Cha Jeoh’s persistent devotion that continued for a long time only came to an end after Cha Woodan appeared.
Even though he’d just spent a long time being attentive without rubbing hard and roughly, my fingertips and fingers had turned red. As I rubbed the skin with burning heat rising, Cha Woodan narrowed his eyes.
“Did you get hurt?”
“Would I have left Hayoung to get hurt? I just disinfected it.”
Cha Jeoh expressing it as disinfecting with his own mouth was absurd, but I didn’t dislike it. Without denying it and staying still, as soon as the two people’s conversation ended, I interrupted and conveyed the situation from just before.
“The student council president came and went.”
“Student council president… Seong Taehyeon?”
The corners of Cha Woodan’s mouth that had been full of languid smiles twisted heterogeneously.
“What did he come for? He said he came to see you, Hayoung?”
As if his mood hit rock bottom again upon recalling it, Cha Jeoh with a fierce expression answered in my stead.
“It’s obvious. He spouted that nominally he came to bring the guy who shot the arrow to apologize, came to deliver the map he couldn’t give.”
“Was that all? He didn’t demand or propose anything else?”
“There wasn’t. I wonder if he just came to get on our nerves…”
“He came to try using his ability on me. To see if it really doesn’t work, if there was some mistake.”
Cha Woodan and Cha Jeoh’s gazes simultaneously stabbed toward me. Among them, the first to move was Cha Jeoh.
“Seong Taehyeon used a mental-type ability on you?”
“He tried but was blocked.”
“Anyway, he used it. That son of a… bastard…”
Thanks to Cha Jeoh’s tenacious patience, words that couldn’t become complete curses continued in disarray. Soon he sprang up and acted as if he would immediately rush out of the art room.
“I’ll go right now and…”
“Go and do what? Kill him?”
Cha Jeoh, who stopped moving, neither affirmed nor denied. Instead, the one who confirmed was Cha Woodan standing quietly beside him.
“That’s the easiest and fastest way to remove a threat. There’s no way the two of us can’t beat Seong Taehyeon alone.”
I wasn’t unaware of the twins’ skills to some degree. But separate from that, hadn’t they never experienced directly engaging in combat with a survivor who’d awakened a mental-type ability until now?
Swallowing a sigh, I slowly opened my mouth.
“What the student council president awakened touches the target’s emotions. Whether it’s anxiety, tension, or anger, those kinds of things.”
Cha Woodan’s gaze that had been rolling through the air dyed in a cool light softened as it reached me.
“Emotions?”
“Yeah. That’s why it turned out that way in the student council room a few days ago, and in the auditorium the other day too.”
Student council room, and the auditorium. Just as I thought Cha Woodan was retracing the incidents of those times in order, he turned his head and stared at Cha Jeoh.
“Since I’m also a mental-type ability user, he probably didn’t try hard with me, but did anything happen to you?”
My gaze also turned to Cha Jeoh one beat late. He who had been firmly suppressing the resentment and rage aimed at the student council president closed his mouth and rolled his eyes. It seemed he was carefully pulling up and examining memories from the day he’d encountered the student council president.
“…Not yet, I think.”
It was fortunate news at least. Not having experienced emotions bursting out from falling victim to the student council president’s ability meant, in other words, that his mental barrier was still holding up firmly.
I nodded and added.
“It would be better if I accompany you whenever you have to face the student council president from now on. That ability doesn’t work on me, and I can see it too.”
“You haven’t figured out that part yet, right? Why the student council president’s ability doesn’t work on you, Hayoung.”
I expressed affirmation to Cha Woodan’s following question.
“So once my calf heals, I’m going to try various things.”
“Various things?”
“Yeah. Various things, about my ability. And after that…”
“Please, let’s just leave this damn school. How is there not a single peaceful day?”
Cha Jeoh muttered, representing my feelings. Since I damn well agreed, I just nodded silently.
***
The orphanage was a place where children who’d lost their families gathered. So most of the children belonging to the orphanage, regardless of gender and age, inevitably came to regard each other like family.
Of course, that wasn’t universal. But the children obtained more than simple friends or colleagues from relationships within that fence. Even if it wasn’t necessarily in the form of love but loyalty, a sense of kinship, belonging, or even jealousy or love-hate, they at least harbored emotions of deep density.
However, that was a story that didn’t apply to me. To me, the children I lived with at the orphanage weren’t much different from those who just passed by at school.
Since I’d been acquainted with them for at least five or six years to as many as over ten years, their names were stuck in my head. But that was all. Even with those who shared the same room, the conversations we shared didn’t even exceed ten words a week.
There was nothing to say about when I’d changed like that. Since from the moment I entered and lived at Hanbit Orphanage in my childhood that I couldn’t even remember, my relationship with others had been like this, there was no likelihood of there being anything worth explaining as a trigger or reason.
From when my head grew, I divided and classified the attention directed at me into two branches. One was instinctive threats trying to exclude something heterogeneous, and the other was thorough disregard and indifference. After more time passed and I entered middle school, even petty pranks or quarrels disappeared, so what remained for me was only indifference where not even a handful of gazes reached.
I knew that it wasn’t that they consciously tried and willfully ignored me. In the case of children who stayed at the orphanage for only two or three years before leaving, there were quite a few cases where they couldn’t even perceive my existence itself.
Why. I didn’t particularly have such a question. I just thought I was born to be this kind of person and passed it over thinking ‘that’s how it is.’ Like having to slow down because I kept spilling whenever I tried to eat something, like having an unusually hard time memorizing people’s names, like there being no particular problem even if I didn’t take meals on time. Though different from others, it was a part of daily life that was utterly ordinary to me.
I didn’t know what the expressions of other children looking at me were like. I seemed to have sometimes responded after hearing what they said to me, but my memory was hazy. Something that I couldn’t tell whether it was me or something else seemed to poke at my unconscious and whisper that from the beginning, I was an existence separated from them.
My gaze stared at one point of the city beyond the window. Under the night sky dyed black because the sun had set long ago, a spectacle of the city so pitch-black it couldn’t be called the densely populated metropolitan area was unfolding. It was a sight that had become quite familiar now, achieved because there was no way lights could come on in each building after the world became a mess.
If you walked straight along that main street, you’d come to an old building with a small garden attached. A tacky sign reading Hanbit Orphanage would be hanging at the garden entrance, and in front of it, vehicles that had lost their owners to monsters would be abandoned and sprawled out.
Most of them there had probably died already. Whether they fell to monsters or suffered from wound infections, except for a lucky minority, they wouldn’t have survived.
“Hayoung-ah.”
My gaze that had been stuck outside the window moved slowly. To my side sitting perched by the bedside, Cha Woodan had at some point approached soundlessly.
“You…”
“I’m in my right mind. I wasn’t trying to go out anywhere either.”
Cha Woodan, who had closed his mouth for a moment, gently curved the corners of his eyes.
“I know. I saw you sitting obediently.”
Not quietly, but obediently. That word was a bit lukewarm, so I was chewing it over when Cha Woodan naturally occupied the seat next to me and sat down.
Inside the art room where the lights didn’t come on, several large flashlights maintained a hazy brightness. I didn’t know where they kept getting those large flashlights, and likewise large-sized batteries from. I just accepted them without saying anything since the twins brought them for my convenience.
“What were you thinking about?”
I let Cha Woodan into my vision that had been scanning the art room interior. Because he had his back to the flashlight, only the outline of that face cast in gray shadow was barely revealed. Unable to read his expression because of that, I stared blankly at his face and slowly opened my mouth.
“Are you asking because you’re curious?”
When another question popped out instead of an answer to the question, Cha Woodan tilted his head.
“Hm?”
“Just, I’m curious too. Whether you’re really asking like that because you’re curious about what I was thinking.”
Cha Woodan, who had been silent for a moment, responded.
“Of course I’m asking because I’m curious. Neither I nor Cha Jeoh are people who would bring up insincere words and lay them out nicely, right?”
“……”
“Or is it hard for you to understand the very statement of being curious about you?”
Even in the darkness, I could clearly see only that the smile permeating Cha Woodan’s mouth had deepened. Looking at him like that without even blinking, when my eyes that had lost moisture became painful, I lowered and raised my eyelids a couple times.
“…I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.”
What I finally brought out was about the first question I still hadn’t properly answered. When I turned my gaze with the meaning that I wouldn’t continue, Cha Woodan also didn’t try to probe and matched my rhythm.
