Opening Day
What comes to mind when you hear the words start of term?
Whether student or staff, precious few people actually welcome the opening of a new school year.
Except, that is, for the two of us — father and daughter.
“Hmm-hmm….”
Up before dawn, I hummed under my breath as I fussed with my hair ahead of my first day on the job.
Damn. Whoever’s husband this is, he’s looking sharp.
I wasn’t the type to style my hair just because I was going somewhere. Still, a first meeting was a first meeting — a little effort felt warranted, so I’d deliberately gotten up earlier than usual.
After all, first impressions mattered most.
“Nakyeong! Breakfast!”
Fully ready, I set out a simple toast breakfast and called for her. Nakyeong usually handled mornings, but I was in such a good mood today that I’d made an exception and prepared it myself.
“Almost done!”
“It’s all set, so take your time — and hurry up.”
“Okaaay.”
While I set out a steaming cup of coffee for myself and juice for her, the sound of hurried footsteps finally announced Nakyeong’s arrival. She appeared in the kitchen, face bright with anticipation.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Come on — do I look okay today or not!”
“Ah.”
Catching her meaning a beat late, I stepped back and looked her over from head to toe.
Her black hair held thicker curls than usual, half-tied with a ribboned cord for a little flair. Beneath the Academy uniform, a mature figure peeked through, and her skirt looked conspicuously shorter than it should have. She’d even put real effort into her makeup — the face that was usually pure sweetness now carried a distinctly grown-up edge.
From top to bottom, it was obvious she’d gone all out.
“Hmm.”
“Well? Am I pretty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whaaat!?”
I pulled my gaze from her look of pure outrage and stuck the juice back in the fridge.
“Pretty or not, we’re buying you a new uniform. That shirt and skirt are way too small.”
There was no need to wear clothes that clung like that. It wasn’t as if we were broke.
“Tch. Everyone wears them like this these days, you know?”
“Then the trend’s wrong.”
We ate breakfast together and set out side by side. I’d dropped her off a few times before, but this was the first time we’d climbed into the car headed for the same destination.
“Hmm-hmm-hmm….”
Settling into the passenger seat, Nakyeong casually worked the car’s controls and connected her phone over Bluetooth. It was my car, and yet the only names in the paired list were hers and Choi Yeonjeong’s….
“Dad.”
“What.”
We pulled out of the parking garage and eased into traffic that was already starting to thicken. Nakyeong, phone in hand with music playing, tossed the words out as if they meant nothing.
“Don’t be too nice to the girls.”
“Out of nowhere?”
I glanced over, puzzled. She turned her head to meet mine, her expression uncommonly serious.
“Girls my age — if you’re even a little bit nice to them, they start thinking you actually like them.”
“What, are you worried the girls will fall for me?”
“Yes.”
“Come on. Who’s going to fall for a middle-aged guy like me.”
“What are you talking about. Where in the world is there a middle-aged guy who isn’t even thirty yet.”
“Fair point. I’m still in my prime, heh.”
It wasn’t entirely baseless fretting. The training sessions over break had hammered that exact point home.
Be careful not to form deep relationships with students… or something like that.
Especially since the session had been aimed at temporary teachers. To Academy students, explorers were objects of admiration — and high-ranking ones even more so. On top of that, not being a permanent faculty member meant relatively freer rein.
In short: the perfect position for forming an inappropriate relationship.
Is it really that serious?
Honestly, I thought it was needless worry. It wasn’t going to happen in the first place — and this wasn’t the Joseon Dynasty. If two people felt the same way, wasn’t that fine?
Not that I had any intention of chasing after some female student. Absolutely not.
“Anyway! You got it?”
“Got what?”
“Don’t get unnecessarily close with the girls.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll be careful.”
“Hss. Why does that answer sound so half-hearted?”
“…You’re imagining things.”
I really, truly meant it.
“See you later!”
“Yeah. See you later.”
After we arrived at the Academy and parted ways, father and daughter went our separate paths. Our majors were completely different, after all.
Thank god she inherited her mother’s talent.
Having taken after Kim Yubin — a genius mage — Nakyeong was currently enrolled in the Magic Department. As a little girl she’d shown real interest in the sword, but at some point her magical gift had blossomed instead.
Back when I’d delayed my return and torn through the other world alone trying to bring my dead wife back, the day Nakyeong started floating around the house by herself had nearly given me a heart attack. I’d even felt a quiet pang of disappointment that her talent had turned out to be magic. Teaching my daughter the sword had been a private dream of mine.
Well — none of that mattered now. Different majors were probably for the best. At least we wouldn’t run into each other during swordsmanship class.
“Hello.”
I made my way to the department office and exchanged greetings with the Academy’s swordsmanship faculty.
“Ah! Dohyeon!”
“You’re early.”
Having already gotten to know their faces during training, they welcomed me warmly.
“Nervous? First class and all.”
“Oh, terribly. Feels worse than the first time I ever picked up a sword.”
“Right, right. Everyone’s like that at first.”
“I took a calming pill before my first class, you know.”
I’d noticed it before, but the swordsmanship faculty had a distinctly close-knit feel. Maybe sword-swingers just understood each other. For someone who’d swung a blade alone for so long, the atmosphere was more than welcome.
Someday, maybe even Cheon Seo-hui and I…
And so Academy work began in earnest. The very first thing I had to do was get familiar with the system.
This system is excellent.
As the best-equipped institution in the country, the Academy ran its own cutting-edge computer network. With a single phone, you could pull up nearly any information on campus — a student’s personal records, for instance.
Cheon Seo-hui…. Born in Seoul….
The moment I received my account, I looked up the information on Cheon Seo-hui that I’d been holding onto. It left me feeling like a full-blown stalker, which sat a little uncomfortably.
But it has to be done.
In an information age like this, not seeking out information was practically rude — or so I rationalized as I dug deeper.
And in the process, I uncovered a few critical facts.
No family…?
Cheon Seo-hui was an orphan. The guardian fields that should have been filled with family were completely blank. A little more digging revealed that her mother — she’d been an only child — had died when she was young, and her father had passed about a year ago. Judging by how long she’d been receiving state support, her household situation had been dire.
Knowing the misery of her previous life, the knowledge sat heavy in my chest.
Even reborn, she ended up in a house like this….
Every child summoned to the other world had their share of hardship, but Kim Yubin had endured particularly brutal domestic violence. As a little girl, her mother had thrown a glass ashtray that shredded her hand. They never even took her to a hospital, so she’d lived with the scar for the rest of her life.
The irony was that she’d always said she was glad for her wretched circumstances — because they were what let her meet me.
“Haa….”
I was still piecing together Cheon Seo-hui’s information when something odd caught my eye among the admissions records.
Why are her scores so low?
Cheon Seo-hui had scored quite well on the document screening — high enough to place her in the upper ranks on paper alone. The problem was the entrance exam.
998th place.
Out of a thousand admitted students, ranking 998th meant she’d scraped in by the barest margin.
That doesn’t make sense.
As far as I knew, a Hero was only ever designated from people who already possessed the necessary aptitude. Dragging someone with no potential into the role of Hero was a recipe for an obvious outcome.
And her first-semester grades are near the bottom too…?
The girl the scores described looked far from ready to become a Hero. Something had to be going on.
Cheon Seo-hui’s class was scheduled for the following day. Every instinct wanted me to seek her out immediately, but I needed the meeting to feel natural, so I gritted my teeth and waited.
I waited twelve years. What’s one more day.
The first week of classes was essentially orientation. Methods varied by subject and instructor, but as the practical instructor I met the kids straight on the training grounds.
Which meant I would finally come face-to-face with Cheon Seo-hui.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Han Dohyeon, and I’ll be handling first-year swordsmanship practicals this semester.”
“Whoa!! He’s handsome!”
“So cool!”
We’d moved to the Academy training grounds. Roughly thirty students clustered in one corner of the vast space, and their reaction was, once again, not bad. The average age of the existing swordsmanship faculty ran high, so the welcome felt even warmer.
Cheon Seo-hui… Cheon Seo-hui….
I continued my introduction while pretending to survey the group, searching for her.
!
I found her in the farthest corner, crouched a little apart from the others.
Wavy black bob that brushed near her chin. A small, neat face with somewhat sharp eyes set just so. A clean, defined bridge of the nose and full lips that left a strong impression. And because she was crouched, the combat jersey she wore made the almost violent swell of her chest stand out all the more.
Nearly a month since I’d last seen her, Cheon Seo-hui was still beautiful enough to stop my breath in my throat.
“So…. uh…. where was I?”
“Feedback!”
“Right. Continuing on….”
I’d let my attention wander for a second, but I managed to pick up the class explanation again. The sooner I finished, the sooner I could use feedback as an excuse to speak to her.
“Everyone got that? Let’s take our positions, then.”
“Yes!”
The kids moved as one the moment I finished. Students usually hated diving into actual work on day one, but fortunately these ones were fired up and already reaching for their swords. Leaving a good first impression seemed to have paid off.
I could only hope it had worked on Cheon Seo-hui too.
Let’s see what they’ve got.
Among swordsmen, there was a saying that you could gauge skill just from the way someone held a blade. Odd cases existed, of course, but for the most part a single swing told you roughly where someone stood.
I planned to have them strike practice dummies so I could assess the overall level.
“Number one. Begin.”
“Haaah—!”
The first boy poured every scrap of mana into the tip of his sword and swung.
Mana control’s decent, but the form is awful.
“Okay. Next. Number two.”
“Ah, yes!”
I worked steadily through the evaluations. Around the time I was reminded just how wide the skill gap ran even within the same department —
Ah.
— her turn finally arrived.
“…Number twenty-eight.”
Cheon Seo-hui.
“…….”
Silent, she took up her sword and slowly settled into stance. She was holding a cheap iron blade not unlike the one I’d bought years ago.
Left-handed…. One-handed form.
Her stance wasn’t bad.
No — it was the best I’d seen from any student so far. Even compared to the upper-class kids I’d taught earlier, it stood out.
Arm angle, center of gravity — all excellent. But then why…?
The problem appeared somewhere I hadn’t expected at all.
As Cheon Seo-hui raised her left arm high, the tip of the sword trembled violently.
“!”
Twang—! With no real force behind it, the blade bounced weakly off the dummy. Absorbing the full shock through her left hand, she dropped the tip of the sword, brows knitting as she clutched her left wrist.
Don’t tell me….
Something was wrong with her left arm.