
Just as I'd expected, there didn't appear to be any magical contract binding her to the guild. Which was, frankly, to be expected — our Seoa was a reasonably famous face these days.
The guild would have loved to slap all sorts of restrictions on her — gag clauses forbidding her from breathing a word about incidents, that sort of thing. But if anyone ever caught wind of it and came swinging, screaming about an exploitative contract, things would get ugly fast. Public outrage is a nasty beast.
A magical contract isn't the kind of thing you can spot at a glance, but every application of mana leaves traces whether you like it or not. A hunter with a keen enough sense for mana could absolutely sniff out a contract's existence — perhaps even piece together its detailed terms just from looking at the parties involved.
As it happens, I'd been planning to do exactly that myself.
And if it turned out our Seoa was being unfairly bled dry, the day I confirmed it would be the day her guildmaster's head became my soccer ball.
Which is to say, the guild's craftsmanship in leaving nothing to seize from the very start was genuinely masterful. If any magical evidence like a contract had remained, I could have pursued them through official channels too.
So. What now?
No solid evidence. All I had was Seoa's own testimony — and at the end of the day, Seoa herself had never once asked me for help.
I mulled it over for a while. The social fallout if this came to light, the sheer weight of it, and my own current position in the world.
Mmnn... teacher...
Yeah, yeah.
And then I gave up thinking entirely.
Then again, when had I ever cared about that sort of thing?
By the way — why me, of all people?
What do you mean, why me?
I mean, why me of all people? Why'd you have to pick me to learn from?
Didn't I tell you I had no money?
That you did. And yet...
What is it?
Nothing. It's just — didn't you hate me?
...
You did, didn't you. You thought: if he'd only gotten there a little sooner, maybe my father wouldn't have died. That I was the one who killed your father.
Oh, honestly. And here I was being serious.
No, I mean it. I was being dead serious.
Because to me, Seoa was — always, no matter what — my adorable first disciple. Even if this whole mess turned her against me, that fact wouldn't change.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The weekend arrived. No matter how impressive a hunter's physical abilities might be, the mental fatigue of handling unfamiliar work couldn't simply be ignored.
So, leaving Seoa to groan in her sleep, I headed out to the city.
"Teacher, bring me back a Melona popsicle~"
That's what she'd said, waving her hand.
Even after that day, Seoa never said a word to me. Of course, neither did I — no pestering her with questions, no asking whether something had happened or whether she had anything she wanted to tell me.
And so, the two of us had spent the week acting as if nothing whatsoever was wrong.
The door clicked shut behind me as I left the boarding house. I'd been walking for a little while when I spotted Hayeon waiting in the distance, near the fence at the edge of the property.
Because I'd asked her to.
"I was right, wasn't I?"
"Told you."
Though I hadn't mentioned it to Seoa, I needed Hayeon's help for this. So I laid out everything I'd learned and made my request — and to my relief, she nodded without a moment's hesitation.
Grateful, of course. But she was so refreshingly prompt about it that it actually left me a bit taken aback.
And then Hayeon added a condition I found a little hard to follow — which is precisely the reason I was walking out here alone right now.
The original plan had been to set off together in the morning, but Hayeon herself had been firmly talked down, ending with her joining me separately outside. Which naturally didn't mean I'd abandoned my duty as her escort — as a result, from the moment she'd left the boarding house under the pretext of having an appointment, she'd had no choice but to linger within my detection range the entire time.
"This is something we're hiding from Seoa-unni, right?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"Then it's better if I go out separately."
The strange thing was, it worked out exactly as she'd predicted. At first, when I'd seen Hayeon off, Seoa had been stubbornly insistent — I don't know what's going on, but we're going together — and yet the moment a convenient excuse sent Hayeon out ahead of her, Seoa had gone completely limp.
What on earth had she been trying to do?
"But honestly, I never expected this."
"Hm? Expected what?"
"I was happy when you asked for my help, of course. I just never imagined the first thing you'd ever ask me for would involve Seoa-unni."
"...When you put it like that, it does feel a bit strange."
I'd have to get her something nice later. That was all I could think at the moment. The way she'd said it, hand resting lightly on her cheek, genuinely seemed like she didn't realize a thing herself.
"Anyway, I'll explain as we walk."
"Okay."
And so I began walking Hayeon through the whole affair once more.
Loosened up with liquor and gently pried at, Seoa had made it clear that something had happened recently within her guild. I couldn't pry out the fine details, of course — but drunk as she was, she'd spilled her heart out piece by piece.
And the thing she'd mentioned with particular bitterness in her voice had been the locations of a number of gates.
Yet the Association's records were conspicuously unremarkable. Joongoo's answer had been the same: among the gates Seoa had named, not one had shown any unusual activity recently.
At least, not on paper.
Had anyone else told me this, I'd have dismissed it as hot air and washed my hands of it. But this time, I couldn't.
So I decided to approach from a different angle.
The gates Seoa had named were all managed by her guild. As I dug into their detailed records first, I found something odd — their casualty counts were abnormally high compared to comparable gates.
Yes, this is an industry where even A-rank hunters lose their heads to E-rank monster attacks. Even so, this was excessive.
A death rate that crept upward, quietly enough never to draw the eye. But day by day, the accumulated dead had long since stopped being a number anyone could reasonably overlook.
If I'd glanced at it in passing, I might have written it off as coincidence. But the fact that it was precisely the gates Seoa had pointed to showing this pattern — that was something else entirely.
Not that I could exactly call up the guild and ask about it.
Luckily, I had a card to play for occasions like this. That 'man-killing hunter' fellow who'd recently given me so much grief.
To put it bluntly, his interrogation preparations were finished.
Granted, this should have been easy to guess from the moment I drafted Tiamat as a student teacher, given that her real assignment was keeping an eye on him.
Truth serum, acquired through my personal connections. A drug reputed to force nothing but the truth from the lips of whoever drinks it.
Of course, in a world where this stuff floated around freely, there were also silver-tongued types who dodged the question entirely — answering with clever technicalities like "I never told a lie." Word was that mind-readers were out there making the sales circuit, peddling stories about how even they had failed using their own abilities.
But this matter was, first and foremost, a private affair. Even he couldn't prepare for it in advance.
So I decided to spend my hard-won truth serum on cracking this case first. An A-rank hunter doesn't grow on trees, I figured, and a well-connected fixer like him would surely know his way around the industry's back rooms.
And then.
The hunter who emptied the serum performed beyond expectations. At the very least, the drug was worth its price. Thanks to him, I could move like this.
"Everyone's here, right?"
"Yes."
Just as she'd said. In the distance, the faint shapes of a gathered crowd began to catch my eye.
I'd asked Hayeon for exactly one thing: to quietly summon the people this job required. Without leaving a trail afterward.
Because this was, at its heart, my personal business. And the fallout — I couldn't even begin to guess how far it would spread. Nobody gains anything by getting tangled up with me.
I wound up my explanation.
Seoa had named several gates in her drunken rambling. Which meant I needed to mobilize as many people as I could manage on my end as well. Snuffing out the fire itself would be my job, but if something moved at the other gates while I was occupied, things would get very troublesome indeed.
In short — lookouts. Eyes on the gates.
And the most representative members of that watch were, of course, the girls.
"Teacher?"
As I walked into the clearing, Lee Yeeun let out a baffled little sound at the sight of me.
When I'd laid out my reasoning, Joongoo had sent his younger sister Yeeun in his place. First, because he was far too conspicuous to move himself — and second, because he felt she needed the experience.
"I got to thinking after last time. Maybe I've been coddling her too much."
He'd said that with a wry smile, and I couldn't exactly muster much disagreement. And so Yeeun was here now, alongside the hunters Joongoo had sent with her.
Ryu Jihee was the same. This was my private affair, and calling in the Honinhoe without any damage to Choi Seungjun or the Academy was only possible thanks to her help.
"Huh."
And Hwang Yoonha, standing there and letting out that low grunt of surprise, was here for the same reason — several of the gates Seoa had named sat uncomfortably close to the dismantling yard where Yoonha worked.
As I wrestled with how to keep that covered, I decided to simply borrow Yoonha's help instead — asking whether she could let me know if anything happened at any of the gates I'd flagged.
Looking over the assembled group, I felt like a foreman on some backbreaking construction crew.
Clap. A light round of applause to get everyone's attention.
"Thank you all for coming. Some of you may have already heard, but something's come up where I'll need your help for a little while. That's why I asked you to gather here."
...
"My name is Park Woochan. At present, I hold a teaching position at the Hunter Academy."
I swept my gaze across the crowd. The reactions were curious — though, really, they couldn't have been anything else. Most of the people gathered here had no direct connection to me. The students who knew me, meanwhile, looked utterly dumbstruck.
"That said, this is strictly my personal business. I can pay you about a day's standard rate, but honestly, if it doesn't sit right with you, you're free to quit partway through. I won't press the matter."
I had no intention of holding anyone to account. All I needed right now was as much manpower as possible.
"The objective is just one thing: surveillance of the gates I've specified. And as I said — you won't actually need to use your strength."
"Huh?"
"What in the world is that supposed to mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Even if a monster pops out mid-watch, none of you will need to fight. All I'm asking for is eyes. That's it."
...
What could the students have been thinking as their homeroom teacher — summoned in their classmate's name — recited one absurdity after another? I had no idea. Thankfully, though, not a single student stepped forward to denounce my outrageous proposal.
"What on earth is going on...?"
And so I answered the question hanging in the air among the people gathered there.
"Word is, a monster nest has been discovered inside one of the gates I've pointed out."
Saying those words, I remembered the acrid stench of monster that had crept up to the boarding house not long ago.