Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Breathing in the cologne at the tip of his nose, Jaegyeom threw a punch at Yoon Taehee.

The fist came fast enough to knock Taehee off balance. A brutal impact rang through him, and the mug in his hand shattered with a sharp crack. Coffee splashed everywhere, drenching his shirt brown in an instant.

Taehee staggered back and braced his upper body against the stair rail. The wave of coffee swallowed the lingering scent of cologne. One broad hand clamped over his mouth as he slowly raised his head. When he pulled it away, blood poured from his split lip in a thin stream. His face locked hard as stone, and he coughed shortly under his breath.

“You...”

If his reaction had been even a little slower, his jaw would have been shattered.

Both Jaegyeom and Taehee knew that.

Taehee wiped the blood from his mouth. Still looking stunned, he lowered his gaze to the palm smeared red. Then, almost to himself, he muttered,

“You put ghostly force into it...”

Before his mind had even processed the fact that the ambushing punch carried ghostly force, his body had reacted first. In that fleeting instant, a body tempered by real combat had sensed the coming blow and released ghostly force on instinct. It was a startling reflex for someone caught completely off guard. If that layer of ghostly force had not wrapped his skin like a shield and softened the impact, the bone would have broken for certain.

Why he had been hit did not matter.

What rattled Yoon Taehee was the fact that the boy had shown ghostly force to him.

No one would ever use that much ghostly force just to hit an ordinary person. And just as Taehee had recognized the ghostly force loaded into the punch, Jaegyeom had also recognized that Taehee had blocked it with ghostly force of his own.

This had been a test.

And Taehee understood at once the message inside that single blow.

“So it’s true.”

Jaegyeom opened and closed his fist once, then looked quietly down at his hand. It still throbbed from colliding with the ghostly force that had blocked him. The back of his hand was scraped a little, but it was not bleeding.

“So you were gifted.”

He nodded to himself as he said it under his breath.

The flat voice did not sound as though he were speaking to Taehee at all. It sounded more like something he was repeating back to himself.

“Looks like Naja these days even keep ghosts on a leash.”

At the added remark, Taehee, who had been standing there half-stunned, widened his eyes.

Only then did the situation begin to make rough sense to him.

Jaegyeom stepped forward with the same indifferent face. Without sparing Taehee so much as a shred of a glance, he walked right past him. Taehee, who had gone rigid, came back to himself a beat too late and spun around in a rush. He caught Jaegyeom by the arm before he could get away.

“Hold on, friend.”

“Friend...”

Rolling the word over his tongue, Jaegyeom looked down at the hand gripping his arm.

Do you want to be real friends with me?

The grip over the fabric was firm and warm. Because Taehee’s hand was soaked in blood, the sleeve at Jaegyeom’s wrist was quickly stained.

Jaegyeom lifted his eyes and stared straight through him.

“Friend?”

The outer corners of his eyes sharpened viciously.

There had been a time when he asked why, if Taehee wanted to be friends with him, he wanted that at all.

And the young man, with a face like he could not understand why anyone would ask something so obvious, had given the useless answer: Because I want us to get close.

But thinking back on it now, he had never asked the more important question.

Why had he wanted to get close in the first place?

What would Yoon Taehee have said if he had asked?

“Right. You said you were looking for someone to become a Naja.”

Well, no wonder something had felt off.

Only now did he understand.

Why Taehee had kept circling around him. Why he had kept closing the distance no matter how many times Jaegyeom shoved him away. All those vague, suggestive questions. The strange edge in every kindness, every favor. Even the reason Taehee had stayed on his mind.

Jaegyeom jerked his chin toward the outside, as if pointing the way.

“There’s a trash heap over there. Go dig through it.”

With his free hand, Taehee pushed back the hair that had fallen across his face. The way Jaegyeom compared Naja to garbage carried a deep, unmistakable hostility.

Why...?

For a moment, Taehee found himself wanting to know where that hostility came from.

But that was not what mattered now.

He let out a shallow breath. The metallic taste of blood still mixed in his mouth slipped down his throat, unpleasant and salty. His face hardened as he hurried to speak.

“I don’t know what you saw or heard, but—”

Before he could even finish, Jaegyeom let out a short, derisive laugh.

As if there were nothing worth hearing, he gave a small shake of his head. Then he laid his own hand over Taehee’s where it gripped his arm. He put a little strength into it to pry the hand off, but the fingers locked around him like a snare did not budge.

“Let go.”

“I’ll explain it myself.”

“I said let go.”

“Are you mad?”

Mad? Why would I be?

Jaegyeom closed his eyes.

“That’s twice.”

“It’ll only ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) take a second.”

“If I have to say it a third time, your wrist breaks.”

When he finished speaking, Jaegyeom opened his eyes.

The sharpness in them went straight through Taehee. The words had come out in an even tone, but there was nothing soft in them.

If keeping hold of him meant getting his wrist broken, Taehee thought, that would be worth it.

And yet at the same time, instinct told him this was the moment to let go.

“...”

You could tell just by looking at those eyes.

Every lock was drawn tight, without a crack anywhere.

After a brief hesitation, Taehee slowly removed the hand gripping Jaegyeom’s arm.

Jaegyeom turned his back without a trace of hesitation.

If you expected nothing, you had nothing to be disappointed by.

And yet, to his own surprise, Jaegyeom realized that he was disappointed right now.

Why?

He did not understand himself.

What had he been expecting from the young librarian in the first place?

He did not know.

He had been curious what the present would be if he collected all the stickers.

But now he was not curious anymore.

Whatever it was, it would stink.

Humans always betrayed whatever little expectation he had of them. When he expected nothing, they stuffed something into his arms. When he did expect something, they took away whatever he had been holding.

Just like the young librarian and Naja Yoon Taehee had.

*****

A familiar trace of ghostly force flickered at the doorway.

Paehyeon and Saero, who had each taken a seat at the reading table and positioned themselves as far apart from each other as possible, both turned their heads at once. Their eyes fixed on the closed door.

The door swung wide, and at last the figure they had been waiting for appeared. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Both of them brightened and rose to their feet.

As always, they each dropped to one knee first. They bowed their heads and greeted him with perfect courtesy.

Then they lifted their faces to see who stood before them—

and both froze.

“Taehee!”

“Taehee?”

Yoon Taehee looked a mess.

There was blood smeared across his face and hands. Coffee had drenched him, leaving his white shirt mottled with stains. Against the white fabric, the vivid splashes of blood here and there created an oddly chilling effect. Even his hair, always immaculate, was badly disheveled.

Taehee stood there looking down at the two spirits staring up at him in shock.

The face that always carried a faint trace of a smile was startlingly expressionless.

Without any expression at all, he looked cold.

Dangerous.

Like a different person.

Sensing the gravity in the air, so unlike his usual self, Paehyeon and Saero exchanged glances.

“Hello. So you were waiting for me.”

Only after a long, heavy silence did Taehee finally speak, greeting them in the same tone he always used.

Paehyeon lowered his head slightly in return, then asked with care,

“Taehee, did something happen?”

“There’s always something.”

Taehee answered simply, then smiled without a sound.

“I didn’t know you’d be here. I don’t remember calling for you.”

“Ah, well, that is...”

Saero was just starting to explain.

“Whatever the reason, thanks for coming.”

Cutting him off, Taehee suddenly lifted one hand and touched his jaw. The pain had only started to sink in now. His jaw joint throbbed with a dull ache. It seemed the punch had knocked it slightly out of place.

“Thanks to you two, I got dumped in spectacular fashion.”

After adding that short remark, Taehee brought both hands up and cupped his lower jaw. He moved it from side to side a few times, then pressed hard with both hands. A moment later, with a dull crack, the jawbone slipped back into place.

Dumped?

Paehyeon and Saero stared up at him, completely bewildered.

“What... do you mean by that?”

At Paehyeon’s question, Taehee smiled.

“It means we’re fucked.”

He turned slightly and locked the library door.

“Of course, this wasn’t the first time I got rejected. He brushed me off once before too.”

At first, he had planned to get close by disguising himself in kindness and good will. In his experience, very few people rejected affection when it was offered so openly. And if it was a young gifted boy with weak ties to anyone else, Taehee had thought, that would be even more true.

“But he’s a uselessly sharp little bastard, and he would not let me get close no matter what. Maybe because no one’s had a hand on him for so long, but his temperament is really something special. At first I just tried to pull him in without thinking too hard, and he kicked me away beautifully. All I did was stir up unnecessary suspicion. Looking back, that was my mistake.”

A direct approach had never worked on the boy.

The moment Taehee closed the distance head-on, the boy only grew more wary.

So Taehee had decided to take the long way around.

First, he had to soften that vigilance.

To do that, what mattered was sharing the same space.

Blending himself naturally into the landscape the boy saw every day.

That was the method Taehee had chosen.

Paehyeon and Saero listened in silence, their expressions blank with confusion.

“They say when bodies stay close, hearts follow on their own. So I went through every pathetic little bit of bullshit I could think of and barely managed to buy some time. I cut back on unnecessary questions and kept steering things toward shallow, easy topics. I was building the tower one layer at a time, and then—”

That was why he had kept Jaegyeom in the library under the pretext of campus service. He had deliberately avoided making him do any unpleasant work. Instead, he had let him spend the time drowsing over books. He wanted the place to feel harmless. Comfortable.

Taehee had found himself creeping closer with all the caution of someone taming a wild animal, holding his breath so the boy would not startle and bolt.

The instant he saw an opening, he had meant to slip right in beside him.

Today, he had been planning to ask him to dinner.

The conversation with the teachers in the Faculty Office earlier had been because he was asking if there were any decent places nearby to eat. By today, he had thought, the boy would probably give in and come along.

By now, the boy had started speaking to him with a fair amount of ease. He had even burst out laughing at Taehee’s stupid little jokes. Everything had been moving forward peacefully, like a boat catching a good wind.

For the boy who was meant to become not the Office’s Naja, but Yoon Taehee’s Naja, he had been preparing a shackle in the form of a special bond.

“And then you two destroyed it.”

But in an instant, the whole scenario Taehee had written so carefully was gone.

The boy had fled just as far as the distance he had once closed on his own.

Letting something slip away right in front of him left a bitter taste in Taehee’s mouth.

“I don’t know exactly what kind of nonsense you were flapping your mouths about, but this time, I’m pretty disappointed.”

Paehyeon and Saero did not fully understand what he was saying.

They could only guess at it in fragments.

But one thing was clear enough.

Yoon Taehee was angry because of them.

Ordinarily, Taehee almost never got angry. Even when they made fairly serious mistakes, he tended to let them slide with easy patience.

“Don’t worry. I still care about you both.”

But now, Yoon Taehee was furious in the quietest way possible.

“You’re still far better than those idiots who crawl upward without knowing their place, puffing themselves up over brains that may as well not exist. What’s spilled is spilled, and now that things have turned out this way, it can’t be helped.”

At those words, the two spirits kneeling on the floor lifted their stiff faces.

Taehee wiped his dirty hand against his waist. Under that absent gesture, the neatly tucked hem of his shirt crumpled. In the most casual voice, he murmured,

“All right, then... Saero first.”

Saero first?

Saero blinked in confusion and reflexively turned to look at Paehyeon. The same bewilderment was in Paehyeon’s eyes.

After roughly wiping away the coffee and blood on his hands, Taehee gave them a light shake. Then he straightened from the slant he had been standing in and spoke.

“You should each take one hit too. It’s only fair.”

Unlike the boy, who had led with his fist, Yoon Taehee gave them the courtesy of a warning first.