Hospitalized
Munch, munch.
"...So that's how we ended up rescuing Miss Nam Da-hee."
Scarlet wrung her brain dry to cobble together an excuse. Drawing on her years with the Iris Guild and every scrap of rumor she had ever overheard, she spun an entire fictitious organization around Lee Ho-yeon — a power base that did not, in fact, exist.
Nobody had told her why Ho-yeon had gone after Nam Da-eun in the first place. Terrified of derailing whatever plan he was running, she had no choice but to manufacture a story that would leave the real explanation for him to deliver himself.
"So in the end, you don't actually know the real reason either, Miss Scarlet."
Munch, munch.
Nam Da-eun tore into a piece of fried chicken, listening with rapt attention to the tale Scarlet had just invented on the spot.
"That's right. We were simply following Mr. Ho-yeon's orders, so... um. Excuse me — why are you crying?"
Nam Da-eun's eyes had gone glassy mid-conversation. Scarlet, still mid-sentence, could not hide her alarm.
"I'm sorry. This is the first time I've ever had fried chicken..."
Scarlet watched Nam Da-eun sniffle her way through another bite and found herself privately wondering why every woman in Ho-yeon's orbit was some kind of eccentric.
"Unnie... you couldn't even eat chicken because of me..."
"It's okay, Da-hee. I love you."
"Hic... waaah..."
The two sisters clung to each other, nuzzling their faces together. Beside them, Liliana shredded through chicken with single-minded determination, guarding her share against any possible theft.
Scarlet wrestled her spinning thoughts back into order and turned to Nam Da-eun.
"Where is Mr. Ho-yeon right now? If he was caught up in the same attack, it would have been much easier to explain everything if he'd come along."
Scarlet had been waiting for Nam Da-eun at the academy's central fountain, and she had no clear picture of what had actually happened. Nam Da-eun had arrived the instant the attack ended, leaving no time to investigate.
"...He'll be at the hospital. I don't know the details myself, but the hunters were going on and on about Cadet Lee Ho-yeon's sacrifice."
Nam Da-eun had never left the barrier from the moment the attack began until it was over. Only after every last Demon had been dealt with did she slip out of the banquet hall and come straight here. She simply didn't have the particulars.
"...!"
"S-Scout! Hurry up and find out what's going on!"
Liliana had been paying the conversation no mind whatsoever, wholly absorbed in her meal — but she could not ignore Ho-yeon's name.
"Yes. Right away."
Scarlet immediately started working her personal network of informants. Reports of a terrorist attack at the social mixer were only just beginning to hit the news, and all she had to go on was Nam Da-eun's rough account. She wasn't even sure where to start looking. Still, her contacts had always taken a professional interest in this sort of thing. They might already know.
The replies came in almost at once.
"What'd they say? Is he alive?"
Liliana grabbed Scarlet's arm and shook it.
"He's in a coma at the moment, hospitalized. The Saint and a number of other healers are giving him intensive treatment, so they haven't released anything to the public. No visitors allowed, either."
"Please..."
Nam Da-eun clasped both hands together as if in prayer and squeezed her eyes shut. There was still so much she needed to ask him. Why he had saved Da-hee and herself. What she was supposed to do from here. The path ahead felt impossibly blank.
"Oh. Is that all? Scared me for nothing."
Liliana let out a breath of relief at the news that Ho-yeon wasn't dead. As long as he was breathing, that was enough. She was already certain that stubborn life of his wouldn't snuff out so easily. She turned her full attention back to the chicken.
"Hmm..."
Baek A-young had gone, and I had been turning the problem over ever since — but I still couldn't land on a decent approach. No matter how I sliced it, coming right out and saying hey, let's be careful about birth control felt spectacularly unsexy.
Of course that was the cleanest solution. I just couldn't shake the fear that it might chip even a single point off the affection score I had stacked all the way to one hundred. It was the first time I had ever hit a perfect hundred, and with nothing certain to go on, I couldn't settle on a course of action.
She would be back anyway, to look after me. I could sound her out then.
I've still got more than a few women left to win over. Pregnancy would be... a lot.
While I was working through Baek A-young's route, I had also been asking myself how to come out of all this looking like slightly less of a scumbag. If I was going to clear every heroine, this exact situation was going to repeat itself more than a few times.
I had briefly considered just being honest. I got dropped into a game world, and I have to romance all of you. A harem is mandatory. That sort of thing. Obviously that was insane. If I were a woman, I would never date a man who said something like that. I wouldn't even believe him.
There was a way to prove it, technically. The heroine status window. If I read their hearts out loud, that would be all the proof anyone needed — except I was the only one who experienced it as "reading." From their side, it would feel like a grotesque invasion. Going public would tank the routes, not help them. There was also the small matter of the existential collapse that came with learning the world you had lived in was fiction. Not worth revisiting.
I put the problem down and checked the public mood on my smartwatch. A-young had said a full day had passed since I collapsed, which meant if today was the day after the attack, the news cycle would already have chewed through everything.
I opened Everyday. Sure enough, every trending post was about the social mixer.
"They're losing their minds."
Fair enough. I had been caught off guard by a terrorist attack out of nowhere — I could only imagine how everyone else had felt. The whole thing had never happened in the original, which had made it a nightmare to respond to.
I tapped into a post that looked like a roundup and started reading.
So apparently Demons hit the social mixer today.
A barrier slammed down over the entire venue out of nowhere and not a single person could get out. I wasn't there so I don't have it firsthand, but from the interviews I've seen, dozens of smaller barriers went up inside the hall too, splitting the hunters into isolated groups.
On top of that you had an assault by hundreds of Demons at the same time. Total bloodbath, right?
Except the death toll stayed in the single digits. There were even civilians in there. That number should not be possible.
The reason, they're saying, is Lee Ho-yeon.
A barrier that would take three or four active-duty A-class hunters more than ten minutes of reverse-engineering to crack — he punched through it by himself in thirty seconds, over and over, and pulled most of the hunters out. He even turned away the ones who tried to help him and told them to stick together and survive.
After he'd saved almost all of them, he took down dozens of Demons on his own, rescued the Saint, and then collapsed into a coma. And some of those Demons were apparently absurdly strong.
The combat rating on the big one he dropped is being estimated at A-class minimum, S-class at the high end.
That is actually insane.
A few people are calling it Ho-yeon glaze and saying it's fake, but go watch the survivor interviews. That is not a lineup that lies. Those people have zero reason to inflate the academy's reputation lmao
[Video] [Video] [Video]
These are the interviews I used.
"Yeah, I guess that's how it looked."
The truth was I had just been running around looking for Baek A-young. She had been impossible to find, and the hunters had gotten rescued as a side effect. The ones who kept trying to follow me for no reason — I had dressed up a "don't come near me, go stand with the crowd over there" into something that sounded noble.
Reporters desperate for a story and hunters filling in the blanks had tangled together and produced a misunderstanding. Watching the comments sing my praises didn't feel bad, though. A better image was always a win.
I checked the other posts too. Looking closer, the interviews and reactions had exploded over just the last few hours.
Cadet Lee Ho-yeon really must have played a massive role...
This isn't "good job, kid." This isn't even "impressive for a cadet."
They're treating him like the man who saved their lives.
Is Ho-yeon coin heading to Mars?
Public opinion had shifted hard since the attack. Celebrities who had been at the academy's Celestial Festival and gotten pulled out by me were bringing my name up again, and plenty of the other people I had saved were speaking up on my behalf too.
"What is this now."
I had been browsing posts when I clicked on one of the videos. On screen, a man sat with his head bowed, his face drawn and heavy.
"Good evening. I am Jeon Young-su, First Team Leader of the Taebaek Guild. I was at the scene of Victoria Academy's Celestial Festival. I was not able to speak until now, because of pressure from a certain guild."
"Huh..."
He had almost certainly been threatened within an inch of his life, and he was still saying this out loud. That took serious guts.
"I had already made peace with dying, and then I was saved. I cannot treat my benefactor like this. I will say everything. I was threatened by the Shinyoung Guild. And I will not have been the only one."
I had thought his face looked familiar. It was the side-character look — the well-meaning idiot who stood next to the protagonist and meant well.
"That's what you get for running your mouth. Tch."
This was going to give the Shinyoung Guild a serious headache. They would probably keep their heads down while they tried to contain it. Dr. Kang Hyo-rin would bring me whatever she had on them eventually. I could always blow it open when I had the time.
And it wasn't just this video. A staggering number of hunters had stepped forward on their own to cover for me. All of it had happened in a span of ten minutes. Even while I was sitting here taking the temperature of public opinion, things were unfolding in real time.
Then another video caught my eye — a post with far more upvotes than anything else around it.
[Video]
Okay... yeah. This is how you make the Saint fall for you.
That is so damn cool.
Ha... I don't even have words.
"...What did I even do that they're glazing me this hard?"
I didn't remember doing anything that cool at the banquet hall. I hit play. The screen opened on a hiss of static and a field of black, then resolved a moment later.
"Ah... that moment."
On the footage, Baek A-young was treating me with tears streaming down her face. Beneath her, I lay collapsed and bleeding. I hadn't actually lost that much blood — it was just a gash on my forearm. But the blood running from that cut had soaked into my clothes over the course of the fight, and on camera it looked like I had been bleeding from everywhere.
"And why is the resolution so damn good? It's embarrassing."
Whatever tech they were using, A-young's face and mine were both painfully clear. I kept watching.
A moment later, my pained expression hardened. I grabbed A-young and yanked her in, turning my back to shield her.
Thuk.
A dagger, thrown from somewhere offscreen, buried itself in my back.
"Ugh... that really did feel disgusting."
The sensation crawled over my whole body all over again — that nauseating, skin-crawling feel of a blade punching into flesh. On screen, I coughed and spat a little blood. My insides had been a wreck from Blood Beat, most likely. I had been too out of it to notice at the time. Seeing it like this was strangely fascinating.
My face twisted as the dagger hit. A-young's eyes went wide. That was the last clear frame before the image started to smear, and then the footage cut out in a burst of static.
"...Wow. Okay. That actually does look cool."
If even I thought I looked cool watching a video of my own face, then it had to be the real thing.
I was about to scroll down for more reactions when a knock sounded at the door.
Knock, knock.
Who is that?
Baek A-young had said there wouldn't be any visitors or attendants for a while.
"Yes. Come in."
The person who opened the door was someone I truly had not expected.
"You look like you're doing all right, Cadet Lee Ho-yeon."
"...Good afternoon, Chairman."
"Sorry to disturb your rest. I'm afraid I have something urgent to discuss."
Standing in the doorway was the Chairman of Victoria Academy. What was he doing here? And what could possibly be so urgent?
"Please, come in, Chairman."
"Mm. Thank you."
The Chairman stepped into the hospital room at an unhurried pace and took a seat. I waited for whatever he would say next, a thin edge of tension settling over me.