A Criminal's End
In the end, everyone gathered in the hospital room.
With all eight of them crammed into a single space, the room was packed to bursting.
"So who came up with this whole plan?"
Kim Gabyul asked from where she sat on the bed, gently stroking Miho.
Miho, shriveled up under the pressure of Holy Power, looked pitiful — but there was nothing to be done about it.
You go ahead and soothe Kim Gabyul's temper for me.
Feeling her gaze on me, I turned my eyes toward Hwang Ju-hyeon.
"The one who led the operation was…"
Caught under both my stare and Kim Gabyul's at once, Hwang Ju-hyeon flinched.
"What, why! You did it too!"
Apparently deciding to brazen it out, he puffed out his chest with shameless confidence.
"I was really, really scared…"
Lee Jiwoo murmured under her breath.
Hearing her, Hwang Ju-hyeon flinched all over again.
"Really? Are you okay?"
"Does anything hurt?"
Watching Seong Hyeon and Lee Ye-rin fuss over Lee Jiwoo, Hwang Ju-hyeon muttered,
"Well, I mean… is it that big a deal…"
Lee Ye-rin shot him a withering glare.
Suddenly the center of everyone's attention, Hwang Ju-hyeon wilted and shrank into himself.
"So why are we even here?"
Seong Hyeon, still checking on Lee Jiwoo, spoke up.
The moment I looked at him, I nearly burst out laughing.
Am I… still alive?
No, no — if I started laughing now it would all spill out.
I clamped down on the urge with everything I had.
"They just said that since we got hit with dark magic, there might be some kind of aftereffects. You never know."
Lee Ye-rin, still tending to Lee Jiwoo, answered Seong Hyeon's question.
Those people really had made a production of it.
Probably because they were police, and so many villains used dark magic — they were hypersensitive about it. They ran every test imaginable.
Spraying alchemical reagents, drawing blood for analysis, scanning our bodies with magic. They did the whole circus.
"…Are there aftereffects?"
Go Sang-hyeok's expression turned grave.
"For real?"
Looking thoroughly serious, he glanced back and forth between me and Moon Seyeon.
"Haha. Nothing of the sort."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Go Sang-hyeok looked to Kim Gabyul as if seeking confirmation of my claim.
Under his gaze, Kim Gabyul nodded with an air of pure inconvenience.
"If there's nothing wrong, can't we just leave already?"
Seong Hyeon offered a perfectly reasonable suggestion.
"Haha. Shall we head back to the lodging, then?"
"What, we can just walk out?"
"I don't really know either."
Chukji Hotel.
Named, apparently, after the legendary art of shrinking the earth — Chukji — the hotel was set to serve as lodging for the Warna Academy students on their career-experience field trip.
Built near the ghost city used for training exercises, it sat surrounded by nothing but desolate mountains and open plains, which at least made it easy to find.
"Are we really just allowed to walk into a hotel like this?"
"The schedule's over anyway. They said it's free time."
Once inside Chukji Hotel, we showed our student IDs to the front desk staff, and the clerk handed over our keys.
Two rooms per team.
Four rooms total assigned to our group.
"I'll room with Seyeon. That works, right?"
"Uh, yeah."
Moon Seyeon, now paired with Lee Ye-rin, shot me a sidelong glance.
What? Why are you looking at me?
At the small stir, Kim Gabyul — who had been heading into the next room — stopped in her tracks and looked back and forth between Moon Seyeon and me.
And what's your problem?
"You've got talent."
"You're not half bad yourself."
Hwang Ju-hyeon and Go Sang-hyeok grinned as they clashed weapons.
Go Sang-hyeok wielded a greatsword; Hwang Ju-hyeon's entire body was a weapon.
Which is to say: Go Sang-hyeok's greatsword and Hwang Ju-hyeon's fists were slamming into each other.
Having discovered a wide open lot behind Chukji Hotel that looked perfect for sparring, Hwang Ju-hyeon had dragged Go Sang-hyeok into a match.
Word had somehow gotten out, and a crowd had gathered to watch. People were packed in shoulder to shoulder.
Waaaaaah—!
Gold Sun! Gold Sun! Gold Sun—!
"What the hell is a Gold Sun?!"
The students were as feverishly worked up as Romans at a gladiatorial bout.
There was even a teacher serving as referee.
I was the one who'd called him, actually.
Lee Gil-young.
I'd heard he was resting in his room, so I tried summoning him once — and he showed up immediately.
Waaaaaah—!
A roar went up.
Go Sang-hyeok's greatsword, swung in a lightning-fast arc, had landed a clean hit on Hwang Ju-hyeon and chipped his barrier.
Taking a solid hit for the first time, Hwang Ju-hyeon laughed with genuine delight, golden hair whipping around his face.
Gold Sun is so handsome—!
The girls erupted at the sight of his good-looking smile.
At this rate, "Gold Sun" was going to stick as Hwang Ju-hyeon's nickname for good.
"Ha. Unbelievable."
Lee Ye-rin, watching the spar beside me, let out a hollow laugh.
"What's so unbelievable?"
She furrowed her brow.
"I mean, how is that supposed to be handsome? Something must be wrong with their eyes."
"Objectively speaking, I'd say he's on the handsome side…"
"Ugh, absolutely not."
Lee Ye-rin made a gagging motion.
Hmm. That bad, huh?
"Jealous, by any chance?"
"W-what. No I'm not."
At Kim Gabyul's offhand remark, Lee Ye-rin's face flushed redder and redder.
"Ahh, I see."
"I'm serious, I'm seriously not."
Lee Ye-rin's voice trembled unsteadily.
Reacting like that, even someone as dense as me couldn't miss it.
Lee Ye-rin almost certainly liked Hwang Ju-hyeon.
I glanced around. Seong Hyeon, Lee Jiwoo, and Moon Seyeon were all pretending not to listen while hanging on every word of our conversation.
Everyone was at that age — apparently this kind of thing was endlessly fascinating.
"Looks like Ye-rin likes Hwang Ju-hyeon."
Lee Jiwoo whispered to Seong Hyeon.
Whether Lee Ye-rin heard her or not, her ears had gone completely red as she fixed her attention on the spar in stubborn silence.
Gold Sun—!
Gold Sun—!
Gold Sun—!
The match ended.
Hwang Ju-hyeon, who had fought bravely against Go Sang-hyeok's greatsword, had finally managed to close the distance and force the spar into extreme close quarters.
Go Sang-hyeok had abandoned his greatsword at once and met him in hand-to-hand combat, but by then Hwang Ju-hyeon had already piled on considerable damage — and from there, he sealed the victory.
The spectators, thoroughly fired up by the match, kept chanting Hwang Ju-hyeon's name.
And when the two of them shook hands and pulled each other into a hug, the cheers only grew louder.
"If no one else wants to spar, we'll call it— oh, for crying out loud."
The heat had spread to the rest of the students. Plenty of people now wanted a turn.
Suddenly stuck refereeing match after match, Lee Gil-young shot me a look of pure resentment.
Uh… sorry.
…But you did call me boss, didn't you?
When the boss says jump, you jump.
"Well, it's finally over. At the end even the professors wanted to spar, so things got completely chaotic."
"Good work. You're better off than I am, stuck here doing paperwork."
I meant it sincerely.
Sitting in a chair handling office work, I envied Lee Gil-young — the one who got to move alongside Sejin-nim in person.
"Shall I relay that to the boss exactly as you said it? 'Seo Jia here finds the work the boss personally assigned her disagreeable'?"
"Ah — no, that's not what I meant…"
"Heh. Seo Jia. You haven't changed a bit."
I nearly had a heart attack — until Lee Gil-young's playful tone made it clear he was only joking.
I wasn't about to take that lying down.
"I heard you use formal speech with the students. The Shadow Snake, of all people, speaking politely to a bunch of green kids — that's genuinely entertaining."
"Hoh. Our boss is still a student himself, and yet that's how you think of him? Understood. I'll report this entire matter to the boss…"
"Th-that's not what I meant…"
"Hahahaha! Fine, fine."
And with that, Lee Gil-young hung up.
I frantically called him back several times. No answer.
"I'm doomed…"
If this reached Sejin-nim's ears, what would he think of me?
Nothing good, that was certain.
Well — it had almost certainly been a joke. There was no real chance it would actually get back to Sejin-nim. Still.
I turned my head and looked out the window.
Even at night, the city's bright lights had long since blotted out the stars.
Because of that, the night sky held nothing but the moon.
I often thought that moon was like Sejin-nim.
Let me correct that.
Not often — always.
The reason was simple.
Who else but Sejin-nim stood alone in that dark night sky, shining so high and so bright?
Looking at that moon brought back old memories.
The day I first met Sejin-nim.
A little over six years ago, by the count of years.
Back then I was a low-ranking combatant in an organization that no longer exists, and I was very young — barely fifteen.
And Sejin-nim, I later learned, had been even younger than I was.
From the moment I first became aware of my own memories, the organization that had taken in an orphan like me drilled into me that I owed them total devotion, and I trained without end.
The organization I belonged to at the time was involved in human trafficking — kidnapping children and selling them.
Even as revulsion and disgust churned inside me at what they did, I told myself I had to repay the organization that raised me. So I accepted my first mission and stepped out into the world.
My target that day was Sejin-nim.
No — I was the one who became the target.
I approached him as he was pouring mana into a butterfly, then stopped halfway.
The thought of kidnapping a child younger than myself filled me with such self-loathing, such raw revulsion, that I hesitated. And Sejin-nim, deliberately letting himself be caught, asked me my name.
I answered, "Seo Jia."
Sejin-nim gave a little smile — and that very day, he tore the entire organization apart.
Police arrived in the middle of the night, drawn by the sudden chaos. But Sejin-nim and I were classified as pitiful victims exploited by the organization, and just like that, I escaped their grasp for good.
That was when it began.
The day I started following Sejin-nim.
"Back then he was so short and tiny it was adorable…"
Now look how much he'd grown.