The Uniform Ambush
The sheer absurdity of it had left me staring into the void for a good while, but having clawed back a sliver of my reason, I now had to face a reality shaped exactly like a single sheet of paper.
That one sheet of paper. A transfer notice.
Pale with disbelief, I could do nothing but bore holes into the document with my eyes.
"Th-this is strange...? Why is this seat's honored name here, of all places...?"
"Oppaaa...! Waaah... I'm sorryyy... I honestly never thought it would come to this...!!!"
Rustle, rustle. I flipped the papers over, held them upside down, even folded them this way and that, but no amount of glaring or rummaging would change a single word. The name Cheon Yujin written on that document, and the age of seventeen beneath it—both were, quite literally, a nightmare that refused to wake.
My little sister. Cheon Se-ah.
Seventeen was exactly how old Se-ah had been when I was flung into Murim—the very season the first Gate tore open. Which meant my sister had been forced to walk away from high school with nothing but a middle school diploma to her name...! This seat, by contrast, had dutifully attended high school for three whole years, and though I vanished during the Gate crisis, I remained a fine graduate in possession of both diploma and yearbook!
"Th-this makes no sense at all...!"
If anyone was being sent back to school, surely it should be Se-ah the middle-school-graduate dummy, not the brilliant this seat?! After my return I had suffered nightmares of being locked in a military prison as a deserter or dragged back into the ranks, and I'd even smirked at the thought that surely nothing of the sort could happen now that I was stuck in this worthless girl's body. Never once—not for a single second—had I imagined being hauled back to school...!!!
So I slumped against the wall like a scholar robbed of his cheese before his very eyes, and Se-ah spoke up, stammering.
"We-well... it took almost three or four years for the Gate crisis to settle down, and... in the meantime, everything from the resident registration system to compulsory education pretty much blew apart. S-so that's why I'm a middle school graduate too! Ahaha..."
Cheon Se-ah was forcing a cheerful laugh to thaw the mood. When I gave no answer and only stared with a sullen glare, her shoulders sagged even lower.
"So there's no law saying anyone has to attend school anymore.... I just registered your age as seventeen because it seemed about right..."
"......About right?"
"Ah—th-th-th-that is, I'm s-sorry...!!!"
Even the accounts I used online were things Se-ah had set up on my behalf, back when I couldn't adapt to modern civilization after so long away. How was I to know my official age had been registered as seventeen? Even if it couldn't be my original age, I'd assumed I would at least be on record as an adult. I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol or a single cigarette since my return, so I'd never even wondered why no one would issue me an ID...!
Grieving over the injustice, this seat glared at the papers once more. And then, suddenly—
"Not a school... an Academy...?"
The Awakener Academy. And beside the name, in small parenthesized print: (High School Division).
The words "High School Division" grated on me, but it definitely said Academy. The transfer notice and the age of seventeen had blinded me to everything else; I'd simply assumed I'd been made into a high school girl. But if this seat could call herself an Academy cadet rather than a high school girl, perhaps I might look a little less like a student...! Cadet, or academy trainee—didn't those titles at least leave room to pass for an adult...?!
However.
"Ahaha.... I did some digging the moment I saw the notice... and it's going to be pretty different from whatever Academy you're imagining, Oppa."
"...Huh?"
"The one you're picturing is probably a Hunter Academy—the kind the guilds jointly run as a private venture. Honestly, I thought it was that too, at first."
"Hunter Academy...? That's a different thing from this Academy...?"
"Did I ever mention it? The state manages awakeners, and the guilds manage hunters—since not every awakener aspires to be a hunter," Se-ah added with an awkward cough.
"Awakening doesn't care how old you are, and the rate of fatal accidents caused by underage awakeners climbed high enough at one point to become a national talking point. So they brought back compulsory education—but only for minor awakeners."
Control and education. I'd assumed public authority had been badly eroded by the existence of hunters, but judging by how Se-ah had kept her lines to the higher-ups in government open all this while, it seemed nothing as trivial as a Gate could crack the iron rice bowls of this nation's civil servants....
"Honestly, the name Academy was just picked to match Hunter Academy.... From what I hear, the curriculum sits somewhere in between a Hunter Academy and an ordinary high school."
"Teaching everything half-heartedly like that—isn't it just a high school after all...?"
"Hence the High School Division... ahaha.... There's an elementary division and a middle division too, but apparently this one is the main campus. Oh, and there's even an affiliated kindergarten."
"Hiiik...!"
If Se-ah had set my registered age even lower to match this appearance... did that mean I could have been dragged off to a place like that...? Weighed on a scale against "going back to the army," it carried enough heft to put me through agonizing deliberation....
No—setting that aside. Training for hunters effectively happened at Hunter Academies, meaning in the private sphere. Public education. The state-run Awakener Academy was, in practice, just a high school that happened to gather awakeners under one roof. What was this déjà vu? This feeling, as though the hometown I'd left behind when I was flung into Murim had somehow changed and yet not changed at all...!
"Oppa. So... going back to high school really is a bit much, right?"
"........."
At my flat glare, Se-ah's eyes slid away.
"It's still summer break! There's plenty of time before the transfer, so... I'll find a way somehow in the meantime!"
"A way...?"
"It's on the official record, so I can't do anything about the transfer itself... but after that, well! Grade-skipping, withdrawing, keeping your name on the roster and never showing up... I'll throw every ounce of power I have at fixing it...!!!"
In any case, with the eyes of the world upon us, I would have to at least go through the motions of transferring and attending. But public education, after all, has endless loopholes for anyone with money and power. With a 1st-Generation Hunter for a sister as my rock-solid backing—no, since the very culprit responsible had promised to handle it—only a trace of unease remained.
Time ticked steadily by. As summer waned, this seat began preparing for transfer into the Awakener Academy... and then met an ambush no one saw coming, left trembling between terror and fury...!
"Th-this is...!!!"
The Awakener Academy, reputed to sit somewhere between an academy and a high school. True to that reputation—
A school uniform. Not some academy dress uniform, but the plain, ordinary uniform of a high schooler. That dreadful ambusher, the uniform itself, had been lying in wait in secret, biding its time to pounce on this seat...!
"──Gal!!! If I... if I put this on... won't this seat truly become a high school girl...!"
Voice thick with sobs. This body of mine, wringing out theatrical tears in perfect sympathy with the injustice.
"The last time I wore one was ten years ago, too... I really do miss it..."
Beside the fitting room, Se-ah muttered this under her breath, sheepish, and looked away.
It had already been at least a few months since I'd begun living in this frail girl's body, and in truth I'd hardly registered the fact that I'd become a "woman" at all. Because this cursed body harbored a problem even more absurd than womanhood itself...!
Its physical features were flat as a board to begin with, and that magical phenomenon said to visit only women was, for whatever reason, absent as well. I'd been saddled with a body so hopelessly feeble that merely breathing and moving was a struggle, and if I let my guard down for even a moment, my mind got dragged along by the flesh's newborn instincts and turned to mush. No—in truth, the humiliations I had already suffered, my guard slipped, ending up ruled by this body, were beyond counting.
"Grrrrhhh..."
When would I ever have had the spare attention to fret over a changed sex...?! Besides, given this body's chronic inability to hold anyone's gaze, I'd far more often worn loose, face-concealing, unisex hoodies. In Murim, men and women alike wore their hair long and their robes longer, so I had never thought much of it.
But a school uniform. And a skirt. Unmistakably a woman's garment—no, the exclusive attire of a high school girl. To think that this one thing alone would finally make me feel my physical sex for the first time, months into living like this.
"Khh...!"
Letting out the same indignant groans once spat by the orthodox sect heroines I had taken prisoner, I gathered up the uniform with trembling hands and stepped into the fitting room. A short while later—
"O-Oppaaaa..."
The moment I emerged from the fitting room, Se-ah blinked and blinked, her voice gone hollow. This seat's face had flushed redder and hotter than these blood-crimson eyes.
"Ughk, ughhhk..."
Knowing nothing of girls' uniforms, I had simply left the choice to Se-ah. The short skirt swayed far too freely with every step, and the thin blouse beneath felt like it might turn sheer at any moment, so I had to huddle into my jacket, smothering every hint of a figure. Thank the heavens summer was ending and the summer uniform would not be required. Had it been any thinner than this, this seat would have simply hurled herself into a Gate and gone to live among the Ratmen...!
"U-um... Oppa..."
The instant Se-ah tried to continue, a clerk from the uniform shop who had been waiting nearby stepped forward.
"Waah! Your little sister is just too, too adorable! Once she starts school, honestly, ah! She's going to be so popular—!!!"
"......"
Silence. Stillness. Dead air. Se-ah averted her eyes. The clerk blinked and tilted her head. And this seat stared up at the heavens.
"──Squeak, squeak-squeak."
Perhaps I should simply have lived as the Blood Mouse after all.
Kim Jinhu, Guildmaster of Iron Blood. He had just witnessed, right before his eyes, what a living miracle was.
"Kkeeeugh...!!!"
Granted, she was letting out a shriek so strange it hurt to hear. But two steps taken—the sword demon stood upon the earth. With a grin so smug it begged for a flick on the head, the crimson-eyed girl threw both arms wide—ta-da!—and presented her achievement to Kim Jinhu.
Watching the girl pull off her first genuinely natural steps, Kim Jinhu felt his eyes mist over and gave a hearty standing ovation. Clap, clap, clap, clap.
"Did you see that, Jinhuu...!!!"
"Yeah, I saw it...!!!"
The girl's body was frail beyond belief, but her mind was another matter. Well—there were moments it regressed into an incomprehensible, infantile state, but... he had been looking after her for barely two months, and astonishingly, she was already comfortable enough with Korean to fumble through everyday conversation...!
"You may praise me further, Jinhuu."
"Yeah, no, that's a bit much."
"Jinhuu......?!"
She slammed her foot down. For all her tiny frame, a heavy shockwave rolled out and the floor heaved, and Kim Jinhu's face stiffened at the depth of power radiating from that "quake-step." As of late, that frail body which had seemed utterly beyond hope had begun toughening at a pace that kept accelerating. The only real problem was that perfect control of it was absurdly difficult; the crimson-eyed girl already possessed physical abilities on par with your average awakener.
The cause? I figured she wasn't an ordinary kid, but... Yes—it was unmistakably martial arts. And it was clearly different from the mana that Martial Arts Awakeners wielded. She trained, tempered herself, meditated, and grew stronger by the day. Worse, a sinister undercurrent of power he could only faintly sense kept knocking at his heart.
Something about it feels... ominous.
Kim Jinhu had no way of knowing it, but this was the power of magong—the demonic arts. They said martial arts were dangerous for her, with body and mind so badly out of balance, but magong was the art of the heretical path: learned precisely by those who had strayed from the norm, and honed until it drove its practitioner to the extreme. Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, having sensed that magong could never reach transcendence, had deliberately never learned it. But this sword demon neither knew nor suspected any of that, and so she simply grew at a blistering pace on the power of an art that pushed the balance of body and mind even further off-kilter. Hers was a precarious tightrope walk, with no telling when her demonic nature might run rampant and reach its end.
And the sword demon in that perilous state opened her mouth with the utmost gravity.
"Jinhuu... food now...!"
"Ah, yeah. Uh... right..."
Was it his imagination, or did he see a green dinosaur waggling its finger at that crimson-eyed girl? As Guildmaster of Iron Blood, Kim Jinhu had wealth, glory, and fame all in hand. Naturally, he had mobilized every method available—food delivery, hired housekeepers, the works—to care for the girl without exerting himself. But this kid was such a picky eater that unless the food came from his own hands, she wouldn't take more than a few spoonfuls...! Supposedly she suspected poison in anything not made by someone she trusted with her life—or something like that. But as the guildmaster of a major guild, busy every hour of every day, he couldn't personally cover her three meals. Fist clenched tight—
"Jinhuu......?"
Watching the girl grow stronger far faster than he had expected, he made up his mind. At the very least, he would send her somewhere that would take one meal a day off his hands...!