How Does Your Friend Look?
Consciousness returned as damp, chilly air wormed its way into her nostrils. Her head throbbed as though it might split apart, and a pulsing heat radiated from her cheek.
Han Seoyeon forced her heavy eyelids open. But what greeted her was not the familiar ceiling of her own bedroom. There was nothing — only a darkness so complete it seemed to swallow the world.
What is this? A blackout? Even as confusion swirled through her, she tried to sit up — and found she couldn't. Both arms had been wrenched behind her back and bound tight with rope; her ankles were no different. Like a prisoner nailed to a cross, her body had been locked in place, utterly immobile.
Only then did the situation begin to take shape. Kidnapping. This was unmistakably a kidnapping.
When she opened her mouth to let out an irritated scream, despair struck her a second time.
"Mmph! Mmmph!"
No words came out. Something foreign filled her mouth, forced in against her will. A hard, ball-shaped gag crushed her tongue, and saliva streamed down to soak her chin. A blindfold covered her eyes. A gag filled her mouth. Rope bound her entire body.
Everything she had once taken pride in — her looks, her voice, her status — had been stripped away. She had been reduced to nothing more than a helpless lump of flesh.
Goosebumps crawled over her skin. Rage surged through her, and with it came a primitive terror she had never felt in her life.
Yoo Jimin. That filthy little insect. She hadn't done this alone. She'd planned it with that hulking man. How dare they. How dare they do this to her — to Han Seoyeon!
She thrashed desperately in the darkness. The ropes bit into her flesh, but this was no time to care about pain. Her struggling, though, was nothing more than a meaningless spasm.
It was in the midst of that desperate writhing that she heard it. Thud. Thud. Footsteps approaching — heavy, lumbering steps. It was unmistakably the same hulking man who had knocked her unconscious.
She screamed, rage and terror tangled together in her throat.
"Mmph! Mmmmph!" (Who is it!)
Only muffled groans escaped past the ball gag, but the arrogant demand of a queen was still buried inside them.
"You're loud."
The voice that reached her ear was cold, stripped of all emotion.
"Take a look at this first."
She felt his hands. Han Seoyeon tried to resist, but her head was locked in place and wouldn't budge. His fingers brushed her ears, then settled something cold and plastic over them. A headset.
A moment later, something covered her eyes. What replaced the blindfold was a pair of goggles that sealed completely around her eye sockets. It didn't take her long to realize it was a VR headset. Before it was even fully in place, the man seemed to be adjusting the audio that would pour from the speakers.
Then, in the pitch-black void before Han Seoyeon's eyes, a screen exploded into existence.
The sudden, violent light made her flinch. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. As her blurred vision found its focus, the scene unfolding before her stole the breath from her lungs.
It was the very room she had just been dragged into. And on the screen, a woman — completely naked — screamed as a whip tore into her flesh. The footage played in raw, unflinching detail.
It was Yoo Jimin.
"Mmph! Ghk!" (What the hell is this!)
What filled her vision now was a garden. And crawling across it on all fours was a woman.
She was completely naked. A thick leather dog collar encircled her neck, a steel chain attached to it. Both wrists and ankles were shackled in heavy chains as well. Clank. Clank. Every time the woman moved, the scrape of dragging metal rang through the headset with sickening clarity. A large ball gag filled her mouth, so that only muffled, strangled moans — "mmph, nnngh" — leaked out at intervals.
Her ass was hiked up to a grotesque degree, and the hole between her cheeks was swollen an angry red from whatever had been done to it.
The instant Han Seoyeon confirmed the face, her heart plummeted through the floor.
Yoo Jimin.
No matter how humiliating the pose, she would have known that face anywhere. The pathetic, irritating face that had always trailed after her like a lost puppy.
"...Mmph?!"
She couldn't believe her eyes. This is impossible. What... what is this? Some video some sick bastard cooked up? A deepfake? Special effects?
No matter how she turned it over, the scene was too surreal. Yoo Jimin — that proud, stupid bitch — would never let herself be reduced to something like this. This had to be a crude, disgusting piece of theater designed to scare her.
She strained to find the cracks in the footage. Awkward graphics. Unnatural movement. Anything. But no matter how wide she forced her eyes, the Yoo Jimin on the screen was far too vivid, far too real. The face twisted in pain and shame. The muscles trembling through her body. The skin gleaming with sweat and drool.
That was when it happened. Through the headset came the clank of a chain. And in that same instant, from the real world behind her, the exact same sound reached her — faint, but unmistakable.
Goosebumps erupted across her skin.
A hallucination? No. This was...
On the screen, a hand appeared and yanked the chain attached to Yoo Jimin's dog collar. Yoo Jimin was dragged forward, a pained moan spilling from her gagged mouth. And then, as if he were speaking right beside her ear, the man's cold voice sounded once more.
The man's lip movements in the VR footage matched the voice in the real world with perfect, horrifying precision.
What is this? What the fuck is this? This goddamn spectacle?
Han Seoyeon could not believe what she was seeing. The Yoo Jimin she knew had always been beneath her — clumsy, pathetic — but she hadn't been some kind of freak. And yet there she was, crawling across the ground like an animal, completely naked. This is a dream. A nightmare. Or an extremely well-made fake.
It was in the very moment she was desperately denying reality that the background on the screen changed.
No longer a dark, damp room, but a garden carpeted in green grass. That pastoral landscape, however, had been transformed into a vision of hell by the figures occupying it. Led by some man's hand, Yoo Jimin was being forced to circle the garden — on all fours, like a beast. The chain attached to her dog collar dictated every movement. The instant her pace lagged, or her foot slipped, the whip in the man's hand came down without fail.
Crack!
A sharp report split the air as the whip struck Yoo Jimin's pale, plump ass with surgical precision. In a fraction of a second, a red line bloomed across the white flesh.
"Mmph!"
The body on the screen convulsed, a scream-like moan bursting from her. But the man did not stop.
Crack! Crack-crack!
Under the relentless whipping, her ass began to bruise almost instantly. Vivid red, then shifting toward a bluish purple. With every blow — horizontal, vertical — hideous patterns were branded into her skin like a cattle mark.
One lash. Two. As the count climbed past several dozen, Yoo Jimin's struggling on the screen gradually became something closer to a seizure. Her body seemed to have given up on resistance entirely. Each time the whip came down, she merely flinched — a mechanical twitch, nothing more.
"Nngh... ghk, khh...!"
She couldn't even scream properly. Her tongue and throat, crushed beneath the ball gag, produced only grotesque noises — the desperate, hideous sound of a broken machine grinding against itself. Her eyes on the screen had already lost focus, wandering through empty air.
They said that when pain grew too severe, the brain shut down sensation to protect itself. That was exactly what she looked like now. Vacant eyes. A face slathered in drool and tears. Humiliating traces leaking from between weakly spread legs.
This was no longer the Yoo Jimin that Han Seoyeon had known. She was nothing more than a living doll, perfectly ruined by pain.
Han Seoyeon was forced to watch every second of it from inside the VR headset. Even when she shut her eyes, the horrific sounds pouring from the speakers burrowed into her ears. She wanted to run. She wanted to escape this insane space. But her body couldn't so much as twitch, and the footage in front of her would not end — as if, regardless of her will, it meant to brand this vision of hell into her mind like a mark of ownership.
Then the man on the screen finally stopped whipping. He leaned in and whispered something against the ear of Yoo Jimin, who hung limp as a broken doll. That voice came through the headset and reached Han Seoyeon's ear with perfect clarity.
In that instant, a chill bloomed behind Han Seoyeon's back. The man from the VR footage was standing behind her right now.
And in that instant, the last remaining fragment of reason and denial that had ruled Han Seoyeon's mind shattered into pieces.
This is not a lie.
This is not a fake.
This is real.
An icy dread raced down her spine and flooded her entire body. Her heart began to hammer like a mad thing — so hard she thought it might smash through her ribs and burst out of her chest. Her body shook like a leaf in a gale, a convulsion of primitive terror utterly beyond her control. She couldn't even feel the ropes stripping the skin from her bound wrists and ankles.
The presence standing behind her. She didn't need to turn around. She didn't need to touch it. She knew. The man who had treated Yoo Jimin like an animal on that screen was standing directly behind her right now.
"Mmph! Mmmmmph!"
She twisted her body in desperate resistance. Whether the sounds she made were a plea for her life or a thrashing of rage, even she couldn't tell. But her body, locked down tight, didn't so much as tremble — as if mocking her struggle.
The man said nothing. He simply placed a hand on her shoulder. The touch of that cold, hard hand drained the strength from her entire body.
On the VR screen in front of her, Yoo Jimin — her whipping finished — was being led away by the man's hand, as if being prepared for a new round of training.
It had been a trailer. And now it was her turn to become the star of that horrific main feature.
Han Seoyeon. A queen who had never known defeat in her life, who had always reigned above everything. For the first time in her existence, she was face to face with true, genuine terror.