35. alma mater (3)
The end of The Guard, a hunter training institution that was once called the shield of Korea and received envy and envy, was shabby.
Only a handful of people had gathered.
A man was on the podium and giving a speech.
“People who were supposed to protect us abandoned us and ran away to live for themselves. It’s not even about trying to fight back. Literally they abandoned us. They are a stain of the times. I want to clear the stains of that era and build a new future in its place.”
It’s a face I’ve seen before.
Was it Park Sang-min?
He was a member of the National Assembly and was condescending.
I haven’t seen him since I was with Je Poong-ho, but as always, this guy seems to live a long time.
A disgruntled voice flowed from all around.
“That human. I insisted on destroying the school building, which had nothing left.”
“I’m thinking of doing something. There’s an election soon, right?”
“National representative? The one that says 500 people are selected?”
“The population of Korea has shrunk by more than half, but why is the number of rice bugs only increasing? For whom?”
Half of them blamed Park Sang-min, but the other half seemed to be the person Park Sang-min brought.
“You know what.”
“Be quiet. On the subject of abandoned waste.”
“Don’t you know the basics of increasing the people’s rights as the people’s representation increases?”
“Draw. If you want to resent it, do it to the member of the National Assembly that you abandoned. While not being able to say a word to those on a leash.”
Park Sang-min watched it from afar and finished his speech.
“The dirty era will end. A new era will come. Sangmin Park. We will run at full speed today to open a new era with you.”
When Park Sang-min left by car, half of the few people left.
There were about 20 people left at the dreary scene where the wind mixed with sand was blowing.
Everyone looked older than me.
Most of them were in their 40s, and sometimes in their 50s.
I couldn’t find a friend younger than me even after washing my eyes, and I couldn’t even find my age.
I found a woman with regret.
Da-ram Kim might be here.
She is one of the reasons I accepted Minhee Woo’s invitation.
I thought maybe she might show up here.
For both her and me, this is a precious place.
Others criticize my gifting and call me a cheater, but I owe it to him.
The same goes for Daram Kim.
Jang Ki-young treated the children of wealthy and powerful families fairly and the orphans like us.
I didn’t carelessly ignore them because I didn’t have parents, and I never gave them a disadvantage.
I have always been grateful for that fact.
Because the other instructors didn’t.
However, Daram Kim did not appear at this event.
Baek Seung-hyun, who tried to bring me down by selling her name, is also not there.
“…”
Two small objectives went to naught.
If either of them showed up, it would have cleared some of my old doubts.
There was a small mortuary next to the school.
Jang Ki-young’s funeral.
I didn’t know why Jang Ki-yeong, who was alive, was placed next to the school, but now I think I know a little bit.
It’s Minhee Woo’s work.
Her morbid sensitivity gave it drama.
On the first page of the guestbook, the name of the person who planned this event was written in needlessly elegant handwriting.
[ Woo Min-hee ]
After that, there were a few names of instructors who remained only in vague memories, and a few names of people who seemed to be seniors, but the total number did not exceed 10.
I wrote my name in the 10th guest book.
“…”
I was worried for a moment.
Should I write Park Gyu?
In fact, it is correct to write Park Gyu here.
It is courtesy for the deceased to write down the first and last name that represents oneself publicly or privately.
However, an unknown whim strongly reminded me of other options.
The fact that no one was guarding the mortuary also gave strength to my new idea.
Slowly and respectfully, I left my existence in the guest book of the still living dead.
[Professor]
Perhaps this is the name that will resonate with the teacher who is already dead and will die again.
When I think of the brightest moment of my gift, I strongly insisted and pushed forward when everyone objected that it was undeserved.
I heard the conversation of the middle-aged men next to the mortuary.
“The headmaster said there was a trick to stopping the demolition of the school. What was the number he said? They said that if that was successful, demolition could be prevented.”
“well. No matter what anyone says, it will not change that Captain Jang is a patriot. He was loyal to his country to the end. When I resigned as principal and was involved in a lawsuit, a scouting offer came from China, but I quickly declined. There is no one else like that.”
No matter what anyone says, Jang Ki-yeong was more popular than Lee Sang-hoon and deserved respect.
I’m not saying this because I was a favored disciple.
“Please back off. We will start blowing up soon.”
A crowd gathered amid distant gunfire.
A few people saw me and bowed, but I didn’t recognize them.
It’s a face I vaguely remember, but it feels too far away to have a conversation pretending to know it.
Talking about it would be an empty repetition of echoes.
The countdown began, and soon explosives planted all over the school created a roar.
In the dust, the campus and classroom where I spent three years were submerged as if melting.
Perhaps, at this moment, my teacher, who is not an exaggeration to say that he is the founder of the school, will also face an eternal death.
I paid a moment of silence to the school and to my two teachers, and left, remembering a page from the years that would never come back.
On the way back, I rode an armored car.
Unlike the soldiers in the helicopters, the soldiers in the armored vehicles did not build a wall.
They were curious like me.
“I heard you were a Hunter? How did you feel when you stood in front of a monster?”
“It is similar to how people live. I want to run away and I want to hit him.”
“Kang Han-min, do you know Na Hye-won?”
“I don’t know. When there are about 1,200 classmates, there are bound to be some that you pass by without even seeing their face.”
One of the officers who had been silent looked around.
He looked at me and asked abruptly.
“Won’t you get depressed if you live like this?”
“Well, it must be something to overcome.”
“There is such a thing as a freelance hunter. The salary wasn’t that high, but it was enough to fill my mouth. With that much, I think I can get a decent accommodation next to the pier instead of in a place like this.”
I wanted to say something, but it seems that he is worried about me.
The officer held out something to me.
“This is what Director Woo asked me to deliver.”
It was a palm-sized notebook.
“They said it was Master’s keepsake. I was asked to deliver it saying that it would be good for Mr. Park Gyu to have it.”
The notebook was so old that the leather on the cover had run out, and powerful and moderate handwriting densely filled the entire notebook.
On the first page, the old-fashioned picture of a dragon and the powerfully written Chinese text caught my attention.
[Even if this body is broken, for the protection of the fatherland. ]
Undoubtedly. These are the letters of my gift, Jang Ki-young.
I must have scribbled something with a pen that ran out of ink in that room.
I thanked moderately and got out of the armored car.
The soldiers waved their hands.
They were warm-hearted people.
However, I have to walk quite a distance to get to my shelter.
I didn’t want Minhee Woo to know my location, so I walked 12km away and contacted her.
Should I have done it at 3km distance?
However, there is one corner to believe in recently.
“Do you have a defender brother?”
“The ribs I gave you before were delicious. It was so delicious that you wouldn’t know even if two of you ate and killed three of them.”
“I’ll tell you where I am, so can you scout the area?”
“I~.”
With the support of my defender brother, I arrived at my realm by walking on a desolate road.
As always, the dreary yet friendly scenery.
I opened the door to the shelter and went in and lay down on the mattress.
“・・・・・Whoa.”
It seems like a lot has happened, but when I get home, I don’t remember anything, like sand slipping through my fingers.
If I were to narrow it down, it would have been nice to wake up from bed bathed in the sunlight in the morning.
I was thinking of going online for a while, but I lay there for over 30 minutes in a daze and didn’t do anything.
What made me stand up was the K-walkie-talkie ringtone.
Personal Identification Number: REDMASK
This is Minhee Woo.
Why did she contact me when she couldn’t even peep her nose in Incheon?
Should I not be contacted? I thought about it for a while, but eventually got up and listened to the walkie-talkie.
“Are you Minhee Woo?”
“senior!”
Woo Min-hee’s voice was overflowing with, to say the least, unsettling energy.
“Jang Ki-young said it!”
“what?”
“Before he died, he had a sudden seizure and was peeing and pooping, and even in the middle of the fuss, he shouted his senior call sign! Professor! Professor! Called!”
Explaining the situation at the time in a tone full of ridicule and contempt from Woo Min-hee would have an unfair side to my teacher.
I have many flaws, but my gift is not someone that Woo Min-hee will carelessly evaluate.
I tried to reconstruct the end of the gift in my own way.
Jang Ki-young, who was sitting like a still life, was seated on a reversible chair that could be used as a surgical chair and bed, and then inserted a needle into his vein and let the deadly drug flow.
Until then, my teacher had been staring blankly ahead like a dead person, motionless.
It was when the venom that flowed through the tube reached the heart and tried to stop the heartbeat.
My teacher lightly tore off the restraints made of leather and iron that restrained him and jumped up from his seat.
People gather around them with electric batons or firearms.
They looked at my teacher with a worried gaze in preparation for any unsavory situation, but my teacher was looking at a different landscape than the research institute.
In fact, the school he built, the shabby mortuary built next to it, and I see myself playing with a pen in agony inside the mortuary.
And finally, I saw the four syllable words written in the guestbook.
Feeling an unknown impulse, my gift roared like a tiger.
“Professor!”
I reached out and picked up the notebook thrown on the corner of the mattress.
In the notebook left by the teacher, plans such as countermeasures for each type of monster, strategy for each type, position, and more effective weapons were written.
To be honest, it’s something that can’t be used in practice.
A lot of it is overly flashy and meaningless.
The more I turned the page, the more questions I got.
How did you write down your outdated and unrealistic imaginations on every page?
It made me laugh that this kind of person taught us.
Is that why?
Jang Ki-young forced us to be perfect.
He treats his students so harshly and injects them with the word perfection because he knows he needs the best actors and artists to bring his vague imagination into reality.
But his imagination was too weak to contain reality.
Who would have known.
To think that Kang Min, whom he saw as the most insignificant tool, would change the entire frame of the world.
On the other hand, it is an objective fact that I, Park Kyu, is the tool that best expresses Jang Ki-young’s absurd imagination.
As if proving that fact, the last page depicted a weapon that connected him and me.
It is the cutting edge ax conceived by Jang Ki-young.
“No, Instructor.”
Unknowingly, I found him.
Ironically, there was a propelling rocket attached to the tip of the axe.
[Rocket Propelled Striking Power Attachment]
Could it be that he was inspired by robot animations that were popular in his childhood?
I looked at the ax quietly, feeling the smile on my lips naturally at the innocence of the teacher.
“?”
Something feels out of place.
On the part of the handle that had been shaded black, the shade suddenly disappeared as if it had been cut out.
Looking closely, there was something attached to the missing shade.
tried to take it off
It is not ordinary paper.
It’s a psychological test.
The black paper that Suu and I put side by side on the wall.
However, the color of this test paper is unfamiliar.
white, not black.
It is also pure white.
I remembered what the instructor’s daughter had said.
Did you say black – blue – red – gray – white?
hundred.
it’s white
It was also sadly pale white.
“…”
I closed the notebook and thought about the end of my gift again.
In the harsh experiment he proposed, Jang Ki-young was chosen by God.
Like Kang Min-min or Na Ye-won, with insight that penetrates all things.
In that moment, Jang Ki-young realized everything.
Your own great success and your unavoidable dark fate.
He must have known that he would not be able to escape from the test subject, whether the results were good or bad.
But now Jang Ki-young has the power to overcome the situation.
With the power given to him by the gods, he was able to break the restraints and give a sharp lesson to the disciple who despises him.
I know he doesn’t want to make that choice.
He is a soldier and a patriot, and he is as harsh with himself as he is with others.
He probably waited for the promised disposition in silence so as not to hurt the Republic of Korea he was trying to protect.
That decision would not have been so easy to carry through.
He knew his daughter was out in the hallway waiting for him to call her name.
Until the last moment, Jang Ki-young was torn between his duty as a soldier and his personal desires.
His anger at Min-hee Woo and the member of the National Assembly behind her must have had a significant impact on his judgment.
In the end, what my teacher chose was passive resistance – a quiet death.
I honestly don’t know why he called my callsign in the end.
What is the reason for calling my call sign, not my daughter, wife, Kang Min-min, or my name?
After a long thought, I came up with a reason, albeit clumsily.
Maybe it was because he was trying to give his favorite disciple the last lesson.
“Professor!”
To let you know that there is an adverb “yet” before us, the unchosen ones.
*
I had a dream that night.
In my black-and-white dream, I was a teenager with freshness remaining, and the gift in front of me also remained young in my 30s.
“Park Gyu! This is how the ax is used!”
I sparred madly with my teacher.
To the extent that the whole body drains away.
I chased the trails that were difficult for the eyes to follow, blocked the attack, and counterattacked in a similar way.
“short break!”
Jang Ki-young, who possesses inexhaustible energy like in the past, left me gasping for breath and turned her head to the side.
A clear rage flashed in his tiger-like eyes.
“Kang Han-min! what are you doing!”
Jang Ki-young looked at me again.
he smiled