Chapter 193: Tbh, it looks normal...
***
(Si Hon — few minutes earlier)
Si Hon walked with both hands deep in his pockets and Jisoo talking somewhere beside him, her voice a steady background noise he wasn’t fully processing.
Something about the penalty system probably. Something about the checkpoint radius.
He let it wash past him and just kept walking, watching the front of the school get closer, the scattered clusters of students still moving around the entrance with their arms full of whatever they’d managed to pull from the wreckage.
Then his eyes landed on Seong.
She was sitting on the front steps with Han and Suha tucked against either side of her, the three of them quiet in a way that looked earned rather than comfortable.
Something in Si Hon’s chest did a small, unexpected thing.
He didn’t examine it too closely. He just thought, (Hm. I missed them somehow,) with the same mild surprise of someone who hadn’t realized they were cold until they stepped inside, and changed direction toward her without really deciding to.
Jisoo glanced sideways at him, then followed his line of sight. "Hm?"
"Nothing."
"You say ’nothing’ like a criminal."
"Thanks."
"I try."
Then she simply shrugged and peeled away toward the side of the building, apparently deciding that whatever awkward social disaster was about to happen wasn’t her problem.
Si Hon continued forward alone.
Step.
Step.
Step.
He stopped in front of Seong.
Silence...
She looked up. He looked down. Han and Suha were right there, Suha already starting to open her mouth with that expression she got before saying something completely unhinged about the day’s events, and Si Hon opened his mouth too, fully prepared to say— something.
Hi. Hey. You good.
Any normal thing a person said when they walked up to someone they knew.
But...
Nothing came out.
(Wait,) he thought. (This is so awkward. What am I supposed to say. What do people say. Why is this so hard right now.)
He’d just spent seventy something resets walking toward monsters on purpose.
He had died by having his ribs caved in.
He had genuinely stopped caring about intestines. And now he was standing in front of Seong and could not produce a single sentence.
"Hi" felt weird.
"How are you?" felt weirder.
"Nice seeing you after dying seventy times." probably wasn’t appropriate.
Then he noticed her hands.
The way they were holding Han and Suha a little tighter than before. The slight tremor in her fingers, barely visible, the kind of thing you wouldn’t catch unless you were already looking closely. His eyes narrowed on their own. Just slightly. Just enough.
A small translucent window flashed beside him.
「Weak Glare — activated.」
Si Hon stared at the notification.
(Oh.)
(Oh no.)
He looked away immediately.
Dropped his gaze to the wet pavement and exhaled once through his nose and thought, (Okay. That’s enough of that. That was terrible. I should leave now.)
He did not look back up. He just turned, located Jisoo leaning against the wall a few meters away watching him with the expression of someone who had already decided this was the funniest thing she’d seen, and walked over to her.
"Okay." Jisoo pushed off the wall and fell into step beside him, a laugh already sitting in her voice, not quite released yet. "What was that. It gave me shivers... Second hand embarrassment, honestly."
"I don’t know what happened," Si Hon said, with complete sincerity. "I just wanted to say hi. I froze. I don’t know."
"You glared at her."
"I wasn’t glaring on purpose, my skill just—"
"You glared at her, Si Hon."
"Aigo." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Can we move on."
Jisoo giggled. Actually giggled, which was rare enough that he almost stopped walking just to see if it’s real.
She reached over and patted his back once, easy and unhurried, pulling him back from something stupid, and said, "Okay. Where are we going?"
Si Hon looked around at the ruined courtyard, the mist still coming down soft over all of it, the sounds of students hauling things around inside the school somewhere behind them. "I don’t know," he said honestly. "ಠ_ಠ"
Jisoo made a face. "ಠ,_｣ಠ ...Let’s just go around the back. And I think you know why."
Si Hon glanced at her sideways.
Then something in his expression shifted, loosened, just a little— the first genuine thing that had moved across his face since the checkpoint. "Haha. Already? Alright."
They went around the side of the building together, footsteps quiet against wet pavement, the noise of the front gradually fading behind them as the path curved toward the back of the school grounds.
And then it opened up.
***
The backyard of Jisoo’s school was— fine, okay, he had not been expecting this. After hours of broken corridors and cratered fields and ceilings that had given up on being ceilings, the back grounds looked almost untouched.
Clean green grass spreading wide across a full soccer field, the white lines still faintly visible beneath the rain.
Two large buildings rose at the far edges of the fence— the pool on the left, the gym on the right, both intact, both lit in a way that made them look almost normal.
A row of trees along the eastern fence, still standing. The whole thing had the disorienting quality of a place that had decided to o out of the apocalypse happening on the other side of the wall.
"Ah," Si Hon said. "I forgot you go to a prestigious school."
Jisoo didn’t respond to that. He looked over and found her already watching the middle of the field, expression doing that specific thing it did when she was running calculations faster than she was talking.
He followed her gaze.
In the center of the soccer field, roughly where the center circle would be, a portal sat in the grass, like it had always been there.
Blue light, soft and cold, rippling outward from its edges in slow pulses— not dramatic, not urgent, just steady, like a heartbeat that had been going for a while and had no intention of stopping.
The glow caught the rain as it fell through the outer edges, scattering into tiny lit droplets before they hit the ground around it.
Si Hon looked at it for a long moment.
"Ah... fuck," he said.
