Doing Bad Things (6)
Nothing in particular was different from usual.
CZ cleared the lane with vicious aim, Jiyoon_0420 held the tempo while looking after the newbie, and seowoojin123 used his skills exactly as he was told. The same picture as every other day. Only the sound coming through the headset had changed, just a little.
"Jiyoon."
"What."
"Tomorrow too? That thing?"
"...Later. Someone else is here."
A secret had formed between the two of them.
About three minutes after I'd shut the computer off.
Bzzzt. Lee Jiyoon's name lit up on the vibrating screen.
So it was Friday already. What a long week.
I'd have to stop by the academy on Saturday anyway, because of Hayun... but anyway. Next week, at last, school would start. I gulped down water with a sweet little thrill of anticipation and sent a reply.
So many excuses. She talked like that when it was just what she wanted.
Tomorrow, just in case, I ought to bring condoms. And more than that, school was starting soon...
After firing off that half-hearted reply, I sat on the edge of the bed and looked over the calendar. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And Friday, the twenty-eighth of February, jabbed itself at the edge of my sight.
I'd regressed on Wednesday the nineteenth, so a little more than a week had passed. Thinking it over, it also seemed like not much had happened at all. Then again, I'd managed to get my hands on three of them in all, heroes and villains both, so it also seemed like a great deal had happened...
"......"
...Hm.
I set the calendar down, flopped back onto the bed, and stared blankly up at the ceiling.
These days I'd accepted the regression and was living happily enough for the sake of my own lust, but sometimes, right before sleep came on like this, a curiosity would stir about why a thing like this had happened only to me. It was strange, after all. There was no known record of a time-related Transcendent, so why had I alone come back ten years, with no proper reason to point to.
The most plausible guess I could scrape together was that maybe my healing had included something that sent me back to the past right before I died. Something like that. Who knows. I couldn't prove it by dying again. Nothing but a vague guess.
"I should just sleep..."
I wasn't exactly bright, and no amount of hard thinking seemed likely to spit out a clean answer. I packed the cluttered thoughts down into a corner of my brain and killed the light before they could bob back up like stuffing from a doll.
And so, instead of the reason for the regression, I was hazily turning over the Miren heroes I'd wanted to fuck, when—
Bzzzt. The phone I'd left by my pillow vibrated again.
It was Yozora.
Yozora, who'd apparently spent the last few days quietly digging into my past. For a moment I pictured her dragging that past up and trying to blackmail me.
I pulled the fluffy blanket up to my chin and looked at the chat without much worry. She was only needling me because she wanted me to rape her anyway. She might make a show of leaking secrets to the people around me, but she wouldn't go blabbing far enough that I'd actually throw her away. If I just picked a day and fucked her rough, the way she liked, she'd probably be satisfied and go quiet.
Thinking I might have misread it, I rubbed my eyes and looked at the phone again. We'd meet soon—in context, that had to be about the academy.
Yozora even answered with certainty, driving the point home. What on earth was this.
I let out a small groan and stared at the screen. Among the larger villain alliances, planting people in academies to gather information was common enough that villains running into each other there wasn't all that strange.
But.
Even setting aside the question of The Company's size, the window for getting in through normal channels had long since closed. And she couldn't come in as a teacher. Yozora had no career as a hero.
Which left only one way for her to enter the academy.
Intrusion.
Just the one.
I didn't think that was it, though. It would be plain suicide.
Because they hated the world that had thrown them away. Because the hypocrisy of heroes made them sick. Villain entrance—because it was fucking badass. Even Most Wanted, those absolute psycho bastards gathered for reasons as different as those, had never once stormed an academy swarming with heroes. It meant they could tell shit from piss. The bare minimum.
And Yozora, a cut below people like that?
"Hmm..."
Enroll as a student. Get hired as a teacher. Crazy bitch, make your entrance!
If it wasn't that, then how did she mean to get into the academy...
While I ground away at that rock I called a brain, the phone screen nudged upward, tick by tick.
Whatever the method, this was the point. At least this much was easy to understand. It meant, one way or another, please fuck me as much as you want.
For now I answered that I got it, and asked what I'd been curious about.
And Yozora, still slow at typing in Korean, answered at a crawl.
From the tips of her fingers.
Utterly out of nowhere.
A name I knew well had jumped out.
A Friday morning that felt, somehow, different from usual.
Buried deep in her blankets, Lee Jiyoon slowly lifted her eyelids to the sunlight slipping in through the curtains. Come Friday, she was always busy gaming through the night until she crashed. How long had it been since she'd slept properly and woken on her own like this? She had started counting on her fingers—one, two—when she stretched with a long groan and got up. The smell of spicy kimchi stew was drifting in through the crack of the door.
"Hm? You eating?"
The moment the door clicked open, her sister's voice came from the kitchen. It was a kitchen in name only, hardly more than an extension of the living room, so Lee Hayun stood all of four steps ahead of her.
Which meant she could stare, blankly, at that long ponytail.
...I tied my hair up like that yesterday, too.
With Seo Woojin.
In Unni's room.
Pretending to be Unni.
...Mm.
"I-I should eat. Breakfast..."
"Think there's any rice left? I didn't make much yesterday, so if I set some aside for a lunchbox it might come up short."
"Don't we have instant rice?"
"If we don't, we eat instant rice. What else."
She was starting to understand why criminals returned to the scene of the crime.
The drool she'd dripped all over Unni's bed yesterday, sucking his cock like her life depended on it—would the smell still be there? She'd moved every wad of cum-soaked tissue out of Unni's trash, but what if the smell lingered anyway? She'd messed the room back up the way she remembered it, but what if Unni had noticed something off? She'd run the vacuum hard and flushed every suspicious scrap that came out of it down the toilet, but what if something she hadn't managed to clear was still sitting there? Right now she was losing her mind, wanting to slip into that room and check.
Lee Jiyoon spoke while quietly opening the rice cooker.
"...There's only exactly one bowl. Where'd I put the instant rice?"
"The shelf I'm poking with my toe."
"...Th-that's gross, so move it."
"What are you on about. I'm wearing socks. What's gross."
"It's gross anyway..."
"You just crawled out of bed. You're dirtier than I am. Hurry up and stick it in the microwave."
Scattering the sweet smell of shampoo, Lee Hayun tapped a few light kicks against Lee Jiyoon's shin. Jiyoon took them without a word and let out a sigh of relief on the inside. A reaction no different from usual—she probably hadn't been caught. If she had, this conversation would have been stiff and awkward clear through, instead of this.
She crouched beside her sister and took a pack of instant rice from the shelf under the gas range. Into the microwave, two minutes.
"......"
"......"
Between the whirr of the microwave and the bubble of the stew, Lee Jiyoon hid the sound of her own heart.
...She was only feeling it keenly now, but she was glad she hadn't run into Unni yesterday. Even a full day later, just the sight of her sister's hair was enough to set her ears burning. If she'd seen her yesterday...
Aaaagh...
"Oh, that reminds me..."
"Hik...!"
"...? What? Jiyoon?"
"N-no, uh, um, it's nothing..."
"Anyway. I looked last night and one of my pairs of pants was missing. Must've ended up in your closet."
"...Pants?"
Thump. She clutched her sinking heart and swallowed, over and over.
"Dolphin shorts. The black ones. Everything you wear is gray, isn't it?"
"Ah, aah. Those were in my closet the other day, so I just wore them for a bit and tossed them in the wash."
"Yeah? Back in high school you said you'd rather die than share clothes with me..."
"......"
"Well, the black dolphin shorts are prettier, though. Right?"
"I-I don't know..."
"If they weren't pretty, you wouldn't have worn them for even a second. You'd have thrown them on my bed and left."
"......"
Had that been natural?
Had it been awkward?
Mouth clamped shut, Lee Jiyoon stole a glance at her sister's back and pressed a hand to her chest. Hayun's reaction was calm enough that it seemed she'd gotten past it, for now. But it was the first lie this large in all her twenty years, and the tips of her fingers trembled. The lies she'd managed until now were nothing—I only gamed for two hours today—that was the size of them.
...How was she even supposed to say it.
That she'd given her sister's boyfriend a blowjob.
That she'd gone and done thigh-sex, too.
"You want to buy a pair too?"
"No. ...I'd mix them up when I'm hanging laundry."
Ding. The microwave chimed, time up. At the same moment, a small vibration sounded from inside Lee Jiyoon's room. She glanced back. Her sister, busy with the stew, seemed not to have heard.
Scratching at her tangled head, Lee Jiyoon went back to her room and pulled the phone off the charger.
And then, just like that.
Her cheeks flushed bright red.
"......"
A reply starting with shit. One starting with are you insane. One starting with does that even make sense. One starting with bullshit. One starting with did you notice. Every last one of them scratched in and erased.
Lee Jiyoon glanced, just for a moment, toward her sister in the kitchen.
She sent it off like that, then let her eyes drop to the trash can in her room.
The tissues she'd used yesterday, wiping up Seo Woojin's cum. She needed to tie them up and throw them out—quickly, before she was caught.