The Right To Grab A Collar

— Frrrrrip!

She could hear the Hidden Shop’s list sorting itself at speed, and she hoped for even the smallest hint about the other users.

— Gulp.

Dong-hui swallowed hard on a dry throat and waited, wondering just how many people had written reviews.

But.

— Frrip!

“Did you ever see such a lowlife!”

Dong-hui was so angry she could feel the lid of her head flying clean off.

“Hey! If there are zero customer reviews, you shouldn’t have put it on the list in the first place!”

“I am not doing it!”

“Of course I’ll write them. Naturally. Shopping is something you do in order to write the customer reviews in the first place. Open the purchase list!”

She genuinely wanted to let fly with a string of filthy curses. Dong-hui clenched her trembling fist tight and steadied her breathing.

One chance to take that livid-blue thing by the collar and shake it, and she would hand over a thousand points, two thousand, whatever it asked. She was in the middle of picturing herself gripping the blue status window and dashing it to the floor when it blinked up in front of her again.

“About what.”

“Possible?”

“Deal!”

She could think of them as points she had never had in the first place. If she could get hold of that blue mug of a face, wring it out like a dishcloth and slap it flat against the floor the way you slap a ddakji tile¹, two thousand measly points was nothing. She would have paid more.

“Hm?”

She could not begin to work out what was happening. Then the status window, always nothing but a flat expanse of blue, began to change. Its center had been calm as still water until now; a whirlpool spun there, round and round.

“Huh? Huh!”

Dong-hui backed away a step at a time from the sudden churning, regretting the whole thing far too late. Standing that close, she felt she would be sucked right into it. As if to prove her right, the still air began rushing swiftly toward the window.

She whipped her head around looking for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere of the kind in sight. While she was still looking, the whirlwind reversed, and her hair, streaming toward the window a second ago, blew back the other way.

— Whooooosh.

The wind blew for no more than a few seconds. To Dong-hui it was a terror that felt like hours. With the whirlwind turned around, the vortex grew steadily larger.

Dong-hui had no room left to back into. She stood staring wide-eyed at the window, worrying about what came next, and the whirling thing went ptoo! and spat out something large.

“Hm?”

Out of the status window had come the man who looked like a silver hairtail, the one she had seen in the carriage the other time. She had no idea what to say and watched with her breath held while he came slowly toward her, his long silver hair streaming.

He looked like moonlight given human form. To say he shone from head to foot would have been no exaggeration, but the livid glare in his eyes was cold as ice, and she felt that meeting them would turn her to ice as well.

The man came closer and closer.

“Hic!”

The shock startled a hiccup out of Dong-hui’s mouth. The tall man looked down at her, then bent slowly at the waist and brought his eyes level with hers.

He smelled of winter wind.

“Grab it.”

The man’s voice was as chilly as his looks.

“Wh— what do I grab?”

Dong-hui asked, trembling and frightened, barely holding back the tears that wanted to come.

“My collar.”
“I beg your pardon?”

Her mouth hung open as she echoed him, as though her wits had left her, and the man swept up his long silver hair as if wearied and let out a deep sigh.

“Two thousand points. You were the one who thought you wanted to grab me by the collar.”

“Th— then you’re…”

Dong-hui pointed a finger at him, blank-faced, and the man snorted out a small laugh and snapped his fingers with a sharp click. At that, a blue screen floated up behind him, round as a moon.

“Do you understand now?”

Dong-hui looked from the status window to the man and back, and nodded slowly.

“So Mister Silver Hairtail here—”
“I find the expression ‘silver hairtail’ offensive.”
“Quiet. So what you’re saying is, you are that status window, and the status window is Mister Silver Hairtail — you?”

The man frowned as though she were impossible to talk to, then nodded irritably.

“Not perfectly identical, but broadly speaking, yes.”
“And you came out here to have your collar grabbed because I paid two thousand points?”
“I hate to admit it, but yes.”

Stung in his pride, apparently, he creased his handsome brow and scowled. If Ray was a flower boy, Mister Silver Hairtail was a handsome man carved out of ice. Either way it came to handsome, and yet somehow she did not warm to him in the slightest.

“Now that you understand, the act corresponding to the two thousand points—”

The man was carrying on in that cool, elegant voice of his, and that was as far as he got.

“You little punk! I’ve got you now.”

Dong-hui seized the man by the collar, yanked him sharply forward, and glared. His gray eyes met her brown ones from less than a hand’s span away.

“What is the meaning of this!”

The man recoiled at the rough handling and turned severe, but Dong-hui had too much stored up to hear a word of it.

“That glittering hair of yours! If you don’t want it scraped off the way you scrape the scales off a hairtail, be quiet! I paid two thousand points, and you, Silver Hairtail — I have the right to grab you by the collar!”
“Hairtails do not have scales.”
“Shut up! I’ve got you now. You’ve had a fine time making a fool of me all this while! Look perfectly respectable, and hiding behind a blue window is the best you can do! Making fun of somebody as innocent and clueless as me? Well?”

Dong-hui shouted, gripping him by the collar and shaking him back and forth. That was when she saw the letters ‘LOLOLOL’ inscribed on the blue screen floating behind him.

She let go of the collar and reached out toward the deep-blue status window. And the blue screen, which had never once let itself be gripped until now, met her fingertips, cool to the touch.

Dong-hui did not hesitate; she took a firm hold of the status window and dashed it to the floor with all her strength.

— Smack!

The status window went sprawling across the floor like the ddakji tile she had longed for it to be, and the sentence that had been an unbroken run of ‘LOLOL’ filled up with flustered exclamation marks. It gave every impression of not having seen this coming at all.

The man’s eyes went round at the sight of the status window sprawled on the floor. Then he caught the seething Dong-hui by the shoulder, spun her around, and asked.

“What are you.”
“What do you mean, what am I. I’m Ha Dong-hui, the one you dragged here as you pleased!”

“Don’t tell me you’re—”

The man stared hard at her, eyes wide, then snatched up her hand and examined her palm. Before she knew it the status window had floated up too, standing at his back and casting a blue light over it.

“What do you think you’re—!”

Dong-hui was trying to wrench her tightly held hand free when it happened.

The man’s body grew steadily more transparent, and then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he was sucked away into the status window.

That intense stare had not left her until the very last moment. Dong-hui gazed blankly after it and only belatedly came to herself.

The status window floated up as though nothing had happened and announced, in its neat script, that the points had been duly deducted.

The two thousand points vanished the way her part-time wages used to graze her bank account and pass on by, back before she came to this place, leaving nothing behind but a stinging pressure in her grip. Dong-hui blinked at the whole unbelievable business, then opened her palm slowly and looked at it for a long while.

“So… that Silver Hairtail fellow is the status window, and the status window is that Silver Hairtail fellow, is that it?”

Something about accepting it entirely made her uneasy. While she had the man by the collar and was shaking him for all she was worth, the status window behind him had been throwing up a parade of ‘LOLOL’ and enjoying every second of it.

“What’s this, then?”

Dong-hui narrowed her eyes and thought hard.

“Ah! Could the silver hairtail be a subset of the status window?”

“Then is the status window a subset of the silver hairtail?”

Stung, Dong-hui swung a hand at it, but the status window was as ungrippable as it had been at the start; her hand passed clean through.

“Then what is that man?”

— Bzzzzzt.

The window had asked whether she meant the silver hairtail, and then a crackle came and the letters were wiped away almost at once.

Dong-hui thought about what a silver hairtail might be in English and was on the point of naming him Silver Fish.

She looked at the sentence that had shot up in such a hurry and smacked her lips sourly.

“All right, then. He came out of the status window, so let’s make it Taechang.”

“Taechang. Family name Sang, given name Taechang². A Korean-style name — how about it? Not bad, is it?”

— Bzzzzzzt!

The moment the sentence registering the man’s name as Taechang went up, the status window crackled for a good long while and then vanished before her eyes. It felt as though a storm had swept through and gone.

Dong-hui sat there a long while in a dazed sort of mood, then got to her feet.

From somewhere, she thought she could hear the wailing cry of the silver-hairtail man.