“…Senior, if someone does something wrong… they have to apologize. Apologize.”
The senior had clearly kept apologizing over and over,
but it seemed like he’d used the excuse of “it’s not sincere” and “I don’t like it” to beat the guy several times. Even though that senior was physically bigger, the dull, heavy sounds of him getting hit without being able to resist even once kept echoing from behind the school building. Enough to make anyone watching recoil in horror.
Kim Seong-un, who had been watching, felt goosebumps crawl all over his body. Even while doing something like that, the smile never left Baek Yu-gyeong’s face — it was as though he were a psychopath incapable of understanding human emotion.
After that, the matter never even surfaced to the level of a school violence committee. The senior kept missing school, and before long it all wrapped up with him voluntarily transferring out. The students whispered amongst themselves that the senior had transferred on his own, humiliated by what happened before.
But Kim Seong-un — the one who had witnessed that scene — was certain. Baek Yu-gyeong’s family must have buried it.
…No matter how justified the revenge, wasn’t that going a bit too far?
Honestly, if he’d just roughed the guy up a little, he might have written it off as a fight between guys — but having seen the actual beating firsthand, it had been brutal enough to leave him shaken.
On top of that, he really didn’t like the way Baek Yu-gyeong played the kind, caring, model student in front of others, only to turn sinister behind their backs. Even now, Baek Yu-gyeong’s image at school was that of a good-natured, diligent rich boy, and it grated on him to see the girls shrieking and fawning over him.
Of course, that didn’t mean he had any intention of picking a fight. As a beta, Kim Seong-un knew that getting into a dispute with an alpha — who held the instinctive upper hand — was a losing game from the start.
So when this senior named Shin Chae-il showed up and spoke to him out of nowhere, Kim Seong-un felt like he’d been struck by lightning from a clear blue sky, worried he might somehow end up tangled with that unhinged bastard.
…Why would someone who looks this decent be hanging around with that guy….
Then again. Weren’t omegas the type to go absolutely wild at the sight of any impressive alpha? Birds of a feather, obviously.
In the middle of those thoughts, their eyes met. The moment Cha-heun and Seong-un locked eyes, Cha-heun smiled faintly and was the first to speak, apologizing for holding him up when he was probably busy.
“Oh, no, it’s fine. But why are you…?”
“Ah, nothing major — do you happen to know a student named Kim… ah wait, no, Min Ha-seong in second-year class four? I’m Shin Cha-heun from third year. I came to return something that I think belongs to Ha-seong.”
“Oh, …Min Ha-seong. …Um, he’s absent today….”
“Hm? Oh, really?”
Shin Cha-heun seemed to think for a moment, then handed him the name tag and said,
“It looked like this was dropped in the hallway, and it had his name on it…. Could you possibly put it on his desk for him?”
“Uh, …yeah. …Yes, understood.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Kim Seong-un briefly revised the opinion he’d formed earlier, given how neat and upright Shin Cha-heun’s manner actually was — but then he remembered that this was someone who went around with Baek Yu-gyeong, and gave his head one small shake.
After Shin Cha-heun left, Park Ji-min, who had been walking up behind Seong-un, spotted his friend standing dazed in the doorway holding something and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, what’s that? Did you go dropping your name tag like an idiot?”
“It’s Min Ha-seong’s name tag, apparently.”
The moment Park Ji-min heard the name, his face went pale.
“What the hell, throw it away quickly. Didn’t Ha-seong go absent right after talking to Baek Yu-gyeong the other day?”
Kim Seong-un nodded. Park Ji-min was the friend who had watched Baek Yu-gyeong’s violent scene with him back then. Just that morning, Park Ji-min had been going on about how Baek Yu-gyeong had probably gone and buried Min Ha-seong for good this time — rambling that it was a repeat of what happened a year ago, making a huge fuss about it. He was the starting member of the kendo club, yet somehow the biggest coward imaginable.
“…That’s probably what it is, right?”
“What on earth did he even do to get on Baek Yu-gyeong’s radar?”
“…Who knows. That bastard’s a complete psychopath. All smiles in front of people, but behind their backs — hmph,”
Park Ji-min cut off his own mouth as if he couldn’t even bear to think about it, shaking his head back and forth.
“Ah, forget it, forget it. What’s the point of getting mixed up in it. Come on, hurry. Throw that thing away already, you idiot. Don’t get tangled up with Baek Yu-gyeong at all.”
“…God, I can’t stand this.”
“What does it matter that you can’t stand it. Just throw it away, I said.”
Kim Seong-un put on a small show of bravado — took the name tag all the way to the trash can, glanced around,
…and slipped the name tag into his pocket.
“Hyung~”
Cha-heun, who had failed to get away from the second-year hallway fast enough and had ended up with Baek Yu-gyeong tailing him again, braced for another round of clinging —
“You came to give Ha-seong his name tag, right? Did you get it to him?”
But Baek Yu-gyeong walked alongside him and asked in a neat, composed manner, without any of his usual physical contact. Cha-heun felt a strange sense of dissonance, but calmly nodded.
“He was absent, so I asked one of his classmates to pass it along.”
“I see.”
“…Why?”
Since yesterday, Baek Yu-gyeong had been oddly interested in that boy. Did he actually have some kind of personal grudge against Min Ha-seong?
“Hmm? Well… because I don’t like it when hyung pays attention to other guys besides me?”
Cha-heun immediately regretted saying that. Because the moment he did, Baek Yu-gyeong whined and wrapped his arms around him from behind.
“Hey, do you mind letting go?”
“You never come to see me, and yet you go out of your way for other guys.”
The fact that Min Ha-seong was being counted as another “guy” was absurd. Cha-heun was at a loss for words.
“Yu-gyeong’s upset.”
I’m the one who’s upset.
Because there was no way today wasn’t a deeply upsetting day — being the person a male high schooler in his late teens, standing over 180 centimeters tall, was talking about himself in the third person to.
Is this what a marine animal feels like with a barnacle attached to it? So this is why sea turtles sink beneath the water and die.
Unable to physically pry him off, Cha-heun trudged forward with Baek Yu-gyeong stuck to his back once again.
Even in the middle of a school life like that, he had made one friend.
The reason it was called “a school life like that” was plainly because of Baek Yu-gyeong.
Word had spread through the school that he was a superior omega, which led most of the beta students — who made up roughly eighty to ninety percent of the student population — to keep their distance. On top of that, thanks to Baek Yu-gyeong, his relationships with other students had grown even more distant by a factor of three. And since he himself didn’t feel confident getting close to kids his age and hadn’t been approaching anyone, he had been living a life that was close to being socially isolated.
Fortunately, a beta male student named Kang I-hyeon had unexpectedly become close friends with him.
They were seatmates, and all it had taken was catching him dozing off in Korean class and getting caught by the teacher — so he pointed out the place they were reading from while he was flustered.
That was all there was to it.
The reason he’d done it was because I-hyeon was reportedly the kendo club captain, and as someone who had come from a sports background himself, he understood how hard it was to juggle training and academics. He would be falling asleep at home like he’d collapsed, yet still waking up to practice in the mornings — and being captain meant he’d have individual training too, so there was a good chance he was doing basic conditioning drills from the crack of dawn. Once you drained yourself that way, it was only natural that sitting through classes would be agony.
And yet this big guy said he was grateful for something so small and asked to be friends.
“Wow…. That guy is really good.”
Today, Kang I-hyeon had said Cha-heun could come watch kendo club practice, so he’d tagged along — and out of all the students, there was one who stood out unmistakably, and Cha-heun let out an admiring murmur before he even realized it. The student in kendo gear, face guard and all, was nearly 190 centimeters despite clearly being young, yet moved with sharp precision and agility. Even among all the students there, his footwork was in a different class entirely.
“Oh, him? He’s insanely good, yeah…. But he said he’s quitting. Apparently he even won some championship at some point, but even back in first year he skipped every tournament.”
“Huh? Why? When he’s that good?”
Cha-heun had never done kendo, but he knew enough about physical technique to roughly gauge how skilled someone was just from watching. The way he completely and methodically dominated his opponent left no wasted movement — filled with power and presence — even a complete stranger would look at that and know: that’s the ace.
“I don’t know. Asking any further would be too….”
“Too?”
“…I don’t want to say I was intimidated by a junior a whole year younger than me, but look at that guy’s build. Apparently his face underneath is even scarier.”
At I-hyeon’s words, Cha-heun quietly gazed ahead.
He was tall and broad, with a solid, wide-set frame that caught the eye right away. Honestly, just his build alone made him look like someone you wouldn’t want to approach, let alone pick a fight with.
When the match ended and he took off his face guard, Cha-heun recognized him. It was the same boy who had been staring him down in the hallway before and then walked past. Come to think of it, every time they’d crossed paths since, he always seemed to be glaring.
…It’s not that his expression is scary. It’s that his face itself… looks kind of dangerous.
He was clearly a little on the pretty side, but with that sharp, blank look on his face, he had the kind of appearance that could make a person feel like their life was in danger.
The fact that looking at someone so sculpted made Cha-heun instinctively think don’t poke that before he even registered he’s handsome said everything.
Cha-heun nodded.
“Fair enough. You had every right to be intimidated, I-hyeon.”
“What? No, I wasn’t intimidated exactly—”
“Let’s just go with that.”
“Ugh, Shin Cha-heun. I’m only letting it slide because you’re tiny, you know.”
“You really are packing something huge, huh.”
Cha-heun grinned and looked at I-hyeon. His lips curved up like a little troublemaker’s, his eyes folding slyly like a fox — somehow obscenely coy in the most inexplicable way.
“You absolute—with that face, saying something like that—”
Kang I-hyeon’s manly face flushed scarlet, and he waved his hand in the air before letting out a long sigh.
“Hey, you…. Didn’t you say you’re an omega? I’m pretty sure the fact that you get confessed to by alphas on a daily basis is entirely your own fault.”
It was something I-hyeon had teased him with after hearing that he got confessed to at least once or twice a month. Cha-heun, who had tried to tease back and gotten more than he bargained for, made a sour face.
This insane world. A world where guys can confess to guys and it’s perfectly normal.
It didn’t help that alpha population skewed heavily male, and omega population skewed heavily female — which made his situation all the more awkward.
Cha-heun exhaled once and pulled his gaze away from the large male student, looking at I-hyeon instead.
“So, could you date me?”
“Ugh, absolutely not. …Oh — I don’t mean that as an insult—”
“No, I get it. Dating is something you do with someone you actually like.”
Now that was a normal guy’s reaction. Cha-heun didn’t take it as rude at all — if anything, the dramatic refusal was oddly refreshing. I-hyeon scratched the back of his own head, looking a little awkward.
“Honestly speaking…. I don’t even really know what pheromones feel like, and just because I might catch a nice scent from you, Shin Cha-heun, I don’t think I could date you — a guy. …Unless I somehow fell for you as a person, maybe, but… no matter how I think about it, being physically conscious of another guy in that way just isn’t something I’m capable of.”
He’s right. Just as Kang I-hyeon said, it’s the same for Cha-heun — catching a nice scent from someone doesn’t mean he could date them.
Whether that was a beta way of thinking or not, he wasn’t sure — but perhaps because his body was omega, while he could technically register an alpha’s scent through his body’s receptors, he had never actually felt drawn in or attracted by it.
“Yeah, I feel exactly the same way.”
“…Aren’t you an omega?”
“I mean…. Sort of. Practically a beta?”
“What, like recessive or something? But regardless of any of that, if that’s how you feel, it doesn’t matter. You said you like girls anyway.”
At I-hyeon’s easy, matter-of-fact words, Cha-heun let out a small smile.
When rumors of him being a superior omega were already everywhere, the fact that I-hyeon didn’t even know that and said “recessive or something?” confirmed it — Kang I-hyeon was a genuinely straightforward person. He judged and decided based on what he saw himself, not on what he heard. And the way he pulled back, worried he might have been rude, made Cha-heun think — for someone so young — that’s actually pretty admirable.
Cha-heun tucked away his warm thoughts about I-hyeon, and turned his attention to the student in the distance.
…He’s really good. With that level of skill, he’d coast his way onto the national team easily — so why is he quitting?
He felt the urge to watch just a little longer, and Cha-heun moved closer to get a better look.
About ten minutes or so passed like that.
The student he’d been watching had already started packing up, and —
“It’s such a waste for him to quit….”
He said it before he even knew he had. In only a short span of time, Cha-heun had gotten a little absorbed in watching that student move.
What an unfortunate talent to let go of. They say it’s never too late for anything, but the time when a shining talent can truly be set free is limited.
With skill like that, the student must know it himself — which made Cha-heun all the more curious about why he was walking away.
“……”
Perhaps that feeling was too strong — right at that moment, their eyes met. Eyes meeting had happened plenty of times before, so that part was fine.
…The problem was that the distance between them was closer than expected.
…Did he hear that?
It seemed like he had, because the other person was staring back at him, seemingly having noticed something odd too. Setting aside the question of what might be going on behind that cool, unreadable expression — as an adult, Cha-heun felt a small wave of embarrassment.
Ahem. Ahem.
Cha-heun cleared his throat a couple of times, spent about five rounds weighing whether the boy in front of him had heard or not, and ultimately decided there was no way he hadn’t — so he chose to come clean.
“Ah, well…. I overheard that you’re quitting…. Why are you quitting?”
He hadn’t meant to go that far, but things had already come to this, so he figured he might as well break the awkward tension while he was at it.
The boy’s clean, straight brow furrowed rapidly.
“…How is it any of your business whether I quit or—”
The boy’s low voice came to a sudden stop. His deep ash-grey gaze swept over the name tag, then —
“—Sir.”
He added a formal honorific — oddly enough. Even though his voice carried a strangely prickly, unmistakable edge of hostility.
