Vicious Darling

[36]

Upon closer observation, Hannah was a person whose words and actions didn’t always align.

“Wanting so much from just one sample. Really.”

At that muttering, Chris’s face brightened.

Though she pretended to be grumpy, she was essentially agreeing to check it out.

She placed the pill on a cute little scale. Her eyes sharpened at the gaze watching her.

“What? Suspicious because it’s a scale for weighing kids’ candy?”

“No, I’m grateful.”

“Stop buttering me up before we even have results. I’m not sure if we’ll succeed with such a small amount.”

Hannah sighed deeply.

There’s not much that can be confirmed with this. It means there won’t be a second chance if it fails.

“It might be easier to make candy without sugar at this point.”

“I’ll bring more.”

“More?”

Chris looked at Peter.

But he didn’t react immediately, just staring blankly at Chris.

Chris, who rarely expressed himself verbally as he usually followed Yuri, finally opened his mouth with an “Ah.”

“I’d like you to open the door.”

He had overlooked the fact that without Yuri here, he needed to explain things more specifically.

“Door? No, how are you going to bring it?”

Peter asked in surprise.

An ordinary Baekyah member would have sent Chris without asking how he’d do it.

“I’ll manage bringing it myself.”

Peter, who had been looking skeptically at Chris wondering what he could do with that bulk, hesitated.

Come to think of it, Chris could use telekinesis on objects beyond the “door.”

Hadn’t he seen it with his own eyes?

‘This isn’t just for their benefit… it’s for the other illegal immigrants.’

The ‘storekeeper’ might smack him if he found out, but well, he’d have to bear it.

Peter gritted his teeth and said, “If you get caught, I don’t know anything about it.”

Chris pointed his finger at the ceiling.

The door didn’t necessarily have to open on a wall. Hadn’t Peter opened it that way when coming to Hannah’s shop?

Above all, humans rarely look up. Unless properly trained, their field of vision is naturally limited.

‘Yuri was alone until just before I came here.’

It might still be the case now.

“…If there’s any trouble, I don’t know anything either.”

Chris said to reassure him, “I won’t ask you to take responsibility.”

“That’s very comforting,” Peter said sarcastically.

Peter looked at Hannah with pleading eyes.

“Can I use some candy?”

Hannah silently nodded.

Shouting “Yay!”, Peter ran over, opened the lid of a glass jar, and grabbed an armful of candy canes from inside.

Returning to Chris, Peter laid the long candies on the floor one by one, forming a rectangle.

The colorful and cute door looked more like a child’s play than an ability to connect to another place.

“So the condition for creating the door isn’t drawing?”

“Any rectangle I make works. But… with things like this, if the objects shift, the door becomes unstable.”

“Why did you use candy canes?”

“Well…”

Peter said, putting the last remaining candy in his mouth and crunching it,

“If I drew on the precious shop, Hannah would hit me.”

“You know me well.”

Hannah showed her fist in the air.

Her eyes had sharpened from the moment Peter put the remaining candy canes in his mouth instead of returning them.

“Alright… It’ll connect in a moment.”

With those words, a black darkness gaped open within the cute candy cane rectangle.

Soon, the container where Yuri was became visible.

Chris quickly scanned the interior for the medicine bottle Yuri had mentioned.

First, he saw Yuri.

The problem was that there were two people standing next to his master, who was sitting on the bed.

Yuri was having a casual conversation with them, a blanket draped over his shoulders.

It seemed someone had come to check on Yuri’s condition in the meantime.

‘I need to do this quickly.’

He could see the metal shelves in the container and several medicine bottles on top of them.

They all looked the same, so they were probably the same medicine.

Chris slowly summoned his power.

To check if his power was working properly, he lightly touched the lid of a medicine bottle, and it turned.

Now he needed to concentrate.

If he wasn’t careful, the contents might rattle, and someone might notice something strange was happening.

If Yuri were alone, Chris wouldn’t mind doing some poltergeist activity. Yuri would immediately realize it was Chris’s doing even if bottles flew around or the bed flipped over. A long time ago, though not recently, Chris used to throw such tantrums to his Guide.

‘Even though it was a time without proper reason, it was embarrassing behavior.’

But in this container, there were two other unrelated people besides Yuri.

Chris tensed his body appropriately and focused his mind through the candy cane door.

Under his power, the medicine bottle lid slowly began to turn.

The contents were quite full.

Chris lifted a small amount of the medicine from inside, not enough to be noticeable.

One, two, three… six.

The pills rose towards the ceiling, defying gravity. The string of pills looked almost like Vienna sausages.

When he looked around wondering where to put them, Hannah hurriedly took out a napkin and spread it.

The shop’s pink logo was drawn in the corner.

The pills stolen from the other side spilled onto it.

‘Just a little more…’

Just as Hannah patted Chris’s back as if to say that was enough, Chris’s eyes met purple eyes looking at him incredulously from the other side.

He’d been caught.

Next to him, he could see Hannah gasping.

Peter knew Yuri’s face, but from Hannah’s perspective, they’d been caught stealing by a stranger.

Chris raised one hand as if to say it was okay and made a slight hand signal.

Unavoidable situation.

Understanding this, Yuri naturally averted his gaze.

Finally released from Yuri’s gaze, Chris felt sweat running down his face.

He’d have to explain later, but it seemed Yuri was willing to let it slide.

Even knowing that he was a rational and reasonable person, Chris still felt tense.

‘I was just caught watching arbitrarily, and now I’ve been caught quietly stealing…’

“The door, close the door quickly.”

They’d gathered everything they needed. Chris turned his head, intending to tell Peter to close the door.

But he saw Peter choking and coughing, clutching his throat.

“Yu-cough-ri sir and I made eye contact, I was so surprised… I choked… Just a moment!”

At that moment, unfortunately, one of the illegal immigrants started to stretch.

If it had been someone with their back to the door, it might have been fine, but if this person opened their eyes, they were in danger of discovering Chris.

In this critical moment, as everyone tensed up, Yuri could be seen pretending to cough roughly.

The immigrant who was about to turn towards Chris went to their place and brought back a pile of blankets.

Yuri could be seen waving off the blankets piling up on his lap.

“Whew… we… we made it.”

Peter wiped his chest. Now he’d certainly face questioning, but at least they hadn’t been caught by a third party.

He looked at Chris with desperate eyes.

“Can I close the door now?”

His face showed he wanted to flee this place immediately. He seemed eager to withdraw before any uncontrollable variables arose.

“Wait a moment. I haven’t closed the lid yet.”

Saying this, Chris carefully started to turn the medicine bottle as before.

With a vain hope, he looked in Yuri’s direction.

But his heartless master hadn’t even glanced this way since their eyes first met.

Nevertheless, Chris alone couldn’t take his eyes off Yuri.

“Now… you can close it.”

Chris said, neatly folding away his lingering feelings and regrets.

He was used to this sort of thing by now anyway.

Peter closed the door and collapsed.

Rather than the aftermath of using his ability… it seemed more due to excessive tension.

“Oh, you rascal!”

Hannah, who couldn’t even make a sound until now, hit Peter’s back several times.

Though it sounded loud, it didn’t seem that painful, but Peter was making a fuss.

“Ow ow ow! It hurts! It hurts!”

Swallowing a sigh, Chris decided he needed to sort out the situation and opened his mouth.

“Will this… be enough?”

Chris said, holding out the pills on the napkin with the shop’s cute logo.

“Now I really can’t say I can’t do it.”

Hannah, pretending to wipe cold sweat, stood up.

She moved towards the back of the shop.

When the two men stood blankly without following, she came back and gestured.

“What are you doing? Aren’t you coming quickly?”

The two men moved immediately.

Hannah stood in front of a counter full of measuring cups, cooking utensils, and ingredients like flour and sugar.

Roughly pushing aside what was on top, she opened a cupboard and started busily taking out things from inside.

As she stretched on tiptoe, Chris asked,

“Should I take out everything on that shelf?”

“Would you help? You need to take them out gently without breaking anything. And don’t shake the contents.”

She seemed to trust the ability he had just demonstrated, stepping back readily.

Chris lightly flicked his finger.

Hannah’s items came down neatly and were placed on the counter.

She combined some reagents in a beaker and put it into a long oval tube. After putting the pill in and sealing it, Hannah processed a few other pills in the same way with different reagents.

Soon, Hannah put all the reagent tubes into what looked like a shelf-like machine and pressed the power button, and the tubes started vibrating.

“We have to wait until the layers separate,” Hannah explained briefly.

“Would you like some coffee while we wait? Or cocoa?”

Chris tilted his head at her more friendly attitude than before, but opened his mouth.

“I…”