To kill pegasus

“Ow! What the hell?”

Pain shot through the bridge of my nose. For a second, everything flashed white.

I’d just rounded a corner in the hallway when someone came out of nowhere and slammed straight into me. He was a little shorter than I was, which put his forehead at exactly the wrong height for my nose.

I staggered back two steps, clutching my face. My study notes and score sheet scattered across the floor.

“Sorry.”

That was the whole apology.

I rubbed my nose, which hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, and glared at him.

He was white.

His hair, his skin, even his clothes looked as though all the color had been drained out of them. His bangs hung to the tip of his nose, hiding his face completely.

From a distance, he might have passed for a walking baekseolgi—a snow-white rice cake.

White hair? Did he dye it?

Ever since SRC relaxed its rules about hair color, more students had started dyeing theirs. But I’d never seen hair that white all the way down to the roots.

He was about 175cm tall.

Only 5cm shorter than my 180, but standing this close, I found myself looking down at him.

He stood there a moment, then started to walk past me.

Apparently, he hadn’t even noticed the papers on the floor. It didn’t feel deliberate. It was more as if he’d already forgotten he’d collided with someone.

That made it even more ridiculous.

“Hey. Hold it.”

He stopped. I pointed at the floor.

“If you’re sorry, pick those up. You knocked them out of my hands.”

His white bangs tipped slowly in the direction of my finger. Only then did he bend, a beat late, like he’d just noticed the papers existed.

He gathered them one by one, put them back in order, and held them out to me. The last sheet showed this month’s overall third-year rankings.

First: Kang Jihyeok.

Second: Seong Iyeon.

The gap: 1.7 points.

I hated that number every time I saw it.

SRC. Strategic Research College.

Its mission was to train people who could respond to all kinds of situations with an astronaut’s adaptability.

Established under the Cheonghaedo Special Missions Bureau, it was the country’s premier public college for training special-operations personnel. There was no age limit for admission, and graduates had a clear career path. Every year, people who had been called monsters in their respective fields gathered on this island.

I wanted to be at the top even among them.

The entrance exam had been brutal. After the application screening, written exam, practical tests, and a one-on-one interview with an examiner, we still had to compete directly against the applicants who remained. I met Kang Jihyeok during that final assessment. By the time I left the testing grounds, I knew his name by heart.

First year had been worse. We learned physical conditioning, combat, weapons handling, survival, concealment, and first aid. Students who couldn’t keep up with the training transferred out or took leaves of absence one by one. Through it all, Jihyeok and I traded first and second place in the overall rankings.

In second year, I pulled so far ahead it wasn’t even close. The curriculum centered on operating and maintaining every kind of vehicle—motorcycles, cars, trucks, helicopters, boats, light aircraft.

That was my territory.

The moment I settled into a driver’s seat or took hold of the controls, the machine became part of my body. I could feel the road through the tires, the tremor of the engine, the shift of the vehicle’s weight. A few maneuvers were enough to tell me the limits of a model I’d never driven before. Maintenance and mechanical theory came easily too; I only had to picture the machines I’d taken apart and put back together myself.

But the curriculum changed completely in third year.

Our common courses were designed to teach environmental insight through the application of natural science. We studied physics, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology, and materials engineering without pause. First we had to memorize properties of substances, reaction conditions, densities, strengths, structures. Then, in an unfamiliar environment, we had to pull out exactly the right piece of knowledge at once.

By sheer volume, there was as much to memorize as there was in medical school.

It wasn’t that I was bad at studying.

I wouldn’t have been second if I were.

But what Jihyeok remembered after reading once took me two or three passes. So I never missed a class. I reviewed during breaks, and at night I rewrote everything we’d learned that day from memory.

And still, there were 1.7 points between us.

I didn’t like having some guy I’d never met see that score sheet.

Then again, he looked so indifferent I couldn’t tell whether he’d read it at all. He slipped it beneath the other pages and handed the stack to me.

“Here.”

I took it, my eyes falling on the insignia on his chest.

Third year.

We were in the same year, yet I’d never seen him before. With hair that conspicuous, how had I failed to remember him?

Five minutes until class.

If I left now, I’d get there with time to spare. But my nose still hurt, and I was too annoyed to let a guy who wouldn’t have picked up the papers unless I told him to just walk away.

I stepped into his path.

“You.”

The white bangs turned toward me.

“What’s your name?”

After a brief silence, he answered.

“…Seo Siha.”

Seo Siha.

I didn’t know him, but the name felt strangely familiar.

I turned it over in my head a few times, then remembered a rumor from right after we’d entered SRC in first year.

The student who’d earned a perfect score on every part of the entrance exam.

Written work, physical tests, judgment, observation, response under pressure—not a single point deducted. People said the instructors had gone back through all his assessment records because they suspected a scoring error.

But once classes began, his name was nowhere near the top of the rankings. At first everyone had been curious. Eventually, the story came to be treated as an exaggeration.

I thought that student’s name was Seo Siha.

“Are you the Seo Siha who got a perfect score on the entrance exam?”

“Don’t know.”

“What?”

“Don’t know.”

He didn’t know his own entrance score?

I considered whether there might be two students with the same name, then dismissed it. Seo Siha wasn’t a common name. If there were two in our year, I would have remembered.

It wasn’t impossible not to know your score. Once you received your acceptance notice, you had to log in to SRC’s internal site to see the detailed results.

It took a few minutes, at most.

I’d never imagined someone could get into a school full of the country’s best and not bother checking.

“You never looked up your entrance score?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“No need.”

With that, Seo Siha walked past me.

I turned and called after him.

“If scores don’t matter to you, why did you come to SRC?”

He paused.

“Think what you want.”

Then he kept walking.

Did this bastard think he could brush me off?

He’d run into me and offered one word of apology. He answered every question as if he couldn’t be bothered, and now he was telling me to think whatever I liked. Not once had he even shown me his face.

I caught up with him in a few long strides.

Not even five.

“Hey.”

Siha didn’t turn.

I moved around in front of him and reached out.

“At least show your face when you’re talking to someone.”

I pushed my fingers through his long bangs and swept them up all at once.

His face emerged from behind them.

“Huh?”

A stupid sound escaped me.

Even his eyebrows and eyelashes were white. I’d thought he’d dyed his hair, but maybe not. Blue eyes stood out in the middle of that pale face. The straight bridge of his nose, the sharp line of his jaw, lips that gave almost nothing away—every feature was almost too precise.

Those blue eyes were the strangest part. Clear and cold, as though a lake frozen solid had turned into a mirror. My face must have been reflected in them, yet I felt that if I looked long enough, I might see something submerged beneath the ice. A winter mirror (冬鏡). The phrase came to me out of nowhere.

Handsome wasn’t enough to describe him.

He was too cold to call pretty. Too compelling to look away from.

I froze with his hair still in my hand.

I’d recognized good-looking men before. Jihyeok and Yoo Woonha were both objectively handsome. But that had always been an observation, nothing more.

This time, my body reacted first.

The ache in my nose faded. Heat spread from the back of my neck to my fingertips, as if my blood had suddenly begun to race.

I hadn’t expected to feel this way just from seeing a man’s face.

Siha looked up at me without a word. Since I had five centimeters on him, the hand holding up his bangs was resting naturally above his head.

“Ah…”

It wasn’t my voice.

Strangely, he had stayed still even when I grabbed his hair. Now he let out a small, feeble sound, as if he had only just realized what was happening.

Only then did I come back to myself.

I let go at once.

White hair spilled down over his face again. The eyes I’d just seen vanished with it.

The warning bell for class rang.

I checked the time.

Less than two minutes.

“Anyway.”

I hugged my notes to my chest and pointed at him.

“Next time, greet me properly.”

Even I had no idea what I meant by that, but there was no time to take it back.

I turned and ran for the lecture hall.