A Wolf in the Rabbit's Hole - vanish into fiction

Statistics Department graduate lab, Room 304. People called the place ‘The Rabbit Hole.’

The reason was simple. Hong Seo In, who sat in there like a permanent fixture of the lab, was a rabbit beastkin, and he lived buried in papers and administrative work day and night.

“Ha…… I’m really going to die like this.”

Eleven in the evening. Hong Seo In crawled out of the building, squeezing artificial tears into his parched eyes.

Teaching-assistant duties, waiting on an insufferable fossil of a professor, data sorting that went on all day, and, in the middle of it, undergraduate complaints that ran wild once.

At this point, wasn’t it less a pitiable TA and grad student and more a superhuman workforce you’d need, funded by the department’s entire budget?

The sweet-scented pheromone unique to Seo In, a recessive rabbit beastkin, had already drained from his body. All that was left was a body steeped in fatigue and a musty survival smell that even the scent of the shampoo couldn’t mask.

He hooked a finger into the knot of his tie, drooping as much as his energy, and dragged it down as he walked, trailing his feet.

‘I’m going to fall asleep in the shower. Man or whatever, today I’m just going to collapse and sleep.’

Normally on a gloomy day like this, he would have picked up someone to pick his mood up. A man who was reasonably neat, reasonably uncommunicative, reasonably clean.

A stranger whose name he didn’t need to remember, whose number he especially wouldn’t keep. After a passionate entwining of bodies with them, at least his head went quiet. It didn’t ease the fatigue, but the emptiness let up a little. But today he didn’t have the energy for even that.

Swallowing a sigh, Seo In turned into the alley that was the shortcut. A streetlight, as if on the fritz, flickered with a sizzling, crackling sound. The light repeated on and off, and beneath it the shadow blinked along with it.

Seo In trudged a few more steps and stopped.

Something was standing in the middle of the alley.

First of all, it was big. Not just big, but as if a piece of a building’s outer wall was standing there, doing an imitation of a person.

The shoulders, which even a black hoodie couldn’t hide, were broad enough that two Seo Ins side by side would still come up short, and his posture with his hands in his pocket had the unmistakable air of someone who would quietly dismember a person and bury them beneath a wall.

Black tattoos were wrapped around the neck jutting out of the hood. Lines tangled like the marks of a beast’s claws ran up to under his jaw.

Anyone could see he was a wolf. And not an ordinary wolf, but a top predator who had either just scaled a prison wall or is among the current gangster seniors that would make other gangsters warn others to watch out for him.

What was more, judging by the pheromones rippling even out to this street, he was a dominant. For Seo In, a recessive beastkin, the worst possible opponent.

‘Ah, my luck is truly screwed today.’

Seo In swallowed dryly. Run? But at a rabbit beastkin’s speed, he could never beat that monster. If he foolishly showed his back, he would clearly get bitten from the nape down.

Seo In slowly thrust one hand into his pants pocket. In there was a can of pepper spray. The problem was that, against that frame, he felt he would be hit and killed before he even got the spray out.

Silence flowed for a moment. In that interval, the streetlight sizzled once more.

In the end, Seo In spoke first.

“Excuse me.”

Then the huge shadow flinched slightly.

……Huh?

The reaction was strange, unlike what he had expected. But his appearance was still menacing. Seo In set that subtle sense of unease aside for now. To survive, he had to seize the upper hand.

“I don’t know whether you’re a student or an old man, but I don’t have any cash on me right now.”

He spoke like a person who was as annoyed and tired as possible.

“Here, my watch. It’s a knockoff, but if you sell it on a secondhand market it’ll cover a meal. So take this and just let me go, okay?”

He took off his wristwatch and held it out. But the huge shadow didn’t move a muscle. Instead, only rough breaths, panting like a beast, leaked out.

Cold sweat ran down Seo In’s spine.

‘What the…? Is he not trying to mug me?’

Then it was worse. If that rejection meant “pay with your body,” he was truly out of luck. However loosely he lived, he had no taste for being caught by a weapon-like bastard on the street and reduced to a rag.