Taming Han Sua (5)
I had been thinking about Han Sua all wrong.
Lunch hour. Some restaurant thick with the sharp, spicy smell of kimchi stew. I'd ended up sharing a table with a pack of rough-looking middle-aged men, and while I nodded along at whatever they tossed my way, I turned the problem over in my head.
That confident stride? The air of someone used to ordering people around? The way she tried to play it easygoing, while a fussy selfishness still leaked through underneath?
Nearly everything in the file I'd put together was wrong.
There was no confident stride. Far from ordering anyone around, she shrank in on herself and could barely get a sentence out. Playing it easygoing? The half-lidded, drowsy eyes, the bare face, the sloppy ponytail—only the surface looked laid-back. The way she actually moved was pure shut-in.
And that faint fussiness and selfishness. Same story. When I'd gone back over the old interviews, I'd been sure I felt it. Now, nothing.
The Han Sua I'd just met was no different from Shut-in No. 1, the girl who couldn't hold a conversation with a man.
And yet, thinking about how plain her hero costume was—not a scrap of skin showing—it also felt like that really might be her nature. So one piece of the compiled intel was right after all. Then what the hell was going on?
"One drop of sweat in training is one drop of blood you won't shed later…."
"That's why it's a good thing a Healing-type Transcendent showed up. Back in our day there weren't even proper laws, so the schooling just turned Spartan on its own…."
Either something had happened to her while she was at the Academy, or Yozora was up to something strange at her side. Frustrating as it was, that was still all I could come up with.
Just as I was finishing the thought, the burly man beside me pounded my shoulder.
…That hurts like hell.
"You think so too, don't you, Mr. Woojin?!"
"Huh? Oh. Yeah."
"Ha! You weren't even listening!!"
"…Ahaha."
"We were sayin' they oughta bring back the old training system that got killed off. No matter what the big shots upstairs squawk about, we're fine with it. That's what we were sayin'."
"Right, right."
Nobody was even drinking. Why were they like this? Too much friendliness wears a person out. I didn't let it show, but that jagged, in-and-out closeness peculiar to middle-aged men desperate to stay young was wearing on me.
"Sparring. This shouldn't be a couple of kids tapping fists and calling it a day. Do it like the real thing. Like we used to. We've got Mr. Woojin here, haven't we?"
"How did you used to do it?"
"We went until one of 'em was about half dead. I mean, they're gonna be arresting villains later. You gotta go at least that far. Those bastards aren't gonna stick their hands out and say please take me in."
The gravel-voiced man pressed his wrists together and burst out laughing.
Even if they really did fight until someone was half dead and got hauled in afterward, I could put them back together inside of five minutes. That was about how long treatment used to take back when I was with the Company. Still, it wasn't a proposal I liked.
Whoever got carried in after a spar would be the weaker one. Lee Hayun, who still couldn't handle her own strength with any finesse, was one thing. Lee Jiyoon and Han Sua would smash their opponent to pieces and leave me with a mountain of extra work.
…No. Wait.
Thinking it through, maybe those two would end up in the infirmary fairly often after all. Say the other students weren't on their level, and Jiyoon and Sua had to spar each other. If that happened, I might be able to lock the infirmary door for a long while under the excuse of keeping the patients stable.
Put that way, it wasn't a proposal I disliked quite so much.
I set a piece of pork on a trembling, steaming cube of tofu from the stew, swallowed it with rice, then pretended to think it over while my eyes drifted across the table.
"It's fine. Of course, if someone gets hurt badly, treatment will take at least thirty minutes, but…."
"What's thirty minutes? It's not like we're talking four weeks in a cast, or twelve."
I'd mixed in a suitable lie, and that was enough. The slabs of muscle roared with laughter. No delicate giggles in the mix, but anyway.
I slipped out of the center of the conversation without incident, ate my share of the stew, and started building a new plan. Nothing grand.
Just this: if I was going to tame Han Sua, how exactly was I supposed to do it?
Easygoing. Confident. Prickly. I scribbled out the Han Sua I thought I knew and laid a new image over the top.
Easygoing only on the surface. Confident? Not even close. Just a shut-in. Whether she was prickly, I still couldn't say. What I could say, in the middle of all that, was that her whole body ran sensitive.
Hayun and Jiyoon were sisters, and their sweet spots sat in similar places. Mostly the mouth of the womb. Around there.
Yozora, whom I'd quietly checked before the regression, was ordinary itself. Nothing unusual about where she felt it. She'd kept calling herself a sadist anyway, so I hadn't cared to look any further, or get any closer.
But Han Sua, the one who'd come to the infirmary that morning—her entire body was an erogenous zone. A fetish, if you wanted to call it that. Even the places an ordinary person would find strange were sweet spots, every last one of them. A kiss and she came. Suck on her ear and she came. Squeeze her throat and she came. Even a light stroke over her ass was enough to make her come.
A complete pervert.
And yet, absurdly, there wasn't the slightest trace of her having touched herself with any real effort. As if, at her age, she barely understood what lewd even meant. As if she didn't know what masturbation was.
"……."
That was what made it a problem. Blackening her by force, the way I'd first planned—through threats—felt like a waste. That kind of corruption is only fun when the girl has some upright conviction to begin with. Training a lesbian lost in a one-sided crush until she becomes a bitch who knows nothing but cock. Training a girl who already has a lover until she comes happily, tacking I'm sorry onto her boyfriend's name again and again. That's when it works.
But a Han Sua like this—an untouched sheet of pure white paper—opened one more option. Wasn't this a chance to pour as much wrong sexual knowledge as I liked into someone that innocent?
There's a reason people say her ex's handiwork.
Because her ex taught her this was how you give head. Because her ex taught her that swallowing every drop afterward was only polite. Because thanks to her ex, she realized that ordinary, considerate sex felt worse than choking sex—a school-uniform tie cinched around her throat while he pounded her breathless. Because her ex told her a fully shaved pussy was prettier, so she assumed every man wanted the same.
A chance to stamp my tastes, one by one, into a woman's life. And not just any woman—a heroine who was certain to be famous someday.
"……."
Right. All of that was good. So how?
The two legs that had been strolling pleasantly through a dream came back down to the ground. At the entrance ceremony, and from how close she was with Yozora, she didn't seem shy of people in general. But the Han Sua who still struggled to talk to a man rose up in my mind.
Hmm. Then the first hurdle was getting close to her. What would it actually take for me to become her friend?
If she were a stray cat, I'd set out a churu or a can of tuna. What would work on Han Sua?
The method that came to mind first was to wait quietly until she got hurt, then let her get used to my face a little more every time she came to the infirmary, stacking affection the way those dime-a-dozen dating sims for nerds do. The problem was that I had no idea how many days that would eat. Something I couldn't control might crop up in the meantime. Some other man with his eye on her might snatch her up halfway through.
…In that case, there was nothing for it.
I couldn't lean on a fated meeting. I'd have to manufacture an inevitable one. However the process went, it only had to feel like fate.
Making friends. A failure.
Having thrown the whole day away, Han Sua walked the hall beside Yozora, who somehow looked in a far better mood than yesterday.
Class had mostly been easy. The kind that hurt her head and the kind that wore her body out—both the same. Maybe because it was the first day. She still couldn't tell. What she regretted more was simply that she'd never gotten a chance to make a friend. She'd thought of breaking the ice with her cute lion ears and tail, so much like a cat's, but of course they were all boys. Keeping them out where those boys could see felt a little embarrassing.
Ha.
Han Sua let out a small sigh, and a grinning face popped in front of her.
"Whyyy? Did something happen?"
"Ah, it's nothing. I'm just a little tired."
It wasn't nothing. She hadn't enrolled because she wanted to be a hero, the way the other students around her had. Still, she answered without letting it show, and smiled back at Yozora.
"Now that I think about it, you're pretty strong too, Yozora. You didn't really stand out on the practical exam."
"Well… I only had to pass, right? Ahaha…."
Yozora brushed it off, smiled warmly again, and took the lead down the hall.
The thought had been nagging at her today: sometimes Yozora's pronunciation turned announcer-precise. She'd heard somewhere that when foreigners learn a language, the one thing they pronounce perfectly is swear words, but she'd never heard of accuracy showing up only in certain situations. Well. It probably just meant she was studying hard. It was a shame to watch the cute accent fade, but Sua could cheer her on.
Taking it in good faith, Han Sua left the Academy with her.
Snow that hadn't finished melting glittered softly along the roadside in the sun. A short while later the two of them reached the crosswalk where Sua ran into Yozora every morning.
They'd part here, she'd go home, and… maybe she'd look at just one of the things Yozora had recommended. It was dirty, so it was hard to look at, but the material itself wasn't bad. A little taste wouldn't hurt. The 19+ part at the end—she could skim it and pretend she'd read it.
She was standing in front of the light, thinking that, when a buzz shivered the air. It came from Yozora's side. Sua turned her head a fraction and found Yozora already yanking her phone out, staring at something with fierce concentration. Just a feeling, but it looked as if she'd been waiting desperately for exactly that.
What was it? Oh—a lottery win? Did those come by text? Even if it wasn't that, the way the corners of Yozora's mouth kept climbing said something good had happened. Should she congratulate her? Or pretend she hadn't noticed, and congratulate her once Yozora let it show?
Han Sua was still turning over every romance manga she'd ever read, trying to decide what a normal friend would do, when the crosswalk clicked over to green and a voice cut in.
"Hey!"
"Hm?"
"Wanna go to a bookstore together? To buy man— manga?"
"…Manga?"
"Yeah. Manga! I wanna try reading what Sua-chan reads!"
Yozora said it like she might start bouncing. Sua, watching her, hesitated at the thought of a bookstore with a friend. Honestly, it was a little embarrassing. But… it was fine, wasn't it? Just the two of them, both girls. Their hobbies were similar anyway. If she went home now, all she'd do was roll around on the bed, shifting position every time the second hand moved.
"Okay. Let's do that. I've just never actually bought a book myself…."
"Then I'll see if there's one nearby! Hang on…."
The moment Yozora started tapping at her Japanese-language phone, a notification appeared at the very top of the screen. Sua knew peeking into someone else's private life wasn't a good hobby, but curiosity was curiosity. Her eyes slid that way before she could stop them.
Yozora swiped the notification aside, so she never saw what it said. She was sure, though, that it had read Master.
Well. She liked dirty manga. That was probably all it was.