The School Trip, and the Sunset a Sprint Revealed
Beneath her eyelids, a pair of blurry blue eyes flickered into focus.
There were days like this.
Days when you woke at an hour you could never manage on a normal morning, no matter how hard you tried. The bed, which should have been soft, felt inexplicably hard, and the weight of the blanket was wrong too—heavy and strangely plush instead of the light, airy texture of a summer duvet.
Despite being fully awake, she could hear soft breathing nearby, and Yeoncheong looked around.
What the...?
The night must have been hot, because the blanket had been kicked aside entirely, and her oversized training shirt had ridden halfway up, leaving her stomach exposed to the cool air.
The hard floor beneath her announced that this was no bed. Following the natural turn of her head, Yeoncheong discovered why the night had been so warm.
To her right, Hasol lay fast asleep, presumably having shared the same blanket.
She had no idea how her body had ended up turned around, but Suyeon and Nayun were each draped over her—one with her head pillowed on Yeoncheong's stomach, the other with her legs hooked over Yeoncheong's.
Only then did the memory come back.
They'd watched a horror movie, and fearing she might be up all night, she had squeezed herself into the middle of her friends for a little while.
Seriously... I just fell asleep here? All night?
Fully restored by a proper night's sleep, with both the fear and the exhaustion wiped completely clean, Yeoncheong's freshly rebooted mind let out a silent scream.
First things first—get up.
She carefully disentangled herself from Nayun's leg, which was using her thigh as a stand, and lifted Suyeon's head off her stomach.
The moment her squishy pillow vanished, Suyeon squirmed, so Yeoncheong slid her own pillow under her friend's head as a decoy and made a swift escape.
Stretching her leg out of the sleeping pile, Yeoncheong wobbled.
The spot where her head should have been—the place where no one was supposed to be—was occupied by Seoha, curled up asleep.
Her footing lost, one foot hovered precariously in the air. A body never intending to balance on one leg in the first place began slowly tipping to one side.
Sleeping friends in every direction. In her blue eyes, the sofa locked into view.
Like a cat mid-leap, Yeoncheong stretched herself out and dove for the sofa, which—befitting the excellent accommodations—received her with a minimum of noise.
She clamped both hands over her mouth to keep her breathing from escaping, then crammed herself as deep into the sofa as she could. She wanted to muffle her pounding heart too, but she only had two hands.
The clock ticked. Her friends' sleeping breaths rose and fell.
Until she was certain she was safe—like that, Yeoncheong held her breath for a good long while.
Students filed off the bus.
While Suyeon went up front to take attendance, Hasol cornered Yeoncheong for an interrogation.
"Yeoncheong, did you actually go back to the bed last night?"
"I told you I did."
The answer came with her eyes fixed firmly on empty air. Hasol's narrowed.
Unlike the night before, when Yeoncheong had been dragged back over to fall asleep again, Seoha had been sleeping up at the head of the bedding. And there had been room for exactly one more person left open in the space between Hasol and Suyeon.
Suyeon counted the passing students two at a time. Hasol watched the others go by and spoke.
"Fine. I'll pretend I believe you."
"No, I'm telling you, it's the truth!"
It was a story with effectively zero persuasive power, and Hasol didn't buy a word of it.
The students had arrived at the southern reaches of Jeju Island.
Cheonjiyeon Waterfall—no less famous a destination for a school trip than Seongsan Ilchulbong itself.
It was close enough to the lodging that there was no reason not to visit.
Attendance complete, Suyeon rejoined the group, and Class 1 filed in after being cleared through. For a while, Yeoncheong walked under the endless barrage of her friends' accusations—you just got up early and ran off, didn't you?
The sound of falling water grew closer. Just as the breeze flowing through the shade of the trees began to carry a cool mist on it—
Nayun, a step ahead, took in the waterfall at a glance. Hand shading her eyes, she gazed up at its crest.
"Whoa. It's way taller than I expected."
The falling column of water shattered into brilliant white, glittering in the sunlight of a cloudless sky.
The cool breeze that had traveled all the way here drew smiles out of them without their even trying.
Nayun clambered onto a nearby rock and called to Yeoncheong.
"Yeoncheong, take my picture from here."
Nayun struck a pose, and Yeoncheong pulled out her smartphone with a grumble.
"I told you. Wanting a good picture doesn't mean you get one."
Still, a request was a request, so she snapped a few shots—the results were, predictably, mediocre.
In the end, Suyeon and Hasol retook the photos for her, and after a class group photo, they quickly stepped back to make room.
Swallowing their disappointment on the way back, Suyeon murmured,
"Ah... the waterfall was so nice, though."
There were other tourists around, and given the nature of the spot, they'd had to give up their place for the other classes.
After eating the lunch provided by the lodge and resting in their rooms, the students of Hwaryeong High School filed back outside right on schedule.
With the students lined up by class, the teachers huddled in conference off to one side.
High noon, blazing sun. True, they stood in the shade—but this was a humid Korean summer, and shade was no shield at all.
As grumbles of if this is how it's going to be, just tell us to come out later swelled from every corner, the teachers finally wrapped up their meeting.
And then, having finished, the teachers loaded the students onto the air-conditioned bus.
"Suyeon, take attendance, please."
"Ah—I'm sitting down already! You could've told me before I sat..."
True to some unspoken agreement? Suyeon, who had been sitting next to Yeoncheong since the third day, was up on her feet the moment she sat down.
The headcount finished in a flash, and Suyeon was back in her seat. After a word with the chauffeur, Teacher Jisu turned to face the students.
"The schedule's changed a little. We were supposed to go to the oreum first and then the museum, remember? We've decided to swap the order."
"Why?"
It was Suyeon who asked, leaning her head out into the aisle.
"Someone suggested it'd be nicer to visit the oreum at sunset."
It was the kind of reasoning that made heads nod on its own.
Satisfied that there were no more questions, Teacher Jisu told the driver to set off and took her seat.
The word museum is, by default, the fastest route to the word boring. But reading the description—the words immersive media art made people tilt their heads.
What's this supposed to be?
Seeing was believing. One look was worth more than a dozen lines of explanation.
An ocean that seemed to surge right before your eyes. A space made of the world's most famous paintings. A whale dancing out of the sea that lived inside the walls.
Moving images on walls and floor alike captured every gaze.
And it wasn't just the visuals—sound wove through it all, maximizing the experience for every sense.
"Guys! Over there, let's check that one out too!"
Suyeon dragging her friends around in breathless excitement explained everything better than words ever could.
"Wow... this one's kind of a lost cause as a photo, though."
Hasol, who'd been snapping pictures on her phone, shook her head after reviewing the results. The limits of capturing such vivid, living scenery in a static photograph were all too clear.
That said, there were spots good for photos alongside the actual exhibits.
"Hey, there's a rabbit over here!"
Where Nayun had called them over stood a colossal rabbit sculpture.
When Yeoncheong and her friends started taking photos in front of it, other students who'd been watching began lining up behind them for their turn.
As the other classes followed suit, Yeoncheong and her friends felt a quiet, secret glow of pride.
Each exhibit had a fairly long viewing runtime, so seeing everything was simply out of the question.
The students took in as much as they could, preserved it all in photos and videos, and boarded the bus once more—with plenty left behind to regret.
Immersive media art may have been beautiful, but the eye strain that had quietly piled up was beyond help.
And in that respect, swapping the schedule turned out to have an unexpected payoff.
The oreum, a rolling sea of green from base to summit, offered their tired eyes a moment of rest.
The students had loved the museum so much that they'd lingered past the planned time, and now the sky was already ablaze with color before they'd even departed—the sun slipping lower with every passing minute.
There was enough time to climb to the top and come back down. Whether they'd actually see the sunset from the summit, though, was another question entirely.
"Aw, come on, really?"
At one student's petulant complaint, Teacher Jisu replied,
"Then run up. Who knows? Maybe you'll catch the sunset from the top."
It was half a joke—but some people were fully prepared to take it at face value.
Nayun, retying her shoelaces, looked up.
"Guys. Let's run."
"Yeah, I don't think that's gonna work..."
At Hasol's very reasonable objection, Nayun shook her head.
"It'd be a waste to just walk. We came all this way—we've at least gotta see the sunset. Let's run as far as we can, and if it's hopeless, we walk from there. Deal?"
Everyone agreed to Nayun's compromise.
"Alright, you can head in now! Be careful, don't get hur—"
Before Teacher Jisu could even finish, all five of them were off and running up the trail.
"Huh? Are those kids ours?"
Class 1 students nodded, and a few of them broke into a run as well, chasing after Yeoncheong's group.
Watching them go, Teacher Jisu let out a helpless laugh.
"They actually took off running. Must be nice, being young."
It was the stamina of youth that even their still-young homeroom teacher couldn't hope to match.
An uphill slope, first and foremost. The usual outcome is running out of gas partway up.
But.
Nayun, two years deep in the basketball club. Seoha, famed among friends and teachers alike for excelling at both study and exercise. Yeoncheong, whose pride on this particular front still carried plenty of her former masculinity—and Hasol and Suyeon, both comfortably above average among their peers.
As a group, Yeoncheong and her friends belonged firmly in the upper tier of physical fitness, and they ran for real.
Yet as the grade steepened, their pace steadily bled away. The explosive energy of the start was gone, leaving them clinging to a pace barely above a jog.
It would have been easy to give up, gasping I can't anymore—but strangely, not one of them stopped.
Every single one of them believed the other four were still pushing toward the summit, and so they all kept climbing, holding on to the bare minimum of speed no matter what.
After widening the gap with the students trailing behind them, after the once-steep slope finally began to gentle—
"The summit!"
Nayun, leading the pack, shouted.
"Guys! The sunset's still up there!"
At that, Hasol and Suyeon, who'd fallen a little behind, found a second wind.
Yeoncheong arrived third, right after Seoha, and tried to soothe her hammering, about-to-burst heart. Straightening her aching back at last, she sucked in a breath.
Beyond a sky dyed crimson, the sun was slipping away.
Perhaps because the surroundings were so open—even though this was no towering mountain, nothing stood between them and the fading light.
Suyeon and Hasol, who'd come up the trail wheezing and clinging to each other, erupted in exclamations the moment they saw it.
"Worth the run."
"Hasol. Hasol! Don't pass out. We still have to take pictures."
"Just lemme rest a sec..."
Suyeon caught Hasol as she melted to the ground, and only after finally managing the group photo of five did she collapse as well. Leaving the two of them resting back-to-back—
Nayun came over to Yeoncheong, who was gazing blankly at the sunset.
"So? Glad you didn't quit before you even tried?"
"Acknowledged."
Watching Nayun take in the sunset with a proud, satisfied face, Yeoncheong raised her smartphone.
The foundation of a good photo is a great subject. And the lens turned toward Nayun, shining brighter in that moment than at any other point in the day.
Her blonde hair caught the dying light, its tips going red along with the sky. Loose strands fluttered in the breeze around her ponytail.
Her loose-fit shirt sat slightly askew from the run, and her chest rose and fell with each labored breath—far more attention-grabbing than it had any right to be. The evidence of effort trailing down her cheek gleamed in the light of the setting sun.
A vibrant smile, brimming with proof that she was alive, faced the sun head-on.
"Nayun."
At the call, Nayun turned her head—then quickly realized what was happening and swung her whole body around, breaking into a wide grin.
Maybe it was the heat the run had worked up in her. Nayun's cheeks were flushed as she met Yeoncheong's gaze through the lens, and that flush melted seamlessly into her smile, turning it into something almost unbearably lovely.
"So? How'd it turn out?"
Did I actually take this? Yeoncheong stared at the result in a daze, then managed nothing but a fool's little nod.
Hopping down from the best vantage point for the sunset, Nayun checked the photo.
"Hey... I made this face?"
Yeoncheong answered with the silent nod of affirmation. Nayun made her swear never to show it to the others.
Teacher Jisu clicked her tongue in disbelief that they'd genuinely made it before the sun went down. As for the five of them, having spent every last ounce of strength on the way up, crawling halfway back down and coming in dead last—that was a story for later.