Someday
Before I knew it, a full week had passed since Choi A-rin arrived.
Even while we were buried in work, she had taken the household chores entirely upon herself, and the place stayed spotless because of it. She seemed far more at ease here than she had at first, too — as if she were finally settling in.
She had been anxious about the receiver implanted in her body, but once we told her we had jammed its signal and rendered it useless, the tension drained out of her. These days she even went out on short walks alone, treating them like little breaks to clear her head.
Part of me wanted to just dig the receiver out of her entirely, but that would have required specialized equipment and a specialist's hands. For now, I decided it was better left alone.
"Want to go somewhere farther tomorrow?"
It felt like a waste that, with this rare stretch of freedom, she never went anywhere beyond the neighborhood supermarket. So I floated the idea of a proper outing.
"Huh? Is that… okay?"
She didn't look like she was trying to refuse. If anything, she seemed interested.
"Things have settled down for now. The three of us should get out for a bit."
"I'm in!"
"You two go ahead. If I go out there'll be people. Cars everywhere. Subways, huge buildings — it's all too scary…"
Park Jae-hyun was already trembling as he spoke. Truth be told, I had been planning to eventually drag him outside for the sake of his socialization, whether he liked it or not. But the guy was working himself to the bone right now, and even I had enough of a conscience not to be that cold about it.
Before we left, he asked us to just grab him something tasty to go. We got ready without much fuss and headed out.
"Anywhere you want to go?"
"Hmm… I'm not sure. Where do kids my age usually go?"
How would I know…
According to the setting, Choi A-rin was currently sixteen — the same age as me. What would a sixteen-year-old middle school girl like? Cosmetics, clothes… something like that?
That thought jogged a memory of Lee Yeon-ah and Lee Yeon-hui having a good time window-shopping at the underground mall. So I took Choi A-rin to a nearby shopping mecca where the underground arcade connected straight into a big mall.
And the result:
"Whoa…"
A soft little gasp of wonder, and then she was turning this way and that, taking everything in. The way her eyes sparkled told me I had passed the "What do you want to eat? Anything's fine" test with flying colors.
We had gone clothes shopping once before, but that had been a small shop with barely any foot traffic — more like running errands for necessities than actual shopping. This was probably her first real shopping trip.
"Wow… it's so pretty…"
She held clothes up against herself, turning them this way and that, sampling the whole mall experience. But she never actually bought anything — just kept looking. I walked over and held out a card.
"Use this."
"No, you already bought me stuff last time."
"Think of it as wages. You've been doing all the laundry, cleaning, everything around the house, and you haven't taken a single thing for it."
I had been trying to pay her an allowance since early on, and she had stubbornly refused every time. This time I pushed a little harder.
"Aah~ my arm's gonna fall off~"
"Okay, okay. Thanks."
It took that much just to get her to take the card. She grabbed a few of the pieces she had been eyeing and headed straight for the register. Even then, she couldn't bring herself to buy anything expensive — everything she carried to the counter was from the cheap racks.
Same story at the cosmetics store. A couple of basic skincare products, and she was done.
"Hey… when someone gives you a card, actually use it. Don't make the person who handed it over look pathetic."
"No, it's not that… there's just so much stuff. I don't know what I'm supposed to buy. It all feels different from what I saw online, too…"
Ah. So that was it.
Sure, part of it was probably the pressure of spending someone else's money. But shopping is something you get better at with practice, and for someone like A-rin who barely had any experience, the sheer volume of options must have been overwhelming.
I wasn't about to stand there and force her to buy things item by item, so I let it go and moved on.
"……"
Then I caught sight of her at the accessories corner, staring intently at a single pair of earrings. It was a completely different look from anything she had given the other merchandise — like something had genuinely hooked her.
She picked the earrings up, checked the price tag, flinched, and set them back down. Then she walked off to look at other things without a backward glance. The way she pretended not to care was honestly pretty cute.
While she browsed elsewhere, I picked up those same earrings, paid for them, and was waiting when she wandered over with a puzzled look at finding me at the counter. I held the bag out to her.
"Huh…?"
"What are you doing? Take it."
She accepted the little shopping bag with a dazed expression. A second later she snapped back to herself.
"I-it's fine, really—"
"Ah, then what am I supposed to do with these? Throw them out? Miss, these can't be returned, right?"
I enlisted the clerk at the counter to help break through her pointless stubbornness.
"That's correct, sir. Without a receipt, exchanges and returns aren't possible."
"Yeah, I already threw it away. What now? I don't need earrings. Guess I have to toss them."
"Fine… I'll take them. Thank you."
The fact that it took all of that just to get her to accept a gift said plenty. She simply wasn't used to receiving things. Thinking about that left a small, sad weight in my chest.
It may have been a half-forced present, but it must have landed somewhere near her heart — the corners of her mouth had softened, just a little.
Yeah. Even the unfamiliar things would grow familiar, bit by bit. And someday, a day would come when she could cry and laugh freely, from the heart.
After working our way through the underground arcade and the mall connected to it, we headed upstairs to a restaurant. A-rin had seen a place online that she said she wanted to try, and luckily it was right there.
"Hey, can I ask you something? Have you done this a lot?"
"Done what?"
I tilted my head at the abrupt question.
"Giving gifts to girls."
An oddly specific keyword dropped out of her mouth.
"Hmm… I don't think I've done it that much."
I answered honestly, wondering why she even cared.
"So you have done it. Just not a lot."
"What? Why are you like this all of a sudden?"
The temperature in her voice plummeted. The whole atmosphere shifted from a moment ago. What kind of landmine had I just stepped on? I hadn't done anything.
"No reason. You just looked reeeally practiced at it."
She raised one eyebrow at me, clearly in a mood. It was getting a little uncomfortable. I scrambled for anything that might change the subject.
"Th-there it is! The restaurant you wanted to go to!"
I picked up the pace toward our lunch destination and made my escape.
Being a weekday, the restaurant was fairly quiet. Calm atmosphere, stylish interior. Ordinarily it would have been on the pricier side, but according to A-rin they ran student discounts plus an extra lunch-hour cut, so the actual bill wouldn't be bad. Coming from someone who had hesitated even over shopping, I supposed that was the natural choice.
We ordered drinks and food and filled the wait with small talk.
"Jae-hyun said you've been doing… dangerous work since before you two met. Why do you keep doing stuff like that?"
Dangerous work, huh.
I always stayed inside the safety lines when I operated, so I didn't think of it as all that dangerous. Still, if I had to dig into why I did it in the first place…
"Hmm… because I need to?"
Maybe the answer was too vague. A-rin tilted her head like she couldn't parse it. A few seconds passed. Then a little lightbulb practically popped over her head, and she locked eyes with me.
"Is it because of a girl?"
She leapt to the most random conclusion imaginable.
"……"
Technically, no — but the person I ultimately wanted to reunite with, the friend at the end of all of this, happened to be a girl. I couldn't quite bring myself to say it wasn't.
"It is a girl. So this is that 'girl-obsessed loser' thing I saw on the internet."
"……"
I had given her a phone recently so we could stay in contact. Apparently she had been finding some weird stuff online.
A-rin looked pointedly away, face pinched, and sucked hard on the straw of the drink that had arrived first. Then she kept going.
"What about before that?"
She meant before I started tearing through villain organizations.
"Before that, I was going into dungeons."
That seemed to catch her interest. She let go of the straw and stared at me with eyes gone wide.
"That artifact from before — you got it from a dungeon yourself?"
"Yeah."
That was the whole reason I had gone in, after all. She went blank for a second at how casually I said it. Then she recovered and pressed on.
"Then… then what about before that?"
What was this, twenty questions?
Still, it was hard to shut her down when she looked that genuinely curious. I cast my mind back to the time before the dungeons.
Before the dungeons…
The moment it surfaced, my face twisted on its own.
"I trained under some absolute maniac."
Just remembering those nightmare days made the muscles in my face seize up. A-rin must have found the look on me hilarious, because she burst into a bright peal of laughter — and still didn't stop asking questions.
"Then what about before that?"
"…Before that…"
Thinking further back, the faces of two kids flickered through my mind. I hadn't even said a proper goodbye when I left them. A bitter little smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it. I tried to smooth my expression so A-rin wouldn't notice —
"Your food is ready."
— and the perfectly timed arrival of our meal let me fumble my way past it.
From there we shifted to other topics over lunch. After we finished, we stopped at a nice café nearby for dessert, and by the time we stepped back outside, the sun that had been hanging high overhead was already sinking low.
"We've probably got time for one more stop. Anywhere you want to go?"
I had chosen the mall with her in mind. At least for the last stop, I figured she should pick.
"Hmm… actually, yeah. There's one place I want to try."
Luckily she had somewhere in mind. She grabbed my arm and towed me toward a shop packed with students.
"A four-cut photo booth?"
"I saw it online and I've been wanting to try one."
She had dragged me over with such a solemn face that I had braced for something serious. A photo booth.
"Pfft."
"Hey, why are you laughing?"
The sheer modesty of the wish pulled a snort out of me before I could help it. She scowled and scolded me.
"Nothing. Come on, let's go take some."
She puffed out her cheeks in protest, but she followed me into the booth anyway. In her hands were a ridiculous headband and a pair of sunglasses — props from the rack outside, apparently.
Click.
A few shots later, before the prints came out, A-rin started decorating the photos — sticking on bizarre little hearts and clown noses, having the time of her life. Two sets of four-cut strips came out. She tucked one into her pocket and handed the other to me.
"Later we should cut out a picture of Jae-hyun and stick it in here too."
These bright, sparkling photos… with Park Jae-hyun's gloom-radiating face pasted into them.
"Pffhahaha!"
"Hah… I really shouldn't laugh."
I couldn't hold it in at how perfectly wrong that would look — and neither could she. She was barely keeping her own laughter under control.
"Oh, you're back?"
Park Jae-hyun came out to meet us looking like he had been glued to a computer for hours, the skin under his eyes dry and strained. The second I held out the takeout steak we had ordered from the restaurant, he lit up and tore into it. He demolished an entire steak in no time, patted his stomach with a satisfied little burp, and looked up.
"Did you look into what I asked?"
"Ah… yeah. More or less."
The limp way he answered told me he hadn't pinned everything down completely. I hadn't expected him to crack it that fast in the first place, and he had insisted on digging into it himself even after I told him to rest today. I wasn't about to push him —
"I found it."
"What…?"
"……"
"You found it?"
I stepped closer as he avoided my eyes. He let out a long breath, like he had no choice left but to talk.
"I was going to keep quiet if you didn't ask, Boss. But I found it. The thing is… this is way too dangerous."
His voice had gone serious. Worry was written all over his face as he looked at me.
"I know. You think I would have asked you without knowing that?"
"Boss, this isn't like last time. Last time was an ambush. This time, they'll definitely be ready for us."
Maybe so.
But still.
"That doesn't mean we can just not go."
"Just this once, we should hand the intel over to the Heroes and stay out of—"
"No."
I understood why he was saying it. But that would take too long. The Hero Association was a massive organization in its own right, and that meant it took no small amount of time for them to move.
"It'll be too late if we do it that way."
The scale of this one was big enough that we needed to cut the delay as short as possible. Just because we had gotten the information faster than expected didn't mean we had time to sit on it.
"Haa… fine. But if it really looks bad, you smash the facility and get out. That's the deal."
"Got it."
While we went back and forth, Choi A-rin had clearly picked up on the heavy mood. She watched us in silence, worry thick in her eyes — starting toward me several times, then stopping herself. She looked like she couldn't decide what to do. I figured anything I said would only make her more anxious, so I pretended not to notice and let it pass.
And then the next day arrived.
"Be careful."
I nodded at Park Jae-hyun's words. Even at the end, he couldn't shake the gloom from his face. I turned to say goodbye to Choi A-rin as well —
Clench.
"Do you… really have to go…?"
She had a fistful of my sleeve, looking up at me. Anxiety, worry, restlessness — a whole tangle of feelings sat in her eyes. Of course she was scared. She might not know exactly where I was headed, but she already knew from experience that it wouldn't be anywhere ordinary.
"It's fine. I'll be back before you know it."
I gently pried her fingers off my sleeve and headed outside.
—Nogoe.
In a dim, sunless space, a voice laced with mechanical static called a name.
"Speak."
A man answered in a heavy voice.
—A boy named Park Yeon-chan will be coming.
"……"
—I don't care if you have to cut off his arms and legs. Bring him in.
The mechanical voice delivered its order.
And to that order—
"…Understood."
—Nogoe, Park Mun-seong, bowed his head and quietly lowered his eyes into the dark.