114. My Buff is a Drug
114. My Buff is a Drug
That night, Hye-yong did end up sleeping with Lanfang, but sating his libido hadn't been the objective.
It was more accurate to call it a kind of territorial marking.
What happened tonight could just as well be described as an act to etch his presence more deeply into Lanfang—someone who still permitted no male intrusion other than him.
Fully satisfied with just that single round, Hye-yong lay facing the woman who said she was happy being his pet, quietly stroking her neck.
Lanfang lay still as well, simply feeling his touch.
After a moment, Hye-yong stopped his hand.
"Lanfang."
"Yes, Master."
"Is this really okay with you? I mean, it's not just relaxing and receiving affection. It means coming when I call, becoming someone who doesn't know what kind of creature she'll end up fighting."
"It's all right, Master. I trust you, Master. Everything you do is the right thing for me too."
"......If you want, I can make the whole pet thing like it never happened. We could manage as close friends instead of a pet. I've gotten awfully attached to you. And I feel kind of sorry, too."
It was a declaration—that if she wanted, he would set her free.
At those words, Lanfang's eyes widened slightly.
Hye-yong wasn't saying it to actually let Lanfang go.
He just wanted to make things more certain.
A being he had tamed and leashed.
If he suddenly unfastened that leash, would Lanfang run away—or would she notice it was undone and beg him to reattach it?
If it were Lanfang, she would probably choose the latter.
Hye-yong had a vague expectation of that.
But the animal called a human being never felt satisfied until it confirmed things with its own two eyes.
He wanted Lanfang to pick up the leash handle with her own mouth and plead with him to please take it.
That said, he wasn't entirely without the thought of letting her go.
If Lanfang said she truly wanted that, Hye-yong was prepared to accept her not as master and subordinate but as an equal.
He had grown that attached, and he thought she was a good person.
"I don't want that."
Lanfang gave that reply and clasped Hye-yong's right hand tightly in both of hers.
'Lanfang.......'
Her hands were trembling slightly.
The emotion on her face was unmistakably anxiety.
"It makes no sense for you to suddenly let me go."
"I've been studying hard to become an excellent dog, you know."
"From what I've learned, that isn't letting go. It's discarding. It's abandonment."
"They said that to a dog, her owner is her entire world."
"They said people who abandon their dogs are bad people."
"Master, you're not a bad person...... right?"
"You won't...... abandon Lanfang...... right?"
Lanfang's answer was exactly, perfectly what Hye-yong had been hoping for.
Her heart was completely entangled with the being called Hye-yong.
It had started as a twisted relationship, but because it was twisted, it had tangled and stuck together all the more messily and solidly.
"How could I ever abandon you."
He felt keenly that they had become that kind of existence for each other.
-
August 8th (Monday), 8:48 AM
Lecture hall
"......Factions?"
Choi Ah-young echoed what she'd just heard.
"Yeah, they keep telling me to join their faction. The thing is, I have no clue what they even do."
"Hmm. It's definitely not something that ever applied to us. Invitations to join a faction only go out to people with reasonably top-tier grades."
Choi Ah-young seemed to know a little about the factions inside the facility.
Or rather, wouldn't not knowing be the weird part?
Either way, it seemed like a good idea to get whatever information he could here.
"What's the best way to answer?"
"You need to think carefully about which choice benefits you."
"That's the problem—I don't know that. I need to know something to make a proper choice."
"I don't know much either...... but I'll tell you everything I do."
Choi Ah-young laid out this and that about factions.
"First off, once you belong to one, it'll affect your school life and later your life as an Awakened pretty heavily. Just like the offers said, you can get support with points, artifacts, skills, and after graduation it should become a whole lot easier to join a guild run by the house the faction head belongs to. Then you wouldn't necessarily have to work as a civil servant."
"Obviously there are downsides too, right?"
"Of course. The factions are basically structured competitively, so there's a lot of conflict. Sometimes quarrels from outside spill into the facility."
Choi Ah-young paused for a moment, glanced around, then covered her mouth with her left hand and whispered cautiously.
"I mean, I've heard that the instructors don't interfere in disputes between factions. Probably because they're too closely connected to the actual ruling powers. It's like, joining a faction is your choice, but you're on your own when it comes to your conduct? The way I see it, it seems like they're learning politics, or psychological warfare—that sort of thing."
"So you can get caught up in annoying shit."
"If you get discarded partway through, or become a target, there's no one to protect you, so it can get ugly. I've actually heard about someone who earned the ill will of a faction and quietly graduated by their third year without a single friend."
"Whoa, that bad? Scary."
"Right? That kind of thing scares me too, so even if someone asked me, I couldn't do it. From what I heard from my old party members, it seemed like everyone wanted to belong to a group, but...... I guess even though it's scary and tricky, the career advancement is good."
The instructors don't intervene in conflicts between factions.
As he'd always felt, this facility seemed to have far too little control over student behavior.
Never mind that they're legally adults—this still seemed like an age where they needed oversight.
Leaving almost everything to individual discretion had its upsides, but there were clearly adverse effects too.
Wherever people gather, there will be those who get left out.
Being left out in a society that feels this closed-off is a perfect environment for bullying and harassment.
Hye-yong had personally witnessed the damage with his own eyes.
For instance, the facility itself, by gathering students together, seemed to effectively write off being ostracized as "your fault for being pathetic."
He even wondered if they'd deliberately set it up that way to hammer home the point that they were adults.
'Haha, not that I'm really in a position to be thinking that, seeing as I blatantly tormented Lanfang.'
If they'd properly controlled ostracism or harassment and looked after the victimized students, cases like Lanfang's probably wouldn't have happened.
Still, the notion that within the facility the instructors wouldn't get involved even in open brawling clashed a little—no, a lot—with Hye-yong's sensibilities.
'Do I need to pull the "otherworld-style acceptance method" for this too?'
Well, what can you do about facility policy?
This place wasn't really Korea anyway; it was just wearing a Korea skin.
Even educational law was applied differently for Awakened. If they say this kind of thing is allowed in schools that gather Awakened, then frankly there wasn't much to argue against.
'It really was in the novel's setting. That Awakened people's human rights are treated a bit differently from ordinary people's.'
A slightly more rough-handed treatment.
Even for the same crime, sentences could be applied differently.
In a direction unfavorable to the Awakened, of course.
And the reason no revolt like overthrowing the state ever arose was probably because Awakened can be suppressed by a military made up of ordinary people, and because the vast majority of ordinary people look up to the Awakened.
By the time you reach about S-class, you could probably disregard the laws set up to disadvantage Awakened to some degree.
"That's about all I can tell you."
"Thanks. That helped a lot."
Squeak!
With impeccable timing, Instructor Lee Ji-eun opened the door and entered.
It was time to focus on class.
'So Hye-yong even got offers to join a faction.'
But Choi Ah-young couldn't fully concentrate on class.
'I guess it's only natural. If he can handle a shield that skillfully.'
The moment Hye-yong joins a faction, you might as well consider him out of the party.
Why would they support him with artifacts and skills?
Once you belong to a faction, you have to clear raids under the faction's name and build up achievements for them.
So it was obvious they'd pressure him to leave his original party.
She didn't know much about factions, but she could guess that much.
'Sigh. I guess the time for our party to start falling behind has come.'
Everyone had trained diligently, and thanks to steadily earning Essences of Strength through raids, they'd grown enough that even without Hye-yong, they could manage raids at a certain level.
But without Hye-yong they might immediately have to drop the difficulty by about two tiers.
'It stings...... but it can't be helped. Hye-yong has the ability. Keeping him tied down would be greedy.'
Still, Choi Ah-young thought it was a relief that she at least had somewhere to lean on.
After they'd done that kind of thing together, if she asked Hye-yong for help when she needed it, he would lend a hand at any time.
The Hye-yong that Ah-young knew wasn't someone who would discard a promise and pretend not to know.
'Haa.......'
That point reassured her, but the more she thought about it, for some reason, the more sighs escaped her.
'It was wrong after all, that method.......'
Choi Ah-young felt deeply regretful and rueful about having approached Hye-yong that way back then.
She didn't regret the fact that she'd lost her first time by doing that kind of act with him.
Originally, she liked Hye-yong enough that if he'd said he wanted a sexual relationship with her, she would have considered it positively even without any compensation.
The problem was the occasion and the method.......
'What does Hye-yong think of me? He probably thinks I'm just a shallow woman who'll casually offer her body for her own benefit, right?'
If only she had approached him in a way like, she'd simply grown interested and wanted to try it once.
Even if it were more embarrassing, she wouldn't have felt this sense of self-loathing.
Choi Ah-young wanted to ask Hye-yong directly, but ultimately couldn't bring herself to.
'That's not it. That's not what it was. I just wanted to be more tangled up with him.'
She had always held gratitude toward Hye-yong.
You can't deny that her fondness arose from his ability.
Because before Hye-yong changed, when he was utterly powerless and suffering from aphasia, she'd felt nothing in particular, and had even thought of him as one of the dead weights.
All of them did.
Han Geon-hu, Seo Ha-yoon, Chae Hwa-ra too.
Everyone thought of him as dead weight.
She'd thought she didn't belong here, that she'd been forced to take charge of this dead-weight party made up only of losers.
But now she knew.
That all they'd needed was a chance.
They were all good people and good friends.
The kindest and most comfortable friends she could have made out of all the people Choi Ah-young had met so far.
Ah-young had originally thought that the anxiety gripping her whenever she imagined Hye-yong growing distant stemmed from uncertainty about the future.
And so she had seduced Hye-yong that way, and secured a promise through a physical relationship.
But that wasn't it.
She finally realized only now.
Until now, her life had been a succession of pretense, like sitting on a bed of thorns.
Only now had she finally been able to make friends she could genuinely think of as true companions, not as pretense.
This amicable relationship...... she had been afraid of growing distant from party members with whom she could smile pleasantly and see every day, without any pretense, without having to walk on eggshells.
In a sense, Hye-yong had made her realize that she'd implicitly looked down on others with arrogance and hadn't been able to fully trust people.
Not just her—everyone had received, and was receiving, help from Hye-yong.
If he left the party, it felt like the thing holding the relationship called "party" together would collapse, and everyone would scatter.
Everyone had grown enough to at least aim for the bottom rung of C-rank, so the excuse of being unavoidably bound together because of grades had disappeared, too.
She had finally met true friends she felt it was okay to open her heart to.
He was the first boy toward whom she'd felt such a special feeling—gratitude, and the wish to be together.
And yet, they'd formed that kind of relationship—practically a transaction.
No. It had clearly been a transaction.
She felt an intense self-loathing.
Uncharacteristically for her, she seemed to have been too hasty without properly thinking things through.
'Even now, I want to say it. To ask him to treat that time as if it never happened. That he doesn't have to do anything, just please forget about it.......'
If that happened, her first experience would become something with no compensation at all.
That was better.
Because even having that thought was disgusting.
The very act of giving her first time hoping for something in return.
Even if she said that, Hye-yong was the type who wouldn't refuse if she asked for something.
Still, for some reason, Ah-young couldn't muster the courage to speak.
"Today's class ends here."
"Ah."
Because those words suddenly hit her ears, Ah-young let out a very small, startled sigh.
What had she learned today......?
She had a vague memory but it wouldn't come into clear focus.
She'd just zoned out the entire time.
'Hoo. I need to tell him.'
Ah-young sighed heavily to herself.
"Well, I'll be off. See you at the raid, Ah-young."
"Uh, yeah. Bye, Hye-yong."
If only he'd asked something of me.
Ah-young watched Hye-yong's retreating back for a moment, then packed up her own things.
-
"Choi Hye-yong."
"Shit, you startled me."
The moment he left the lecture hall and rounded the hallway corner, a girl was waiting.
First-year, Han Chae-hyun.
She had obviously come to hear his answer.
"You were waiting for me to pass by? Why not use the messenger."
"You've gotta hear this sort of thing in person. Your answer?"
Hye-yong pretended to think hard before speaking.
"Yeah, factions are kinda...... I think I'll just graduate normally."
"......Are you planning to join another faction?"
"Huh? Not particularly?"
"You made contact with a student from the Yeonseong Group side."
How the hell did she know.
"Don't tell me you've been watching me?"
"It's conjecture. Our people saw you camped out on a bench in front of the first-year male dormitory."
"Ah, I see."
"So...... are you planning to join Yeonseong Group?"
It would be clean to just say, "Nope, I have no intention of joining any faction," but the air she gave off—that she'd been monitoring him—irked him.
He also kind of wanted to feel the mood of a hunter that a guild was anxious to recruit, so he decided to feign being swayed and leave her an opening.
"Well...... their terms were clear and pretty good......."
"What exactly did they offer?"
"They told me not to tell other groups, so......."
"......All right. Tell me the terms you want."
The terms he wanted, huh.
What should he say?