The Fateful Five O'Clock
The fateful five o'clock...
Following the joint training summons for sports festival practice, I dragged my feet toward the department lounge.
The moment I opened the door, the noisy room fell into an abrupt hush. What was it about me that killed the conversation every single time I walked in?
I gave a quick bow, headed for a corner, pulled out an empty chair, and sat down.
But the one person who could have brought me any peace in this lounge — our class president, Cho-hee — was nowhere to be found.
A legitimate excuse to text her first?
I pulled up the contact I'd just gotten and sent a message. The reply came almost instantly.
She hadn't just gone ahead — true to her kindhearted nature, she'd even put Eunjin in charge of looking after me.
"Sang-hae~ Here's the department shirt and gym clothes Cho-hee mentioned. You don't know where the locker room is, right? You'll be going there a lot until the sports festival, so I'll show you~!"
I clenched my trembling facial muscles and scrambled for an escape.
"Actually, I need to hit the bathroom first..."
"You need the bathroom? Then I'll take you there too! You don't know where that is either, right?"
"...I was going to, but I think I'm fine."
A deadly binary choice with no third option... Locker room or bathroom — that was the question!
"...Eunjin, I'm counting on you......"
"Got it! I'll take care of everything! Come on, girls, let's go!"
At Eunjin's call, the other girls from my year swarmed over and linked arms with me on both sides, practically locking me in.
The sensation was nothing like the crude headlocks the guys used to throw around as a joke. Even the scent was completely different.
The soft, unfamiliar warmth pressing gently against me from both sides made my head spin for a second. Like my brain was short-circuiting?
But the reality was that I was a cow being led to the slaughterhouse, held captive by a pack of girls...
I couldn't decide whether to enjoy the soft sensation on either side or mourn it — but I had no choice except to force my feet to move.
As we walked, I spotted Ha-rin trailing quietly a short distance behind.
I looked at her with every ounce of pitiful desperation I could muster. She just stared back with a sour expression and started mouthing something at me.
I carefully pieced together the shapes of her red lips.
'P...e...r...v...'
...Pervert?
Tragically, it was the single most accurate word for my current situation, so I couldn't even argue. I just swallowed my tears in silence.
My life's motto was "Safety First," so of course I'd never once set foot near a locker room — that sacred no-man's-land for the opposite sex.
Avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Cut off any chance of misunderstanding before it starts. That was my ironclad philosophy.
...And yet here I was, standing in front of the impregnable fortress of the women's locker room?
"Sang-hae, what are you doing? Aren't you going in? The upperclassmen will yell at us if we're late."
"...It's my first day, so I don't even know what happens at the sports festival. Can't I just skip changing and quietly cheer from the sidelines?"
"Nope. Cho-hee said to make sure you come out. She said you look like you'd be good at sports."
I desperately squeezed out every excuse I had, but Eunjin and the others just shook their heads with absolute finality.
"We're gonna be late — hurry up and get in!"
The second Eunjin flung open the heavy locker room door, I reflexively turned my head and squeezed my eyes shut.
A voice in my head seemed to scold, Are you even a real man?! — but right now, I was a perfect woman.
So please stop tempting my noble reason, you filthy little devil!
"What? You're super embarrassed, huh? Come on in already!"
Naturally unaware of the desperate war raging inside my soul at the doorway, the girls grabbed my arms and dragged me mercilessly into the forbidden zone.
I'd examined every corner of my new body before — frustrated by the change, but also curious. ...I swear, it was purely academic. Just a little.
But seeing other girls' unprotected bare bodies was an entirely different matter. Morally and legally!
I had no idea where to look, so I just kept my eyes unfocused, alternating between the ceiling and the floor.
After I'd been at it for a while, the girls spoke up.
"Still shy because you don't know us well? What's the big deal? We're all girls here."
"Right? We should be the embarrassed ones. Why are you the one blushing?"
"If I were as pretty and slim as you, I'd walk around naked outside..."
"Sang-hae, you're seriously huge! Can I touch them just once?"
Touch? Touch what?
Whether they knew my inner monologue was about to detonate or not, the girls chattered among themselves, then burst into shrieking laughter loud enough to rupture my eardrums.
Apparently they'd decided my suspiciously awkward behavior was just the shyness of a bashful new girl.
"Ugh, seriously. We're actually gonna be late. Hurry up and change."
And then, rendering all my tearful struggle completely meaningless, Eunjin casually stripped off her shirt right in front of me!
I'm sorry, Eunjin! I can't do this anymore! I don't have the strength to survive another second in this overstimulating hellscape!
Clutching my burning-red face, I yanked open the locker room door and bolted outside at full sprint.
But the exact moment I tried to burst through, someone was stepping in — and we smashed foreheads dead-on with catastrophic timing.
"Ah... ow ow ow."
"Sorry, I'm so sorry! I wasn't watching where I was going..."
I clutched my forehead but still managed to fire off an apology first.
Desperate to escape this forbidden battlefield as fast as humanly possible, I just bowed my head and begged for forgiveness.
But despite my desperate apology, the other person gave no response at all.
Is she mad because it hurt?
I carefully lifted my head. And the second I saw the face in front of me, I froze solid.
Standing there was an absurdly, overwhelmingly beautiful woman!
Her looks were so unreal you could believe she'd stepped straight out of a video game into reality.
It was Han Chae-ryeong — the face of the English Education Department, rumored to be in a major agency's idol debut group. On campus, she was practically a celebrity.
Behind her stood four followers, planted like shadows.
It hit me all at once: those were the source of the blatant hostility I'd been feeling every time I walked down the hallway.
"Oh my? Are you the rumored beauty who appeared like a comet and had the whole building buzzing since this morning?"
"I did come to school for the first time today, but I'm not a beauty..."
"Hmm, up close you're really pretty."
Chae-ryeong didn't even listen. She crossed her arms and stepped closer.
Something about the way she looked at me — like a predator studying a particularly interesting piece of prey — made me tense up.
My male sixth sense was screaming that nothing good would come from getting involved, and I needed to get out now.
"Ah, um, thanks. You're pretty too."
"Hm? Thanks? You're a pretty interesting one, aren't you?"
But Chae-ryeong clearly had no intention of letting me go.
The moment she blocked my path, the followers behind her moved in perfect unison like machines, surrounding me on all sides.
I felt like a protagonist cornered by the extras escorting a villainess from a novel.
Chae-ryeong flashed a smile so perfect it looked painted on, then suddenly reached out.
And without asking, she started turning my head this way and that.
"This is really fun. You can actually look me straight in the eye. Your skin is so soft, too. Your hair's silky, and your overall figure is incredible."
What is with this girl?
I was about to swat her hand away in irritation when it happened.
The hand that had been holding my chin slid down to my chest before I could even react.
And then —
She squeezed. Shamelessly. Repeatedly.
"Gyaah?!"
"Oh my? Jumping like that. What's the big deal between girls? If they're a little big, of course you'd want to feel them once."
My chest is not some piece of marinated short rib for you to knead!
I frantically slapped Chae-ryeong's hand away and scrambled backward.
Is skinship between girls normally this free?
And if it's okay between girls, then maybe I should just grab hers right back!
But I'd retreated so urgently that I didn't check behind me.
Unfortunately, the group that had been giving me those icy stares had already blocked my escape route, wearing the most annoying expressions imaginable.
"Stop playing hard to get and just stay still. Who knows? Maybe Chae-ryeong will introduce you to her agency while she's at it?"
"Look how red her face is. Better to get this kind of initiation over with quick."
"Chae-ryeong, finish what you started."
Finish what, you people?!
Even so, Chae-ryeong was wiggling her fingers and closing in on me again.
Honestly, someone groping my chest wouldn't wear anything out — and it wasn't even my real body, so letting her touch it wouldn't make much difference.
The problem was that if I kept conceding things one by one like this, I felt like my gender identity would start conceding ground step by step too. That was what scared me.
And with my strength, brushing off a few college girls would be nothing.
The issue was that if I used real force, those delicate girls could get seriously hurt.
A true dilemma. Completely isolated with nowhere to turn.
"Move. Stop blocking the way."
At that moment, a characteristically low, blunt voice cut through the air like a sheet of ice and lodged itself in my ear.
There stood Ha-rin, arms crossed, looking at Chae-ryeong and the other girls with dry, unimpressed eyes.
"Han Chae-ryeong. What kind of vulgar crap are you pulling on someone from another department?"
At Ha-rin's cold voice, Chae-ryeong took a small step back from me. She brushed a strand of hair that had fallen forward behind her ear and fired back.
"Oh my, 'vulgar'? That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Why so sharp? Is there some special reason I shouldn't touch her?"
Chae-ryeong smiled with her eyes in a way that was almost creepy.
I could feel a fierce determination to get under Lee Ha-rin's skin no matter what — or was that just my imagination?
But Ha-rin didn't so much as blink. Instead, she slowly raked her cold gaze up and down Chae-ryeong's body.
"Touch her, grope her — I don't care."
Ha-rin's eyes traveled slowly from Chae-ryeong's head to her toes.
"But the pathetic way you gather your underlings from the start to stamp a hierarchy on someone is so tearfully insecure I can barely stand to watch."
"Ha? Who's insecure——"
"And if word got around your agency that you go around groping other girls' chests, I'm sure they'd look very kindly on a permanent trainee like you. Don't you think?"
Under Ha-rin's merciless fact-bombing, I could almost hear a crack splitting the perfect smile-mask Chae-ryeong had been maintaining.
"Don't take out your forever-trainee stress on random people. Practice more and just debut already."
That last line must have hit the mark — a thin vein popped up almost instantly on Chae-ryeong's fair, porcelain forehead.
"Ha! We're clearly not on the same level. I can't even play with you. Getting this serious over a little joke? No wonder you don't have any friends."
"Thanks for the compliment. Fellow friendless person."
Ha-rin curled the corner of her mouth in a sarcastic retort, and the air in the hallway plummeted to subzero in an instant.
At the same time, Chae-ryeong's artificial smile hardened into something rigid in real time.
The pure, stage-fairy innocence was gone without a trace, replaced by a thick killing intent that made it hard to breathe.
A suffocating standoff stretched on, as if the hallway itself had become a battlefield.
They're the ones fighting — so why is my innocent stomach the one that hurts...
Click.
Just as the two beauties' aura clash was about to explode, the locker room door opened with perfect timing and cracked the standoff.
"Sang-hae! Aren't you changing? You're gonna be late!"
Our department's girls, fully changed, came pouring out of the locker room in a rush.
And then they immediately froze, witnessing Ha-rin and Chae-ryeong's bloodthirsty standoff in the middle of the hallway — a literal bloodbath waiting to happen.
Chae-ryeong seemed to regain her composure after noticing the girls' flustered stares. She took a deep breath, put her smile back on, and one of the followers who'd been reading the room urgently tugged her sleeve.
"Chae-ryeong, we're gonna be late. Hurry and change so we can get to the field."
"Yeah. Talking to someone like her any longer is just a waste of my time. Let's go, girls."
One of her entourage opened the locker room door, and Chae-ryeong deliberately bumped Ha-rin's shoulder as she walked in.
Then she paused for a moment, looked back at Ha-rin, and tossed out a line with deliberate indifference.
"Hey. Message from Go Eun-bi. She says come by today no matter how late. Apparently she's dying cleaning up the mess you two made outside? Anyway, I delivered it."
Mess? Go Eun-bi?
Chae-ryeong didn't say another word and disappeared into the locker room.
"Uh... Sang-hae. Your clothes are inside, so change and come out. We'll go ahead, okay?"
Eunjin and the other girls read the room and vanished toward the field.
Only after confirming that everyone except Ha-rin had left did I finally let out a sigh of relief.
But Ha-rin was frowning, her delicate brow furrowed as if turning over Chae-ryeong's final message.
Then she noticed me standing there blankly beside her, shook her head as if I were hopeless, and grabbed the locker room doorknob.
Still riding the relief from the savior-slash-Holy-Mother performance she'd just put on, I tried to toddle after her like a newborn chick.
"What?"
Ha-rin looked at me with eyes even colder than usual, and her voice was so frigid I half-suspected ice crystals were forming on it.
"Stalking wasn't enough, so now you're trying to follow me into the locker room? That desperate to watch me change?"
"......"
Ha-rin shot me a look of pure contempt, then opened the door just wide enough for her body to slip through — as if worried I might catch a glimpse inside — and vanished.
That final look she gave me... it really was the look you'd give a pervert......