Saturday morning.
A blaring alarm went off on the tablet of Professor Hwang Ye-rim, who was enjoying a rare lie-in at her residence.
“Mmh.”
Rubbing her eyes blearily, she sat up and checked the screen.
[Emergency call!]
[Multiple patients in the infirmary!]
“......On a weekend morning?”
She threw on her coat in a hurry and headed for the infirmary, where the inside was already in chaos.
On every bed a cadet lay shivering under a blanket.
“What is going on here?”
Hwang Ye-rim caught hold of the nurse on duty and asked.
“They all came in together. There don't appear to be any signs of external or internal injury. It isn't qi deviation, either.”
“Pulse?”
“Unstable. Their heart rates are spiking and their breathing is uneven. It looks like severe mental shock.”
Hwang Ye-rim's eyes darkened.
Something capable of putting them in this state, in the middle of the Academy, and en masse?
She went over to the bed of the cadet who seemed least affected.
His focus was hazy, but at least he was coherent enough to talk to.
“You. What's your name?”
“Class 21...... Yu Sang-cheol.”
“A freshman? What happened?”
“Well, we went to take a class.”
‘A class?’
Hwang Ye-rim's brow twitched.
“Which class?”
“The Saturday special lecture. Special Instruction Studies.”
“Ah.”
She knew of it too.
That contract professor's course, the most talked-about thing in the Academy of late.
“And what was the class like?”
“The professor drew a line. He drew a line on the ground with his sword...... and told us to cross it.”
“A line?”
“Yes, that if we crossed it we were qualified to be taught, and if we couldn't, we never had to come to his class again...... and then all of a sudden.”
Yu Sang-cheol's pupils trembled faintly.
“I thought I was going to die.”
“......”
“Really. Not just frightened — I honestly felt like my head was going to be cut off right where I stood. I really was going to cross it. But my legs wouldn't move and my body locked up and...... hgk.”
His voice cracked as though the unfairness of it were welling up in him.
Hwang Ye-rim silently took his wrist again.
The pulse was still unstable, but it had settled a little compared with before.
‘His body isn't damaged.’
His qi center was perfectly fine.
There were no traces of severed qi or blood flow, either.
“And the professor didn't lay a hand on you directly?”
“N-No. He just...... stood there.”
That was stranger still.
He had not struck them directly.
He had not injected qi to shake their meridians.
He had made this many cadets get carried into the infirmary as a group with nothing but his presence?
Was that even possible?
‘Besides.’
Hwang Ye-rim let a thread of true energy flow in, and her pupils widened slightly.
‘The qi running through his blood vessels is unusually clean.’
It was much like the state of someone who had just taken a spirit herb or an elixir.
An impossible thing!
‘No, I must be imagining it.’
Rising, Hwang Ye-rim took the pulse of another cadet as well.
The result was identical every time.
‘Seriously?’
Hwang Ye-rim's face went blank.
He had cleared the impurities out of their blood vessels with presence alone?
They had not been made completely clean, granted, but even so it was outside the bounds of common sense.
‘What on earth...... is happening here?’
***
The drill grounds.
Kang Hyeon looked down at the five who had crossed the line and now stood gasping.
“Feeble.”
Kang Hyeon looked in particular at Cha Yu-sik.
He had said something about being able to subdue one of the students here with ease, had he not?
Well, then.
Was that answer enough?
“......”
Cha Yu-sik could not raise his head.
Less out of shame than because if he opened his mouth he felt the retching would come up at once.
‘Insane.’
When he first met the killing intent it had at least been possible to force himself to endure it.
But that had only been the beginning.
One step, two steps.
The closer he came to the line the man had drawn, the more the density of the killing intent changed.
‘And when I crossed the line.’
Cha Yu-sik had experienced the vivid sensation of his own neck being lopped clean off.
‘Honestly, I thought I'd died.’
Even now he could not tell the difference.
Was he not, in fact, already dead?
Was he not already dead and seeing a hallucination?
“Y-You......”
Cha Yu-sik barely managed to speak.
“What are you?”
“What do you think? A contract parachute.”
“That isn't what I'm asking.”
Cha Yu-sik flared up, but Kang Hyeon answered indifferently.
“Does it matter? I said I would teach you how to get stronger, and I said that on that condition only those prepared to die should come.”
He looked slowly over the five, and then.
“And.”
Spoke in a low, weighty voice.
“You have just crossed death.”
The five cadets flinched and looked up at Kang Hyeon.
He liked those eyes very much.
“Good. Now you're finally wearing eyes worth something.”
They were plainly different from the eyes of the fifteen who had been too petrified with terror to move.
There was bite in them, a will to do something, anything.
‘At the very least these ones won't take their own lives at the sight of Asura.’
Which was to say.
Ones worth teaching.
“Then I ought to teach you how to get stronger, as promised.”
Kang Hyeon drew a fresh, unopened bottle of whiskey from inside his coat.
“Six a.m. tomorrow. Out here on the drill grounds.”
“......T-Tomorrow would be Sunday......”
Gwak Do-jin, who had crawled his way over, muttered hoarsely, but Kang Hyeon paid it no mind.
Come or don't.
That was their own freedom.
It was not class time to begin with.
“Khh.”
Taking another swig from the bottle, Kang Hyeon wiped the liquor from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“The drink tastes sweet today.”
And with that he vanished out of the drill grounds.
Until his back was completely out of sight, not one of the remaining five could open their mouth.
***
Weekend or not, the rumor spread in no time.
The commotion at the infirmary had let a great many students find out.
“Hey, did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“That Saturday special lecture that just opened.”
“Special Instruction Studies? The one that contract professor runs?”
“Yeah.”
“What about it?”
“Apparently everyone who took it that day got carried off to the infirmary.”
“Huh? Why?”
“No idea. Did the professor beat them up?”
In the old days a word without legs travelled a thousand li; these days a finger clears ten thousand with ease.
<AcaNet>
Posts began to go up on the cadets' community board as well.
└ The professor beat up students?
└ Doesn't sound like a beating. From what the duty nurse said it wasn't that.
└ Guys. Wasn't Special Instruction Studies cancelled though?
└ nope, heard the Dean put the problem cadets in as enrollees.
└ ?? he can do that? scary
└ he's the Academy Dean. must be allowed if he did it.
└ heard CYS and Mad Dog were both in there.
└ CYS?
└ no way
└ scary
└ did CYS end up in the infirmary too?
└ nah he wasn't there
└ so maybe CYS was the one who beat them up?
└ more likely Mad Dog than CYS. CYS is decent to the students at least.
Solid information was scarce and most of it was speculation and gossip, but it was noisy enough that it reached Jin Myeong-hun's ears as well.
Straightening his clothes, he went directly to the Dean's office.
Knock, knock.
“Come in.”
“Dean.”
“I was expecting you, as it happens.”
Trickle.
Seo Il-hyeon was drinking tea.
That unruffled sight only made Jin Myeong-hun more exasperated.
“That course should have been cancelled if not for you, Dean. What is your reason for going this far?”
“Calm down and sit. Anyone watching would think you had a blood feud with Professor Kang.”
Jin Myeong-hun's brow furrowed more deeply.
Instead of taking a seat he stood rigidly upright and raised his voice.
“I am asking only as the Head Professor. A single loach has come in out of nowhere and is muddying the order of the Academy, and standing by would be a dereliction of my duty.”
Seo Il-hyeon regarded Jin Myeong-hun quietly.
‘My good man. That fellow is no loach. He is a dragon.’
“What order has Professor Kang disturbed?”
“More instances than I can count on my fingers. Drinking on campus. Sending cadets to the infirmary. And from what I hear he even threw out fifteen cadets. For failing to qualify.”
“Hm.”
The Dean set down the teacup he had been drinking from and spoke quietly.
“Professor Jin. Let me ask you one thing. Did Professor Kang so much as raise a hand to the cadets?”
“Sorry?”
“Or swing a sword and injure them?”
“......I hear he emitted killing intent.”
“They are cadets of the National Academy, the supposed finest elites in South Korea. Is it Professor Kang's fault that boys like that could not withstand a single professor's presence and collapsed pissing themselves?”
“That is......”
“If anything, is it not something to be ashamed of, that the true worth of those feeble hothouse flowers has been exposed? Will they collapse in real combat too, in front of monsters inside a dungeon, prattling about regulations and mistreatment?”
Before Seo Il-hyeon's force, Jin Myeong-hun only bit his lip.
“The same goes for throwing them out on his own authority.”
Seo Il-hyeon propped his laced hands under his chin and continued.
“Sifting out who can be taught and who cannot is entirely the prerogative of the professor in charge. Were the seventeen I forced in there not the problem students on the brink of expulsion, whom all of you had given up on in the first place?”
“......”
“I will caution him about the drinking. But, Professor Jin.”
Seo Il-hyeon's eyes settled heavily.
“Let me give you one piece of advice. Mind your own affairs.”
“Dean.”
“Professor Kang is on a one-year contract regardless. It does not become a Head Professor to work himself up this much over a contract professor's single special course.”
“......”
“I trust you have taken my meaning. That will be all.”
At the unmistakable dismissal, Jin Myeong-hun's fist trembled.
***
At that same hour, the safe house.
“What on earth are you going to do?”
Summoned by Black, Lee Se-a had come with the tablet and was now holding her head in her hands.
“Causing an incident like that on the very first day of class......”
“Stop making a fuss and read me the roster.”
“The roster?”
“Yes. Time I saw what sort they are.”
“You said you weren't going to look last time.”
“Last time the roster had names on it I didn't need to see.”
“......One moment.”
Lee Se-a tapped at the tablet screen a few times, then brought up the profiles of the five survivors.
[Cha Yu-sik, Gwak Do-jin, Yoon Hyeon-jong, Han Tae-ho, Seo Hae-in]
“Shall I start with Cha Yu-sik?”
“Go on.”
“This cadet is enormously famous even with the general public. He's the second son of the Cheonrang Guild Master.”
“Cheonrang?”
“Yes, one of the three great guilds...... His older brother is Cha Du-sik, top graduate of the Academy's Class 17. The two of them must be locked in a bloody succession fight right now...... The accepted view is that being suspended this time has effectively pushed him out of it.”
“Tch. Couldn't kill that temper of his.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. Next?”
“Gwak Do-jin. Nickname, Mad Dog. Twenty-one disciplinary actions, and he was held back a year on top of it.”
“With that many disciplinary actions, shouldn't he have been expelled long ago?”
“There seems to be a story behind it. From the record, all of the discipline came in his third year...... apparently up until his second year he was an extremely well-behaved student.”
“Is that so?”
The corner of Kang Hyeon's mouth lifted.
Because the image had come back to him of Gwak Do-jin, streaming tears and snot, clawing his way across the ground on nothing but stubbornness.
‘A simple neighborhood thug could never have crawled through that killing intent.’
There was something inside him — bite, or rage, or something else burning fiercely.
“Next is Yoon Hyeon-jong. Oh, this student!”
Lee Se-a's voice pitched up sharply.
“He's the one you saved by striking his qi center, Professor. His father is the head of a fairly well-known mid-sized company. Taejeong Trading, a firm that mainly distributes the secret manuals, elixirs and rare treasures that come out of dungeons.”
“A merchant house.”
“Yes. In the early days they made a killing on dungeon byproducts, but lately they've been losing ground, with the big corporations tied to major guilds taking their market away. Ah, but honestly, I'm a bit envious.”
“Of what?”
“You've become the benefactor of a rich, silver-spoon student. Won't he be hauling elixirs and the like over in armfuls later to repay the debt?”
“He hasn't brought anything of the sort.”
“What an ungrateful student.”
“Enough nonsense.”
“Yes, sir. Next is Han Tae-ho. This one's a Class 21 freshman. There's almost no information. No family connections either. Still, if he got into the Academy at all he must have some ability?”
“He'll do well enough.”
If he did not......
He could not have crossed that line.
“And the fifth and last is...... oh, it's a girl.”
Among Hunters, especially in the combat track, the proportion of female cadets was extremely low, somewhere around ten percent.
Largely down to the nature of an occupation that required putting your body through brutal work.
“Seo Hae-in. Bottom of her class year in grades. She hasn't been disciplined or anything...... but her marks are all Fs. I'd guess this is purely a matter of ability......”
Kang Hyeon narrowed his eyes.
He remembered.
The small girl beside Han Tae-ho, crawling doggedly across the ground behind Gwak Do-jin exactly as he had.
‘It's less that she has no ability.’
More likely she had never had a master who could look at her condition properly and teach her.
Having run his eyes over the students' records, Kang Hyeon handed the tablet back.
“Ah, and.”
“Yes?”
“We're clearing out of here tomorrow.”
“Sorry?”
“I'm moving my quarters to the Academy's faculty building.”
“......You're abandoning this place?”
“Yes.”
He was teaching the children now.
And if he was going to look for his vessels in earnest, being resident there outright would be better.