At Haru, who lowered his head after finishing with an apology, Sihyeon pressed his lips together. Even after turning the situation over in his head again, he couldn’t understand it. This was clearly a situation where he should be the one apologizing, and wasn’t that exactly why the cold war had dragged on for so long?
For a moment, he wondered if he had misunderstood the situation all along—or if he had simply misheard. He even pinched his cheek lightly, but nothing changed. Still running through his thoughts, Sihyeon looked at Haru.
He needed to set things straight.
“Why are you apologizing, hyung?”
“…….”
“Other than getting hurt because you took the hit instead of the knife, everything’s fine. That’s not what you’re apologizing for, right?”
Haru still seemed to think that what he did that day—stepping in front of him—had been the right choice. There was no way someone like that would suddenly apologize for getting hurt in his place. Sihyeon’s blue eyes examined him. He wanted to check his expression, but his black hair covered his entire face.
“What exactly are you sorry for?”
Carefully adjusting his tone so it wouldn’t sound like an interrogation, Sihyeon asked. Haru fidgeted with his fingers.
Tick, tick.
The training room was so quiet that even the smallest sounds were clear. It was a sound he had heard somewhere before.
“Wasn’t it… my fault?”
“For what?”
“…Just, everything.”
“…….”
What kind of situation is this now?
Haru’s sudden self-blame only left him more confused.
“Why would you think that?”
“…Because you were avoiding me.”
“…What?”
At the timid mumbling in a low voice, Sihyeon’s tone rose. It was the first he’d heard of it. All this time, he had thought Haru was avoiding him, but Haru thought the opposite. The situation had twisted in a subtle way.
“What are you talking about?”
“…You didn’t ask me to eat together.”
“…….”
For the past week, Haru had been eating alone. Since he hadn’t come over, Sihyeon had assumed he was uncomfortable and left him alone—but he hadn’t realized it was because he never asked.
Before he knew it, he had become trash who stirred up someone else’s wounds and then abandoned them. Half dumbfounded, half wronged, Sihyeon let out a hollow laugh, his expression dimming.
He had simply meant to give him time alone. Haru had seemed like he needed time to think, too. And once he sorted out his thoughts, Sihyeon had assumed he’d come—whether to forgive or to criticize. That was how things usually went in relationships.
It had been a miscalculation.
“…Is it because I’m a Dual that you started to dislike me?”
“No.”
“…But.”
His voice, which had been gradually shrinking, finally disappeared altogether. As Haru pressed his lips tightly shut, Sihyeon rolled his eyes, unsure where to start fixing things.
Only today did he realize that Haru’s self-esteem was lower than he had thought.
The relationship Sihyeon had firmly believed to be mutual—Haru seemed to perceive it as a one-sided hierarchy, where Sihyeon was “above” and he was “below.”
“Then… it wasn’t that you were avoiding me—you just couldn’t come over because I didn’t talk to you first?”
After a pause, Haru nodded.
A deflated laugh slipped out. He had no idea what kind of mess he’d been making this whole time.
“You weren’t mad because I saw the mark on your forehead?”
“…At that time, I just…”
“Just?”
“…I was just scared.”
“Of what?”
“That you might… hate me.”
Because you seemed to care a lot about class…
The quiet voice pinpointed his inner thoughts exactly. Even with a slight reinterpretation, it sounded like Haru had been afraid because Sihyeon disliked higher classes like Dual. Sihyeon blinked and looked at Haru, who still had his head lowered.
As Sihyeon slowly stood up, Haru flinched and raised his head. Seeing him startled, as if thinking he was about to leave, stirred a mix of guilt and sympathy in him.
He stepped closer, closing the distance between them from one bench apart to half, then sat down beside him on the same bench and swallowed.
“…Why would I hate you over something like that, hyung?”
It had been Haru who told him it didn’t matter that his class was Quadruple. For Sihyeon to turn around and say, “I’m uncomfortable because you’re a Dual,” would make him nothing short of insane—ungrateful and utterly shameless.
“I thought you were mad at me, so I was just giving you time to calm down.”
“…How could I be mad at you?”
There was genuine confusion in his voice. Sihyeon blinked at Haru, who spoke as if it truly made no sense.
It was blind.
That thought, which had occasionally crossed his mind before, now settled firmly into certainty.
Haru was—strangely, almost irrationally—blindly devoted to him.
“I just… thought that’s how it was.”
Only after exchanging a few similar words did the situation finally settle.
It was the result of misunderstandings piling up.
“If I’d known, I would’ve just talked to you sooner.”
At Sihyeon’s lament, Haru nodded. To think something that had caused him headaches for over a week would be resolved so easily. Feeling a bit empty, Sihyeon looked at Haru’s frustratingly long bangs.
“Then your hair… you grew it out because of the mark?”
“…Yeah.”
“I think it’d be okay to cut it a little.”
The mark was located on the upper part of his forehead, close to the hairline. Cutting it just enough to reveal his eyes seemed fine, so Sihyeon carefully suggested it.
Haru closed his mouth.
Thinking he might’ve touched a sore spot again, Sihyeon changed the subject and brought up Dual—but once again, silence followed.
Sihyeon began to think that the “mouth of disaster and fear” wasn’t Haeun—but himself.
“Um, about that, hyung—”
“…It’s not a normal mark.”
“…What?”
“That’s why I can’t do class engraving.”
He spoke clearly, without hesitation. Realizing what he meant, Sihyeon stared at Haru’s forehead—or more precisely, the area hidden beneath his hair.
“What do you mean by that?”
“…….”
When Sihyeon asked, confused, Haru hesitated briefly before lifting his bangs with his own hand.
His features were revealed.
Meeting his eyes again, Sihyeon’s pupils widened at the forehead where something should have been—but wasn’t.
For a moment, he wondered if Haru had already completed his engraving—
But then, a faint pattern surfaced on his forehead.
The mark that had disappeared as if it had never existed reappeared, growing clearer.
Sihyeon stopped breathing.
Even seeing it with his own eyes, he couldn’t believe it.
Though his knowledge about this world was limited, even he could tell that what was happening to Haru was not normal.
“…Hyung.”
Haru lowered his hand and parted his lips. Wondering if he had forced him into revealing something sensitive by bringing up Dual, Sihyeon carefully chose his words—but Haru spoke first.
“Is it… really strange?”
“…Do you have some kind of illness?”
Sihyeon’s anxiety showed as he asked, wondering if it might be some rare disease that only Awakened suffer from.
A vague thought crossed his mind—that this was all because Haru was from the Ban family—and it made his chest tighten.
Damn this web novel. He’d thought it was strange that someone from the Ban family didn’t have anything particularly overwhelming.
At some point, Haru’s Assassin class had completely disappeared from Sihyeon’s thoughts.
He recalled how, when they formed their partnership, Haru had said he had been held back for a year due to illness. Haru hesitated, scratching at his fingertips with his nails.
Tick, scratch.
At the small noise, Sihyeon’s gaze dropped. Just as he was about to stop Haru from hurting his own hand—
“…It was made.”
“…What?”
Haru’s voice suddenly cut through his thoughts. Looking up, Sihyeon saw Haru tucking his lips inward, lowering his head even further, as if he might sink into the ground.
“…My class—it was made.”
Artificially.
His trembling voice added the final word.
Realizing instantly that this wasn’t something like an illness, Sihyeon’s eyes drifted aimlessly. Not knowing where to look, he glanced around the training room before falling silent at the sight of Haru, who looked like a sinner with his head bowed.
Faced with Haru’s past so suddenly, words kept failing him.
As Sihyeon said nothing, Haru stared at the training room floor and swallowed.
The truth he had struggled with alone slipped out without him realizing—but instead of freeing him, it felt like it was dragging him down.
His darkened eyes recalled the past he had buried deep within the abyss. What he had never told anyone lingered in his mouth, stirring those memories.
The lab and training center he had desperately wanted to escape.
The knife that had been in his hand, and the cold blades that had touched his body.
The memories from the place he had fled from came back vividly, and Haru clenched and unclenched his interlocked hands, his shoulders trembling slightly.
Even just recalling fragments was enough for the past to consume him, his breath catching in his throat—
“Hyung?”
A voice called out.
A voice that pulled him up to the surface in an instant, even from a state where it wouldn’t have been strange for him to hit rock bottom.
Haru raised his head and looked at Sihyeon.
Blue eyes filled his red ones.
Unlike his own murky, heavy gaze, those eyes were simply clear.
Haru swallowed.
The air he inhaled struck deep into his lungs.
Proof that his respiratory system was still functioning normally.
Feeling every sensation that confirmed he was alive, Haru exhaled the breath he had been holding, his fingertips twitching as he faced Sihyeon.
“Are you okay?”
The voice that reached him was calm—steady, yet subtly gentle.
As someone worried about him, Haru slowly nodded and retraced his choice.
He didn’t know if it had been the right one.
He had never told anyone before, so there was no data by which he could judge right or wrong.
But the same was true of his relationship with Sihyeon.
After gathering his emotions, Haru quietly steadied his breathing.
No matter what happened, as long as Sihyeon was there, looking at him, it didn’t feel like the path he walked would lead to ruin. That was simply the feeling he had.
On the day he escaped the lab and came to the school like he was running away, when everything in the world felt unfamiliar, Sihyeon had been the only one who reached out a hand to him.
And so, he found himself thinking that this was someone he could trust.
A blind, unreasoning kind of belief.
It was the first time he had ever felt something like that.
