Dangwooling
"...W-who are you..?"
I'd thought I would sleep well tonight. Cradling the pillow, body curled tight, I had been ready to drift off with the lingering flutter of my heart from Seol Eun as a lullaby.
So why — and how — a strange woman was lying in my bed with only her head sticking out of the covers was something I could not begin to understand.
Faced with a situation so cut off from any sense of beginning or end, my body froze, unsure what gesture it was even supposed to make.
Rustle—
The blanket slid back with her movement, and every time that soft pink hair swayed, my eyes tracked it far too intently. It was a skill honed from gaming — the habit of locking onto an opponent's every motion.
Before long, all that resolved into focus was the pink-haired figure herself, and the blanket crumpling in time with her shifts.
"……"
She rose onto her knees on the mattress. I looked into her eyes as she brought them level with mine.
…What was I even supposed to say. The way she was looking at me, matching my eye line like that, felt… off. Her gaze spun, dizzying, as if I were being pulled under.
Sh-should I run?
But by the time that judgment formed, I was already a full twelve beats too late. Whether from exhaustion or sheer panic, my usual instincts had lagged behind — fatally so.
The moment I came back to myself, she had already thrown both arms around me and was diving us onto the bed. My vision lurched wildly; a weightless, floating sensation swept through my body.
I had reacted when she reached for me. Technically. All it amounted to was a faint twitch of my fingers.
In a game, that tiny input would already have sent my character into a dodge. Reality was nothing like a game. In reality, I could do nothing at all — nothing but let her catch me.
"Haaaah… mmm…"
What she did next was bury her nose against my back and start inhaling and exhaling like a madwoman.
"Nngh… haah…"
She had been waiting inside my home first, and now she was yanking me in without a word and greedily drinking in my scent. Something about the way she moved — as if a screw had come loose somewhere — sent fear crawling up my spine.
"…Kya—!…mmph—"
An indescribable terror ripped a scream from my throat; she smothered it by clamping a hand over my mouth. I tried to twist my head and eyes around to face her, but her grip locked my jaw along with my lips, refusing to let me turn.
"Stay still…"
Her voice followed at once. Sweet and sticky as honey, it started at my ear and poured over my entire body.
"……!"
I didn't want to admit it. I couldn't believe a voice alone could radiate that much raw possessiveness. It almost felt like she wasn't even human.
Her movements had no restraint — only a single, blind purpose driving them. The same atmosphere you get from a beast in heat clung to her as well.
"…Hhb—…nngh…"
Her sudden assault had made me forget how to breathe; I couldn't draw air properly. I thrashed wildly, but she had already locked my arms and legs so I couldn't move. All I could do in that moment was tremble and cry as terror wrung my heart dry.
"Oh— you shouldn't be leaking water from there…?"
"…Hhb… uuuhh…"
A small fist began patting my shaking back in time with my sobs.
"Just a second, don't cryyy…"
"…Hic… hhuk…"
I curled up under the blanket pulled all the way to my chin and cried. The shock still hadn't worn off; I couldn't calm down. I wept like that for a long time. I didn't know why today kept giving me so many reasons to cry. My head throbbed as if it were being squeezed in a vise.
In front of me, the pink-haired woman kept stealing glances, watching my face for cues. Tears welled and rolled down my cheeks in a stubborn cycle. She sharpened and blurred by turns until, gradually, my startled heart began to settle.
"…H-hey… I'm not a weird person, okayyy…?"
With that distinctive trailing lilt of hers, she reached a hand toward me from where she knelt. Reflexively, I yanked the blanket up over my head and blocked her.
"…Uuugh…"
At my reaction she withdrew her hand and settled back where she'd been. I could not comprehend how someone who had broken into a stranger's home, lain in wait on the bed, then grabbed the owner and frantically scoured her scent could possibly claim not to be weird.
I clutched the blanket tight around myself and glared at her, trembling at the thought she might reach for me again.
Still kneeling, fidgeting restlessly, she seemed to realize something all at once. She pulled out her phone and held the screen toward me.
"Ah… right, of course… H-here, look… I-it's me… Don't you remember…?"
On her phone was a familiar interface — the main screen of the streaming platform I had hopped in and out of a good five or six times that very day. My eyes went to the name displayed in the profile menu on the right.
"Dang…woo…ling…?"
The name slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, half dazed.
Dangwooling.
The pink-haired dog-concept streamer who had lodged herself particularly hard in my memory. That day, too, I'd simply been browsing for a streamer I liked, the way I always did — and she was the one I'd landed on.
Haaah… ah, that feels so gooood… Harder, kill me harderrr… Aaaah~ mmm?
……
Instead of getting irritated like any other streamer, she had reacted in a very particular way. On the first day I figured she was just half-assing a bit and trying to farm content off me, so I killed her a combined fifty-seven times until she ended the stream.
The next day I logged in, I nearly lost my mind. In Volcan Online, where dying to another player means a full three-minute respawn, she had used a territory's turrets to assemble a heart out of a hundred and fifty corpses. Even ignoring travel time, the respawns alone added up to seven and a half hours of pure insanity.
……Those comments above were the top-voted ones on a video covering the whole incident.
Back when I was harassing her, she hadn't been a particularly well-known virtual streamer. But that stunt blew her channel up overnight — and after that, I never visited her stream again.
…Because she had genuinely terrified me.
So the moment I realized that same woman was sitting in front of me, I could feel my body shaking in real time. My heartbeat hammered through every inch of me. I understood then that the trembling of pure terror described in anime and novels wasn't exaggerated in the slightest — if anything, those portrayals were too mild.
"…You remember, right? I'm… not some random freak or anything…"
She wasn't a random freak, true — though I almost wished she had been. She was something far worse: an extremely dangerous pink-haired freak.
Half-formed associations with pink hair floated up through my mind. There was even a nickname for it — pinky menace — the archetype was that infamous.
At her introduction I shuddered all over and yanked the blanket up over my head. Under the covers, the tears I'd only just managed to stop threatened to start again.
"Haaah… w-well, no choice thennn…"
After she said that, I heard the sound of her drinking something. Then footsteps drawing closer. For all how tightly I'd been holding on, the blanket was peeled away with pathetic ease.
I squeezed my eyes shut in fear.
At the same time, her soft lips touched my face. I jerked back with a violent start — but I'd already been curled into the corner, and there was nowhere left to run. She pinned my shoulders firmly, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to lock me in place.
"Mmph—!"
Her hand fixed my jaw, and at last her lips met mine. The instant mouth touched mouth, whatever I'd thought was water forced its way into me. And then… carried on that rush of liquid, I felt something small and solid slip down my throat.
I nearly bit down on Dangwooling's tongue in shock, but she yanked it back with sharp reflexes. The sensation of that solid object sliding past my throat lingered. Water that hadn't made it in ran down my chin and onto my chest.
"Wh-what did you just feed—"
She cut me off mid-choke, rushing to speak.
"Ah… do you… have any chronic conditions? Low blood pressure or anything… You have to tell me the truth…"
Instead of answering out loud, I shook my head at her voice.
"…Mm, good. I was in such a hurry I just went and fed it to you without even asking…"
…What. What had she given me?
Every nerve strained toward her voice. But then I felt the agitation drain out of me, and my eyelids grew heavier than stone.
"……What are you trying to…"
"…It's medicine… You can relaxxx…"
Strangely, my body kept loosening, and the fear itself began to sink away. Confirming my state, she scooped me up in a princess carry and laid me down on the bed.
I wasn't supposed to — not in a situation like this — but sleep crashed over me without warning. Whatever drug she had forced on me, how could it erase even a sense of danger this completely?
"…Looks like the medicine's working well…? Oh? Going to sleep alreadyyy…? You must be really… ti—re—"
Her voice receded into the distance, and I sank into sleep.