Chapter 8: You Are the Ones Who Have to Prove It
Frankly, it was disappointing.
That they had no inner arts he could accept, since they had never been taught a proper martial art, but why were their lower bodies in such a sorry state as well?
‘Not even the basics in place.’
To gauge a person’s fundamental constitution or capacity, there had to be at least a sturdy frame capable of holding energy, or some measure of presence radiating off them.
But this……
They were all nothing but pebbles rolling about in the dirt, to the point that cracking them open would not even reveal which one was raw ore.
‘Besides.’
And what were those eyes.
The grain of them was entirely different from the people of Murim.
There, even those without skill had a madness for survival and a hunger for the martial way lodged in their eyes……
These children simply looked innocent.
Even the boredom, the irritation, the arrogant stares only came across as endearing to Kang Hyeon’s eye.
Gulp, gulp.
He drank more whiskey.
Where he usually drank to dissolve the pain, this time it was simply to drink with a heavy heart.
He was supposed to stop Asura, who meant to destroy the world, with children as feeble as these?
“Haa.”
The long breath he let out carried a thick scent of alcohol.
‘Still, think of it positively.’
Who knew?
There might yet be a perfectly matched constitution among them.
***
Cha Yu-sik, on the other hand, had his eyes narrowed.
‘What is this?’
He did not understand.
Anyone who had trained in a martial art carried a certain characteristic presence about them.
Even a C-rank Hunter, at the very least, gave off energy plainly different from an ordinary person’s.
‘But.’
From the professor standing before him, no presence of any kind could be felt.
In a case like this it was one of two things.
Either his realm was so tremendous that he had gathered his energy away entirely, or he had simply never learned a thing.
Cha Yu-sik had seen the former before.
‘Father.’
Whenever he faced Cha Ha-rang alone, he occasionally felt that same strangeness.
‘It couldn’t be.’
Was this rumpled-haired man reeking of drink supposed to be an S-rank Hunter?
Impossible.
The S-rank Hunters in existence in South Korea numbered a mere seven.
At his father’s side, Cha Yu-sik had come face to face with every one of them at least once.
‘So the rumors were right.’
He was a parachute the Bureau had jammed in by force.
What on earth was it, then?
What was it about this man that made both the Bureau and the Dean move to shield him?
Did he have the President himself behind him?
‘The Dean is a disappointment too.’
They called him an upright, incorruptible martial artist, but had that been nothing more than idle rumor?
To be so steeped in politics that he handed a place at the lectern to an incompetent like this.
“Professor.”
Cha Yu-sik stepped forward and spoke.
Though inwardly he despised the man, outwardly he observed courteous form.
Contract or not, the man did bear the title of professor.
“You wrote this in the syllabus. That you teach how to get stronger. Condition: those who are prepared to die.”
His voice carried across the drill grounds.
“And so, if I may be so bold, I would like to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“Do you truly believe you have the ability to make us stronger?”
At the audacious provocation, the eyes of the cadets holding their breath went wide.
Gwak Do-jin, watching from behind, also nodded with a snort of laughter.
‘Cha Yu-sik really is a madman.’
The other cadets felt a strange satisfaction at the words as well.
‘He isn’t wrong, though.’
‘What’s a man in that derelict state doing calling himself a professor in the first place?’
‘If he wants us prepared to die, shouldn’t he prove himself first, at minimum?’
They might be cadets on the verge of expulsion, but they carried the pride of being cadets of the National Hunter Academy.
They had not the slightest desire to bow and scrape to a contract professor of unknown origin.
And Cha Yu-sik had just scratched that exact itch for them.
Only one.
Yoon Hyeon-jong alone was watching Kang Hyeon with a worried expression.
But Kang Hyeon still wore the same indifferent look.
“So what is it you want to say?”
“Prove it to us.”
Tap.
Cha Yu-sik lightly struck the scabbard at his waist.
“If you set out a condition that grand, surely you ought to be able to subdue one of the students here with ease? Contract post or not.”
“Hm.”
Kang Hyeon stared flatly at Cha Yu-sik, then let out a short laugh.
“I thought I’d been given nothing but dogs with their tails tucked, but there’s one here that knows how to bark.”
Cha Yu-sik’s brow creased.
Just as his mood soured at an attitude he could not tell was praise or mockery.
Shing!
A sword was drawn from Kang Hyeon’s waist.
A mass-produced iron blade of the sort sold in cheap neighborhood weapon shops.
‘He drew it without any hesitation at all?’
Cha Yu-sik’s pupils trembled minutely.
An ordinary professor, at this point, would have fallen back on some hollow authority or floundered through excuses.
But this man was different.
And what was more shocking.
‘I lost the arc, if only for a moment.’
The draw had been too fast.
If that shabby iron blade had flown toward his throat instead of empty air……
‘I’d have been cut.’
His head would have left his shoulders before he even registered that a sword had been drawn.
For the first time, tension surfaced on Cha Yu-sik’s face.
Kang Hyeon had of course drawn it with no thought behind it whatsoever, but there was no way for him to know that.
Kang Hyeon was not looking at Cha Yu-sik.
He let the tip of the drawn sword drop toward the ground, and then.
Scrrrrrrape!
Drew a long line across the sandy floor of the drill grounds.
To the twenty cadets frozen in place wondering what he was doing, Kang Hyeon spoke.
“The one who has to prove anything is not me. It’s you.”
The moment he lifted the whiskey bottle and tipped the last of the liquor down his throat.
BOOOOM!
A horrific killing intent erupted from Kang Hyeon’s whole body and swallowed the drill grounds like a tidal wave.
“……Hgk!”
“Kuh, kuhk!”
A pressure as though the oxygen had evaporated in an instant.
Cha Yu-sik, Gwak Do-jin, the cadets behind them — all of them instinctively stepped back.
It felt as though that professor’s sword would sever their necks at any moment.
“That’s killing intent at exactly first-rate level.”
A faint smile hung at the corner of the professor’s mouth.
“Come across. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
The condition of enrollment.
Those who are prepared to die.
“Whoever crosses this line is qualified to receive my teaching. Those who can’t cross it, turn around and walk out as you are. You need never attend my class again.”
In Murim, word that he was giving instruction would have brought them bowing their heads with armfuls of elixirs and rare treasures, orthodox, unorthodox and demonic alike.
Compared to that, these ones were fortunate indeed.
Cross this one line and a fated encounter was theirs to seize!
‘Let’s see it, then.’
The bare minimum of will required to take heaven’s fortune for free.
***
One minute passed.
Nothing but a suffocating silence hung over the drill grounds.
Not one of them lifted a foot.
No — not one of them could.
“Hgk, hah……”
“S-Save……”
“Please.”
More than half had already sunk down with their legs gone out from under them.
From between the trouser legs of several, a damp liquid ran out and soaked into the sand.
They had wet themselves.
It was energy at merely first-rate level, but there was no chance of hothouse flowers withstanding the true killing intent of a man who had wallowed twenty years in Murim.
“Tch.”
Just as Kang Hyeon clicked his tongue in bitter disappointment.
Scrrrrtch.
The sound of sand being scraped hard cut through the stillness.
His gaze went to where the noise had come from.
Someone was taking a step.
Astonishingly, the first to move was neither Cha Yu-sik nor Gwak Do-jin, but Yoon Hyeon-jong, who had been standing in the corner of the drill grounds.
‘Oho?’
Kang Hyeon’s eyes curved with interest.
He remembered.
The one whose points had been tangled, not long ago.
‘I took him for a middling frame at the time.’
People really did have to be struck to be known.
You had to bring the hammer down as though to shatter them to learn whether what lay inside was clay that crumbled easily or steel that threw sparks.
“Kuuuuugh.”
Pale as a sheet of paper, the boy was walking straight toward him even so.
Kang Hyeon knew how much courage he was summoning to do it.
The next to move was Cha Yu-sik.
His eyes were stained with shock and disbelief.
‘I can’t breathe.’
A presence that felt like it flayed his skin with every step!
Cha Yu-sik had experienced killing intent like this exactly once before.
‘Father.’
When he had lost guild members in a dungeon, his father’s aura had been precisely this.
No — if anything, in sheer ferocity, this man was a cut above.
That settled the conclusion.
‘This man is an S-rank Hunter.’
Not an incompetent parachute, but a being whom the Bureau and the Dean had planted in the Academy with his identity concealed for some reason of their own.
Cha Yu-sik bit his lip.
The truth was that the reason he had run wild at all was that the professors were barely A-rank.
He had thought there was less to learn here than at the guild.
But if the man in front of him was S-rank?
‘Then it’s a different story.’
He had to learn.
This was an opportunity, in fact.
Because the Dean, the only S-rank at the Academy, did not teach students.
‘I’ll be the first one across.’
Step.
Watching Yoon Hyeon-jong’s back as he walked ahead, Cha Yu-sik forced his rigid legs to move.
And behind them.
“Wai…… wait, ah, fuck! This isn’t right…… Hgk!”
Gwak Do-jin was face down on the ground, shaking.
His mouth spat out an unbroken stream of obscenities, but his body would not move.
Mad Dog?
What mad dog in this world tucks its tail before death?
What he was at present was a mongrel crawling on the ground because it wanted to live.
In his head he wanted to get up and bolt out of there at once, but not a scrap of strength would go into his legs.
‘I’m losing it, I’m actually losing it……’
Then, into the vision of a Gwak Do-jin eaten alive by fear, came Yoon Hyeon-jong.
The Class 20 junior whose collar he had grabbed a moment ago.
‘You have got to be kidding. That punk’s going?’
In an instant Gwak Do-jin’s face flushed scarlet.
He was afraid.
Even now, one look at that professor’s eyes felt like it would burst his heart.
But it was humiliating.
The junior bastard he had written off as a fucking nobody was walking over there ramrod straight, and here he was — the supposed senior — flat on the ground?
‘That won’t do.’
Gwak Do-jin gritted his teeth once more and braced a hand against the ground.
He had no strength to stand.
So he crawled.
Drag, drag.
Cold sweat poured off him like rain, but he clawed his way stubbornly toward the line.
Kang Hyeon watched the sight as though it surprised him.
‘There are more interesting ones here than I thought.’
The shape of it was as wretched and miserable as could be, but that kind of stubbornness was itself one of the talents a martial artist ought to have.
And.
‘In front of the Demon God there’s no such thing as saving face.’
When Asura descended, a great many masters who had commanded Murim went mad or took their own lives.
The ones who kept throwing themselves at it to the end were nothing but the vicious sorts who had rolled in the mud.
‘Oho.’
Kang Hyeon’s gaze shifted slightly to the side.
Behind the crawling Gwak Do-jin, two more figures were visible, dragging their shuddering bodies along, trying somehow to move.
Kang Hyeon was honestly taken aback.
He had thought one at most would come, or perhaps not even one.
And five of them were moving?
Kang Hyeon’s lips traced a curve.
Perhaps choosing this Academy had been the right call after all.
‘Five out of twenty isn’t bad.’
Ten minutes had passed before he knew it, and as the killing intent crushing the drill grounds scattered along with it.
“Hgk, hah!”
“Cough, cough!”
Those who had passed the line numbered exactly five.
