Chapter 49
Second-year Class A, 12th overall in the rankings.
A physical-type awakener, Yoo Eun-bi…….
If I were to recite her profile, it would be roughly this much. In game terms, her position was something like an assassin.
In truth, the fact that she was Baek Seol-ah’s best friend was far more important than those minor details.
That was why I could vaguely guess why she had suddenly gotten behind me. Even if I didn’t know the exact reason, it obviously had something to do with Baek Seol-ah.
“Couldn’t we put this knife away and talk?”
I said, tilting my head at an angle and taking in the navy-blue hair barely visible behind me.
I had reflexively assumed a surrendering posture, but even so, wasn’t a knife going a bit too far?
As for my image at school, it was what it was, and of course, it wasn’t hard to imagine what Yoo Eun-bi had thought after seeing Baek Seol-ah spending so much time with me.
Still, charging at me as if she were about to stab me in the back was an overly hasty judgment, wasn’t it?
I didn’t know how things had been at first, but these days, my relationship with Baek Seol-ah was fairly amicable……
At the very least, I was confident I hadn’t done anything so terrible that Yoo Eun-bi would suddenly come at me like this. Probably.
But Yoo Eun-bi didn’t so much as blink at my words, continuing to speak in her chilly voice.
“Shut up, just answer what I’m asking. If you try to hide or lie about even one thing……. You know what happens, right?”
“Mm.”
“What the hell did you do to Seol-ah?”
The main point she tacked on was obvious enough. It was the sort of subject anyone could easily have predicted.
From my perspective, though, it was an accusation that was not merely unfair but downright upsetting.
‘What do you mean, what did I do.’
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t something I should have been hearing.
Unless Lee Hyeonseong or Baek Seol-ah were the ones being addressed, that is.
To begin with, from a purely principled standpoint, all I had done was accommodate the tastes of couples with perverted fetishes.
Even if I had slept with Baek Seol-ah, it had all been consensual.
I put on a bored—or perhaps tired—expression and gave her a stock answer.
“I didn’t do anything. At least, nothing bad enough for you to get this worked up over.”
“……Bullshit.”
As I had expected, Yoo Eun-bi didn’t take those words at face value.
Naturally, she narrowed her eyes sharply, looking as though she thought I was spouting lies.
“If you really didn’t do anything, why is she so out of it and slumped over? From where I stand, I can’t help suspecting you, Han Taeyang.”
“……Is that so.”
I had never expected her to be satisfied with my answer either. So I merely smacked my lips, without feeling particularly disappointed.
However, I did find something puzzling in Yoo Eun-bi’s words as she pressed me for further explanations.
‘Out of it……? Slumped over?’
In context, the ‘she’ she had just mentioned obviously referred to Baek Seol-ah. I couldn’t think of any other possibility.
But Baek Seol-ah was out of it, huh.
……Come to think of it, she had seemed strangely preoccupied when we parted after leaving the motel the day before yesterday.
‘Something troubling her.’
My thoughts naturally went there. The worry Baek Seol-ah had briefly mentioned while we were having sex. Some vague matter concerning me that she had been thinking about.
Looking at it that way, I couldn’t say I bore no responsibility at all.
‘Good grief.’
By the time I was scratching my cheek with a complicated feeling, Yoo Eun-bi added in a harsh tone:
“This is your final warning. I won’t ask twice. Give me a full account from beginning to end—what happened, and why you’ve been hanging around Seol-ah lately.”
“……Hmph.”
But the thing was, feeling uneasy about Baek Seol-ah and meekly complying with Yoo Eun-bi’s aggressive threat were two separate matters.
Even if I might have shared some responsibility, that didn’t mean I had to quietly accept this situation with my hands meekly raised.
In the first place, I only lowered myself when I felt romantic interest in the person in question.
Whether it was Seo Ah-hyeon or Baek Seol-ah, at least Yoo Eun-bi was not included in that category.
‘This is getting annoying.’
Grab!
“……Huh?”
I watched for the right moment out of the corner of my eye, and the instant I saw an opening, I grabbed Yoo Eun-bi’s wrist.
It was the very right wrist that had pointed what was presumably a dagger at my back.
Crack-
“……”
Then I twisted it, stopping it from functioning for a while without seriously damaging the joint.
Apparently, she hadn’t expected me to respond like that, because Yoo Eun-bi’s eyes went round, and she spoke in a dazed voice.
“……Uh, uh?”
She probably had confidence in her skill, which was good enough to rank her twelfth in the ranking matches.
Until now, I had been a student who moved back and forth around the middle-upper ranks, so she likely hadn’t imagined having the tables turned on her like this.
That must have made her all the more flustered. Even with her arm caught, the fact that her response was so conspicuously clumsy clearly stemmed from that shock.
I muttered with a faint scoff.
“You should’ve checked the rankings more often, Yoo Eun-bi. My rank went up a while ago.”
“W-what……!”
After defeating Seo Ah-hyeon a few weeks ago, my ranking had shot straight up from 31st to 16th.
Even judging by the numbers alone, you could say I was now somewhere roughly comparable to Yoo Eun-bi.
Whoosh─!
“……Ngh, eek?!”
I was the one who had beaten Seo Ah-hyeon head-on, even though she was practically a total brute among physical-type awakeners.
Assassin or not, once Yoo Eun-bi had been caught at point-blank range, there was no way for her to escape.
So I simply lifted Yoo Eun-bi, spun her around once in the air, and slammed her down onto the ground.
Maybe because her body was so light by nature, it felt almost like swinging a mannequin.
Thud! Before long, Yoo Eun-bi hit the ground with a shrill cry of ‘Agh!’ and was subdued. Sitting astride her stomach, I spoke in a bored tone.
“I’m a little sorry for handling you so roughly, but you did pull a knife on me out of nowhere, so you can’t really complain, right? From my standpoint, it was nothing but self-defense……. Hm?”
I didn’t finish the sentence, and the reason was simple.
My gaze, which had been sweeping over Yoo Eun-bi indifferently, paused for a moment.
Specifically, on her right hand—the one that had been pressing a dagger against my back moments ago.
“……A ballpoint pen?”
No, I had thought she’d been pressing a dagger against me, but in reality, it hadn’t been a dagger at all.
She was merely holding a ballpoint pen with its tip sticking out sharply─.
‘What the hell.’
I released Yoo Eun-bi’s wrist with an awkward expression, and she, still pinned beneath me, lay spread-eagled on the ground and muttered weakly.
“……Yeah, as you said, self-defense. It wasn’t a knife, though. Well, I did mean for you to think it was a knife, so I can’t complain either.”
“Uh……. Mm.”
“Were you always this agile……? I didn’t expect to end up pinned instead. Anyway, since things have turned out this way, answer me just one thing, Han Taeyang.”
Yoo Eun-bi then glared at me with her pale blue eyes and asked in a thoroughly deflated voice:
“You……. You really didn’t do anything bad to Seol-ah? Like threatening her after getting some kind of leverage over her.”
“……”
It was a much more timid question, with far less bite, than when she had been barking at me moments ago.
Could being subdued in an instant have shocked her that much?
Yoo Eun-bi had become strangely docile, wearing an expression as if reality had suddenly hit her.
Still, thinking it might be dangerous to leave anything to chance, I flicked away the ballpoint pen she was holding with my fingertip and answered her question.
“……I can see what you thought, and it’s understandable to a certain extent. But there was no coercion between Baek Seol-ah and me, at least.”
“……Really……?”
“Judging by that look, Yoo Eun-bi, you asked Baek Seol-ah directly, got turned down, and came looking for me, right?”
At my counter-question, Yoo Eun-bi flinched with a guilty ‘Urk!’ expression and avoided my gaze.
Just as I had guessed, she must have come to threaten me as a second option after failing to get an answer from Baek Seol-ah.
I clicked my tongue and continued.
“If she’s keeping her mouth shut, I can’t tell you anything either. Believe it or not, I’m not the one authorized to reveal this secret.”
“……Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“……”
“If you really want to know, get Baek Seol-ah’s permission and come back. Then I’ll tell you too.”
It probably wasn’t a perfectly convincing explanation, but what else could she do if she didn’t find it convincing?
I had no intention whatsoever of being the one to reveal the NTR play.
Even less so if the other person was Yoo Eun-bi……. In other words, Baek Seol-ah’s close female friend.
In any case, this was ultimately a secret connected to Baek Seol-ah’s honor as well.
“……So that’s how it is.”
Fortunately, although Yoo Eun-bi didn’t seem to be completely convinced, she didn’t look like she intended to keep holding me up and pestering me any further.
Judging by how much of the venom had left her expression, she also seemed aware that she had acted rashly.
The tension seemed to have eased a little. I disliked this awkward silence for no particular reason, so I blatantly changed the subject.
“By the way, where did you leave that dagger set you usually carry? I naturally assumed that was what you had, so why are you jabbing me with a ballpoint pen out of nowhere?”
“……Well, your guilt hasn’t even been established, so I couldn’t just pull a real dagger on you.”
Perhaps realizing that I had noticed the intention behind it, Yoo Eun-bi answered with an awkward clearing of her throat:
“Good grief, someone who knows that sure is good at sneaking up behind a person on their way to school and threatening them?”
“That……. Mm, sorry. My daggers are here.”
She then apologized to me and gently lifted her school uniform skirt. A sheath was strapped around her pale thigh with a belt.
There was probably another one on the other side as well.
‘Oh, some meat.’
I let out a small exclamation of admiration inwardly at the unexpected gift I had just received.
The flesh of her thigh, squeezed and pressed down by the belt, had a subtly alluring quality to it.
It wasn’t especially explicit, but that only made the sensuality of the exposure stand out more.
“……Hey, you’re staring way too openly.”
Perhaps aware of it herself, Yoo Eun-bi blushed faintly and was just about to let go of the skirt hem when—
──What are you doing there, Taeyang?
“……”
“……”
A gentle voice belonging to someone I had never expected to hear at that moment rang out.
At the sudden presence of a third party, Yoo Eun-bi and I froze exactly as we were.
Before long, a girl appeared in the alley between the buildings where we had just had our scuffle.
A female student in a school uniform, with jet-black hair and purple eyes.
She stared intently at the sight of me straddling Yoo Eun-bi in a mounted position─.
“What’s that?”
Seo Ah-hyeon uttered those few words in a low voice with the most benevolent smile imaginable.
“A new girl?”
“……”
With both hands demurely clasped together……. she cast a chilling look over Yoo Eun-bi and me, her eyes not smiling at all despite the smile around her lips.
Seo Ah-hyeon, who had probably been taking a route similar to mine to school, performed the feat of freezing the atmosphere of the entire area the moment she appeared.
Hic-
At that moment, whose brief hiccup had slipped out—Yoo Eun-bi’s, or mine?
Perhaps it had been both of ours.
Obviously, it wasn’t a particularly important fact.