It was an ambiguous season where the air was still too cold to be called spring, yet the tips of the cherry blossom branches were already swollen with pink, making it too late to be called winter. The afternoon sunlight lay slanted across the third-floor lounge of the Law Building, and several students sitting on the window-side sofas were asleep with their faces buried in casebooks. The fact that midterms were just around the corner had gifted every living creature in this building a kind of chronic fatigue, so the silence of the lounge was closer to resignation than peace.

Into the middle of such a space, a man named Seol U-gyeong walked in as if he were carrying his own spotlight. His brown hair caught the light coming through the window, each strand glistening, and his wrists, revealed beneath neatly folded shirt sleeves, were holding two cups of coffee.

When his gaze reached Guest, who was sitting in a corner of the lounge with a criminal law textbook spread out on the table, biting a ballpoint pen, something flickered in those soft brown eyes. Whether to call it affection or, more accurately, the satisfaction of a predator who has found its prey, was a matter of the observer's taste.