Chapter 189: Daily Life (2)

TL: SHW

Kang Tae-woo sometimes, no, actually quite often envied Lee Seung-yeon.

He took everything in stride with a smile and approached other people with ease, without ever considering that someone might push him away. Even if something upset him, he never dwelled on it for long. He quickly brushed it off and thought about what came next.

There were plenty of other reasons Kang Tae-woo envied Lee Seung-yeon, but the thing he envied most was probably.

‘I'll just do better next time!’

That hopelessly carefree optimism.

A person whose most serious worry in life had been, at worst, a fight between friends.

‘What if there is no next time?’

Finding that irritating, Tae-woo had deliberately asked him once, only for an answer to come back immediately, without even a pretense of thought.

‘Then just do it again.’

Kang Tae-woo, who had never once been given a chance to ‘try again’ in life, found Lee Seung-yeon's words difficult to understand.

Lee Seung-yeon probably could not understand Kang Tae-woo either. Thinking that… somehow made his irritation flare even more.

‘You don't know whether you'll get to keep doing it or not.’

‘Hey. Why are you so gloomy?’

‘What did I….’

‘If it looks like there won't be a next time, just try something else! There are so many fun things in life. Why would you only do one?’

In other words, Lee Seung-yeon did not even realize that he could say things like that precisely because he was what people called a kid from a well-off family.

Lee Seung-yeon had clearly noticed that Tae-woo was getting irritated. He might have been carefree, but he was not oblivious.

Even so, Lee Seung-yeon kept smiling brightly and saying things that drove the listener up the wall.

‘If you keep doing that, eventually you'll figure out what you're good at.’

‘…….’

‘No, wait. You can just keep doing what you're already good at. Something it feels like nobody but you could do!’

Easy for him to say.

Tae-woo nearly snapped something sharp back at him, but forced himself to swallow it. Lee Seung-yeon had probably said it because he genuinely meant it.

There was no malice behind it. Lee Seung-yeon really was saying those things because he wanted to encourage him. By now, Kang Tae-woo knew Lee Seung-yeon well enough to tell that much.

‘Hey. Look at me. Honestly, I'm not particularly good at anything either, but I'm still doing something.’

‘Hyung, you….’

A movie he had seen at the research institute came to mind.

Having money was a talent too. Whether that money belonged to one's grandfather or one's parents.

Having lived at the research institute and the Orphanage, Kang Tae-woo had learned the realities of life early. If he had enough money….

At the same time, Kang Tae-woo was not the sort of boy who dreamed about impossible realities. Completely unaware of what Tae-woo was thinking, Lee Seung-yeon rolled a ballpoint pen between his fingers and stuck his lips out like a duck's bill.

‘And I think you did have talent. Otherwise, there's no way Mr. Woo would've gone out of his way to look after just you. Did you know? I was insanely jealous of you.’

‘…Me? Why?’

‘Because I wanted to be a Hunter!’

Apparently something about that statement struck Lee Seung-yeon as hilarious again, because he laughed until he was nearly out of breath.

Kang Tae-woo still could not understand Lee Seung-yeon.

Why was I here doing this again? His Awakening had been an accident, and the only reason he had called Woo Hwijae afterward was because the director of the Orphanage had told him to.

Come to think of it, Mr. Woo must have recognized me from the beginning…. He must have given me his phone number on purpose too.

An ordinary kid might have been hurt, but Kang Tae-woo simply accepted it. He thought he would have done the same thing in Woo Hwijae's place. If anything, Woo Hwijae had still protected him even after what had happened to the Orphanage. There was such a thing as being too nice. If I'd had bad intentions….

Kang Tae-woo thought of the principal and Lee Seung-yeon's aunt.

Those two would've stepped in before I could even do anything. Who am I to worry about anyone?

In any case, Kang Tae-woo's plans for the future had never included becoming a Hunter, or even Awakening in the first place. So once again, he could not understand Lee Seung-yeon's desire to become a Hunter.

‘You could die if you become a Hunter.’

‘That's what's romantic about it!’

‘…….’

Why that was supposed to be romantic was yet another thing Kang Tae-woo could not understand.

Were rich kids just like this? There had been a clique at the high school he attended during his Orphanage days who made it fairly obvious they had money. But even they had never said things like that.

Any active Hunter who actually risked their life raiding dungeons would have been horrified to hear it. Lee Seung-yeon finally seemed to notice the appalled look on Tae-woo's face and scratched his head awkwardly.

‘No, that's not what I meant.’

‘Then what?’

‘It's something I can accomplish entirely through my own effort. Without help from my parents or anything. Depending on whether I work hard or not….’

‘It looks like you're already getting a lot of help from Hunter Lee Mi-seon.’

‘Ah, don't hit me where it hurts!’

‘And does it have to be becoming a Hunter?’

‘Huh?’

‘There's nothing in the world you can get without putting in effort.’

Though there were things he could not get even if he put in the effort. Kang Tae-woo fiddled with the bracelet around his wrist.

Lee Seung-yeon did not deny what Kang Tae-woo had said.

‘Right. That's why I wanted to find out how far I could get through my own effort.’

Kang Tae-woo looked at Lee Seung-yeon with an expression that hovered somewhere between understanding and not. He really did not mesh with this hyung. Their personalities, or….

No. Whatever else, I should at least be honest with myself.

Kang Tae-woo envied Lee Seung-yeon. He envied that carefree personality most of all, but still… more than anything, he envied the kind of environment that had allowed him to grow up with a personality like that. It was jealousy.

Because Tae-woo himself still remembered receiving his mother's love and support, however briefly. He found himself thinking that someone who had steadily received the love that had only brushed past him would naturally grow up to be like that.

Well.

It was all in the past.

Nothing was more foolish than clinging to something that could never be changed….

“Aaagh!”

Bang!

“Seung-yeon. You think that's enough to break the desk? You need to slam your head harder.”

Park Seo-hyun, who had been gnawing at the tip of her pencil, murmured quietly.

Her soft voice landed clearly in his ears.

“If you're going to crack your head open anyway, go outside and do it. It'll be a hassle if you get hurt inside the house.”

Sun Sun-jin followed up bluntly.

“Could you keep it down? You're being noisy.”

Han Eun-young spoke coldly as well.

“Umm, if you're feeling cooped up, go take a walk or something.”

Yoo Hye-eun gently shooed him out.

Lee Seung-yeon tugged at his short hair before throwing down his pencil.

“Why do we have to do this?!”

The pencil Lee Seung-yeon had thrown rolled across his workbook. The kids, huddled around a large low table in the living room solving problems from their workbooks, lifted their heads one by one, every face hollow-eyed.

The girls had at least remained relatively composed. The ones who put down their pencils like Lee Seung-yeon were the boys.

Kang Tae-woo shrugged and continued grading. Circle. Circle. Ah, this one's wrong.

“Hunters only need to be good at fighting, don't they?!”

“Mr. Woo said it himself. You fight with your head.”

Seo Han-seong answered. He looked just as fed up as everyone else, but he had at least kept his eyes on the workbook he was solving. Lee Seung-yeon's head shot up as he stared at Seo Han-seong.

“That's not the kind of head he meant!!”

A red rain had fallen across Lee Seung-yeon's math workbook. Even with such a disastrous result shoved right in front of him, Seo Han-seong only laughed. Kang Tae-woo glanced at Seo Han-seong's graded pages. He had gotten so few questions wrong that they could be counted on one hand.

“How are we supposed to decide that?”

“No, you can tell just by looking, just by looking! Why the hell would you need calculus to kill monsters!! Where are we ever going to use this?!”

“…Getting into college?”

Seo Han-seong answered in a somewhat deflated voice. Lee Seung-yeon's head whipped toward him. Seo Han-seong spoke indifferently.

“You're going to start a Guild, aren't you? If you want to do that, it'd probably be better to graduate from college like your aunt did.”

“Seo Han-seong's right. I looked into it last time, and if you start a Guild, there are all kinds of things you have to deal with.”

The one who spoke after Seo Han-seong was Oh Hyun-wook, who, like Lee Seung-yeon, had tossed aside his pencil and sprawled out on the floor.

Lee Seung-yeon sneaked a look at Oh Hyun-wook's workbook. Hyun-wook had gotten plenty wrong too, but still fewer than he had. Lee Seung-yeon shouted indignantly.

“You can just hire people to do all that!”

“Hiring people isn't that simple either. How do you know what they'll do behind your back? If you don't want to get scammed, you need to know a lot yourself.”

“What are you talking about? I heard the more educated you are, the more likely you are to get scammed.”

“Oh. So you're going to settle for being a middle school graduate?”

“That's one hell of an excuse…. You're saying you'll stay a middle school graduate so you don't get scammed?”

“Hey, Hyun-wook…. When you put it like that, you make me sound like an actual idiot and weirdo.”

“Aren't you? If you're going to yap, go outside and yap! Stop distracting me!”

In the end, Park Seo-hyun snapped in irritation.

Only then did Lee Seung-yeon glance around cautiously and grin sheepishly. That seemed to annoy Park Seo-hyun even more, and she scowled deeply.

Park Seo-hyun pointed at Kang Tae-woo with the tip of her pencil.

“You study quietly like him. You know your grades are even worse than his, right?”

“Hey, Tae-woo was still going to school until recently!”

“What are you… You make it sound like you didn't go to school. I heard the teacher tutoring us now used to be your private tutor.”

“Honestly, after I got into Pilot High School, I thought I'd never have to see that tutor again.”

Lee Seung-yeon laughed with an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. It was obvious he was only doing it because he did not want to study, so no one paid him much attention.

Having finished grading, Kang Tae-woo put down the red colored pencil. Maybe because he still had the foundations from when he had studied diligently, his scores had not dropped as much as he had feared, even though he had done no studying at all for the past few months.

No, should I stop calling them scores now and call it GED prep instead….

Eventually, starting with Lee Seung-yeon, everyone took their eyes off their workbooks. They had spent more than half a year living with regular academics completely on the back burner, studying things like Mana Control and Dungeon Raiding Strategy instead, so none of them found it easy to adjust now that they were actually trying to study ordinary subjects again.

Kang Tae-woo, who had awkwardly kept his pencil in hand until the very end, eventually gave in to Lee Seung-yeon's not-quite-pestering and decided to enjoy a brief break.

“But didn't they say we'd be recognized as a school? Then we don't really need to take the GED, do we?”

“Your aunt said it herself. Even so, we need to know the basics…. We can't help getting private tutoring here for now, but she said we'll study this stuff at school later too, didn't she?”

“What? Seriously? My aunt said that?”

“Even if it is a school, they can't teach us nothing but monsters and dungeons…. What were you even listening to when they explained all this?”

“They said they'd have us take the college entrance exam too. I don't know about everything else, but they said we have to do Korean, English, and math.”

“Honestly, I can see the point of Korean and English, but math… I don't know. Do we really need it?”

“You'll need it to know how many monsters you killed.”

“That's not math. That's basic arithmetic.”

The conversation was mostly pointless, but unlike the other kids, Kang Tae-woo knew exactly why the adults were making them study.

It was not because someone had told Kang Tae-woo, nor because Kang Tae-woo was unusually quick on the uptake.

‘I agree that we shouldn't just let the kids play around, but…. The GED? Is that really necessary?’

‘Maybe they don't need it right now, but… no. We don't know what might happen in the future. One of them might decide they don't want to become a Hunter.’

‘Hmm, well. I suppose that's possible.’

It was simply because he had secretly overheard Woo Hwijae and Lee Mi-seon talking.

Though Woo Hwijae had probably noticed that Tae-woo was listening anyway.

***

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