Prologue — Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Where did it all go wrong?
The bill for my first-ever confession came back scorching hot — hotter than I could have ever imagined.
It had been barely two hours since Lee Ha-rin — my classmate, the girl I'd fallen for at first sight back in February during orientation — had cleanly delivered a death sentence to my psyche.
I'd been alone at the neighborhood playground, wiping away tears and trying to piece my shattered mental state back together, when I happened to spot Ha-rin's retreating figure walking past with a small child who looked like a little sibling. Out of pure, pathetic lingering attachment, I'd decided to follow her and ask what exactly about me was so unappealing. That had been a mere five minutes ago.
And in those five minutes, I had found myself on the brink of physical death.
Squelch.
The sound of a foot stepping into something heavy and viscous echoed grimly through the alley.
By the time I came to my senses, I was already sprawled on the cold asphalt of a back alley. My entire body felt like it was burning. My breath caught in my throat, and a skull-splitting pain crashed over me.
Through my blurring vision, far off in the distance, I could make out a pair of legs — clad in strangely familiar jeans and sneakers — lying discarded on the ground.
Of course they looked familiar.
They were the exact same pants I'd put on this morning while looking in the mirror.
Which meant that right now, I was staring at my own lower half from a considerable distance.
Death — something I'd only ever seen in novels and popular media — was closing in on me in real time, but what hit me first wasn't fear. It was indignation and sheer absurdity.
"You'll understand, right?"
Looking down at me — the me whose everything below the waist had been cleanly erased — Lee Ha-rin asked in a tone of pure, unadulterated nonchalance.
Beside her stood a silver-white wolf the size of a house, its jaws clamped around a human arm that dripped blood in steady drops.
When my gaze landed on it, the wolf spat the arm onto the ground as if it were a nuisance. Clutched in the hand of that discarded arm was a longsword that looked like it belonged on a medieval battlefield — the kind of blade that would get you thrown in a holding cell if you walked around downtown Seoul with it. And the blade itself was thickly caked with nauseating dark-red liquid and scraps of flesh.
"Right. Silence is consent, they say. Good."
I doubted my own ears. From what angle, by what stretch of imagination, could she possibly think I'd agreed to any of this?
"The one who did this to you is Kang Jun-cheol — an Incarnation of Asgard who'd been keeping tabs on us. He'd been crossing the line a little too often lately, so I was teaching him a lesson."
Ha-rin gave the growling wolf a single stroke along its neck and continued.
"Fortunately the ambush almost worked — we nearly finished the job. I just didn't expect you to come bursting out of the alley at that exact moment."
The cross-section of my waist lying far away had been sliced with surgical precision. If not for the blood soaking the ground, I could almost have mistaken it for a cut of meat on a supermarket display.
"I'm sorry things turned out this way. Consider this my apology. Still, I did take one of that bastard's arms as payment for carving you up, so try not to feel too hard done by."
Was this situation — this — really something a single "sorry" could wrap up?
If a simple apology could paper over everything, the world wouldn't need laws at all. One forearm from that psychopathic murderer was an absurdly bad deal. The injustice of it all made me want to burst into tears.
Ha-rin knelt on one knee beside me and tapped my cheek with her index finger.
"I'll give you a choice. You can go cleanly to Niflheim as you are, or you can open your eyes in a completely different body."
She paused for a moment, then let out a small sigh.
"Either way, the responsibility for dragging a normal person into our battlefield falls on us. Your opinion doesn't matter. Even if you say no, I'm going to keep you alive no matter what."
Ha-rin's expression was conflicted.
"Honestly, you're partly to blame for things ending up like this. Even after hearing what I said, I never thought you'd actually follow me... I should have rejected you more thoroughly. That was my mistake. It's too late now, though..."
Ha-rin drove the verbal dagger home like a finishing blow. Blood surged up my throat.
I wanted to scream that I'd only meant to ask one single, unfair question. But with the blood pooling in my throat, I couldn't even manage a wheeze.
If she'd just done that from the start, I never would have run into that insane Asgard-whatever greatsword-wielding murderer...
But we'd already come too far to turn back.
"You were just unlucky. That's all."
Ha-rin summed up the entire situation in a single sentence.
Yeah. I knew that all too well — bone-deep.
My name is Lee Sang-hae.
A college freshman who enrolled this past March.
Unlike my name — which sounds like the Korean word for "strange" — I was so thoroughly, frustratingly ordinary that it was almost irritating. The one thing about me that wasn't ordinary...
...was just how catastrophically unlucky I was: rejected in spectacular fashion on the day of my first-ever confession, then bisected and left dying — all while still being subjected to character assassination on the way out.