You Weak-Ass Bitches
Thud! Thud! Thud!
"Hah... hah...!"
A figure tore down the sidewalk under the red wash of the setting sun, weaving through the stream of pedestrians that filled the street in place of cars. It was Lee Eun-byul, sprinting at full tilt toward the alleyway where the original little performance had been scheduled to go down.
She'd been running for a long time. Her lungs burned and her heart hammered like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest, but she could not make her legs stop. The dread clamping down on her skull would not allow it.
She muttered to herself as she ran.
Damn it... what the hell is going on?
Her head was stuffed full of the photo Lee Se-won had sent. A side-profile selfie, his face completely blank. If that had been all, she might have shrugged it off and moved on. But the moment she saw his cheek — flushed an ugly, unmistakable red — every worst-case scenario in the book came flooding in at once.
It was a clear mark of violence. Nothing she had planned for. Nothing she had even imagined.
She had bombarded him with texts after that, hoping against hope that he was fine. That it was just makeup. That Se-won and Han Ho-cheol had cooked the whole thing up together to mess with her.
No reply came. And to make matters worse, Ho-cheol wasn't picking up his phone either.
A grim possibility flickered through her mind.
No way...
What if Se-won was actually getting beaten right now? What if he really was surrounded by thugs, in genuine danger?
She pictured him trembling under the blows. She pictured him breaking, fat helpless tears rolling down his face as he folded under violence he couldn't fight. The image would not leave her.
"Please..."
Lee Eun-byul prayed that nothing had happened.
Inside the alley, after the sun had gone down.
"Hhhk... hhhk..."
"Hah... hah..."
Ragged breath tore up out of raw lungs. The alley was thick with it — not from one person, but from everyone still standing.
From the middle of that ragged chorus, Lee Se-won bellowed, furious. He was, at present, extremely pissed off about how unfair this all was.
"You cowardly bastards!"
The one-on-one setup he'd baited them into at the start was long gone. Taking down Yu-ju after she'd swaggered forward had gone well enough. That had let him handle the next girl in roughly the same fashion. She'd watched the earlier fight and tried to guard her solar plexus, but Se-won's attacks slipped through the gaps like a knife, and she folded fast. Too busy watching for his fists, she never saw the Paralysis Kick coming.
Two of them on the ground was apparently enough to trigger a survival instinct. The rest piled in at once. Getting jumped as a group, they'd decided, was less humiliating than losing to a guy one-on-one.
After that, it was a brawl. Fists came in from every angle. Kicks tangled with kicks. With that many attacks flying at once, the disadvantage hit Se-won almost immediately. Human-wave tactics were the oldest strategy in history, and in a close-quarters scrap they were still brutally efficient. Against numbers, a guy who was already weaker was always going to be on the back foot.
"Hah... hah..."
If you'd only seen this much, Eun-byul's worst fears wouldn't have been far off. He was, in fact, being subjected to violence. He was, in fact, surrounded by thugs.
What Eun-byul had failed to account for was that Lee Se-won was not, by any stretch, a well-behaved human being.
"Come at me one-on-one like you've got some pride, you weak-ass bitches!"
"Sh-shut up!"
Just because they'd started ganging up on him didn't mean he was standing there taking it. The second he saw an opening he tried to use one of them as a human shield, and even while he was getting hit his eyes were hunting for weak points. One of them had already caught a fist square on the jaw because of it. They had every reason to be careful.
The standoff dragged on. Se-won raised his voice again.
"Don't you have any pride?! Just hit me in the dick already!!"
"We don't even HAVE dicks, you know?!"
"Oh. Right."
One of the girls shouted it like she couldn't believe what she was hearing. It was a conversation so completely off-kilter it didn't belong anywhere near a street fight.
Yu-ra, in her neon hot pants, watched the whole exchange and scratched her head like she was trying to dig a hole in it.
Is this guy actually insane...?
She could not process what she was looking at. In a situation like this, a guy — hell, even a regular girl — would be shrinking back by now. And this bastard was still cracking stupid jokes.
Whatever meek act he'd put on at the start was gone. What stood in front of them now was a rabid dog.
What is wrong with this guy...
He wasn't a good fighter. That much was obvious. He was weaker than they were, and he wasn't particularly fast either. They were the ones landing most of the clean hits. He was the one at a disadvantage. So why were his eyes still burning like that?
Every time she met that sharp, predatory stare, she felt herself flinch. They were supposed to have the upper hand, and yet the second she left him an angle she could practically feel a fist burying itself in her jaw. Two of them already eating dirt was all the proof anyone needed.
Yu-ra shot Ho-cheol a look of pure resentment.
Hey. You said we just had to stand there and look scary...
He'd asked them to come out and set the mood, nothing more. She'd dragged herself out here, swallowing the hassle, for the grand reward of one round of drinks. Actually throwing hands had never been part of the deal. This wasn't even her area.
She had no interest in ending up like Yu-ju, twitching in the dirt. Honestly, she just wanted this over so she could go home.
"Hah... hey. How about we stop fighting and just go our separate ways?"
So she put the offer on the table. They were in a standoff, both sides catching their breath. As good a moment as she was going to get.
"You don't want to stick around here either, right? Nobody wants to burn more stamina for no reason. We won't even try to stop you if you walk. Let's just call it here."
"Hey!!"
Han Ho-cheol was the first to react. Of course he didn't want it to end like this. He'd come out here with a whole production planned. If it fizzled out this messily, it wouldn't just ruin his mood — the story that reached Eun-byul would be a disaster. That was unacceptable.
But that was Ho-cheol's problem.
"You stay out of this!"
From Yu-ra's perspective, she had already done more than enough for one round of drinks.
Whether that guy's in a bind or not is none of my business.
Ho-cheol had cooked this whole thing up by himself. She hadn't even wanted to come. He'd begged, so she'd shown up. She had zero reason to hang around any longer.
"Oh. Not bad."
Fortunately, the other side seemed receptive. He nodded like it was a decent proposal. Yu-ra smiled inwardly. Right. No reason to stay. No point in a war of attrition nobody needed. She could finally go home and see her cute little puppy, Poppy...
What came out of his mouth was a rejection.
"But I don't want to."
"Why?!"
Yu-ra blurted it out on reflex. Why? She was offering to just let him walk! They could end this without throwing another punch!
He was the one at a disadvantage. She could not, for the life of her, understand why he would turn that down.
She stared at him, dumbfounded. Se-won opened his mouth.
"Look, I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss my apartment. And I don't enjoy getting hurt. But..."
His gaze shifted. At the end of it, Han Ho-cheol was sitting on the ground.
Se-won looked at him and finished the thought.
"I haven't finished wrecking that guy yet. I'm not leaving until I do."
A cold stare locked onto Ho-cheol.
It was a look cold enough to freeze the overheated air itself. Ho-cheol flinched. That was genuine. That was the look of someone who sincerely, enthusiastically wanted to beat the hell out of him.
He swallowed hard.
What is wrong with this psycho...
How had it come to this? The plan hadn't just gone off the rails. It had been run over, set on fire, and dumped in a ditch.
Se-won was supposed to be the one shaking in his boots by now. The fact that Ho-cheol was the one scared instead was almost impossible to process. And even more unsettling — the physical advantage they'd started with was evaporating by the second.
Right now, for instance.
"Opening Kick!"
Mid-conversation, Se-won's foot came out of nowhere and slammed dead-center into Yu-ra's groin.
Hit square in her weak point without a shred of warning, Yu-ra let out a strangled sound and crumpled to the pavement.
"Ghk?!"
Both hands clamped between her legs, she dropped to her knees and shook. The pain rattled all the way up into her skull and scrambled everything it found there.
Se-won looked down at her with the idle curiosity of a researcher who'd just confirmed a hypothesis.
"Hmm... so it really does hurt like hell when a girl gets hit there too. Learned something new... noted..."
"You cheap-shot bastard!! We were in the middle of talking!!"
Yu-ra howled it from the ground, outraged. Se-won snorted.
"Cheap shot, my ass. That's rich, coming from the people who jumped me."
"Kh...!"
That made three on the ground. Considering the guy who'd put them there was weaker and slower than all of them, it was bordering on a genuine achievement. Sure, a few cheap tricks had gone into building that particular résumé — but three people down was three people down. Nobody could argue with the math.
An ugly thought slithered through Ho-cheol's mind.
Is this psycho actually going to win...?
The girls he'd gone to the trouble of rounding up, all of them on the ground, and Se-won walking over to him at the end of it. It was almost impossible, obviously. An ordinary guy beating five delinquents was not a thing that happened. But after everything he'd just watched, he could no longer rule it out.
Useless bitches.
Three down. Two left. Se-won looked exhausted, sure — but nobody had any idea what he'd pull next in that state. And after that, just like he'd said, it would be Ho-cheol's turn. He had never been on the receiving end of anything like this in his life. The mere possibility of it was terrifying.
Which was how he arrived at a certain thought.
Should I just run...?
The exact calculation Se-won had been making at the start of all this was now running through Han Ho-cheol's head. And it looked pretty good, actually.
Yeah. If he ran, Se-won wouldn't be able to do a thing about it. Lose his actual target and he'd have no choice but to take Yu-ra's deal and slink off.
The girls might be a little disappointed, but...
He could smooth that over later. Right now, getting out of here was the priority.
He chewed on it for another second. Then he bolted for the mouth of the alley.
"Huh?!"
"Hey!!"
Voices erupted behind him — the girls, startled, and Se-won, furious. Ho-cheol ignored them and ran. The alley wasn't that long. By the time anyone finished shouting, it would already be too late to catch him. He was getting closer to the street with every stride.
A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Just a little more.
A few more steps and he'd be out. He reached the end of the alley and started to swing around the corner.
...But someone came flying around that same corner first.
"Wha—?!"
He barely had time to register the figure bursting into his path. Momentum did the rest. He slammed into them at a full run.
WHAM!
Body hit body. His balance vanished. Clutching a head that was ringing like a bell, Ho-cheol thought, furiously:
Who the hell—
What kind of idiot pops out of nowhere in a deserted alley like this?! He looked up, irritation written all over his face — and then he froze.
"Huh?"
Lee Eun-byul was standing there. A dazed look on her face. Her night-sky hair still settling around her shoulders from the collision.
"Whew. You sure got here fast."
From behind him came Lee Se-won's voice, thick with relief.