Delusive Fate

#044

Watching Ki Baek-woo desperately deny his relationship with Jung Yi-dam, I found it a bit disgusting. What a shameless, sly, and repulsive guy. It felt like watching a popular long-running infidelity exposé program, “Love is War.” Like a scumbag husband who’s cheating but doesn’t want to lose his stable home, so he sweet-talks his clueless wife, showing zero shame. Ki Baek-woo was exactly like that. Thinking about it made me feel like the delicious kimchi stew I’d just eaten was about to come back up.

Trying hard to suppress the urge to vomit on Ki Baek-woo’s face, I asked, “So, Baek-woo, why are you lying?”

“What do you mean…?”

“The one making up lies isn’t those people, it’s you.”

Ki Baek-woo looked up at me with a clueless expression. His lazy and innocent gaze made my anger rise. His naive demeanor, seemingly believing that if he begged and pleaded enough, I would eventually give in, was infuriating. It was the kind of look only someone who had never been betrayed could give. A look I could never have again.

What was this Ki Baek-woo trying to do?

This Ki Baek-woo was definitely different from the previous ones. He kept doing things that a normal Ki Baek-woo would never do. Constantly glancing at me, fidgeting as if wanting attention, eagerly preparing things as if trying to please me. Watching Ki Baek-woo hovering around like a puppy needing to pee, at first I thought:

It must be because I’ve changed. This is the first time I’m not even worried about Ki Baek-woo, let alone liking him. So maybe the setting of “act coldly towards Lee Han-sol who loves me madly” that was programmed into Ki Baek-woo isn’t working properly. Because the most basic condition of “Lee Han-sol loving Ki Baek-woo” isn’t met.

So I judged Ki Baek-woo’s odd behavior as a temporary glitch. I firmly believed that in a day or two, Ki Baek-woo would return to normal, that is, the proper Ki Baek-woo who would screw me over and follow Jung Yi-dam around.

But this damn world always blindsides me, and Ki Baek-woo showed no signs of coming to his senses. After all my fuss, Ki Baek-woo should have naturally thought:

Seeing him act up like that, Lee Han-sol hyung… I really want to kill him. How does this old geezer three years older than me have the energy to squawk like that? This won’t do, I need to get rid of this useless guy as soon as possible and go find my real honey.

And he should have been desperate to cut ties with me as quickly as possible. But this Ki Baek-woo never acted as expected. It was so infuriating that I wanted to beat that bastard to death ten times a day. No, no. It wasn’t just about punching him; Ki Baek-woo’s abnormal behavior was triggering my PTSD to a severe level.

Ki Baek-woo’s clueless expression, unable to even guess why I had changed, his attitude of trying to get closer despite being treated badly, his habitual trust believing that if he just proved his affection and poured out love, everything would soon fall back into place.

It was a decalcomania of the first Lee Han-sol. I hated Ki Baek-woo who seemed to be imitating me from back then. What are you? Why are you acting like this? Do you love me? You don’t, right? So why are you behaving like this?

If you want something, just say it instead of irritating me with your dog-like behavior!

Ki Baek-woo acting submissively while wasting unnecessary emotions. Ki Baek-woo seeming to firmly believe that it’s impossible for us to deviate from our current life trajectory and live our separate lives. Ki Baek-woo acting weak and desperate like a parasitic organism that can’t exist without me, like an insect.

In front of him, I felt contempt. It was humiliating. I’m being sincere when I say this, if I had a gun in my hand, I would have shot myself in the head right there.

“Hyung, I’m sorry. Just this once… I won’t make you angry again… I don’t understand why we have to be like this. If you tell me what’s wrong, I can do better, really. You’re all I have, you know me best, hyung.”

Watching Ki Baek-woo kneeling under the bed and sobbing, I thought:

This bastard… he’s really such an idiot, isn’t he?

I felt pathetic, uncomfortable, and unpleasant. It sent chills down my spine. Ki Baek-woo kept apologizing.

“I can’t do without you, hyung. I can’t do anything… I’m nothing without you, really.”

The disgust was so intense that I broke out in a cold sweat. Is this what they call empathetic shame? It was a moment when I perfectly understood why the previous Ki Baek-woos were so fed up with me, why they acted so cruelly.

If my clingy behavior looked like this to Ki Baek-woo, it’s no wonder he fell out of love. It’s so unsightly that you’d want to strangle them to death right away. But…

But how many times did I repeat such disgusting and unpleasant actions?

Aaargh! Aaargh! I felt a strong sense of obligation to commit suicide right away. Let’s die. Run to the kitchen right now, grab two chopsticks, and poke them into the electric socket. Let’s say goodbye to this insufferable world. Let’s depart to another dimension outside this game. There, we’ll find the developers who created this kind of world and story and annihilate them all.

The reason I didn’t act on this specific impulse was because of a fact that suddenly occurred to me. The fact that I’m the only person in this world who remembers past lives. To think that there would come a day when I’d be grateful for this fact, which is almost like a curse… Well, I’m really at a loss. I guess life really is unpredictable.

Anyway, I felt so ashamed that it was painful, and I had an urge to smash something right away. So I reached out to Ki Baek-woo. I deliberately stroked Ki Baek-woo’s head gently as he begged for forgiveness. Ki Baek-woo then crawled on his knees and clung to me a bit more. He seemed to think I was forgiving him.

To Ki Baek-woo, who was acting like a pitiful creature, resting his cheek on my knee and whimpering, I asked:

“Baek-woo, am I all you have? Can you really not live without me?”

“Yes, hyung. I can’t do without you, absolutely not. Without you, it’s not even living. You’re all I have in my world, I might not even be able to breathe. If you could just forgive me this once…”

Ki Baek-woo’s shameless nonsense was laughable.

“I don’t think so. Think carefully. Do you really think you can’t do without me?”

“How can I live without you, hyung… Why are you saying such scary things, you know best… Hyung…”

“Yes, hyung knows everything. I told you before, Baek-woo. Hyung doesn’t have anything he doesn’t know.”

So I also know that everything you’re saying now is a complete lie, Baek-woo.

“You’ve already kissed Jung Yi-dam. Stop pretending…”

My voice was so emotionless that even I found it chilling. Ki Baek-woo’s eyes, which had been looking up at me with a pitiful face, wavered.

More. Even more than that. So much shock that he can’t even breathe!

My heart raced at the thought of crushing Ki Baek-woo and making him uncomfortable. There wasn’t even the tiniest grain of sympathy. I was purely venting my heightened emotions caused by Ki Baek-woo onto him.

“Stop talking nonsense about how I’m all you have. There’s a limit to how much deception I can pretend to believe.”

“……”

“Why do you keep upsetting me like this? It’s disgusting to hear, Baek-woo…”

Ki Baek-woo’s face turned pale in an instant. I felt almost sorry for not feeling sorry at all. To be honest, I thought at that moment:

Oh, this is fun.

And then I felt like a terrible villain. Enjoying the sight of Ki Baek-woo sinking into despair. I felt that my mind had been irreversibly twisted. It wasn’t self-reproach. Isn’t it inevitable that I’ve become like this?

It’s not me who’s bad, it’s the world. This world was constructed with malice towards me in every aspect. It kept treating my life as cheap and continuously killing me. It was making me experience the same betrayal and the same failure over and over again. In this reality, if I were still kind, gentle, and felt compassion for others’ despair, it would mean that I had gone completely and irreversibly insane, or that I had overcome human limitations and become a god. Right? Even a saint with numerous followers didn’t suffer the same betrayal from Judas more than twenty-five times.

I was already being sufficiently rational by not becoming a serial killer running around killing random people on the street. Feeling exhilaration at the sight of Ki Baek-woo groveling was nothing. It was natural to feel joy bordering on contempt towards Ki Baek-woo, who looked as pitiful as a chewed-up piece of gum. What’s wrong with that?

Countless past Ki Baek-woos must have felt this emotion while crushing me as I begged and pleaded.

They must have enjoyed it for a long time. Did I look like a worm writhing under the scorching sun, begging to just stay by his side even if he loved Jung Yi-dam? At first, they must have felt curiosity seeing me suffer intensely and quickly wither away, then they must have snickered, and finally, they must have muttered indifferently.

Why is this bug so persistent? It’s not even fun anymore, I wish it would just die already…

Thinking that way made this situation even more interesting. More. Even more than this. Until Ki Baek-woo couldn’t even come to his senses! I firmly grasped Ki Baek-woo’s hair that I had been gently stroking.