Chapter 102: Kim Yu-seong In Summer Vacation
July 24, 2017, Monday.
Normally, I would have left home early in the morning, but today, I could leisurely sit at the dining table for breakfast.
After all, the long-awaited summer vacation had begun.
The breathless first semester of the second year seemed like a lie, as the first morning of summer vacation was quiet.
Apart from the planned beach trip with the Group D members from the school trip in early August, I had no other plans yet.
If it goes like last year, it might be a laid-back life, but that wasn’t necessarily bad.
Because I always lived as if chased by a schedule during the semester.
“I’ve eaten well.”
As I said this and stood up from the table with my empty bowl, Mrs. Imija, my mother, asked,
“Hey, you’re not planning to just stay at home and exercise all vacation, are you?”
“…I’ll just do a little.”
“That’s good then, but go out and play too. If you need pocket money, I’ll give you some.”
“Okay.”
I entered my room, avoiding my mother’s scolding, which was really not a scolding.
“Phew.”
Seeing the exercise equipment filling the room somehow made me feel at ease.
Recently, due to various things, I didn’t have enough time to exercise, but today, it seemed I could enjoy it slowly.
First, I sat on the bench and did dumbbell curls.
I did three sets of 10 reps each as a warm-up with 50kg, then moved on to the main exercise with 60kg, doing three sets of 10 reps each.
Normally, once muscle mass would reach a certain limit, its growth would slow down.
However, Kim Yu-seong’s body kept growing endlessly, as if such common knowledge didn’t apply to it.
As if he had taken anabolic steroids.
Previously, I thought this was just muscle gag character correction in a love comedy, but now I know, thanks to Senior Fuma, that it’s because of an extreme yang constitution.
For someone who lifts weights, it wasn’t an overstatement to call it a God-given talent.
“Huff, huff, huff, huff.”
After finishing the dumbbell curls, I completed dumbbell flies, presses, and side lateral raises in succession, wrapping up about an hour of morning exercise.
Personally, when working out, I like to mix dumbbells and barbells.
This was because dumbbells could target muscles that barbells couldn’t, and vice versa.
I opened the window to ventilate the heated room, but the sweltering summer heat made little difference whether the window was open or closed.
And in my room, there was only a fan.
“…”
It was hot—insanely hot.
I already had a body that tended to be warm, but the current heat was inhuman.
I immediately closed the opened window and headed to the bathroom to wash off the sweat.
Thump.
“Ahhh~”
After taking a shower with cold water, turning on the air conditioner in the living room, and sitting on the sofa, it felt like heaven.
With a slice of freshly ripe watermelon and a cup of barley tea from the fridge, my relaxation was complete.
Staring at the ceiling in a daze, I turned on the TV and took a bite of the watermelon.
The cool juice spreading in my mouth reminded me of a summer scene.
On TV, they were rerunning the last episode of “The Blue Academy Youth Apocalypse,” which had recently concluded.
“Teacher! I like you!”
The character played by Minato, who had become incredibly busy due to the drama’s huge success, was confessing to her homeroom teacher, Akito, on the screen.
I thought a romance between a teacher and a student was risky, but seeing her holding a graduation certificate, it seemed she confessed at the graduation ceremony.
Akito, who initially asked for time to think as he couldn’t respond right away, eventually accepted Minato’s confession after her birthday three months later, when she became a proper adult, ending the drama.
Perhaps this was the writer’s version of a happy ending.
I only watched about 30 minutes from the middle, but it was quite interesting, so I thought I should watch the whole series later, as I checked a text message that had just arrived.
[Senior, what are you doing?]
Speak of the tiger. It was Minato, whom I hadn’t seen much of lately.
It seemed she was keeping up with her attendance, but as we were in different grades, there weren’t many opportunities to meet.
[Nothing much.]
[That’s good. Would you like to go to a festival with me on Saturday?]
[Festival?]
I paused and looked at the calendar in the living room.
Come to think of it, it was about time for the Summer Festival.
[I’m fine with it, but are you okay? You’re busy being a celebrity.]
[I’ve cleared my schedule for that evening, so it’s fine. I don’t work every single day of the year, you know.]
[That’s good to hear, but…]
While texting back and forth, I realized something odd.
[Aren’t we close enough to go to a festival together?]
Wasn’t this moving too fast for people who had only met a few times?
[Is it strange for a senior and junior to go to a festival?]
[That’s… not.]
[So, there’s no problem, right? Okay, it’s decided.]
Before I could even argue, it was decided that I was going to the festival.
Half-resigned, I sent a text.
[Fine, I’ll do as you wish.]
[Hehe, thank you for indulging my insistence, Senior. I might as well show you my special yukata that day.]
Ding!
Immediately after the notification sound, a photo popped up. Curious, I saw it was a photo of Minato in a waiting room, making a V-sign with her fingers.
[This is a bonus.]
I couldn’t help but smile at her charm, which seemed to radiate through the screen.
‘She’s cute.’
After a late lunch of chicken breast sausage, fried eggs, and brown rice, I started to binge-read the love comedy manga that I had bought in bulk but hardly ever read.
“Hehe…”
Unknown to many, the history of love comedy spanned a good 40 years.
The first work, called a love comedy, appeared in the 1980s, and what are now clichés in love comedies were all established in the 80s and 90s.
Originally, love comedies felt like male versions of pure romance mangas with triangular or quadrangular relationships, but this trend changed in the late 90s with the emergence of harem love comedy in shonen mangas.
Due to the influence of that work, in the 2000s, harem love comedies, where several heroines compete for one protagonist, became a trend.
The 2000s was a decade filled with stellar works in manga, PC games, and novels… And then, entering the 2010s, love comedy became a passé genre.
Since the stories were mostly similar, it all came down to the uniqueness of characters or unusual settings.
Of course, even amidst this, there were rare hits like Scramble Love, but compared to the heyday of love comedies in the 80s and 90s, it was but a drop in the bucket.
Generally, once I started reading, I usually followed through to the end, but with love comedies, honestly, there were many times I felt like coughing blood.
Even though love comedies were basically a genre to watch with your brain turned off, there were just too many developments that defied my understanding.
“Today was fun too…”
Thankfully, there are more quality love comedies these days because there was a time when I seriously wanted to tear the writers apart, especially for stories like NTR, which I had little tolerance for.
It was not without reason that I preferred Shonen Jump-style love comedies.
At least they didn’t incorporate unreasonable settings here.
After about three hours of binge-reading the backlog of manga in one sitting, I decided it was time to hit the gym and mark my attendance.
Generally, the busiest times at the gym were the New Year and summer seasons.
Some come for dieting, others to get in shape for swimsuits.
Most people wouldn’t last more than a month, disappearing without a trace, leading to a cycle of the gym becoming quiet again.
In another sense, if you endured a month, you had lasted quite long.
Recently, Senior Fuma and Kazu, who joined our gym, have been attending almost daily.
While finishing up with the treadmill, a thought struck me, and I asked,
“Senior Fuma, aren’t you going back to your hometown for the vacation?”
Senior Fuma, running beside me, answered,
“The fare is too expensive.”
“…Isn’t that a sad reason not to go?”
“My hometown is quite far, and the transportation alone costs almost 10,000 yen. With that money, I can buy 30 bowls of gyudon. Plus, it’s risky if I work fewer days.”
Somehow, converting the value of money into bowls of gyudon made it seem even sadder.
Kazu, who was also running on a treadmill next to us, asked with a puzzled look,
“Doesn’t sister usually do a lot of part-time jobs? Where do you spend all that money?”
Then, Senior Fuma chuckled and replied,
“Don’t underestimate Tokyo’s killer cost of living, Koto. Even working four hours a day, after paying rent, going to public baths, and buying minimal cosmetics and groceries, my bank account becomes empty. If my family hadn’t supported my tuition, I might have given up on my studies and returned home by now.”
Senior Fuma’s side profile, seriously discussing the cost of living in Tokyo, looked sad.
She was pretty, but why does she give off such a feeling of poverty?
After completing 30 minutes, Senior Fuma stepped off the treadmill, wiping sweat with a towel, and said,
“By the way, Kim Yu-seong. Are you free this summer?”
“When are you referring to?”
“Anytime. After all, I’m the one asking a favor.”
“…A favor?”
Senior Fuma nodded and explained,
“About passing on the ‘Swift Wind’ technique I mentioned before, the village elders want to meet you and decide. If you could spare 2 nights and 3 days for it.”
“If it’s about that…”
I added a new schedule to my mental calendar.
It seemed empty just this morning, but within just 12 hours, it had filled up this much.
As expected, I seemed to have no idea what was going on with people.
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