The Delinquents
Every now and then, the internet flexes its power in the most unexpected places. Like when someone you happened to meet over a LAN cable turns out to be the opposite sex. Or when someone who casually commissioned NSFW art from you turns out to be a classmate at the same school. Or when you're chatting with that classmate without a thought in your head and end up overhearing a secret plan.
That kind of thing. The situation I was sitting in right now was exactly that.
I was staring at an open chat room. The messages flickered in front of my eyes like a dying bulb.
A message from Good-for-nothing Me.
Ever since I'd sat through her worries last time, she had taken to dropping me messages like this every so often. Laying her fetishes bare must have knocked down a fair few of the walls around her heart. Fine by me — it was a decent cure for boredom, and watching the gap between her real-life self and her online persona was entertaining all on its own.
So I'd been messing with her and playing along, the way I always did... I just never expected something like this to fall into my lap.
A smirk tugged at my mouth at the sheer absurdity of it.
Well, well. Look at this.
Things had been awfully quiet lately. Turns out she'd been cooking up something deliciously sneaky. I hadn't even imagined she was putting together a plan like this.
The gist of the message was simple enough. On a friend's recommendation, she had cooked up an old-school eighties-drama scheme: rescue a guy from a pack of delinquents. She just wasn't sure whether it would actually work. So here she was, asking for advice from behind the safety of anonymity.
Thanks to that, I had the entire plan — the one they'd been putting together in secret — figured out before it had even started. Pure coincidence, too.
It would probably feel pretty hollow from her side. From mine, it was a gift.
Not that knowing changed much. I had no intention of sabotaging it.
......
I let myself picture it for a moment. A deserted back alley. My pitiful self, hemmed in and threatened by a ring of women...
Ohh...
Just thinking about it was starting to get me a little hard. Surrounded on all sides by the opposite sex. Was that not basically a scene out of a harem?
Sure, they would be threatening me... but being surrounded by women was the part that mattered. The little guy downstairs was filing his own enthusiastic vote in favor.
It was all an act anyway. Not like there was any real danger. They'd gone to the trouble of building a whole plan — turning it down would have felt rude.
So I decided to accept.
Tap-tap-tap. I danced my fingers over the keyboard and sent a reply.
I'd told her it was fine, but she still seemed to be dragging her feet.
A coward to the end. She got along with people just fine, but the second she had to take the lead on something, she always took a step back. She'd pile up the worries before the thing had even started. That kind of caution could save you when something actually important was on the line — but the flip side was that the hesitation itself wrecked the opportunity more often than not.
That was how she'd blown her chance to get laid just a few weeks ago, wasn't it?
Not a great habit. I set about talking her into a decision with everything I had.
After a few more back-and-forths, Lee Eun-byul seemed to have made up her mind. In the right direction, too.
I smiled to myself.
Got her.
Any day now, she would make her move. I would get snatched up by a pack of delinquents, and she would be waiting in the wings, practically vibrating for me to look scared, before making her magnificent entrance. That much was a locked-in fact.
What came after was the real question. Would I gasp and fall for her, exactly the way she'd scripted it? Would the whole thing fall apart because the acting was too awkward? Or would some other variable crash the party and send everything somewhere nobody had predicted? Nobody could know.
One thing I did know for sure: whatever happened, I was looking forward to it.
"Alright."
I wrapped up the conversation and stretched out on the bed. I'd heard the plan. All that was left was to sit back and wait. I fell asleep looking forward to the little play headed my way.
And so, four days.
Four full cycles of night and day. And in all that time, astonishingly, nothing happened. I just went about my ordinary life. No tells. No omens. Knowing the plan in advance didn't make anything change in some dramatic way.
That didn't mean everything was exactly the same, though.
I treated this stretch as a kind of prep period — the window between deciding and doing, when you gather your people and collect your information. And sure enough, whenever Lee Eun-byul came to find me, she would occasionally run a little census.
"By the way, where do you live? With your family?"
"Nah, I've got my own place."
"Oh... I see. Isn't the commute rough? I live around here and I still can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning..."
"I live nearby too. Takes about twenty or thirty minutes."
Exchanges like that. What neighborhood, how far, who I lived with. She was pretty persistent about it. Not that she ever asked outright. She'd just wait for a gap in the conversation and slip one or two questions through the cracks in my attention, quiet as anything. Subtle enough that I almost wouldn't have clocked it as a background check. If I hadn't already known about the plan, I might have let the whole thing slide right past me.
But I had clocked it. And knowing full well it was recon, I handed the information over without a fight.
Why? Because it looked like fun! If I didn't feed her the intel, it'd be that much harder for a pack of delinquents to "coincidentally" cross my path!!
For the sake of a good time, that was a sacrifice I could make. Someone was offering to drop a whole stage play into my boring life. That was more than enough to be worth it. And it wasn't like I'd given her my actual address — just the general route I took home. I was getting the better end of the deal for free.
Anyway. After deliberately leaking that much, I got a rough briefing from her other self, Good-for-nothing Me. I wanted to know roughly where they were going to run the thing. How else was I supposed to play along properly? Luckily, she answered without a fuss.
My information went in, the plan got more specific, and that newly refined information looped right back around to me. Unfortunately, even Lee Eun-byul didn't seem to have the whole thing down cold. From the sound of it, this "friend" of hers had written most of the script.
Still, boiled down, her answer was this: the plan would kick off in some dark, out-of-the-way alley. I nodded to myself. I knew exactly which one she meant.
So that's the place.
Near where I lived, there was an alley people barely used. No utility poles, no convenience store, no housing close enough to matter — the kind of stretch that sank into pitch black the second night fell. Not a road anyone liked to walk. I used it all the time, though. It was faster.
That was clearly where they'd decided to stage it. Fair enough. I couldn't think of a better fit. Atmosphere, no foot traffic, and just damp enough to feel unsavory. I'd have picked it too.
I was still turning all of that over when I realized the lecture had ended.
"—Oh, look at that, we're already out of time. Good work, everyone. Exams aren't far off, so please study hard~"
The professor glanced at the clock and called it.
"Thank you!"
The students sprang up like they'd been sitting on coils and shot out the door. The lecture must have been pretty dull. Not that I could talk.
I watched them go for a second, then stretched.
"Nngh...!"
Crack. Stiff muscle unknotted and a dull pull ran through my whole body. For once, even that uncomfortable sensation felt like a clean little rush. My brain, which had been slowly drowning, clawed its way back to something like consciousness. I swore under my breath.
Goddamn calculus.
I mean, for fuck's sake — the economics department is a humanities track. Why the hell were we learning math? Why was I sitting here concentrating harder on calculus than I ever had in high school? This was some next-level bullshit on top of bullshit. For someone who'd spent his entire life hovering around a C-minus in math, derivatives and integrals were a brick wall. What even is f(x)... and why do I have to find it? I'd wiped that crap from my memory years ago drawing NSFW art.
"Hah..."
I let out a sigh, then decided to take the win I had: it was over, and I got to go home.
I grabbed my bag and headed out of the building. The sun hung at a slant and stabbed straight into my eyes. It was already perched on the far edge of the sky. Not sunset yet, but it wouldn't be long before everything went red.
Class had run especially late today. Two lectures on the schedule already, and then they'd gone and tacked on a makeup session. I hadn't crawled outside until around five.
A yawn slipped out before I could stop it.
"Haaah......"
Tired. Sleepy. My brain, which had been running hot for hours, was formally requesting time off. If I lay down right now I could probably sleep a clean two or three hours. Throw in some Chinese takeout first and it'd be the icing on the cake. From somewhere deep in my soul, a voice was ordering me to become a good-for-nothing slob this instant.
I shook my head.
Can't do that.
Unfortunately, I still had somewhere to be. The fun little event I'd been looking forward to for days was, as it happened, today. I was a bit annoyed it had to be today of all days, but according to Good-for-nothing Me, there wasn't a better window.
Current time: 5 p.m. Too early for office workers to be heading home, late enough that most students had already left campus. The dead hour sandwiched between four and six. Which meant a place that was already empty became even emptier, and the sunlight coming down had just enough mood to it. Add a few slouching delinquents and the set dressing would be perfect.
I walked toward home for a good while... and finally set foot on the promised ground.
"Ah."
I poked my head around the corner into the narrow alley, and there they were — a whole knot of people. Quite a few of them. Five women in total, packed in tight, like they meant to plug the alley with sheer numbers.
I gave them a once-over. And I had to admit, I was a little impressed.
Oh.
The lineup in that alley was... pretty solid. The clothes alone were extremely promising. Every last one of them was dressed light and sharp, the kind of outfits that showed off a body on purpose.
One of them had on neon pants and a gray Under Armour shirt, the fabric stretched tight enough to leave nothing to the imagination. The chest swelling over the top was... honestly a little on the small side, but the thin waist and the thighs were more than enough to work with.
And the one right next to her? White sweatpants down below, not much exposure there — but up top she was wearing a tank top with some real nerve. Follow the line down from those pale collarbones and you got cleavage cut deep enough it looked like someone had shaded it in. Every time my eyes dropped there, I could feel my dick give a little twitch.
That was just the two in front. The other three were dressed plenty hot as well. Thin fabric, body-hugging cuts, short tight Under Armour pieces, the lot of them.
Classic delinquent fashion, apparently migrated over to the women of this world. Back in my original world, nothing on earth had looked worse... but the delinquent look here was just plain hot. So the delinquents had been visionaries all along. I made a solemn vow, then and there, to start calling them eyecandy instead of eyesores.
And somewhere under that, I was also deeply, privately relieved.
Phew...
Thank god. I'd been worried there might be an ugly one in the mix. Play or not, if something like a tattooed-pig-broth-gukbap TS-freak had been standing there, I might have turned around and run on the spot.
...Christ. A tattooed-pig-broth-gukbap TS-freak. What manner of chaos even was that? I was the one who'd said it and I was still horrified that such a thing could exist. That was not an entity that should be allowed in reality. It shouldn't even be allowed in the imagination. I scrubbed the word from my head as fast as I could — it was up there with the madness of Nyarlathotep.
Huh?
I was still hanging there with my head poked around the corner, scanning the alley, when it happened. Stare at the same scene long enough and you always find something new. After a few minutes of openly ogling the women, I spotted a man sitting quietly behind them.
A face I'd seen any number of times at school. The guy whose trademark nasal voice and phoniness had always rubbed me the wrong way. I hadn't expected that face in a thousand years, and I couldn't help but freeze.
What's he doing there?
Han Ho-cheol was standing right in the middle of the delinquents.