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After the series of commotions was resolved, I cleaned up the spilled items one by one, feeling the fishy taste of blood in my mouth. After getting into a fistfight with the gangsters, I immediately started working as if nothing had happened, and Choi Su-yeon was startled and came out from behind the counter to stop me.
"Senior! I'll sort this out, so you can take a break."
"No, you should get some rest. You must have been surprised by those bastards coming in droves and threatening you."
"No… Actually, I was more surprised to see you punching them than to see them…"
"Hmm, sorry about that. But if we don't do this, those guys will just come back with their gang…"
I cleared my throat and continued to clean the convenience store floor. Some of the items were in good condition, but the bags of some of the snacks had burst, and the contents had spilled out, so I picked them up with a dustpan and handed the empty snack bags to Choi Su-yeon.
"I'm sorry, but please ring these up at the POS machine. I have to calculate it."
"You want me to calculate it myself?"
"Then I'm the one who knocked it over, so I have to pay. Who else would pay?"
"…I'll calculate this. It was you who suppressed the rampage of those guys earlier, so it would be unfair for you to have to do this as well."
"No, but I—"
"No. Now, please hand me all the snack bags first. And here, here, beep, beep. And my card. Now, the payment is finished. I paid, so it's over."
Choi Su-yeon took a picture of the barcode and swiped her card. Then she came out with a broom and dustpan and swept up the snacks next to me.
"I said I would do it."
"While you were suppressing those guys, I couldn't do anything but scream. I also have a part-time job here. So, I will do the same."
After that, we cleaned the floor in silence for a while. After putting away all the spilled snacks and finishing mopping, we both returned to the counter and sat side by side. There was a slightly awkward silence, and I was the one who broke it.
"Now those kids won't come to smoke."
"They're not coming?"
"To be exact, they 'can't' come. I scared anyone who comes here to smoke a cigarette to death. As long as I work here, I won't have to suffer from the people trying to smoke cigarettes in the future."
"What were you going to do if those guys actually reported it?"
Choi Su-yeon asked with a worried expression. My actions were quite extreme.
"It's okay. They have proof of their actions, and I can bluff that it was self-defense, so they won't act carelessly, even if they're scared of going to juvenile detention. Even if they did tell someone, I'm a third-year student at Centipede Academy, and I'm no good for me."
Kang Baek-san, the guy those first-year bullies mentioned, is the leader of the Eunbong Industrial Higher Education Academy's gang, known as Eunbong Tong. He's a famous gangster in the area, but the fact that even that guy fought and lost to me, Han Seong-jin, remained in my memory. This is a part where you can see how infamous Han Seong-jin is. It's a pathetic achievement in the world, but to the idiots like before, who treat adult words like they're nothing, an older brother who is two years older is much scarier. If they find out that Eunbong Tong, whom they worship like a god, has already been dealt with by me, they'll be too scared to even come near here.
"You, you were a scarier person than I thought."
Choi Su-yeon's eyes looked wary. I clicked my tongue and sat back against the cigarette display.
"Tsk, I didn't want to do this anymore, so I worked part-time and tried to live a healthy life, but as soon as I started working, these guys started to cause trouble. I'm sorry about that."
"…Thank you, though."
"Thank you?"
"There have been many times like this before. When I had a previous part-time job, when kids like that came, the two of us would tremble and ring the wireless emergency bell. But the police would be late, and those kids would curse, scream, and throw things before the police arrived. You don't know how scared I was back then. Even when I had a manager, it didn't make much of a difference because he couldn't fight them off… But when I saw you do that earlier, I was scared, but I felt a bit relieved inside."
"What is it? Is this what you wanted to do, to beat them up if you could?"
"Well?"
Choi Su-yeon stretched her arms upwards and to both sides, probably to relieve her tension.
"Anyway, thank you for helping me, even if the means were a bit rough. I also owe you a debt of gratitude for preventing such kids from coming in the future… Huh?!"
Choi Soo-yeon was suddenly startled and started to panic.
"Why are you so surprised all of a sudden… Huh?"
As I spoke, I realized the reason at the same time. Something in my mouth was out of my control and ran down the corner of my mouth and down my chin. I felt the fishy taste remaining in my mouth getting stronger, so I wiped the liquid running down my chin with my hand. Choi Soo-yeon, seeing the red liquid on my hand, was startled and started to panic.
"Aaaaah! Senior, I'm bleeding, I'm bleeding! Toilet paper, toilet paper… Miss, what is it?! Why isn't there any?! Hey, at least wipe it with this!"
Choi Su-yeon, who saw that the toilet paper that was always in stock had run out, took out a handkerchief from her bag and put it to my mouth. In a hurry, I took Choi Su-yeon's handkerchief and wiped the blood flowing from the corner of my mouth. Seeing me wiping away the blood, Su-yeon Choi looked at me with a mixture of worry and anxiety.
When the blood stopped flowing, I took the handkerchief off my mouth and waved my hand as if it was no big deal.
"It's just that I bit my cheek, and it's bleeding because I got hit earlier. It's nothing special, so don't look at it like that."
"No, but…"
"What's wrong with me not being able to do anything while all this fuss was going on?"
She nodded.
Instead of answering, Choi Su-yeon nodded eagerly.
"Then, please escort me to the date course rehearsal on Friday."
"Ah… Are you really going to take me with you?"
"Instead of pretending to be my girlfriend at next week's meeting, you said you would plan a date for me?"
"Yes, that's right. I did, but… Ha ha… Okay."
"Why do you say you don't want to do this? Then you can just comfortably pretend to be my girlfriend—"
"It was a sigh of worry about how to plan a course!"
After the uproar, fortunately, my part-time job went on without much fuss. Throughout her work, Choi Su-yeon couldn't get the sight of Han Seong-jin overpowering the bully boys out of her mind. It was a violent, barbaric, and extremely primitive method. She didn't like that kind of typical stand-up behavior, and she never harbored any illusions. But why did she think Han Seong-jin was cool while she was watching it? Is it because it is a prescription for extreme medication to save yourself from trouble? Or is it because she outwardly associates with her fellow students, and she gets into that situation without even realizing it?
When she couldn't figure out why she thought Han Seong-jin fighting earlier was a little cool, she spoke to her.
"Oh, Choi Su-yeon. That's the handkerchief I gave you earlier."
"Yes?"
"I'll take it home, wash it, and return it to you."
"Ah… You don't have to give it back."
"Is it because I put it in my mouth that I don't even want it back? That's too much."
"No, I didn't mean that…! Oh, okay, then wash it and return it! You're turning a normal person into some kind of strange person."
Choi Su-yeon, who had accepted Han Seong-jin's joke, was sticking out her lips, but suddenly her thoughts wandered somewhere else.
'…But did this senior always have this playful personality?'
I have never met Han Seong-jin in person and only knew his face through photos. The only thing I heard about him was rumors through his friends. And the content of the rumor was truly absurd. He said that he took three girls and had a foursome, that he got into a gang fight with other academy members and won and then took the girls from that academy as trophies, that he got into a fight with a college student, and that he used the money he stole from his subordinates to run the club.
According to the rumors, he was a type of person who was not worthy of being treated as a human being. And I thought that such a person could not have even the slightest humanity, let alone courtesy. However, Han Seong-jin, whom she started working with yesterday, was very different from what she expected. As you can see in the photo, her impression was extremely harsh, but her attitude toward the convenience store manager was quite polite. She was quite diligent in learning to work at a convenience store, and surprisingly, she adapted to the job very quickly—so much so that there was nothing more to teach her on her first day. Even though she was strong, she did not limit the work to herself, and she did her work diligently. When he knocked down the gangsters one by one with one punch, I thought he was just as inhuman as I first thought, but he never used more violence than was necessary.
Perhaps out of consideration for himself, he took steps to prevent future customers from coming to the convenience store to smoke and even apologized, saying he was sorry for surprising them. If you think about it, Han Seong-jin didn't do anything wrong in the first place.
'I really don't know. He's a strange person.'
It was still difficult to know what he was thinking, but Choi Su-yeon thought that Han Seong-jin was not as depraved as she thought.
'Still, I'm not the type that you want to be involved with for a long time… I'll just introduce a course on Friday and take care of what I need to take care of.'
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