Side Story – My Friend's Girlfriend Is a Monster (1)
This chapter is a side story.
"Yeah, I'm glad to hear you're doing well."
"Hey, since when do you get to worry about me? What, a little taste of Seoul water and now you're all high and mighty? Or are you just coasting on the fact that you've got a pretty girlfriend, huh? Well?"
"Haha! What are you even talking about… A girlfriend, I mean… lately things have been a bit… no, whatever. Let's grab a drink next time."
"Yeah, you bastard. When I make it up to Seoul someday, you'd better show me around."
"Of course. Then… talk to you later."
"You bet~"
Click.
The moment the call ended with Hyun-ok — my friend from way back, all the way through high school — a silence like a lie settled over the cramped one-room apartment I lived in alone.
"Huaaaaah…"
Creeeak—
Maybe it was because the long call had finally wrapped up. Somehow all the strength drained from my body, and after exhaling a breath I'd been holding in forever, I sank deep into my chair.
Click.
I fumbled across the desk for my cigarette pack, lit one up, took a long drag, and muttered a self-pitying lament into the empty air.
"Haaah… Lucky bastard. It actually pisses me off how well he's doing… Moved up to Seoul, seems to be making good money… and on top of that, a pretty girlfriend… Ugh, damn it. …Still, I guess… the guy's been through hell… So yeah, I'm jealous as shit, but I want to root for him too."
Even someone like me — a walking piece of human garbage, by my own honest assessment, with a personality to match — couldn't bring myself to truly resent Hyun-ok, my closest friend for as long as I could remember.
The guy had grown up in shittier circumstances than mine, and yet he'd clawed his way up to Seoul, was supporting his family while he was at it, and had somehow landed a girlfriend who looked like a model. An absolute beast of a man.
Me, on the other hand? I'd crawled out of some no-name regional college and now spent my days bouncing between part-time jobs, getting older by the day in the most miserable way possible. A complete wreck.
Lifelong single. Friendless except for Hyun-ok thanks to my garbage personality. Total net worth: a few crumpled bills in my wallet.
A pathetic existence where worrying about tomorrow's rent was a daily fixture.
"Christ~ almighty~ Life is absolute dogshit~"
As soon as I acknowledged reality, self-loathing came flooding in, and the walls started to suffocate me. I opened the balcony door to get some air.
Flap.
I was scattering cigarette smoke and leaning toward the balcony railing when I heard the sound of rustling fabric and turned my head.
Being an open-style balcony with no dividing walls, I could see the unbelievably pretty college girl from next door stepping out to hang up her laundry.
Maybe because she lived alone, she was in completely comfortable clothes — dolphin shorts and a white tank top that left most of her smooth skin on full display.
Apparently too lazy to deal with it, she'd pulled her long black hair back into a loose ponytail, and her face was bare of makeup — but her base features were so stunning that even that came off as effortlessly halfway flattering.
She probably did Pilates or yoga. Whenever I caught glimpses of that sculpted figure beneath her clothes, I felt like my sleeping idiot brain would raise its head all on its own.
We'd crossed paths in the hallway any number of times, but ours was a dry, colorless relationship — we'd never even exchanged a greeting.
Lately, though, even that lukewarm non-relationship had turned ugly.
The reason was…
"…Ah."
The college girl's eyes met mine at the sound, and she flinched — then openly scrunched her brows and glared at me.
That contemptuous, furious look, as if she were staring at a registered sex offender, made my soul leave my body — and then heat slowly began to rise in my chest.
Oh, you fucking bit—
SLAM!
Before I could get a word out, she snatched up all the laundry she'd spread across her balcony and shoved her sliding door shut with a vicious rattle, vanishing inside.
"You piece of—! Haah… calm down, you fucker…"
I barely strangled the curse rising up my throat and vented instead by expelling a rough cloud of smoke into the burning air.
It wasn't my hideous, sweaty face that made her hate me like that. It wasn't the lack of contact between us, either.
A few days ago, I'd stepped onto the balcony for a smoke and found a pair of women's panties lying on the floor.
At first I had no clue what it was — then I realized the college girl next door had hung her laundry out on her balcony and the wind had blown it over onto my side.
I considered returning it, but I figured it would create an awkward situation. And also… every time I looked at it, it turned me on. A filthy little thought crept in.
In the end, I used it as fap material until the thing was stained white all over, and threw it away.
…What? What was I supposed to do, hand it back?
"Excuse me, your panties flew off your balcony and landed on mine, tee-hee, here you go!" — was I supposed to say that?
Like that girl would be thankful. Please.
No… these days, I'd be lucky if she didn't suspect I'd stolen it and start treating me like an actual sex criminal.
…Wait, who exactly am I lecturing here?
Anyway, once the girl belatedly realized her underwear had gone missing, she started suspecting me, and every time we ran into each other in the hallway, the look she gave me turned ice-cold.
Each time, I had plenty I wanted to say — but my conscience pricked at me, so I kept my mouth glued shut and endured her glares.
She had suspicion but no hard evidence, so she couldn't say anything outright.
Instead, she picked a fight over something else.
"Stop smoking on the balcony. The smell drifts all the way over to my side."
The first words she'd ever spoken to me in the hallway after that incident — no, wait. That wasn't a conversation. That was a one-sided accusation.
Back then I was so furious I wanted to hammer-fist her skull into paste, and I somehow — miraculously — held it in.
In my heart of hearts, I nearly screamed, Then how about YOU quit broadcasting the sounds of you and your boyfriend going at it, you hypocritical bitch! The heavens themselves had to hold my tongue back.
"Thinking about it again, it really is dogshit… hooowww…"
Lamenting my existence, living in this shitstain of a world one more time, I blew a long ribbon of cigarette smoke into the empty air.
"Ding-dong-dick~ wants to pound that pussy so baaad~"
Late at night, on my way home from the convenience store with a bag of booze, I was humming my own little tune as I walked.
Even for the countryside, this was the far edge of it — a quiet, sleepy stretch of empty street with not a soul around, and I was half-dancing my way down it.
"Uuuuh――uh!?"
A sound reached me — like a scream trapped behind something sealed shut, leaking out in muffled scraps. My humming died mid-note, my footsteps stopped, and I turned my head toward the gap around the corner.
There, in the empty roadside alley wedged between houses, a woman sat slumped against the wall, faintly visible, her hands flailing at the air.
…The hell?
"Gah!?"
It was hard to see clearly, so I narrowed my eyes and shone my phone screen toward her — and the bizarre scene that met my gaze wrung a noise out of me before I could stop it.
A shapeless mass of grotesque tentacles, each one roughly the size of a human fist, was plastered flat against the fallen woman's face.
A few of them had penetrated inside — slid deep into her ears — though I couldn't begin to guess what that meant.
"Eegigigeek!? Ugigeek!? Uhihiiiiiit―――!!?"
Twitch… twitch…
What it meant, apparently, was that the woman was convulsing as if electrocuted — eyes rolled back until the whites showed, tears and drool streaming down her face in long strings.
Her skirt had flipped up over both legs sprawled bonelessly across the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, and whether from sheer obliviousness or not, it shamelessly exposed the pink lace underwear beneath, right there in a public street.
Then a stain began spreading slowly from the bottom of her panties — until she wet herself so thoroughly that a puddle pooled across the pavement.
Paralyzed by the sheer impossibility of it all, I floundered between terror and confusion for who knows how long before the woman's face finally registered.
Holy… that's the college girl, isn't it?
The girl who lived next door to me. The rude woman who, as of this very morning, had been treating me like a sex offender and shooting me looks full of pure contempt.
"Hih!?…Nheheee… I'll open my mouth… hehe…"
While I stood there with no idea what to do, the girl suddenly opened her mouth wide — agonizingly wide — her face wearing a grotesque expression of torment and delight all at once.
A horrifying sight, as if her brain's dopamine were being dangled as bait and she was being puppeted by something else entirely.
The tentacles clinging to her face retracted the ones buried in her ears as though they'd been waiting for exactly this, then wriggled deftly into her gaping mouth.
The moment something thick and heavy pushed down her throat, the girl's body bucked and thrashed as she choked and gagged in agony.
And even through it, her throat convulsed helplessly, again and again, swallowing the thing down — then she trembled, rigid as a condemned prisoner, shaking in place.
"Uh…!? Ah, ugh… ahh…"
She vomited up a few clipped, dying fragments of a scream, then her rolled-back eyes slowly slid shut, and her head lolled forward as if in collapse, her whole body going slack.
And through all of it — I, the pathetic bastard that I am, was gripped so completely by terror that I did nothing. Worse, I just stood there, watching like I was under a spell.
Is… is she dead…?
Swooosh.
The girl held perfectly still for several seconds — then abruptly raised her head. And it was unmistakably clear that the look in her eyes had changed from before.
"…Delicious… this woman's brain… delicious… mmh… Young. Pretty. Good body. …A college girl. …A convenient identity… mmh…?"
Muttering to herself in a voice like a completely different person, she must have felt my gaze frozen on her from the street corner — because her head turned, and our eyes locked.
"Hrik!?"
I flung the plastic bag from my hand and staggered like I was about to fall over my own feet, scrambling away for my life from the thing that had apparently devoured the girl next door.
Wh-what the hell!
What IS that!?
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT THING―――――!!!