The All-Master (1)
“Th-that is, please don't just barge into live lectures like that….”
“How is that barging in? I just took a wrong turn, that's all.”
Korea Hunter Academy, the Headmaster's office.
I'd been hauled here and effectively placed under arrest, having had my campus free-roam privileges revoked after exactly fifteen minutes.
Apparently, the charge was disturbing students during class.
“And what on earth was that practical, may I ask? Beating your classmates half to death is a practical exercise now? That was nothing but a dogfight.”
Whatever way you looked at what I'd just witnessed, it didn't even qualify for the first letter of the word 'education'.
One strong student hunting down and tormenting a pack of weaker ones.
That was nothing more than one-sided assault, plain thuggery.
“Ahem! In any case, if you continue like this, we will have no choice but to forbid your visits entirely.”
“Ahh~ Yes, yes. Understood.”
Only after promising never to stick my nose into another lecture was I finally released from the headmaster's office.
“Jeez, what a bunch of squares.”
Well, the only reason things ended this lightly was because I was a Cheonseong heir.
The Academy had received no small amount of funding from Cheonseong when it was first built, after all.
One of the buildings in the practical training complex was even named 'Cheonseong Hall'.
I only went because I thought I'd take a look while I was at the Academy anyway.
And the moment I got there, the kids just happened to be fighting.
So I was quietly watching from the sidelines when—
[B-Class]
[Shin Min-woo]
The name printed on that name tag made me move before I could think.
Of all the times to catch a glimpse of that.
“Ah…!”
Stepping out of the headmaster's office into the corridor, I spotted a familiar-looking boy running toward me.
“Hunter, sir!”
Hair with a slight natural curl to it.
A face that screamed 'utterly ordinary' no matter how you looked at it.
“So you really were here!”
“And you are?”
“Ah! I'm Shin Min-woo. The one you saved earlier, that is… d-do you not remember?”
Shin Min-woo scratched his neck, looking sheepish.
No, how could I possibly forget?
You were the entire reason I carved time out of my schedule to come to this Academy.
“I remember. I just saw you. How could I forget?”
“Wow…! It's an honor, Hunter Lee Tae-hyun, sir!”
“…Aren't you mistaken?”
“…? How could I be?”
Shin Min-woo pulled out his phone and started playing a string of articles and videos.
“You're the hottest topic of the moment!”
Well, fair enough. I had been carving my way through every corner of the industry lately.
I still hadn't dropped out of the top search rankings.
[Regarding Lee Tae-hyun's unprecedented growth trajectory, experts say……]
[I'm taking this one with me! KWAHAHAHAHA!]
[Additionally, with eyewitness reports that he has been staying at the Goryeo Hotel alongside Baek Seo-ha, the 'White Dragon' and one of the next generation's top prospects, some are arguing strongly that Lee Tae-hyun has yet to shed his scoundrel tendencies.]
And what on earth was that supposed to be?
“Turn that off. Now.”
“Sorry? Ah, yes sir!”
Whoever they were, that bastard who uploaded that video was getting absolutely destroyed. Guaranteed.
“Anyway! I've been waiting here because I wanted to thank you properly for saving me!”
“…Until lunch break was completely over?”
“Thanking my benefactor matters a lot more than some lousy lunch!”
The instant those words left his mouth—
Shin Min-woo's stomach let out a monstrous growl.
“…….”
“…….”
What was I supposed to do with this.
“Th-thank you so much! You even bought me a meal!”
“It's just the cafeteria, don't make a big deal of it.”
It was only the school cafeteria, sure — but this was the Hunter Academy, so the food came out surprisingly upscale.
“Digging in!”
Must have been starving, because Shin Min-woo demolished his meal in one go.
I picked lazily at my own food, combing through my memories from before the regression.
The All-Master.
There had once been a hunter called by that title.
Exactly what it said on the tin — a hexagonal, all-purpose hunter who handled every category of skill at a masterful level, without exception.
Magic, if it was magic. Assassination, if it was assassination. Healing, if it was healing.
In an industry where hunters struggled to reach even mid-tier proficiency in a single specialty, the emergence of someone like that had been a whole new world.
Some critics said he could do everything, but mastered nothing — that he'd reached first-rate in no single field.
That was completely wrong.
Having a force on the battlefield ready for every possible situation was worth a thousand cavalry and ten thousand foot soldiers.
And that future All-Master was—
“Delicious!”
—that guy right there, gobbling down rice with sauce smeared all over his mouth.
All-Master, Shin Min-woo.
A monster who would one day, as a B-rank, claw his way to #3 in the hunter rankings.
The last I remembered of him was his entry into a major British guild.
He'd still been alive at least up to the Babylon Gate, as far as I could tell…
Given there was no word of him by the time of the Iron Blood Monarch…
He'd probably died sometime before then.
“All done!”
With the meal finished, we headed out to the Academy's open courtyard.
“That was genuinely delicious. Best thing I've eaten in ages!”
“…Is that so.”
Shin Min-woo's personality was a little different from the one I remembered, too.
Before the regression, the #3-ranked All-Master had been so quiet he was practically the dictionary definition of taciturn.
He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions escape was impossible—
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
That was the entire extent of it — nothing but clipped one-word answers.
But the Shin Min-woo of now—
“Anyway, you seriously saved my life back there. If you hadn't shown up, I might've gotten marked and beaten black and blue. Last time, one of them took out a kid's eye just because he didn't like the way he was looking at him.”
—talked a lot.
Excessively so.
I can literally feel my ears bleeding.
If I listened any longer I was going to slip into a coma, so I cut him off at the waist.
“Doesn't it make you furious?”
“Sorry?”
“Those S-Class bastards and whatever the hell it is they think they're doing.”
“Ah…….”
A single storm cloud rolled over his perpetually sunshiny face.
“What those bastards did went far beyond the line.”
Even if everything was technically treatable.
Inflicting needless suffering and toying with people like that was unjustifiable.
Physical wounds could heal — but mental anguish didn't mend so easily.
“I think so too. Honestly, I'm sure everyone thinks so.”
The S-Class's over-the-line behavior.
There couldn't have been a single student who'd never felt a flicker of resentment over it.
But.
“Somehow or other, those students always end up justified.”
They were, after all, hunter candidates of S-rank caliber.
A status so precious that a mere B-class couldn't even dream of comparing.
And they're clever enough to only pull this garbage during practical lectures.
Even if the incidents were dragged into public discourse—
Given the nature of a profession where you literally rolled your body through danger, anything that ended at 'minor injuries' had a high chance of being quietly written off.
Worse, the accusers would just get scoffed at — oh look, they're trying to drag down the next generation's prospects over some petty grudge.
“So I'm going to protest the fair and honest way.”
“Fair and honest?”
“Yes. By getting strong enough to stand against those students and beat them.”
Shin Min-woo's eyes sparkled like a child's dreaming of the future.
“I want to prove that it isn't only jewels that are beautiful. That sometimes, the pebbles scattered on the ground can outshine every gem there is!”
That was quite the grand ambition he was nursing.
A B-class toppling the S-Class.
The kind of statement that would earn a snort from anyone who heard it.
“Good.”
—if not for the fact that I'd once been an F-rank.
“Min-woo. Want to make a deal with your friendly neighborhood senior here?”
“A deal?”
“That's right, a deal.”
I put on the most trust-inspiring, dependable expression I could manage.
“Within the next week. I'll make you strong enough to beat those S-Class students.”
“O-one week?!”
“And purely with your own strength. No me swooping in to interfere like today.”
Shin Min-woo mulled it over with genuine seriousness, then fired a question right back.
“You did clearly call it a deal, after all. So then… what is it that you want from me?”
“Ahh… well, nothing much, really.”
This time I put on the most casual, nonchalant expression I could fake.
“I'm planning to build a guild. All you have to do is join it.”
“If it's just joining a guild, that's really no big deal at all…?”
Damn it.
Why did he have to have a nose for exactly this kind of thing?
“Whoa there, kid, you're about to say something very dangerous. Back in the day, sure, lifetime contracts with a single guild were the norm — but that's not how it works anymore. These days you hop from guild to guild, build up your résumé, and drive up your market value. Plus, a founding membership in a brand-new guild on your record projects this whole fearless-challenger image. And if it takes off and becomes a top-tier guild? You'd get your incentive package plus one very shiny original-member seat, and also—”
“Uuuum… i-is that so…?”
“That's exactly how it is. Just trust your senior here. What family do you think I come from?”
“Ch… Cheonseong!”
“That's how Cheonseong climbed all the way to the top, too.”
“Really?!”
I could feel the fish taking the bait all the way through my fingertips.
This one was a monster catch.
“Then… okay. Let's do it!”
“…Deal.”
Just wait, Seo-ha.
I'm bringing you the All-Master.
“Heehee~ I call dibs on this one!”
“Ugh… my golem was slower than I thought, I barely caught any….”
Ah Seo-ah stuffed a fistful of cookies into her mouth, cheeks bulging.
“How's it going, Sung-chan? Is the cake any good?”
“…Huh? Ah, yeah.”
“Hm? What's wrong? Are you feeling sick?”
The two girls studied Park Sung-chan's expression with concern.
He looked oddly drained compared to his usual self.
“Hey, you two. Do you know a guy who looks like this?”
Park Sung-chan told them about the man he'd seen during today's hunt.
A fierce-looking hunter who'd appeared out of nowhere and gotten in his way.
“Isn't that… Lee Tae-hyun?”
“Lee Tae-hyun?”
“Goodness, Sung-chan. You seriously don't know who Lee Tae-hyun is?”
“I told you, I don't care about that kind of stuff.”
Park Sung-chan's personality, put kindly, was restrained — put unkindly, it was indifferent and self-absorbed.
Anything that didn't enter his sphere of interest he thoroughly ignored and promptly forgot.
Even within the Academy, only Ah Seo-ah and Yoo Ji-an had bothered to remember his name.
“He's been all over the news lately. Something about Cheonseong's scoundrel undergoing a metamorphosis, or whatever.”
Ah Seo-ah gave him a brief, condensed rundown of the whole saga.
And Park Sung-chan's reaction after hearing all of it?
“That's it? Doesn't sound like anything special.”
Disappointment.
The records that guy had set? He was confident he'd rewrite every one of them the moment he entered the hunter industry himself.
Naturally — he was a genius who wielded a sword better than anyone alive.
“I really don't get why people are making such a fuss over that.”
The very reason he hadn't joined the famous Cheongnyong Sword Sect was his pride in the belief that, on the axis of pure talent, he surpassed even Seong Yong-ho himself.
“Pfft! Our country really is a strange one, isn't it?”
“It's true. At this rate, the moment Sung-chan becomes a hunter, there'll be an exclusive headline about him every single day.”
Yoo Ji-an covered her mouth, laughing.
“……”
And yet Park Sung-chan's face remained frozen stiff.
His wrist, seized by that man during the hunt.
Throb. Throb.
The spot still ached dully even now.
Despite all the time that had passed, an unpleasant foreign sensation kept pressing down on his wrist.
“…Infuriating.”
Blocking my fist was one thing.
Keeping itself annoyingly stuck in my mind like this was another.
Just some hunter who happened to be passing by, huh?
Park Sung-chan despised exactly this type of human.
Bastards who weren't even strong, yet stuck their chins up so defiantly.
They grated on him like thorns sprouting from a mouth — unbearable.
“I've decided.”
Exhaling a small breath, he added one more item to his to-do list.
“I'll crush him. This Lee Tae-hyun.”
“Oh? Approved!”
“Fufu. If you two are for it, then so am I.”
And so—
a peculiar line of confrontation was drawn between the two groups.