Why Already? (2)
“Philin, you’re okay, right?”
No. I was not okay. Clinging to a consciousness that kept threatening to slip away, I forced my brain into overdrive.
Philin’s route was extremely short. The fact that we were already a couple meant today was absolutely not the first day of the game.
One chilling possibility slid down my frontal lobe and settled cold along my spine.
No way. Already?
Had I already become a handle? Without even a chance to change a single thing?
My heart dropped. Praying it wasn’t true, I spoke to Junhyuk in a trembling voice.
“Um, hey.”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
“What day is this for us?”
Just saying it out loud sent goosebumps crawling over my skin. Having to ask a scatterbrain what day it was—the sheer humiliation of it.
But then—
“Yesterday…. We decided to start dating.”
Oh, thank god. A huge sigh of relief escaped me before I could stop it. From what I remembered, that Submissive-by-Day, Dominant-by-Night Casanova was not the kind of no-holds-barred alpha who went straight for the horns the second they started dating.
Back when I was playing, I’d been annoyed at how long he dragged things out once the meal was basically cooked—but that pacing had just saved me.
More important than that, though—
The horn scene was the evening of the day after they started dating….
So that meant today?
My lips went bone-dry in an instant. My whole body started to tremble.
These already cumbersome accessories on my head were scheduled to be demoted to handles—and if the original timeline held, that night was tonight!
“I—I need to rest today!”
“What?”
“Sorry. Just go. I’m not feeling well today.”
No matter what happened, I was not leaving the house today. I had no idea what would come tomorrow, but I was certain of one thing: a horrific event was waiting for me this evening.
“Just go already!”
I shouted it through the front door. On the other side, Junhyuk stood in silence for a moment.
“…Philin. Can I come in for a second?”
“No. I don’t want you to.”
“I’m coming in.”
I didn’t even have time to get angry.
He punched in the passcode—beep, beep, beep, beep—and shoved the door open without hesitation. He knew the passcode?
Before I could recover from the shock, the fortress that had been protecting me crumbled with pathetic ease.
And the Junhyuk standing in the doorway—
“Ah….”
—was pure narrative necessity made flesh.
Describing someone who looked like that with the single word “ordinary” was fraud, and an insult to every actual ordinary person alive.
A calm hairstyle. A neat, refined face. A height that wasn’t oppressively massive, but solid enough to lean on.
Looking at him, I was finally certain.
This really was the game world. There was no way a male god with physical specs this broken existed in reality.
“You look pale.”
Worry in his eyes, he reached for me.
But before his hand could touch my arm, I reflexively swung mine and slapped it away with a sharp smack.
Confusion cracked across Junhyuk’s sculpted face like a fracture in porcelain.
“What’s wrong, Philin? You’re really acting weird today.”
“Stop.”
I hung my head and raised both hands.
Don’t come any closer. Don’t look at me with those guilt-tripping eyes. Because—
“Please. Just go.”
You’re only like this during the day.
Even knowing his true nature, that face was so gentle it still needled a person’s conscience. If he carelessly fired those eyes at people who didn’t know what he really was, how was anyone supposed to hold out without falling?
Submissive by Day, Dominant by Night. Exactly as advertised.
In the game, Junhyuk’s daytime behavior was pure frustration—a complete slog—and yet the game still became a massive hit. The reason was simple.
At night, he wrecked the heroines so thoroughly that every scrap of that daytime frustration got wiped clean from your mind.
With that innocent face, he thoroughly crushed and roughly trained heroines who had been proud and fierce. In the service scenes, the gap was so extreme you had to wonder if it was even the same character.
Then again, once a player had already cleared everything and entered a service scene, who was going to care about something as trivial as narrative consistency?
From the position of someone about to receive that rough training, the perspective was a little different.
“Philin, I’m just worried about you….”
“I said just go!”
Stop the abuse training!
Even as I yelled, I was startled that such a sharp, fierce sound could come out of my throat.
The heroines’ service scenes, still vivid in my head, flashed through my mind, and I instinctively crossed both arms over my chest.
Junhyuk stared at me for a long time with a blank expression.
“…Okay.”
He closed the door weakly and left.
A short but intense storm had torn through the house and gone.
Only when I realized the place had gone quiet enough to hear birds outside did I finally manage to sink down where I stood.
“Whew.”
Grrrk.
Perfect timing.
I’d been wound so tight while shouting my head off that my throat hurt and every ounce of strength had drained from my body.
I wanted something a little spicy. I rummaged through the kitchen.
True to the setting of having a high-ranking father from the Demon Realm, the house was fairly spacious. A clean kitchen layout with a matching fridge and induction cooktop, plus cookware that looked expensive at a glance.
It was definitely a luxurious kitchen unsuited to an Academy student who’d only just become an adult.
But the setting seemed to have been applied a little too strictly.
“No instant noodles.”
Not even the most common ramen. Not a single pack of bibim-myeon either.
What filled the fridge were vacuum-packed steaks and salad ingredients neatly arranged in the vegetable drawer.
I didn’t know how to cook any of it.
“Ugh.”
I shut the fridge with a heavy sigh.
There was a ridiculous amount of time left until evening. I fretted for a moment over what to do, then bolted for the front door.
To change the passcode.
I settled on my birthday for now—the first thing that came to mind. My birthday from before I became Philin, of course, so there was no way he would know it.
After changing the code, I sat in front of the living room TV and turned it on. The programs were almost identical to the ones from my original reality. I flipped through channels, and then, out of nowhere—
“I’m hungry.”
The words slipped out on a stream of consciousness.
With no other choice, I went back to the fridge and pulled out a slab of meat. I set a fancy-looking pan on the induction cooktop.
“How do you even turn this on.”
Having only ever used gas stoves, everything about the induction felt alien.
After poking at this and that, I finally got the power on and cranked up the heat. The pan heated faster than I expected. Around the time smoke started hissing up from it, I tore open the vacuum pack and dropped the meat in.
PSSSSHHHHH!
“Waaagh!”
A massive noise and a blast of smoke kicked off total chaos. Not knowing what to grab first, I hurriedly killed the power—but a pan that had already been thoroughly heated was never going to cool down just because I said sorry.
“Ugh…!”
Only then did the obvious answer—flip the meat—occur to me, and I started frantically searching the kitchen drawers for utensils.
The price of dumping the meat in first without preparing a spatula, tongs, scissors, or any tool whatsoever to flip it was brutal.
“Well-done, I guess.”
I pried the nearly welded meat off the pan and flipped it. A blackened charcoal crust greeted me.
Terrified the other side would burn too, I barely seared it and transferred it to a plate. At least this side looked okay.
…Or so I thought.
“Rare.”
When I cut into it, the inside was completely raw. And I hadn’t even salted it, so it was bland on top of that.
I forced down a few slices, then couldn’t take it anymore. With a bitter heart, I dumped the whole thing in the sink.
Even expensive meat was worthless in the hands of a cooking disaster. The sadder part was that I had no idea what I’d done wrong.
Which is exactly why I needed instant noodles in the first place.
“This is so annoying.”
I muttered it, sat back down in front of the TV—and without meaning to, drifted off to sleep.
I woke up starving. Rubbing my bleary eyes, I sat up to find the whole house dim.
The sun had gone down.
I picked up the phone to check the time. The moment my thumb touched it, the lock dissolved smoothly, as if it had always been mine.
Pretty nails. Looking at my—no, Philin’s—hand under the bright phone light, that thought drifted through my mind.
Against a character this small and cute….
That deranged thought was just starting to curdle into disgust when a notification caught my eye.
Sleep vanished instantly.
Wasn’t this basically obsession? Even for a couple, after about five calls you’d normally assume the other person was asleep, right?
…Or not. I’d never dated anyone, so what did I know.
Just in case, I opened the texts too. Dozens of messages, sent all day long.
The feelings behind the unanswered messages shifted gradually from worry to hurt.
I wanted to ask him the same thing. What the hell was so special about these horns that he was this obsessed? That mania was starting to genuinely scare me. If I hadn’t known today was the service scene date, by now I would have….
Huh?
The timestamp on that last message was—
Three hours ago.
And the first of those thirty-one missed calls had started right then.
Wait. Then was he still—
“Hhk.”
The thought that he would have walked right in if I hadn’t changed the passcode earlier sent a crawling, insect-swarm revulsion over my whole body. My hair stood on end.
Why was he like this? Couldn’t he just see me in the morning? Did it have to be tonight? I only needed to get through today!
Then, suddenly, the phone—
Bzzzzzt.
“Kyaah!”
I screamed without meaning to and dropped it.
The phone hit the floor with a clatter and buzzed frantically, light flashing from the screen over and over.
He was probably calling from right outside the door.
I bit down hard on my lip. I desperately wanted to get through today. I already knew the future—there was no reason I had to play along with that nightmare version of it.
But.
A phone call should be fine, right?
“Yeah. You can’t grab the horns if you don’t meet me first.”
I’d tell him to go home. Pick up, say I didn’t want to talk right now, and send him away. I could figure out how to handle things from tomorrow on, step by step.
Getting through today was the priority.
I carefully picked up the phone and slid my thumb across to answer.
On the other end, I heard him suck in a sharp breath the moment the call connected.
In a small, slightly hoarse voice, I spoke.
“…Hello?”