Not Guilty, Thud Thud
Thud. Thud-thud.
Kicking the blameless floor, Yeoncheong grumbled under her breath.
"Acting like I'm a little kid. Telling me to go off and play for an hour or so..."
It stung more than she cared to admit, being the only one avoided after what had happened over the holiday. Sure, something had happened during the long weekend — but was it really so strange for them to hang around her like nothing was wrong?
And that went double for Hasol and Nayun, who were complete third parties in the whole affair.
With Seoha and Suyeon she could understand — they had something to feel guilty about — but why the two with nothing to hide had tagged along was a genuine mystery.
Thud.
She was still taking her frustrations out on the innocent floor when she happened to look up.
She'd been in the annex, but at some point she was somehow in the main building. And judging by the view, she had climbed to the third floor without even noticing.
What greeted her eyes was the first-year classroom.
Ordinarily she would have turned right around, but the scenery she'd arrived at with no particular destination was a far cry from the usual after-school quiet.
The classroom and hallway bustled with students hammering away at festival preparations.
The second-years had their own pace, of course, but the boundless energy unique to a first festival swept Yeoncheong up in it too.
She was just freshly reminded that the festival was drawing near, and had turned to leave when—
"Yeoncheong sunbae?"
Among the sea of first-years she'd assumed she didn't know, here was the one junior whose name she actually did know.
Chaerin, the first-year vice president who assisted Seoha.
When Yeoncheong turned her head, Chaerin confirmed her face, equipped herself with a friendly voice, and came over.
"What brings you all the way up here?"
"...Nothing much."
But her face clearly didn't believe a word of it. A sunbae who never came up here had climbed all the way to the third floor — suspicion was only fair.
Unable to admit she'd been kicked out of the club room, Yeoncheong improvised.
"I had some time to kill. Just wandering around, checking things out."
Seoha's assessment had been accurate — she was a perceptive junior.
One look told her the sunbae didn't feel like explaining, so Chaerin took the vague answer as her cue and smoothly changed the subject.
"Time to kill? What about your festival preparations?"
"Our class is practically done."
Yeoncheong gave a light shrug.
Part of it was thanks to the nagging she'd done before midterms about making a solid plan, and part was thanks to the thoroughly competent vice class president steering the overall schedule.
To Chaerin, a first-year leading festival preparations for the very first time, Yeoncheong — a mere one year her senior — looked impossibly impressive.
"We tried to do something way too ambitious, and now we're dying over here."
It was the natural result of putting off the task assignments until after the exams.
Everyone had been all smiles during the planning stage. But once midterms ended and it was time to actually divide up the work, the poor junior was suffering at the hands of classmates who kept fishing for the easiest jobs.
A faint sigh escaped Chaerin's lips, and Yeoncheong's ears perked up.
"...Want me to help out for a bit?"
She had nowhere to be anyway, freshly exiled from the club room, and nothing passed the time quite like busywork.
Besides, the person in question was Chaerin. The first-year vice president who assisted the student council president. Get close enough, and who knew — she might even learn some of Seoha's weaknesses, the kind you'd never hear about otherwise.
"Really?"
At the pure-hearted junior's wide-eyed reaction, Yeoncheong — who had been harboring exactly those ulterior motives — flinched.
"I mean... I can't promise it'll be that much help."
Yeoncheong scratched her head, and Chaerin shook hers vigorously.
"A spare pair of hands is exactly what we need right now. I'd be the one thanking you!"
And so Yeoncheong rolled up her sleeves to help a junior — killing time, yes, and perhaps extracting intel about Seoha along the way.
And on her side—
"If I get close to Yeoncheong-sunbae, maybe I'll gain something out of it too."
Chaerin was thinking much the same thing.
***
Meanwhile, Suyeon — having exiled her one and only club member — had opened a court of inquiry.
"See? We did nothing wrong."
As she recounted the events of the holiday, she mounted her defense of innocence.
Yes, she had invited Yeoncheong over — but she'd done absolutely nothing, and Yeoncheong had only stayed for dinner before leaving. Hasol looked skeptical, but Suyeon had finally secured her trust by offering to summon her twin Siyeon to verify the story if she still wouldn't believe it.
The moment her friend finished speaking, Seoha, seated beside her, nodded along.
"That's right. If anything, we're the wronged party."
Yeoncheong wasn't only avoiding Suyeon, after all — and the whole reason she'd been invited over in the first place was a movie date with Seoha.
Forced to testify in order to prove her innocence, Seoha glossed over the truth: the two of them had eaten lunch together, watched a movie on a coupon a junior had given her, and that was all.
"I mean... but why are you telling all this to me?"
Hasol, who at first had only been asked to hear them out, suddenly found herself cast as the judge of the entire case, and offered an awkward, pained smile.
"Because you're an uninvolved third party to this incident."
"By that logic, Nayun—"
At Seoha's addition, Hasol started to call over the friend sitting beside her — then stopped.
Watching Nayun cheerfully munching popcorn — the very popcorn she'd ripped open at lunch, been told to put away, and then opened again — clearly enjoying the whole spectacle as pure entertainment, Hasol understood exactly how Seoha and Suyeon felt, with only her in their sights.
"Haaah..."
Both friends felt a twinge of guilt at her deep sigh. But their eyes also made it clear they had no intention of backing down until their innocence was officially recognized.
"...Am I really a third party here, though?"
It had been less than a day.
Hasol, who had endured Yeoncheong's surprise attack, decided to bury the facts for now and deal with the problem directly in front of her.
Having heard the whole story, Hasol narrowed her eyes and looked back and forth between the two of them.
"And that's really everything?"
"..."
A brief, loaded silence. Then, as if they'd rehearsed it, Seoha and Suyeon both nodded at exactly the same moment.
Needless to say, it was not everything.
They knew all too well that if they misspoke now, the arrows wouldn't fly at Yeoncheong for avoiding her friends — they'd fly right back at themselves.
Anything about Yeoncheong's hyper-sensitive, mother-of-the-household matters, and anything that had happened during the movie, had been carefully excised from the account.
"They're definitely hiding something..."
Seoha's face barely changed expression even under pressure, and pinning down the true feelings of Suyeon — hardened by years of constant teasing — was no easy feat.
"I suppose you two are innocent, then. If there's really nothing you're hiding..."
Hasol, ultimately unable to uncover the tightly concealed truth, ruled in Suyeon and Seoha's favor.
The two lit up at the verdict.
"See! She's the one who seduced us, and now she's running away because she got embarrassed!"
"Or maybe she doesn't even realize she was seducing anyone. That's my read."
Realizing Seoha harbored the same suspicion she did, Hasol muttered before she could stop herself.
"...Honestly. That would track, wouldn't it."
"Huh?"
"What did you say?"
And that muttering happened to be just loud enough for Suyeon and Seoha, seated right in front of her, to catch every word.
"Hasol. Something happened, didn't it? It did."
"Tell us. In detail."
Was it a woman's intuition? They hadn't even said anything notable, yet the two of them pounced on Hasol in perfect unison.
With the dynamic flipped in an instant, Hasol broke into a cold sweat.
"Oh. Act two, I see."
Nayun simply found the whole situation delightful.
***
Hasol was released once she'd confessed everything that happened while they were making the snacks.
Nayun, having polished off the popcorn, dusted off her hands and delivered her verdict.
"So in the end, isn't Yeoncheong the problem?"
And just like that, the arrow of blame pointed at its natural target — Yeoncheong, the root of every single problem, who had spent the entire holiday hoarding her friends all to herself.
"You're sure she's never dated anyone, right? How does someone with zero experience reel in three people in under a year. Is it talent?"
Hasol bristled at that.
"Don't drag me into it! I have zero intention of turning our group into an even deeper hellscape than it already is, and honestly, being just friends is more than enough for me."
She gave a few more shakes for good measure, clutching Nayun by the collar until her temper burned out, then added:
"What actually worries me is Suyeon and Seoha. They're in love with a friend who's out there winning people over without even realizing it herself."
The thought that words once aimed at her could just as easily land on someone else had given her pause.
And sure enough, Suyeon and Seoha were now deep in a conversation with grave faces on.
From the fragments she overheard, they seemed to be agonizing over what to do about the current situation. One genuinely unsettling proposal — just kidnap her — did come up, but mercifully, it was struck down.
The two agreed to handle the problem directly in front of them first.
"Let's get Yeoncheong back first, at least."
Home or anywhere else might be fair game, but at school, they couldn't afford to let her run wild.
"She'll come back on her own."
"It's been an hour. She hasn't."
Suyeon was unmoved even by Hasol's suggestion that she might be worrying too much.
She could believe it of Seoha — but of Hasol? Never in a million years had she imagined it. Her certainty that something had happened was absolute.
"If the order was me, Seoha, then Hasol... am I next?"
Meanwhile, Nayun, who had been speculating about Yeoncheong's next target, pointed playfully at herself and grinned.
But—
"Not a chance. Never you."
"That's right. Don't worry about it."
"Nayun's perfectly safe."
Faced with her friends' utter lack of consideration, Nayun bristled.
"Hey! And what exactly is your basis for that?!"
When Nayun bared her claws, her pride wounded, her friends obligingly explained their reasoning.
"You and Yeoncheong are never, ever going to be like that."
"She'd have treated you exactly the same even if she'd met you back when she was still a boy."
"Guh..."
Even Nayun herself couldn't say they were wrong.
Yeoncheong was so completely at ease around her rough-around-the-edges friend that there was simply no opening for that kind of tension to creep in.
But that was that, and this was this.
Hearing it out loud did not exactly lift her spirits.
"Ha... damn it. I'm supposed to be grateful there's no chance, so why does this sting..."
Muttering under her breath, Nayun trailed after her friends as they set out in search of Yeoncheong.
***
Having, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, lost both her club and her clubmate, and now roaming in a pack of four, they finally found Yeoncheong in — of all places — the first-year hallway.
She was helping Chaerin with festival preparations.
At first, the first-years had tensed up needlessly at the word sunbae, but they quickly discovered that Yeoncheong was the most harmless sunbae in the world.
Right now, in front of the four observers, Yeoncheong stood surrounded by adoring juniors in a warm, cheerful atmosphere.
"Look at her. Now it's the juniors..."
"I know. And our student council juniors, no less."
Whether because of the conversation they'd just had, Suyeon genuinely did not like the scene before her eyes.
And Seoha — who knew perfectly well that Chaerin had been secretly helping Yeoncheong all along — found that seeing it in person left a distinctly sour taste in her mouth.
How long until they noticed their presence?
The expressions of Yeoncheong's lurking friends — Suyeon and Seoha above all — were growing more murderous by the second as they waited for her to sense them on her own.
But the first to catch the chill wind blowing in from the classroom doorway was Chaerin's childhood friend, Soyul.
"Huh? Who's that?"
Having seen Seoha around before, Soyul instantly recognized them as second-year sunbaes.
And she also recognized that their terrifying glares were fixed squarely on her classmate Yeoncheong — and on her own childhood friend, Chaerin.
Two people, each with their own agenda. Standing shoulder to shoulder like that, a misunderstanding was practically guaranteed.
Yeoncheong, absorbed in her volunteer work, and Chaerin, glued to her side hoping to gain something from it, were both completely oblivious. And even if Soyul had wanted to warn them, cutting through the noisy, crowded classroom was easier said than done.
But Soyul never got the chance to call out to her childhood friend.
"Yeoncheong?"
Because Suyeon, having hit her limit, called her friend's name first.
The low voice skimming along the floor found its mark, and a chill ran down Yeoncheong's spine as she whipped her head around.
Standing before her: Suyeon and Seoha, and nothing else. Hasol and Nayun, who had tagged along, had already read the room and melted away.
Seoha, standing at her side, tilted her head and curled the corner of her mouth upward.
"Having fun?"
A softly upturned lip that should have formed a smile — but the frost in her eyes made the whole picture feel deeply wrong.
"G-guys! I was just heading out. Good luck with everything!"
Instinct screaming that she was in mortal danger, Yeoncheong beat a hasty retreat from the classroom alongside the very friends who had come to collect her.
She'd braced herself for a tirade the moment they stepped outside — but strangely, Suyeon and Seoha said nothing at all.
And that silence frightened her far more.
Because in her experience, this was exactly the kind of situation where the bill came due later, with interest.
