Chapter 16
#16. Dropping Out (2)
“Have my baby!” This was no longer a line exclusive to men.
I learned just how terrifying women who sincerely shouted, “I’ll have your baby!” could be.
Just as I was wondering whether I’d be helplessly robbed of my seed by women casting a net of sincere courtship, a hand reached out to save me.
“Green tea? Coffee? What would you like?”
“I’ll have juice.”
“Here.”
It was plain water.
“...”
“Just drink it.”
“Yes.”
That was too much.
Shin Ye-hwa was young for a professor in her mid-thirties, and she was famous among men for always wearing clothes that clung tightly to her body.
Any man would inevitably think upon meeting her for the first time, “At that level, why not just become a model? Why be a professor?” She possessed that kind of face and figure.
In short, she was an upgraded version of the teaching assistant noona from the department office.
Of course, she wasn’t anywhere near Iris’s level.
Honestly, Iris was so far beyond the norm that comparing any other woman to her was an insult to Iris herself.
That said, there was no disputing that Professor Shin Ye-hwa was on another level, practically beyond the bounds of East Asia.
“Hmm, Hyunwoo. Are you dropping out?”
“Yes.”
“The reason is admission to the Magic Tower, right? You’ve become a mage?”
“That’s right.”
Shin Ye-hwa’s reaction was quite different from those of the other people who had reacted in the office earlier.
She didn’t seem particularly surprised.
‘Well, it would be strange for her to be surprised by every little thing when it had nothing to do with her. And it would be rather improper for a professor to seduce a student over marriage.’
Even so, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
Aside from the awkward situation in the office, I had secretly been feeling pretty good about it.
“Could you tell me who taught you magic?”
“Is that a question required for the withdrawal procedure?”
“Can’t you just consider it a question born of personal curiosity?”
No sooner had she finished speaking than Professor Shin Ye-hwa uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way.
And she did it extremely slowly.
Thanks to that, I was able to leisurely admire her flashy lingerie between her tight pencil skirt and the black stockings covering her legs.
“Hmm? Is it difficult for you to tell me?”
“...A little?”
No sooner had I finished speaking than she once again uncrossed and recrossed her legs in a way that made her intentions so obvious it was almost absurd.
“Hmm? What’s wrong? Is there something on my leg?”
“...No.”
There were limits to shamelessness. She had openly shown her panties to her own student, even if I was about to drop out, and was reacting like that?
However.
‘This is when black stockings get in the way.’
I personally liked black stockings, but it was a different story when they subtly concealed the underwear beneath them.
It was definitely black lingerie, but the stockings made it difficult to see.
Perhaps Professor Shin Ye-hwa knew that, because there seemed to be an unusually playful smile on her face. I felt as though I was gradually being toyed with.
“I didn’t know you were the tight-lipped type.”
“I do hear that from time to time.”
I had told the people at the Magic Tower without much hesitation, but that was because I had wanted something from the Magic Tower.
But there was nothing in particular I wanted from Professor Shin Ye-hwa now, nor any reason I needed to make a good impression on her.
Besides, she kept acting as though she was going to show me something without actually showing it properly. Why should I be forthcoming with her?
“As you know, Professor, I’ve been admitted to the Magic Tower. I can’t keep attending university, can I? Honestly, isn’t this interview just a formality?”
“That depends on the person, doesn’t it?”
Professor Shin Ye-hwa gave a smug little shrug.
“There are students like you, for whom continuing university instead of dropping out would seem strange to anyone who saw the situation, but there are also students for whom dropping out is simply the end of a period of aimless wandering. Even if the title of academic advisor in Korea is nothing more than empty window dressing, shouldn’t we still stop immature students from raising the difficulty of their own lives?”
It was a perfectly sound argument.
Just as you’d expect from a professor.
“I’m self-taught.”
“Hmm?”
“You asked who my magic teacher was. I learned it by myself.”
Judging by her attitude, dragging things out any longer definitely wasn’t going to make her spread her legs wide for me, so it was better to go home and devote myself to magic training than waste time here.
“...Self-taught?”
“I’ll be going now. I’m a busy man in many ways.”
I placed my withdrawal application on the desk and stood up.
“Please submit the application for me. You should at least pay me back for satisfying your curiosity, shouldn’t you?”
Click—Just like that, I left the professor’s office.
***
Like the Magic Tower, Korea University was also on break.
Of course, unlike at the Magic Tower, not nearly every student left campus during the vacation.
There were plenty of students who came to school during breaks for seasonal classes or club activities.
Of course, I meant there were relatively many; compared to the regular semester, the campus was still bound to seem empty.
“It’s quiet.”
The plaza and streets that would normally have been crowded with students were deserted.
As I walked through the peaceful streets on a quiet afternoon, my thoughts grew tangled in a way they usually didn’t.
Most of them concerned magic.
‘My magic.’
I suddenly remembered what Iris had taught me.
-Elements, concepts, alchemy, spirits, and summoning. Mages don’t research magic according to their own interests. Their talents alone determine what kind of magic they study.
A simple experiment had revealed that my aptitudes were for elemental magic and summoning.
While most people had an aptitude for only one type of magic, Iris congratulated me, saying that I had been blessed with talent.
For the record, Iris was a triple mage with aptitudes for elemental magic, alchemy, and spirits.
“The only things I can use right now are fire and lightning... The others aren’t working well.”
A fairly hot flame rose from my left hand, while sparks crackled in my right.
Only a small minority of elemental mages could handle two or more attributes.
In that respect, the fact that even a mere First Circle mage like me could use both fire and lightning from the beginning was proof that I was an absurdly gifted genius.
“I don’t know much about summoning, but can I summon something like a familiar?”
Even Iris was a novice when it came to summoning, so I would probably have to learn that part at the Magic Tower.
I was busy working out the conceptual framework of my magic when—
“Oh, who do we have here?”
“?”
A voice from nearby brought me back to my senses.
It was a familiar face.
That unpleasant-looking mug, not to mention the way he walked around with a woman on either side of him.
It was my classmate, Jeon Hye-seong.
‘...Fucking great.’
My thoughts had been tangled up in magic, but I hadn’t been in a bad mood.
The moment I saw that bastard’s face, however, my mood turned rotten.
“Kang Hyunwoo, did you take summer classes too?”
Jeon Hye-seong was what people commonly called a silver-spoon kid.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had come to university not to earn a degree but to meet women.
He looked like a host-club player, and he was popular among the girls in our department.
But I hated that bastard. Not just disliked him—I fucking hated him.
When I entered university, there were only ten men in the Gate Support Department, including Jeon Hye-seong and me.
Naturally, we became close, and I even thought we could work together to enjoy university life.
But that bastard Jeon Hye-seong was the worst of the worst.
Perhaps he took after his father, a corrupt assemblyman who liked taking kickbacks more than eating three meals a day; he constantly played political games among the few men in the department.
Especially shortly after the semester began, he frequently badmouthed a classmate who was unusually short and scrawny.
Several of us, myself included, disliked seeing him act that way, but he was so generous that he always paid for everyone’s drinks and meals, and he got along well with the girls. As a result, he was always the one playing politics, never the one being targeted by it.
After that, he made any man he disliked into a laughingstock by openly humiliating him in front of the girls.
Anyone capable of thinking normally had started disliking and avoiding Jeon Hye-seong long ago, but there weren’t many women in their early twenties who disliked a man who drove a foreign car and paid for their drinks.
Of course, a few of the male students kissed Jeon Hye-seong’s ass too. I don’t remember exactly who they were.
Around the time the department atmosphere split between those who hung out with Jeon Hye-seong, those who hated him, and those who didn’t care about him, we went on an MT.
And that night, the incident happened.
-All right, everyone! Pay attention!
While my classmates were excited at the thought of drinking, Jeon Hye-seong glanced at me and gave me a look that seemed almost mocking.
-Kang Hyunwoo says there’s a girl he likes here! He wants to confess his feelings, so let’s support him with a round of applause!
By any reasonable standard, it was an obviously malicious prank.
It would have been perfectly natural for most of our classmates to glare at Jeon Hye-seong with frowns instead of cheering.
But perhaps I had underestimated the extent of Jeon Hye-seong’s political maneuvering.
-Ooooooh!
-Kang Hyunwoo! Kang Hyunwoo!
A few students who were especially close to Jeon Hye-seong began cheering.
And the female student he pointed to was a girl I knew well.
It was Yoo Subin, my classmate and the girl I had genuinely had a crush on.
Naturally, my expression was completely wrecked, but the students who had already had a few sips of alcohol began to enjoy the situation more and more.
Subin, of course, was not enjoying it.
She was suddenly about to receive a public confession from a classmate she barely knew. If I’d been an alpha male, we would have become “a couple starting that day,” but unfortunately, I was an utterly ordinary, painfully average guy.
I was forced to end my first love without even getting the chance to confess, and I was even immortalized online as the guy who confessed at the MT.
For the record, I had never told Jeon Hye-seong that I liked Subin.
I had merely let it slip casually while drinking with some of the other male students, so I spent quite some time wondering how the hell that bastard had found out.
Most people would have taken a military leave of absence or dropped out then and there, but I gritted my teeth and endured it.
I continued attending school while ignoring the whispers and sidelong glances around me whenever I walked by.
By the time I became a sophomore, the rumors about me had mostly died down, and I was able to enjoy a reasonably comfortable campus life.
However, I could never easily forget that one of the classmates who had been drinking with us that night had told Jeon Hye-seong everything about me and gone along with him.
-Who was it? Who told him? Jitae? Yuhyeon? Hyunwoo? Or maybe Sunho?
Unable to identify the culprit, I could no longer spend time in the department with my friends as I had before, and I became a loner who attended lectures, ate meals, and studied for exams entirely by myself.
“Hey.”
Just thinking about that made my stomach churn.
“Don’t pretend we’re friends. Get lost unless you want to eat while drooling all over yourself.”
I still didn’t know why I had become that bastard’s target that day.
But knowing his personality, maybe he simply disliked me, or perhaps he had wanted to take someone down and, while wondering whom to choose, had happened to land on me by bad luck.
“...That’s a little harsh.”
“Yeah, Kang Hyunwoo! Why do you talk like that?”
“Hye-seong only came over because he was worried that you don’t have any friends!”
The host-club player who treated other people’s lives like toys, along with the empty-headed bitches who went along with him.
It was a combo meal fit to be served only in a cesspool.
“Ah, are you perhaps still hung up on what happened at the MT...?”
Wham!
My fist reacted instantly to the word MT. Don’t hold back, fist.
“Guh!”
My fist, thrown with genuine feeling behind it, sent him straight to the ground.
“Eek!”
“H-Hye-seong!”
I was a rational, nonviolent person.
But every now and then, the beast inside me ran wild beyond my control, and apparently today was one of those days.
“H-ha-ha... Guys, I’m fine, so don’t worry.”
Despite his bloody nose, Jeon Hye-seong put on a friendly smile.
No, he strained to put one on.
His lips trembled, and if the girls hadn’t been there, he definitely would have cursed me out and punched me.
Of course, if he had, I would have been grateful. I could have taken turns pounding that bastard’s face with fire fists and lightning fists, enjoying the variety.
“Then we’re even now, right?”
Look at him managing his image because there were women watching.
“Shut your damn mouth. Your breath stinks.”
Crack—I could almost hear someone grinding their teeth somewhere.
He’d have a hard time later if he ended up needing implants.
I hoped he would keep grinding his teeth habitually from now on.
“Have fun with those empty-headed bitches.”
I flipped him off and left.
***
Brrring-
In the secluded alley leading home, I called the new number I had saved for the first time in a while.
Click—the other person answered the phone.
“Hello, Grandma?”
-Oh my, our grandson-in-law. What is it?
I carefully broached the subject, doing my best not to let my voice tremble.
This wasn’t something I could casually ask, like whether she’d eaten.
“Do you happen to know Assemblyman Jeon Jin-mook?”
-Ah. Yes, I know him well. His current campaign promise involves cooperation with the Magic Tower, and I’m in charge of that, actually.
“...Then, if I may impose, could I ask you for a favor?”
-A favor?
I knew this was rude. She and I had only met briefly that morning; our connection was short and shallow.
But she was the only person who could grant this favor.
Of course, my future self might be able to do it too, but it would be meaningless unless it happened right now.
“I want revenge on Assemblyman Jeon Jin-mook. No, more precisely, on his son.”
-Hmm... Hyunwoo, I wouldn’t have expected this from you. You’re more emotional than I thought.
“It’s more important to me than anything else.”
-Hmm...
I could sense Choi Young-ok’s discomfort in the pensive hum that came through the phone.
So I added one more thing to ease her concerns, at least partially.
“I have an aptitude for elemental magic and summoning.”
-...?
“With elemental magic, fire and lightning are my limit for now, but I’m confident I’ll be able to handle more attributes in the future.”
I decided to turn this into a transaction rather than a one-sided demand.
“And...”
The payment was myself.
“I think I’ll reach the Second Circle soon.”
That wasn’t a lie.
What a mage needed to advance to the next stage was to create a circle made of mana around their heart.
Just three days.
If I were given that much time, I was confident I could reach the Second Circle.
“I’m asking as your prospective grandson-in-law... Could you make it happen?”
There was no denying that this was a gamble.
It was possible that Choi Young-ok would come to think poorly of me because of it.
But I was serious enough about revenge to take that gamble.
-Hyunwoo.
“...Yes.”
A somewhat solemn voice came through the phone.
-You said your goal was revenge, right?
Gulp... A dry swallow went down my throat with effort.
-I’ll show you more than you can imagine, so look forward to it. Hehe.
In the final exchange of the call, I could hear heavy goodwill toward me and a chilling determination in her voice.
This was only my prediction, but wouldn’t that man, Jeon Jin-mook, soon end up out on the street for the crime of having raised the wrong son?