Words of Love (2)
I couldn't catch my breath.
Muscles that hadn't even finished filling out were begging me to put them out of their misery. My back, stuck fast to the ground, was soaked through with a clammy damp.
First-year mock training. I was sure I'd heard the teacher say, flat as anything before we started, that we'd just be beating up scarecrows. If that counted as a scarecrow, then what did that make me? Space junk, face-down in the dirt, losing to a scarecrow?
Still gasping, I shoved myself upright, sweat-soaked gym clothes flapping. The iron sword I'd chosen because I was an Evolution Type Transcendent had already gone dull and notched. At this rate nothing I did would amount to anything. I had to show some kind of result and pull a decent grade.
…Or so I told myself. Up ahead, Han Sua was toying with a scarecrow all by herself, like it was a plaything.
"…Is that thing even human?"
"No idea."
I tossed the answer to Space Junk No. 2, who happened to be sprawled beside me, and followed the lion tail swaying in the distance with my eyes.
Mutation Type Transcendents are generally strong. No—calling them strong doesn't cover it. They crumple rebar. They throw around a strength that sits clean outside common sense. Of course, even among Mutation Types there are people who look no different from anyone else most of the time, but the closer they are to a beast of prey, the more monstrous they get. And the base of the girl standing perfectly intact up there, all on her own, was a lion. The same base as Predator, the hero who represents Britain.
The result was simple. The scarecrow we'd been told to face as a team—no, a thirteen-foot lump of iron spewing a terrifying glare—Han Sua had taken on by herself, and in the end she'd actually made the thing stop working.
…Well. That would be why she came in second on the entrance scores, right behind the Magic-type, Lee Jiyoon.
A look that was half awe and half a strange inferiority settled on her. Evolution Types grow stronger in honest proportion to how hard they train, but every so often, watching a Mutation Type who was simply born that powerful, a petty resentment crept in. Come to think of it, Han Sua had a diamond spoon in her mouth on top of all that, which made it sting a little more.
I was scratching my head for no good reason when the scarecrow was finished, the objective met, and Han Sua came over, putting away the cute lion ears and tail that had popped out. Those half-lidded, characteristically indifferent eyes of hers turned toward the rest of us space junk.
And then—
"……G-good work."
What came out of her was unexpected. Extremely unexpected. My head tilted.
Good work? Me? Or him? We'd just been lying here watching. Ah. Was she needling us for sprawling around and resting while she did all the work?
"Nah. You did all of it, Sua."
"Y-yeah…. That's right…."
"……."
So what if it pissed me off. She really had done all of it. We laughed—hahaha—awkward as anything, and turned the words back on her. What came back was the fine line of Han Sua's brow, creased just a little deeper than before.
Did she think we were such morons we couldn't even tell she was being sarcastic?
I racked my brain as hard as I could, but before long the whole effort turned out to be pointless. Yozora, done with training, had come this way with a bright smile and taken Han Sua away with her.
Another day, wasted.
Failed to make a new friend. Girl or guy. I let out a sigh as the dismissal bell came through the school speakers.
Why was this so hard? In manga, people became friends in no time without any real effort. How did they even do it? Sit next to someone and you're friends. Take a class together and you're friends. Wasn't that just a manga convenience that didn't exist in real life?
It wasn't as if I was asking for much. I'd never even thought about getting along with every student in the academy. I only wanted to be friendly, more or less, with everyone in first-year Class A. But this hopeless lack of people skills wouldn't even allow that.
A little kinder. A little gentler. A little warmer. All three carried a similar nuance, and I could understand that nuance in my head, and I'd even tried to act on it—and all that came back was failure.
Honestly, I could set the boys aside. I was still awkward with them myself. What was even more ridiculous was the girls. Sometimes I managed to talk to them somehow, but it felt as if they were so preoccupied with something that they couldn't get out what they actually wanted to say. At least the reason for that was obvious, which was a relief.
My people skills were a problem, and a face that looked cold was probably part of it too, but just as much of a problem was the name Han Sua itself. More precisely, the name sitting behind me: Hansol Group. Even if the class system was gone, this was a world where money was status. I tried my best not to say anything in that direction, but people couldn't help being conscious of it.
"……."
…But still. Today, somehow, everyone seemed to find me even harder to approach than usual. Was it just my imagination? At this rate Father really might start treating me like livestock that did nothing but waste food. I couldn't even manage studying, and they'd said that was the easy part. I couldn't make friends. I was just nibbling away at the group's image, bit by bit.
"The infirmary? Why?"
The question came from Yozora, who had no idea what was going on in my head—busy laughing and chattering with a different friend every time I looked. For a few days she'd only hung around with me, but today, whenever she had a free moment, she was running all over the place, adding friends. If this really seemed impossible, getting a special lecture on friend-making from Yozora might not be a bad idea. I'd file that away.
"…Ah, I just have something to talk about with the teacher for a bit."
"Oh, I see…."
It was the obvious thing to say, but I didn't tell her all of it straight. Even if Yozora was my only friend right now, how was I supposed to honestly say I was going to learn from the teacher how to talk to guys? Fortunately she just nodded without comment. She was only studying the phone in her hand. A vibration now and then, and from the way the corners of her mouth kept twitching upward, she was probably texting the health teacher.
…The more I looked, the stranger it was. When I'd seen the teacher briefly at the bookstore, and when he'd given his first greeting from the podium in the auditorium, and even when I'd been ready to threaten him on the spot with what I'd witnessed yesterday if he rubbed me the wrong way, and he'd answered in that gentle voice—then let's be friends from now on—if I only thought of the sides of him I'd seen so far, he seemed like an incredibly kind person. So how had Yozora and the teacher ended up in that kind of relationship?
Social media? Was that how they'd met, after all? Well, manga did sometimes use the whole secret-account thing as a plot. Bright and cute like this on the outside, but inside she must have had a lot of dirty thoughts. The teacher looked kind on the outside too, but the inside was apparently something else. I hadn't seen him that way. So he was the underhanded type. Mm-hm. Well, that was what social life was. These days everyone kept a mask or two. Nothing strange about it. As long as they didn't do anything weird in front of me, it was fine. Everyone thought that way.
I was rudely imagining what kind of person Yozora might be on the internet—lewd selfies and the like—when one small question rose up in a soft puff.
Yozora. Right before she'd told me we should go to the bookstore, hadn't she been texting Master—that is, the health teacher? But at the bookstore she'd acted so glad to see him, as if they'd run into each other by chance….
"……."
…Ah. It must have been because I was there. Right. If it had been just the two of them, they wouldn't have bothered with an act like that. They'd have gone straight to a motel, or to the bathroom, like yesterday. And then just s— …s— …….
…Anyway! Question solved!
Head clear, I parted from Yozora—who was smiling with her eyes—and headed for the infirmary.
"…Right. Since you're treating, I'll go with you…."
There was already someone there. A girl with a snow-white bob I felt I'd seen somewhere, her uniform buried under a khaki jumper. The entrance exam, the new students' oath, and she'd looked exactly the same ever since, so I knew her the moment I saw her. The one who only slept in the seat behind me. Lee Jiyoon.
"……."
"……."
"……."
Had she gotten hurt in class? Could a Magic-type even get hurt? Why had she come to the infirmary? The thought only lasted as long as it took me to gnaw on my tail. Because I'd opened the door and walked in without knocking, the teacher's gaze and Lee Jiyoon's landed on me at the same time. Not one person's eyes. Two.
…My breath. I felt like my breath was going to stop.
Three seconds of fiddling with my bag strap while I read the room for no reason. I raised the white flag at once, with no will to resist, lowered my eyes just enough to see the tips of their shoes, and spoke.
"…H-hello…."
Maybe it was the tension. I'd just been talking with Yozora, and still my throat had gone badly hoarse. If it had only been in front of the teacher, maybe—but Lee Jiyoon was there too, someone I wasn't even close with, and my cheeks burned hot. They said first impressions mattered most when you were making friends. Getting close to her was a lost cause. Yeah. I'd liked her—pretty, even though she always wore that bored, sullen face, the way Yozora's smile was so charming. Now that it had come to this, I should probably just give up.
"Could you wait a moment? There's a student who got here first."
"…Y-yes…."
Unlike me, on the verge of breaking down just because one more person had shown up, the health teacher spoke in his usual, extremely gentle tone. How did he even do that? My voice was shaking and everything. Unfortunately there was no time to ask him the secret. I moved my creaking limbs toward the bed beside me.
The softness against my hips felt pretty good. To exaggerate a little, it didn't seem like a bed that belonged in an infirmary so much as one from someone's house. He must have spent a lot of money on it. That idle thought was just about finished, my hips still planted there, when Lee Jiyoon—who'd been getting treated without a word—shook out her wrist and left the infirmary. Without so much as a glance my way. Step. Step.
She was gone, and at last it was just me and the teacher. I'd been quietly reading the room; afraid of being a bother, I approached him carefully, softly.
"Hello…."
"Yeah. Hey."
And then I stopped where I was, because of how easily his voice came out. Yeah? Hey? That was to me, right?
"…Uh, um…. That…."
"You're the one who said we should drop the formal speech."
"…You said it was still uncomfortable to speak casually with me…."
"It's still uncomfortable. I'm forcing myself to switch."
Only then did I notice the awkward smile at the corner of his mouth. I didn't get many chances to read people's expressions, so I was late catching it.
"If you don't like it, should I go back to being polite? That's easier for me."
"No! No…, …I mean, …um. Like this is fine too…."
"Yeah?"
But that only lasted a moment. On the health—on Seo Woojin's mouth, a gentle smile was already hanging. The kind that put the person looking at it at ease. A soft smile that didn't suit Yozora's Master at all.
To think a person like this had done that sort of thing with a woman in a building bathroom. I knew it was a very strange thought to be having now, but the very idea of him doing something that would draw public scorn was incredibly hard to swallow. A pure white coat. An upright young man. First or second, it was exactly the impression my parents' generation would like. And he was fairly handsome, too.
"So how should I help with the conversation practice? A role-play?"
"……Y-yeah. A role-play. That sounds good…."
When I nodded like a bobblehead dog, my voice gone limp, he smiled and copied me. Seeing it like that, it was a little embarrassing. From now on I'd nod in moderation. Already learned one thing.
Then, right after, words that were very, very, very suspicious reached me.
"Then we'll do it that way…. For now, shall we step out of here?"
"O-out?"
"If another student catches us role-playing, it'd be embarrassing. For you. For me."
"……Ah."
"Want to go to my place? Compared to your house, Sua, it'll be a bit cramp—"
"…W-wait."
Of course, a moment ago I'd said that imagining him doing bad things was hard to bear. That was all it was: hard to bear. It didn't mean I trusted Seo Woojin completely. To begin with, there was ironclad proof that he'd come out of a bathroom with a woman. That kindness was a mask. Under it, something sly—a snake in the grass? Was that the phrase? Anyway, a mask hiding something like that. There had to be a reason Yozora called him by that strange title. So I had no intention of trotting after him, ignorant of the world, into a dangerous place where the two of us would be alone.
Of course my strength was greater, so he couldn't just try something reckless—but there was no need to do something risky on purpose, was there? What men liked. And how it was good to talk to them. Best to take just those two things from him and keep the relationship at a suitable distance.
So.
"…If we're going, my house."
"…Your house?"
"……."
"Sure. Why not."
Our house, where the housekeeper looked after things, was one matter. Seo Woojin's house—where, just like in those dirty manga Yozora had recommended, the ones I'd looked at yesterday, we would clearly end up alone together—was absolutely, absolutely not.
I felt a little safer now. Whew.
I said it firmly and stood up from my seat.
Ah. It took a full twenty more minutes before I realized that I had just invited a man into my house for the first time in my life.