The Classroom's Bermuda Triangle
Hobnobbing with brats so much younger than myself could only ever end in tedium.
"Mm-hmm."
Bonjwa — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
Sure, my outward appearance was this sorry, pitiful state, and perhaps because coming home had loosened my grip on myself, I had lately displayed a rather unseemly amount of disgraceful conduct.
But no matter how you cut it, with seventeen-year-olds fresh into high school, my years lived, my generation — even the very world we'd known — were all different.
Just because I'd become a high school girl did not mean I harbored any notion of making friends and restarting my youth like a genuine high school girl.
There did exist the concept of mangnyeonjigyo — friendship across the years — companions who cast aside the gap in age to grow close without reserve.
And even granting that Murim was a place where kindred spirits might share cups of wine and swear brotherhood in a single day,
in truth, genuine friends across the years were a truly rare sight indeed.
And above all — could Bonjwa possibly become true friends with such minors...?!
Before coming to this place I couldn't even tell was an Academy or a high school, I had certainly thought as much, fully intending to keep my distance.
"U-um, excuse me..."
Someone reached out a hesitant hand, but—
Flinch!
"Ah — should we go to the bathroom?"
"Yeah, let's!"
Whoosh. Swish.
In the blink of an eye, my classmates whipped their heads around and vanished beyond the door. Their head-turns were so swift that beautiful afterimages seemed to bloom in their wake — far from calling out the names on their tags, I never even got the chance to read them before they disappeared with that superhuman, Awakener-grade speed.
As expected of an Awakener Academy.
It was a display of blinding footwork that no ordinary person, staring with both eyes wide open, could ever hope to follow....
"........."
No — look. I had fully intended, like a mature adult, to keep a little emotional distance from the little ones.
Bonjwa was the one planning to keep the distance — not to have distance kept from me like this...!
They had averted their eyes even back when Bonjwa was in the clutches of the Namgung Clan's assassin.
How could it be that not one single soul — not one brave hero anywhere in creation — would take the hand Bonjwa had extended after long anguish, pleading for aid...?
Where had all the chivalrous heroes of the gangho gone who should have upheld its ways? Since when had all under heaven become a demonic realm where only the Evil Sects remained?!
"...Huh?"
No — come to think of it, a world under demonic rule is a splendid thing, so strike that. It's quite the opposite.
Before my first day as a transfer student had even ended, there was a separate culprit behind my being given a wide berth by the rest of the class.
Awakeners or not, students were evidently still just students.
The moment they stood before that brilliantly gleaming bleached-blond head of hair, everyone crumpled like wet paper.
And that culprit already held the classroom Bonjwa was to attend in total, absolute dominion...!
"Hey. Where you going?"
"Eeek...!!!"
A voice from behind me.
I barely managed to still a body that very nearly shrieked aloud and spun into a midair somersault from the shock.
In this cruel reality where the Evil Sects had perished and only the Orthodox Sects reigned supreme, Bonjwa could not contain my bitter lament.
"Hey. I said, where are you going?"
The bleached-haired girl grinned, lazily running her tongue along her upper lip.
The hunting hound dispatched by the Namgung Clan — no, the hunting cat... Namgung Yurin...!!!
No matter which way Bonjwa moved, this running dog of the Namgung Clan glued herself to my shadow as though conducting close-range surveillance — enough to make me suspect the Namgung Clan had truly been resurrected in this modern age...!
Bonjwa — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin.
Mine was a situation where, until that fool of a middle-school-dropout sister Se-ah found a solution, I had no choice but to live as a high school girl.
Not friends, perhaps — but having someone to keep reasonably close company with wasn't anything worth refusing. Except when that someone was a lowly henchman of the vile Namgung Clan who had led the charge in scheming against Bonjwa. Then it was another matter entirely.
Therefore.
With this brain of mine — the very one that had so astonished Ma-noe, finest strategist of Blood Heaven Castle, that he wept floods of admiring tears — I calculated the perfect excuse to pry Namgung Yurin off of me...!
Glaring into those catlike eyes, I declared with iron resolve:
"I-I'm... g-going to the bathroom!"
Just now —
the perfect excuse, engineered with inspiration harvested from the very students who had abandoned me moments ago.
Namgung Yurin might be a bleached-haired delinquent whom no one dared meet the eyes, but men and women must keep their distance, as the sages decreed.
For as long as the Master Confucius's teachings shone resplendent upon this land, common sense, ethics, and the wall of the bathroom were barriers that could never, ever be crossed—
"The bathroom? Aww, you wanted to go to the bathroom? Then we can just go together."
"......Eh?"
Ah. Right.
I was a girl now, wasn't I.
Bonjwa gazed up at the classroom ceiling with eyes gone doleful and damp — and Namgung Yurin's hand reached out.
Glomp!
For the eighth time now, her arm rose toward my head as though to sling it around my shoulders in a comrade's embrace — and the difference in our height turned it into something absurd, more like a friend playfully hooking me into a headlock.
And then — squish.
".......!!!"
Something — something firm and solid, and yet so impossibly soft against the skin — thigh-flesh, of all things, had pressed against Bonjwa's cheek...!
My voice wobbled on the verge of tears.
"──G-G-G-GAAAL...!!!"
"Wh-what?"
"I-I don't wanna go anymore...!"
"The heck...."
Having shaken off Namgung Yurin's hand and slid away in retreat, Bonjwa clasped my hands atop the desk, buried my head in them, and sank into the deepest agony of my life.
Why had the students who'd shown interest at first taken to avoiding me from day one of the transfer?
Strictly speaking, the culprit was not Namgung Yurin alone....
I stole a glance to my side, and the girl who had been staring blankly at the blackboard turned her head, blinking those lake-blue eyes.
"......?"
"N-nothing...."
My fellow transfer student — Bukgung Seol.
A girl presumed to be a Demonic Arts Awakener.
Well, setting that aside —
Skin pale and translucent as white jade, a standoffish, frosty air wrapped around an undeniably cute face. She had every feature that should have drawn any student's interest. And yet —
The skin beneath her eyes was stained deep blue with dried tears, as if she'd turned into some baby panda, and her nostrils were plugged tight with wadded-up balls of tissue against the nosebleed from her fall.
There had also been the moment her demonic-arts aura flared and crushed everything around her for an instant.
She had toppled over and burst into loud, snotty sobs on her very first day of transfer — and when you stacked her four-dimensionally bizarre self-introduction on top of all that, avoidance was the only possible outcome.
Namgung Yurin in the seat to my right. Bukgung Seol in the seat to my left.
Right: Namgung. Left: Bukgung.
On the left, Bukgung, eyes brimming with fresh tears as she fought to dam a nosebleed that had started flowing again. On the right, Namgung, who for some reason could not tear her gaze from that girl — a delinquent down to her very bones, in anyone's book.
And — judging things coldly — myself as well: the one who, unable even to finish a proper self-introduction, had suffered nothing but humiliation in the form of applause and cheering.
Bonjwa — the Blood Demon, Cheon Yujin — thought:
"So we're the Three Hopeless Sisters, huh......?"
This was, quite literally, a Bermuda Triangle planted in the corner of the classroom.
A blank no-man's-land that no living soul dared approach...!!!
This would not do.
No matter what, I could not spend my school life being served up as a combo meal with these two Gungs — the humiliation was beyond bearing.
The instant I tried to squeeze out a breakthrough plan to escape this situation —
Riiiiing. The bell announcing the end of class tolled from the speaker mounted on the classroom ceiling.
And then —
As if she had been waiting for precisely that, Namgung Yurin's hand came to rest atop the crown of Bonjwa's head.
"Oh — already lunchtime? The cafeteria here's got tons of good stuff, y'know? Not just the meals — the desserts are pretty decent too. Worth eating."
"Eh. N-no, I-I'm, umm...."
"It's your first day today, so you dunno what's good in the cafeteria yet, right? 'Course you don't, right? I'll buy, so how about it? Hey — we're eating together, got it?"
Somehow Namgung Yurin's voice seemed to be speeding up, an edge of anxiety creeping in — but regardless.
A proper cafeteria... not school-provided lunches?
That, too, felt nothing like an ordinary high school, which was fascinating — and the very word "cafeteria," rather than those legendarily flavorless school lunches of the old days, set my mouth flooding with drool —
But however many humiliations Bonjwa had already suffered, losing all reason to the delicacies of this beloved modern era —
I had not fallen so far as to be beguiled by food offered up by a henchman of the filthy Namgung Clan...!!!
"......?"
What was this... a strange sense of déjà vu....
"Hey... Bukgung Seol, was it? You come too. I mean, I'll buy for the both of you."
"........."
Bukgung Seol, silent until now at Namgung Yurin's offer, parted her small lips and spoke in a tone of absolute frost.
"If they are not one I can trust as I trust Jjinhu, then... Khuff — SNIIFFF! Snrk — food given to me by others, I do not eat."
She was doing her level best to set a mood, voice cold as ice —
but noisily blowing her nose into the tissue stuffed against her nosebleed rather undermined the whole performance....
"My apologies to Jjinhu, who bade me eat meals here, but I must decline."
So what in the world is a Jjinhu....
Well. Whatever. As it happened, this worked out perfectly.
I had been racking my brain over how to refuse — but with things as they were, all I had to do was ride comfortably along on Bukgung Seol's rejection.
"Me too—"
"Really? I was even gonna buy you guys fried ice cream for dessert, though...."
Namgung Yurin murmured with theatrical disappointment, chin propped on her hands in proper delinquent fashion —
and my eyes met Bukgung Seol's at the exact same moment.
"──Mngham-ham-ham!"
"──Mmm-nom-nom-nom!"
Licking the crisp golden crust off the round little fried morsel speared on my fork, eyes brimming to the brim with tears at the very summit of rapture and bliss, I gave myself over entirely to the taste before me.
For some reason, bursts of light like camera flashes kept popping off beside me — but that was of no consequence whatsoever...!
The sweet perfume of melting ice cream flooding my mouth, married to that crackling, shattering fried shell — this combination was, quite literally, the Orthodox Sects and the Evil Sects joined as one Murim!
The unification of the world by force was over.
Two flavors that had seemed utterly incapable of blending had fused as one.
Today... the Orthodox and Evil Sects had cast aside generations of grudges and centuries-old enmity, and joined hands for the peace of all peoples under heaven...!!!
And so —
"Mngham, mmm...... haaam...."
"Mmm-nom-nom...... n-nom...?"
Swept away on waves of ecstasy, licking furiously at our fried treasures, my eyes met head-on with Bukgung Seol's — both her cheeks bulging out like a hamster hoarding feed.
"........."
"........."
A beat of silence — then, in perfect unison:
"Is this sorcery......?"
Anyway. That was how it went.
On the way home.
This time it was Se-ah — that fool of a middle-school-dropout sister — who had installed Bonjwa in the passenger seat, and she ventured the question offhandedly, in a voice leaking worry.
"Oppa, how was school?"
"School...."
With eyes gone dewy and moist, steeped in wistfulness, Bonjwa gazed out the window.
"....Gulp."
"Oppa?"
"School... was delicious...."
"O-Oppa?"
"N-no! That's — that's not it... it's... it was just normal! So normal... is this seriously an Awakener Academy...?"
"Looks like the classes really were as normal as your research said, huh."
I nodded at Se-ah's words.
Well, there had been... a few... assorted incidents along the way...!!!
But those were all slated to be hastily buried in the darkness of memory — and setting them entirely aside, today had genuinely felt like an ordinary day of high school life, right down to heading home.
"Still, for an Awakener Academy... is it really okay for it to be like this...?"
"Funny — that's exactly why I have something to show you, Oppa. Hold on a sec."
Her hands stayed steady on the wheel, driving in perfect ordinariness —
while, like a Murim master whose internal energy had reached its very zenith plucking an object from thin air, Se-ah's smartwatch began to be pressed and manipulated by some formless force, operating of its own accord.
Knowing exactly what Se-ah's awakened ability was, Bonjwa could only muse that she had found a remarkably distinctive way to put such a power to use.
"Minor Awakeners, see... setting aside the personality issues, a lot of them end up causing accidents because they're clumsy at controlling their abilities."
"Mm-hmm."
"But abilities come in such a wild variety... it's apparently hard to help with training through the standard curriculum alone."
A wry smile tugged at the corner of Se-ah's mouth as she went on.
"So they brought in veteran Awakeners matched to each ability — retired hunters, still-active hunters, Awakeners working in fields outside hunting altogether — and built a mentor-mentee system, from what I hear."
A mentor, was it.... The debut of a system that reeked of hassle was already starting to make my head ache.
"So what exactly did you want to show me...?"
If that was all she'd wanted to tell me, couldn't she have just said so in the car like a normal person?
At that, Se-ah beamed.
"I figured you'd be dying of curiosity later about who your mentor turned out to be, so I brought it along ahead of time. I did well, right? Gonna praise me?"
"R-right... a-amazing... really amazing...."
That fool of a middle-school dropout...!
After all that early caution, she'd now lost every last shred of hesitation about wielding power and wealth...!!!
"Here, look."
Se-ah's smartwatch cast up a hologram in a wash of blue light — and reading the text that floated within it, Bonjwa had to blink.
"....Eh?"
I turned the screen this way. That way. Upside down. Zoomed in. Zoomed out. Nothing changed.
Wondering for a moment whether I might be dreaming, Bonjwa even pinched my own cheek.
Mentee:Cheon Yujin, Bukgung Seol
That much was fine, but.
Below that —
"........."
No.
Surely... it couldn't be...?