Thank You for Still Liking Me
Of course, even a hospital in the dead of night is never truly empty. If Siberia is humanity’s front line, then a hospital is the front line where life and death fight it out.
So the moment I woke up, someone was bound to show up. Swallowed whole by my own bleak thoughts, I hadn’t even managed to predict something that obvious.
“Unnie! You’re awa…ke?”
And the one who would have to pay for that failure was, inevitably, me.
“Ah?”
“…Ah.”
Clara’s pink eyes swept the room. They locked onto my thoroughly flustered face, then dropped to the phone lying face-down on the floor, and finally landed on my hand as I desperately tried to cover the lens.
She didn’t say a word, but somehow I knew exactly what she was thinking. The expression on her face said it plain as day: No way. Is this unnie streaming right now?
And the thing that drove the final nail into her suspicion was the TTS voice that spilled out before I could kill the sound.
“…”
“…”
An awkward silence stretched between Clara and me.
The frozen pink-haired girl’s expression began to shift, little by little—from “mildly surprised” to “how should I tease this unnie for maximum entertainment.”
“Hmm… and what sound might that have been, Unnie?”
No, wait, Clara!
Your face is broadcasting every single thought in your head, you know that?
Can we just calm down for a second and talk this through?
St-stop…?
Every possible thought stormed through my mind. The brain that hadn’t stopped even in front of an S-rank dungeon boss refused to function and shorted out completely.
And Clara, as always, was terrifyingly sharp when it came to things like this. The second she had the full picture, she closed in on me with a look that said she was about to devour me whole.
“…I’m warning you right now. Don’t even think about opening your mouth without my permission.”
“Ah?”
The pink-haired girl who’d been advancing like a predator savoring its prey came to a halt. Okay, good—I’d stopped her for now… so if I could just figure out a response while—
“…I’m disappointed, Unnie.”
“What are you even trying to—”
“We were close, weren’t we? Right?”
“Don’t you remember? Just a few days ago we were out on a date together, and we even touched each other’s bodies, didn’t we?”
“…Hey!”
They say nothing is more terrifying than agitation grounded in truth. Sitting right there, I felt every ounce of that saying.
A date? It wasn’t like we hadn’t. If two people spent time together, and one of them had feelings for the other, then yes—that counted as a date.
And each other’s bodies… well, we had touched. While picking out clothes, she’d measured me and put her hands all over me!
“Okay, that’s… not technically wrong, but…”
“If it’s not wrong, then?”
Wait, looking at it like this, am I the trash here? Going on a date with a girl who keeps clinging to me because she likes me, when I have zero intention of dating her—is that my fault?
But the situation is a little different, isn’t it…?
I didn’t have a choice to begin with. I’d made my refusal perfectly clear, and because of my condition we had no choice but to keep seeing each other.
I’m screwed. Even Maria has piled on. If I mess up this explanation, I’m going to get chewed out the second I get back to Korea.
“Haa…”
In the end, I let out a long sigh, picked the phone back up off its face, and launched into a rough explanation.
How the long, grinding Siberia War had wrecked my body. How she was basically the doctor I met once a year to keep that body in check.
I deliberately left out the Saintess part. The idea of a girl who was always pure and devout in public saying things like that without a second thought would be a controversy all by itself.
Just… a capable priest from Vatican City?
Well, looking at it one way, that wasn’t even wrong. Technically, a Saintess is a kind of priest.
“…So, her and I are not like that!”
“Hing…”
“Ugh, my head hurts.”
I’d only been live for five minutes and my head was already pounding.
Clara chattering away beside me, the viewers spouting whatever nonsense they pleased, and Maria poking me with donation messages on top of it all.
As always, my stream was pure chaos.
As if the self-pity I’d just poured out, the self-mockery, the ugly insides of myself I never thought I’d ever lay bare—none of it mattered in the slightest.
“…Still. Having a headache feels good.”
And that was why I liked it.
These people were different from everyone I’d met before. They liked ordinary shut-in Lee Haneul—not Sword Saint Serena Eustania.
“Huh?”
But Clara, next to me, seemed to take that in a completely different way.
“Unnie, did you hit your head really hard…?”
A flicker of worry showed in her eyes as she asked carefully. How on earth had she interpreted “having a headache feels good”?
With a face full of genuine concern, Clara clung closer and started to pull the blanket back, saying she needed to check my head.
“Hey, hey…! Hold on! I’m only wearing underwear under this blanket!”
“Oh, really?”
“Why are you happy about that?! Wait—wait a second! If that gets shown, it’s an instant ban, you filthy nun!”
“Hey, wait a minute! You guys shouldn’t be celebrating either!”
Even if I had something like diplomatic immunity, it still looked pretty bad to use it against a platform like Pazijik. That meant a multi-day ban with no way out… were they really fine with that?
The second I said it, the chat went into emergency mode.
Thanks to that, Clara—who’d been plastered all over me—eased off a little. She still stuck right by my side, but at least she stopped trying to yank the blanket off.
“Whew…”
Only once things settled a bit could I actually run the stream properly.
Meaning: the things I’d been about to say earlier, before Clara’s entrance shoved them off the rails.
“Mmm, so… about that ‘murderer’ thing I mentioned at the start.”
“…Unnie?”
Whether Clara’s voice came from beside me or not, I closed my eyes and sorted my thoughts.
Talk about Babel Tower? I couldn’t just spit that out here. I didn’t particularly want to take the World Government’s side, but I also didn’t want to be responsible for the social chaos that would erupt if I casually revealed the existence of an SS-rank gate.
The astronomical observatory?
Obviously off-limits. Blabbing about a confidential Holy See facility would shatter whatever trust the Vatican still had in me.
The fight between the Holy See’s Holy Knights and the World Government’s Execution Unit?
Why would I want to split a functioning world in half? Saying that out loud would be the start of a global civil war. However much I hated the World Government, I didn’t want to smash a world that still worked.
“I just… got assigned something similar to the Execution Unit.”
So I fudged it. Telling myself that later—once I revealed my identity and today’s events came to the surface—I would explain it properly then.
You know the saying, ignorance is bliss?
It fit perfectly here. I wanted these people to know nothing, and just live in peace.
“…Killing people made me wonder if this was really why I learned the sword. At first I followed my sister into fighting to protect people.”
No matter how bad the other person is, cutting a life short with your own hands is always hard. My sword was meant to protect people.
And in the end, didn’t one person’s death mean more people lived?
Don’t bring utilitarian, consequentialist arguments to me. I was the damned sacrifice of that utilitarianism.
“So honestly, I was scared. Scared people would hate me for being like this.”
In the end, that fear had been groundless.
I still seemed to be someone who deserved to be loved.
And for that, I was truly, truly grateful.
“But thanks to you guys, I think I’m a lot better now.”
At first, when my mind was all over the place, the words had poured out easily. Now that my reason was coming back, I was starting to get a little embarrassed.
Ah, how many times am I going to get clipped today?
How many more of my screenshots are going to circulate on the gallery?
Any hope of still being treated as some cool, athletic unnie type… was probably gone by now, right?
Even thinking that, I still wanted to get the gratitude out somehow.
Knowing full well that someday I’d be kicking the blankets going, Why did I do that?Lee Haneul, you idiot…!—I still whispered it with everything I had.
“…Thank you so much for still liking someone like me.”
Saying it bare like that felt a little cheap. And, with a conscience that also meant please don’t archive this one, I didn’t forget to prepare a small reward.
“Everyone currently in the stream—drop your stream nickname, a stream screenshot, and the burger set you want on the gallery, and I’ll buy one set for each of you.”
“Hoo…”
Leaning blankly against the wall, I felt the quiet after the stream ended. For some reason, my heart felt light.
I had never felt like this in my life.
For the first time ever, I had complained to someone else.
I had laid out my ugly insides, asked for understanding, asked for attention.
I’d thought it was an excessive wish, something that didn’t fit someone like me. But maybe it wasn’t.
Did I still deserve to be loved…?
I was staring blankly at the ceiling with that thought when I felt an intense gaze from beside me.
“…Clara?”
“I took a screenshot of the stream.”
Shyly showing me her phone screen, Clara asked with a look of pure expectation.
“You’ll buy me one too, right?”
“And of course, it would be even better if we ate it together.”
She added the sly little condition with a knowing, mischievous look.