You're the Bad One (6)
“Mmm….”
I'd only meant to close my eyes for a moment, but it seemed I'd fallen into a deep sleep. Even though the room barely got any sunlight, the pure white brightness filtering in told me quite some time had passed.
7:10. I'd slept a solid four hours straight. I pulled the tissues stuffed up my nose and tossed them into the trash can under the gas range.
Both went in on the first try. Looks like today's going to be lucky.
“Ugh….”
No wonder my legs felt so heavy—Sowon was using them as a pillow. After all that effort trying not to fall asleep, too. I rested a hand on her shoulder and gave her a light shake.
“Get up.”
“Ugh…. I'm sleepy.”
“We've got to head out soon. Morning lectures, remember?”
It was a weekday. Staying longer would have been nice, but we all had our own daily lives to get back to.
Once she sat up, Sowon checked on Junhyeok first thing.
“Junhyeok…. How is he?”
“Ah, hang on.”
I unfurled my healing magic and examined his condition. Thankfully, unlike yesterday, I couldn't detect any injuries. There was no damage left that could even be called an injury—he'd entered the stage where his own recovery could handle the rest.
“He's just sleeping. He's all healed.”
“Phew, what a relief!”
Sowon let out a long sigh of relief. Watching her, I found myself smiling bitterly. If she was that worried, how had she managed to sleep at all?
Still, someone who fretted over him like that was exactly the kind of person Junhyeok needed by his side. Maybe I, too, had been just another one of those countless people who'd disappointed him—taking advantage of the endless love he kept giving.
If the route wasn't fixed anyway… then I ought to carve out a path where everyone could be happy.
Having Sowon next to him suited Junhyeok far better.
That was when it happened.
Thump thump thump. Someone knocked on the door from outside. We exchanged puzzled looks.
“Who is it?”
“No idea. At this hour….”
Sowon tilted her head, but I already had a hunch. The day I'd blacked out at Junhyeok's place after my horns got cut off, I'd heard someone knocking in my half-asleep haze. There'd been a bit of a commotion, too, though I never found out what it was about.
Maybe it was the same person. Holding that thought close, I approached the front door.
“Should I open it?”
“Yeah. I've got an idea who it might be.”
“What if it's some shady thug….”
“Then you can just roast them.”
My blunt reply made Sowon laugh awkwardly. “W-well, yeah, I guess….” What kind of bold burglar would confidently knock on the front door and try to break in without even knowing how much mana the homeowner could handle?
Sure enough, when I opened the door—
A middle-aged woman with a plain, or rather slightly mean-looking face, and a chubby man who seemed to be her son, stood there.
“…Who are you?”
“And who might you young ladies be?”
I'd asked first. I wanted to snap back at her for that, but I decided to keep basic manners toward an adult and answered properly.
“We're Junhyeok's friends.”
“Friends?”
“Yes. My friend behind me, too.”
When I pointed behind me, Sowon, who'd been standing there, tentatively leaned forward and bowed her head with a polite “Hello.”
Junhyeok only shifted a little in his sleep, showing no sign of waking.
The woman studied the atmosphere for a moment, then her expression turned ice-cold.
“This brat keeps making excuses about having no money, and now he's got two girls over playing around?”
“No money to move out, but plenty to fool around with girls, huh.”
She and her son spat out the sudden accusations. That clear contempt made a corner of my chest go cold even as something sharp and prickling dug into me at the same time.
What the hell is this nonsense they're spouting out of nowhere?
“Ma'am. Junhyeok got hurt yesterday. I'm a trainee healer at the Academy, and I came to treat him. If you're going to criticize someone, at least get the situation right first.”
“You're the one who needs to get the situation straight. I already told that guy to move out, and he's still hanging on—that's the problem! Some clueless kid talking back so rudely….”
“Move out…?”
What was this all of a sudden? I'd never heard anything about Junhyeok moving, so I was a bit thrown. Of course he didn't have to report every little thing to me, but….
Still, there hadn't been any signs—no browsing for places on his phone, no searching for moving companies. Moving wasn't something you decided and did in a day or two.
Just then, Junhyeok sat up.
“…What's going on?”
“Which part? Me and Sowon, or that lady over there?”
“Both.”
To Junhyeok, who was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, I pulled out my phone and showed him my call history.
“You called me. Sowon came yesterday because you didn't show up at the Academy and she wanted to check if something was wrong.”
“I… called you?”
“You don't remember?”
“…I did something embarrassing.”
From his expression, it wasn't that he had no memory of it at all. I had a mountain of things to ask this guy, but that could wait.
“What's this about moving? Are you moving? Where to?”
I needed to figure out why this situation had blown up and clean it up first. But Junhyeok's face went ashen, like he really didn't want to talk about that either.
If you just clam up here, how am I supposed to fix this? Fortunately—or unfortunately—the woman ignored Junhyeok's silence and volunteered the whole story herself.
“This is my son. He took a leave of absence this time and needs a place to stay. So I told him to clear out the room. Is that a problem?”
At only twenty, Sowon and Junhyeok would struggle to handle something like this with any real force. I deliberately raised my voice as I spoke to the woman.
“Looks like you're the landlord. If you're going to issue an eviction notice, you need to give at least a month's warning. And the lease term takes priority over any eviction notice, doesn't it? How much time is left on this place's lease?”
I fired it off without hesitation, but it was pure bluff. There was no guarantee the tenant protection laws from my previous world applied here. Still, common sense said springing an eviction notice just a few days in advance was something you simply didn't do, law or no law—human to human.
But right now, tenant protection laws weren't the important part.
“Lease term? There isn't one.”
“What… did you say?”
“He moved in without a contract. Just like that!”
I was speechless. I didn't know how long Junhyeok had been living here, but as far as I knew, the five million won in independence support money had been scammed out of him, so this couldn't be the place he'd gotten with that money.
That meant he'd been around nineteen, and the money someone that age could earn was limited. A million won would have been a big haul.
“Ma'am, my head's spinning. I think I need to sort this out.”
“What's there to sort out? Just leave quietly and—”
“Shut your mouth and listen first.”
The rough words came out before they even passed through my brain. As I closed in on her, spitting out that vicious informal speech, the woman's face went deathly pale. Her so-called son didn't even step in front of his mother—he just stood there reading the room. That told me everything about their level.
“When he signed for this place, how old was he?”
“N-nineteen….”
“The deposit?”
“One hundred thirty thousand, I think.”
“You said there's no contract. Did you even mention needing a contract beforehand?”
I didn't need to ask. How the deal had gone was obvious. Junhyeok had probably called after seeing some scrap of paper stuck to a utility pole in a hurry, and this woman, who'd listed the place without even going through a realtor, had taken the deposit without a single contract and pocketed the whole thing.
“How much is the monthly rent here.”
I dropped the polite speech entirely. The woman mumbled in a voice so small it was barely audible.
“Four hundred a month….”
“You fucking piece-of-shit bitch. And you call yourself a human being?”
At those words I couldn't hold it in any longer and exploded. The son still couldn't shake off my hand; he just fretted uselessly as he watched me grab his mother's collar and shove her against the wall.
Well, what crime did he commit? Having a mother like this wasn't his fault either.
“You took a nineteen-year-old kid who didn't know how the world worked, swallowed his entire deposit, stuck him in this shithole of a place, and milked him for four hundred a month in rent?”
“H-he said he'd live under those conditions…!”
“Then you should've at least let him leave like a decent human being, you fucking bitch!”
Even before he moved in here, he'd already been thrown out onto the streets without knowing how the world worked, and right after that the five hundred thousand meant to help him find even a barely decent place had been scammed away.
And then this kid had scraped together every last bit of a deposit only for her to swallow it whole, charge him an absurd rent, and now, as if that weren't enough, practically kick him out?
I didn't even need to hear it—I finally understood how Junhyeok had ended up in that state. He'd been working nights in secret to scrape together moving money without telling anyone. Needing a lot of cash in a short time, he'd taken dangerous jobs.
“Have him leave. Fine, let's do that.”
I was so angry my head was spinning. I couldn't even tell whether people were the ones who were bad, or whether the situations that made people bad were the real problem.
So, on pure impulse—
“Spit out the deposit. We'll clear the room today.”
“What? There's no room, so how—”
I'd said it in the heat of the moment.
“I'll take him in at my place, so spit out the damn deposit!!”