Discipline 14: The Disciplinary Committee Leader Cares for His Comrades (2)
Glug, glug, glug.
She nailed it.
The ramyeon broth had been simmered to perfection. From any angle you cared to look at it, the bowl deserved admiration. She'd laid out properly ripened kimchi and side dishes of meat on the table, then set a trivet in the middle, and atop it sat the pot of ramyeon. The soft-cooked egg and the noodles, chewy at just the right firmness, looked absolutely inviting. I supposed I was hungrier than I'd realized.
"Baek-seo, it's done. Seventeen years of ramyeon mastery, distilled into my magnum opus."
"Wow... that looks delicious."
Baek-seo had already made her way to the table, letting out a gasp of admiration. Her voice was so gentle that even her exclamations came out soft and serene.
Then I caught the familiar scent of shampoo and body lotion. I turned my head toward it.
"Come eat befor—"
The words died in my throat.
Ugh—!
Impossible. I had anticipated this. I had braced myself. And yet something far more devastating than anything I'd imagined was carving its way into my field of vision.
Damp hair freshly washed. Baek-seo, wearing nothing but my dress shirt. The long, elegant line of her legs gleamed with pale skin below the hem of the shirt, and the overall effect was, frankly, lethal.
Heart, please—!
A violent shock slammed through my chest. I bit down on my tongue and barely managed to keep my expression in check, but the intermittent tremors running through my body were another matter entirely.
"Want an apron? I figured the broth might splash on your clothes."
"Here you go."
"...Why are you handing it over so gingerly?"
I supposed it must have looked odd—me averting my eyes with strained determination and extending nothing but a rigid arm with the apron dangling from it. Baek-seo tilted her head, then smiled soundlessly. A smile that seemed, somehow, to carry a knowing weight.
We sat across from each other at the table and ladled the ramyeon into our bowls. Between the string of exhausting events and the pounding headache of the problems I'd been chewing over, I'd apparently forgotten I was even hungry. It tasted better than one and a half portions of the ramyeon I used to eat on night marches back in my soldier days—by a wide margin.
I stole a sidelong glance at Baek-seo. The way she swept a strand of hair behind her ear before gathering kimchi and noodles together with her chopsticks and slurping them down was adorable.
If we got married, could I see this view every single day?
A sudden daydream bloomed in my head, which until moments ago had been mired in dreary worries. When I'm having a hard time, I look at Oh Baek-seo. Just looking at her is healing. But alas, I couldn't exactly sit back and enjoy the view in peace.
I returned to my ramyeon and thought it over.
...She doesn't know about the Head Principal and Dal-bi.
If even one piece were missing—my knowledge of the game, the mountain of clues, the goblin's message—I never would have been certain that the Head Principal was a target I needed to treat as my problem.
Best that I keep it to myself for now. Explaining it would be awkward, and it would only bury her under more weight. I'd rather she rest easy for the time being.
I glanced at Baek-seo's hands. The trembling had improved, but I couldn't help worrying about her all the same.
"You make ramyeon really well, Leader."
Baek-seo said it out of nowhere.
"I've eaten enough of it. This much is just the basics."
"You could call yourself a ramyeon artisan, you know."
"What's with the speech all of a sudden...? Anyway, if you want it again, I'll boil you some whenever. Just say the word."
"A sharp young thing like you, I do like."
Baek-seo teased in a joking tone, letting a warm laugh spill out. Then, still eating, she tossed out a question that came from left field.
"Come to think of it—has anyone besides me ever visited your home, Leader?"
"?"
What kind of question was that?
Well, of course there had been.
Unless you count Dal-bi coming over all the time when we were kids, no one.
I'd never invited anyone else to my place.
"Apart from a friend back in the day, no. Why?"
"...It's nothing. Just suddenly curious, is all."
Baek-seo shook her head. Was she worried someone might show up at our door in the dead of night?
Can't blame her.
If some acquaintance of ours dropped by out of the blue and found me and Baek-seo living together, who knew how they'd react. Not that there was any danger of that.
"I see."
We let the topic slide and went back to our ramyeon.
Every time Baek-seo drifted into my line of sight, my attention kept snagging on what she was—or wasn't—wearing. Beautiful every time I look at her... It was astounding. The mind is firmly in thrall to the body, and my body was in the full bloom of its hot-blooded prime. A woman of undeniably stunning beauty wearing nothing but my dress shirt was profoundly, aggressively stimulating.
And the fact that she was someone I actually liked only made the stimulation more ferocious. In the end, the heat pooled so stubbornly below my belt that I couldn't get up from my chair. Left with no alternative, I was forced to perform the national anthem in my head.
When the ramyeon was finally demolished, Baek-seo rose from her seat.
"Thanks for the meal. I'll do the dishes."
"Don't bother. Guests get to rest. I've got it."
"Oh...? Then why aren't you getting up?"
"Something came to mind I need to think over. Go rest first."
Even after all four verses of the national anthem, the results were disappointingly modest. Apparently my patriotism from my past life had been lacking.
Baek-seo watched me in silence for a moment, then offered a slightly awkward smile.
"Okay... then next time, it's my turn."
Thankfully, she left.
That was close...
In the end, it took resorting to my last-ditch arsenal—reciting the Lord's Prayer and the Heart Sutra both—to weather the crisis. Truly, the power of the divine is great.
When I came back from doing the dishes, I found Baek-seo on the sofa, scrolling through her smartphone.
If only I could just walk right over and—
"I'm going to shower."
...The moment the impulsive thought surfaced, I hurried off to the bathroom.
While Ahn Woo-jin was in the shower, Oh Baek-seo wandered through the house exploring. Eventually she came across a middle school graduation album.
She found the short-haired Woo-jin among the class photos and gently stroked the picture. It was a side of him she'd never known.
"......"
Her plan for the night had been to feign sleep, wait until Woo-jin drifted off, then take up Baekryundo and stand watch until dawn. There was no telling when a threat might come. That was why she'd kept the blade within arm's reach—outwardly calm, inwardly braced for anything.
Then a single line of Woo-jin's surfaced in her mind.
─ 'Apart from a friend back in the day, no one's ever come over.'
No one had come or gone recently. At the very least, Woo-jin seemed to regard that as simple fact.
But Baek-seo remembered the day Woo-jin had come down with the flu—and the bowl of plain white porridge that had appeared, cooked by a hand neither of them could identify. Who on earth had made it and slipped away? And in a residential district crawling with security robots, secretly enough that even Woo-jin never noticed?
Baek-seo operated her smartphone, deploying the personal security drones she'd stockpiled near the house to positions around Woo-jin's address. It was possible because she'd already secured clearance from the district's security team.
"I'll just have to stay with Woo-jin for a while, then..."
So she murmured to herself. Until she could be certain of his safety, staying at his side was the sensible choice.
Ordinarily, simply living together at his place would have been best, but obviously that was out of the question. Setting aside the matter of permission, she had no wish to impose on his private life.
"In that case..."
She would need to dip into her savings before long, it seemed.
Soon after, freshly showered and changed, Woo-jin emerged into the living room.
"Baek-seo."
And then:
"Want to watch a movie?"
"?"
The unexpected offer popped out of his mouth.
A little while later, with every light in the house switched off, the two of them sat side by side on the sofa under a shared blanket, and Woo-jin started the film.
"What movie is it?"
"A hero movie. Seen it?"
"I haven't. Let's give it a try."
It was an odd situation, but Baek-seo could tell he was doing it to take her mind off things, so she settled in quietly.
On the TV, a hero film began to play—a surviving remnant of the culture pre-humanity had left behind. A genius engineer soaring through the sky in a suit of steel; a man in tights who'd gained the powers of a spider after being bitten; a guy in blue tights who hurled his shield around like a frisbee. The story followed a roster of heroes battling a wicked villain with every trick and gadget at their disposal.
It was an old movie, made before the mysterious power called 'mana' had entered the world, yet the city it was set in felt not so different from the Neo Seoul of today. According to history, humanity's culture and technology had regressed while billions of people lost their lives. Which made it entirely plausible that the world then and the world now looked so much alike.
Woo-jin lost himself in the film. Strangely enough, there was longing in his eyes. Baek-seo found watching him like that better than watching the movie itself.
"Ah."
Woo-jin suddenly let out a cry.
"What is it?"
"Forgot something important."
He came back with a big tub of snacks and drinks, and the two of them started sharing.
"......"
Sitting here now, wrapped in a warm blanket beside Woo-jin, leaning shoulder to shoulder as the film played—Baek-seo stayed alert while savoring a deep, quiet sense of contentment. She smoothed her brow. At some point the trembling in her hands had faded, and the thoughts she'd dreaded recalling had settled. Part of it was surely the penalty from her unique ability, Cloud Master, easing with time—but even accounting for that, she was recovering remarkably fast.
By the time the movie reached its final act, Woo-jin's eyes were blinking heavily and his head was nodding. He'd faced the dawn without ever recovering from his fatigue, and sleep was finally crashing down on him.
Baek-seo pretended not to notice and kept watching in silence.
"Baek-seo."
"Hm?"
Woo-jin, seemingly aware of how drowsy he was, spoke in a low, slack voice.
"I've got some new security drones set up recently. If anyone breaks in, an alarm will go off. So... if things go wrong, I can run too. You don't have to worry so much."
He said it to ease her worry, even a little.
"Okay. I'll keep that in mind."
Baek-seo answered with a gentle smile.
The film ended and the credits began to crawl up the dark screen. Baek-seo turned her head. Woo-jin was fast asleep, his neck propped against the backrest of the sofa.
"...Careless as ever, Leader. What if someone pounced on you?"
She whispered the tease in the tiniest voice, that intimate tone of hers soaking into the still air.
She rose from the sofa and debated whether to lay him down properly, then instead carefully guided his head onto her own shoulder. Then, ignoring the pounding of her heart, she leaned her head gently against his.
Baek-seo quietly closed her eyes.
"You know perfectly well..."
she said,
"you're just pretending not to."
The two of them had long since guessed at each other's hearts. Looking back at everything they'd shown one another, even the most oblivious person would have found it hard to miss. And Baek-seo was anything but oblivious.
She'd understood long ago that Woo-jin had taken on a great burden when he became Disciplinary Committee Leader. She couldn't say exactly what that burden was, but she knew he had no room to spare for anything else—and she respected the obsessive sense of duty he carried as Leader.
So she had already made her resolution: to follow the path Woo-jin chose, without a word of protest. To weave herself into his life step by step along the way, layering it with her own color. And on the day he finally set down the weight of the leader's armband, she would let her heart show, naturally and without ceremony.
"...Sleep well."
With a faint, glowing smile, Baek-seo slipped her hand softly over his.
"I'm Oh Baek-seo. I just moved in next door today."
"......?"
"Want some housewarming tteok?"
And just like that, a new neighbor had moved in next door.