What I Could No Longer Hate
* * *
Only after dumping the self-proclaimed goddess on Choi Seungjun was I finally able to leave the principal's office behind.
For all I knew, the unprecedented event of a monster becoming chairman of the Hunter Association might soon come to pass.
'Well, that'd be fine, wouldn't it?'
Honestly, it wouldn't even be a bad thing.
No one besides me had ever once managed to figure out the goddess's true identity, after all.
If she could hide it on her own, great. And if she got exposed? Even better.
That would be the perfect setup to lop her head off on the spot and spin a nice little story about how insidious monsters had been gnawing away at the Association from within.
All I wanted was for that impostor goddess's mask to slip, the sooner the better.
'The real question is what the hell I'm supposed to tell the girls~'
I was chewing on that thought as I crossed the school grounds when, without warning, the sound of shuffling footsteps approached me.
And then.
...Um, Sabu? Were you just coming out now?
Seoa was there, waving at me with her usual bright smile carefully pasted on.
One look at that face and I knew.
Shit. She found out.
At the same time, I finally understood—couldn't not understand—what the issue was that Seungjun had waved off as "personal business."
Desolation.
An awkward silence settled between us.
'Goddamn it.'
How the hell was I supposed to get out of this? Was it really because of the gas mask?
I was throwing this damn gas mask away the moment I got home.
I was still swallowing that grumble when I beat her to it—me, not Seoa, who was still standing there hesitating.
"...Want to walk a little?"
Yeah.
Thankfully, she didn't refuse.
That didn't mean the awkwardness between us vanished, though. So I racked my brain, trying to figure out how the hell to break this atmosphere.
*
Frankly, I hate you.
Looking back on it now, Shin Seoa thought, it had been an absurdly petty way to vent.
She still remembered it clearly. Until quite recently, the fact that thirty percent of South Korea's citizens had lost family to monsters had felt like somebody else's story.
She had been filled with that inexplicable confidence every kid has when crossing the crosswalk—the certainty that she, at least, would never be hit by a car.
She'd never imagined that losing her father to a monster that burst out in front of their house would leave her mother, who witnessed it all with her own eyes, traumatized.
The Shin Seoa who, until barely a month ago, had no idea how blessed her circumstances were, no longer existed.
Now that the horrors of this era she'd only ever understood in her head had finally come for her own family, she realized just how shallow her half-baked sympathy had been.
Which was why she'd needed something to hold on to.
The higher a bird flies, the harder it falls.
Only after losing her father, the head of the household, did she understand reality.
Even the high school she'd grumbled about attending was, in this desolate world, practically a privilege.
Objectively speaking, she could see that the hand she'd been dealt was an abundant one.
But crushing despair in the face of a harsh reality wasn't a privilege reserved only for the most wretched people on Earth.
And she was about to have to wade through that brutal storm with nothing but her own two hands.
So even before the shock of her father's death had faded, she was already planning her entry into society.
Of course, common sense said she didn't need to—especially in a world like this one.
Her father had left behind a decent amount of assets, and her mother could comfortably support a single daughter.
More than anything, this was a society where graduating high school was itself a credential. Graduate, and any company would treat you reasonably well.
In fact, that was exactly what Shin Seoa's mother would say every time her daughter mentioned wanting to become a hunter.
But Shin Seoa had come to understand something.
Just how precariously balanced modern society really was.
A decent amount of money? Enough to support one daughter?
What the hell was any of that worth?
In the face of monsters, meager assets were nothing more than scraps of paper.
Did anyone seriously believe a monster would take money and walk away?
So the day her high school diploma—her mother's repeated plea—arrived, Shin Seoa decided to become a hunter.
Fortunately, there was an opening.
A young hunter who had been staying in the area recently.
...The hunter who appeared in an instant that very day, when a monster devoured her father, and butchered it.
Strangely enough, the hunter who introduced himself as Park Woochan didn't leave right away. He stayed by the mother and daughter's side, helping them in every way he could.
He'd even quietly gone out to hunt the monster on his own once, so that her mother—who began seizing whenever one appeared—wouldn't have to know.
Etched into that young hunter's face was a strange guilt.
Even for a hunter accustomed to death, watching a life vanish before his eyes must not have been a pleasant thing.
If I'd only been a little faster, would this not have happened?
Which means it's as good as if you killed him.
Perfect timing, actually.
Shin Seoa decided to exploit the man's conscience.
...Honestly, she knew.
She didn't truly believe this man was at fault. If anything, they were the ones who'd received help.
She would prod a hunter's guilt and learn the skills she needed to hunt.
But even so—there had to have been a kinder way to say it.
Saying it now would do no good; handled poorly, it might just earn the hunter's wrath instead.
Thinking about it that way, she supposed she hadn't been level-headed.
To steal a hunter's skills.
If you'd come just a little sooner, Dad wouldn't have died.
So she twisted the knife.
It can't be helped, if I want to steal his skills—that's how she'd consoled herself.
In truth, she'd probably just needed someone to pour her heart out to.
Thirty percent of South Korea's citizens had lost family to monsters.
And now that Shin Seoa finally understood that fact in her bones, she needed someone to blame.
When gates opened and monsters poured out, people babbled about mana-stone economies and a fourth industrial revolution—but what actually happened was that countless people died.
No black-handed mastermind with some absurd scheme ever appeared to confess that he'd orchestrated the attack, and taking down such a mastermind wouldn't suddenly improve humanity's situation in one stroke anyway.
What happened to Shin Seoa was no different.
A gate opened. Her father died.
That was the whole of it.
That gate wasn't some historically monumental event; if anything, the damage was on the minor side.
The monster, too, was nothing but one stray lowborn wretch that had happened to drift into a residential neighborhood.
In other words, the misfortune that befell Shin Seoa wasn't particularly special at all.
She simply hadn't known until now—out there in the world's underbelly, this kind of thing was happening countless times over.
The world went on as it always had, and what she'd experienced was wrapped up neatly. The gate was cleared, and the monster that killed her father met its end at a hunter's hand.
It was like a traffic accident.
Undeniably tragic, but just one misfortune among the endless ones overflowing the world. In newspaper terms, a single clipped line in the obituaries.
The burden of awareness the girl had absorbed amounted to precisely that much.
And Shin Seoa could not bear it.
She hated the world for going on moving, perfectly intact, as if nothing had happened at all—even with her father gone.
So she lashed out at her benefactor, the hunter. It was the same behavior as those people on TV she'd called idiots just weeks before.
Strangely, though, the hunter never answered her venom with violence, never spewed abuse back at her, despite the irritation written across his face.
He only frowned, as if the sight of her saying such things pained him. And sometimes he wore a look of deep sorrow, as if lamenting his own shortcomings.
Throb, throb. The conscience left in her heart ached.
But Shin Seoa deliberately looked away.
Unable to adapt to the situation that had crashed down on her, she refused to admit she was using her benefactor as an emotional garbage can, and told herself instead that the plan was working.
That was how Shin Seoa became Park Woochan's disciple.
And then.
The intimacy—that strange, unguarded closeness—now drifting between them felt exactly like the silence of that day.
Are you... really mad at me?
That was all Park Woochan managed to force out.
The sheer, excessive carefulness of it nearly made Shin Seoa burst out laughing.
Mad? Mad about what, exactly?
She might have her reasons, but Park Woochan had not a single thing to apologize for.
...It was an escape from reality. She knew that. A resignation that was, in effect, running away.
Even while she'd been pacing back and forth like this, the guild's upper brass had been holding her life in their grip.
So she'd wanted them to feel uneasy too. Honestly, she'd quit in a fit of anger.
Her long-overdue trip home had been the same. Instead of that suffocating guild, she'd wanted to sit beside her Sabu and eat the food her mother made.
It wasn't that she didn't want him to understand. But this wasn't something she could consult an outsider about, so for the past week she'd spent every day forcibly dragging back down the words that kept trying to leap out of her mouth.
And yet.
Park Woochan had already known.
And in a single weekend, he had resolved her problem entirely.
That fact made her feel grateful, not resentful. There was no reason to blame him now.
Nah, I just took one look at those guild bastards and they pissed me the hell off. So I blew it up. That's all. Sorry, though—it was your workplace.
But Park Woochan wasn't posturing.
If anything, he'd been the one nervously worrying whether his disciple might be angry at him for acting without so much as consulting her.
Careless consideration. And beneath it, a shyness that peeked out its head now and then, more fragile than anything.
That was the kind of man he was.
A man who strode forward without a glance at society or the world's judgment, as if he could flip either of them upside down at will—and yet, when it came to the people standing beside him, fumbled and second-guessed himself.
Even now. I did it for you. I saw you struggling, so I did it for you...
Instead of simply saying those two easy sentences, Park Woochan stood in front of Seoa stammering out one nonsensical excuse after another.
And surely, that was his true heart.
Park Woochan genuinely did not think of this as something he'd done for Seoa.
It wasn't that he'd done such-and-such for the sake of his disciple—it was that watching someone grind his disciple down simply didn't sit well with him. That was all.
The way one tends to a small child. Park Woochan still treated Shin Seoa with that same attitude.
The way he had when he stood before a girl who'd lost her father through an accident too embarrassing to even call a mistake.
Or the way he had when he faced a girl so hollowed out by loss that she couldn't manage a single word of thanks, and could only spit out blame instead.
That was why he'd taken in a child who claimed to hate him and made her his disciple.
That was the kind of man he was.
Suddenly, Shin Seoa burst out laughing. Maybe, in his eyes, she still looked like the shameless girl who flew into a rage whenever a situation like this caught her off guard.
If so, she supposed she had no one to blame but herself—call it poetic justice.
Be honest with yourself. Isn't this starting to feel like a scam?
She couldn't entirely dismiss the thought. In all likelihood, Park Woochan still saw her as that girl, hurting over the loss of her parents, hating him for it.
But.
She remembered something he'd once told her.
If you want to become a hunter, you have to understand why they're called hunters instead of superhumans or heroes.
Only then do you earn the right to truly be called one, Park Woochan had said.
She'd awakened to power, but she'd never awakened to anything at all.
Possessing strength beyond a human's didn't make her a superhuman descended from on high on a white horse.
No matter how much people worshiped them as heroes, he'd said, those who truly carried a hero's heart could be counted on one hand.
It was the truth.
Shin Seoa was neither a superhuman nor a hero.
And so.
The blame without reason, the hatred forcibly swallowed—both had long since become things of the past.
Emotion is like a bonfire; without kindling, it cannot burn.
That was why Shin Seoa could no longer hate Park Woochan.
He'd taken in a girl who clung to the most ridiculous of grudges, and years had passed like that.
In that time, Shin Seoa had forgotten her hatred. Because she'd received far more from him than the emptiness she'd felt that day.
And somewhere along the way, something other than sorrow had taken root in her heart.
It was first love.
No one had ever told her, but Shin Seoa could tell.
What had it been, exactly? Had she fallen for the way he endured her stubbornness without a single complaint? Or had her heart moved at the sight of his face, wounded by her spite?
Honestly, she didn't know.
But that was how love always began.
All the more so for a high school girl.
Thinking of it that way, even this strange silence between them felt somehow different now—like it carried some other meaning entirely.
So Shin Seoa let Park Woochan's excuse-that-was-not-an-excuse flow in one ear and out the other.
As she always did. Watching him pile up those clumsy excuses for her sake, she thought—uncharacteristically, perhaps—that her heart felt warm and faintly ticklish, deep down.
* * *