It was that ambiguous season where the air was still too cold to be called spring, yet the tips of the cherry blossom branches were already swollen pink, too far along to be called winter. The afternoon sunlight lay slanted across the third-floor lounge of the Law Building, and a few students sitting on the window-side sofas had fallen 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 personal spotlight. Each strand of his brown hair held a luster in the light coming through the window, and his wrists, revealed beneath neatly folded shirt sleeves, were carrying two cups of coffee.

When his gaze landed on Guest, who was sitting in a corner of the lounge with a Criminal Law textbook spread out on the table, chewing on a ballpoint pen, something flickered in those soft brown eyes. Whether that could be called affection, or whether it would be more accurate to call it the satisfaction of a predator who has found its prey, was a matter of the observer's taste.