A Legendary Situation Just Happened
The market, which served as the destination for this legendary situation, was practically attached to the harbor, so the distance was considerable. Still, the gradually sharpening fantasy elements in the scenery helped avoid any sense of monotony. The most striking example was the market entrance, with its rows of massive pillars forming a colonnaded portico. It felt excessively grand, yet that very grandeur screamed fantasy market so loudly that it came across as refreshingly original.
“Oh… it really is a fantasy world. Or maybe the romance-fantasy creator went all out on the exterior descriptions but skimped on the rest? The interior had a distinctly Korean vibe.”
The ceiling was a pale jade color and eerily transparent, giving it a weirdly plastic-like arch that made the place feel far more like a wholesale produce market than anything fantastical.
“?”
“Hey, cute little kid. Want some fish-shaped buns?”
“Huh?”
“Not a fan? How about some tanghulu then?”
“Ah, no thank you… I hope you sell lots!”
Helen stared in bewilderment at the street stall that seemed to blatantly reveal the creator of this world’s nationality. She then headed toward a fruit and vegetable stand run by a burly farmer and his plump wife.
“Mister, how much for one of these?”
“Lemon? Just half a copper.”
“Card okay?”
“?”
“Never mind. Could I have two, please?”
“That’ll be one copper.”
“Just a moment.”
Helen picked out two good-looking lemons and reached into her pocket.
Rustle rustle.
Rustle rustle rustle rustle.
“Kid?”
“Ah, just a second? Could you wait a moment, please?”
At the farmer’s increasingly impatient tone, Helen forced an awkward smile and patted around her waist. But nothing was there. Only an empty, hollow feeling lingered in her palm. Confused, she lifted the pouch attached to her belt.
The dirty little pouch made of yellowish plush fabric had a small hole in the bottom. Sadly, the hole was perfectly sized for coins, making it obvious to anyone that her money had slipped right through.
“Ah.”
Helen let out a tiny sigh. Before she could even blame the pouch, she realized the far more devastating truth: the little cash she had left was now scattered all over the street. Overwhelmed by embarrassment, a numb emptiness and sense of injustice completely took over her mind.
With sad eyes and a trembling lip, Helen finally gave up. She dropped her head and placed the lemons back where she’d found them.
“Sorry, mister. I’ll come back next time…”
She was in the middle of awkwardly setting the lemons down when—
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“?”
It was a familiar voice. Unfortunately, it was also a dangerous one. Helen tensed up immediately and turned around with a sinking feeling.
“Eek! Y-you’re the evil Bread Hat…!”
“Who are you calling evil? And what’s with that weird hiccup?”
Startled, Helen instinctively stepped backward. Their meeting might have been pure coincidence. But considering their relationship, it was impossible not to read something into it. An objective debtor, faced with such a coincidence, would never think of anything romantic or touching. Instead, the first thing that came to mind was some dirty conspiracy.
Helen mentally flipped through the dozens of index cards in her crisis-escape manual and picked one. It wasn’t complicated. Running would just get her caught anyway, so she simply dropped to her knees and started begging like her life depended on it.
“I’mreallyworkingsohardpleasejustwaitalittlelongerthere’snothingyoucouldgetevenifyoucutmeopenpleasepleasewaaah.”
“???”
When Helen suddenly fell to her knees and started wailing, Bread Hat couldn’t hide his bewilderment. He glanced around. Even though he was a back-alley loan shark who normally didn’t care about public opinion, this particular scene was undeniably awkward.
“Hey, hey…! Stop that and get up. People are getting the wrong idea…”
“Shouldn’t we report that?”
“Report…?”
The situation, which could easily be misinterpreted in a very obscene way depending on who was watching, left Bread Hat looking extremely wronged as he protested.
“No, it’s not like that! That’s not what this is!”
His desperate plea did nothing to help. If anything, it acted like a fan, drawing in even the passersby who had shown no interest before.
“Oh my… Isn’t that the guy I’ve heard about? He’s pretty well-known around here.”
Bread Hat pinched the bridge of his nose. A few gossipy old spinsters who knew far too much about other people’s messy relationships began slowly gathering. Once they arrived, they started circling Bread Hat while chattering nonstop.
“Oh my, oh my. Who is he?”
“I heard he’s a big loan shark operating on the Western Side…”
“Heee~ Really?”
They dove headfirst into the gossip. A flood of questions poured out without any rational filtering. Even though the thoughts had no logical connection, they turned vague speculation into undisputed fact.
“So… she was abandoned at an orphanage, finally found her real father, and is begging to live with him, but he’s coldly rejecting her? What a piece of trash.”
“Excuse me?”
The wildly exaggerated rumor shocked not only Bread Hat but Helen as well.
“Um, ladies? This is… I don’t know what you’re imagining, but it’s really not—”
“Poor!!! Pitiful!!! Little!!! Kid!!!”
Helen stumbled backward in utter panic. From their reaction, she vaguely realized that facts didn’t matter to these old women anymore. The process of taking a distorted imagination, slapping it onto a single scene, and turning it into an entire narrative purely for entertainment left her with an indescribable sense of eeriness and déjà vu. It was basically cyber bullying in real life.
A single lightly tossed rumor—whether true or false—would be seized upon by these subjective, objective-blind moral judges who felt zero discomfort. The mere thought of what they could do made Helen’s skin crawl. So she grabbed Bread Hat’s wrist and bolted.
The longer they stayed, the more people gathered and the more twisted the rumors became. It was a feedback loop. Whether on the internet or in reality, the most effective way to break a negative feedback loop like this was always to stop feeding it firewood.
“Mister, run!”
“Huh? Uh?”
The bizarre three-legged race between Bread Hat and Helen continued until the nosy onlookers finally stopped whispering.
“Haa… haa…”
Thanks to her chronic lack of exercise and horrifically low lung capacity, Helen spent a long time catching her breath before she finally straightened up. A sea breeze immediately brushed her cheek. The water’s surface shimmered like silver fish scales, reflecting the towering cumulonimbus clouds above. The sun hung low on the horizon, creating a rare luminous phenomenon that was almost unreal. When she turned her head slightly in another direction, she saw people. They were building a pier. Even from a distance where she could barely make out their arms and tools, the hammering sounds rang out absurdly loud. It was like a low-budget silent film where the rookie sound director had completely lost track of timing—the impact noises were too loud compared to the blurry motions and always came a beat too late.
“Huu… huuk… What the hell is this.”
Bread Hat, who had also plopped down on the ground and let out a long sigh, reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
“Can I have one too?”
“Sure.”
“Light?”
“Here.”
Helen snatched a cigarette from him, sat right beside him, and lit up.
“?”
Bread Hat tilted his head as if he wanted to say something, then stopped. The timing of her borrowing the cigarette had been so perfectly natural that refusing hadn’t even crossed his mind. Plus, her earlier sudden behavior had created a strange, albeit slight, sense of intimacy.
“Sudden behavior… Oh right, hey.”
“Huu… Yes?”
“Why did you do that all of a sudden?”
“Do what? I didn’t…”
Helen trailed off, her mouth hanging open with smoke curling out. Then she gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. The reason for her sudden behavior, which had been forgotten amid their mutual confusion, had just hit her again.
Bread Hat barely stopped Helen as she tried to drop to her knees and start begging again. He swallowed a lungful of smoke and spoke.
“Stop! Don’t. I didn’t come here to catch you. What kind of misunderstanding did you have?”
“R-really?”
“Why would I do that to a model debtor like you? You even paid this week.”
“Ah, yes…”
Embarrassed, Helen scratched her cheek with one finger. Her hands were overall dark reddish from the harsh factory work, with two missing fingernails, making them look ragged. In some ways, they were even worse than the farmer’s calloused knuckles.
Bread Hat looked at Helen’s more damaged-than-expected hands and said, “That’s why I told you to work at the brothel.”
“Were you actually serious about that?”
“Why not? It’s way easier and simpler than the factory.”
“No. That. Um…”
Helen chose to stay quiet. It didn’t take long to sense from the romance-fantasy-scum’s expression and various nonverbal cues that he really meant it.
“The factory’s going to be tough. There should still be openings, so even now—”
“I’m sorry, but no thank you. I won’t run from the debt, so please stop talking about the brothel.”
“Really? Then when are you going to pay it all back? Unless you start a business, it’ll take over ten years.”
“That’s…”
“So why not change your mind while you still can? Those perverted rich upstarts would come running with sacks of money, you know?”
“Ugh…”
Helen nervously flicked away the half-burned cigarette butt and stood up with a disgusted look. She began walking along the harbor. She could overlook individual comments like this, but if he acted this way all the time, it would be a real problem.
“…Why are you following me?”
“Just curious about something.”
Helen glanced back at Bread Hat, who was trailing after her with a look that suggested he still had lingering thoughts, and seriously began to question whether this was actually a romance-fantasy world. After all, not just romance-fantasy authors but most writers generally hated vulgarity and barbarism. They were extremely careful about using such words, even as a humorous euphemism, because they could be artistically misleading and their meaning changed drastically depending on the situation and characters involved.
“Tsk. I’m thinking of starting a business, just like you suggested.”
“A business? Please. That’s not something an uneducated kid like you can do.”
“What do you mean I’m uneducated! Me? Even though I look like this, I was pretty successful at Korea University, you know—!”
“Kankoku University? Never heard of a beggar school or weekend school with that name.”
“No… Ha… Never mind.”
Helen opened and closed her mouth a few times before shutting it again. Bread Hat looked like he wanted to say something more to her but gave up. With her arms crossed and head turned sharply to the side, she was making her sulkiness way too obvious. It seemed difficult to continue.
“…”
“…”
The silence stretched on for several minutes. But it didn’t last long. A fisherman who recognized Bread Hat approached from afar and greeted him warmly.
“Boss! What are you doing over there!”
“Hm? It’s been a while. A few months since the due date?”
“Probably. Thanks to you, I managed to put out the urgent fire. I appreciate it.”
“No need to thank me. You paid it back, so we’re square.”
“Haha… Right? So, about that—I think I’ll need to borrow a bit more.”
“Why? Did you cause trouble?”
“Nah, it’s not that… You know how we’re at war with those Nordic bastards up north these days?”
“Yeah. So what? That has nothing to do with you.”
“Turns out it does. You know that waterproof sealant you put on the bottom of boats? It’s made from wood that comes from up north. With the war showing signs of dragging on, those guys doubled the price.”
“Huh… Those dirty bastards…”
Helen, who had been quietly listening to the conversation beside Bread Hat, suddenly fell into deep thought. Then she turned and sprinted back toward home.
“Eh? Was that your daughter, boss? She’s pretty cute.”
“She’s not my daughter.”
“Then what is she?”
“Well… just…”
“Just?”
“I don’t know, dumbass!”
“Whoa, easy there. Why are you getting so mad all of a sudden?”
“Ahem… Anyway, I don’t know either, so stop asking.”
“Sigh… You really have a lot going on, boss. Anyway, I’ll drop by the office soon, so keep that in mind.”
“Do whatever…”
The friendly fisherman walked away toward his boat with a puzzled expression. Bread Hat stared in the direction Helen had run, then pulled two lemons he had warmed in his pocket and chewed them noisily.
“Goddamn it. These are disgustingly sour.”