An Old Goddess's Social Graces
Unsurprisingly, this club activity became a hot topic in more ways than one.
Not just among the students, either—the teachers were every bit as buzzing.
Above all, the lineup was far too illustrious to be dismissed as a handful of mere temporary instructors.
Which was why the academy's faculty had, for all practical purposes, treated this club session as a hiring exam.
Truthfully, it was an easy prediction to make. In this line of work, the very notion of retiring in one piece was already treated as rumor at best.
A high mortality rate—and, in proportion to that risk, a profession perfectly suited to anyone dreaming of striking it rich with their life on the line.
There was never going to be a surplus of teaching staff, and no one in their right mind would waste talent they'd scraped together with such difficulty on nothing more than a temporary post.
Given all that, it was only natural that this dinner party had effectively turned into a welcome reception for the club instructors.
To the academy's faculty, those temporary instructors were, for all intents and purposes, their future colleagues.
Fortunately, the wariness and jealousy that inevitably fester at gatherings like this were rare.
Not entirely absent, of course—but everyone seated at this dinner was a hunter first and a teacher second.
In other words: résumés and pedigree aside, all that mattered was whether you could kill monsters well.
That was precisely why I'd managed to keep my job without incident all semester, even though my credentials or the question of who pulled strings for me could easily have blown up into a scandal from day one.
When that article about my mixed blood broke, the faculty actually defended me—with "he's dealing with things that are half monster anyway, so who cares"—to the point where it honestly put me in an awkward spot.
...Well, whatever the case, every hunter who'd taken a teaching post at the academy had passed through Choi Seungjun's own rigorous screening.
Some were missing an arm. Others had lost a leg.
And yet.
Despite all of it, the vast majority had come here intending to pass their skills and experience down to the next generation of hunters—so that one more monster, at least one more, could die.
Thanks to that, the atmosphere wasn't bad at all.
I raised my glass just enough to hide my gaze behind it and scanned the room.
The center of attention at this dinner was, without question, Seoa.
She was, after all, the protagonist of the incident everyone had been clamoring about lately.
To be fair, a fair number of questions had come flying my way early in the evening too.
Seona had, after all, dragged her teacher out into the open right before class started.
Still, most of the questions amounted to nothing more than disbelief that Seoa and I were actually master and student.
Even that had wilted considerably after I answered it once.
Well, of course it had.
What the other teachers were curious about was strictly what had gone on in Seoa's old guild.
Not a single person here wanted to dig into my personal history at this point.
Though honestly, the bigger reason was probably that I was already famous enough to make digging unnecessary.
Seoa did shoot me a few pleading looks, as if begging for help, but I decided to ignore them this time.
My involvement in that incident wasn't something to be aired publicly, and frankly, explaining it all in detail sounded exhausting.
But hiding behind Seoa and keeping to the back like that, I started noticing things I wouldn't normally have seen.
For instance, Jung Ilhyun's side of the room was comparatively quiet.
Part of it was that, next to a young star like Seoa, there was simply less about him to pique curiosity—but more than that, it was the heavy presence that hung around him.
Several years removed from the front lines.
And yet the killing intent he carried was closer to an active hunter than a dojo swordmaster.
Because of that, the only people who approached him were the teachers who'd once witnessed Jung Ilhyun's skill firsthand—or heads of households his own age.
Seeing the usually quiet men clinking their cups down with hearty laughter whenever the topic turned to their kids was oddly delightful to watch.
Well, being hunters, they wouldn't get drunk easily.
Short of deliberately manipulating their mana, getting drunk was practically impossible for them.
So I could relax a little and turn my gaze elsewhere.
Which left exactly one person.
Namely.
Our headstrong, hapless goddess.
"Hohoo, what a fine drinker we have in our young lady here."
"Fufu, I was taught never to refuse a cup offered by one's elders, you see."
"That's all old-fashioned nonsense these days, old nonsense. Well, it does look nice, I'll give you that."
"Thank you, Elder!"
"Ha! She's sharper than our own daughter, I swear. I'd trade you for her in a heartbeat."
"Oh please, next to your daughter I'm sorely lacking, truly~"
"Heheh, is that so? You flatter me, but I'll take it. They told me you were a foreigner, miss, but your Korean is quite fine indeed?"
"Yes. I studied very hard!"
"Magnificent. Simply magnificent."
And then.
I nearly threw up.
No, seriously.
Fuck, who the hell is that.
Before I knew it, I'd set my glass down. And for the first time in my life, I was running my mana at its absolute limit.
"Uh, Mr. Park Woochan? You're getting a nosebleed. Nosebleed!"
It even got to the point of bleeding, but the hallucination before my eyes refused to disappear.
Was this for real.
My mind, crystalline to the point of excess, simply refused to process the scene in front of me.
Goddess Tiamat.
An ancient goddess who had journeyed here from the distant Middle East.
The mother of gods from Mesopotamian myth was, bizarrely enough, a consummate hand at social life.
The dinner party ended.
Fortunately, nothing untoward happened.
The goddess—who couldn't even begin to guess how she'd ended up with that name in the first place—didn't once screech out a quarrel at the top of her lungs.
What's more, she didn't lord her signature bizarre speech over complete strangers, nor did she torment the senior faculty by demanding they pay proper tribute before accepting their gifts.
Frankly speaking, judging by results alone, the evening exceeded my expectations.
But it seems a result that exceeds your expectations doesn't always leave you feeling glad.
Walking through streets wrapped in night, that was the thought running through my head.
Beside me was the goddess in question, Tiamat.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, but now that the dinner was over, I needed to see her home.
Part of it was the fuss from the other teachers, but it was the more practical concern that mattered.
If, god forbid, this drunken creature got it into her head to chew on a human skull as an anju... then.
A shiver ran down to my chin.
At that point it would stop being a joke.
And so here we were, walking side by side, the dinner behind us.
There was no smell of alcohol, surprisingly—because I'd been holding my breath, having failed to bring a gas mask.
Besides, ever since a certain incident made my gas-masked appearance famous to an absurd degree, it wasn't something I could just stroll around wearing anymore.
Advancing on nearly five years' worth of patience in installments, I matched my steps to a monster's.
If things had gone as usual—or at least as I'd predicted—I could have tossed off some lighter jab, but having just witnessed what I had at that dinner table, I couldn't quite bring myself to. So when I finally managed to pry my mouth open, my voice sounded almost comically awkward even to my own ears.
"I mean, what was that. Dropping the whole act? Not bad, actually. Uh, thinking about it, I guess talking like that all the time would've been exhausting for you too. Yeah."
"Son of a bitch."
But my delicate consideration melted away the instant the goddess spat out that curse.
I could feel the willpower I'd barely scraped together moments ago collapsing like a sandcastle before a wave.
"Have you not just entertained a thought most blasphemous?"
"Nope?"
My voice trembled despite myself.
Okay, a little. Honestly, a little.
Question one: if that demeanor at the dinner had been her natural manner of speech, did that mean this woman had spent all this time studying and rehearsing that goddess persona?
And thought two: if she'd been putting on that archaic tone all along for the sake of the act, wasn't she completely out of her mind?
Truthfully, none of this was news worth being shocked by at this point.
I'd known she was out of her mind from the very beginning.
...Huh?
Come to think of it, from my position there was really nothing to be surprised about at all.
And with that, I could let my guard down a reasonable amount.
Not too far, though. Let it slip too much and somebody's getting stabbed.
"Honestly, it was a bit disgusting."
"Disgusting, you say? What an outrageous accusation."
"You're the outrageous one, you lunatic. What, 'elder'? Are you shameless too, crazy, carrying an ID from three thousand years BC?"
"...I merely acted in a manner befitting this body of mine. Besides, did the other teachers' reactions not please you as well!"
"Give those men ten years of you and every one of them would have a screaming fit."
"Ugh... hnnngh."
So she did have a conscience after all, the crazy old bat of a woman.
At my headshake, she failed to mount any proper rebuttal either.
To borrow an expression she herself once used, men were certainly "creatures whose eyes roll back the moment they see a pair of tits."
But there were degrees to everything, and when a five-thousand-year-old grandmother called herself your big sister, it wasn't charming—it was just revolting.
Five thousand years. Honestly.
Think about it—this woman was older than the pyramids.
"The body of a goddess does not age," she said. "What brings this on, all of a sudden?"
"Which means your body is, for all practical purposes, at prime marriageable age for an ordinary adult woman."
"Even had I remained a Constellation, I would hardly have crafted for myself an aged form."
"...And by modern science, a living creature's mind is bound to its body."
"So you're telling me a sound body houses a sound mind, is that it?"
"I'm talking about hormones. In other words, a body in its twenties means you're no different from a woman in her twenties."
And now she'd moved on to brazenly shoving her face full of steel plate.
As I gaped at skin thicker than any makeup could ever make it, armed with bulletproof sophistry, various thoughts naturally began to surface.
Of course, that claim might well be true. Living creatures are, as a rule, beings whose minds are anchored in flesh—when the body sickens, the mind sickens with it, and when the body is healthy, the mind clears. In fact, though it's a somewhat extreme theory, you could say that what constitutes the human mind is the sum of every experience accumulated through external stimulus. But then—was it really safe to lump the Constellations into the category of ordinary living things?
Having thought that far, and having no desire to let the conversation sprawl on, I answered with a single word.
"You're a married woman, though."
"You absolute bastard."
The goddess flicked a middle finger my way.
...Well, I'd said it half as a joke, but it really was a strange affair.
This, of course, concerned the goddess before my eyes.
Just the title of a Constellation descended to earth was peculiar enough on its own.
But having crossed paths with this woman a handful of times by sheer accident, I could say that what was stranger still was the goddess herself—her very self.
Goddess Tiamat.
This monster, playing at being a Constellation, was, if anything, far more bizarre than I'd given her credit for.
In a word: even among the Constellations, Tiamat was an outlier.
Setting aside my own view that the very concept of a Constellation was utterly laughable, that is.
There had been signs. Signs, plural.
Her uncanny familiarity with modern conveniences.
Or her suspiciously Korean vocabulary.
At first I'd chalked it up to some translation ability—she called herself a goddess, after all—but what she'd shown at that dinner couldn't be brushed off as a mere Authority.
To put it plainly, before language or anything else even entered the picture, this goddess was simply well-versed in getting along with people.
No.
Better put: she was well-versed in South Korean culture.
The strange archaic diction she ordinarily refused to drop for love or money—watching her calmly serve up polite register instead, the elders at the Association would have fainted clean on the spot.
And yet.
At least as far as I could tell, what she'd shown at that dinner hadn't been mere acting.
There was something uncannily alive about it.
Strange word to use for a goddess of Mesopotamian myth, I know—but experience, would you call it?
I couldn't help thinking so.
Really dwell on it, and the oddities stacked up well beyond one or two.
Why, she'd even known the McDonald's menu last time.
"This is a problem."
Even now, every fiber of me wanted to leave it alone—but I couldn't afford to.
Let's be blunt: what else could possibly explain why I'd attended a dinner I knew a monster woman would show up to?
It was guilt toward Lee Joongoo and Choi Seungjun, wasn't it—those two idiots who thoughtlessly put me in charge of the thing and ended up saddled with a monster for their trouble...!!
Park Woochan, man of honor, knows his shame.
Which was why I'd figured that if anything suspicious stirred, it'd be best to kill it in advance, on my own watch.
"Well, I'm screwed."
This woman was far stranger than I'd bargained for.
Had I, perhaps, planted the bomb myself?
But whether she sensed my mood or not, the goddess kept chattering on without pause.
"In any case, what a mannerless creature you are. Besides, my being a married woman is, after all, merely the content of myth—"
"Certainly, from where I stand as well, there is much that seems lacking in a mere priest serving a goddess."
"Priest, my ass—quit spouting nonsense that's gonna get someone killed, I swear. Dead."
"Wh-what? I said no such thing, I'll have you know."
"Furthermore, the manner in which you hold a goddess hostage with your mortal frame—it deepens my suspicion that you are, in fact, unqualified for your post."
"...Huh?"
And then.
threaded between those grumblings came a voice I had never heard in my life.
Light, almost flippant in its timbre.
Polite register, and yet utterly devoid of the smallest shred of respect for anyone.
My eyes followed the voice, and the first thing they caught was the nightscape of the street, drenched in shadow.
And there, beyond it.
On the far side of the writhing dark of night, a suspicious figure stood.
No, really.
There was no other way to describe it.
A rough mat of cloth draped over his entire body.
With the hood connected to that cloak pulled down deep, not an inch of his face could be made out.
Even if it had been Lee Joongoo standing here in my place, I doubted the verdict of "suspicious figure" could have been avoided.
"Good evening. And—it has been a long time."
And so.
The strangely dressed man spoke those words—not to me, but to the goddess right beside me.
"I have missed you, Tiamat."
Jolt.
Reacting to the voice of a man she'd never heard before, the goddess's shoulders flinched—just once.