Shieldbearer Choi Mari (1)
Choi Mari. As of the entrance ceremony where the original novel begins, she's a second-year student at Cheonmu Hunter Academy.
She's the second heroine of Surviving the Hunter Academy, the one who naturally grows close to the protagonist by teaching his scrawny, weak-stamina ass how to actually exercise.
The first heroine is Han Sora, the protagonist's childhood friend, but let's set her aside for now.
Choi Mari's position is shieldbearer — a tank — and naturally, her department is the Defense Department.
Her flaw is... well, the moment she decides her teammates are beneath her own level, she has a tendency to abandon her defense role and try to convert into an attacker.
In the original story, the protagonist stimulates her protective instincts and gets her to fix that reckless, charging personality — but I have no intention of using that method.
For starters, I, Lee Seonho, don't have the kind of handsome face that could move a woman's heart, and deliberately playing the pathetic loser to trigger someone's protective instincts isn't really my idea of a good time.
It might work as an excuse for a first meeting, but my real goal was to make her see me as someone she could genuinely trust and rely on.
Because that way, when I apply my Suggestion, she'll accept it willingly and quietly. There was no reason to feed her wariness by showing her an untrustworthy side of myself.
Suggestion: Runner's High ※ Target: Lee Seonho
"Hoo, hoo, hoo..."
And so the operation I'd launched was simple: every single time I worked out, I made sure to keep squirming around within Choi Mari's field of vision.
That doesn't mean obstructing her runs or deliberately racing her like I was desperate for her attention. She's an original-story heroine with an eye-catching appearance, after all — if I openly showed any romantic interest, I'd only spike her guard even higher.
Instead, I planned to borrow the strategy from how the original protagonist first met Choi Mari.
'In the original, the protagonist crossed paths with Choi Mari at the academy gym, after all.'
She'd seen him fumbling hopelessly with the exercise equipment, gotten frustrated watching, and started teaching him — that was the whole origin of their relationship.
If Choi Mari hadn't simply been charmed by the protagonist's face and approached him on a whim, then surely I could lure her in using a similar method.
With that in mind, I was jogging through the park where Choi Mari came to work out, deliberately maintaining sloppy form — and before long, a woman with a pink ponytail appeared behind me and swept past.
-Pat, pat-pat.
"......"
Choi Mari kicked off the asphalt and charged ahead, as if to say she couldn't care less about me.
And for some reason, the moment she passed, I could have sworn I caught a whiff of something citrus-fresh.
I didn't adjust my running speed just because Choi Mari was nearby. After all, a few more laps and there'd come a point where she'd overtake me again anyway.
Above all, stay natural. The absolute last thing I could afford was for her to catch me being conscious of her.
'Still, she really is hot as hell, I'll give her that...'
That ass of hers, swaying right in front of my eyes with every single stride.
Staring at those pink leggings the exact same shade as her hair, I felt a primal urge surge up — the overwhelming desire to bring my palm down across that soft-looking rear just once.
...Naturally, actually doing it was out of the question, so I kept the fantasy strictly inside my head. Eyes locked forward, I held my pace exactly as it had been until now.
'Just hold out a little longer. Once I finally get my hands on her for real, I'll be able to grope that ass and those tits as much as I want, whenever I want.'
That ponytail that made my fingers itch to grab and yank from behind, that slim waist with not an ounce of excess fat on it — one day, all of it would be mine.
Until then, I'd swallow my desires and focus on nothing but manufacturing a single point of contact.
Choi Mari of the Defense Department, Cheonmu Hunter Academy.
Lately, she'd been paying a small measure of attention to a suspicious man who kept appearing on her running route.
"Heh... heh... hah..."
"......"
"Haaah... hah... haaah... just a little... more..."
"......"
Twice a day, morning and evening, every single day. A strange man she kept running into whenever she passed through her jogging course.
His body was as scrawny as an anchovy, not a shred of visible muscle anywhere... but watching him run over the past several days, he seemed to have a surprising amount of grit.
Despite how he looked, he wore the expression of someone who genuinely enjoyed the act of running itself — and Choi Mari, who had spent her usual morning and evening jogs observing every manner of human specimen along the route, found the whole thing a little odd.
When you exercised every day, you did occasionally run into people with that kind of physique — the type who seemed to be naturalborn enemies of exercise. But this was the first time one of them had stayed within her field of view for nearly two full weeks straight. No wonder it was gnawing at her.
'Kind of bugging me. Running into him almost every day, he keeps getting on my nerves.'
It wasn't so much that the anchovy-looking man's presence itself offended her — it was that his running form was flat-out intolerable.
He'd run around with that blissful this-is-the-best-thing-ever expression on his face, yet his actual form was a shapeless, sloppy mess that hadn't been refined even the slightest bit.
People like that usually vanished from her field of vision within three or four days of first crossing paths, which was exactly why she'd tried not to pay him any mind. But ignoring a man who showed up in her view every single day for two weeks straight was proving a little difficult for Choi Mari.
'Is he just some guy who finally started working out, discovered it unexpectedly suited him, and stuck with it? Or does he have some kind of circumstances forcing him to exercise whether he likes it or not...'
There were people like that now and then. Men who faked a love of exercise in a transparent attempt to catch her attention and squeeze out even one extra sentence of conversation.
But at least with this man, she probably didn't need to worry about that. If she had been his target, he would have spoken to her at least once over two weeks. If anything, he seemed completely oblivious to her existence — she was the one growing curious, not him.
And so, naturally, Choi Mari's wariness of the man who kept drifting into her sight gradually softened, until in her eyes he was nothing more than a new student trying to learn how to work out for the first time.
'Still, if you're going to do it anyway, you'd be better off learning proper form first. I wonder if he's doing any strength training alongside the cardio.
Maybe I should tell him he'd benefit from watching his diet too. Is he drinking protein? I've got some supplements I ordered by mistake last time — pretty sure they're great for bulking up, actually. If I just suddenly hand him a tub of it, he'd probably get suspicious though...?
Running alone gets boring anyway, and if he's out here exercising every day, I wouldn't mind getting to know him a little. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and say something?'
On days she didn't have to go to the academy, Choi Mari spent close to half her waking hours on exercise.
So the moment the thought of teaching him crossed her mind, she found her eyes drawn to his every little movement.
He might get weird about it if she approached him out of nowhere, so easing into things with a simple greeting first seemed like the right call — and with that, Choi Mari cautiously made up her mind.
'If he shows up at the same time tomorrow, I'll say hi. I seriously can't stand watching him jog around in that disaster of a form any longer.'
After all, there was nothing wrong with having a running buddy to chat with while she logged her laps.
And so Lee Seonho, preparing for the Cheonmu Academy entrance exam, found himself unknowingly carved into Choi Mari's memory.
Runner's High
"Heh... heh... heeeh... hahk..."
Two weeks had already flown by since I'd started deliberately making myself visible on Choi Mari's workout route.
The moment I got home after finishing my evening workout, I barely managed to wring the breath out of lungs that felt full to the brim.
It was a sensation I went through twice a day now, yet I never truly got used to it. The moment the euphoric high where running itself feels like pleasure cuts out, your body lands hard in a sea of accumulated fatigue — like a demon of exercise addiction possessing you for two hours and then abruptly handing the body back.
Feeling exactly like that vengeful ghost of a gym rat surrendering my body back to me, I shuffled into the bathroom with the hollow satisfaction of having somehow completed today's schedule.
"Did I gain a bit of weight...? Well, compared to day one, I think I've put on at least a little muscle."
Anyone could claim to be exercising if results came after a mere two weeks — but then again, the current me was running on willpower support from Suggestion magic.
The fastest way to grow the body was, without question, driving it to its absolute limits — and in that respect, Suggestion was undeniably an efficient buffing tool.
...Granted, that was strictly limited to the fact that it could be cast on others as well.
'Being able to apply Suggestion to myself really is a huge advantage. The problem is that unless I set the conditions properly, it'll drive me past all limits without stopping...'
I'd applied my "cleaning addiction" Suggestion with the same caution — restricting the target space to "inside my own home." If I'd ever stepped outside while under it, I'd have peeled the labels off every fallen scrap of trash and every plastic bottle in the recycling bin, one by one, until everything was sorted. That was what happened in the original story when Lee Seonho put the cleaning addiction on Cha Eunju, so I figured I wouldn't be much different.
The "Runner's High" I was using for workouts was operated the same way — fifty minutes active, then ten minutes released. Set up like this, the ten-minute release window naturally became rest time, letting my body register when it had genuinely hit its limit so I could stop the Suggestion before it went too far.
Building a normal, healthy physique as fast as possible mattered, sure — but if I carelessly wrecked my health in the process, the whole thing would be for nothing.
'Speaking of which, Choi Mari... she's proving harder to bait than I expected.'
I figured that if I kept jogging around in conspicuously mediocre form inside her field of view, she'd crack and say something at least once. But with two weeks nearly up and not a single word from her, maybe my approach was just wrong.
'Is it because this is outside the academy? Higher guard up when there's no institutional context?'
Or maybe she'd only taught the original protagonist because the equipment was hers to use, and since running doesn't have that kind of barrier to entry, she just leaves people alone.
Or — simplest answer of all — maybe it's because I'm not the protagonist. Choi Mari isn't exactly shallow, but objectively speaking, it remained a fact that Lee Seonho's face was a downgrade from Seo Woojin's.
'I thought it'd be nice to at least build some rapport before entering the academy. Turns out nothing goes the way you plan.'
In case she ever did approach me, I'd even been keeping my diet as close to Choi Mari's as possible. If a conversation topic presented itself, even a small one, we'd probably warm up to each other that much faster.
Of course, just because the plan wasn't panning out didn't mean I intended to abandon the training and diet I'd already started.
Getting close to Choi Mari was, at the end of the day, a bonus — a nice-to-have. Right now, she was decidedly not my top priority.
The bigger goal was to drag this skeleton-of-a-body back toward a normal weight before the academy entrance exam, and to build at least the bare minimum of basic fitness so that I'd never end up clinging to someone else's ankle for lack of stamina.
Besides, first impressions matter — it'd be far easier to approach the heroines if I looked even slightly more human and less like a walking corpse.
...Not that it mattered much for Cha Eunju, my actual top priority. The original Lee Seonho had seduced her just fine, so she was hardly a concern.
'For now, let's focus on what matters more than dog food.'
Befriending Choi Mari was, at most, a side dish.
The thing I absolutely could not afford to forget was that the academy entrance exam was what mattered most right now.
And then, the next morning.
"I feel like I've been seeing you around here a lot lately. Have you only just started working out, by any chance?"
...Choi Mari took the bait.