The Way of Life for a Terminal S-Class Hunter - C29
$29
Hangover cure. I’d only heard about it, never experienced it myself. Hunters, known for their physical resilience, might get drunk but never suffered from hangovers.
I wondered if Lee-han was the same, or if he had some personal rule about needing a hangover cure after drinking. The question floated above my head.
“Then let’s just eat together. I’ll use this chance to get closer to Lee-han. I’m curious why you keep circling around him.”
There was a subtle barb in his words, but I was a bit surprised that Seo-heon had brought up improving his relationship with Lee-han for the first time.
Until just now, he seemed to be holding back his anger…
Seo-heon’s gaze was fixed on my neck. I realized my mistake and tidied up my disheveled clothes, and Lee-han seemed to notice something too as he stared at me.
“Even if we’re eating, we need to get ready to go out. Wait outside. Lee-han, change your clothes too. Let’s eat at our guild’s cafeteria, no need to go far.”
It had been a long time since I’d eaten breakfast, so I didn’t even feel like eating anything. But if I left things as they were, they both seemed ready to live in my room.
“Okay.”
After the door closed, I heard a banging noise. As I was taking off my clothes, I opened the window to see that one side of the dormitory corridor was dented, and they had already left.
“Was it like this yesterday too?”
Yesterday, I had been focused on Lee-han supporting me, so my vision was narrow. But connecting it to the loud noise just now didn’t make sense, as the corridor had been empty for a while since they disappeared.
I should ask for it to be repaired.
It wasn’t a big problem, so I continued getting ready to go out. Thinking of the people waiting outside, I needed to move quickly, but the more I thought, the slower my hands became. Judging from Seo-heon’s behavior earlier, his attitude towards me was the same as always. If nothing had changed, I doubted there would be any progress in our conversation.
Slow time clumped together and passed quickly. No answers came, but I finished preparing. I put on the coat I wore every day and arrived at the dormitory entrance to find Seo-heon and Lee-han waiting. They were standing far apart, making it seem unlikely that their relationship would improve.
Why would he lie about something so trivial just to eat together? Even after knowing Seo-heon for years, there were many things about him I couldn’t understand.
“You’re here?”
“Let’s go.”
No one spoke on the way to the cafeteria. They were clearly walking separately, but I had the illusion of feeling weight on my shoulders.
Wasn’t the atmosphere like this last time at the cafeteria too?
I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Offensive-type Hunters often clashed due to their strong personalities, but there was something peculiar about Seo-heon’s attitude towards Lee-han. He didn’t usually guard against other S-class Hunters like this.
No, has Seo-heon ever been wary of anyone before? He usually faced stronger people even more aggressively.
“Let’s just eat quietly and go.”
No matter how much I racked my brain, I couldn’t find a clear answer. By the time we arrived at the cafeteria, I decided to give up hope that the two would get along.
“Eat Set A today. You don’t eat well in the morning.”
As soon as we arrived at the cafeteria, Seo-heon glanced at the menu and said this. Today’s Set A consisted of simple side dishes and seaweed soup.
“Okay.”
“Hyung, you don’t eat breakfast?”
Lee-han often showed various expressions even at small talk.
“I’ve gotten used to not eating well.”
When my parents were around, I ate regularly, but that was too long ago.
“I’m sorry if I forced you to eat.”
Seeing him deflated like a puppy with its tail between its legs made me feel sorry for him. I was concerned about whether he could properly train his juniors with such a soft heart.
“If I really didn’t want to eat, I would have refused.”
“Really?”
I unconsciously raised my hand to pat Lee-han’s head as he acted cutely, but stopped. I kept treating him like a child, but Lee-han also had a high position within the guild. Seo-heon saw this and smiled.
“Woo-hyun, you’re a bit oblivious. Despite being so good in combat.”
It wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t understand why he was saying this all of a sudden.
“I’ve always been like this.”
When my mother was alive, she would sigh deeply whenever she saw me and say, “How can you be so oblivious?” My level of awareness was such that I didn’t even understand why my mother said that. Now, I prided myself on being at least as perceptive as an ordinary person due to my developed senses, but I sometimes heard such comments among Hunters.
“I like it when hyung is sometimes oblivious.”
Lee-han hurriedly joined the conversation. He seemed to want to take my side unconditionally but couldn’t bring himself to lie outright.
“Thanks.”
Seo-heon observed Lee-han and me with an appraising look. The casual conversation up until now was cut off as if it had been a lie, and a subtle tension began to circulate again.
This is more tiring than I imagined.
Silence was fine, but awkwardness was hard to bear. Thinking about the conversation I needed to have with Seo-heon later made my head hurt even more. The ding-dong sound announcing that the food was ready helped clear the atmosphere a bit, making me feel slightly better. As I hurriedly got up to get the food, I felt a piercing gaze on my back.
“Sit over there.”
Seo-heon, who had been following right behind me until just now, was suddenly standing next to me, pointing at an empty seat with partitions.
So you were aware of the commotion around us from earlier.
Unlike me, who occasionally came to the cafeteria, Seo-heon was picky about his food and only went to his preferred restaurants.
It wasn’t that he only sought high-end food. He was just sensitive about hygiene and wouldn’t even set foot in a restaurant if it had even one ingredient he disliked. Moreover, he wouldn’t even look at strongly seasoned food, further limiting the restaurants he would go to.
Come to think of it, our tastes are similar.
The difference between us was that I would tolerate and eat things I disliked to some extent, while Seo-heon wouldn’t eat what he disliked even if it meant going hungry.
“What are you thinking so hard about, hyung?”
Lee-han asked as I put the food on the table but didn’t pick up my chopsticks.
“I’m just a bit dazed, maybe because it’s morning.”
Worried that Lee-han, who was already feeling sorry for forcing me to come, might think I didn’t want to eat breakfast, I hurriedly picked up my spoon.
I’ll just mix rice into the seaweed soup and eat that.
Unless I was serving others, I didn’t bother to pick apart foods that required a lot of effort, like fish. In the military, we had to eat quickly, and being a slow eater, I simply avoided foods that required a lot of effort to eat. That habit still remained.
Of course, there were superiors who insisted we finish all our food, but my supervising officer would throw away all the food and punish the entire group if we couldn’t finish within the time limit.
“Eat.”
Seo-heon, who sometimes seemed to know me perfectly despite often seeming not to know me at all, switched his deboned fish with mine.
“Oh, okay.”
When Seo-heon acted like this, I didn’t know how to respond. I felt guilty about my love for him.
What would you think if you knew I was shy and happy about the kindness you show to a friend?
“There’s even a TV in the cafeteria.”
Lee-han, perhaps visiting the cafeteria for the first time despite living in the dormitory, broke the silence. As he said, there was a fairly large TV showing the news.
[Next news. Congressman Kwon Myeong-gun has proposed a bill to prepare for workers’ safety accidents.]
The screen briefly showed an interview with the congressman before switching to footage taken while moving.
“Ah, that’s the Guild Master’s lover.”
Lee-han, with his excellent eyesight, spotted Kwon Ho-jun and spoke in a low voice. It wasn’t his usual voice, but a low, gloomy, grumbling tone. Seo-heon seemed to notice too, putting down his spoon and responding with an obviously fake smile.
“Lee-han seems to be very interested in me and my lover?”
“I’m not interested, but I’m curious because the Guild Master treats you strangely.”
The words “treats you strangely” stung me.
The behaviors I had decided to consider as my misunderstanding might have seemed odd to others as well. Just as I did, Seo-heon didn’t have many people he could call friends, so it might have been behavior stemming from simple friendship, or he might have been continuing habits from our childhood before our relationship became strained.
“I’ve never treated Woo-hyun strangely.”
I realized because of Lee-han that this might seem strange to others as well. Foolishly, I had naturally accepted Seo-heon’s intermittent kindness as a habit.
“Ha, what kind of friend debones fish for you? No, who even looks at a friend that way in the first place?”
“What if I’m doing this not because he’s a friend, but because he’s Woo-hyun?”
Lee-han stood up abruptly from his seat.
“That’s exactly the problem with you!”
At that moment, something snapped in my head.
Maybe Lee-han…
I didn’t want to believe it, but I felt my intuition was correct.
“Lee-han, sit down and eat.”
I muttered quietly, not wanting to draw attention from others. Then I returned the fish Seo-heon had deboned for me.
“You’re right. I was short-sighted too. Habit is a scary thing, isn’t it?”
There was clearly a problem in my relationship with Seo-heon. And if the other party had no will to break it off, it was right for me to be firm.