The Weight of Guilt
The “lesson” only ended when Ho-cheol was on the verge of passing out. Se-won would have gladly kept going, but one more hit and the guy really would have blacked out, so he had no choice but to stop.
“Urgh…”
The last look at Ho-cheol’s face showed both cheeks so swollen and red that his features were barely recognizable.
Lee Se-won smiled with pure satisfaction at the sight.
There’s no way he comes back for more after a beating like that.
The ominous phrase criminal complaint flickered through his mind for a second, then he wiped it away. Ho-cheol knew exactly what he’d done; he wouldn’t dare report it. Even if he did, Se-won stood a good chance of walking on self-defense.
After that, Se-won gave Eun-byul a brief rundown of how things had spiraled this far—why Ho-cheol had tried to jump him, what insults had been thrown, the whole mess.
Eun-byul had been staring blankly, but she seemed to more or less accept his explanation. She’d already pieced a few things together herself on the way over.
“Ah… okay…”
Watching her nod in a daze, Se-won managed a bitter smile.
I really showed her an ugly side…
He’d gone too hard under the excuse of paying Ho-cheol back. His tone and voice had turned sharp with real anger, too. It wasn’t a side of himself he’d wanted someone he usually laughed and joked with to see. From her perspective, it must have been pretty shocking.
An awkward silence settled between them, so Se-won forced the words out.
“Should we get out of here…?”
Leaving this place seemed like the smartest move. The situation was over, and walking had to beat standing around in this uncomfortable quiet. And honestly, by now he just wanted to go home.
As he started toward the exit, Eun-byul pointed at Ho-cheol.
“Uh… what about him?”
“Leave him. He’s conscious, at least. He’ll either walk out on his own or call one of his buddies.”
“Ah. Okay.”
Eun-byul gave an awkward nod and followed him.
Ho-cheol’s swollen face snagged on her conscience for a moment, but she decided he’d brought it on himself. The sense of betrayal she felt was pretty sharp, too. She’d trusted him when he said he was going to help—only to get used like this. If Lee Se-won had frozen up the way Ho-cheol expected, something truly awful might have happened. Just thinking about it still made her head spin.
She couldn’t hold the question back.
“Um… oppa, have you been training or something for a while?”
“Huh? No. Just dabbled a little in high school.”
“Then… do you maybe squat four hundred kilos or something…?”
“I’m a total scrub. What are you talking about?”
She tilted her head.
That can’t be right…
Ordinary scrubs didn’t drop three out of five women in a fight…
Today she kept seeing sides of him she’d never known. Unlike his usual habit of freezing up whenever a crowd pressed in, the moment things turned openly hostile he’d gone strangely calm and composed. Maybe he’d decided that if trouble was already here, he might as well do whatever he wanted. Either way, it wasn’t a normal guy’s reaction.
Especially…
That look at the end.
After the thugs had all cleared out and only Ho-cheol was left in the alley—the expression on Se-won’s face still wouldn’t leave her head. In all the time she’d known him, she’d never seen it before. Angry, he’d been genuinely intimidating. Every faint trace of goodwill had vanished from his face; those cold eyes boring into someone still rose up in her mind. His features had been almost frostily blank, yet the rage seething behind those dark eyes had been unmistakable. Those fierce eyes had found their purpose and crushed people under them without mercy.
His voice, too. He hadn’t even used particularly rough language. He hadn’t raised it at all. His tone had simply dropped a little deeper, a little heavier than usual—and that alone had carried a pressure you couldn’t easily shrug off. She’d frozen for a second herself, after all. That was why she hadn’t properly stopped him when he was mercilessly slapping Ho-cheol’s face. She’d been afraid that if she interfered too actively, those eyes might turn on her… and just imagining it had been terrifying enough.
She lingered on the memory of his expression for a long while, then shook her head as if to cast the thought off.
Anyway, I’m just glad.
Glad he’d fought well. Seeing him angry was a hundred—no, a thousand—times better than watching him get hurt.
She let out a quiet breath of relief and carefully looked ahead.
“Nice weather today…”
Se-won was walking a few paces ahead of her, scratching his cheek in what looked like awkward embarrassment. The distance was only a handful of steps, but today it felt impossibly far to Eun-byul. It wasn’t just that he’d shown her so many unfamiliar sides of himself. Before that, it was the guilt over what she’d done.
In the end Han Ho-cheol had been the one who pulled the trigger, but like it or not, she had helped him do it. She couldn’t simply shrug that off. Every time the thought surfaced, her chest tightened as if something were squeezing it. The heart that had pounded with panic had settled, only to be replaced by the weight of a heavy stone.
“……”
“…Yeah. Nice weather.”
They walked on in that awkward, uncomfortable quiet—until suddenly:
“…Huh?”
Her eyes caught on Se-won’s shoulder. The skin there was discolored in a way it usually wasn’t. The moment she registered it, Eun-byul grabbed his arm without thinking.
His trudging steps stopped. His body turned halfway back toward her. Her voice came out trembling.
“W-what is this…?”
It was a bruise. The kind of mark left when something struck hard enough to cause bleeding under the skin—a wound, plain and simple. Small as it was, it was still an injury, and undeniable proof that he’d been hit.
“Ah, shit. I’ve got a bruise? No wonder it was throbbing… that damn bitch.”
Eun-byul ignored his grumbling and dropped her gaze lower. It wasn’t just the bruise on his shoulder. His arm was covered in small cuts and scrapes. Some patches were flushed red; others looked like they’d been dragged along a stone wall. They were light wounds, but more than enough to carve into her chest.
Every one of them was the mark of blocking or dodging something. And this was only one arm—she didn’t even want to imagine what it looked like under his clothes.
This is normal, though…
Right. Thinking about it properly—no matter how well he’d fought, there was a limit to what one person could do alone. There were inevitable costs. In a rough brawl, getting hurt was a given. He hadn’t won with some incredible technique that made it look easy. He’d fought desperately, held on by a thread, and barely managed to drop three of them. The pain that came with that wasn’t something you could casually guess at. She’d simply been looking away from that obvious reality.
It had to still be stinging and throbbing right now, yet he waved it off like it was nothing.
“Hey, hey, it’s fine. Spit on it and it’ll heal.”
“It is not fine!!!”
“Whoa—! Why are you yelling all of a sudden?”
She scowled hard.
And whose fault is it that it ended up like this…
The guilt settled deeper in her chest. Every wound on his body drove into her like a knife.
Eun-byul thought to herself,
If I…
If she’d gotten there a little sooner… if she’d pushed her legs even if her lungs burst… no—before any of that, if she hadn’t gone along with that stupid plan in the first place… he never would have had to go through this. In the end, the fact that he’d gotten hurt was her fault.
She forced the apology out.
“I’m sorry…”
Guilt rolled thick on her tongue.
“I’m really, really sorry…”
It felt like a stone was lodged in her throat. Every mistake she’d made replayed in her head. It felt like she’d wronged him in far too many ways.
“If I hadn’t done something so stupid… if I hadn’t given him that information… sunbae never would have had to go through any of this…”
Eun-byul slowly confessed her sins. She didn’t think the tightness in her chest would ease any other way—how she’d taken part in the plan, how days of conversation had really been an information-gathering job, how she’d passed everything straight to Ho-cheol. She was telling him, right now, that she’d been as good as an accomplice.
With every syllable her head sank lower. The longer the confession went on, the more her arms trembled. Fear kept welling up for some reason. She was too scared to look at Se-won’s face.
He’s angry, right? Of course he’s angry.
Now that he knew she’d gone along with it, there was no way he’d stay calm. Her eyes were fixed on the ground, but her mind painted Lee Se-won clearly—staring at her with the same eyes he’d used on Han Ho-cheol. She pictured him scolding her in that ice-cold tone. The Se-won in her imagination was even colder than the one he’d shown Ho-cheol.
Fear and worry set her heart pounding all over again.
This is it…
She was certain this friendship was over. Eun-byul steeled herself to accept whatever blade came out of Se-won’s mouth.
……Meanwhile, Lee Se-won was just confused.
Huh?
Honestly, he had no idea why she was acting like this.
Why is she suddenly like this?
One second she was apologizing, the next she was confessing her crimes, and now she was standing there trembling all by herself. On top of that, every “sin” she listed was something he already knew. She’d already spilled it once while logged in as Good-for-nothing Me. Hearing it a second time didn’t exactly move the needle.
And to be completely honest, Se-won didn’t even think of it as her fault.
That psycho was the one who stabbed her in the back.
When you boiled it down, Eun-byul had just been used. Who could have predicted some lunatic was actually preparing to jump someone? It was practically a natural disaster. All the shit had come from Han Ho-cheol.
Se-won genuinely believed she hadn’t done much wrong.
Well, if getting used counts as a mistake, then sure, it’s a mistake.
He’d known about the plan himself and still gone along with it. He wasn’t exactly in a position to lecture anyone. And right now, fresh off wrecking Ho-cheol, he was in a pretty good mood.
Hmm…
Se-won looked ahead for a moment. There was Lee Eun-byul, trembling like something terrifying was about to happen. Gone was her usual easy confidence; all that remained was a scared kitten. Leave her alone a little longer and she looked ready to cry.
Honestly, I kind of want to mess with her…
But he decided against it—she really might start crying. Instead he stepped closer and spoke gently. Quiet, but kind.
“…It’s okay.”
And like soothing a crying child, he stroked her head.
Her cap must have flown off somewhere while she was sprinting down the alley; glossy hair was fully exposed now. That night-sky blue looked especially good under the fading sunset light.
Se-won huffed a small laugh and went on.
“I’m not really mad, so you don’t have to worry. People make mistakes. It happens.”
Stroke, stroke.
He smoothed her hair gently. The feel of straight strands clinging to his palm was oddly fun. A pretty enjoyable toy all on its own.
“…Huh?”
Eun-byul lifted the head she’d been hanging. She’d been certain a scolding was coming. She’d expected those cold eyes fixed on her. What came back instead was the soft touch of a hand.
What was going on…?
She looked up at Se-won’s face to make sense of it. The expression she’d feared wasn’t there. There was only him, standing with the faintest smile—as if he were trying to calm someone who was anxious, smiling with quiet kindness.
She stared blankly for a moment, and then he spoke again.
“And you came to help me anyway. That’s enough.”
“……”
Eun-byul took in the sight clearly. She fixed the smile on his face firmly in her mind. The reddened light of sunset softly brightened everything around them. Light coming in from the side caught in his black hair and reflected. Warm color filled her vision completely—somehow romantic, somehow dreamlike.
And in that ironic scene where she was the one being comforted—
“Ah…”
—she could only watch, spellbound.