When the heavy impact hit my left shoulder, my body reacted before my brain even registered what had happened.
I didn't move an inch off my feet, but force of the collision rattled my collarbone.
I turned my head slowly, my eyes narrowing into sharp, deadly slits as the giant Ukrainian transfer student brushed past me without so much as a backward glance, charging through the cafeteria double doors like a runaway freight train.
For two full seconds, absolute silence fell over our end of the table.
Myung-sung, sitting next to me with his untucked uniform shirt, slammed his glass of iced tea onto the wooden table so hard the liquid sloshed over the rim.
"YAH! Is that crazy bastard out of his mind?!"
"Who the hell does he think he is?!" another second-year rebel growled, pushing his chair back with a harsh screech against the floorboards. "Should I go catch him in the hallway, Dae-ya? Who does a waegukin transfer student think he's shoulder-checking?"
My body remained completely taut, my mind screaming at me to spring up and drag the giant back by his collar. Nobody at Kirin Arts High touched me like that. Nobody looked me like that. Even the third-year bullies and the pretentious Student Council elites knew better than to cross my physical boundary unless they were looking for a brawl.
'Yet...'
There was zero calculation in it.
I stared at the swinging double doors where the Mountain had vanished.
My jaw clenched, my hand instinctively twitching toward the pocket of my hoodie.
And then... a low, rasping sound broke out of my throat.
A chuckle.
The rebels around me froze, looking at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head.
"Dae-ya?"
"Look at that idiot," I muttered, a wide, crooked smirk spreading across my face as I leaned back against the bench. "He actually has a pulse."
My friends exchanged bewildered glances, but the tension instantly deflated.
I rubbed my shoulder where he'd hit me. It had been solid. The guy wasn't just a towering lump of clumsy limbs. He wasn't like that spineless dog.
***
When I spotted him hanging from the matte-black pull-up bars in his workout gloves—moving through a fluid, explosive muscle-up I knew he wasn't just an uncoordinated clown in an orange tracksuit.
And our ten-point one-on-one basketball match on the neighborhood court only cemented it.
My lungs were still burning as I strolled away down the silent avenue of the Golden Triangle, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my oversized hoodie.
The cool night air bit against the fresh plaster stuck across the bridge of my nose—a lingering souvenir from my brief, bloody scuffle with Jun-seo near the nurse's office earlier that afternoon.
I spun the key ring around my index finger, listening to the quiet metallic jingle echoing off the dark stone walls of the surrounding mansions.
'Hm...' I thought, letting out a long plume of white mist into the night sky. 'He's... actually not bad.'
It was refreshing.
It was the first authentic thing I had encountered on this cursed campus since everything fell apart half a year ago.
My smirk faded, replaced by a sudden, bitter tightness in my jaw as a different image surfaced in my mind.
I remembered seeing him sitting at the front cafeteria table.
I remembered him looking up at Park Jun-seo with that lost, grateful expression, letting that self-righteous bastard wave him over like a stray dog being offered a scrap of meat. I remembered Jun-seo putting on his perfect, golden-boy "Class President" smile, playing the noble protector while subtly holding the foreign kid on a short, polite leash.
My fist clenched inside my hoodie pocket, my knuckles popping in the quiet night.
A dark, irritated scowl pulled down the corners of my mouth as I turned the corner toward my family's estate.
'If that Ukrainian idiot actually has real fire in him... why the hell is he trailing around that fake, arrogant dog, Jun-seo?'