The Academy’s Unrivaled Professor - Chapter 12

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Academy Absolute Professor Episode 12
Drain the festering wound cleanly
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Gwak Do-jin’s body twisted abruptly as he moved toward them, his expression hardening.
‘Damn it.’
The aftereffects of the Horseback Riding Stance.
His lower body muscles were shredded; even walking was agony.
“Senior!”
Baek Yu-yeon cried out in alarm.
“How did you find this place?”
Hwang Min-woo stepped in front of her, a smirk playing at his lips.
“Hey, hey. Mad dog. You need to calm down.”
“You bastard…….”
“Why, hit me again? Take another Disciplinary Action? Do you know it’s because of me you only got Grade Retention and not expelled?”
“You! You!”
Up on the Rooftop, Kang Hyeon watched this unfold with interest.
So Gwak Do-jin was well-behaved until second year, they said?
Judging by the look of it, there was some tangled history between these three.
“Disciplinary Action? Fine, you punk. Let’s see you try giving me another one.”
As Gwak Do-jin charged forward like a raging bull, Hwang Min-woo flinched and stumbled backward, cowed by the momentum.
“This lunatic’s actually lost it.”
“Senior! Please stop!”
It was Baek Yu-yeon who cut off his advance.
“Why are you always like this, senior?”
“What?”
“Whatever I’m doing here has nothing to do with you. It’s my business—I’ll handle it myself. Don’t interfere.”
At the sharp edge in Baek Yu-yeon’s voice, Gwak Do-jin’s footsteps halted abruptly.
He knew better than anyone that her fists were trembling slightly.
“You hear that, mad dog? Learn to read the room, you——”
“Be quiet, Hwang Min-woo.”
Baek Yu-yeon’s gaze turned cold upon him.
“Watch your tongue with senior. If I keep seeing that attitude, my desire to sign that Contract is going to disappear.”
“Ah, fine. I get it. Senior Gwak. My sincere apologies?”
Hwang Min-woo bowed his head perfunctorily, then gave Baek Yu-yeon a meaningful look.
A signal to move elsewhere.
After a moment’s hesitation, Baek Yu-yeon turned sharply and vanished from the spot.
Gwak Do-jin watched her go, grinding his teeth, his mouth opening to say something before he thought better of it.
Then.
“Aaaaaagh!”
Bang! Crack!
He howled like a beast and slammed his bare fists against the wall.
Passing cadets grimaced and gave him a wide berth—a sight they’d grown accustomed to.
Just the mad dog doing mad dog things, it seemed.
Behind his back came the light sound of someone landing softly.
“……!”
Gwak Do-jin spun around in surprise, and a familiar face thrust a Whiskey Bottle toward him.
“Care for a drink?”

* * *
The two of them sat in the Alley, each with a bottle, drinking straight from the neck.
Kang Hyeon knew how to release his Qi gradually while drinking, but Gwak Do-jin was drunk in minutes.
“Damn it, damn it!”
He gulped down drink after drink.
Did Gwak Do-jin know this bottle cost five hundred thousand won?
Normally he would have let it slide.
He believed that kids’ problems were better left to the kids themselves rather than adults poking their noses in.
‘Except.’
When Baek Yu-yeon was involved, everything changed.
Especially when she was on the verge of signing some strange Contract.
“Kid, that girl. You like her?”
“……That’s not what happened.”
“Then what?”
“There’s nothing for you to know, Professor.”
Gwak Do-jin replied curtly and raised the bottle to his lips again.
Gulp, gulp.
“Nothing to know, true enough. I don’t care who you run with or whether you’re kowtowing to some two-bit thug.”
“……I didn’t kowtow!”
Gwak Do-jin bristled.
“No? Then what was I watching earlier? You threw a punch like your hands were shaking, couldn’t even extend it properly.”
“That was……!”
Kang Hyeon deliberately provoked him.
The intention was to scratch at the wounds he’d buried so deep they’d come pouring out.
‘Get drunk. Vomit it all out.’
Wounds don’t heal when you hide them.
They fester when you hide them.
Festering wounds rot from the inside out, and eventually they destroy a person entirely.
So just tear it open.
Turn yourself inside out, squeeze out the pus, spill the blood — drain the rot first.
Only then will something else grow in that empty space, won’t it?
“If you’re scared, don’t bark. And if you bark but can’t bite, that makes you a mad dog? No — a worthless mongrel.”
“You think I don’t bite because I don’t know how?”
“Isn’t that what I thought?”
“If I bite, Yu-yeon gets hurt! That’s why I don’t!”
Gwak Do-jin was so overwhelmed with emotion he could barely speak, but in that one outcry, something in his chest cracked open, and he felt it ease slightly.
Once the dam broke, he wanted to let more spill out.
“Hwang Min-woo is the firstborn son of the Tae-wang Guild Master.”
“The Tae-wang Guild?”
“You don’t know it?”
“I don’t.”
……
Gwak Do-jin stared at him as if wondering what kind of professor this was.
The Tae-wang Guild wasn’t one of the top three or even major-tier, but no Hunter could be unaware of it.
“A year ago, we had a Dungeon Practical Training.”
A Demonic Beast’s aggro drew toward Yu-yeon, and Gwak Do-jin threw his body in front of her to save her.
But later, when the full story came out?
It was Hwang Min-woo’s doing.
He’d harbored an unrequited obsession with Yu-yeon, made a public confession, and when she rejected him, he did it out of spite.
“The bastard.”
“Exactly. A bastard.”
Crunch.
Gwak Do-jin ground his teeth.
“So I beat the life out of him without thinking twice.”
“Good.”
“Good? What’s good about it?”
Gwak Do-jin choked back emotion and poured the liquor down his throat.
“I almost got expelled because of it!”
That was how the whole mess began.
After that day, Gwak Do-jin was referred for disciplinary action on charges of assaulting a fellow student, with expulsion hearing looming.
He’d fought back hard, naturally, but the Tae-wang Guild had already bought off several professors.
“That’s when I learned the truth about the world. It’s a rotten place where money-soaked thugs with connections thrive while decent people get crushed.”
That must have been when it started.
The moment Gwak Do-jin began to unravel.
Kang Hyeon drank in silence.
‘Ah. So that’s it.’
Every time he’d seen Gwak Do-jin, something had felt off—like a man wearing clothes that didn’t fit him, barking in a voice not his own.
Not a true thug, but someone imitating a third-rate one.
Kang Hyeon had rolled through the Martial World and seen countless wretches.
Real bastards who’d cut throats and laugh about it.
You know what set them apart?
They never bare their fangs in front of someone stronger.
If they think they’re going to die, they piss themselves, grovel, and run.
That’s the true nature of garbage.
‘But.’
Gwak Do-jin was different.
Even with killing intent that felt like his neck would be severed, he crawled across the ground and crossed the line.
Real garbage could never pull off something like that.
He was just wounded, crying out for someone to look at him.
The problem was that no adult was there to set him straight.
“Ugh, the whiskey tastes bitter.”
Gwak Do-jin’s voice trembled finely as he drained the bottle.
“I know. I know why I haven’t been expelled. It’s because of Yu-yeon. That fool…….”
Gwak Do-jin’s fist clenched tight.
“She was about to ruin her own life saving me, so she begged in front of that garbage Hwang Min-woo. She asked him not to expel me.”
“…….”
“That bastard was thrilled when a woman who never looked at him got down on her knees, and he’s been squeezing and shaking Yu-yeon all year because of it.”
Gwak Do-jin felt relief wash over him with bitter honesty.
At the fact that he wouldn’t be expelled.
“I have no parents. I was raised by my grandmother from childhood.”
Kang Hyeon felt kinship in that detail.
He too had no parents and had been raised by elderly relatives since childhood.
“My grandmother dedicated her whole life to raising me, selling greens at the market. When I got into this Academy, she threw a celebration all through the neighborhood, weeping with joy. Our Do-jin’s going to be a Hunter now, she said, and he’ll give us a comfortable life.”
Drip, drip-drip.
Finally, tears streamed from Gwak Do-jin’s eyes.
“How do I tell her I got expelled for beating a classmate? What excuse do I make—that I was unfairly driven out because I had no backing?”
What had bound Gwak Do-jin in the end was the people who loved him.
The sacrifice of Baek Yu-yeon, who knelt for his sake.
The expectations of his grandmother, who lived only for him.
“Do you know Professor Hwang Ye-rim? She’s the country’s finest expert in Martial Medicine. Yu-yeon is a prodigy who could become her direct disciple. But……to save just one person—me—she’s about to sign a ten-year slave contract under that bastard Hwang Min-woo’s guild. I found out today! Damn it all—what a fucked-up world this is!”
“The world was always like that.”
In the Martial World too, there were plenty of types like Hwang Min-woo.
Hypocrites wearing the flashy facade of prestigious Orthodox Factions, then binding people with money and power behind closed doors.
Conversely, he’d seen countless ones like Gwak Do-jin—pathetically crying out for justice, crushed and abandoned because they lacked strength.
‘Justice? A nauseating word.’
The world wasn’t corrupt.
It simply moved according to the logic of force.
Powerless justice was always devoured by powerful hypocrisy.
“If you’re bitter about it, become stronger yourself. Why roll around in the mud with them and brag about how dirty you are? Stupid bastard.”
Kang Hyeon rose slowly from his seat.
He brushed the dust from his pants roughly, then snatched the empty Whiskey Bottle from Gwak Do-jin’s hand in one swift motion.
“Wh-what?”
Gwak Do-jin’s eyes, half-dulled by alcohol, followed the gesture blankly.
“Drained it, I see.”
Kang Hyeon clinked his own bottle against Gwak Do-jin’s empty one.
Clink!
The clear glass friction cut through the night air.
“I’ve heard enough of your whining.”
“……I wasn’t whining. I was just feeling wronged.”
“Wronged how? Were you hoping someone would step in and slit that pretty boy’s throat for you?”
Gwak Do-jin’s lips pressed shut.
He’d never hoped for that.
He’d learned bone-deep long ago that nobody in this world would help him.
“Listen good, you mutt.”
Kang Hyeon’s lazy eyes suddenly turned cold as ice.
His heavy voice, tinged with alcohol, fell like a blow against Gwak Do-jin’s ears.
“If you lost something because you were weak, then get it back with your own strength. Today has to be the last day you roll around in the mud barking about how unfair it is.”
“…….”
“And you’re the exception.”
“Pardon?”
What did that mean?
“You can’t miss class anymore. If you don’t show up tomorrow at six in the morning, you’ll die by my hand before that pretty boy ever gets you.”
“……H-hold on, all of a sudden?”
“The price of stealing my expensive whiskey.”
With that, Kang Hyeon’s form melted into the darkness like mist, vanishing without a trace.
As if he had never been there at all.
“What?”
A faint, hollow laugh tugged at the corner of Gwak Do-jin’s mouth.
Still, some of the frustration that had been gnawing at him seemed to have lifted.

* * *
That night.
The corridor of the Professor Building quarters.
Knock-knock.
The door swung open at the sound.
“Kang Hyeon?”
Lee Se-ah, who had just finished showering and had a towel wrapped around her head, greeted him with wide eyes.
Kang Hyeon immediately thrust two empty Whiskey Bottles into her arms.
Lee Se-ah understood perfectly well what that meant.
‘He wants me to buy the same ones,’ she thought.
“Oh, you drank all of these? They’re expensive.”
“Something came up that needs investigating.”
“Yes? Ah, that cadet you mentioned earlier — Baek Yu-yeon?”
“No, not that.”
“Then what?”
“The Tae-wang Guild.”
“……The Tae-wang?”
“And a list of Academy professors who have any ties to that guild — financial, professional, whatever.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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