Enrollment (2)
There was still a little time before the homeroom teacher arrived. I looked around the classroom, taking in the major characters from the novel.
Two of them, in particular, kept snagging my attention.
Yeon Hajin and Baek Woohyun.
Yeon Hajin was the protagonist of the novel Academy Battle Mage, and a transmigrator. The premise was that he had gorged himself on the game Baek Woohyun appeared in as a playable character until he was a complete veteran, climbed all the way to rank one, then got cocky about clearing every achievement and ended up kidnapped into the game itself.
An intelligent beauty with black hair and blue eyes. The cool-guy type of lead who went around thinking things like, Maybe it's because I'm an emotionless psychopath, but even watching the world end doesn't stir a thing in me.
In the novel's ending, he left the collapsing world behind, scooped up only the heroines, and returned to the peaceful Earth of the dimension he had lived in before transmigrating. What he felt as he abandoned that dying world was never described, so there was no way to know — but he was definitely not the romantic type who would choose to die with it.
As someone who was, for better or worse, a resident of this world, that ending was not exactly a welcome one.
I glared at the back of the cool transmigrator's head with a pointless, petty resentment, then shifted my gaze.
Another black-haired head, a shade similar to Yeon Hajin's. Baek Woohyun.
He was the protagonist of the game Yeon Hajin had played, and a regressor. Unlike Yeon Hajin, he was the edgy middle-school-syndrome psychopath type of lead who went around declaring things like, I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Which meant he was the one who destroyed this world.
The original villain organization, the Union Church, had slaughtered his entire family. Afterward, as a sacrificial offering to the Church, he had endured every kind of abuse, and he spent the rest of his life living for revenge. Deceived by the Church's schemes, he died — and when he regressed, he fell into darkness.
The Tower of Beginning, which had appeared in Seoul along with the first gate. That tower was a kind of Trojan-horse virus the Union Church had summoned to merge the outer dimensions with Earth. Having failed to stop the Church by conventional means, the regressor, on this run, simply chose to smash the Tower of Beginning to pieces.
The tower — a virus eroding the world — was an artifact packed full of fragments of other worlds. And that lunatic destroyed it. The fragments that burst free as the tower collapsed tore Earth apart, and the world was destroyed. That was the ending of Academy Battle Mage.
"……."
My memory of what I had felt reading that ending was hazy, but I could say this with confidence.
In my previous life, after reading that conclusion, I had almost certainly expended a certain amount of effort on the author's behalf.
Leaving a long, scathing comment, for example. Or posting a sincerely impassioned appeal on a community forum.
Maybe that was why I had been reincarnated into this world….
I glared at the back of the edgy psycho's head with even more resentment than I had for the cool-guy earlier — at the cause of the world's destruction, and quite possibly the root of every misfortune in my life.
And then….
"……!"
Whoosh—
As if he had felt my stare, Baek Woohyun whipped around with a sharp look, and I hastily averted my eyes from his red irises.
What the hell…?
Did regressors grow eyes on the backs of their heads or something?
I pointedly stared somewhere else, pretending nothing had happened — and then I felt a gaze from the blurry right edge of my unfocused vision.
Ah. So that was what it felt like…?
But I could sense a stare because it was in my field of view. How on earth had he felt me looking at the back of his head?
"……."
I forced myself to ignore the gaze pricking at my cheek, and by the time I had taken in the colorful array of heroines' hair as well, the door banged open and a woman strode into the classroom.
"Nice to meet you, brats."
With the homeroom teacher's entrance, Baek Woohyun's stare finally peeled away.
"Haa…."
Only then could I let out the breath I had been holding.
"Anyone here who doesn't know who I am?"
A husky voice slid into my ears just as I was reclaiming my mental composure. Jin Soyoung, the homeroom teacher of Class 1-A, was a fairly famous Awakener — the kind of person who had every right to throw out an arrogant question like that. At the very least, if you were a student enrolling at the Academy — no, if you were simply a citizen of South Korea — it was hard not to know her.
And, of course, as the cliché demanded, she was scheduled to die somewhere in the mid-to-late sections of the novel.
Though, given that Baek Woohyun would smash the tower and end the world, the only ones who survived all the way to the ending were Baek Woohyun's party — the ones who destroyed the tower — and Yeon Hajin's party, who fled to another dimension.
Ah, wait.
Come to think of it, had Baek Woohyun's party died too?
In the original, after Baek Woohyun destroyed the tower, the story only continued from the perspective of Yeon Hajin, who had already dimensional-hopped. So his final fate was never shown.
"Looks like you all know, but I'll introduce myself anyway. Jin Soyoung. A-class Awakener."
Clap, clap, clap—
Applause rang out through the classroom at an odd hour. The name Jin Soyoung carried that kind of weight.
"I'll be the homeroom teacher for you Class 1-A brats, and I'll also be the instructor in charge of combat techniques."
Back when Jin Soyoung had been active, her epithet had been the Weapon Master. She had earned the name through outstanding mastery of every kind of weapon art and combat technique, and in the original she had served as the mentor who handled the protagonists' power-ups.
"Anyone got questions?"
Normally someone would have raised a hand, but at that moment every student in the classroom was glancing around, hesitating to be the one. Jin Soyoung swept a look over the lot of them, snorted a laugh, and bellowed,
"No questions? Then class is over for today. Dismissed!"
A cheer erupted from the students.
"Waaaaah—!"
The entrance ceremony in the main auditorium had run from nine to eleven — roughly two hours.
And the current time was 11:23.
Even if they were Academy students who would one day be trained as warriors, for now they were still kids whose faces split into ear-to-ear grins at the prospect of a shortened class and an early trip home.
Yu Haneul, seventeen years old — or rather, sixteen, thanks to early admission.
I was at an age that entitled me to flop around in my room rejoicing over the blessing of a shortened class….
But my reluctant feet carried me toward the training grounds instead.
According to the novel, Yeon Hajin had transmigrated into this world a week before the entrance exam, and Baek Woohyun had regressed on the day of the exam itself. And the entrance exam had been more than two months ago.
Haa…. I should have face-planted into this world just two months earlier.
Those two had almost certainly spent the last two months gobbling up free opportunities, hidden pieces, and every other easy meal they could find, growing like weeds. For a pair of combat-types, that kind of growth was barely enough to keep pace with the original power balance — and I was a support-type who was already two months behind. I had no time to mess around.
Maybe because it was the first day, the training grounds were practically empty when I stepped inside and looked around. You could tell this was one of the world's five great academies — and the setting of the novel — at a glance. Weapon rental counters, private training rooms, group training halls, sparring arenas… every kind of facility you could want was ready and waiting.
After a brief gawk at the luxurious facilities that clearly had serious money poured into them, I headed for the weapon rental counter. I tapped my student ID, stepped inside, and found all manner of weapons lined up along the long walls of the room.
At the firearms corner, a variety of black guns were on display. They weren't conventional powder weapons, of course — they were a kind of magitech armament produced through magical engineering. Instead of gunpowder, they used the user's mana to load and fire. Far less recoil, no shell casings, quieter — you could even call them an upgrade over powder firearms. But their mana efficiency was nothing special, so they weren't exactly popular weapons.
Proof of that: the cold-weapons corner for swords and spears had at least a person or two, but the firearms section was gathering nothing but dust.
"Hmm…."
I looked over the displayed guns, then tagged a semi-automatic sniper rifle, an automatic rifle, and a handgun with my student ID to unlock them and stowed them in my inventory.
Mm. But I don't actually know how to handle firearms properly. Is this okay…?
With that somewhat belated worry, I found an empty private training room and stepped inside.
The interior was wider than I expected. The moment I entered, I operated the panel right in front of me.
Ranged Training Mode (Firearms) — Level 0
A message appeared on the screen, and targets materialized up ahead.
Following the holographic motion guide that floated up beside me, I awkwardly shouldered the handgun.
Then I poured in mana, pulled the trigger, and fired.
Bang—!
"Ugh—"
Being a magitech firearm, the recoil wasn't strong enough to hurt my wrist — but every time I pulled the trigger, the gun put on a free-spirited performance and wandered all over the place, missing the targets entirely.
On top of that, since I wasn't using a skill — just pumping mana in to fire — Amplification Shot didn't even trigger, so the destructive power was a little weak too.
"……."
After a moment of thought, I put the handgun back in my inventory and pulled out the automatic rifle. Once again I tried to follow the hologram into a clumsy shoulder position, but… thanks to a certain pair of obstacles on my chest, the stance was a little awkward.
I somehow finished shouldering it and this time loaded a lowest-tier healing skill into the gun. I felt mana draining out as a golden light began to coil around the weapon.
"Oh."
I was still savoring how cool it looked when I pulled the trigger — and a problem appeared.
Brrrrrt—
Never mind that the automatic rifle went berserk, spraying bullets everywhere. With each burst of fire, the skill activated in rapid succession, and my mana started getting sucked out in a rush.
"Eek!"
I yanked my finger off the trigger in a panic, but in that roughly one-second span, seventy percent of my total mana had vanished.
"……."
Without a single second of hesitation, I stuffed the automatic rifle back into my inventory and drew the semi-automatic sniper rifle.
Bang—!
Bang-bang—!
Going back and forth to the mana recovery facility as needed, I spent three solid hours doing nothing but shooting. In the end, I managed to scrape together at least the fundamentals of marksmanship. Satisfied with how much faster and more accurate my shouldering and aiming had become compared to the start, I left the private training room — and there were Yeon Hajin and Baek Woohyun, who had somehow shown up.
"Hmm…."
Come to think of it, one question still remained.
The amplification rate of the skill Amplification Shot.
Since my only skill was a healing skill, there had been no way to check its power in the training room.
A healing skill couldn't restore an inanimate target, so to measure its power I needed a living assistant. Someone who would take a wound for me so I could compare the recovery rate of a lowest-tier heal fired through Amplification Shot against a lowest-tier heal without it.
I looked back and forth between Yeon Hajin and Baek Woohyun, deliberating for a moment — and then a brilliant idea struck me. If I got the two of them to fight, I could gauge both of their combat strength and test Amplification Shot at the same time, couldn't I?
…Not bad.
Ha. What am I supposed to do with this genius of mine.
Even your brain is exceptional, Yu Haneul!
If you keep being this perfect, the only option left is to become a munchkin!
Having found the perfect answer, I beamed with a radiant smile and started walking toward the two of them.