The Clueless Ones (3)
Even after I got home, the dazed, buzzing feeling refused to fade. I picked up a glass to drink some water, then set it back down. I sat in front of the broken TV, then stood up again. I went into the bathroom and came back out without doing a thing.
With no way to untangle the mess in my head, I spent a good hour repeating completely meaningless motions.
I felt awful. Feeling awful in this situation was only natural, so that part wasn't strange.
But what exactly was making me feel so bad — that, I couldn't pin down. My thoughts refused to sort themselves out.
Hoping a full stomach might wipe away the useless fretting, I opened the kitchen drawer, only to find I was completely out of instant noodles.
Tch…
I checked whether there might be a delivery app of some kind, and sure enough — it had never shown up in the game, but just like before I'd been isekai'd, delivery apps were pretty thoroughly implemented here.
And not merely implemented. They'd gone and developed options I never would have imagined.
The moment your food is ready, we teleport it straight to your table.
Wow. That was a genuinely revolutionary feature. Just the thought of never again receiving a soggy pork cutlet made my mouth water on its own.
Still, I had to wonder — with a system like this in place, why was there still an option to type in a delivery address?
It didn't take long to figure out why.
Please enter the coordinates to connect the portal.
So it was a delivery option you couldn't even use if you didn't know how. Portal magic was out of the question for someone whose basic magical proficiency wasn't even that high.
In the end, I ordered what I figured would arrive the fastest — jajangmyeon and mini sweet-and-sour pork.
But that Chinese restaurant betrayed my expectations head-on, taking a full hour to deliver the jajangmyeon and tangsuyuk. The noodles were bloated. The pork was soggy.
Ugh…
Jajangmyeon I could still force down even a little overcooked, but the tangsuyuk barely got my hand near it.
And to make matters worse, even the jajangmyeon filled me up so fast I only managed half. I'd forgotten I was Philin now and ordered way too much.
Still, it felt wasteful to throw out delivery food, so I pushed myself through as much of the jajangmyeon as I could.
"Huuuh…"
I got indigestion.
I never knew this in the game, but apparently even a horned half-demon can get heartburn. Truly a rewarding discovery of a completely useless piece of lore.
Fuck. Nothing works today.
I was so irritated that even sighing made my solar plexus throb and nausea rise in my throat.
I flopped onto the sofa and kept picking my phone up and putting it down, until the discomfort finally forced me upright.
I wish someone would just prick my hand for me.
I'd never gotten indigestion once in my entire life, so I didn't even know how to do the finger-prick trick. In the middle of that suffocating frustration, something suddenly came back to me.
The way my whole body had gone soft and loose when that guy held my horns in bed.
Just that much tension relief would probably do it.
What the hell am I thinking?
I snapped back to myself and slapped both cheeks hard. The sharp crack brought my mind into focus.
But still.
I still couldn't figure out exactly what was making me feel so bad.
I was just… unpleasant. Like indigestion that had lodged itself somewhere I couldn't find, tormenting me all night long.
In the end, I thrashed around all night before my condition finally improved a little by morning.
I skipped breakfast, but my stomach had settled enough that I was hungry. I wished someone would make me some porridge.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, I suddenly remembered the first day I'd been isekai'd — how he'd shown up carrying porridge. I'd been so out of it I hadn't taken a single spoonful. Come to think of it, what kind of porridge had he even bought?
I got that far and immediately delivered a double self-slap to both cheeks. Smack, smack.
Have I lost it?
If I had, I'd lost it thoroughly. What was I even thinking right now? Why did I keep thinking about that piece of trash…
Deliberately, unlike usual, I yanked my hair into a tight ponytail and practiced a cold expression in the mirror. Maybe I didn't even need to practice. I actually felt bad right now. I'd felt bad since yesterday. I was definitely in a bad—
"Why the hell am I thinking about this?!"
I snapped at my reflection in irritation. I stared blankly at the seething version of myself in the glass, and then—
I'm pretty.
The thought hit me out of nowhere.
The girl in the mirror — dark crimson hair pulled tight into a ponytail that just brushed her shoulders, dark crimson eyes glaring coldly — was beautiful even like that.
And without realizing it, the way I'd referred to the girl in the mirror in my head was…
Me…?
A wave of disorientation washed over me. I fled from the mirror like I was running away and hurried out of the house.
But apparently I couldn't even manage that much dignity, because I hadn't gotten far before—
"Ah."
"Ah… hey."
I ran into the trash bastard.
I almost greeted him out of habit before whipping my head away and walking faster than usual. Afraid he might follow, I strode off without looking back, practically running.
Around the time I passed the café we'd gone to together just yesterday—
I finally spun around and snapped at him, every bit of irritation loaded into my voice.
"Why do you keep following me?"
Caught off guard by the sudden venom in my eyes, Junhyuk looked startled for a moment, then answered in a voice that shrank into itself.
"I'm just… going to the Academy too…"
…Right.
Thinking about it, we took the same route. Realizing I'd just made it obvious I was hyperaware of him only pissed me off more. So I drove the point home one more time, packing it full of warning.
"Don't talk to me today. Don't let me see you. Got it?"
Junhyuk nodded without a word. His expression said he'd already been planning to do exactly that, and I almost fired off another shot — but I held back.
The atmosphere in the lecture hall was even worse than when I'd run into Junhyuk earlier. Serena, uncharacteristically keeping her distance while sneaking glances at my face. Sowon, chatting away with a cluster of other girls until she saw me walk in and her expression went completely stiff.
And Junhyuk, who came in not long after I sat down, claimed a seat like some remote island, and stared blankly at his phone with an indifferent face.
It was a bizarre picture — the people who'd been on the same team yesterday each occupying a different corner of the lecture hall, scattered to the winds.
Maybe I should have opposed Sowon joining the team to the bitter end. Or maybe bringing Serena in had been the mistake. My head filled up with completely pointless fretting, and not a single word of the lecture made it in.
At this rate, was I even going to be able to take the midterm evaluation properly?
I couldn't afford to face evaluation day like this, so I decided to move — to try something, anything.
But first, I needed an ally. Unreliable as she might be.
"Serena. Come see me after class."
"Huh? O-okay."
I recruited Serena.
She also owed me a debt I needed to collect.
Serena liked mint. I'd ordered it just to mess with her, and somehow I'd only ended up doing her a favor. The mint tasted especially bitter today.
"So, uh… what happened yesterday?"
"What?"
"You two came in separately earlier. Don't tell me…"
Serena carefully lowered her voice.
"You didn't break up, right?"
"How many times do I have to tell you we're not dating?!"
I slammed the table. Serena flinched, and people around us started murmuring and looking over. I cleared my throat — ahem — and growled again in a lower voice.
"Listen carefully. I have zero feelings for that guy. Got it?"
I figured that would finally get through to her.
But Serena just looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked back,
"So you didn't break up — you were never anything to begin with?"
"Yes!"
"Then why did you ask me about that back then?"
"About what?"
"When we were drinking wine at your place. You said his personality was weird. That you were going to try talking to him again. You said all that."
Ah… I let out a faint sigh, and Serena started complaining instead.
"I thought you two were about to get together properly, and that silver fox kept butting in, so I deliberately overdid it to snap you out of it."
Of course, we really weren't anything.
But it was impossible for someone giving romantic advice to believe the person asking for it had no relationship with the guy in question at all. It didn't make sense from the start.
And more importantly—
"But hang on. You actually told me you'd decided to go out with him, didn't you?"
"I did?"
"Didn't you? I mean, a girl who came to me day after day talking about nothing but Yeom Junhyuk — there's no way she already broke up after dating for that short a time."
My mind went blank. I kept forgetting that the timeline I was in was the hidden route.
Just like Yeom Junhyuk wasn't the one I knew from the game, Philin, Serena, and the relationships between them all had differences from what I remembered.
Philin had built up far more affection with Junhyuk over a much longer stretch of time than I'd known.
And she'd shared all of that with Serena.
The only variable that had crashed into their otherwise stable dynamic was—
None other than me.
"So then… haah. What am I supposed to do for you?"
I never imagined the conversation would go this way. Instead, Serena was fretting about everyone around us and asking me for a solution. Flustered, I stirred my drink in circles, picking through words in my head without even noticing the whipped cream melting into the mint chocolate.
"For real — you're not dating Yeom Junhyuk, and you have zero feelings for him? We need to get this straight."
Yes. That was the correct answer. Nodding was the right move.
But I was worried that I'd be the one shattering the coherence between these people again. The thought that it might set off some other incident made me hesitate to answer.
But.
I couldn't claim affection that didn't exist, either.
Their peace and the story's coherence mattered, sure — but the most important thing to me was—
Me.
"We're nothing. I have no feelings for him."
At that, Serena nodded and drained her drink in one long pull.
"Then we're good. If we push Lim Sowon and him together, that'll smooth over that silver fox's mood. Don't go changing your story later."
Serena agreed without objection that this lineup needed to hold until midterms. As for Sowon, if Serena and I sat down and talked with her, we could at least slap on a temporary patch.
But the real problem was something else.
"What about Yeom Junhyuk? He seemed pretty serious."
I could handle myself. The problem was Yeom Junhyuk.
A bomb that could blow the barely-sealed problem sky-high in one shot.
"Leave him to me."
"What are you going to do?"
At Serena's worried look, I nodded with a grim, resolute expression. Judging by his temperament so far—
Maybe I actually had a shot.