14. Taming Han Sua (2)
By the time I drifted back to myself, the day was already running out.
The flood of students that had poured through like a tide was hours in the past now. It might have been only today, but it seemed there was no training harsh enough to get anyone hurt in the stretch right before dismissal.
I was resting on the plush bed instead of a chair, and with my heavy eyelids lifted only halfway, I let out a sigh.
Being stuck among kids drained the life out of you. I hadn't felt a thing like it back when Lee Hayun and Lee Jiyoon were the only ones I had to deal with.
“Teacher, what high school did you go to?”
“Teacher, how much do you make?”
“Teacher, why are you wearing a school uniform? What's a Health Committee Member?”
“Teacher, what if—hypothetically—you got hurt somewhere embarrassing?”
“Teacher, is your MBTI a T?”
“Teacher, Teacher....”
The questions themselves were limited in variety, sure. But one patient would drag along one or two perfectly healthy friends, and they'd come in little clusters asking the same things, and it was enough to drive a man neurotic.
On top of that, most of the people who came to the infirmary today were second- and third-years. Which meant, absurdly enough, that girls who were only twenty-one or twenty-two used polite speech with me and still tried to play the older sister.
None of them went as far as Lee Hayun, of course, who had tried to feed me side dishes with her own hand. It was more that I could feel it in the way they moved—quietly taking me for a little brother....
Well. Anyway.
If they'd at least been pretty, I might have played along and spent the time working out how to get them flat on that bed. Unfortunately, the girls making noise in the infirmary were, as far as my memory went, B-rank or C-rank heroes at best, and every last one of them had the ordinary face you see on any street. I had yet to meet even an A-rank prospect, never mind a woman on the level of Lee Jiyoon or Han Sua.
...Ah.
If I forced one in, there was Baek Seoyeon. Unfortunately, that woman was on the villain side. Better to keep as far from Baek Seoyeon as I could than get tangled up with her for nothing. The same way I'd treated Yozora, before I caught on to what she actually liked.
Live like that until around the time Yozora threw Han Sua away, then quietly pick Han Sua up and raise her to my taste. She won't want to be abandoned by a friend again, so she'd better listen to Seo Woojin.... That kind of feeling.
On the other hand, I also wanted to trample Han Sua's mind myself and break her in by hand. How.... Was there a way? Find something to hold over her. That sort of thing.
I hadn't gotten anything useful before the regression, but Yozora—busy right now with plans to break Han Sua—might know something. Later, when I had the time, if I played the man of Yozora's tastes to perfection and then let an interest in Han Sua show, she might drop something useful while pretending it was a slip of the tongue.
I had my eyelids comfortably lowered, turning it over without even realizing it, when—
“...?”
Tok.
A light sound rang off my forehead. I forced my eyes open, and what met them, thanks to the bend of her waist, was a nicely sized pair of breasts pulled downward.
And a jet-black ponytail spilling past her cheek.
“...Ah. Hayun-noona.”
“Why are you sleeping? I came to get treated.”
I'd named her before I even saw her face. Lee Hayun, who had been breathing out a long haaah and lining up a flick to my forehead, smiled playfully and slipped her hands into her pockets.
A ponytail. Not a particularly unusual style, but after a few days of looking at it I'd grown so used to that length that I could tell who it was the moment it came into view.
...This was actually kind of perverted.
Even so, Lee Hayun was grinning, so she seemed pleased I'd recognized her. Or maybe she just liked being alone with me. Or maybe she just liked to smile. I couldn't tell.
“I wasn't sleeping. I was lying down.”
“I miss that.... I was like that every day in high school, too....”
“It's not an excuse....”
“You didn't even hear me knock, and you didn't hear me open the door, did you?”
“......”
Did I actually doze off for a second?
I looked away for a moment in embarrassment, and with a light hup the bed gave a small bounce. She must have just washed—the body wash drifting off her was quite fresh, and the shampoo mixed through it was the same. Identical to the scent that had clung to my hair a few days ago, after I'd had so much sex with Lee Jiyoon.
So the house and the academy used the same toiletries. It wasn't useful, so I forgot it at once, smoothing the white coat that had wrinkled from lying down and getting off the bed. If another student caught me lying there with Lee Hayun, I'd be exhausted for days, and I was already tired. I had no wish to pile on more stress.
“...Anyway, where are you hurt? You look fine on the outside.”
“I'm not hurt.... There's something I wanna show you?”
“Something you want to show me?”
Instead of answering, Lee Hayun busied herself with her phone. Before long she held it out, as if telling me to take a look.
What did she want to show me? I took the phone without much interest, and a screen that looked like a chat room settled at the edge of my sight. There was none of the short, blunt talk of the dreary men from my days with the Company, so it was probably a chat full of girls.
Should I call it eerie?
Should I say there were far too many crying faces?
Should I say there was a lot of one-character spam?
Should I say it felt like pointless, cringey gushing?
Looking at a girls' group chat for the first time in my life, I slowly scrolled up the screen.
And I saw it.
A photo of me, taken on the sly by the look of it, planted square in the middle of the chat.
“......”
So every looks-review I'd seen while scrolling was....
“......”
Lines like he's fucking handsome were surely just them teasing someone on purpose. Strip out the excessive glazing and the bullshit, and a short summary came to this.
...Well....
A lot of them said I looked better than they'd expected.
I was scrunching my face at the embarrassing verdict when Lee Hayun, busy watching me from the bed, burst out in a bright laugh.
“Woojin. Feel good, getting a nice review from the noonas?”
“No. Not really.”
“Oh, come on, you liked it. The corner of your mouth is twitching.”
“It wasn't twitching.”
“Just admit it. You want to beat noona that badly?”
“......”
In the end her finger jabbed right into the corner of my mouth, the one I'd been forcing down. She tugged it lightly upward, then smiled first—a pretty, dopey smile. I tapped her wrist and told her to quit, but she didn't budge, so I gave up and let her have it, and she asked me just like that.
“You free after this?”
“I've got plenty of time. Why?”
“These days, every time Jiyoon eats she keeps telling me to go on a date with you, so I thought I'd try once before my shift.”
“...Ah.”
“Thinking about it, I don't think we've ever had a proper date.... It seemed fine.”
“......”
So she'd been quietly putting ideas in her own sister's head. The reason was obvious. The better things got between me and Lee Hayun, the more garbage those secret meetings, excused as “practice,” would become.
She seemed to be cosplaying a normal person as hard as she could, but seen this way, Lee Jiyoon was a crazier bitch than Yozora—and that one was soaked through with drink.
“I think taking a picture and sending it would do it. What do you think?”
“What about your shift, noona?”
“If I say I'll be a little late, the boss'll let it slide!”
“......”
Casually putting her work off on the boss, Lee Hayun dropped into the chair in front of me. Finally free of the forced smile, I fiddled with the corner of my mouth and nodded.
“Shall we go to a karaoke place, then?”
“Oh. Karaoke? Now that you mention it, it has been a while....”
For Lee Jiyoon, who had already betrayed her sister a fair amount and fallen—what kind of photo would be good to send. The framing. The situation.
The match was over. Lee Jiyoon hooked the headset around her neck, sighed hard, and slid inch by inch down beneath the chair.
Maybe because she'd been playing other games so much lately, her skill had rusted clean off.
An FPS, by sacred law, was never to be left alone more than two days....
There was only one way to bring it back.
Face-plant into the dirt.
Lee Jiyoon heaved another sigh and queued again. The window outside was already dyed red, which meant she'd been doing nothing but losing for close to six hours.... The points she'd lost now, she could get them back someday......
Bzzzt.
“...?”
Far off, the phone plugged into the charger beside the bed vibrated once. Who was it. A game ad? She'd turned all of those off. Or maybe something like the academy group chat—the kind she'd been invited to at the start of every year, middle school and high school alike, and muted on the spot. Better to kill it before more alerts rang and got on her nerves.
Having settled that, Lee Jiyoon rolled her chair over to the bed.
And then—
“......”
A photo, out of nowhere? That was the first thought. He'd texted her first plenty of times, but he had never once sent a photo. Same for emoticons. What would Seo Woojin suddenly have reason to send? Had he meant it for her sister and hit the wrong name?
“Mmm....”
She didn't know what it was, but she was curious. He hadn't screwed up and sent a dick pic meant to show off for her sister, had he? Hayun, Jiyoon—one syllable apart? That would be the worst of the worst. ...No. Her sister had a rape kink, so maybe she'd actually like it?
While Lee Jiyoon let her imagination take off from a single line in the notification, the phone vibrated once more.
“Hm?”
Above the line that had read Sent a photo, the same sentence from her sister stacked up like blocks.
At that strange sight she'd never seen before, still spinning every kind of fantasy, Lee Jiyoon checked the photo her sister had sent first.
“...What.”
But contrary to her worries, it was nothing. Just a photo of Seo Woojin with her sister at Coin Karaoke.
The one thing that snagged was the karaoke she'd gone to with Seo Woojin last time. And of all the rooms, the one the two of them had taken together. Her sister, sitting there with him.
“......”
Seo Woojin had probably chosen that room on purpose. She wasn't naive enough to call it chance. ...And why he'd gone out of his way to pick that room—she could roughly guess that, too.
On the message her sister sent next, she left a reply with no effort in it at all.
She backed straight out of the chat and stared holes through the red 1 beside Seo Woojin's name. Every kind of ugly imagining trailed after the next in a long line. Unlike her sister, who had sent an ordinary shot of herself holding a mic, it might be a photo of Seo Woojin somewhere, buried in sloppy sex with her sister. Or maybe a shot of her sister's face while she was diligently sucking him off.
So she just shouldn't look.
If she didn't look, the conversations with her sister still ahead wouldn't turn awkward, and all of it would end as nothing but her own filthy delusion. Her head thought so.
Her finger, it seemed, did not.
“...Huh.”
The photo she came face to face with, the one Seo Woojin had sent, was also nothing special. Like the one her sister had sent, nothing but a picture of the two of them alone in the karaoke room. She'd searched in case a condom was hidden in some corner of the frame, but there was nothing of the kind.
“...Then why'd he even send a photo.”
Doing well with her sister, the way she'd taught him.... A proof shot? He must have sent it with some meaning like that. The same way her sister had sent hers just now, a little puffed up. How deflating.
Hnnng—she sighed through her nose and looked at the photo on her phone again. Into the chat with Seo Woojin that she was staring at, a file a little over two minutes long popped in with a soft tick.
“......”
She hit save and cranked the volume as high as it would go. A match had popped without her noticing, so she quit the game, yanked the charger out of the way, and dropped onto the bed. Phone at her ear, she pressed play.
“...?”
But contrary to what she'd expected, all that poured from the speaker was a karaoke backing track, with a faint crackle of static mixed in. That was all. The melody line that surfaced now and then was somehow familiar.... The recording had started midway, so she couldn't tell what song it was. Was it the one that had been on when she and Seo Woojin went to karaoke last time? She tried humming it, just to test, and it seemed roughly right.
...So. Why had he sent this?
Lee Jiyoon's question wasn't answered until the file was nearly over.
“Fwaah.... ha....”
“Woojin, wai— ...mmph....”
“Chu....”
“......”
Two minutes of quiet.
Her sister's voice, only for a moment.
Then silence again.
It was nothing special.
Just the sound of her sister kissing her boyfriend.
It was nothing special.
Really.
It was nothing special.