Half-Naked Through the Halls
"P-please, just lend them to me...!"
"Heh heh! Nope. Oh, there's something I'm curious about — have you ever done it?"
She still only had eyes for my naked body. Even in the moment I'd been forced to strip down past my pants, Haebin kept right on teasing me.
I stared blankly, not understanding what she was asking, and she answered with a filthy little hand gesture.
"...! I-I don't know...!"
"Come on. Tell meee. I'm curious. When else am I supposed to ask? Hm? Safety Administrator Han Yeoreum!"
She stretched an arm toward my chest — fingers bent, index and middle curled like she meant to pinch something — and I scrambled several steps backward on pure instinct. I wasn't wearing a top at all, so one arm was already busy trying to cover my breasts. It didn't work the way I'd hoped.
"Ugh... I-I really don't know... I c-can't remember, I s-swear..."
It was a lie. The truth was simpler — I'd just been someone else entirely.
Unless the original Han Yeoreum had kept a diary, treated that diary like a secret best friend, and locked every last confession behind a little pink padlock, there was no way for me to know.
"Heh heh. Fine then. Move your hands."
"...Th-then you'll lend them to—"
"Tsk. Why does everything have to come with conditions? Want me to just take the pants and underwear too while I'm at it?"
"..."
"Heh heh! That could be fun. Steal them every single day and make you walk around naked. How about it?"
"Ah, uh..."
The second those words left her mouth, my hands dropped. She wasn't wrong. These were the people I saw more than anyone else in this life — forcing me to go fully naked might be a stretch, but turning me into the kind of girl who walked around without underwear was more than doable.
No police. No law. Nothing. The possibility wasn't zero.
Even back on Earth, bullying had thrived under the constant threat of being reported. Out here, it would be far more relentless than I wanted to imagine.
"Mm-hmm. Looking good."
Haebin made a little effort-noise as she stood, strode straight over, and put her hand on my chest.
"—!"
I jolted. My spine went rigid, the muscles along my lower back pulling taut.
It was a completely different sensation from when Minseo touched me as casually as breathing. This wasn't shyness. Shame and self-loathing fit better.
"..."
And in that same instant, every past fretting about human dignity, about protecting some scrap of masculinity, about chastity and all the rest of it — all of it felt utterly useless.
Squeeze. Knead. Her fingers pressed deep into the soft flesh, denting it into the shape of her grip, over and over—
"Huh. Quieter than I expected? Heh heh!"
"Nnh..."
"Ah — Minseo, and, uh, Jiyeon? Was it? Hyeju?"
She trailed off mid-sentence, then seemed to remember something and turned it into a question. The way she mumbled through the names made it clear that not everyone here was particularly close.
"......"
"I'm asking you. The ones who share a room with you, Yeoreum."
"J-Jiwoo, and... H-Hyejin-ssi..."
"Ahh, right, right. Heh heh."
When I corrected her, Haebin flashed a mischievous little grin.
"Already gotten fucked, then. Yeah. Makes sense. They're all intersex, right?"
"Nnh— N-no, that's not...!"
It caught me off guard. I hadn't literally been fucked, but the two of us had done things close enough that the accusation still landed.
"Don't give me that. So you were just always the kind of bitch who didn't mind getting groped?"
"No...! Th-there's no way...!"
Well. I didn't know for certain, but I doubted the original had been that kind of person. It wasn't some grand theory — just a vague, maybe slightly uncharitable thought that a face and body like this were weapons on their own. Why would she have thrown them around carelessly?
"Heh heh! Then how about just once? Come on, Integrated Safety Whatever Administrator Han Yeoreum. Please?"
Haebin smiled. She rolled my title around on her tongue like she was savoring the distance between the me of that ordinary day and the me standing here now.
"I-I don't want to..."
It was the only refusal I could manage. That line was one I truly could not cross — one I must not cross.
I understood the puzzled look on Haebin's face, the expression of a child seeing a puzzle for the first time... but how strange must I have seemed? Stripped of my clothes, groped, and all I did was make a halfhearted show of dislike.
A girl whose sense of chastity seemed to have been dumped in some corner of the floor, suddenly drawing a hard line at this.
And I almost never said no outright. At best it was cushioned language — please stop, please don't, please quit it.
"...What even are you. Heh heh. Weird. Okay then — so, can I touch your pussy?"
"...Hnh, ugh..."
"Oh, this one's fine? Aha! Ha...! Hilarious. Seriously."
The hands working my breasts grew faster, harder, until something deeper inside was being caught and it started to hurt—
"Ugh. Whatever."
—and then Haebin pinched both nipples hard and pulled.
"Augh...!"
She strode toward the bed. I hurried to match her pace, terrified of getting hurt — not that I knew enough about a woman's body to say whether that was even a real risk.
She finally let go, crouched, opened the drawer under the bed, and pulled out two adhesive bandages.
"..."
I stared at her with a look of pure resentment, half-suspecting I already knew what those were for.
"Hehe! If you don't want them, fine?"
She dangled them in front of me, then made as if to put them back in the first-aid kit—
—so I took them. Anything was better than nothing.
Back home, bare upper chests had been ordinary. Underboob, sideboob, every kind of fashion under the sun. By induction, if I just covered the tips, it wouldn't really count as exposure—
I kept brainwashing myself with that thought.
Otherwise I didn't think I'd be able to take a single step.
"Kyaa~. Look, a naked pervert wandering around!"
"Hiiik...?! Sh-shh...!"
"Kyaha...! Anyway, bye~? See you tomorrow? Oh — and don't wear underwear tomorrow either."
"I-I don't want to..."
I offered a timid little protest to Haebin's send-off at the door, then opened it.
I stuck my head out first and scanned the hallway. Thankfully, no one was walking it.
Of course, voices and light still leaked through the cracks under other doors, so staking my entire life on that emptiness felt shaky at best—
"Up we go."
"Kyaa...?!"
Click. A shove between my shoulder blades made me whip around — just in time to see Haebin waving at me as the door narrowed, narrowed, and shut her from view.
And so the slut made her entrance... or something like that. My heart started hammering harder than it had even when I'd been fully bare, every private part on display.
After a moment, the voices beyond the walls faded under the sound of my own pulse thudding in my ears.
The second I imagined what it would feel like to get caught, my heart felt ready to burst — and in perfect contrast, my arms and legs refused to move at all.
"H-huuh...!"
Minseo and Jiwoo were the nice ones. I was sure of that now.
This was real bullying. What they'd done was just cute flirting by comparison.
I took a step. Heel down — tong. Toe down — kong.
The sound was inevitable.
The floor under my feet wasn't just a floor. It was little more than a walkway laid over a tangle of pipes and wiring and whatever else ran through the guts of this place.
That hollow tokang-tokang, the kind of sound effect you always heard walking a spaceship corridor, filled the empty, silent hall.
My back bent further forward with every step. I'd managed to keep the underwear and pants, at least, but my chest was still bare, so both arms stayed wrapped around it.
What a strange organ.
If I'd still been a man, going shirtless for a roadside rinse wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, depending on the mood. That had been the baseline of the world I'd lived in.
And even with that history, here I was covering my chest and praying no one would see.
"Huuh, hah, huuh...!"
My breathing roughened. A heart thrashing that hard was never going to leave enough oxygen. I walked on, gulping and spitting air through my mouth.
If I'd been fully naked, maybe it would have been different. But like this — nipples covered in nothing but adhesive bandages — if someone caught me, they might just come running and—
"Ugh...!"
I picked up the pace.
If someone stepping out was a fixed future, better to be past them fast. How many people would even bother checking the hallway just because they heard footsteps in a shared living space?
So I walked hard. Tokang-tokang-tokang. The showers first. That was the only option.
Every instinct screamed to just write the clothes off as a donation and bolt for my room — but if I did that, next time it would be full nudity, maybe with writing all over me, and I'd be walking these halls like that.
Tokang. Tokang. Tokang.
My short stride had never felt so hateful, but the corridor still didn't feel like it was about to produce a person, so I kept going.
An objective view of myself — that little fantasy — forced the image into my head: a flushed girl in nothing but shorts, bandages stuck over her nipples, hurrying down a sci-fi corridor where she absolutely did not belong—
and just as a tiny corner of me wondered if that image was starting to feel like excitement—
Cheol-keong.
A sound I never wanted to hear. A sound I should never have heard. From ahead.
"..."
A hiccup tried to jump out. I clamped a hand over my mouth. The other hand stayed on my chest. I didn't forget that.
"Why am I always the one who has to go? Move a little."
"Uuueh~. Too much work~."
Light spilled into the hall as the door opened, and a woman I hadn't even introduced myself to yet stepped out.
My brain melted. Two futures collided at once — dragged off somewhere and raped, or stared at with pure disgust — and I couldn't decide which one was better—
"...!"
I spun. Dropped into a crouch, curling in on myself. From the conversation, they were just going for water. Maybe they wouldn't look my way at all.
So. I was going to get caught. No — wait.
Maybe I wouldn't. People didn't usually check left and right the second they stepped into a hallway. And almost no one turned around while walking.
What if I got caught? Should I just tell the truth? Would they believe me? What if they believed me, went to confront security, and security just turned off the lights and pretended to be asleep...?
Thump. Thump.
Cheol-keong.
"Ughguk...!"
Thump-thump.
"Augh. So tired......"
Thump. Thump.
I clutched a heart that was, stripped of euphemism, exploding with every beat — and prayed I hadn't been seen.
"......Han Yeoreum-nim?"
The sound I wanted least in the world arrived exactly like that.
I finally understood how protagonists in horror movies felt. Carefully, very slowly, I turned my head—
"......Kh, ahem. Ahem!"
Our eyes met. Not a ghost, not a spirit, not a goblin, not a creature. A person, looking at me.
"...I-it's not like I don't understand, you know? Stress relief and all that. It's not exactly a major crime, and right now I'm closing my eyes, so—"
The woman — intersex or pure female, I couldn't tell — kept talking.
Comfort, supposedly. And the more of it I heard, the more my skull felt ready to split.
"U-uuuh...! Uwaaang...!"
I bolted for the showers. Half-naked, tears streaming, arms locked over my chest, feet pounding — and the second I pictured it, I realized there were probably cameras in this hallway too.
"H-hey, are you oka—"
"I'm fine—! Please don't f-follow meee...!"
I shouted it. Not loud enough to bring everyone out of their rooms — just loud enough for her to hear.
"Aha...! Ahaha...! For real? And then?"
"...I-I just r-ran..."
"Ah, that's fucking hilarious. Heh heh...! Hup...! Pffha...!"
The woman laughed like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. At least the showers had decent soundproofing.
I felt awful. Most people would, in a situation like this — but more than anything, being alone in a late-night shower room with a complete stranger was what soured my mood.
"...My clothes. Please..."
"Heh heh... Ow. My stomach."
"..."
"Oh, clothes? Heh, heh heh. I don't know."
"...What?"
I'd spoken like they were already in her care. Maybe that was my mistake...?
Either way, I'd thought reaching the showers meant it was over. Instead, she just stood there with that noncommittal attitude.
"Hmm..."
Her expression sobered for a moment. She let the silence hang.
"Take the rest off too."
"...What?"
"I didn't get to see. You said you stripped all the way inside, right?"
She pulled a terminal from her pocket and gave it a little shake. Right — it had a messenger function. Information could have already been traded.
So she was planning to use that as leverage to torment me for a while longer.
Still — relatively speaking, it was manageable. She was a woman, and she was alone. From everything I'd learned so far, bullying needed entertainment value, so I put on a show of hesitation and then stripped out of the pants and underwear.
And there I stood: fully naked except for shoes and socks. Some kind of fetishist's dream.
"...Wow. For real. Heh heh. I don't know the details, but the amnesia can't be fake, can it?"
That was her first review. She circled me the way someone might inspect a cut of good meat, then delivered her verdict.
"..."
"Answer."
"Y-yes..."
"Heh heh. Ah, this is why you've got to stay alive first. Administrator. Administrator... Administrator Han Yeoreum!"
"Nnh, y-yes? Yes...?"
She stopped in front of me, snapped my attention into place, then beckoned. Come closer.
"I didn't know you were this kind of bitch."
I stepped in a little, and she continued almost in a whisper.
"Do you remember what my name was?"
"......Ah, umm..."
"Why did I ever like a girl like this? A worthless slut who pays with her body the second things get a little dangerous. Heh heh."
And just like that, my mouth snapped shut.
I'd sprinted all the way here. I wasn't fit, so my heart was still slamming, and closing my mouth left me short on air.
"Hey. Administrator Han Yeoreum."
The air had gone cold. Nothing like the memory of this place from that day.
"Hup — y-yes. Yes."
"Go out with me. How about it?"
I felt my head go blank. The smile that appeared was the opposite of the one from five seconds ago.
And so, with nothing left to say—
I had no idea how I was supposed to respond.