Midterms

“No! Let this one goooo!”

The Tiger Clan’s youngest princess, her limbs restrained, struggled wildly while hanging in midair.
It took no less than three shamanesses clinging to her to hold her down, but as expected of one who had inherited the White Tiger’s blood, In-woo was strong.

“Let goooo!”
“Princess! It is time for you to return now!”
“Didn’t I say nooooo!”
“Kyaak!”
“Put in a little more strength!”

The shamanesses strained as they held onto In-woo’s arms and legs.
Anyone who saw it would think they were trying to cage a dangerous wild beast.

‘Even so, isn’t grabbing a child by all four limbs and lifting her like that a bit much?’

You could not really judge a Spiritual Creature’s true age by its appearance, but since she had only recently recovered from being weakened by otherworldly energy, it still seemed too much, so Ro-un spoke up.

“Um,”
“Saint!”
“Kyaaaak!”

The moment she heard Ro-un’s voice, In-woo thrashed even harder.

“Saint! Please step back! The princess is getting even more agitated!”
“…I’m sorry.”

The princess really is healthy.
Feeling like a red cloth provoking a bull, Ro-un backed away again.
Once Ro-un was out of sight, the princess seemed to calm down a little.

“Now!”

At the shout of the shamaness acting as their leader, the others hurriedly shoved In-woo into the car.

Kaaah!

The sound of In-woo thrashing around came from inside the car.
It felt like he had just watched a wild animal being captured.
As Ro-un blinked, the man he had seen at the Association bowed his head to Ho-yeon, who had been watching with his arms crossed.

“I will escort the princess back and then return.”
“Yeah. Good work.”

Ho-yeon waved a hand as he sent the princess off.
He had thought from the moment he saw him at the Association that the man was no ordinary person. So he was the king’s close aide.
Ro-un watched the car drive off the moment the envoy got into the passenger seat, impressed.

Benefactoooor…!

It almost sounded as though In-woo’s voice calling for him could still be heard from the retreating car.
They had exchanged numbers, so even if In-woo returned to Inwang Mountain, they would still be able to message each other.

‘Wait, but why am I already thinking about messaging the Tiger Clan’s princess?’

Realizing he had almost started building familiarity with her without thinking, Ro-un turned his head to the side.
Baek Ho-yeon, having sent the princess off, looked extremely refreshed.

“Hoo. Honestly, I wonder who she takes after to be that stubborn. I wasn’t like that at her age.”

Looking at the tiger who had suddenly become the new chairman and left his own territory to stick himself here, he thought he had a pretty good idea who she took after.
Ro-un kept his mouth firmly shut.
When he quietly turned his head, someone else spoke.

“We should be going now too.”
“Hngh.”

The child in Yong Chang-jin’s arms whined.
Ah. This side was leaving today too.
Just as multiple beings had arrived at Jiri Academy all at once, they were also leaving all at once.
The white-haired child lifted his head and reached a hand toward Ro-un.

“Hiiii.”
“You know I can’t leave you here alone without Mugi.”
“Hiiiing.”

The child whined.
The princess had been the same, and it seemed the baby dragon didn’t want to leave either.

“No.”

At Yong Chang-jin’s firm words, the child buried his face into his shoulder.
As if realizing he couldn’t persuade the stubborn dragon, the child only peeked his eyes out and looked up at Yong Chang-jin.

“……”
“……”

For a moment, the child and Baekdu Academy’s chairman stared into each other’s eyes as if sharing some wordless exchange.
Could dragons communicate just through eye contact?
Ro-un blinked, once again struck by the strange wonder of beings you would normally only see in myths.
Of the two dragons silently exchanging looks, the older one was the first to look away.

“All right. Just this once.”

Even a being recorded in myth apparently couldn’t beat his own child in the end.

‘Or maybe Yong Chang-jin is simply an unusually family-oriented dragon, even among dragons.’

When he talked about his mate too, he’d gone on about black and beautiful scales and all that.
No, dragons were supposed to be more independent than any other beings, but maybe that wasn’t always true.
As Ro-un looked at Yong Chang-jin in a slightly peculiar way, his gaze suddenly met the dragon’s.

“?”
“The child says there’s something he still hasn’t said.”
“To me?”

So that whispering was about this?
Ro-un looked at the child in Yong Chang-jin’s arms, whose eyes were shining brightly.
The child, finally meeting Ro-un’s eyes, beamed.
As if infected by that smile, the corners of Ro-un’s lips lifted too.

“Yu-jeong.”
“Pardon?”
“The child’s name. It’s Yong Yu-jeong. He insisted on telling you his name.”
“Ah.”

So it’s Yu-jeong.
Now that he finally knew the child’s name, Ro-un looked at the pretty white-haired child.

“Hi.”
“Yeah. Hi. Let’s meet again next time, Yu-jeong. We’ll have even more fun then.”
“Hi!”

The child nodded vigorously as if to say he understood.

“Then we’ll be off.”
“Hiii!”
“Please go safely.”
“The transfer offer still stands. Think it over carefully until we meet again.”
“Hey now. Don’t go trying to smear that fishy smell around here. Shoo. Get going.”

Baek Ho-yeon flapped a hand and shooed Yong Chang-jin away.
The more he saw that tiger, the less dignified he seemed.

‘Is that why he never left his territory?’

A reasonable suspicion arose that the Tiger Clan had maintained its closed-off stance in order to hide how childish their king was.
Ignoring the two immature Divine Beasts, Ro-un waved his hand and saw the child off.

‘If it hadn’t been for the princess and Yu-jeong, I wouldn’t have gotten either the way to clear the Gokseong passage or that old tome.’

Thinking of the two new numbers added to his contacts, Ro-un decided it had indeed been a good idea to exchange numbers.
If a message came, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to reply at least once…?
Ro-un, who had kept waving until they disappeared from sight, suddenly came to his senses.

‘But why did they call me out here just because they were leaving?’

No, it’s not strange. I could at least see them off.
It’s not like they were using the children as bait to try to tempt me until the very end.

‘Nah. No way.’

A famous Divine Beast wouldn’t really try to lure a human in by putting forward his young child, would he?
With that faint suspicion erased, Ro-un turned and headed toward the library.

The day had come.
The kids with no intention of studying for exams made their way toward the classroom, giggling among themselves.

“Just sit there, come back out, and class is over. Long live exam week.”
“If getting an F didn’t mean retaking the class, I’d skip the exams too.”
“Want to head down below for the first time in a while after the exam?”
“We went down there yesterday.”
“Exactly. It’s been twenty-four hours.”
“True. That does make it a while.”
“Smart bastard. You didn’t secretly study for the exam by yourself, did you?”

One of the snickering students at the front opened the door.

“Hehehe. Even if I don’t study a thiiiing, hiiiiik!”
“What the, whyuuugh!”
“What’s wrong with all of you, kiaaaak!”

The students entering the classroom recoiled in horror when they saw inside.
They all bunched together into one terrified clump.
Someone sitting alone in the otherwise empty classroom lifted his head at the sound of people arriving.
At the familiar face, the students asked in trembling voices.

“Pr, pr, pr, president?”
“Why are you here, President— no, what’s going on?”

Lee Ro-un tilted his head with a stiff little motion as if he had heard something strange.
In the unlit classroom, seeing Ro-un act nothing like the president they knew, the students silently freaked out.

‘Why has he gotten even scarier in the time we haven’t seen him?’
‘They said the president changed like he became a completely different person after the entrance ceremony.’
‘Don’t tell me… possession?’
‘What kind of lunatic ghost would even possess the president’s body?’

Suspicion began to gather in the students’ eyes at the sight of the student council president’s drastic change.
As each of them started preparing to ward off a ghost — one quietly tracing a cross with his fingers, another pulling anti-otherworld-resident items from his inventory, and yet another somehow producing salt from who knew where — Ro-un spoke.

“Pyo Seon-woo. Hwang Yu-jun. Go Hae-sol. Sit.”
“Yes, sir!”
“I was just about to sit down, President.”
“I-I’m already sitting.”
“…That fast bastard.”
“As expected of someone with an Agility trait.”

The students moved with unnerving speed under Ro-un’s gaze and sat down.
Judging by how their bodies reacted automatically when Ro-un called their names, the person sitting there really was the president.
If they’d known this would happen, they never would have come early.

“Ah. And one more thing.”

Flinch!

At Ro-un’s words, not yet finished, his classmates’ backs snapped straight.
Their stiffened bodies waited for Ro-un’s command like well-trained puppies.

“Call me Lee Ro-un, not President.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Yes, understood.”
“Understood, Lee Ro-un!”
“Lee Ro-un.”
“Yes! Lee Ro-un!”

The students, full of forced discipline, maintained their posture through gritted teeth and stared anxiously at the second hand of the clock.

‘Please, time, hurry up and move!’

While they all thought the same thing, more students began filing in one by one.
The other students, who had shown up for the exam simply to avoid an F, first jolted in shock at Ro-un’s presence just like the earlier ones, and then stiffened and sat down at their desks.

Slide.

“R-right, the exaaauh!”

The teacher who entered to proctor the exam clutched at his chest when he saw Ro-un sitting squarely in the front seat of the classroom.

“Ro, Ro, Ro, Ro-un?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here, no. That is your seat, but after not showing up all this time…”
“I still have to take the exam.”
“R-right. Of course. You still have to take the exam.”

The teacher walked up to the podium with a hand still pressed to his chest.
The students gave the startled teacher sympathetic looks, as if to say they understood exactly how he felt.

‘Sir. I understand exactly how you feel.’
‘We thought we were seeing a ghost.’
‘I didn’t study, but even if I had, I would’ve forgotten it all just now.’

Expecting the worst, the students picked up their markers.

“B-begin.”

The midterms, which had been held over five days, came to an end.
The students who shared classes with Lee Ro-un had unintentionally experienced hell.

“…Uuugh.”
“I survived.”
“The culprit… is the pre… sident.”
“……”

They had only planned to breeze through by filling in random answers, and of all things they had ended up taking the exams with the president.

‘He’d been skipping classes, and there were rumors he was dropping out soon, so I thought he wouldn’t even take the exams.’
‘I wanted to skip.’
‘I was afraid he’d come drag me back if I skipped, so I couldn’t even do that.’
‘Practical training would’ve been way better than this.’

Students from other classes, seeing them stagger and crawl out of the classroom, flinched and turned away.
The very person who had plunged his classmates into hell remained alone in the classroom, checking his scores.

“…The ones I got wrong before, I handled properly this time, and the rest all came from things I already knew, so I think I did well.”

This exam seemed satisfactory.
Ro-un leaned back in his chair with a refreshed expression.
It was the first time in a while he had felt this satisfied.
After the second-year midterms, incidents had started blowing up one after another, and he had spent all his time running around to deal with them, so he barely remembered what he had learned or even how he had taken later exams.
The one thing he did remember was that the number of students had dropped sharply the higher the year went.

“This isn’t the time to be sitting around.”

He had unintentionally lost time to studying for the exams, so he needed to hurry on to the next step in his plan.
He needed to go to the chairman right now and get the consent form.

“It’s the kind of test that gets graded right away, so the scores should already be out. A Divine Beast of all things wouldn’t go back on his own words.”

…He wouldn’t, right?
There was technically an objection period, but there was no one in this academy who would bother filing one.
No one had suddenly gotten their act together and started studying just because he had regressed, so the rankings should be exactly the same as before the regression.
When Ro-un opened the grade check page, the scores appeared immediately, just as expected from an automatically graded system.

“[History of the Otherworld War] is 100, [Introduction to Otherworld Passages] is 100….”

After that, the 100s just kept coming.
Good. His scores had gone up compared to before the regression, so there was no way his rank would change because of this.
Having checked his grades as well, Ro-un rose from his seat feeling light.

“Then I should go see the chairman right away.”

Finally!
He was escaping this wretched academy.
With the exhilarating feeling of leaving behind this prison-like place that kept him confined, Ro-un strode out of the classroom.

Vrrr!

“Lee Ro-un!”
“Ah.”

Someone was standing in front of the door.
It was Cheon Su-ho.

‘So after the princess and Yu-jeong, now it’s this guy.’

Seeing the guy standing in front of the door with the delighted face of a dog waiting for its owner to come home, Ro-un frowned.
For some reason, Ro-un had the absurd illusion of perky puppy ears and a tail spinning rapidly in front of his eyes.

“Lee Ro-un. Did the exam go well?”
“More or less.”

After saying something every student in the country would have risen up and called deceitful, Lee Ro-un quietly tried to slip past him, but Cheon Su-ho blocked him with uncanny speed.

“Lee Ro-un. I have something to show you.”
“Yeah. Later. I need to go somewhere right now.”
“Look at this first!”

Faced with the large frame blocking his way even though he had somewhere urgent to be, Ro-un glared at Cheon Su-ho with an irritated look.

“Why do you keep blocking me?”
“Lee Ro-un, I have something to show you!”
“No, what is it you keep telling me to lo—”

Cheon Su-ho popped a hologram up right in front of Ro-un’s face.
Ro-un’s eyes, reading the hologram window in front of him almost without thinking, suddenly widened into circles.

“What.”

At the familiar number, Ro-un reached out as if he might crumple the hologram itself.
The hologram window actually wavered for a moment under Ro-un’s grip before snapping back into clarity.

[Midterm Exam Results]
[1st. Lee Ro-un]
⋮
[10th. Cheon Su-ho]

‘Cheon Su-ho got 10th?!’

Ro-un looked up at Cheon Su-ho with a stunned expression at the rank he had clawed his way up to from the depths.

“So now you’ll come to the passage with me?”

Cheon Su-ho looked at Lee Ro-un with the guileless smile of a country mutt.