The Duel (1)
"Whew..."
With the long, long weekend finally over, I let out a sigh of relief as I headed to the Academy.
Now, you might ask—reasonably so—why a guy who'd spent all of Friday whining about a public holiday wrecking his weekend suddenly couldn't wait to get to the Academy.
To understand that, you'd only need to look back at my last two days of "vacation."
First.
"Up. We're gaming."
"GET UP!!!"
Gods, you see, don't technically require sleep, so apparently they spend their free time playing hobbies while humans are unconscious. Which meant the two of them played by themselves while I slept—then woke me up at the precise moment I hit exactly five hours and thirty minutes of rest.
And as it happened, five hours and thirty minutes was the bare minimum of sleep my body could function on.
Whether they knew that or just hit the number blind luck, I couldn't say—but either way, my body had been worked to the bone.
Second.
"Drink this!"
"What is it?"
"Cthugha's Special Shake!"
Some incomprehensible shake, forced down my throat three times a day. Called "Cthugha's Special Shake"... but with a color somewhere between purple, black, and an ambiguous muddy yellow, I really didn't want to drink it.
"...What exactly is in this?"
"You'll find out when you drink it~"
Trusting her, I drank it. The taste...
"Uuulp!"
Imagine taking every negative substance in existence and grinding them all into one glass. That was the flavor.
Think "food waste," and that's what it tasted like. Think "rotten egg," and that's what it tasted like. Think "industrial chemical that shouldn't legally qualify as food," and—yep, that's what it tasted like.
I genuinely have no idea what you'd have to blend together to hit every single one of those notes at once.
"It's making you healthy! Finish it—don't leave a drop!"
I only kept drinking because I didn't want to see Cthugha on the verge of tears, but it was a taste I never wanted to experience twice. Having it served to me three meals a day was literal torture.
For the record, this morning's shake tasted like uranium.
And finally, third.
"Greet him. A Great Old One you already know."
"Nice to meet you~"
"GRRAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Every single day, they dragged in gods from their circle and shredded my sanity.
Nyarlathotep insists that 'your SAN value has to get wrecked before it can recover and climb.' Honestly? It felt more like dying.
Technically I only saw the true form for about three seconds before it shifted into human shape... but those three seconds were pure hell.
According to them, 'we take a moderately subdued form so humans don't go insane.' Frankly, most humans would go mad from a single glimpse.
And even the human form wasn't safe.
CRACK!
"Ah—oops, my strength control slipped. Sorry."
"...It's fine."
Since she kept accidentally pulverizing everything she touched, my apartment was now a landscape of wreckage.
With a weekend full of moments like these, how could I *not* be happy to go to the Academy?
At least until evening, I'd be free of the disaster zone.
"Hey, you hear?"
"Hear what?"
"That Lee Seonyoung from Class D died?"
What?
At those words, I perked up my ears, careful not to make it obvious.
"Don't know the details, but apparently somebody killed him."
"What? What did he even do?"
"No clue. Sounds like a straight-up random murder."
"Who the hell could kill an awakened person..."
Awakeners. Monsters beyond superhuman.
No matter how low-ranked an awakener was, an ordinary human couldn't kill them. Not even a martial arts master among civilians, not with a gun, not with a knife.
Even I was confident I could take a gun, for instance.
And yet someone had killed an awakener. Which meant...
Another awakener did it?
Which meant a villain.
A villain had committed murder against an Academy cadet?
A declaration of war on the Academy.
Whoever it was, they were well and truly screwed. Very.
I clicked my tongue and walked on toward the classroom.
Creeeak.
The moment I opened the door to Class F, I saw the exact same scene as always.
With one difference...
"You've arrived, Master!"
The class's number one, whom I'd brainwashed with my skill, was kneeling on one knee, waiting for me.
"I feared you might not come!"
"...Go back to your seat."
"Understood, Master!"
Gu Haseong's status window had popped up on its own.
His stats went up across the board?
Apparently he'd followed my order to transfer to Class A, because every stat had risen.
But there was one odd thing.
Level 6?
I hadn't bothered checking last time, but he wasn't Level 1 anymore. Which meant he'd been hunting monsters.
How did that even happen?
I'll say it again: first-year cadets don't hunt monsters. It's far more efficient to max out your stats first, then start hunting.
There goes his shot at Class A.
He'd ignored that rule and grinded his way up to Level 6—which was functionally the same as wasting five whole stat points.
Considering that each stat point costs an astronomically larger amount the higher it gets, this was a devastating loss. Look at the S-Rank heroes—the moment they raise a single stat, they end up plastered all over the nine o'clock news.
What a waste.
Still, if the guy I intended to squeeze dry got stronger, that couldn't hurt.
Thud.
I walked slowly to my seat and sat down.
Until recently, hostile stares had rained down on me from every corner of the room—now there was none of that.
If anything, the prevailing mood was indifference.
So my skill really did do its job.
When I made Gu Haseong my subordinate, I'd apparently talked the entire class over in the process—and somewhere along the way, my image as the resident pariah had evaporated.
Which suited me fine.
It wasn't a profession where I needed to live under endless scrutiny; having the spotlight turned off was nothing but a relief.
Tap, tap.
Just then, the front door of the classroom opened and an Academy professor stepped in.
"Let's see... this is Hero Ethics hour, correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"Right, then, where were we..."
"Page 148, sir."
Awakening fundamentally happens in adulthood. In other words, every Academy cadet was a legal adult.
Think of the Academy as something like a university. Except every subject is a general requirement—since combat ability is what ultimately matters, there's no real need to sweat the minor courses.
"Hmm... A hero is, by definition..."
That professor looked unremarkable, but he was one of the top 1% in the country, having operated as an A-Rank hero. Since the entire Academy faculty were monsters who'd chewed through at least A-Rank, even Class F paid attention in class.
Get on the wrong side of those monsters, and your future career as a hero gets a lot harder.
"Therefore, a hero must stand against evil and..."
That said, Hero Ethics was an extremely easy subject, so almost nobody took focused notes with any real intent.
The hard material was piled up in the second and third years; first years only learned the basics. It was basically a class that went, "Stealing is bad, kids~"
Honestly, the course could be scrapped without anyone noticing—but occasionally a first year would pop up who was a trash-fire degenerate beyond all imagination, so they kept it around.
Though whether keeping the class actually prevented those degenerates from appearing was another question entirely.
"..."
A subject nobody paid attention to?
For me, that was an absolute jackpot.
Every single point I scraped out of this class would help climb the rankings. Now that I'd finally gotten stronger, getting expelled was not on the menu.
With the mindset of slamming every syllable the professor spoke straight into my skull, I focused on the lecture.
BANG!!
Just then, the front door burst open with an explosive crash.
Everyone—who had been more or less zoning out—jolted in their seats.
"Hm?"
The professor, mid-lecture at the front, turned only his eyes toward the unidentified intruder.
"Well, well. To what do we owe the honor of the Class C professor's presence?"
Then, in a tone that was half reprimand, he addressed the man.
"My apologies, Professor of Hero Ethics. There is an urgent announcement that needed to be delivered, so I came at once."
And he bent at the waist in a full ninety-degree bow of apology.
"What the hell?"
"Professor or not, he kicks the door open like he's tearing it off the hinges, then grovels like that."
Truthfully, though, none of this was strange.
There was one ironclad saying carved into the hero industry:
'To have grown old is to have survived.'
The Hero Ethics professor was, at a glance, comfortably past fifty. Meanwhile, the Class C professor was thirty at the generous end.
Who was stronger, who held the higher position—the answer was obvious. If anything, given that the Class C professor had kicked a classroom door open mid-lecture, a full prostration was the least he deserved.
"The truth is... you see..."
The Class C professor approached and whispered into his ear.
"...Damn it. That student treats his possessions however he damn well pleases, is what you're telling me?"
"I sincerely apologize. That student's backing is simply too powerful. There was nothing I could do to stop it."
"Even so, this is too much—dragging a Class F cadet around and doing *what*, exactly..."
The two of them had suddenly dropped into deadly serious conversation.
And since the subject of it was apparently from Class F, the entire room had gone rigid.
"There was nothing I could do."
"Damn it all. Those reporters will be sinking their teeth into some tabloid garbage or other again."
He pressed a hand to his head as if dizzy, then shook it.
"Cadet Kim Hyunseong. Please step outside for a moment."
What?
"By request of Class A cadet, Iris Gostrick."