The Third Class (2)
Being trusted by a regressor was, of course, a happy thing.
Still, this sort of trust didn’t sit right with me.
I had no real way of knowing how highly he rated me, but to put it a little dramatically, I was still just a child who needed Kim Hyunsung’s warm concern and affection.
That was especially true when it came to this whole direction my growth seemed to be taking.
Sure, if you asked what was so great about advancing classes and raising stats, I couldn’t exactly give you a proper answer. But even so, I still couldn’t get used to being exaggeratedly praised like this.
Show a little doubt, you bastard.
I’d spent so long building up the image that I could handle things on my own, but this was still irritating.
And yet, I could also understand why Kim Hyunsung had reached this decision.
This expedition has a high chance of ending in failure.
He’d started to grasp, at least somewhat, the truth behind what I’d told him about the party members relying on the psychological comfort I provided to hunt safely.
“I-I’m not going either. I don’t want to go. Absolutely not.”
“……”
The problem was Jung Hayan.
The closer the expedition date drew, the more absurd it became to hear her say she wasn’t going, making up one excuse after another.
On the first day the subject had come up, she’d immediately started moving in order to reach the stats and class change Kim Hyunsung had named.
She’d apparently thought that if she managed to advance her class or hit the stat requirements within the few days we had to prepare, she wouldn’t have to leave on the expedition at all.
Of course, even if Jung Hayan had reached the target values, the expedition itself was already a done deal, but I’m sure she had planned to use that as leverage to bargain her way out of it.
As if that would work.
Even legendary-tier talent couldn’t produce visible results in that short a time.
Her stats had risen explosively in a very brief period, which was shocking enough on its own, but she still hadn’t reached the target.
In the end, Jung Hayan became terribly unstable, and her condition was so similar to the stages a terminal patient went through before accepting death that it was almost uncanny.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
It didn’t take long for the first stage to appear.
She began by denying the fact that we would be separated for a month.
There’s no way that could really happen. It must be a joke. Something like that.
She acted as though she couldn’t even imagine the separation at all.
She watched Park Deokgu and Sun Heeyoung packing their bags as if they were strangers, and behaved as though that meeting of ours had never happened in the first place.
But as time passed and the expedition date drew nearer, she began to face reality.
That was when the next stage arrived: anger.
……
She started hating Kim Hyunsung for suddenly making the expedition schedule.
If I had to call it lucky, then sure, maybe it was a lucky thing, but she didn’t seem to harbor any actual killing intent.
She still seemed to understand that they were comrades who had shared life and death.
She spent more and more time shouting alone in her room, and she really did grow quite irritable.
She also didn’t forget to direct her anger toward Kim Yeri, who was the weakest among us aside from me.
It was her way of searching for a reason for this expedition.
She seemed to think this was some kind of homework she had to solve because we were short on little bow-wielding archers, but she never directly snapped at Kim Yeri or shouted at her.
Jung Hayan had her purity, after all.
Instead, if you could call it that, she’d go around hurling idiot, moron, or other similarly cute curses at empty space.
According to Park Deokgu’s official report, she’d once gone up to him and bad-mouthed Kim Yeri behind her back.
Considering Jung Hayan’s personality, it was behavior that didn’t fit her at all.
Once she entered the next stage, she started talking a lot.
Bargaining?
As if she had possessed me, she began proposing all kinds of conditions.
I can really work hard. I can raise my stats more if I stay here instead of going on the expedition, and I can work even harder. So please. Please, just—hngh.
Or:
Then how about we go together for just a week? That would be more effective.
Or:
It seems like the best way is for Oppa to leave too, but keep watch like Kim Hyunsung does.
She started spilling out lines like those.
The goals and numbers she named were so specific that it made me wonder, at least for a moment, whether it might actually be more effective for her to stay here.
When she even laid out a statistical analysis of the difference in her stat growth between hunting outside and staying here, I honestly couldn’t help but click my tongue.
Of course, I knew she’d also been presenting Kim Hyunsung with all sorts of conditions.
Same with Park Deokgu and Sun Heeyoung.
She kept making a bizarre case that we should formally lodge a protest, and in the end, that very sort of agitation was what pushed Park Deokgu to make up his mind.
It was only a guess, but I also began to suspect that Park Deokgu had already been entering the bargaining stage himself.
He had actually come to see me once.
He’d looked at Jung Hayan and then reflected on himself.
What was hardest, though, was the next stage: depression.
Depression…
She started losing weight noticeably, and there were many nights when she stayed awake crying.
She seemed to become aware of her own condition too, and kept saying she was sick, that she couldn’t go, to the point where she really did seem like a severe depression patient.
She spent a lot of time staring blankly at the sky.
I really hate this. I really do…
Her muttered repetitions also grew shorter and shorter.
It wasn’t just Jung Hayan who had a hard time then. I did too.
I ended up spending more time soothing and comforting her.
Of course, I tried calming her by bringing up rewards, or by promising to pay out all the rewards she’d accumulated and delayed at once, but the fact that we’d have to be apart for more than a month seemed to have shocked her enough to wash away all that happiness.
Jung Hayan did enjoy being comforted by me, naturally, but in the end the sadness only grew stronger.
The sweeter the time they had together, the more frightening the time apart became.
In the end, the fourth stage was completed with tears spilling down her face even while we were touching.
The biggest problem was that the final stage—acceptance—was never properly reached.
I had watched her go through the previous four stages with my own eyes, so I thought the end would naturally be acceptance, but unfortunately Jung Hayan did not become resigned to the separation.
More accurate to call it forced acceptance.
She denied reality to the very end and didn’t even want to believe it the day before we left.
She cried and wailed, but of course that had no effect whatsoever.
Still, it was a decision made by the party, and a decision I had made myself.
From Jung Hayan’s perspective, she had no choice but to comply.
In short, I’d spent a month preparing for our separation through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and forced acceptance.
If someone had said we wouldn’t see each other for a year—or for the rest of our lives—it was hard to imagine what kind of shock that would have caused.
Separate from the fact that meeting me had twisted her into something strange, she simply wasn’t used to parting from people.
I suspected that the long period she’d spent living alone after being abandoned by her sisters and family had played a large part in shaping that personality.
In any case, despite Jung Hayan’s condition, time kept flowing, and the expedition date kept drawing closer.
Honestly, there was no way the preparation had gone well.
Jung Hayan looked like she was barely keeping herself together, and though I didn’t understand it, Park Deokgu seemed a little off too.
As for Sun Heeyoung, she seemed calm enough, thinking only about what would come after, but she was also carrying a bit of stress from having been unable to go do volunteer work for a while.
To be honest, I had no idea what Kim Yeri was thinking.
Watching the rest of the party prepare for the expedition was honestly exhausting.
Of course, it wasn’t because I was worried about being abandoned.
It was because I found myself thinking, Was it always this much of a disaster?
Sure, there were some oddballs like Park Deokgu and Jung Hayan, and Sun Heeyoung wasn’t used to expeditions either.
And since even the kid had been dragged into this, I’d expected preparation to be lacking, but I never imagined it would be this bad.
As I’d already said, once Kim Hyunsung also dropped his hand from the process, everyone ended up lost, not knowing what they were supposed to do.
It wasn’t unreasonable for me to be worried.
“Are you really going to leave like this?”
“Yes. It’s right for me not to help with anything. Our party members are very used to being given orders. You probably feel that yourself too, Kiyoung.”
“Yes…”
“You’ll realize some things during the expedition.”
“……”
“What it means is that until now, you’ve all been going on expeditions from a psychologically comfortable position. Of course, it’ll be even more pronounced while hunting, but… there’s no doubt that Deokgu and Heeyoung’s growth rates are high. Hayan goes without saying, but honestly, I can’t say everyone is without problems. Of course, if you and I go together, there won’t be any accidents, but if we assume neither of us is there…”
That would be the situation we were facing now.
I could understand what Kim Hyunsung was saying.
It wasn’t just a matter of hunting and the like. He was clearly thinking that there were problems with the party’s command structure itself.
The party had Kim Hyunsung as the leader and me as the backup plan, but nothing beyond that.
Whether it was Sun Heeyoung, Jung Hayan, or Park Deokgu, if even one of them stepped up and started finding a direction for the expedition, the preparation process would naturally become much easier.
And yet there was no one finding the right questions, let alone the answers.
This should work, right?
This should be enough, right?
Without a doubt, they were thinking too casually. To put it more simply, it was no exaggeration to say this expedition was as much about training as it was about finding the party’s backup options within the group.
Will this actually work?
Honestly, I was a little skeptical.
Given how they looked right now, I couldn’t help feeling that way.
For a month-long expedition, the supplies were pitifully lacking, and it looked like none of the equipment or tools each person needed had been properly packed.
To exaggerate only a little, it felt like a group of children were preparing for a trip on their own.
The only things Kim Yeri had packed were arrows and her bow.
As for Jung Hayan, either she didn’t understand at all what it meant to go far away, or she was too busy packing objects filled with memories of me to care about anything else.
This is…
To be blunt, there was no other way to describe this but utter train wreck.
If all the guilds and organizations that had invested in our party saw them like this, they’d probably be scrambling to pull their money out immediately.
“Even so… you should at least prepare the basics…”
“We’ve already handled the truly basic things. At the very least, there are the things Deokgu and Heeyoung prepared. I’m just as uneasy as you are, but this is the right way to do it. There’s a clear difference between what people feel in their bones and what they don’t.”
“I see.”
“Then let’s depart.”
“Yes…”
When I stepped outside with Kim Hyunsung, the party members waiting for us came into view.
They were carrying bags that looked fairly large, but I already knew all of them were packed with useless junk.
Just looking at Park Deokgu, who clearly thought everything had been prepared perfectly, made me want to sigh.
Whether they understood my frustration or not, they each started talking to me one by one.
“Don’t worry too much, hyung. It won’t even take a month, I’m tellin’ ya!”
There was more than enough possibility that it would take longer than a month.
“Please take care of things while I’m gone, Kiyoung. I’m worried that I won’t be able to go do volunteer work…”
I found myself thinking that before a month had even passed, she might end up needing volunteer work herself.
“Oppa… Oppaah…”
Seeing Jung Hayan clinging to me with tears welling up in her eyes, I was almost past the point of feeling my heart twist at all.
“P-please take care of yourself while you’re away. A-and also…”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, Hayan.”
You should be the ones worrying more.
She looked like she was more afraid that I might meet someone else while she was gone than anything else, but for now the pain of separation was clearly greater.
Kim Hyunsung’s voice telling us it was time to leave reached me, and I gently pushed Jung Hayan back a little, but she had absolutely no intention of letting go.
She hung on with all her strength.
In the end, I managed to peel her off, but seeing her face smeared with tears and snot wasn’t easy.
“Then I’ll be back.”
“Don’t worry, all right?”
A road of penance.
This expedition wasn’t a bus trip with Kim Hyunsung.
I could say with certainty that it would be a road of penance more painful than any path a monk had ever walked.
Maybe it’s lucky I’m not going with them.
That was half sincere.