ABFR 05

Chapter 5…

Rayley Kraha had lived that kind of life in his previous world as well. He had prepared a revolution for his discriminated kin across the continent and for all the oppressed people living under tyranny. In the middle of it all, he realized that the revolution was actually being controlled from the shadows by someone else. Yet even after discovering his entire life was being thoroughly exploited, he decided to burn through his own life force to fulfill his responsibility to the path he had chosen.

That’s just the kind of person he is. So even though the physical touch and intimate affection are completely gone, I catch myself wondering if his insistence on looking after me so attentively stems from that same sense of obligation.

“Even though he still has that ugly habit of being obsessed with people.”

Looking at Rayley Kraha’s car as it pulled up in front of my apartment building around 3 AM, I had to murmur bitterly to myself. I had no way of knowing whether that obsession was just about keeping a tight grip on something he already possessed, or actual obsession with someone he loved. Dammit, I knew deep down that overthinking this was a completely useless exercise anyway.

In short, even though it was deeply uncomfortable, irritating, and disappointing, maybe I was secretly waiting for Rayley Kraha to state his clear stance. But I had to wait two whole years in the novel just to hear a proper declaration from him, so what was I even hoping for? Give it up, self, just give it up. Letting go of pointless expectations and greed makes life about three times happier, Ah-jin.

“What are you thinking so hard about?”

Stepping out of the driver’s seat to open the passenger door for me, Rayley knit his silver eyebrows into a cool line. Beneath his neatly parted, half-swept silver hair, his sharp, sculpted face looked striking. The crisp beauty mark under the left side of his lip and his delicate features—resembling a finely crafted ball-jointed doll—flashed cold and sharp under the neon lights. His violet eyes gleamed clearly like cut crystal.

Standing in front of me, he tilted his neck slightly downward. It was his habit of lowering his gaze to match my eye level. But my real-life height was about 10 centimeters shorter than the body I used in the novel, so whenever he did that, I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated.

Standing near 190 centimeters tall, he was a good 30 centimeters taller than me. Even if I wore heels, the gap was massive. Besides, Rayley was someone who preferred traditional dress shoes with sturdy heels anyway, so that height difference was bound to stay pretty consistent.

Beneath Rayley Kraha’s handsome face were broad, solid shoulders, a lean waist, and long, well-proportioned limbs. As expected of someone who used to rule as a top figure in a dark fantasy underworld, he possessed a nimble yet solid build you rarely saw in normal people.

Back in the novel, the body I used was tall and slender, so I hadn’t really felt it then. But looking up at him in my original body, the sense of pressure was no joke. He had a surprisingly lean frame, but touching it revealed nothing but hard muscle. Since he always wore suits, you couldn’t see it, but beneath that pretty face, his entire body was probably covered in countless scars.

Even to me, seeing his face felt surreal every single time. Catching sight of that face here in the real world gave me a whole different level of uncanny sensation compared to seeing it back in that fantasy world.

“Nothing…”

Actually, it had been like that from the second he stepped out of the driver’s seat. Every single passerby left on the street was staring blankly at this well-built, handsome foreigner with their mouths wide open. Either way, even standing in reality, he looked far from a real human being.

Sighing out a heavy “Phew,” I gently pushed his shoulder back with my fingertips.

After nudging his shoulder back a bit to squeeze past, I walked right past the rear door he had opened and pulled open the front passenger door instead, letting out another deep sigh. Though I didn’t care to know the exact details, he had somehow become insanely wealthy, so the car he was driving was a luxury model a regular person could never dream of owning.

“I was just thinking it’d be nice if Kim Rayley Kraha meddled a little less in my life.”

“A completely hopeless thought.”

Answering nonchalantly, Rayley smoothly closed the rear door, then neatly shut the front passenger door as well. Before walking back to his side, he pulled a cardigan from the back seat and handed it over to me. Looking closely, it was the white cardigan Rayley had gifted me a while back. I must have left it at his place last time I visited.

“What’s this?”

“The night air is chilly. We’re going to the riverside, so put it on.”

He answered in a tone that treated the whole thing as completely natural.

“The riverside? Why the riverside all of a sudden?”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to go last time?”

Rayley, who had leaned over to fasten my seatbelt for me, answered offhandedly. Even after hearing his response, I had to rack my brain for a good while to remember. The car began to roll smoothly forward.

“Oh…? I honestly don’t remember. When did I ever say that?”

“You probably meant to say ‘I want to go out somewhere to play!’ from all the deadline stress, but said something else instead. Either way, I heard it, so I’m taking you.”

“Hmm… That actually sounds plausible.”

“Aren’t you slacking off on your writing lately? I haven’t seen you write anything.”

Well… why else would I have fallen into a slump for the past four years? Because my romance with Rayley Kraha inside the book was so intense and deeply missed that I spent years wandering aimlessly, unable to properly adjust back to my real life. The fact that I hadn’t finished a single proper work during the six months since reuniting with him was for the exact same reason.

On top of that, there was still a clear, undeniable distance between us that was different from before. Is this kind of gap inevitable between exes who get back together?

Either way, I had no desire to whine about any of that to Rayley now. I didn’t want to get desperate over love. Just like how I managed to start writing again without him after almost four years had passed, time would naturally make it easier for me to write again.

“Of course you wouldn’t know. You only look when I don’t feel like writing.”

I threw out the cold reply, but Rayley didn’t seem to pay much attention. I gave him a deliberate glare, slipped off my shoes on the passenger seat, pulled my knees up to my chest, and started staring out the window. Half of it was genuine frustration.

Whenever I curled up on the bed cradling my laptop to write, Rayley had a terrible habit of coming over and watching over my shoulder from behind. Even when I told him to stop doing that, he never seemed to get it. His logic remained stubbornly consistent. Sure enough, those exact words came out of his mouth again.

“I’m going to read it once it’s published anyway, so what does it matter?”

“Watching me write in real-time is completely different! You really don’t understand the mind of a creator at all. Anyway, I really am writing.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m serious. I even mapped out the synopsis for my new work.”

Since he looked completely skeptical, I kept babbling on about the new synopsis right up until he parked the car, casually unbuckled my seatbelt, walked around to my side, and opened the door for me.

“The main character is a female college student who wears a red varsity jacket, and she’s a fiery twenty-year-old freshman.”

“Is it set in modern times?”

“Yeah. Lately, I’ve been really into the raid genre. It’s a Sentai-style story starting from the premise that a gate spewing out creatures suddenly opened right in the middle of Seoul.”

“‘Sentai’?”

Even though he had adapted to modern Korea surprisingly well over the past six months, Rayley knit his brows and asked, still unfamiliar with terms like that. Except for his otherworldly looks, he was practically a fully adapted local, so whenever I got questions like this, I found myself pausing to figure out how to explain it.

Faced with another unexpected question, I tucked the front of the cardigan together with my fingertips and trotted along to keep pace with him as we walked down the riverside trail. Rayley quickly adjusted his speed to walk right beside me. Surprisingly, there was a steady trickle of people strolling along the glowing, flickering riverside. Then again, it wasn’t even 4 AM yet—pretty much the perfect time to wander around after a quick drink.

“Uh… how do I explain this…”

“Is it a specific genre?”

“U-Uh… It’s a genre where multiple people… wear matching uniforms to form a team… and fight off villains or monsters… something like that.”

“Hmm…”

Rayley let out an ambiguous hum and made a dissatisfied face, as if that explanation alone didn’t sound like anything special. I pondered a bit more, then decided to just lay out the actual synopsis of my new work. Figure he’d catch the drift once he heard it.

“In my story, people with superpowers team up to fight off creatures pouring out of gates. They get called by colors depending on the color of the clothes they were wearing when the gate first opened.”

“Aha.”

Rayley let out an understanding hum. The moment a guy passing by bumped into my shoulder, the guy started to spit out half a curse word, only to instantly shut his mouth when Rayley—wrapping a hand around the shoulder I had just been bumped on—glared down at him with a terrifyingly cold gaze. It was definitely not the look of someone who had only killed a person or two. Well, in reality, he certainly hadn’t stopped at one or two. Ugh, nope, let’s not imagine that.

Anyway, the guy quickly blurted out, “Ah, so sorry!” and scrambled out of sight. To block Rayley’s lethal glare from trailing after the man’s retreating back, I used my fingertips to gently nudge his chin upward.

“Don’t go threatening innocent citizens…”

“‘Innocent’? Are they really innocent?”

“Probably more law-abiding than you…”

When I offered that pathetic response, Rayley narrowed his eyes, then casually brought the conversation back on track.

“So you mean those hero shows featuring people in skin-tight bodysuits that occasionally air on television.”

“Yeah, stuff like that.”

“Do they wear bodysuits?”

“No, not necessarily. Like I said earlier, the protagonist is a girl in a red varsity jacket, so she’s Red. The guy her age from a rival school who wears a blue varsity jacket is Blue. A banker or office worker in a suit would be Black. A doctor would be White. Purple and Pink will probably be celebrities, while Green and Yellow will span different age groups… Hmm, I’m still working that part out.”

“In short…”

Stepping up to the railing first to position me where I could get a good view of the night lights reflecting over the river, Rayley gave a dry, unbothered reply.

“You haven’t actually finalized a single concrete detail.”

“Shut up.”

I instantly balled up my fists and began thumping him on the chest and shoulder, but Rayley just scoffed like it was hilarious, lowering his gaze without reacting to my punches in the slightest. Instead, he simply adjusted my cardigan and collar neatly. The look in his eyes as he quietly stared down at me felt oddly irritating.

It was the kind of look someone gives a cat rather than a person.