The Hunter Academy Project
It seemed the Hunter Association was a good deal more competent than I'd ever given it credit for.
Three years had passed since the end of the Second Great Cataclysm, and humanity was still posting steady victories against the monsters. Corporate-managed gates and the sporadic minor breaches that kept cropping up produced their share of incidents, but nothing beyond what could be stamped back down.
In a word, it was the perfect climate for baseless optimists to bloom. The South Korean government, however, refused to relax. They understood all too well that the nation had survived the Second Great Cataclysm not through any merit of its own, but purely because Lee Joongoo happened to be Korean—nothing more, nothing less.
And so, with the Second Great Cataclysm behind them and the firm conviction that the monsters would resurface someday, the government had been driving forward a project of a certain kind. What I'd been handed this time was one strand of exactly that.
The Hunter Academy.
In short, the government apparently meant to formally establish an institution dedicated to raising the next generation of hunters. That explained why the paperwork had been sitting ready and waiting despite the out-of-the-blue call.
Truthfully, it was necessary work. Who could bring themselves to trust that the gates—things that had appeared without warning one day, vomited up monsters, and razed countless cities flat—had gone quiet for good? Preparing for a Third Great Cataclysm was a must, and doubly so for a country that, during the Second, had burned through its accumulated human resources like they were expendable while it held its breath and waited for Lee Joongoo to appear.
In that sense, you could call the Hunter Academy project a fairly sensible piece of planning.
Two cataclysms back to back had made any systematic hunter education impossible until now. The first-generation hunters who rose during the First Great Cataclysm had fought by the seat of their pants with no precedent to guide them—couldn't just make precedents, in fact, but had no choice but to become them. The second generation—me, Lee Joongoo, and the rest who awakened during the Second—fared no better. Even the know-how painstakingly stacked atop our seniors' sacrifices had been left half-shattered in the effort to keep the country alive.
While one corner of the world blared its trumpets over humanity's victory, the substance of that victory had never been anything but half-finished. Humanity had, quite literally, seized it by carving off its own flesh and shaving down its own bones.
Which is to say, the time granted to humanity since the end of the Second Great Cataclysm was... a vanishingly small opportunity.
The problem was that no method of educating hunters had ever been established. There was underground know-how of the "here's how to channel your mana" or "this approach works well against this type of monster" variety, but that was the ceiling. In practical terms, the most the state had ever been able to offer its hunters was a monster briefing, or maybe a morale lecture.
The government, it seemed, wanted to replace that ad-hoc mess with a bona fide system for cultivating hunters.
The problem was who they intended to hire as the instructor: me.
Well, I had confidence. I'd fumbled through something vaguely similar a few times before, and since the method I studied was itself built on precedent, I happened to know other hunters' techniques in unusual depth.
But that's my business, not theirs.
I rifled through the documents one more time, and nothing written on them had changed. In the end, I couldn't help but heave out a quiet sigh.
A high school. Seriously?
That was exactly what it said.
The targets of this Hunter Academy project were, in fact, high school students. Far more rational than piloting the program on active-duty hunters already serving as combat assets and breaking them in the process, no?
Which left me with two sizable problems. First, I had only ever graduated middle school. Second, naturally, I possessed no teaching license or anything remotely like one.
Has Lee Joongoo lost his damn mind?
Of all ages, he picks the most emotionally volatile stretch of human life. Kids at the exact age when they're busiest believing they're special—made to rub shoulders with brats who'd genuinely awakened extraordinary powers.
And the one assigned to teach them? An unlicensed hunter with zero credentials who, from any angle you looked, could only ever come across as a parachuted-in nepotism hire.
According to Lee Joongoo, accepting the proposal would get me a registration issued by the Hunter Association under the title of Academy instructor... but even that wouldn't rewrite the history of my never having joined.
In a word, anyone who pulled my file from the Association's records would find it bone-dry. Better than an E-Rank hunter's, I suppose—but how students would react upon glimpsing my subjugation record was as plain as day.
No, seriously—why is that bastard Lee Joongoo handing me something like this?
Fuck. Does he hold some grudge against me or what?
My every instinct screamed to reject it on the spot. Frankly, talk of improved treatment inside the Association didn't move me an inch; to me, a Hunter Association registration was the kind of thing that would be convenient to have and inconvenient to lack. Exactly that much of an object.
But.
Tch.
I was the one who had reached out first this time. After three whole years, no less. Considering the side-eye I'd always drawn from the Hunter Association, none of it could have gone smoothly anyway—and then I'd gone and lobbed a sudden A-Rank monster incursion right into his face, out of nowhere.
Even after all that, the man hadn't shown a hint of irritation. Hell, he'd found me a job on top of it. Sure, a labor shortage sat at the root of it, but the fact remained: I'd been a burden on him.
Until moments ago he'd been muttering things like you don't need it, but if I took the handout, wiped my mouth, and walked away clean, I wouldn't be a person anymore. I'd be a monster.
Which is why, for the first time in a good ten years, I was living life seated on the floor. In my hands was the reference material he'd sent over—more precisely, not so much a hunter-development text as a manual on the military's employment of its hunters.
Truthfully, the contents were quite familiar to me. The military hunter who'd authored them, Brigadier General Cheong Joonpil, was an acquaintance of mine.
Well, well. Looked like the old man was keeping busy too.
Not that "acquaintance" amounted to much—more precisely, a handful of collaborations on unofficial operations.
Back then, wrestling with doctrinal problems, I'd been picking the brains of every hunter I could reach, and that included Brigadier General Cheong Joonpil—the man credited with establishing the Republic of Korea's hunter doctrine. Thanks to those conversations, I had a decent feel for how to put this textbook to use.
Out with this one, in with that...
I'd been tailoring the material to my own taste for a while when—
"You're working awfully hard there."
A voice I couldn't possibly have known rang through the semi-basement room. It had been roughly three years since another person's voice had sounded in this one-room apartment, and the sheer strangeness of it—strange enough to be almost disorienting—had me lifting my head and turning toward the speaker before I knew it.
The girl sat there, alone and adrift.
Honestly, it was almost enough to make me apologize. A girl left parked in the middle of a room with no TV, no books, not even a single proper chair to relieve the boredom. Before her sat the glass of tap water I'd scrounged up after racking my brain for something—anything—to offer, equally forlorn and forgotten.
Her hair spilled all the way to the floor, still that distinctive bluish-pink. Though—was I imagining it? That luxuriant mane seemed a touch deflated today.
Ja Hayeon.
Witness and central figure of the whole incident—its victim, too, you could say. Somehow, this kid had ended up in my care.
...Saying it like that makes me sound damn suspicious. But allow me a moment to defend myself.
The truth is I wanted to keep my connection to her, plain and simple. Because if my hunch was right—if she really could draw in A-Rank monsters, three of them no less, in a world where every last gate had slammed shut—then nothing could be better than staying close.
So originally I'd planned to borrow Lee Joongoo's name, petition the Association for her protective custody, and if the request went through, keep up a reasonable amount of contact from there. It wasn't as if I lacked standing—I'd been a witness to the monster incursion myself.
That plan hadn't changed even now, with Lee Joongoo's offer having put me on the Association's rolls. But I had overlooked one thing.
Think it through: in the current climate, could we really afford to go public with the fact that an A-Rank monster had been on the loose?
Announcing it to the whole world would have been satisfying for me, sure. But it would amount to telling people who'd spent three years savoring peace that a nuclear bomb of unknown detonation time was parked in their backyard.
Complacency was worth guarding against, absolutely. Even so, this was a matter far too grave to detonate without warning. It was probably no coincidence that the man had come in person, either. So I, too, could agree to bury the thing. It was a call that might have sent me into a frenzy not long ago—but maybe slicing up monsters again after so long had mellowed me? My heart had found a little extra room.
And that, naturally, created a security problem.
She and I, the parties involved, couldn't be helped—we'd simply have to swallow the gag order. Lee Joongoo, who'd conceived the arrangement, and the agents he'd moved to conceal the monster's carcass were necessary expenses. But widening the circle of people who knew about the incident any further was dangerous—that much he and I judged alike.
The snag was that, by rule, a sitting National Assemblyman can't hold a second occupation.
So he solved it in the simplest possible way.
And that was how I became the bodyguard of the girl in front of me... Ja Hayeon.
Not that I couldn't do the job. With the paperwork filed, I could technically call myself an Association hunter, and if we had no intention of spreading the incident any wider, settling it internally was the obvious right call.
If it had ended there, fine—but as luck would have it, she currently had no proper place to live. After the Cataclysm, the orphanages had been forced to lower their discharge age from twenty to sixteen just to contain the flood of newly orphaned children.
Sleeping rough, obviously, was out of the question. Setting the ethics aside, she'd be impossible to protect. And above all, if she truly did attract monsters, the streets would be a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Which left me no choice but to bring her here.
Honestly, in my heart of hearts I'd have preferred to set her up with a whole house. But as I'd reflected before, springing something like that out of nowhere would only rouse her suspicion—she'd smell an ulterior motive. Maybe that wouldn't have mattered before; now that we were charge and bodyguard, friction like that was to be avoided at all costs.
Besides, even now I lacked the confidence to fight my way through the forest of real estate ads out there and actually make it to a realtor.
Ah, you bastard. The least you could do is handle this part for me.
"It's fine. You can do this. The you I know? That girl will open up to you in no time."
Oh, fuck off~ If you're gonna spout that crap, ship me a house while you're at it~
Money, at least, he could throw at me any day of the week. I swallowed the grumbling.
Realistically, of course, it came down to the same logic as before: a bodyguard doesn't get to live apart from her charge, and if we kept our distance and monsters surfaced wherever she happened to be staying, my response time would be useless...
Even granting all that—a grown man and a teenage girl, hello? Show a little consideration, you son of a bitch.
"So. Anything uncomfortable? Any problems at all?"
"No, there isn't."
"Th-that's good, then."
Thankfully, she wasn't high-maintenance. She'd been that way from the first moment I laid eyes on her—if anything, she was a quiet kid.
But that didn't put my own mind at ease.
This is so goddamn awkward.
Frankly, the mere fact that another human being existed inside my personal space was discomfort incarnate. Not that I said it aloud—she was probably no happier about it than I was.
Worse, I had no idea how to talk to a girl that age. Maybe before I'd run away from home it would've been different, but to Park Woochan, 27-year-old active-duty hunter, the creature known as the high school girl was impossibly alien...
And then there was the truly massive problem.
Namely: not a soul knew when this awkward cohabitation would end. The whole incident had been unprecedented from the very start, after all.
For my part, the plan was to stop by the Hunter Association at the earliest opportunity. If that monster-drawing ability of hers might be a sign of her own awakening as a hunter, it needed measuring. And if the results confirmed she had awakened, then nine times out of ten she'd be walked through enrollment at—you guessed it—the Hunter Academy.
That's how the Association's protection system worked: promise someone thorough protection, and their living arrangements inevitably fall under your thumb. In this case, since I'd been drafted as Academy faculty, she'd have no choice but to enroll at the Academy too.
If she turned out not to be a hunter, I'd have to give it some more thought—but from where I stood, even that worry seemed like buying trouble. The mana seeping faintly out of her alone said as much. Nine times out of ten, she was a hunter.
She just didn't know it yet.
The problem is, if that's the case, this uncomfortable arrangement is going to drag on for quite a while.
Aptitude results wouldn't be back in a matter of days, after all.
And yet.
...
For a girl who'd been left to share a room with a total stranger of a man—a man she'd never laid eyes on, who might soon stand to her as guardian and ward, or as teacher and student—her expression was, if anything, unnervingly unchanged.