Me, Franc, and Yeoni (5)
Hwayeon sat at the top of the organization chart, as a matter of course. Beneath her the structure split three ways: General Affairs, Special Operations, and Business Support.
General Affairs was headed, naturally, by Director Lee Hyeryeong. Her branch forked again—thirty staff down one side, and on the other nothing but my sister's name, dangling by itself. A direct report, then? Or were they standing up some integrated management post, and this was the shape of it?
Business Support was the same story, divided into a mission-support team and a combat-support team. No rank-and-file names. Only the department head.
Department Head Kim Pyochung. If the chart bothered to list only the department-head titles, maybe those were the only names worth memorizing.
Business Support ran to 832 people in all, 390 of them marked combat support. Combat support meant the life-assistants who went into the Phase World alongside the ability users. Supporters. Porters. Ah, the terminology was a mess.
Supporters, then. That had to be it.
"Do you actually know what a supporter does? They just tag along and handle everything that isn't fighting?"
"I should think so. In Britain, we call such people porters."
Porters. Baggage haulers?
A word soaked through with chosen-people arrogance. Close enough to a slur. They'd all awakened the same way, and yet some got to be called ability users while others were called baggage haulers.
"You claw your way back from the Phase World alive, and then they tell you you'll never grow past G Class. That would feel pretty hollow."
I'd cleaned it up because Franc was listening. Honestly, though, wouldn't a person want to die? The treatment didn't seem as bad as the name. Still.
"They say it is not entirely so. The money is very good, you see. And they are ability users, so their bodies are hardier than an ordinary person's, and they hold the right of self-defense as well."
"It's still dangerous. Die, and everything ends. I don't care how well you earn—I don't think it's worth a life."
"There is a Korean proverb, is there not, that money can put even ghosts to work? A regular knight's yearly pay comes to a little under thirty thousand pounds. A porter, though, earns about six thousand pounds a single entry, depending on the take, and once the life-support duty is finished they may gather within whatever bounds have been judged safe, and so earn a side income as well. I am told that brings it to roughly one and a half times."
"A pound's about 1,700 won, right? So a regular knight makes around 52 million a year? A porter gets 10.4 million a trip, and with the side income that's 15 million?"
"Yes. And I have heard that porters receive benefits, in tax and in various other matters, for the work itself. The rules applied to them are looser than those for ability users, the tax is lighter, and the advantages are real, so the talk was that they can live quite comfortably. An excellent porter earns more than a mid-tier ability user. Of course, commit a crime and the punishment is every bit as strict."
I ran the numbers while she explained. Base pay plus the side income, and you were looking at something like 200 million a year. No—they were paid every entry, so once the entry cooldown cleared, couldn't you go in three times a month? And the take swung hard depending on what you brought down.
Hmm. Awakening didn't mean you couldn't live an ordinary life, and every supporter was there because they wanted to be. It wasn't really mine to pick apart. Even so, relative deprivation was a real thing. I could see how it would rankle.
I dropped my eyes back to the chart and checked the last branch.
Special Operations split in two, same as the others. One side was a special reconnaissance squad of fourteen. The other was the raider teams: two vice-captains, ten team leaders, and a hundred members divided into ten teams.
Eleven to a team, leader included, and yet the math refused to close. Fourteen detection-types out of 113. They'd said two of them always went in on every entry. So the fourteen weren't fixed to teams at all—they rotated?
Wow. What kind of brutal schedule was that? Was Time River one of those things that came out of Japan—what were they called. A black company? A place that didn't see its employees as people, but as livestock. Corporate cattle.
Worrying about it inwardly, I looked for where I belonged.
I wasn't there.
Hwayeon's name wasn't on the teams either, and neither were the two vice-captains, top-tier C-Class. She'd definitely said the two of us would be going into A Team together.
Well. I wasn't an official member yet. They probably just hadn't built the team.
I tilted my head at the chart, then went into the Certifier's community and looked up how a raid team usually entered.
Hm. Ordinarily they brought supporters in numbers about equal to the raiders, or at one and a half times. So Time River ran a team as one set—a leader and ten members—slotted in two detection-types for thirteen, and then took thirteen supporters out of the 390?
Another question occurred to me, and I asked Franc.
"Franc. When we went to the Ability User Association building yesterday, people were moving around in packs, so there has to be a way to go in together. How do you enter the Phase World as a group?"
"I have only heard it told, but there is said to be a system of host and guest. One person is named host, and when the host enters, the rest of the team enters with them."
"Huh."
Like a game lobby's host, then.
Ding!
"Ah. Reply's here."
I'd watched a documentary about people dodging taxes and cursed every last one of them into the ground, and now, looking at a cut this monstrous, I was starting to understand them a little.
"So if I receive 500 billion won next January, I have to hand over 100 billion of it in tax alone...?"
Better send a reply first.
Send!
"Tax is a citizen's duty, after all. What you pay will be put to sound use by the nation."
"That's true. The First Lady doesn't give off the embezzling, luxury-mad image at all. It stings a little, but I ought to think of it kindly."
I thought about browsing the ability-user community a while longer, and found my head strangely blank. The feeling of gaming through two nights straight and looking out the window to find the morning sun coming up.
Lie down for a bit, eat lunch, then head for the Time River Building.
"Franc. Hold me."
I flopped onto the bed and stretched both hands up toward Franc, drifting in the air.
She laughed, soft and fond, as if I were something precious, kissed my forehead, and lay down beside me. Sis was like that, Hwayeon was like that, and Franc liked kissing foreheads too.
I caught her by the waist, turned her, and pulled her in from behind. Lie face to face and I might grab her backside again without meaning to.
Turned under my hands, Franc's eyes went round for a moment, but she was soon smiling, bright and shy. She caught my hand, drew it to her stomach, and squirmed in my arms.
And because she was doing that, my cock had settled, just slightly, into the cleft of her backside.
"You tell me to endure it, and then you do this. You're a villainess too, Franc."
I grumbled it small, and she flinched, clutched my hand to her chest on reflex, and went still. Which left my arm nestled in the cloud-soft cleft of her breasts.
Sleep. Just going to sleep!
I drew my hand out from between her breasts, wrapped an arm around her waist, and shut my eyes with an effort.
Naked Franc was far too much temptation.
Three hours of sleep, and this time I woke clear.
No fog. The moment my eyes opened, my head was turning over sharp and clean. It had been a while.
Franc was lying in my arms—caught in them, more like—with her head pillowed on my arm, and she turned to look at me.
"Did you sleep well?"
"Yeah. All thanks to you, my bamboo wife. Thank you."
I kissed her snow-white cheek. She shrieked, covered her face, and glowed with delight, and the sight lifted my own mood whether I wanted it to or not.
I gathered Mana Sieve into my hand and stroked the soft of her lower belly. Yielding, plush—a body you could get hooked on. I still hadn't properly touched her breasts, but once I did, I might lose my mind and never stop.
Franc flinched at the hand that had drifted to her stomach and looked back at me. I rested my chin on her shoulder and offered my cheek, and she kissed it with a little sulk in her face.
"Mana Sieve came undone while I was falling asleep, so you could've read on the tablet beside me. Weren't you bored?"
"I like being held in your arms too, you know?"
"Agh! How is anyone allowed to be this cute?!"
The hand around her waist went for her side and tickled without mercy. Franc burst into laughter and kicked both feet.
We'd been playing like that for a good while when the smell of something delicious drifted into the room from outside.
That smell—!
Spicy stir-fried udon. My favorite.
Franc, laughing hard enough at the tickling to squeeze out tears, used the moment I paused to wriggle free of my arms with an effort. Up in the air she shivered all over. So it really had been that ticklish.
Crisp cabbage, scallions cut to threads, udon noodles with a proper chew, all fried through in a spicy sauce—I hold stir-fried udon to be a truth of the universe on par with fried chicken. Bite down and the noodles bounce and dance in your mouth, and when that bounce meets the sweetness of cabbage and the crunch of scallion, the destructive power is simply supreme.
I sat there and put away four servings without a word. Mom watched me do it, smiling, thoroughly pleased.
"Take me to Time River, like you promised!"
I was sitting on the carpet, drinking the plum tea Mom had brought so I'd digest, when Sis tried to sneak off to her room. I snatched the hem of her gym shorts—
—and the angle must have been wrong, because the shorts came clean off.
"Eek?!"
"...!?"
The shorts caught at her ankles, and Sis pitched forward with all the momentum she'd had. Which left her presenting me with a backside in pink polka-dot panties.
One look at that ripe-peach rear and I startled and let go. Sis scrambled up, yanked the shorts back on, and glared at me with her face gone red.
Oh. So today was the anniversary of my death.
"Ugh. You... honestly...!"
"S-sorry! It was an accident! Spare me!"
Her clenched fist was trembling, and I squeezed my eyes shut and hunched my neck, bracing for the pain that was surely coming.
A patter of running feet. I opened my eyes, and there was Sis's back, fleeing.
"...Uh. Hm."
"Tsk, tsk."
Dad clicked his tongue, and I scratched my head.
"I thought Sis was going to go full asura on me."
"So she got caught, after all that hiding."
Mom was coming out, apron off—the kitchen must have been finished—and she heard me muttering and chuckled.
"Huh? You knew?"
"Oh my. She really got caught?"
"I happened to see her tearing into Hwayeon yesterday. Has Sis always been like this?"
"That girl Siha took after your grandmother's temperament when she was young. Didn't she, dear?"
Mom looked thoroughly entertained. She sat down beside Dad and poked his side with an elbow. Dad closed his book and looked at me.
"Yes. Your grandmother—my mother—is blunt in ordinary times, and kind, but when she gets angry she shows a face so grim that no one around her can talk her down. Once, when you were little, at the country house, a passing wild dog nearly bit you. Do you remember?"
"How would I remember that?"
The moment I heard wild dog, the Long-snouted Lean Wolf came to mind, and my mood soured.
"Your grandmother came charging out with a club as thick as a forearm and brought it down on that dog's skull in a single blow. The dog was about your size, back then. She shattered its head."
"Ghk..."
In the photos, Grandmother in her youth had looked even more slender and delicate than Sis, and she'd done that with a club. Franc, listening beside me, had gone round-eyed with surprise.
So that gentle, warm grandmother, and Sis, had a temper like that hidden away. A shock.
"So the ghost of a fury, when she's truly angry—all of it comes from your grandmother. She worked so hard to hide it and show her little brother only a pretty big sister, and in the end it slipped. Hohoho."
I listened to Mom laugh and scratched my head. Asking Sis for a ride was a lost cause. I almost asked Mom instead, met Dad's sharp look, and gave it up.
Ugh. Nothing for it. A taxi, then?
I'd learned the truth, and the conclusion was that they'd gotten that angry because they treasured me. Sis too. Thinking of it that way, I didn't feel bad so much as good.
So long as I didn't actually do something awful, Sis wasn't going to get that angry at me.
Though I'd definitely felt my life in danger just now!
Anyway, I went into the bathroom to shower, and Franc followed me in again and started washing my back with both hands.
I genuinely could not tell whether this girl had any self-awareness. I was naked in the shower, and she came in naked to wash my back.
And after all this, hands off until I was fully recovered? What was this, some new species of torture?
Her hands on my back, and in Spatial Perception the sight of her naked body moving, and the blood started rushing hard toward the center.
Worse, Franc had begun washing the rest of me without seeming to notice her breasts against my back. The unmistakably stiff tips pressed into me, and in the end I couldn't hold it. I got hard.
No hiding it, and somehow the thought of showing Franc my magnificent Neo Armstrong Cannon felt oddly good, so I pretended not to notice and started washing my hair. The hands that had been on my back rose to my shoulders, then washed my sides, my chest, my stomach. And Franc's hands kept coming lower.
Mischief kicked in. I focused Mana Sieve into my cock.
In that instant, the hand about to pass my lower belly bumped softly against my shaft. She made a face—did my hand catch on something?—and started feeling me over with both hands!
Soft, slender fingers at the tip of the head, the tickle of them, or something like an electric shock. I nearly let a moan slip without meaning to.
I was losing it. This was completely different from touching myself!
"...?"
The moment her slender fingers grazed the slit and brushed the ridge of the head, a sharp crackle of pleasure shot up into my waist, and I couldn't hold the moan back.
"...?!"
Only after she heard me did Franc realize what she had in her hands. She startled and snatched them away, and I used the opening to speak, quick.
"You won't let me touch you, but you go touching mine. This isn't fair."
"Ah—ahhh—!"
Franc, face scarlet, hesitated and fidgeted, and in the end covered her face and fled the bathroom.
Hnnn. Get me this worked up and then run for it. At this rate I was going to cultivate a sacred relic out of pure suffering.
I couldn't even relieve it myself. I belted the national anthem in my head with everything I had, barely managed to settle, and finished the shower.
I washed the rest, wrapped a towel around my waist, and came out to find Sis emerging from her room in going-out clothes. A white long blouse with flowers embroidered along the hem, sky-blue skinny jeans. She looked every inch the university student.
"Sis, where are you going?"
"...You're done washing? Get dressed and come out. I'll take you."
She said it while looking away from me, standing there in nothing but a towel at the waist.
"Oh, really?"
"Really. I have business at Time River too."
So the anger had cooled? I'd braced to take a hit, and this was better. In the old days I would've been smacked a few times no matter how it had happened.
Come to think of it, since I'd come back alive, the physical corrections seemed to have dropped off a lot.
"I'll be dressed in a second. And earlier was an accident. Sorry."
"I know, so just get dressed and come out!"
Her face was reddening, temper about to flare, and I dodged it and ducked into my room. Franc, who'd been pacing in there, startled. I waved her down, pulled on easy straight-leg pants with an elastic waist and a black shirt, and came back out, and Mom said something I hadn't expected.
"Son. Don't tease Yeoni too much, hm?"
"Yeah. ...Huh?"
Wh-what did that mean?
Startled, I looked at Mom, sitting on the sofa watching television. She didn't so much as glance at me. All her attention was on the drama.
"If you're dressed, hurry up!"
"Yeah, yeah."
I answered Sis, calling from the entryway, and looked back at Mom.
No way she'd caught on that I was thinking of moving out. Come on. It wasn't as if Mom had learned to read minds. She was just worrying the way mothers do.
Franc and I rode in the van with Sis at the wheel, bound for Time River, and Sis, quiet while she drove, spoke when a light stopped us.
"Seoha. About what we talked about at the salon Tuesday night. That Hwayeon had been protecting us. Is that true?"
"I heard it from Director Lee Hyeryeong."
"...I see. That girl really does worry too much."
Sis smiled, bitter, as if there was no helping her.
Well, she had reason. There was an old saying that being born beautiful was crime enough to die for. A beautiful flower with no means of protecting itself, and anyone will try to pick it. Of course she'd grow sensitive.
Mom and Dad ran a hospital, and they knew people in the legal world, but those were acquaintances. Nothing more.
When someone came at you with force, sometimes you needed force of your own to meet them. The way Jeral Packard had met the bastards he fought.
I answered, looking at the 63 Building far off.
"Before I went into the Phase World, I just lived without thinking. Go once and come back, and all sorts of thoughts start piling up."
"What kind?"
"What happens if I reveal everything I can do. Whether bad people will come after me by kidnapping Mom and you, and use you to threaten me. Things like that."
"..."
I spoke the resolve out loud to set it in me, and Sis's small voice tickled my ear.
"...it. ...so manly, it's danger..."
"Huh? What'd you say?"
I turned to her. She was glaring at the windshield as if she meant to punch through it.
"...I said you've gotten ridiculously manly, so a lot of girls are going to fall for you."
"Hah. Weren't you the one calling me ordinary and ugly?"
I grumbled, and Sis let out a snort of a laugh.
I wasn't about to fall for that anymore.
We parked and went into the Time River Building. Franc was still shy anywhere crowded; she turned one hand back to cover the cleft of her backside and followed plastered to my back.
The first-floor hall was as full of people as the last time I'd come, Sunday or not.
"Whoa. They don't even rest on weekends?"
I was a little put off, watching the suited people hurry past, and their eyes poured toward Sis—then gathered on me.
The surprise was plain. I'd had Mana Vision on since yesterday. That had to be it.
If I didn't do at least this, no one would know I was an ability user. Look at me plain and I was just an ordinary high schooler.
Sis had gotten used to the blue light banding my irises, and my eyes didn't startle her anymore. First-timers all jumped like that.
Come to think of it, when I'd compressed Mana Sieve extremely hard into my eyes, the people they called the review committee had locked up. Could it be a kind of Fear?
What if they decided they'd been attacked? A little worrying.
I ignored the murmuring and followed Sis not to the elevator but to the information desk by the entrance, where she spoke to a woman whose makeup had to be a millimeter thick.
"Hello, Ms. Kim Ji-soo. This is my younger brother. He joined as a guest member a few days ago—Jung Seoha. His access pass should have been issued. Could we pick it up?"
Come to think of it, Sis already had something like an ID card around her neck. The woman called Kim Ji-soo bent at the waist, flustered and honored.
"Yes. Mr. Jung Seoha's pass has already been issued, but the Boss retrieved it, saying she would give it to him herself. Shall I put a call through?"
"You don't have to. Thank you."
"Ah—yes!"
Sis inclined her upper body in a small bow, and Kim Ji-soo hurriedly bent to return it.
Once we were away from the desk, Sis dropped her voice to a whisper only I would hear.
"When I called before we left the house, she said she'd be on the twentieth floor. We can go up."
"Yeah. I saw."
From the moment she'd entered my range of perception, she'd been on the twentieth floor practicing a movement art—Sihwa Yuseon, was it? I wasn't sure that was the name, but she'd been going back and forth in one place, repeating the same movements, so it had to be.
Physical Reinforcement types don't tire from anything ordinary, and even so Hwayeon was pouring sweat. Seeing that, the talk of techniques exclusive to ability users had to be true.
"You saw that with detection?"
I nodded without answering, and Sis nodded back, small.
"But what are you here for, Sis?"
"I have something I need to discuss with Director Lee Hyeryeong."
Work talk, obviously.
We traded a few words as we approached the elevator bank, where people were already waiting. They spotted Sis and me, and their eyes went wide as saucers.
"Ah, Ms. Siha!"
And from among them a man who looked to be in his mid-twenties waved at Sis, called her name as if they were close, and came over.
"Hello, Supervisor Yoon Seong-hyeok."
Sis offered a slight bow, posture beyond reproach, and the man's face went slack with delight. I didn't like it. Did he know Sis?
His hair was trimmed neat in a dandy cut, and he wore a black cardigan, a French shirt, and dress slacks, all of it clean. He was a good-looking man, and the look suited him.
"Here to see the Boss?"
"No. My brother is here to see the Boss. I came to learn the work."
She answered with a bright smile, and the slack delight on his face turned awkward. He wanted to ask what work she'd come to learn, and the look of him said he couldn't. Then his eyes moved to me, and the moment they met mine, Yoon Seong-hyeok flinched.
I raised Mana Vision a little stronger in my eyes and glared—looked—at him.
"Ah, ah! You must be Mr. Jung Seoha. It's an honor to meet you. I'm Yoon Seong-hyeok, a bottom-rung supervisor in General Affairs."
The blue light beginning to spill from my eyes startled him for only a moment. Then he put on an amiable smile, bowed his head, and greeted me.
The way he treated me felt a little exaggerated. I let a hint of discomfort at the greeting show, and Yoon Seong-hyeok read it and laughed.
"What happened at the Ability User Association yesterday has already spread all through the company. The Association's review committee members are fussy and impossible beyond belief, and yet you pressed them yourself and drew out the best possible result."
That brought Han Jeongmun and Choi Jinsik to mind, the two who'd gone with me yesterday. Spreading the whole rumor before a day had passed. Impressive, in a sense.
Nearby were three H Class men and two H Class women. By class, Business Support supporters. The envious looks they were giving me made it certain. And the men and women who looked like ordinary employees, too.
I answered with feigned modesty.
"You make me embarrassed, saying that. Where did you hear about me?"
"Hahaha. This world is smaller than you'd think. Word of Mr. Jung Seoha has already spread clean across Yeouido. An outstanding ability user, they say—even the President wants him!"
All at once the First Lady rose in front of my eyes, smiling in circles. Beside her, Director Lee Hyeryeong, grinning.
"I'm still a minor, and I haven't even shown everything I can do. Hearing that much, I'm afraid I'll disappoint people later."
"You're a detection type, so you won't be fighting on the front line. Even if all you do with the time you have left is practice mapmaking and terrain perception, that should be plenty to make your name."
Huh? Maps and terrain perception?
Ding.
The elevator opened and people poured out, and the conversation paused.
"I'm really jealous. A high-grade detection ability..."
A small woman's voice from behind. I turned, and a girl who barely cleared five feet came into view. The H Class life-support ability user I'd sensed earlier.
Neatly braided hair, tied with a ribbon, and it suited her. She was wearing the same kind of white long-sleeve tee I had on, a blue jumper skirt, and flats, and she was looking up at me without any effort to hide the envy.
The moment my gaze landed on her, the people around her quietly opened a little space. But what was this? An ability user younger than me? She looked thirteen or fourteen at most.
"Oh. Yeah. Thanks."
Someone says they're jealous; what are you supposed to say? Whatever I answered would sound like bragging. But at my answer the girl's small, cute eyes went round, and then she started to hem and haw.
Whether she hemmed or not, once everyone was off I pushed Sis into a corner of the elevator first and stood in front of her like a screen. As expected, the forty-odd people waiting behind me piled aboard in a rush.
Over capacity in a blink, packed so tight that a few had to step back off. I triggered Mana Mode and held a reasonable gap so Sis wouldn't be crushed. Then the girl from before was shoved in by the crowd and flattened between them and me.
"Nnngh...! I-I can't take this...!"
Stuck to me with not a gap left, she made a crushed, miserable sound.
She was an Elemental type. And true to that small frame, her physical ability wasn't much; she couldn't move at all, wedged in the crowd, letting out stifled groans. She was short enough that her face was buried in my chest, and through no intention of mine one of my legs had slipped between hers, so my thigh was against her groin.
Bigger than she looked, though. From the outside she'd seemed as flat as Sis, but pressed close, the volume hidden under her clothes—ahem!
I scolded myself for a thought that was rude to her and braced both arms against the elevator wall, holding still. Fidget, and I might stimulate somewhere I shouldn't. Get mistaken for groping someone, and my social life would sprout complications before it had even begun.
The floors rose, and people got off one by one, and only after about half were gone was there room enough to breathe. By then the girl had separated from me at once.
The sweet shampoo scent fading was a little disappointing.
I was straightening my rumpled clothes when the girl, face a bit red, bowed her head and apologized.
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?"
I asked it easily, and the ribbon-braided girl looked up at me with rabbit eyes, flustered—ow, ow!
"Wh-why are you pinching me?!"
"She's older than we are! And don't go talking so casually to someone you just met—it's rude!"
Tch. She could've just said it. Why pinch? And why did it hurt this much? It wasn't as if Mana Mode had dropped. I turned a hand back, rubbed the spot Sis had pinched, and looked at the girl.
That face was in its twenties?
"Seriously?"
"Yes. You can speak however you're comfortable, Mr. Seoha. You're going to become someone great. I'm only a life-support ability user, after all."
She answered with a puppyish little laugh.
That lack of spirit, that missing confidence—it reminded me, unpleasantly, of myself before I became an ability user. Like standing face to face with a past I didn't want to meet.
"But can you really tell ability users apart?"
"Uh, yeah. You're H Class, right?"
"...Whoa."
She left a beat, stunned, as if she'd lost her words.
"For an ability user, you look way too—ghk!"
Pinched again! I'd only been about to say she looked young! I turned and glared at Sis, and she glared right back, eyes sharp enough to split wood.
"Th-then, is that rumor true too?"
"What rumor?"
Hmm. She'd said the girl was older than us, so should I be speaking politely? But no matter how generously I looked, she seemed fifteen at the outside.
Ah, whatever. She didn't mind, so I'd keep it casual.
"Th-that you're... dating the Boss."
"Yeah. Hwayeon's my girl."
I used Hwayeon's name so freely that the people around us startled. Was I not supposed to throw her name around like that? The girl was staring at me, blank.
The men still in the elevator were sending looks mixed of despair, loss, and anger, and somehow I felt I could get addicted to looks like these. I'd never thought being envied would feel this good.
Then Sis, still hiding behind my back, started pinching my back and waist without mercy and scolding in a small voice.
"What are you saying right now?! Are you trying to grind the Boss's dignity into the floor at her own company?! Think before you talk~!"
Gyaaah!
Pain that even Mana Sieve couldn't block. I caught her hand and endured, and forced a smile at the girl.
"Urk. Forget what I just said."
"Ahaha."
She laughed, bright and clear, as if our bickering were fun, and she was cute enough that I wanted to just claim her as a little sister.
If she was older than we were, she had to be mid-twenties at least, and yet a height that barely cleared five feet, small neat features to match, and dainty arms and legs—she did not look that age at all.
"Anyway, what's your name? How old are you?"
"Ah, I'm Jung So-hee. I'm twenty-five this year."
She really was?!
"I-I look a little young, right?"
"A little doesn't cover it... Sorry for speaking casually."
I felt Sis's pinching turning sincere and apologized fast. A resigned little sigh, and the attack stopped.
Ugh. I definitely had blood-bruises on my back.
At my apology, Jung So-hee made a strange face, glad and sad at once, and fiddled with her hair in both hands. On impulse I patted her head. She went rigid, as if the touch had startled her, and then her face reddened and she started in with a flustered little sound.
Ding.
We arrived at the eighteenth floor just then, and the people still aboard poured out. Somehow the strength seemed to have gone out of the men's shoulders.
Jung So-hee got off too, face red, glancing back at me, and Sis gave me a slightly dissatisfied glare and stepped off with them.
"Work hard, Sis."
"Y-yes?!"
I'd meant my sister, but Jung So-hee startled and turned.
"No—I mean my sister."
"...Ah! Auu!!"
Jung So-hee looked ready to die of shame and scurried around the corridor, gone. Sis, who'd been watching, let out a small sigh, waved at me, and answered.
"You too. No slacking. Learn properly."
"Yeah. See you later."
I took her scowling cheer with a smile and rode up to the twentieth floor, where Hwayeon was.