Han Ma-hyeon.
Han Ma-hyeon.
When I met Da-yeon outside the school, she looked at me with worried eyes.
"Si-yoon, who is he...?"
"He confessed and asked me out."
"Seriously...? That's terrifying..."
Park Ji-hoon looked at me and said,
"Want me to handle it?"
"Nah, you know that kid who was in front of me? He said he'd try to handle it himself."
"Yeah?"
We chatted about this and that as we headed home.
I sent Kim Tae-oh and Park Ji-hoon a message telling them not to get involved.
If those two jumped in, Han Seok-hyeon wouldn't suffer properly.
"I'm back...?"
Dad came running up fast and pulled me into a hug.
"Si-yoon!"
"What. Can't breathe."
Dad looked at me and said with a big grin,
"Dad hit number one on the Neelboard!!!"
"Yeah, congrats."
"...What kind of reaction is that."
"That's my line, don't use it."
"...So mean..."
"It's way rarer for your songs to drop off the Neelboard in the first place."
I crouched down to get a close look at Alpha and Beta, who were wagging their tails.
"Did you miss your big sis~?"
""Meong!""
When I paid more attention to the cats than to Dad, he trudged off in a sulk.
"Dad."
"What..."
"Come here."
As if he'd been waiting for exactly that, Dad hurried back and scooped me up in a princess carry.
"You worked hard~"
"Right?!"
Dad, who was now a year shy of forty, was definitely still young.
Whenever exam period rolled around, there was nobody around to hang out with, so I got bored.
Han Ma-hyeon had told me to come an hour early tomorrow, so I briefly considered it...
But why would I come in early just to watch a shitshow.
I'll just make the excuse that I only got four hours of sleep because of my schedule.
Lately, besides Uncle Sheen, I'd been watching another streamer's broadcasts a lot and dropping 1,000-won donations.
- Noprincess has donated 1,000 won.
Big sis Dubu! You're so pretty today too! (dangling dangling)
- "Yeah, thanks... Why are there only dudes in my chat! All of you, just get lost!"
The streamer named Dubu, whose charmingly puppy-like voice was her signature, wailed.
She was a female streamer I'd gotten to know because she sometimes did collaborative streams with Uncle Sheen.
When I'd been showering her with donations and asked why her nickname was Dubu, she said it was because her skin was pale.
Every time she gave a vicious mission or said something, I'd fire off 1,000 won, and before I knew it, I'd become a known name on this channel.
- Noprincess has donated 1,000 won.
Big sis Dubu! I'm going to sleep first! (dangling dangling)
"Quit calling me 'big sis' when you've got a dick!!!"
- Noprincess has donated 1,000 won.
Big bro Dubu! Good night! (dangling dangling)
"Wow... that's creepy as fuck, you son of a bitch..."
I smirked, messed around on my phone for a bit, and fell asleep.
In the morning, as soon as I sent Han Seok-hyeon a text, a reply came.
(Han Seok-hyeon) - I really tried everything I could... I couldn't stop my brother... Please... Just spare his life...
(Han Seok-hyeon) - Can you please not come an hour early today...? I'll try to handle it...
Seeing Han Seok-hyeon trying harder than I'd expected... my original plan had been to send him to the next world within half a year, but now I figured maybe I shouldn't go quite that far after all.
While I was mulling it over alone, looking at my phone, Dad came into the room.
"Huh? My daughter's awake?"
"Yeah, I'm hungry~"
"Alright, get ready for school."
Dad let Alpha and Beta into my room and headed out toward the living room.
Alpha and Beta immediately jumped up onto the bed.
They were fluffy; Dad must have brushed them this morning.
I sniffed the roasted-grain scent from the jelly beans on Beta's front paws, then threw off the covers and got up.
"Ughh... I've still gotta get ready."
I checked my Pineapple Phone; there were twenty-four messages from Han Ma-hyeon.
I usually got to school about thirty minutes early anyway, so I finished getting ready quickly and ate the breakfast Dad had set out.
Dad watched me shovel food into my mouth and smiled.
"Is school fun?"
"Super."
An answer with zero hesitation... Honestly, it was a damn riot.
To the point where I'd been carrying convenience-store popcorn in my bag lately, just in case something went down.
An occasion to eat it was bound to come up soon.
Dad smiled as he patted my head.
I felt a twinge of guilt toward my oblivious dad, but I smiled right back and kept eating.
When I arrived at school, sure enough, Han Ma-hyeon was sitting at my desk with his entourage.
He'd been scratching it up with a knife, and the word 'slut' was carved into it.
It was so childish it was hard to believe the guy was a senior. Even more than I'd imagined.
Han Seok-hyeon had said he'd handle it himself, but there he was, kneeling off to the side.
Han Ma-hyeon gestured with his chin for me to sit at Han Seok-hyeon's desk.
Acting like I was terrified, I slowly walked over and sat down.
A rank, coppery smell stung my nose... a smell that openly announced something had been stuffed into my desk drawer.
"Thanks to you, my little brother is totally fucked. Aren't you sorry?"
"...I'm sorry..."
Thunk!
Han Ma-hyeon slammed the knife into the desk.
'Wow, he's pretty strong~'
"Why'd you ignore my messages... Do I look like a joke to you, you fucking cunt..."
Han Ma-hyeon was suddenly posturing, and I could see that every kid in my class was visibly terrified.
Then Han Ma-hyeon held out a paper packet toward me.
I looked, and it was a tooth.
I briefly imagined the kind of expression a girl would make when seeing a tooth, then fixed a rigid look on my face.
"Eek!"
"It's Seok-hyeon's tooth. Your Prince Charming you chose... Treasure it..."
"Ueu..."
I hurriedly covered my mouth with my hand, and Han Ma-hyeon grinned greasily at the sight of me.
"Also... your friend's pretty damn cute too. Da-yeon, was it?"
He must've heard that Da-yeon and I were hanging around together.
Han Ma-hyeon was crossing a line.
I was trying to play along nicely...
And before I knew it, I muttered,
"Tch... That's not cool."
"...What?"
I put on a flustered expression and said,
"Huh? Ah... I'm sorry."
"Ha... Is this bitch crazy...?"
"Um, Da-yeon, she's... the Hanseong daughter, you know..."
"I know."
I kept a careful expression and said,
"You don't really seem to know, though...?"
Before my words were even finished, Han Ma-hyeon slammed the short sword he was holding into the floor.
KWAANG!
"I, know, okay..."
"There's... this friend who hangs around with us, named Tae-oh... He's a bodyguard... and he's seriously incredibly strong..."
"Ha, what bullshit bodyguard..."
At that moment, the teacher came into the classroom. She flinched when she saw Han Ma-hyeon and smiled awkwardly.
"I need to do homeroom, so I'm sorry, but... would you mind stepping outside for a moment...?"
"Yes."
The seniors all shuffled out, following Han Ma-hyeon.
The classroom fell silent.
Han Seok-hyeon got up to go sit at his own desk, but I shot him a look, and he sat down at mine instead.
Han Seok-hyeon, silently crying to himself...
"Ack, you crying? That's fucking hilarious... I looked into you, you know... I heard there was some little kid who killed himself because of you back in middle school."
The reason I brought this up wasn't because I was feeling pangs of conscience, and it was absolutely not out of some sense of 'justice.'
I just needed a handle to play with my toy even better, that's all.
I leaned close to Han Seok-hyeon's ear and whispered, sticky and sweet,
"Don't cry~ Ahaha..."
What Han Ma-hyeon had put into my desk was just a bunch of dead mice.
I discreetly took photos of the scene.
The kids were screaming, Han Seok-hyeon cleaned my desk up for me, and I switched seats with him.
When self-study period started, I went to sleep just like I always did.
A demon...
A horrifying demon with the face of an angel...
Kim Si-yoon had once been a topic of controversy for being a delinquent, but the Kim Si-yoon I'd seen and heard wasn't a delinquent...
She was a terrifyingly monstrous demon.
I could feel it clearly enough... she was playing with me as her toy.
And once I was completely broken, she'd stop... or dispose of me... It was definitely gonna be the latter, 100%.
Haaaaap..... Fwooooooo....
The fact that she's only breathing once every five minutes confirms she isn't human.
The technique my brother taught me for killing a man with a pencil... could I use it to kill her...?
No... it'd never work against a demon hiding behind that innocent act...
So... there's no way for me to escape this demon's clutches.
It was only after I was away from my desk during lunch that Han Ma-hyeon's operation really kicked into gear.
Pouring milk into my bag, adding more graffiti to the desk... all sorts of methods.
Except, not on my stuff, but on his own brother's bag and desk...
Even if we had switched seats, it was honestly more baffling that he wouldn't recognize his own little brother's bag.
Or maybe he didn't do it himself and just sent some stupid goon to do it...
I looked at the desk that had gotten so caked in graffiti it had become jagged.
Sleeping on that is gonna be a real pain in the ass.
I pulled out the stuffed animal I use as a pillow from my bag and started sleeping in earnest on Seok-hyeon's clean desk.
After classes ended, I went to find Da-yeon's classroom.
Han Ma-hyeon's crew was clustered together...
But Han Ma-hyeon himself wasn't there.
"Si-yoon..."
Da-yeon was watching warily from a distance.
There was no teacher in the classroom, so Kim Tae-oh was in a standoff with Han Ma-hyeon's twelve minions.
And then Park Ji-hoon made his entrance.
Park Ji-hoon had gotten significantly bigger; his build alone was something that wouldn't be outmatched anywhere.
"Oh, what's this, what's this~? This is prime popcorn material!"
The seniors flinched when they saw Park Ji-hoon's face, but they checked the nametag identifying him as a freshman and, stone-faced, moved in.
"Ohh... this has nothing to do with me, right? Go ahead and give that Kim Tae-oh kid a real thrashing for me. Honestly, he's too handsome, it's annoying, am I right?"
In the end, Park Ji-hoon came up next to me.
Da-yeon, who'd gotten used to this kind of scene, just had a displeased look on her face but wasn't actually scared.
Makes sense... she'd have been told ages ago that just Park Ji-hoon and Kim Tae-oh, the two of them, had taken on sixty adults for us.
With them both present, why would these little punks be scary.
And sure enough... ever the thorough preparer, Park Ji-hoon had already produced a bag of popcorn.
He tried to hand some to me and Da-yeon, but...
Huhu... I slowly pulled the popcorn I had prepared myself out of my own bag.
"Oh, sick! That's some next-level preparation."
"Heh."
We bumped fists.
Da-yeon was looking at me and Park Ji-hoon with a pitiful expression...
And honestly... that stung a little.
A senior punk walked toward us.
He was a short little runt. Tae-oh grabbed him by the shoulder and drove a flying knee into him.
"As a member of HSW Team 5, I will say this one more time. Do not come closer... if you want to avoid regret..."
""Ooooh! So cool!""
The punks were thrown off by my behavior, completely different from this morning.
But anyway, the fight started with a preemptive strike from the gang confident in their numbers, and it took less than three minutes for the remaining eleven to fall asleep.
"Tch~ You gotta at least give me time to eat my popcorn."
"I must concur with that."
"The way you talk is getting weirder, dude."
"Honestly, it's funny as hell, admit it?"
While I'd been bickering with Park Ji-hoon for a good while, Han Ma-hyeon walked in.
"...What's the situation here?"
He should have been thrown off at the sight of his friends scattered on the floor, but Han Ma-hyeon just casually started stretching as he approached Kim Tae-oh.
Han Ma-hyeon had a build similar to Park Ji-hoon's.
Han Ma-hyeon closed in fast and tried an upper strike to Kim Tae-oh's cheek, but
Kim Tae-oh lightly dodged it and kicked Han Ma-hyeon's knee hard.
After driving an elbow into the jaw of the off-balance Han Ma-hyeon, Tae-oh followed up smoothly with a back-spin blow, but Han Ma-hyeon raised his arm and blocked it.
Ppak!
"Oooooh..."
From the moment Han Ma-hyeon had appeared, I had transformed back into a pure little lamb and was glued right next to Da-yeon.
With a build and height smaller than Da-yeon's, I looked like I was being held by an older sister.
""...?""
Fortunately, it seemed like Han Ma-hyeon hadn't noticed the popcorn crumbs on my mouth.
Even if he'd somehow managed to block Tae-oh's back-spin blow, the fact that Kim Tae-oh was beating the absolute shit out of Han Ma-hyeon didn't change.
If anything, Han Ma-hyeon's natural durability meant he didn't get knocked out easily, so he just took more hits.
Only after a clean high kick connected did Ma-hyeon finally go down.
Kim Tae-oh shot Park Ji-hoon a sharp look.
"Aren't you in the same outfit now? Why are you just watching?"
"It was fun, wasn't it~ Admit it~"
"Haa..."
"Honestly, if it were me, that pig would've been a 0.5-second KO."
"I'm plenty capable; I just went easy on him."
"Eeeeh? I have to go easy for a 0.5-second KO too, you know?"
"...Let's take this to the gym."
"Oh~ Now that, I won't turn down~"
Even back in my past life, Jae-hyeong had outclassed Park Gi in bare-handed fighting.
Now that Kim Tae-oh knew Park Ji-hoon was Jae-hyeong, he no longer attached much significance to the fact that he lost to Park Ji-hoon in hand-to-hand combat.
However... if he lost at anything other than hand-to-hand combat, they'd still fight like absolute hell just like in the past.
Kim Tae-oh was gradually becoming more and more like Park Ji-hoon, just like the old days.
After that day, Han Ma-hyeon didn't appear in front of me again.
However, he kept trashing the seat that had been mine—Han Seok-hyeon's seat.
Time passed, and exam period arrived.
By then, I must have been labeled a delinquent by the teachers,
because when I finished all the problems and tried to go to sleep, the exam proctor came over.
The same reaction wherever I went; it was honestly annoying, but once I got through these exams, things would get easier.
The teacher had been looking at me like some problem student, just like everyone else, but after she glanced at my exam sheet, she flinched and returned to her desk.
The time it took to solve the problems had gotten longer because there were more essay questions, but I could still finish within five minutes.
Normally when I slept and woke up, Da-yeon or Tae-oh and Ji-hoon would have to wake me to get my answers graded, but...
Now it was the next exam proctor who woke me up.
Just how far apart have we drifted for it to feel this empty...
Still, it seemed like it was only the teachers who were shitheads, not the students—they weren't all total idiots.
Well, it's just that Han Seok-hyeon and Han Ma-hyeon had completely trashed the reputation. Jeil High School was actually a famously prestigious place.
I did wonder whether I should've gone to an arts school, but not having anything to learn would've been the same there anyway.
At least here, I could see my friends every day, so it was better.
The exam proctor's instructions ended, and the next exam began.
When I took a test, I flipped through the paper once, front and back, then quickly started marking answers.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
I filled in the bubbles almost mechanically fast, then wrote on the essay answer sheet without a single pause.
Since I read the questions once at the start and never looked at them again, it made sense the teachers got the wrong idea...
I closed the cap on my computer marker pen again and checked to see if the teacher was watching. When she didn't notice me, I put my head down, and she immediately came over.
"Are you finished...?"
"Yes."
The female teacher took my exam paper, and I pulled a cushion that looked like Beta out of my bag, rested my head on it, and went right to sleep.