Class Rivalry Match (5)
Bright sunlight poured across a crisp, refreshing morning. The air buzzed with the kind of noisy chatter that belonged to a festival, and the smell of street food drifted past every nose.
The students of Class 1-3 were all talking and laughing, swept up in a festive atmosphere they were tasting for the very first time.
All of them, except one.
A girl with a short black crop and a fierce, intimidating face. Cheonghwa sat perched on her desk in silence, cut off from the warm camaraderie filling the room — as if she were an island unto herself. Every classmate carried on their conversations as though she simply were not there.
Damn it.
It had always been like this. Between her savage looks and the ability that had once lashed out at anyone nearby, her classmates had learned to ignore her as a matter of course. Not out of kindness. Not out of cruelty. Just indifference.
No matter how many times she sat with that hollow emptiness in the middle of all that brightness, she never got used to it.
She slumped forward, folding her arms into a pillow and burying her face. Her shoulders came up to cover her ears. The noise dropped a little. Her vision went dark.
In the old days she would have used that darkness to scrub every thought from her head and force herself toward sleep. Not anymore.
Jeong Jojun, with those gentle, sharp eyes. Sometimes she smiled, just a little, thinking of him. Sometimes she ran back through the techniques he had taught her, drilling them in her head. He was the one man who filled that hollow emptiness of hers. Cheonghwa let the time pass that way, holding him in her mind.
A sliding door rattled open, and a long, striding set of footsteps came in with it. The new homeroom teacher.
Cheonghwa's head snapped up. The teacher was already fishing out a staff notebook and flipping it open.
"You all know today's the inter-class battle, right?"
"Yes!!"
The whole room answered in a rush of excitement.
"Good, good. It's just an exhibition match anyway, so don't go killing yourselves over it."
The teacher pulled a folded sheet from the notebook, thunked it against the blackboard, and pinned it there with a round magnet.
"Alright, kids. I agonized over this formation right up through yesterday, but it's locked in now. This is what we're running today."
The teacher checked that the paper was secure, turned back to the class, and grinned.
"Go have fun, then. I'll see you this afternoon."
"Yeeees!!!"
The moment the teacher left, the class surged out of their seats and crowded the blackboard to read the paper.
Cheonghwa swallowed and drifted toward them, slipping into the press of bodies.
A damage dealer mattered more the closer they sat to the heart of the formation. Most of the front line would cluster specifically to protect the center of the middle rank, after all.
No way it's me.
She told herself that, wearing a bitter little smile, and wriggled through her classmates until she could see the sheet. Her eyes started at the outer edge of the middle rank and worked inward.
Ah!
There it was. Her name. Third from the center among the fifteen stationed in the middle rank.
Which meant the homeroom teacher was treating her as a core DPS.
Yesterday the teacher had pulled her aside and asked to see her ability. That hadn't been idle curiosity. The teacher had rated her power highly. A smile rose on her face before she could stop it. Being recognized felt that good. All those weeks of grinding herself down hadn't been for nothing.
"Ah, damn it! I'm all the way on the outside!"
"Eh, this isn't bad."
Cheonghwa slipped out of the noisy knot of classmates still staring at the paper, smiling to herself. She was already daydreaming — tearing through the other class's front line with her ability, catching the eye of some famous guild — and she had to swallow a laugh as she headed for the door.
Then a figure stepped into her path, and she stopped.
She looked up. The one blocking her was Kim Suhan, the class president — a thin face and eyes like a snake. He stared at her with open dislike.
"Hey."
"What."
She had never liked this guy. Back when that bastard muscle-pig had been Class 1-3's homeroom teacher, Kim Suhan had glued himself to the man's side and found a hundred little ways to look down on her. Her voice came out ugly.
"You. Teacher called you out separately yesterday. You ask for a favor or something?"
"The hell are you talking about."
She snarled it back at him. The new teacher was not that kind of person. If anyone had been taking bribes and shuffling positions around, it was that pig from before.
"Come on. It's weird, isn't it?"
He raised his voice on purpose, pulling every eye in the room, then walked over to the blackboard and pointed at the paper.
"How does someone like you end up here?"
He flicked the sheet with two sharp taps. Cheonghwa felt her temper spike.
"I've been training my ability. I can do my job now."
"That so?"
A strange little smile crossed Kim Suhan's face. He picked someone out of the crowd, grabbed a timid boy who flinched the instant their eyes met, and dragged him over by the wrist. Then he shoved the boy's forearm up in front of Cheonghwa.
"Hey. Look."
A thin scar ran across the wrist. You would have missed it if you weren't looking — but the meaning of a scar like that was not small. At the Great Demon Subjugation Academy, where the facilities were so advanced that almost nothing left a mark, scars barely existed.
Except the ones her strange black lightning had made.
"Look at this."
Kim Suhan traced the thin line on the boy's wrist and raised his voice again.
"How do you put someone who does this to her own classmates in the center? What happens if that lightning of hers — the same stuff that blasted an instructor last time, all power and no control — blows our formation apart?"
"I can—!"
She had been about to say that she had her ability under control now, that she wouldn't hurt anyone anymore. The words died in her throat.
The whole class was looking at her. Those eyes that never used to look at her at all were on her now, and anyone could have read what lived in them. Jealousy. And agreement.
"I… uh…"
She tried to speak and stalled, the scarred wrist hanging in front of her face. It was true she had hurt people during afternoon training. True she had kept getting in the way. So of course the class was uneasy. That was just a fact.
She kicked off the floor and bolted from the room.
Cheonghwa fled the classroom like that and walked the festival street in a daze, stall after stall blurring past her.
"Ugh."
A little moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes. She scrubbed it away with her sleeve and kept walking, one heavy step after another.
He was right. All of it was right. But she could not give up that position. Maybe that made her shameless. Her greed would not let her throw it all away. And after everything Jeong Jojun had done for her, she could not quit. If it were him, what would he have said in a moment like this?
Something like:
That kind of scratch isn't even a wound. To a guy, it's basically just a tattoo. Ignore all of them and do your thing.
A small laugh slipped out of her. Yeah. That stupidly encouraging man would be in her corner this time too.
What was he even doing right now, though?
She flicked a glance at her phone. They always met for afternoon training, then split. She had never once asked how he spent the rest of his time.
"Nngh…"
She fidgeted with the phone, hesitating over whether to message him — and then her eyes caught on a trinket in an accessory stall. A phone charm shaped like a jet-black sword. Cute, compact, and more than a little like the blade Jeong Jojun always wore at his hip.
Yeah. This would do.
An excuse to see him, and a thank-you for everything he had done for her. Cheonghwa steeled herself and bought it. She turned the charm over in her hands, pleased with it, still fussing with her phone — and then, as if fate had been waiting, she caught Jeong Jojun's profile passing in the distance.
He was talking to someone, smiling like he was having a genuinely good time.
"Hey! Jeong Jojun!"
She called out to that happy face and started toward him. Then she stopped.
Walking beside the brightly smiling Jeong Jojun was a beautiful girl with swaying twintails and catlike eyes — and with them, the unmistakably graceful student council president, and a vice president whose cold looks only made her more striking.
"Ah."
The word left her without permission. Hollow. Helpless. Like something had just come clear.
Of course. A man that brilliant — the man who had believed in her when she had nothing — would never have been standing there alone. He was not a coarse, fierce loner like her. Anyone could see how magnetic he was.
The way a nobody loner like her looked at Jeong Jojun, and the way Jeong Jojun looked at her, had never been the same thing to begin with.
She understood that now.
"Ahh."
The charm slipped from her fingers and hit the ground. She did not pick it up. She just backed away, then turned and ran in the opposite direction.
She did not want him to see her. If she stepped into that shining little group and they all looked at her, she knew she would be ashamed.
Cheonghwa kept running, fleeing as hard as she could.
And behind her, a girl stood watching.
Violet, with her violet hair, gazed after Cheonghwa for a long moment. Then she bent down and picked up the sword-shaped charm from the ground.
"Haa…"
She let out a faint, complicated sigh, eyes still on the figure disappearing in the distance. Then she slipped the charm into her pocket.
"Hic… hic…"
In a classroom emptied out by the festival, a girl was crying in the corner. Cheonghwa, who looked so fierce on any other day, stood there sniffling, wiping at her tears and staring at nothing.
She tried to figure out why she was crying, but her head had gone too blurry to hold a thought. The tears just kept coming. She had always clenched her heart shut and almost never cried — and today, for some reason, they would not stop.
"Nngh."
She forced the well shut and looked out the window. Everyone out there was happy. Everyone was laughing. The sight cracked her open all over again.
"Kh—"
She jammed the tears back down, dragged a chair out from the back row, and dropped into it. Then she let the focus drain from her eyes and stared into empty air, watching the world smear through the water on her lashes, sitting there erasing every thought as it rose.
Footsteps.
Even that did not last. From somewhere down the hall, someone was coming.
"Ah—!"
Cheonghwa scrambled. The footsteps kept coming, closer and closer, and they were definitely headed for this classroom.
"Crap…!"
Her makeup was wrecked from crying. She looked awful. She cast around for somewhere to hide, spotted the large cleaning-supply closet behind the desks, and dove inside.
The sliding door rattled open. Several sets of footsteps came in. She had been right. They had been coming here.
"Ha. So basically…"
A man's voice, muttering like he could not believe it. Thin, weak, instantly familiar. Kim Suhan. The class president who had driven her out.
"Right? That bitch is seriously vicious."
"No kidding."
Two other male voices piled on. The hangers-on who always trailed after Kim Suhan, most likely.
"Ah, fuck."
Something landed on a desk, and a sweet smell of food drifted through the room. The three of them had come back to eat. Plastic rustled. Then came the wet sounds of chewing, and the talking started again.
"Fucking slut. Latches onto one guy and suddenly her whole life blooms."
Kim Suhan.
"Right? Subin, I'm telling you — Cheonghwa clinging to that monster freak and leeching off him is seriously disgusting."
"Stupid bitch. If that's how it is she should've just latched onto me. Pretty enough face — I'd fuck her once and teach her myself. Perfect."
Kim Suhan snickered. Inside the closet, packed with acrid dust, Cheonghwa heard herself make a sound.
"Ah."
"Hm?"
The three of them made a questioning noise, like they had heard her. Cheonghwa only murmured it again.
"Ah."
Something in her gave way, as cleanly as a thread snapping. She kept murmuring it. Ah. Ah.
Black lightning burst from her wrist with a sharp crackle.
And then—
A sound like nails shrieking down a pane of glass tore through the room, and the air itself was crushed.
"Ah."
She stared blankly at the empty space coming apart in front of her, and the word left her one more time. Black lightning crawled and spat across the seven tattoos on her wrist.
And then, all at once, they caught.