021 – Trolley Dilemma # 1
I had lived on my own for quite a while, so I could cook decently enough. Food I made myself actually tasted pretty good, if I said so.
But the food I truly loved? Food made by someone else.
Sssssk—
A frying pan sat on the induction cooktop, and in front of it, Yu Ari was grilling pork belly. The scene was surreal in a way I couldn't quite put into words.
“The food's almost done, Senior. Could you set out the spoons on the table? I know it should be my job as the junior, but I'm kind of busy grilling meat here….”
Yu Ari's hands were in constant motion—searing the pork while simultaneously simmering doenjang stew and slicing up scallion salad. She looked impossibly busy, yet everything came together with brisk, practiced efficiency. Honestly, it looked professional.
“Since when does setting out spoons require a senior-junior hierarchy? Whoever's free does it. If you want to play that game, you're a B-rank and I'm a D—no wait, C-rank.”
“Oh, is that how it works?”
As I laid the spoons and chopsticks on the table, old memories surfaced.
Back when Korea had fewer than thirty awakeners, the culture of seniority and strict rank order was brutal. The official justification was that inside a rift, one careless mistake could cost you your life, so a rigid top-down system was necessary—sure, fine. But honestly, it just felt like there were a lot of rotten people in those days.
“A lot of the older seniors were total relics, remember? Making juniors fetch their cafeteria trays, ordering them to throw out their leftover side dishes. Absolute scumbags, every one of them. I wonder what they're up to now.”
It had been worse than the military, as I remembered it. Well—it was the military, in a sense. I'd awakened back in high school myself, and instead of enlisting, I served my alternative duty raiding rifts.
Tap.
Yu Ari set the finished pork belly and stew down on the table and let out a hearty laugh. “Puh-huh! Saying all that, weren't you a bit of a relic yourself, Senior? You ordered us around plenty—do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that. You got chewed out behind your back more than you know.”
I knew. I'd actually overheard Seo Yerim cursing me out behind my back once, and it had stung more than I cared to admit. Still, I had my excuses.
“Everything I said, I said so you'd all make it out alive. Back then, one tiny slip-up could get someone seriously hurt or worse. But looking back now… yeah.”
Maybe I'd just been another garden-variety old-fogey senior all along.
That was when it happened.
Glu-glu-glu—
Before I even noticed, Yu Ari had cracked open a cold can of beer and poured it into a glass, the rising bubbles and foam looking impossibly refreshing. And then—on top of that—she broke out an entire bottle of soju.
With practiced ease, she mixed the soju into the beer glass, and the whole performance was surreal on several levels at once.
“Why are you staring at me like that, Senior? Something wrong? Need something?”
“…No. It's just—the girl who was a high schooler is now mixing soju and beer, and I'm sitting here realizing how fast time flies. Also, drinking like that is bad for you. Even if awakeners are tougher than average, still….”
“Senior, you're nagging again.”
Damn it.
Lecturing other people and doling out unsolicited advice had become a habit of mine. Once upon a time, I'd had every right and privilege to do it—but back when I was stuck as a perpetual D-rank, all I got for my trouble were those glares that said, Who died and made you special?
Soon Yu Ari spoke up. “Soju's bitter, you know. Honestly, I still don't get what people see in it. I like to think I'm fairly grown up by now, but maybe I still have a kid's palate.”
A kid's palate, she says—but Yu Ari had grown up very well indeed. Back in high school she'd been scrawny as anything, but now, with her long coat off, she looked ready to burst out of her clothes in every sense of the word.
“Still, getting older has let me see some things in a new light. For instance—I've come to appreciate that all your nagging back then was actually pretty useful.”
So that's how it is.
Yu Ari, once an F-rank high schooler, had become more of an adult than I'd ever given her credit for. Meanwhile, I was still a Peter Pan chasing dreams that should've expired years ago.
For some reason, I felt a little embarrassed by the man I'd become.
Awakeners, as a rule, could hold their liquor. But Yu Ari was on another level entirely.
She'd drained several bottles of soju by herself without a single trace of intoxication on her face. Me, on the other hand? My head was already swimming pleasantly.
“Yu Ari, you drank more than I did. How are you completely fine?”
“Did you not know that an awakener's mana capacity changes how alcohol is broken down and absorbed? The higher your rank, the less you get drunk.”
Drinking without ever getting drunk. For a man who had once turned to the bottle to forget the world's sorrows, this was horrific news.
“So climbing the ranks isn't all sunshine, huh.”
“Exactly. Go up high enough and your workload multiplies, your to-do list balloons, and everything you have to answer for piles up. Honestly, there's not a single good thing about it.”
Shk—
Yu Ari drew her long, pale legs up in front of her chest. Their whiteness was almost blinding, and I felt like it sobered me up a notch. My head, meanwhile, had drifted to a heavier subject—the people who had made Yu Ari's life miserable.
Lee Jeonghun?
“Yu Ari, word is you and Lee Jeonghun had marriage talks going once.”
“Th-that was just his side pushing things through on their own!”
Yu Ai yelped it out in a playfully flustered shout.
Then, behind me, the closed door to the room rustled.
Oinoi?
Yu Ari asked, “There's that nymph behind that door, right? Oinoi, was it?”
“That's her.”
“Is she shy around strangers?”
No.
The truth was, Oinoi wasn't particularly shy at all. But she was terrified of Yu Ari.
Oinoi's instincts were remarkably sharp. So sharp, in fact, that they had never once been wrong. But that meant one thing: Yu Ari was a dangerous person.
The Yu Ari I remembered was a soft-hearted, naive girl—so tender that she couldn't bring herself to kill the monsters that emerged from rifts because she felt sorry for them. It worried me enough that I wanted to sit her down and nag her endlessly: Keep being a pushover like that and someone's going to hurt you badly.
And yet.
I had no choice but to admit it honestly.
The Yu Ari sitting in front of me now was not the girl I used to know.
Still, I had settled on a life policy long ago: from the day I became an awakener, I would trust only what I saw with my own eyes. So I decided to ask.
“Yu Ari, what happened to you all those years?”
“Me? Honestly, I wanted to be a doctor. My family was poor—you remember, right? I couldn't even afford casual clothes, so I wore my uniform everywhere. I hated being poor. So I decided to become a doctor, because I wanted to make serious money.”
“…Well. You always were a good student.”
A studious girl. An ordinary high schooler. A chaebol heir. An aspiring idol. Back then, awakeners were dragged out and thrown into rifts with perfect equality—no exceptions made for anyone.
The vast majority of awakeners in those days were teenagers and twenty-somethings, and nobody bothered with talk of child-soldier conventions or human rights or anything else. The world was believed to be facing extinction-level crisis. And in the face of true crisis, it turned out that morality and law were fences flimsier than a twig.
Shk—
Yu Ari buried her face into her knees, drawn up before her chest.
“You wouldn't know this, Senior, but I was doing pretty well for myself in the awakener industry. So I got a lot of marriage proposals. Did you know that awakeners who marry other awakeners tend to have awakener children?”
“I've heard. Wasn't that just a rumor?”
“It's real. The sample size is pretty big now.”
Seriously?
Coming from a public-health doctor and former B-rank, it had an air of credibility. Why? Because even when the words are identical, statements carry more weight when a doctor says them.
Yu Ari added, “That was around when Lee Jeonghun first brought up marriage with me. I turned him down in every way I could, but it was awkward—I was in the middle of taking on a contract from Ohsa Group at the time.”
Ohsa Group was the company run by Lee Jeonghun's family. The pharmaceutical division was supposedly the branch he oversaw, if I recalled correctly.
How do I know that?
Because on awakener social media, I search up not just my own name but plenty of other people's too.
Soon, Yu Ari lifted her face.
Tears were welling in the corners of her eyes.
“I have nothing going on with Lee Jeonghun. Senior, please don't misunderstand and go spreading weird rumors to other people.”
“Relax. My lips are sealed.”
So I finally understood how the marriage talk with Lee Jeonghun had come about. And I also understood something else—that Yu Ari was hiding a great deal from me.
Then Yu Ari asked me, “Come to think of it, Senior, you used to say you wanted to earn a fortune and make the greatest name for yourself. Like the heroes in the movies. You said it so seriously that I still remember it.”
“I did say that.”
An embarrassing memory. When I'd first become an awakener, I'd wanted to be like Tony Stark from Iron Man—and I genuinely believed I could pull it off, too.
Looking back now… well, calling it nonsense might be going a step too far.
“I still think I can do it.”
I had climbed to C-rank. I'd found good friends, Keongkeongi among them. I still believed I wasn't too late.
Yu Ari gave a soft laugh. “Puh-huh. Then let me ask you—what will you do when the trolley dilemma comes?”
“The what?”
“The trolley dilemma. A train is barreling down the track, and you have the power to switch the points. On one track, five people are tied down. On the other, just one. If—”
“Ah.”
I knew it now.
So that's what they called it—the trolley dilemma.
Swirling the glass of soju-beer in slow circles, Yu Ari asked, “Senior, if you want to be a hero—what do you do at that moment?”
I had never once thought about it.
And it was a hard question.
Sacrifice one life to save the many?
Just as I was wrestling with it—
“Senior, if you truly aim for the top, you should be hammering out your answer now, while you still can. This is advice I'm giving you in all seriousness.”
Yu Ari's voice was colder than anything I could have imagined from her.
When I startled and looked up, she was stretching her arms overhead as if nothing at all had happened.
“Nyeeeah—! Wow, it's gotten late. Would it be all right if I crashed here? If there's no spare room, you can just spread a blanket out in the living room for me.”
Vroooom—
Just then, a loud commotion rang out. Lots of dogs barking.
━Kong-kong…!
━Kong-kong…!
No—those were dog-squirrels barking. Anyway.
It was nearly ten at night. Who on earth was making this much racket? Then I heard the beep-beep of a keypad at the front door, and someone let themselves into the house.
It was Seo Yerim.
“Yah, what brings you here at this hour without even a text?”
I asked, startled—and Seo Yerim immediately blew up at me.
“Excuse me? I sent you TelTalk messages and you're the one who didn't check them. I told the field staff they'd be contacting you over the well water samples, and I told you to keep your phone on you. Did that go in one ear and out the other?”
“It did? Someone contacted me?”
I pulled out my phone and found fifteen TelTalk messages from Seo Yerim waiting for me.
I have a bad habit of never checking my phone when I'm out with people, so it had completely slipped my mind. I was just wondering whether she'd really come all the way here over that when Seo Yerim kicked the empty liquor bottles carelessly out of her path and strode inside, extending a hand toward Yu Ari.
“Yu Ari. It's been a while. Three years, isn't it—since Ha-yang's wedding was the last time we saw each other face to face?”
“It really has. Good to see you, Yerim.”
Shk—
Yu Ari rose from her seat and clasped Seo Yerim's outstretched hand.
So women—even women the same age—shook hands with each other. That was new information to me. Wasn't the usual routine squealing, bouncing up and down, and hugging? Apparently those women existed only in my imagination.
Thump-thump—
Just then, the closed door swung open.
And Oinoi came sliding out in a rush.
“Aaah! Kore Yerim has arrived—it is so…!”