See You Again — Just the Two of Us
It was January 1st.
Seoyun was on her way back from checking the roster posted on the wall, a single sheet of paper clutched in her hand.
Up close, it was definitely the face I remembered — but standing there before me, she was far prettier than she'd been back then.
Which was exactly why the girl from four years ago and the woman in front of me kept overlapping and splitting apart, and when it came right down to it, I had no idea what I was supposed to say first.
"You're Seoyun… right? Really you?"
"Yes. I recognized you right away."
She answered briefly, then took a single step closer and looked up at me.
"It's been over four years and you haven't changed one bit, Teacher. I guess people really don't age here."
"…Only I didn't change. You changed a lot."
"I did, didn't I?"
There was no embarrassment in it, no fishing for compliments. Just blunt, matter-of-fact audacity.
"Everyone says the same thing. That they didn't recognize me."
She wasn't the tight-lipped kid from my memories anymore. She knew she'd grown beautiful, and she didn't bother hiding it. But she wasn't preening about it either, which gave her a strangely honest air.
"By the way, Teacher."
Seoyun fidgeted with the roster in her hand as she spoke.
"Why did you pretend not to know me back at the plaza?"
"…I didn't pretend. I wasn't even sure it was you, and… there were so many people, it was chaos."
"You did pretend. Our eyes met and you just walked right past. I mouthed 'Teacher?' at you and you had the face of someone who understood every word of it."
Seoyun pouted slightly.
She didn't hide her disappointment, but she wasn't accusatory either.
I glanced around briefly before answering.
"…It was for your sake."
"For mine?"
"I'm a squad leader too, you know. I train the rookies, I evaluate them."
I nodded toward the roster in her hand.
"Think about what happens if it gets out that one of the rookies has known me since before any of this. Everyone's on edge right now — 'he's going easy on her because they're friends,' 'she only got placed in a good squad because of him.' That's exactly the kind of talk it invites. True or not."
Seoyun blinked.
"And it wouldn't do you any good either. From day one, the other rookies would resent you. Pretending to know me would only put you in an awkward spot."
I added, a little awkwardly,
"Honestly, even now, I think it's better we don't let on. At least until the probation period is over."
Of course, that wasn't the whole truth. But I couldn't bring myself to spit out the pathetic version — that the guild master was my girlfriend, and that if it came out that a pretty girl like Seoyun had once been my middle school tutoring student, I'd never hear the end of it.
Had my flimsy excuse landed?
"……"
Seoyun stared at me for a moment, then smiled a little. The disappointment from before had softened somewhat.
"You even thought that far ahead?"
"Can't have you in a tough spot."
"Hm-m."
Her fingers, still toying with the roster, went still.
"All right. Then I'll only call you Teacher when we're alone. Everywhere else… I'll just act like a stranger."
There was a faint note of reluctance at the end of it. Even as she said it, her face made it clear she wasn't happy about the arrangement at all.
"But honestly, I never dreamed I'd run into you here, Teacher."
Seoyun fiddled with the sheet of paper.
"When I saw you at the plaza, for a second I thought I was seeing things. A missing person, standing there in the flesh."
"…Missing?"
"You disappeared four years ago, Teacher. Your contact just cut off, remember?"
The words caught in my throat.
So to that world, I was just a missing person. That one sentence dredged up faces I'd been trying hard to forget.
How were my parents doing? I'd vanished without a trace — they must have filed a missing person's report. Were they still waiting, even now?
And my little sister. She was in high school when I was dragged here, so she'd be twenty by now.
Had that little dummy made it into university?
The thought flickered through me — should I ask how much the world back there had changed? But the words wouldn't come out.
What would be the point of asking? Even if I knew, there was nothing I could do about it. If the news was good, I'd only ache with longing; if it was bad, I'd just be stuck here pacing and wringing my hands.
Four years, and there was still no way back. And as long as that stayed true, any news from outside wouldn't be comfort. It would be torture.
So every time it surfaced, I did what I always did — buried it. Not remembering was how you survived.
"…I'm sorry. That's just how it turned out."
"I know. And now… I came here the same way, didn't I? Exactly like you."
Calm, level. No fuss at all.
"…Did you check your squad yet?"
I changed the subject.
"Yes."
Seoyun unfolded the paper and peered at it.
"Choi Jaehyuk's squad. That's the guy who was hovering around me at the plaza, right?"
"…Yeah."
"Of all people, the squad leader had to be him."
Seoyun let out a sigh that was closer to resignation.
"Well, I'll manage somehow. I'm good at handling men like that. I dealt with plenty of seniors like him back at school."
Granted, with looks like hers, no man anywhere would have left her alone — she'd have picked up her own arsenal of coping methods along the way.
"…Jaehyuk's not dangerous, at least. His mouth's just filthy."
"Is he a friend of yours, Teacher?"
"…Yeah. Four years now."
"Then I'll trust him."
Seoyun looked at me as she said it.
"If you say so, Teacher."
For an instant, something was embedded in that tone. The eyes that used to look up at me from a math problem, back in the old days. The eyes that trusted whatever I said was right, simply because I was the one saying it. That look was still there, unchanged, four years later.
I looked away for no good reason.
"…Just, don't trust him too much. Focus on settling in. Ask your squad leader if there's anything you don't know."
"Can't I ask you instead?"
"…I'm assigned to a different squad."
"Tch. If it's supposed to be a secret anyway, you could've just put me in your squad."
She tossed it out like a joke, but I found myself unable to answer right away.
It wasn't that I hadn't had the same thought. Given our history, keeping her in my squad would have made it easier to teach her, easier to look after her.
But Yerin had been the one to organize the squads, and by the time I noticed, Seoyun was already in Jaehyuk's. I couldn't very well have butted in on the spot and demanded that Lee Seoyun be moved to mine. To justify that, I'd have had to explain why I cared so much about the girl in the first place. And frankly, even announcing in front of Yerin that I wanted a female squad member was a non-starter to begin with.
"…That's not up to me. Squad assignments are the guild master's call."
"The guild master's?"
"Yeah. She's got a sharp eye for people. There'll be a reason she put you in Jaehyuk's squad."
Saying it out loud left a strange bitterness in my mouth. I didn't know what that reason was. It was just something Yerin had decided, so I'd accepted it, that was all.
"Hm-m."
Seoyun folded the roster and spoke with an edge of complaint.
"If this guild master of yours has such a sharp eye for people, why did she stick me in the most exhausting squad of them all?"
"…Jaehyuk's not that exhausting. And there's a guy named William who seemed pretty… entertaining."
"I'm kidding."
Seoyun giggled. Then, in a slightly wistful voice, she added,
"But really — it would have been nice if I'd been in your squad, Teacher."
I had no idea how to respond to that, so I looked away again.
"…Settling in comes first. Three months will fly by."
"Yes, yes. Understood, Teacher."
Seoyun folded the roster and slipped it into her pocket. Then, halfway through turning away, she twisted just her head back to look at me.
"See you again. When it's just the two of us."
With a hint of playfulness mixed into the last words, Seoyun disappeared down the far end of the corridor.
I stayed where I was and watched her retreating figure for a moment. The little kid from back then had walked past me after four years, all grown up, in a different world. The fact of it felt strangely unreal.
And more than that, what really bothered me was…
throughout that entire short conversation, I'd kept failing to find somewhere to put my eyes.
[See you again. When it's just the two of us.]
It had probably meant nothing at all.
…Then why did those words keep lingering in my ears?
I shook my head once and started walking toward my squad's quarters.
It was nothing. Just — it had been a while since I'd seen a familiar face. A long while.
She really is pretty, though.
My squad's quarters were the room at the end of the fourth floor.
When I opened the door, four men were sitting around in awkward silence. A cramped space packed tight with five beds. For the next three months, the five of us would be jammed together in here like one family.
Including me.
Ha. I wasn't in the army… but this barracks-style living,
I hated it so much.
"Hello. I'm Lee Hajun, and I'll be overseeing all of you starting today."
The four scrambled to their feet and bowed.
I perched on one of the wooden beds and went around memorizing their faces one by one. All four looked earnest. All four looked awkward. Five men packed into a narrow room made the air feel bone-dry, and not one of them opened his mouth first.
"…Relax, all of you. We'll be stuck together for three months no matter what. I'll drop the formality too."
At my words, they all just nodded stiffly.
Silence settled over the room.
So this was my squad.
"Um… Squad Leader? Sir? Can I ask you something?"
"Sure. Call me whatever's comfortable. Anything at all."
"I heard it from one of the other rookies. Something called… a Verdict? Someone said one's coming up soon. What exactly is it?"
At that word, the other three heads turned at the same time. Apparently they'd all been wondering. For the first time, the awkward air in the room pulled in a single direction.
"Ah, that."
I paused to consider how to explain it.
"Around here, when a dispute comes up over something that's hard to prove, the truth gets settled by a duel. If you have solid evidence, you can take it through the courts — but this isn't a world where that's always possible."
"Do people seriously fight with actual weapons?"
One of the squad members asked, eyes gone wide.
"Yeah. Weapon or magic, doesn't matter. One side names the other, and the one who gets named either fights directly or puts up a champion as their proxy. The winner's word is accepted as the truth, and every guild has to abide by the result."
"…C-can people die in it?"
The rookie's voice trembled.
"By the rules, there's no surrender, and no one can step in mid-fight. Whether the loser lives or dies — that's decided by the winner."
I said it plainly. Not to scare them. It was simply something they needed to know.
"But none of you are going to get dragged into one any time soon. Verdicts are usually a matter for guild masters and people with names — rookies don't get pulled in."
"Hold on. So what happens if whoever's got the stronger champion keeps slinging outrageous claims and demanding Verdict after Verdict?"
A sharp question. This kid — Taeyoung, was it? Catching that on day one meant he had a good head on his shoulders.
"First of all, a Verdict only stands for matters that genuinely can't be settled by evidence. If there's evidence, you just go through the courts. And to file one, you need the approval of a neutral arbitration guild with no stake in the matter, plus there's a minimum notice period. Fire off some reckless claim, and if proof comes out during the notice window that it's false? Then the side that filed it is the one finished first. Reputation, standing, all of it — gone. So nobody files them lightly. Verdicts aren't that common to begin with."
"Oh… but why is one suddenly happening now, then?"
"This one's a little… bigger than usual."
I hesitated, then stopped myself.
"Something happened between the Japanese guild and the Chinese guild, apparently. People disappeared."
"People disappeared?"
"…That part, you don't need to know yet. It'll come out slowly as you settle in."
I cut it off there. No need to drag Suyeon's story out on their very first day.
"Anyway, it's in two weeks, so things are going to be noisy with that for a while. You can go watch it, but don't even think about betting on it. Not that you'd have any money anyway."
All four nodded gravely. A team that had been nothing but awkward minutes ago seemed to have become, if only a little, something of the same side — brought together, however briefly, by the frightening rules of a strange world and the shared status of being rookies in it.
Well. So this was how a squad ran, huh.
One by one, the rookies started arranging their bedding. I claimed the bed in the farthest corner and lay down. Once the lanterns lighting the room were snuffed out, faint sounds began leaking through the wall.
The next room over.
Rowdy laughter. Someone said something and a fresh wave of howls broke out. And mixed in among it, familiar voices.
I hadn't seen them when we came in. Could Jaehyuk's squad really be in the room next to mine?
The wall swallowed most of the sound, letting only a few words drift through.
"…'s what I'm sayin', so I tol' him… we'll…… aw, hell, an' then—……"
Jeolla dialect. William?
I couldn't make out a single word of the content, but that unmistakable lilt came through the wall loud and clear. Someone cracked back a reply, and another burst of laughter rolled out.
"…Aigoo, honest t' goodness—"
"…Really n' truly?"
"…So that's why I—"
A few stray words, and the rest was just happy noise.
So it was Jaehyuk's squad. One wall over, and over there it was lively from night one — while in our room, five men lay stiffly staring at the ceiling.
Among all that laughter, I suddenly found myself wondering whether one of the women's laughs was Seoyun's.
If I put reinforcement on my hearing, I'd catch every word. Who was saying what, whose that woman's laugh belonged to.
I started gathering mana at my fingertips—
and stopped.
I didn't want to hear it. No — I didn't think I should hear it.
There were three women in Jaehyuk's squad… it was probably just the others, anyway.
I rolled over, put my back to the wall, and closed my eyes — turning away from the sounds next door.
Even so, for a long while, sleep wouldn't come.