Chapter 83
“Huh? What are you doing over there, kids?”
“Come sit with us.”
“Whoa!”
Nuri, who had also gone to the bathroom after chatting with her friends to her heart’s content, returned as well.
“We’re one person short.”
“I’ll get someone. Hey, Yoon Sihoo, come over too and hurry up. We’re going to play gonggi in a four-on-four team match.”
“What? Don’t pull me—you’re stretching my clothes!”
Sihoo, who had been sitting quietly and reading a book, joined us, too.
Before long, eight people had gathered in a circle to play gonggi.
Just as a sparrow can’t pass up a mill, any child who saw this fascinating game joined our group as if bewitched.
The gonggi team match began with Yuna and me on opposing teams.
It was a game where, if one person failed, another took over at the exact same stage and continued from there.
We started the first round lightly at thirty years.
If I played seriously, I could go on for a hundred years or even a thousand, so I stopped at a reasonable five years. But Yuna immediately succeeded nine years in a row, causing the match to tilt in her team’s favor.
In the end, Yuna’s team won 31 to 26.
“Waaaaah! We won!”
“Isn’t this too easy, Name?”
“Let’s change the rules.”
“Then should we make it fifty years?”
“No. From now on, the opposing team can freely change the weight of the gonggi stones.”
It wasn’t for nothing that I had condensed mana inside the gonggi stones.
You could say I had planned several steps ahead.
“I made these gonggi stones so their weight changes according to the mana density around them. If I inject a large amount of mana right here, Yuna, try picking this one up.”
“What? This got really heavy!”
“The weight of the gonggi stones changes from moment to moment.”
Simply increasing the number of years would make the game tedious.
Also, since this was a team match, quite a bit of time passed before one’s turn came around again.
“Want to try ‘flipping,’ too?”
Yuna picked up the five gonggi stones and tossed them into the air.
“Whoa! What?”
When thrown with the same force, the light gonggi stones rose high into the air, while the heavy ones fell after barely getting anywhere.
“This way, the opposing team can interfere by changing the weight of each gonggi stone. Shall we start at thirty years again?”
That way, this could become a team match of gonggi in the truest sense, where everyone could participate.
After all, wasn’t there anything more fun than interfering with an opponent who was trying their hardest?
“Jeon Nuri, you said you were going to the bathroom. What are you doing here?”
A clear, ringing voice came from above me. Lee Haru stood with her arms crossed, looking down at us.
“This is super fun! You should try it with us.”
“What is it?”
Haru crouched down and pointed at the shabby plastic pieces as she asked.
Four-on-four didn’t work with the number of people we had.
With no other choice, I stood up and decided to have Haru join the game, too.
“Where are you going, Name?”
“There’s an odd number of people right now. I’ll sit this round out. Haru will join our team instead.”
Yuna suddenly asked me to lean closer so she could whisper in my ear, so I brought my face near hers.
“I don’t like her. Lee Haru is always talking behind my back.”
“Why don’t you use this chance to become friends?”
“...I don’t know.”
Haru seemed just as dumbfounded by what was happening.
“I never said I was going to—”
“Come on, sit next to Yuna.”
Somehow wedged between Yuna and Nuri, Haru ended up joining the gonggi game, but she looked crestfallen and asked us to at least explain the rules.
“I don’t know how to play at all.”
“A fun game~ you learn~ while drinking~.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, right, there’s no alcohol. Just watch the kids and follow along. It isn’t that hard.”
I tried to liven up the mood with a lame line, but everyone’s blank expressions left me embarrassed, so I turned serious and spoke to Haru.
Looking after children was this difficult.
Today, of all days, I was especially craving a drink.
I should go to the bathroom.
* * *
A rival could be defined as an evenly matched competitor, but that definition assumed that both sides saw each other that way.
If Sihoo merely viewed Yuna as his rival, then it was reasonable to say that Yuna’s true rival was Lee Haru.
The eyes of the two girls, staring at each other as though they were mortal enemies, burned fiercely.
The thought that they absolutely could not lose to each other dominated both of them.
However, the one with the advantage in this game was naturally Yuna, who had been taught gonggi by Name first.
“Yes! Three years! Only two years left!”
Cheers erupted from one side, while groans burst from the other.
“Hey! What are you doing making them all heavy? Yuna’s catching them too easily.”
“I really didn’t use mana this time. You must have misjudged your strength, Haru.”
“Hehe, I’m starting to get the hang of this. At this rate, we’ll finish first.”
Yuna swaggered proudly, but her words were rendered meaningless when she immediately dropped a gonggi stone that had suddenly become light during the very next level-one turn, giving up her turn.
“Go, Haru!”
“Watch closely, Seo Yuna. Your turn isn’t going to come.”
Haru could say that because she had figured out the principle behind the gonggi stones becoming heavy.
The fact that their weight changed according to the density of the surrounding mana meant that she could counter it by manipulating that mana in reverse.
Throwing and catching the stones was difficult enough, but handling mana at the same time was truly challenging.
But if she wanted to beat Seo Yuna, this was something she would have to endure as well. Haru gritted her teeth and focused all her attention on the gonggi stones.
‘The yellow gonggi stone is heavy, while the blue one is far too light.’
Haru had devised a strategy to disperse the mana and lower the weight of the former, while condensing that mana again for the latter. At last, she threw the stones.
At that moment, Yuna’s eyes flashed red.
She stirred up a small mana storm and instantly made the light stones heavy and the heavy stones light.
“Ah...!”
Just as a bicycle whose handlebars moved in the opposite direction could not be ridden by the human brain, it was impossible to adapt in such a short time to concepts that had suddenly been reversed.
One of the gonggi stones bounced out of Haru’s fist and fell to the floor.
Sihoo took over the gonggi stones from the dazed Haru and caught two of them during the flipping stage without allowing a single mistake. The second team match ended just like that.
“Aaaah! Yoon Sihoo, you’re amazing. I was counting on you!”
“Ah, get off me, Seo Yuna!”
“We won, we won! We won!”
Haru stood up because she couldn’t stand seeing that obnoxious outcast looking so happy.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the bathroom, too.”
“Want me to come?”
“No, I can go alone. You already went, Nuri.”
Haru touched both of her cheeks. She left the classroom, intending to at least wash her face and cool down her heated skin.
Classes B through D were taking other subjects, so the hallway was generally quiet.
Haru walked down the corridor and entered the bathroom at the end.
“I swear, I’ll never play this childish game again.”
The back of Haru’s hand had also swollen red because of the gonggi stone that had suddenly become heavy.
She thought it might feel better if she ran cold water into the sink and soaked it for a while.
However, the women’s restroom light had already been on before Haru entered.
Because the light operated on a sensor, that meant someone was already inside.
Thud-
‘Is someone there?’
From the last stall, the one with the ventilation fan, came the sound of a door closing, followed by a rattling noise.
But according to Haru’s memory, there definitely wasn’t a toilet in the last stall.
There wouldn’t be anyone cleaning the bathroom in the afternoon, either, so who could it be?
Haru stopped washing her hands and, unable to shake her unease, found herself drawn toward the innermost part of the bathroom.
The door wasn’t locked.
“Is anyone there?”
“...”
There was no answer, but the sound of someone’s presence clearly reached Haru’s ears.
Could it be a squirrel that had come in through the window? What if it was a mouse?
After a brief moment of deliberation, Haru decided to open the door carefully.
Creeeak-
“Aaaaaah! What the—Noname...?”
When had the child who had just been playing gonggi come to the bathroom?
Thinking back, she realized that she hadn’t seen Noname at some point during the game.
It seemed he had come to the bathroom while taking a break from the game.
But even so, Noname was standing precariously on a small chair in such a ridiculous pose that it didn’t make sense.
When she threw the door wide open, a sweet apple scent spread throughout the bathroom.
“What is this smell...?”
“Cough! It’s you, Haru. You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“What? Why is smoke coming out of your mouth...?”
Dark smoke rose from Noname’s mouth as he gave a small cough.
The smoke curled upward toward the ceiling before being sucked outside through the ventilation fan.
Haru had once heard from her older sister, who attended high school,
that delinquent kids would take every opportunity to smoke right in front of bathroom ventilation fans.
She also remembered hearing that they did it to keep their clothes from smelling like cigarettes.
Even so, Haru couldn’t understand why this transfer student was doing such a thing.
“Haru, could you come over here for a moment?”
“No...? Why would I?”
“Since it’s just the two of us, I thought we could have a little chat.”
“No, I’m going back to class.”
Startled out of her wits, Haru backed away and tried to leave the bathroom.
The desire she had once had to become friends with Noname vanished in an instant.
Unlike Yuna, Noname was small in both height and build, and there wasn’t a single thing about him that looked frightening.
So Haru couldn’t understand why she had been scared herself.
It was simply an instinctive movement born from the feeling that she shouldn’t get involved with someone like that.
[Cast: Rotational Motion]
Click-
Like a scene from a horror movie, the manual lock on the bathroom entrance door rotated ninety degrees.
There was no way an eight-year-old child’s hand could reach that height.