Time Attack Begins
If forcing food down someone else's throat is called food assault, then what do you call the act of cramming unwanted information into someone else's brain against their will?
Brain assault?
Anyway, maybe it was because I was already dead tired and then got a whole load of hard-to-digest information dumped on me on top of that.
My head spun like someone had jammed a stick into my skull and was stirring it around at random.
That was why I dug through the room, grabbed a notebook and pen that had been rolling around in the drawer, and started writing.
It was a routine I used to fall back on whenever I started a new part-time job and had to learn the ropes.
I filled the pages with the feeling of pulling everything that had entered my head straight back out again, and after a while I finally knew for certain.
What I had to do right now.
The most urgent thing was, of course—
Fact-check.
Yeah. That had to come before anything else.
In other words… I needed to confirm whether the photos I had just seen were nothing more than fakes the damn app had cooked up, or whether they actually existed in reality.
I wasn't sure if I should call it lucky, but honestly it didn't seem all that hard.
I even had a pretty solid excuse ready to go.
And so, after spending the night with my eyes wide open thanks to the nonstop throbbing in my skull, morning finally arrived.
I headed to the lecture hall for class right on time.
The moment I stepped inside, I saw her.
That familiar back of the head, the color I knew so well, occupying the very last row of seats like it was her personal reserved spot and sleeping face-down on the desk.
Maybe she was exhausted from finishing her personal training first thing in the morning and coming straight to class.
When I got closer I could even hear the soft little snore she was making.
…Sleeping like a baby, huh.
Meanwhile someone else had barely managed an hour of sleep because his head was a complete mess.
I really wanted to give that perfectly ripe apple of a head a solid noogie, but I held back for now.
After all, nothing had been confirmed as fact yet.
Punishment could wait until every check was finished.
Swallowing the rising anger, I sat down in the seat right in front of Lee Chaerin. Maybe she sensed my presence, because the back of her head that had been locked in a staring contest with the desk suddenly flinched.
"Mmm…"
"You awake?"
"@!&*#…"
"What?"
"Gimme a Hot Six…"
What the hell was she talking about first thing in the morning?
"Excuse me, miss, Hot Six is something you find at the convenience store. Or try the vending machine on the second floor."
"I told you to buy me one…"
"When? In your dreams?"
"I sent you a text ages ago…?"
"You know I barely ever check my texts, so why do you always have to bitch at me through chat? If it was that urgent you could've just called."
"Talking is too much work…"
She was seriously trying to die of exhaustion.
Well, the training the kids in the Supernatural Ability Department went through was pretty brutal.
Ever since I remembered that my previous life had ended with something like death from overwork, I had never skipped exercise no matter what else I let slide. Even so, the training Chaerin's department did was tough enough that it wore me out too.
I had sat in on a session once out of curiosity, and it wasn't a metaphor—they really did work you until you were right on the edge of throwing up.
Doing that every single morning, starting before dawn, of course she would be ready to drop.
But still…
The way her fatigue felt like it wasn't only from training—was that just my brain being fried from yesterday?
"So… you don't have any…?"
"If you need one, just say so. The convenience store is too far, but I can go to the vending machine on the second floor for you."
"That one only has the original flavor…"
"Once it's in your stomach it's all the same caffeine."
"Original tastes like ass… you drink it…"
After a short back-and-forth with the girl who casually tried to use people as errand boys first thing in the morning, I finally slipped out the words I had been rolling around in my mouth, unsure whether to say them.
"Oh right. Hey, Lee Chaerin."
"What."
"Let me borrow your phone for a sec."
"Why would you look for your phone with me?"
"No, not my phone. Yours."
The second I tossed it out as casually as asking a deskmate to borrow an eraser, I saw it.
Lee Chaerin's shoulders, still planted against the desk, gave a sharp little twitch.
"Hey, you sleeping? I said let me borrow your phone for a minute."
"…No."
"Come on, just lend it! It'll really only take a second."
"What are you even trying to do with someone else's phone?"
"Well… I got a new phone yesterday."
"Suddenly?"
"I slipped on the way home and… anyway, my old phone got completely wrecked. I couldn't transfer a single photo or anything."
So I just wanted to borrow her phone for a bit to move over some of the old pictures we had taken together.
That was the excuse I had prepared for the fact-check.
Why did I deliberately single out the word "photos"?
Obvious, right?
So she would immediately think about what was sitting in her own gallery.
In other words, this was a kind of… trap.
If Chaerin's phone was packed with the exact same photos I had seen last night?
She would never hand the phone over to me.
She would make up any excuse she could.
In that sense, I actually hoped she would just casually pass me her phone without a second thought.
That would mean all the photos I had seen were fakes.
I wanted that outcome—
"N-no."
Reality went the opposite way.
"Why not?"
"…Battery's dead."
Ah, so that was the excuse she was going with?
"You can just charge it."
"I said no. How long do you think it'd take to transfer all that stuff?"
"Who said I was transferring everything? Just a few important photos. And if we use AirDrop it won't take any time at all."
"…I said no. I'll send them later when I get home, okay?"
"When's later?"
Just as I expected, the resistance was way stronger than necessary.
"How should I know! I'm exhausted, so shut up for a bit."
On top of that she was getting snappy and trying to shut the conversation down.
Considering that until just a few months ago we had freely borrowed each other's phones whenever we needed to, the reaction was impossible not to find suspicious.
So I poked a little harder.
"Tsk… you're acting weird."
"W-what is?"
They say a thief feels guilty about their own feet.
When I deliberately dropped my voice half a tone lower than usual, Chaerin must have sensed something was off, because she slowly lifted her head and looked my way.
"I just started thinking… is this really something to get this pissed off about?"
"…"
"You used to lend it to me just fine."
"Th-that was then."
"Yeah?"
Better to leave a beat of silence here.
Sometimes silence hits heavier than words.
Sure enough, the effect was immediate.
The longer I just stared without saying anything, the more Chaerin's eyes started to waver.
"Don't tell me… you've got something weird on your phone?"
"W-what the hell are you saying, you crazy bastard!"
Eyes blown wide.
Lips trembling.
And a face flushed bright red.
At a glance it looked like the face of someone thrown off by an unexpected remark… but no matter how I looked at it, it was the face of someone who had just been stabbed right in the bullseye.
"That's s-sexual harassment, you know?!"
"I was just joking. Why are you taking it so seriously…"
I only said it as a joke, but the way you're reacting makes it even weirder.
I threw that nuance right back at her, and maybe she decided there was nothing to gain from talking to me any further.
Chaerin shot up from her seat like she had never been fused to the desk in the first place.
Screeeech—
"Hey, where are you going all of a sudden?"
"…Convenience store, why!"
Watching her stomp off, huffing and puffing as if to advertise to the whole room how pissed she was, I became certain all over again.
Because I had seen it.
Under the long sleeve of her hoodie, the index finger of her right hand was twitching and jerking like it was having a spasm.
And as far as I knew… that was a habit Lee Chaerin showed whenever she was lying.
…So those photos were real.
Crazy bastard, crazy bastard, crazy bastard.
Is Kim Taeseong actually insane?
There are things you say and things you don't. Even if you're joking, what kind of joke is that…!
I was furious, but when I thought about it, we had traded jokes like that pretty often in the past.
Maybe it was just the side effect of knowing each other for so long.
He had probably said it without thinking, the same way he always did… and I had gone and taken it completely seriously.
It was like a friend coming in for a WWE-style play fight and me suddenly escalating it into a full UFC brawl.
Was that why?
Or was it something else? Either way, my face was burning like crazy.
There's no way he said it because he actually knows something… right?
I was fanning my face with my hand when that thought suddenly popped up.
I shook my head hard to get rid of it.
Of course that couldn't be it.
It wasn't like I had posted those photos… anywhere.
The owners of the private accounts I had looked at for "research" casually uploaded naked pictures of themselves to SNS, but those people were just crazy.
If I uploaded them carelessly and someone recognized me, what then?
My distinctive hair was obvious even from a hundred meters away, so I could always slap a filter or sticker over it, but someone might still recognize me from the parts I failed to cover.
That was why I was fine just keeping them, but I would never, ever upload or share them anywhere.
…Still, just in case.
I'll really make this the last time.
Honestly, when Kim Taeseong joked about whether I had something on my phone, I got a little scared thinking he had found the photos that absolutely could not be shown to anyone… but I still needed to relieve the stress.
As long as I was careful enough that no one else ever found out, it would be fine. Just careful.
Nothing had gone wrong so far, so what could possibly happen?
Really, truly, this is the last time…
"This isn't easy. Not easy at all…"
I had somehow finished the fact-check, but that only made my head hurt worse.
From my perspective it was more than justified… it had been a full fifteen years.
They say even mountains and rivers change in ten years, and I had known my childhood friend for fifteen. The fact that the girl who acted like the most upright person in the world in front of me might actually be a pervert who secretly did outdoor exhibitionism behind my back had just been revealed.
Who the hell could stay calm in a situation like that?
Only a psychopath with no emotions.
"If those photos are real, then that penalty thing is probably real too…"
So I actually had to take Chaerin and do… that?
And with her consent, three whole times?
Judging by the reaction she had shown when I poked at her earlier, it was realistically impossible.
But I still had to make it possible.
First clear the mission or whatever it was, and then I could do a full dogeza or a grand prostration or whatever… she probably wouldn't kill me after that.
There was just one thing I couldn't understand in the middle of all this—
"Is there no time limit or anything?"
At least as far as I remembered, there wasn't.
Only the penalty for failure had been written down. No deadline of any kind.
So… could I just do nothing for the rest of my life?
The thought that I might have found a loophole in this damn app made me clench my fist on pure reflex—right as the phone in my other hand started buzzing and vibrating like crazy.
The storage capacity of the managed cloud is nearly at its limit.
Please manage your folders immediately and free up space.
The phone was throwing a full-blown tantrum, as if warning me that something very unpleasant would happen if I didn't, and that was how I understood.
It hadn't forgotten to write a deadline. There simply hadn't been any need to write one in the first place.
Don't tell me… this cloud capacity is basically a life bar?
Just in case, I immediately checked the remaining space. The last time I looked there had been a little under 80 GB left; now it had already dropped below 70 GB.
At this rate it wouldn't be strange if the remaining capacity hit zero before the end of the month.
Maybe it was because I was facing what might be a crisis.
Or maybe the energy drink Chaerin had forced on me with the "buy one get one free" excuse was finally kicking in. Either way, my thoughts started racing at about three times the usual speed.
Roughly 10 GB had vanished in two days, so converting the remaining capacity into time gave me about two weeks.
In that time I had to get Chaerin to voluntarily drag me into her little hobby?
But how?
For that to work, Chaerin would also have to know that I knew she was secretly doing that kind of thing behind the scenes.
The only way that condition could be met was if I "accidentally" ran into Lee Chaerin masturbating outdoors while completely naked.
…Tsk. "Accidentally" run into her?
That… if I played it right, might actually be possible.