What She Left Behind<div style="text-align:center;padding:30px 0;margin:20px 0;">
When Awakened spoke of Regeneration, they didn't simply mean closing wounds on the skin.
Sure, it meant recovering stamina and mental energy far faster than everyone else after they'd been drained. And not tiring easily during outdoor activities was a genuine advantage in its own right.
Thanks to it, Jiwoo had spent four straight hours without a single break, combing through dirt and grass in search of magic stones.
Found another one.
Magic stones turned up in all sorts of places. Wedged in the crevices of boulders, along stream beds, tucked inside birds' nests, buried between gnarled tree roots. When she'd first come near the Abyss on day one, she hadn't really noticed, but now that she looked around, the area was practically a forest. Aside from the path leading to the main hall, everything else was packed wall to wall with trees and rock.
Did they plant the trees here on purpose? To thin out the toxic mist drifting out of the Abyss, even a little?
It couldn't have been normal practice to surround a sinkhole that size with a ring of forest.
Rooting through the trees and undergrowth like this, the assignment started to feel less like homework and more like a treasure hunt. ...This might actually be fun.
She wasn't sure whether she was allowed to think that, given the circumstances. But honestly? It was a little enjoyable.
She used to run wild on mountains and hillsides near her old home—back before the age of six, that is, before she was locked away in that house. Hide-and-seek, tag, and when that got old, she would tear through entire meadows trying to catch the butterflies she loved so much.
...With Jihyo.
Is Jihyo still getting treatment?
The moment she pictured Jihyo lying in that hospital bed, the small flicker of excitement in her chest plunged straight down.
...That's enough for now. Time to head down.
Before she knew it, the agreed hour had crept close. Jiwoo counted the magic stones she'd gathered so far.
One, two, three... five in all.
That was a respectable showing, surely. She tilted her head back to check the sky and found the sun already sinking, red and drowsy. Jiwoo hurried out of the forest.
In the distance, beneath a massive tree, a long shadow stood leaning against the trunk. It was Moon Yoojin.
His ash-gray eyes were fixed on some faraway view, and there was no reading what thoughts moved behind them.
Then their gazes collided head-on out of thin air.
Having spotted her, Yoojin peeled himself off the tree in one fluid motion. He must have returned quite a while ago—there wasn't a speck of disorder on him as he approached, every fold of his uniform crisp and untouched.
She expected him to ask why she was so late. Instead, he said something entirely unexpected.
"How many did you find?"
Jiwoo answered by holding out what she'd gathered. Five in total.
"...You found all of these yourself?"
"Obviously."
At that, Moon Yoojin's face produced something resembling an actual expression for the first time. The moment surprise crept across that iron mask of his, Jiwoo felt absurdly pleased with herself.
"And how many did you get?"
This time Yoojin held out his own. Four in total.
Jiwoo looked at them, then lifted her head slightly to study him. ...What's his Core?
She had no idea what the class average was, but four had to be a solid number. It was only one fewer than she'd managed after tearing through undergrowth without a single pause for four hours.
"Let's head down."
Yoojin pocketed his stones and took the lead.
"Huh? Head down?"
Jiwoo, who'd drifted off into other thoughts, blinked at him.
"It's five o'clock. There's only an hour left before the assignment ends."
Factoring in a full thirty minutes just to get out of the forest, plus the time to arrive, submit their stones, and be assessed, it wasn't exactly a generous margin. Still—there was no need to leave this second.
"Lim Lisa hasn't come back yet. Let's wait a little longer. She might have lost track of time searching for stones."
At her words, Yoojin turned around slowly, his face wearing its usual bone-dry blankness.
His muted, ash-colored eyes rested on her for a moment, as if he had something to say.
Then he shouldered his bag and leaned quietly against a nearby tree instead.
...Was that a yes?
Yoojin fished out his earphones, plugged them in, crossed his arms, and shut his eyes as if to seal himself off from the world entirely. Jiwoo, for her part, settled onto a rock a polite distance away.
And so a wordless silence poured by like water.
Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.
At last, forty minutes had gone by.
Lim Lisa had not returned.
...This should be enough, right?
In the shade of a large tree, Lisa, who had been crouched low, checked the time and slowly rose to her feet. Quite a while had passed since the assignment began—it was about time she headed back to the meeting point.
Lisa pulled the stones from her pocket.
"Thank you, little guys. I found them so fast thanks to you."
She murmured it to the air after counting her haul. Or more precisely, to the insects hovering around her.
Ladybugs, ants, grasshoppers. For some reason, those tiny creatures had been circling Lisa all along. The reason was her Core: Insect Pheromone.
Insect Pheromone was, simply put, the power to communicate with insects—and, within limits, to command them to her will.
But perhaps because her subjects were insects... mostly bugs, people around her usually looked at her with revulsion. It might have been the natural course of things when her classmates began shunning Lisa.
The creepy girl who talks to bugs. The girl you could treat however you liked.
At some point, that image had hardened into who she was. And it would stay that way, miserable and lonely, right up until graduation.
Or so she believed, in the last stretch of her second year of middle school.
"Hey, did you see Seol Jihyo eat it during PE earlier?"
"God, how humiliating. If that were me I couldn't even show my face."
Seol Jihyo. Granddaughter of the Seolhwa Pharmaceuticals chairman. She had become the center of the bullying.
Lisa never knew what exactly had started it. She didn't know the reason, either. Lisa couldn't get along with the other kids anyway, so it stood to reason. By the time she realized what was happening, the girl was already being torn apart.
"Hey! Walk properly, look where you're going!"
CRACK!
Someone slapped Jihyo hard across the back. The blow was vicious enough that the small girl staggered and crumpled face-first to the floor.
Lisa had been walking nearby, and the instant she looked over, her eyes met Jihyo's.
"Ah..."
Lisa dropped her gaze in a panic and fled the spot.
She was afraid. Afraid the fire might leap onto her next. So she pretended not to see.
...Even though she knew exactly how wretched that felt. Exactly how much it hurt.
Then, one day in the winter of her third year, during a practical training class, Jihyo had an accident. They weren't in the same class, but Lisa saw the ambulance parked in front of the middle school hall, and she saw Jihyo carried into it on a stretcher.
A few days later, Jihyo withdrew from school. Lisa caught a rumor that she'd gone back to the family estate for treatment.
After that... the target of the bullying slid, effortlessly and inevitably, back to Lisa.
"Ugh, I don't wanna be in Lim Lisa's group."
"Disgusting. Look at her eyes. So gloomy."
It was fine. She'd been through it all before, and besides, she told herself it was punishment—punishment for pretending not to see what they did to Jihyo.
She'd assumed she would never truly get along with anyone, all the way to graduation.
Still, I found a decent number of stones. That means I won't be a burden to them, right?
At the very least, she had to try her hardest not to drag her group members down.
And so Lisa, stones tucked in her pocket, was trudging toward the agreed rendezvous point when—
"Hey."
A large shadow burst out of the bushes, and her steps snagged to a halt.
Neon-bright orange hair that hurt to look at. Silver piercings studding a sneering pair of lips.
...Gu Minjae.
The moment she registered that face, Lisa stumbled backward on pure reflex.
"Where do you think you're running?"
"Ugh...!"
Gu Minjae seized her wrist and held up the black shoe clenched in his other hand.
"You know whose shoe this is, don't you?"
"I-I don't know..."
"Bullshit. I already found out everything. It's your friend's, isn't it?"
...Friend? Lisa froze.
Minjae let a smile curl at the corner of his mouth.
"You sat next to Seol Jihyo on the bus, didn't you? Birds of a feather sticking together, how cozy."
"...You're saying that shoe is Jihyo's?"
"What are you, an actress? Anyone with working eyes saw her board that bus barefoot."
His grip on her wrist tightened with a sickening crush.
"Ah—it hurts...!"
"I'm asking nicely. Whose. Shoe. Is it?"
In that instant, Lim Lisa understood.
Whether this shoe was Jihyo's or not didn't matter to him in the slightest. If she said yes here, then Gu Minjae would without a doubt go after Jihyo—
"Let's do well today, okay?"
Jihyo's face flashed through her mind, smiling that bright, warm smile.
"Hey! Answer me?!"
The scream lashed at her ears and Lisa's shoulders curled in on themselves.
"Fuck! It's Seol Jihyo's, isn't it? Huh?!"
"No—it's not!"
"What?"
"Jihyo said her shoes were stolen from her locker! So that one has to belong to someone else...!"
"This is your last—"
"L-Let go of me!"
SMACK!
Lisa wrenched her arm free of Minjae's grip.
I have to run.
Eyes squeezed shut, she stumbled backward in a hurry.
But—
"...Huh?"
The ground simply dropped away beneath her heel. Of all places, her foot had landed on the edge of a cliff. Not high enough to kill a person, but steep enough—more than steep enough.
"AAAH!"
Lim Lisa plummeted, screaming.
WHAM!
She hit the ground like a thrown rag doll, and a searing blaze of pain shot up from her ankle. As she lay clutching it and moaning, a snicker drifted down from the cliff's edge above.
"Idiot."