The Hell Called Distance
Namgung Yurin. Long legs, a tough-looking face, hair bleached a glaring yellow.
And thanks to the collection of piercings she wore as a hobby, she was often mistaken for a delinquent.
It wasn't as though she'd ever actually done anything delinquent. But her look didn't exactly scream diligent rule-follower either, so even she had come to accept that the label wasn't entirely wrong.
She didn't much care that her surname belonged to the rare sort. But anyone who heard her name and went, Who names their kid Yurin...?—well, her fists were more than sturdy enough to trample every last one of them, exactly as her name promised.
In any case, all the elements that made up Namgung Yurin had fused into a single whole—
Her life was still short, seventeen years of high school girl, but leaving aside the fog of infancy she could barely remember, she had never once in that life looked up at anyone, nor been looked down upon at a first meeting.
Her intimidating, cat-eyed delinquent look was one thing. Above all, though—from childhood to this very day, Namgung Yurin was tall. No, far too tall...!
Man or woman alike, the number of people who could meet Namgung Yurin's eyes head-on was vanishingly small. Her older sister—a hunter outstanding enough to be recruited by a major guild, and an Awakened of the physical-enhancement type—was Yurin's pride and joy, blessed with a physique far superior to ordinary people's. She was a fully fledged adult, too, separated from Yurin by a gap of several years. And yet even that sister, ever since Yurin passed the age of ten, had never once stood taller than she did...!
And Yurin was only seventeen, her growth period not even finished! If she kept getting taller, soon only a tiny handful of exceptionally tall men would be able to meet her gaze at all.
A suitably impressive height brought a sense of superiority, but a height this excessive had a way of giving you a complex instead of confidence. That complex was what drove Yurin to decorate herself ever more flashily, ever more threateningly.
And also—hidden behind the delinquent exterior: fancy goods of every description, jangling charms and key rings, and small-animal plushies filling her bed to overflowing. Their number and variety had long since passed "a bit extensive." They were so wildly at odds with her face and personality that even her one and only sister couldn't understand it and recoiled in disgust—and they were the reason Yurin was, just slightly, insanely deranged about anything small and cute.
And then. Namgung Yurin saw her.
"I-I'm... Cheon Yujin... P-please treat me w-well..."
Just how nervous could one person be? The trembling, tear-thick voice was pitiful to hear—and at the sight of that adorable little figure, Namgung Yurin's eyes flew wide open.
A tiny body quaking and shivering, barely hiding the tears welling at the corners of its eyes—small as the plush doll she hugged in bed every night.
I want to... to pet her... scoop her into my arms and comfort her...!
Suppressing the impulse that surged up unbidden—the very impulse that had made her sister recoil in disgust—she swallowed without meaning to, throat bobbing, and observed the girl with all the calm she could muster.
She's really... my age?
It was impossible to believe. That child was really seventeen, the same as her? Honestly, Yurin half suspected the kid had skipped a grade or something to wander up from the elementary division into the high school one.
The small frame—small enough to vanish into her arms if she spread them wide—looked tremendously soft to the touch. The faintly plump cheeks seemed like they'd puff up exactly like a hamster's if you handed her a single snack, and if she pinched and tugged at them with her fingertips, she was certain they'd stretch all springy and pillowy.
"O-ohhhh...!"
The girl, Namgung Yurin. Of all her fancy goods, her favorite was a hamster character who loved sunflower seeds; and among her many plushies, the ones she was most deranged about were the small-animal sort—just the right size to perch on a palm and roll around.
"Let's see now... right beside Yurin, then. Yurin, could you scoot over and make a little more room?"
Really? Next to me? Nobody ever wanted to sit beside me—that seat's been empty all along, but actually next to me?
Is this... is this even reality? She couldn't believe it, so she pinched her cheek for real—and very nearly screamed.
"Yes, Teacher."
Did I answer that properly? Did my voice come out weird from excitement? Her heart was pounding so hard, the tension rising so fast, that she'd given the homeroom teacher nothing but a curt, half-hearted reply.
Anxious as she was, the small-animal of a girl named Cheon Yujin kept her eyes on the floor as she walked over. And when she hopped up onto the chair like a hamster leaping into its wheel, Yurin's heart nearly stopped. Dress her in animal pajamas and pull a hood over her head, and she'd look exactly like a small animal built at human size.
And so—something flashed. Perhaps the classroom was a touch cold; the flushed girl flinched with a shiver, and the look in Namgung Yurin's eyes as she watched Cheon Yujin settle into the seat beside her could only gleam like a beast of prey...!
"Hey. Good to meetcha?"
She truly was glad.
"...Pfft. Cute enough to kill."
And she really had almost been killed—her heart had stopped dead from the cuteness.
"Hey, don't freak out. I'm not gonna eat you."
She really wasn't going to eat her. She was merely holding herself back from eating her.
"Take care of me from now on, yeah?"
The girl, Namgung Yurin. When the time came for her to start elementary school, a Gate disaster had forced her onto the refugee roads, and by the era of reconstruction, when she could finally enroll, she stood among her classmates like one proud, aloof cat towering over a field of prey. Her complex about her height and her delinquent face meant most of her communication flowed in only one direction, and with not a single acquaintance around—let alone a friend who might have pointed that out—she had lived a life where connecting with people was hard, in a slightly different sense than Cheon Yujin's current predicament.
I greeted her, said I was glad, told her to take care of me... and she's my seatmate... her answers were a little weird, but I got answers, so...
A happy smile.
So we're friends now?
And so, for the high school girl who had always, without a shred of self-awareness, built every relationship from the dominant side—a hell by the name of Distance was about to come crashing down on Cheon Yujin.
Class was far more ordinary than expected. Ordinary—far too ordinary.
Still, with a name like Awakened Academy, I'd let myself hope for a few of those events you always read about in novels... It was true that This Seat had entered by transfer rather than admission, but still. In the standard version, the instructor orders every new student to choose the weapon they'll carry until graduation, the protagonist grabs a gun and earns himself some laughter; then, under the pretext of "self-introductions," everyone is made to loose their awakened abilities against monsters, doubling as a basic assessment; and there, This Seat, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, gets sneered at for being pathetically small—before flattening the lot of them with my peerless, almighty Forged Blood Art, leaving the entire crowd aghast and applauding. Something like that...!
Yes... those... those utterly splendid and essential events.
Rumor had it the hunter academies really did have that sort of atmosphere. It was only the first day, so it was too early to pass judgment, but judging by class alone... this place was just an ordinary high school that happened to be full of Awakened...!
I'd had my suspicions ever since buying the required textbooks in advance, and watching them run a perfectly normal subject class like math settled it. A strange nostalgia washed over me, as if I'd returned to high school.
...?
Ah. Right. I really had gone back to high school. Just... back in a rather different sense than most.
Well, fine. Up to this point, things were remarkably close to a perfectly ordinary high school. Above all—after the transfer notice arrived, my little sister Se-ah had looked into the place, and according to what she found:
That, at least, was what she had said, plain as day.
Cheon Se-ah... that idiot middle-school dropout...!!!
Unlike its fantasy-novel exterior, the classes themselves were ordinary. But I could state with absolute certainty that the situation I was in right now was anything but...!!!
"U-um... n-no, never mind—"
"W-we welcome you...?"
"W-we're, um... in the same class... so... let's get along from here on."
"C-cheer up..."
Normally, when a transfer student arrives, curiosity drives classmates over to fire off a question or two. Granted, since This Seat had gone and displayed such a pitiful spectacle, I expected the friendly interest to be scarce. Friendly interest... well, if you stretched the definition, it was friendly interest. The kind, perhaps, that took a real act of courage to come by.
The young whelps who worked up that courage hovered awkwardly for a moment, managed nothing but sheepish greetings, and fled.
"D-don't... don't goooo..."
This Seat stared after them with desperate, pleading eyes, but not one of them could hold my gaze. Like the self-proclaimed heroes of the orthodox sects, forever bolting at the crucial, dangerous moment... they abandoned This Seat and ran...!
The culprit behind it all.
"Hey, what're you shivering for? The classroom really is cold, huh?"
"...N-no, it's nooot..."
"It was summer like two weeks ago, so they won't turn the heating on, and this is exactly what happens."
Half-sunk into her chair, long legs stretched out past the desk, upper body lowered as though reclining, her seated height shrunk to an extreme degree—the vile assassin of the great Namgung Clan had flung an arm around my shoulders and, pretending to share her warmth, pulled it tight, snug and firm, and was now winding the two of us up together in her baggy uniform jacket, cutting off This Seat's escape. No—my countercharge...!
On the surface, it might have passed for pure kindness. But who on earth, at a first meeting that ought to have been at least a little awkward, would have the nerve to lavish such excessive favor—the kind you'd only show to your own flesh and blood—on a total stranger...!!!
"There. Nice and warm now, right?"
With a slick grin, she twisted the corners of her mouth into something wicked, and Namgung Yurin's eyes—streaked with an odd gold, like a cat's pupils—narrowed into slits.
"Y-yeah..."
So the orthodox sects really were... the orthodox sects! Preparing even a "noble cause" that seemed to exist for others' benefit, thoroughly and down to the very last detail—that was the orthodox way, through and through...! No matter how clever the unorthodox path fancied itself, could it ever out-scheme the orthodox sects, who racked their brains without end to erect their hypocritical justifications...!!!
Even Ma-noe had never managed to win their war of public opinion. And as the greatest victim of the slander the orthodox press had ever spread, This Seat could only feel a wall that would never, ever be surmounted.
Of course, it was unthinkable that This Seat, the Blood Demon Cheon Yujin, would keep taking petty humiliations from a pack of young whelps. So I gathered my wits and, true to my unorthodox nature, moved to resolve this situation by any means necessary—but.
"...Why're you looking at me like that?"
Every time our eyes met, those grinning eyes. That peculiar smiling gaze, whose feelings I could neither discern nor comprehend—an expression This Seat had never once encountered in all my born days—kept crawling goosebumps across my skin and, for reasons I couldn't name, sapping the strength from my limbs...!
Just as I was agonizing over how to slip free of this wicked assassin of the Namgung Clan—
"Um, everyone? You've all heard that we have one more transfer student today, right?"
The homeroom teacher opened the door and came in.
"It seems there was... a bit of a mix-up in the staff office... and she ended up over in the elementary division. So she's... running a little late."
And then, through the open door—hurried footsteps—and in walked a girl who, to absolutely anyone with eyes, belonged in the elementary division.