Exposure (12)
In the student lounge of Yolam Academy, students were taking a brief rest, chatting about this and that. Among them, a female student with bleached hair appeared, grunting under the weight of a massive stack of newspapers clutched to her chest. She made a beeline for her friend, who was seated at a table lighting a cigarette.
Thud!
“Huff… huff…”
Sera dumped the pile of newspapers as though tossing aside a burden and kept panting. The buttons on her shirt strained dangerously, threatening to burst at any moment.
“…?”
The girl with shoulder-length hair sitting there—Yeoreum—tilted her head with a look that clearly asked what all this was about. She took one final drag from her cigarette, ground it out in the ashtray, and waved the smoke away. Then she began rifling through the stack Sera had brought.
The Return of the Hidden Dragon… Black Lotus’s Sa Dae-ryong returns to the Supreme Council after fifteen years… Pressure mounts to repeal the 25-trillion regulation…
With the heart of one who cuts out their own flesh and blood… Red Fire’s Yeon Minha, the young lady, receives final not-guilty verdict… Announces intention to return to Yolam…
Southwest Uninhabited Zone Subjugation Battle Imminent… Will Hae Wolhwa demonstrate her enduring strength…?
Emergency Measures Invoked for the First Time in Sixty-Three Years… Exclusive Interview with Paecheon Baek Seoyeon, the Young Lady Who Averted the Great Catastrophe
“What are you doing with all this?”
“So… all of this stuff happened just in the last few days…?”
“…”
Yeoreum gave Sera an utterly dumbfounded look.
“Are you seriously asking that right now…? Sera, are you a demon spy? These stories have been all over the place for days.”
Even as she scolded her, Yeoreum kept flipping through the papers. She soon spotted something, reached out, and pulled it free.
Who Is the Veiled Son-in-Law of the Paecheon Family? In-Depth Report on Baek Seoyeon’s Mysterious Man…
“Huh? This one’s new even to me. I’ve been curious about Senior Baek Seoyeon’s fiancé… Wait, what? ‘Due to internal circumstances, this feature has been canceled…?’ Ugh.”
After flipping through it a few times, she lost interest and tossed the paper aside with a flick of her wrist.
Sera sat down beside her regardless of the scolding and began leafing through the newspapers with her. Before long she found something that made her eyes go wide. She buried her face in the page.
B-143 District Hokyung Industries Research Lab Fully Disinfected… Director revealed to be a Category 2 demon and exterminated on site… 57 personnel, including Security Bureau staff, killed in the line of duty during subjugation…
“Wait a second…! This is that guy from back then…!”
Sera shrieked, growing more agitated by the second. The newspaper carried a huge photograph of a gaunt man wearing glasses. Sera remembered shaking hands with him during an external request she had taken part in. She briefly wondered whether she should feel relieved that she had clasped a demon’s hand and walked away unharmed.
“Sigh… I knew it. I thought it was weird that mutants kept appearing in a wealthy district! So they were running illegal human experiments…”
“You never thought anything like that. You were just happy to be close to him…”
“Hey! Look at this! This is the article I saw earlier!”
Sera ignored Yeoreum completely and kept talking. She yanked out one of the rolled-up newspapers and waved it wildly.
The New Crown Prince of the Black Lotus Removes His Veil… Enrolled at Yolam while concealing his identity behind a mask…
“This, this…!”
“Like I said, everyone already knew except you… The kids around us are all talking about it…”
Yeoreum shook her head as if she had finally had enough. Yet Sera’s voice, reading the article aloud, still brimmed with unbridled excitement.
“Interview with Chairman Sa Dae-ryong… ‘Concealing his identity was an unavoidable decision to avoid chaos,’ ‘Even now that his existence has been officially recognized, nothing will change’… Wow… wow…”
Sera kept gasping in admiration as she read.
“And the most likely candidate for the first Category 1 male mage in eighteen years…?”
Common sense dictated that no matter how outstanding a mage might be, one person alone could not turn the tide of an entire battlefield. Yet every so often individuals appeared who shattered that logic. Category 1 was a separate classification reserved for mages who existed outside all normal standards.
The list also contained several names the girls were familiar with: the current principal of Yolam, Hae Wolhwa; Paecheon Baek Seoyeon, the first mage in history to register over ten thousand rubins of internal particles; and Red Fire’s Yeon Minha, who commanded dozens of spirits and wielded nearly every elemental magic with mastery.
Because of innate differences in particle sensitivity, more than eighty percent of Category 1 mages were female. But very rarely—once in a blue moon—a male mage would appear on that list. The most recent had been Sa Jaehyuk, the former successor of the Black Lotus. And now, eighteen years later, the Black Lotus had produced another.
“I knew he was no ordinary student from the moment I saw him in practical training… When is Hyun coming back? My mouth is itching to talk about it…”
Voices drifted from nearby tables—students who had missed their chance to get close and were now regretting it—but Sera paid them little mind. After all, she and her friends had maintained a decent relationship with the masked male student ever since he was treated like a freak because of his unique appearance.
Convinced she possessed a keen eye for people, Sera hummed cheerfully.
“This is perfect. Next time our group gets an external request, I’ll ask if he can take it on. Normally the escort fee is split half and half…”
Bang!
A sharp, irritated noise cut Sera’s words off mid-sentence. The lounge door opened to reveal a female student with golden hair and emerald eyes. She wore nothing but a tight-fitting gray training uniform, leaving the sculpted curves of her trained body and her toned midriff completely exposed.
“Haa…”
She was drenched in sweat, breathing hard from exhaustion.
“…”
The moment Jin Yeseo appeared, the noisy lounge fell into sudden silence. But the blonde, green-eyed girl simply grabbed a bottle of ice water from the cooler and left again without a word. Not long after she disappeared, Yeoreum spoke in a cautious voice.
“…Looks like the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“She lost to Hyun in the ranking match and was hospitalized, remember? After she was discharged, they say she’s been living in the training hall almost twenty-four hours a day. Her aura is so terrifying that no one dares go near her.”
Sera grabbed her own shoulders and pretended to shiver.
“Does that mean the moment she sees him she’s going to challenge him to a duel?”
Jin Yeseo was certainly evaluated as someone who could one day approach Category 1, but right now the gap between her and the masked male student was still quite large.
“Who knows… She might lose again… Huh?”
While they were talking, Yeoreum pulled out a magazine that had been sticking out of the pile and read the title.
“Man dies after breaking into a pig farm and engaging in naked intercourse with swine…? Cause of death: intestinal rupture…? Blech. Don’t tell me this is your type…”
“W-what are you saying…! It obviously got mixed in by mistake…! How pure do you think I am…?”
Sera’s bleached yellow hair and the short skirt that revealed her thighs swayed unconvincingly. After bickering for a while, the two girls looked around.
“Speaking of which, Yena said she’d be here soon. Why isn’t she coming?”
In an empty women’s restroom at Yolam Academy, a female student with brown hair and brown eyes was engaged in a staring contest with her reflection. Tears welled in her eyes as she glared at herself with all her might. Yet the girl in the mirror only wore a cold, mocking smile.
The girl in the mirror spoke to the one in reality.
“I won’t.”
She shook her head violently. The woman in the mirror let out a deep sigh.
“Ugh…!”
The girl who had been glaring with all her strength suddenly swung her arm toward her own temple. A small, sharply honed knife gleamed in her fingers. But the blade stopped dead just before it could pierce her skull.
Even though the girl trembled, pouring every ounce of strength into the motion, her arm refused to obey its master. When at last the exhausted girl gave up her resistance, her arm went limp and dropped toward the floor.
The girl in reality looked at the mirror and spoke in a voice thick with resentment.
“Spica. My poor, pitiful sister.”
Watching the scene, the girl in the mirror twisted her lips in clear delight.
“Stop it…!”
“That’s not true…!”
She covered her ears and shook her head wildly, not wanting to hear any more.
“It’s not true…! I didn’t do any of that…! You were the one controlling my body…!”
The tears that had been pooling finally spilled onto the floor with soft plops. After watching the sobbing girl for a while, the reflection in the mirror sighed again.
“…”
“That means…”
The reflection nodded with an expression full of certainty.
“You…!”
“Don’t… call me your sister…!”
The girl in reality ground her teeth and glared at the mirror.
“I’m not you people… I’m human…!”
But her final resistance was swallowed whole by an overwhelming compulsion that resonated through her very soul.
It constricted her body so tightly she could barely breathe. The compulsion coiled around her several times before finally releasing her.
Suddenly a sticky, heavy mist brushed past the girl’s body. When she lifted her head again, the girl in the mirror was shedding thick tears just like the real one.
“Hic…”
With a clatter, the knife she had been gripping slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor.