My somewhat distant companionship with him continued for a while.
Since I only had to follow the path he took ahead of me, there was no chance of me bumping into anyone while walking.
I had told him that my night vision was poor, so the sight of him deliberately keeping to the path ahead of me left me feeling ever so slightly guilty.
Unlike Yu Inna, that boy seemed to feel nothing in particular for me.
He didn’t look completely devoid of emotion, though. He kept sending me glances mixed with sympathy for someone who had been forcibly separated from her lover.
But that gaze never overstepped its bounds, like someone lingering by my side. It never crossed over into the territory of love.
Even knowing that, if I pushed that boy away for trying to get close to me, wouldn’t that mean I was no different from the trash I knew?
During my school days, even someone as perfect as me had been ostracized, all because there were people who resented that I got close to others.
“You know what, you’re a selfish, hopeless piece of trash. How could you rat a friend out to the teacher just to help some bullied bitch? Why? Is she gonna put out for you or something?”
“No? My friend was pathetically tormenting someone, and it made me feel pathetic and ashamed just to be near them, so I said something.”
After that, I got beaten black and blue, and the bullying began. Though that girl managed to escape by transferring schools, I was able to preserve the perfect goodness within my heart.
A boy who looked as wretched as if he’d been drenched in rain even though it wasn’t raining. He hadn’t done anything wrong on his end yet, so was it really right for me to keep my distance? Wasn’t I doing exactly what I hated and denied in others?
Thinking so, I began to see things that hadn’t been there just moments ago, and words I hadn’t wanted to utter even though tomorrow was the weekend filled my throat.
“Wait, stop for a second.”
“Why?”
“Let’s play a game before we go.”
I said it while looking at the PC sign in the distance, but the boy laughed wryly instead.
It wasn’t that he was wondering whether the rule about not being able to game at PC bangs after 22:00 without an ID applied here too. And it wasn’t that he disliked the idea of playing a game with me.
“That place… well, it’s for things like poker, so if it’s somewhere else, let’s play a round and then go.”
To think that the place I’d suggested was not what I’d thought, but an entirely different kind of game room.
Perhaps because I felt slightly embarrassed, my ears felt as if they were burning, but I tried to ignore the change in my face and said,
“But you pay.”
“Since you’re the one who suggested going, you should probably pay… but fine, I’ll pay today. It’ll be about an hour. Next time, you pay.”
The boy, who had looked rather pitiful, walked toward the destination with slightly lighter steps. Yet, as he kept glancing back at where I was, I let out a short laugh.
I definitely didn’t feel any desire to love that boy. But I felt like I might be able to make a friend—the kind I had lost in my youth.
This body definitely still felt borrowed. Unless I completely lost the way to escape and remained here forever, that feeling wouldn’t disappear.
However, even though I felt this body was a false one, the emotions I would feel from making a friend wouldn’t be fake.
Since tomorrow was Saturday and we didn’t have school, the moment we arrived at the game room instead of a PC bang, we began a real sword fight sharper than *Superpower Battle*.
And contrary to the idea that we’d stop after one round, the game we played for a long time was quite fun. …Though I suffered seventeen losses because the fighting game combos from my world didn’t work.
“That’s cowardly.”
My cheeks puffed up on their own like balloons. Choosing a character whose combos chain infinitely after one hit? This was clearly not a difference in skill, but a difference in heroes.
“That’s why we switched characters.”
I took the hero Kim Haneul had been using, and Kim Haneul took the hero I had been using, but I still got crushed.
Was it because my wrist snap was unfamiliar in this body? No. Though this body might belong to someone else, the soul dwelling within it was mine. It was only natural that I should be able to overcome physical abilities far weaker than Kim Haneul’s.
Therefore, the reason I lost was none other than,
“…Because you picked a game you’re familiar with. Let’s play something else. Something else.”
I grabbed his sleeve and pulled. I absolutely could not live with losing. I would pick a game that looked familiar to me and claim victory.
On the boy’s face, as he was led along by my grim determination, something different from the smile I had seen until now appeared and then vanished.
What was that? Before I could even figure it out, we started a game that looked similar to table tennis. Before I could even think to chalk it up to inferior physical abilities, the boy had already scored first. We played like that at the game room until the early hours of the morning, then arrived at my house and fell asleep.
I had worried about whether it was okay to let a man into the house, but if I thought of myself as a man, it was only proper that I could let him in even if he was a boy.
There was no chance the protagonist of a dating sim, who should have been as good as a eunuch, would suddenly try to pounce on me. In fact, the moment he saw the bed in the room next to mine, he flopped down and fell asleep.
When I saw the scratches all over his body, he must have fought an incredibly arduous battle today. After confirming he had fallen asleep safely, I went straight back and fell asleep myself.
*
The woman who would keep waiting even if told to go first was Yu Inna. The reason such a woman had left Erica behind and gone first was none other than to have a conversation with someone there.
In an alley not far from the Association, where the glow of streetlamps faintly reached, there were two women.
Their beauty was so outstanding that anyone looking at them would think they were not the type to beg and plead for “love,” but rather the type to choose from among the men who liked them.
“We need to talk, don’t we.”
A businesslike, stiff tone. The Student Council President offered words to her opponent that she would not use on a student of her own school.
The girl with dark green hair looked at the Association building instead of responding, then focused her gaze on the Student Council President.
Inorganic crimson irises. They blazed like flames when looking at the person she loved, but they did not burn to that degree even when looking at Erica’s former lover, who obstructed that love.
The Student Council President hadn’t expected the other to view her favorably from the start, and if anything, it would have been more unpleasant had she done so. To the President, that woman’s coldness was just right.
“Why do you keep clinging to her side? I’m sure I told you that you have no right to be by her side.”
“Hmm… qualifications are meaningless, aren’t they? Just bury the past, and doing well from now on is what counts. I’m confident I can treat her much better than before.”
Inna’s words sounded peculiar to the Student Council President’s ears. Since Erica was presumed to have lost her memories, it only sounded like she was saying that because those memories were gone, the past was erased and she would do well from now on.
The Student Council President, for whom the lost memories contained precious ones, did not wish for the past to be buried.
But Yu Inna, whose wrongdoing was contained within those lost memories, wished for the past to be buried.
Because they wanted different things from each other, those two had no choice but to head down different paths. There was no longer any meaning in arguing. Just as the Student Council President was about to turn away, the girl with dark green hair smiled.
“You’ve bought all the time you needed, haven’t you? Did you get a text or something?”
It was an accusation that the Student Council President had called the girl here to buy time. For someone who had called her out as a warning, the President had been trying to give up and retreat quite easily.
The President showed no signs of panic. If she possessed Insight, her opponent possessed Influence. A superhuman ability that reached the extremes of irrationality—one capable of turning anything in this world to one’s side.
If the President had learned through a text message that Kim Haneul had taken Erica away, then the opponent could turn anything in this world into CCTV cameras and surveillance agents.
“Don’t worry. I’ll just leave today. Even though I call you my girlfriend, I know he won’t take her all the way home and will just send her off at an appropriate point. And I knew that if I tried to approach any further here, she would end up hating me instead.”
The girl with dark green hair twirled her hair around her finger as she thought of the girl who, ever since losing her memories, refused to let her in beyond a certain line.
Whether it was because the experience of being betrayed by her was embedded deep in her body, or because her desire had been visible from the start.
She didn’t know the reason, but she had been thinking that she should stop her excessive approaches before the weekend. What happened today was merely a good opportunity to create some distance.
“But if the other side crosses the line… you’ll have to bear what comes next, I Seora.”
But that too was a story for if the other side did not cross the line. Without saying what she would do, Yu Inna was slowly swallowed by the darkness and vanished.
“That won’t happen. If he truly desires my cooperation… he won’t do anything I would despise.”
The Student Council President, who had watched the spot where Yu Inna stood until the very end, looked down at the ground and muttered quietly.
…Those who had been here could never have imagined that the ending awaiting them after this was one where the boy and Erica entered the game room together, had fun with each other, and then went home together.
Well, not that the indecent things they had been imagining happened at all.