#83
A strange certainty crept up from his feet.
I can hit it.
His finger, creaking like a rusty hinge, slowly pulled the trigger. Only the sound of wind flowing around enveloped the quiet open space. The moment of firing the gun stretched out like an eternity.
When his finger finally pulled the trigger completely, the muzzle spat fire.
Bang―!
The gunshot shook the surroundings even louder in the silence.
“Ah…”
A low sigh escaped from Ho-woo. The second bullet he aimed didn’t even graze near the monster. Expectation quickly turned to disappointment, and Ho-woo slumped his tightly tensed shoulders.
He was sure he could hit it.
“Don’t be disappointed. If this were real, you’d be dead the moment the bullet missed,” the instructor said, drawing Ho-woo’s attention to focus again. It was only two out of five chances. There were still three more opportunities left. However, the strange certainty from before didn’t feel washed away like water.
Ho-woo raised his arm to aim at the panel.
***
Ho-woo slumped his shoulders lifelessly.
“It’s amazing that you hit it on your first try,” Cha Geon-woo comforted Ho-woo from the side. However, Ho-woo’s expression didn’t brighten. It got worse when he received his miserable score sheet. Knowing that Cha Geon-woo, who received a perfect score sheet next to him, wasn’t trying to be mean, Ho-woo’s surge of emotion was probably an inferiority complex.
The Guides who used fifteen bullets in total, firing five shots three times in rotation, generally hit the panel somewhere with half their shots and missed with the other half. Ho-woo had missed with all his shots except for the first one. If he had hit the panel anywhere, he wouldn’t be this depressed, but his missed bullets didn’t hit anything. They were probably embedded in the wall hastily erected in the open space to stop bullets.
Only Cha Geon-woo received a perfect score and earned a pass from the instructor to skip the next training session.
Even if you can’t fill your stomach with the first spoonful, shouldn’t you at least do as well as others?
Ho-woo took difficult steps, dripping with unnecessary regret. Oh-yul, still leaning diagonally against the wall, waited for Ho-woo to approach and only slightly creased his eyes in a smile when Ho-woo came close.
“Good work.”
Their eyes had met a few times while Oh-yul was quietly leaning against the wall, watching this side during the training. Although boredom wasn’t visible on his face, Ho-woo had wondered a few times if he was bored just standing there watching, so he carefully asked,
“Weren’t you bored?”
“I didn’t even notice time passing while watching you.”
Cha Geon-woo, listening from the side, contorted his face in disgust. The Oh-yul he knew was a cold-blooded Esper without mercy in his hands. Quite a number of Espers had gone missing or died after going on missions with him.
Since it was an unwritten rule not to interfere in conflicts between Espers, everyone just kept quiet about it, and no one openly brought up the topic. They just didn’t want to get involved with him, who would return with a clean face after single-handedly dealing with monsters that should have required team responses.
After parting with them yesterday, Eun-chan had given Cha Geon-woo a rather serious warning.
‘Don’t get too close to Ho-woo, brother.’
The advice not to get close wasn’t because of Ho-woo, but because of this Esper. Even with a smiling face, his essence ultimately doesn’t change. Cha Geon-woo looked disapprovingly at the man who was nodding gently to Ho-woo’s words with a mild face.
The two were in the midst of discussing whether to eat lunch and then train or to train first and eat afterwards. After a brief conversation, they seemed to have decided to eat first, as Ho-woo approached Cha Geon-woo warmly.
“You’re going to have lunch too, right, Geon-woo?”
“I should. Have you been to the cafeteria here?”
“I went last week.”
Cha Geon-woo felt pity for Ho-woo, who smiled gently saying he had eaten pork cutlet but it was ordinary.
‘How did he end up with someone like that.’
Clicking his tongue inwardly, he knew there wasn’t much he could do to help Ho-woo, even if he sympathized with him. He hoped for the best, but that was just Cha Geon-woo’s wish.
“The pork cutlet isn’t great, but the Korean food here is better.”
“Really? Then I’ll try the same thing as you today, Geon-woo.”
As the three headed to the cafeteria together, the gazes of young Espers and Guides belonging to the training center followed them. Cha Geon-woo thought that Oh-yul’s notoriety must be widespread even within the training center, as they looked on with curious eyes but didn’t come close.
Unlike that notoriety, he seemed to be doing his assigned tasks quite diligently while always appearing to be playing around. At least, the majority opinion was that Oh-yul, though with a dirtier personality, was better than Kim Dong-cheol, who was desperate to fill his own pockets.
‘Is it really better?’
It was certainly good for the Espers and Guides. But for Ho-woo? Cha Geon-woo couldn’t say it was a good thing even if his mouth twisted. From the beginning, Oh-yul taking the minister position itself didn’t seem to be with pure intentions. Oh-yul working selflessly for others? A cat making dog sounds would be more realistic than that.
Arriving at the cafeteria under the gaze of many, Cha Geon-woo ordered the same menu for everyone. The soybean paste stew set meal was something he had eaten to the point of being sick of it while staying at the training center, but it was still a decent option. Oh-yul seemed to have no complaints about the menu either, quietly taking care of Ho-woo’s water cup.
“I didn’t think I’d be eating this again at the training center. I swore I’d never come back.”
“Because you ate it too much and got sick of it?”
“That’s part of it, but Guides are forced to enter the training center at fifteen, so I don’t have many good memories. Many kids despair at being forcibly separated from their families and realizing that being a Guide is the only thing they can do. Well, at fifteen, it’s an age where you want to do all sorts of things, right? I was like that too.”
Cha Geon-woo spoke casually, slowly continuing his words with a face that seemed to be tracing the past.
“I wanted to play baseball. I was actually recognized as quite a promising player. I never thought I’d be judged as a Guide, but the moment the Esper who came that day made the Guide judgment, I felt like the ground I was standing on was crumbling. They say at most one or two people come out of a school, and it was me.”
The despair he felt then seemed to come back to him, as a complicated expression settled on his face before quickly disappearing. Ho-woo keenly noticed that this nonchalance came from a kind of resignation. Instead of offering inadequate comfort, Ho-woo silently drank the water placed in front of him.
“When I first came, I tried desperately to escape, but now I don’t think it’s that bad. I met Eun-chan, got to go outside the city where others might never go in their lifetime, and I’m earning good money. Although I hardly have any occasions to spend it.”
Cha Geon-woo added the last part lightly, like a joke, then checked the vibrating bell and went to get the food. With three meals out but only one person to carry them, he had to make two trips, glaring at Oh-yul who didn’t budge, then casually asked Ho-woo who had started eating.
“How is it?”
“Better than the pork cutlet. It reminds me of the cafeteria food I ate in college.”
“College… What was college life like?”
Come to think of it, neither Oh-yul nor Geon-woo would have gone to college.
Ho-woo pondered for a moment as Cha Geon-woo looked at him with expectant eyes. Even trying to think if anything special had happened, he couldn’t remember much. What he did remember was…
“I drank an enormous amount of alcohol.”
Oh-yul burst into laughter at Ho-woo’s words. Cha Geon-woo became dazed at the light laughter resonating in Oh-yul’s throat, then looked at him as if he were crazy. Ho-woo also looked at him bewilderedly, then shook his head at Oh-yul’s question, still mixed with laughter, “Then do you remember how you got home?”
“No, in my freshman year, I was often dragged around by seniors to drink, so I blacked out a lot.”
Strangely, there was one senior who was particularly clingy, but around the end of the semester, contact suddenly stopped. Since Ho-woo wasn’t the one to initiate contact and there were no bad rumors going around the school, he just left it alone. As time passed and contact naturally ceased, to the point where they only exchanged eye greetings when passing by, he even had celebratory drinks with Do-hyun.
“I can certainly imagine Ho-woo being like that.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, with your pretty face, you must have received a lot of attention.”
Pretty… Does that suit me? Pretty is…
Ho-woo reflexively turned to look at Oh-yul sitting next to him. The man’s eyes, still holding a smile on his face, were curved in a gentle arc.
That’s what pretty is.
The man’s smile, captivating at a glance, had a powerful impact. Even if what’s inside that plausible exterior is a morally bankrupt person.
Oh-yul, receiving that gaze, slowly tilted his head. He seemed to wonder why Ho-woo was looking at him. It even looked cute, not matching the man’s large build.
“Isn’t ‘pretty’ more suitable for you, Oh-yul, than for me?”
“……”
“I’m just ordinary.”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
