Below, Not Above
Below, Not Above
Attila, chatting with Ellia, felt a familiar presence approaching from a distance. Glancing up, she saw Aiden and Lee Ha-yul cutting through the darkness toward them.
When she saw Aiden's face, Attila narrowed her eyes. The expression on the guy who'd gone to apologize seemed off.
'...Did that bastard actually apologize properly?'
Attila and Aiden went way back. Not quite childhood friends, but they'd built up some familiarity attending the same academy.
So he knew Aiden's tendencies.
Aiden was stupid. Oblivious, and the type to charge headfirst into anything he wanted to do. The textbook definition of a moron.
If you wanted to cut him some slack, you could say he was nice enough, but that didn't change the fundamental fact that he was all impulse and zero foresight.
Hadn't that personality of his already caused incidents?
Last time, though—last time genuinely, seriously crossed the line from "incident" into what looked like a suicide attempt. Even now, thinking about that day made his blood run cold.
Special Admission Cadet Lee Ha-yul.
The moment Aiden threw down a sparring challenge at her, Attila had felt her heart sink.
'No, for fuck's sake.'
He didn't know all the details about special admission. But he knew the situation of the special admission cadet who was the talk of the academy.
Awakened about a month ago? A ridiculously late awakening, the kind you never hear about. He was also blind, and also mute.
Why the hell would you challenge someone like that to a spar? It was honestly a miracle the whole thing got buried because the idiot got his ass handed to him—otherwise his life would've gotten real colorful.
At the very least, he'd have suffered some consequences at the hands of a coldly glaring Hong Yeon-hwa.
Later, Attila had grabbed him by the hair, shook him, and demanded an explanation. The answer was a masterpiece.
He'd been curious. He'd wanted to see just how special someone had to be to get in through special admission.
Crazy bastard. In his head, it was probably just curiosity, but to everyone else it looked like nothing less than picking a fight... well, actually, wasn't it exactly just picking a fight?
'Dumbass...'
The guy who challenged a blind person to a fight. And then got pathetically destroyed...
That was the title Aiden's friends at Siyoram had been calling him.
Dumbass...
Attila shook her head. Looking back, if Ha-yul had died back then, wouldn't that have counted as suicide?
* * *
By the time we finished the magic experiments and returned, it was nearly time to sleep.
Sleeping inside a dungeon. Obviously, we couldn't just all sprawl out together in cozy harmony.
Grade 4 or not, a dungeon was still a dungeon. Complacency was the express lane to death—words Professor Atra had hammered into our ears until calluses formed.
"Let's draw lots for night watch fairly."
After setting up one tent for the men and one for the women, Attila sorted out the watch order before we turned in.
Inside a can were five wooden sticks, their ends supposedly marked with the order.
...I could see all of them. Attila apparently didn't fully understand how my spatial perception worked.
Out of conscience, I pulled my spatial perception back before drawing. First watch and last watch were supposed to be the easiest, weren't they?
"Hell yeah, first watch."
"Shit."
The order was set.
Aiden, me, Attila, Ellia, Nam Yeon-jung.
Aiden, who'd drawn first watch, clenched his fist in triumph, while Attila next to him muttered a curse at the stick marked with a 3.
A short while later, first-watch Aiden settled into position next to the heating magic tool, and the rest of us retreated into the tents to sleep.
That included me, next in line. I'd have to get up again soon, but I still closed my eyes inside the tent to catch even a little rest.
And absolutely no sleep came. I was absurdly wide awake. My now even more refined spatial perception let me feel the rhythm of every leaf swaying in the wind.
'Ah.'
My gut told me I wasn't going to sleep a wink.
"Ha-yul. Time to switch."
[Okay]
In the end, I was still awake when Aiden finished his shift and threw open the tent flap.
I wriggled sluggishly out of my caterpillar-like sleeping bag. A heavy, unpleasant fatigue clung stubbornly to my body.
"Nothing to report. Take it from here."
[Okay]
I'd dropped the formal speech with Aiden.
When he'd apologized to me, and when he occasionally spoke to me during the dungeon raid, it was obvious he sounded unnatural, so I told him he'd apologized already and should just speak comfortably.
I can't speak, so I never felt any particular need for formality myself.
Though even if I could speak, I probably still wouldn't use it.
A thing I've learned in life: there's not a single person on earth with whom it's a good idea to use casual speech. Just answering politely kept things simple and spared me a lot of trouble.
I planted myself next to the heating magic tool.
There was the magic tool at the center scattering its light, the folding stools beside it, and the green tent pitched right nearby. The whole setup had a real camping-trip feel.
They have that thing, don't they—fire-gazing. Zoning out while you stare at burning firewood. Though the thing in the center wasn't firewood but an egg-shaped magic tool.
Whoooosh. A chilly night breeze swept across me. Even with the Siyoram activewear and the robe layered on top, the cold seeped through.
'Urgh...'
Cold energy. The cold. The thing I hate most in the world. Cool is fine, but cold is absolutely unbearable.
Shuddering, I rummaged through the backpack I'd brought from the tent. I pulled out a heating magic tool identical to the one at the center.
- Click
At the press of a button, the gray surface warmed to a faint orange glow. Feeling the heat slowly building, I hugged the magic tool to my chest.
'Oh...'
The size was perfect, smaller than my torso, and the egg shape made it ideal for hugging. The temperature was adjustable, so it wasn't scorching—just right.
I draped the robe forward to cover my body. The warmth trapped beneath it gradually heated the air.
The trembling in my body eased. Tugging the robe's attached hood over my head made it even better.
A genuine sigh of admiration escaped me. It felt like turning on the heated floors in the dead of winter and burrowing deep into the blankets.
'Hoooh...'
I was no longer cold. I rested my chin on the egg-shaped magic tool. A languid drowsiness settled over me, and I let out a deep breath.
Sleep... still didn't come, but this was comfortable enough. I'd just kill time like this until the next shift.
- ...vulgar jealousy.
"......"
Maybe because my nerves had gone slack, the memory kept resurfacing. I narrowed my eyes. Envy—an emotion I had no desire to remember.
In my parents' house when I was small.
For me, that house had been the whole world. My parents were the gods who'd made me, and the thugs who sometimes showed up to wreak havoc were foreign invaders.
Those people who called themselves parents were utterly unfit to be parents. They were capable of reproduction, so they were parents in the biological sense. That was true.
But from a moral standpoint, they were garbage.
When I was little, I didn't know that. That house was my whole world. Everyone around me was the same. Everyone was violent, everyone mistreated me. Shouting and crying were everyday background noise in the neighborhood.
So I thought that was the average.
I thought my parents were normal, and I was the abnormal one. It was unfair. It hurt when my parents hit me. But I had no choice but to accept it as inevitable.
Parents losing control and putting their hands on their kid. Grabbing me by the hair and flinging me around. Throwing bottles at me. Kicking me because they were in a bad mood.
I thought all of it was normal.
After the fire broke out and my parents burned to death, I wandered the slums. Even now, I don't know how I stayed alive during that period.
After drifting like that, some people found me, and I ended up in an orphanage.
There, too, I still didn't know what "ordinary" meant. All the kids around me had no parents either. Most of them had been abused.
They were like me. So I thought everyone was like me.
Then, one time.
I went into the city. I don't really remember why.
There were people there. People like me. They had two legs. No burns, but two arms. Their eyesight wasn't blurry like mine, but they still had two eyes.
Unlike me they could talk, but they had mouths, noses to breathe with, ears to hear with.
The same.
- Hey, second round of meat?
- If we split it evenly, I'm in.
- You forgetting how you scarfed down the beef last time?
But different. No shouting or screaming. No sounds of sorrowful sobbing. I heard some swearing, but what was in it wasn't my parents' kind of negativity—it sounded like teasing and familiarity.
- Daddy! That! That thing I told you about!
- Alright, alright. I know, but we have to walk slowly, okay?
- Hurry up!
Different from me. A child who seemed to be someone's kid tugged at a parent's hand. Far from getting angry and throwing a punch, the parent soothed the child and walked along with them.
I stood there blankly staring at that street for a long time. It was snowing that day. Maybe Christmas? Or Christmas Eve?
I remember standing there in a daze as snow piled up on my head, and some adult came over and asked if I was lost. I shook my head no and trudged back to the orphanage.
That's when it started.
Everything started to feel wrong. I felt dissatisfied everywhere. I felt it was unfair. I'd been dissatisfied before, but never with such violent emotion.
Before, that had been ordinary. Because everyone was miserable. Because everyone was like me. The other kids at the orphanage had no parents and had been abused. Poor, starving—everyone was.
But that wasn't the truth. Not everyone was like that. Plenty of people were similar to me, but just as many, or more, were happier than I was.
My parents, and the parent being led by that child that day, were not the same.
- What's the difference.
Envy (嫉妬).
- Why are they different. What makes them so special?
The emotion of resenting and begrudging others.
- What did I do wrong?
It was an ugly emotion. Resenting others did nothing but make me miserable. Why were they happy while I was wretched? Why did that child smile so blissfully while I was in this pathetic state?
A worthless act. Nothing came from resenting others. The more I compared my circumstances to someone else's, the more miserable I became.
I did become miserable. I didn't want to live, knowing the only reason our fates were so different was that I'd simply been born wrong. Everything seemed meaningless.
But I was a coward, so I didn't want to end up like my parents who'd burned to death.
If I kept on envying like this, I genuinely thought I'd end up killing myself.
I wasn't the kind of person who could transform envy into productive drive.
So I stopped looking up. I didn't have the confidence to climb. I didn't look up at people better than me, at cases happier than me.
I looked down. People worse off than me... more precisely, people more miserable than me.
If you looked carefully, there were as many, or even more, people unhappier than those happier than me.
Disgustingly, I found comfort there. I wasn't the worst. I was on the fortunate side. I felt a sickening sense of relief.
'......'
I was a vile and disgusting creature. So much so that sometimes I even wondered if maybe my parents had their reasons for treating me the way they did.
I hugged the magic tool tight. My breathing grew a little strained, but it steadied me emotionally. I quietly curled into myself. I adjusted my robe in case someone might see.
The spar with Aiden hadn't been unpleasant. The apology itself just now hadn't been unpleasant. I didn't even think it was something that required an apology.
But because of an apology that dragged envy into it, some unpleasant feelings had simply surfaced.
This was a case where the apology itself needed apologizing for.
It was only a night watch shift of barely an hour or two, and it felt far too long.
* * *
"Come on, come on! Down it in one! Hm? Oh my, oh my? Can't even oneshot a tiny glass like this? How disappointing~ For all your posturing, you've got the guts of a field mouse! Heet."
Heeheeheet.
Finding something absolutely hilarious, Liana banged on the table. The liquor in the glass splashed. Her whole demeanor was pure drunken mess.
Near the liquor glass, bottles that had already been emptied of their contents were stacked high.
The stench of alcohol was so thick it felt like it would make your nose curl.
"Haah..."
I should have just ignored her. I shouldn't have agreed, thinking I'd just let her have this one.
Atra regretted it too late.