Problem Child (2)
“What… do you want from me?”
“Oh… nothing. I was just passing by and heard someone crying.”
I offered a half-hearted excuse and quietly pulled a chair over, sitting a couple of steps away from her.
Not too close, not walking away either—an awkward middle distance. That very distance seemed to make the girl even more uneasy.
“I’m… fine. You don’t have to worry about me…”
“You don’t look fine.”
I cut her off flatly.
“Anyone can see you’re not fine at all.”
At my blunt words, Salad’s shoulders started trembling again in tiny shivers.
She bit down hard on her lower lip, desperately trying to hold back the tears. Color drained from her pale lips, but the emotions threatening to burst free refused to be stopped.
“Really… hic… I’m fi—”
“What happened during the practical?”
My question wasn’t comfort. It was dry, stripped of any warmth—closer to fact-checking than kindness.
That very dryness seemed to shatter the last of Salad’s defenses.
“I… I took a wrong turn and… hic! Our team… fell into a trap. Panir… she tried to save me and… got a bad wound on her leg…”
The tears she had been holding back finally broke free, and her story spilled out in a messy rush.
Her foolish judgment. The teammates put in danger because of it. And her genius friend Panir, hurt while trying to protect her.
Behind the achievement of passing the practical at the top of the rankings, a quiet, tangled backstory no one else knew had been waiting.
“It’s all my fault! If I hadn’t been there, Panir wouldn’t have gotten hurt, and she could have done everything perfectly…! I’m… I’m always just a burden to Panir… useless…”
Like a broken doll, she repeated the same words over and over, tearing into herself.
Self-reproach.
Guilt.
Helplessness.
Every negative emotion was dragging her down like a swamp.
Yeah. That’s exactly the feeling. The one Scone digs into.
Scone would approach a girl sunk in that swamp and whisper to her in a gentle voice. Then, little by little, with cunning care, he would turn the heart that leaned on that comfort into one of his pieces.
But I wasn’t the type who handled emotions with that kind of subtlety.
I hadn’t studied professional psychology, and I wasn’t the sort of person who was any good at comforting people.
So I simply stayed quiet and waited for her self-destructive monologue to run its course. Inside the hospital room, there was nothing but the girl’s raw, wrenching sobs.
When her crying peaked and then slowly began to subside, I asked in an empty voice,
“So.”
“…What?”
“I get it. You’re a useless, stupid burden. But so what?”
The words that left my mouth were nowhere near comfort. They were cold and sharp, like a blade.
Salad forgot to cry for a moment and stared at me with an expression of pure disbelief. Her bloodshot eyes filled with shock.
“If you cry and blame yourself like that, does Panir’s wound heal? Or does your mistake just disappear?”
“…….”
“No. Nothing changes. All that emotional drain, the tears you’re shedding right now—they’re completely useless. Just you suffering alone and calling it self-satisfaction.”
I stood up and lightly flicked her tear-damp forehead with a finger.
“Eep!”
“Snap out of it. That awful guilt you’re feeling right now, that bone-deep helplessness—remember every last bit of it clearly.”
I met Salad’s dazed upward gaze head-on as I spoke.
“Don’t try to force yourself to forget those feelings. Carry them inside you like a weapon instead. Use them as fuel so that next time, because you never want to feel them again, you’ll make a better choice.”
“Fuel…?”
“Yeah. Truly useless people are the ones who don’t even know what they did wrong, or who forget it right away even if they do. But you’re not like that. At the very least, you know how to hurt because of your own mistakes. That means you’re not the worst.”
Salad pressed her lips tightly together and lowered her eyes.
“If you’re really Panir’s friend, you shouldn’t be sitting here crying. You should be finding a way so you won’t be a burden to her next time. Not her getting hurt saving you—you getting strong enough to watch her back. Right?”
At my words, Salad’s eyes trembled violently.
She wasn’t crying anymore. She simply looked up at me with wet eyes.
“…How… can I get stronger?”
As if I had been waiting for that exact question, a faint smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.
“It’ll be hard alone. Want me to help you?”
“…What? You… help me? Why…?”
“It won’t be free.”
I took one more step closer and whispered in a voice only she could hear.
“In exchange, will you grant me one request?”
“W-what kind of request?”
At the word “request,” no small amount of anxiety settled on her face.
“When Panir is truly in danger, will you help her?”
“Pa…Panir? You don’t even need to ask… I’ll help her anytime…”
Right now, those words were probably sincere.
But in the original game, across dozens of playthroughs, she had always betrayed Panir at the most critical moment.
“Good. Not a hard request, right?”
At my follow-up, Salad seemed to hesitate for a moment. What rose in her eyes wasn’t pure goodwill, but wariness as she tried to read my intentions.
“…Yes. If it’s for Panir… I can do it.”
Remembering all those bad endings, I spoke quietly.
“No. You can’t.”
“…What?”
The words I spat out were as cold as ice. The color drained from Salad’s face.
“The you right now can never help Panir.”
I slowly took one step closer to her. Her wavering eyes shook desperately, as if determined not to miss a single one of my movements.
“Right now, in this safe hospital room, you can say whatever you want. But when a real crisis hits? When your own life is hanging by a thread? You’ll look out for yourself first, not Panir. And then you’ll collapse all over again under the guilt of having done nothing.”
“Th-that’s not true! I…!”
“Am I wrong?”
I mercilessly cut off her desperate denial. Salad’s lips moved, but no words came out.
She knew better than anyone that my words had struck home.
“That resolve of yours right now is nothing more than a sandcastle. One wave and the whole thing collapses—just an empty promise.”
I forced eye contact with her as she tried to look away.
In those bloodshot eyes, a bottomless despair was swirling.
“So I’ll make you a proposal.”
At my voice, Salad flinched and shrank back, her bloodshot eyes trembling with fear of whatever terrible price she might be asked to pay.
I let out a short, self-deprecating laugh at the sight of her.
“No need to look so scared. It’s nothing grand.”
I sat back down at her bedside and propped my chin on my knee, like a friend about to share a secret.
“Want to form an alliance with me?”
“…An alliance?”
“Yeah. A Losers’ Alliance.”
At my sudden words, a question mark appeared on Salad’s face. I tapped the bandages on my shoulder.
“I almost died in this practical. Got stabbed by some third-rate villain, shoulder torn to shreds. And before that, in the swordsmanship sparring? I got completely wrecked in front of everyone. A perfect loser, through and through.”
I turned my gaze to her face, still marked with tear tracks.
“And you. Your mistake got your friend hurt, and now you’re crushed under the guilt, crying alone in here. You’re a loser too. A textbook one, even.”
“…….”
“Well? The two of us—don’t we more than qualify to form a Losers’ Alliance?”
There was no mockery or ridicule in my words, only a strange sense of kinship.
Not the image of a savior reaching down from on high, but another loser rolling around in the same mud. That was why Salad couldn’t bring herself to push me away.
“If we form an alliance… what do we do…?”
“Simple. We become each other’s training partners.”
I pulled a crumpled notebook and pen from my pocket, tore out a page, and held it out in front of her.
“Here. Write on this.”
“Write… what?”
“Everything you failed at today. What you regret the most. The reason you can’t forgive yourself. All of it.”
“….”
While Salad stared at me in confusion, I took the pen first and wrote without hesitation on the left side of the torn paper.
- Got completely wrecked in the swordsmanship sparring without landing a single hit.
- Charged a moron head-on during the outdoor practical and got stabbed.
At my blunt, unflinching self-confession, Salad’s eyes went wide. I held the pen out to her.
“Your turn.”
Salad hesitated for a long time.
Facing her own failures was as painful as digging into a wound.
But eventually she took the pen with trembling hands. Then, letter by letter, she began carving her guilt onto the paper.
- I took a wrong turn and Panir got hurt.
- I was so scared I couldn’t do anything.
- I wasn’t any help at all.
Another tear fell from her eye onto the paper, blurring the ink.
“Good. First step’s done.”
I picked up the paper, folded it in half down the middle, then opened it again. A clear crease remained.
“Now, on the right side, write one very small thing you can do starting tomorrow so you don’t repeat the failures you just wrote. Not some grand goal—something really minor.”
I took the pen again and wrote next to my own list of failures.
- Wake up ten minutes earlier in the morning and swing a wooden sword, at least.
- Practice magic that can suppress enemies from a distance.
Then I passed the pen back to Salad.
She thought for a long time. The tip of the pen hesitated over the paper several times. At last, she wrote in very small letters.
- Go to the library and look up the trap I fell into.
For her, it was the hardest and most necessary first step.
“Well done.”
I meant it.
I couldn’t even begin to guess how much courage it had taken her just to write that one line.
I carefully folded the paper she had written on and pressed it back into her hand.
And my gaze naturally drifted to Salad’s slender wrist, half-hidden under the sleeve of her practical uniform.
Marks that looked less like scratches from the forest and more like something clawed into the skin with fingernails. Shallow red lines, evenly spaced, carved with stubborn persistence.
“And our alliance has a rule we have to keep.”
“…A rule?”
“Yeah. Article One: Don’t hurt yourself.”
I continued while looking at Salad’s blank face.
“The world is going to keep hitting you and tearing into you plenty. There’s no need for you to join in, right? At least you should have one person on your side—yourself. That’s the basic premise of this alliance. Got it?”
“…….”
I lightly tapped the scrap of paper in her hand.
“This is our alliance’s contract. No grand witnesses, no fancy seals. No curse if you break it. Just this one piece of paper.”
I looked into her still-bloodshot eyes.
“Every night before bed, write down what you failed at today and what you’ll do tomorrow. Then the next day we check each other. We become each other’s watchdogs so neither of us can run away.”
“Every… day?”
“Yeah. Every day. Building from the bottom up, starting with the tiniest successes. Until we can admit to ourselves that we’re not losers anymore.”
My proposal wasn’t sweet comfort or an easy solution.
It was a brutally hard path, one that might not even have an end in sight.
But she clutched the crumpled scrap of paper in her hand as if it were the most precious treasure in the world.
Yeah…
Not a broken doll for Scone to covet,
but a quiet variable even Scone would fear.