Hyomin stretched her stiff body after another exhausting and mundane day at her university. She starts to pack her books and stationeries into her bag, when one of her classmates approached her from the side.

“Hey, Hyomin! You wanna hang out with me later? You know, have a cup of coffee or something like that?”

Hyomin looked up at the newcomer while packing up her things.

“I’m sorry Eunjung, but I can’t go out with you today… I’m busy.”

“Oh… it’s alright. Maybe next time then…” Eunjung replied, disappointed with her answer. The short-haired woman decided to walk away, but was stopped by a hand gripping her shoulder.

“I’ll call you when I have the free time, okay? Besides, we both have the same thesis due next week. After we’re done with it, we can hang out whenever we want! Well, at least until we need to write another thesis," she sheepishly exclaimed to her friend.

Eunjung was delighted.

“Okay! I’ll be waiting for that!"

With that done, Hyomin gave her a hug and exited the lecture room while waving goodbye to her friend. She felt bad for turning down Eunjung’s offer, but she really needed to finish up this thesis that had been plaguing her mind for a long time. She was good at writing essays, but this was like an endless story that needs to be explained over and over again with non-repetitive language. She can’t seem to write it at home or in school. The only place that she could write it without any disturbance was at her favourite café nearby. It felt like her brain can think up of more words so that the thesis could flow well whenever she wrote there. Maybe it was because of the calm atmosphere in that café.

Finally, when she reached her desired destination, she took the window seat near the entrance of the sophisticated place, ordered her usual mug of coffee, and was determined to overcome the power of the paper nemesis on the table in front of her.

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Lee Soonkyu a. k. a Sunny had waited patiently for her prey to leave the university and started following her again to that café. She was like a professional sniper hiding out on top of a building, waiting for the exact moment that her prey would come out from the safety of her school and exposed out in the open again.

Sunny raised her binoculars again when her prey went inside the café and sat at the window seat. She was in full view. Sunny could see all the attractive features of the woman, completely focused on writing on a notepad. The photo her boss had given her could not be compared with the absolute beauty of the real thing. One of the woman’s long locks of hair fell into her vision. She raised her left hand to tuck it neatly behind her ear. Sunny found that action captivating.

The woman’s face was flawless. A natural beauty, a slim figure, and long legs that made the one watching her green with envy. Already in her early twenties, Sunny’s height was still one of her main weaknesses. The vertically-challenged woman shook off that thought and remained focused on the task at hand. She needed to wait for at least an hour until she could carry out her plan.

20 minutes.

30 minutes. More patrons are entering the café. The university student was not fazed by the sudden increase in customers. Sunny was still watching her.

40 minutes. It was getting dark.

50 minutes.

Almost time.

Sunny noticed that the woman was flipping the pages of the notepad. It looked like she was checking for any mistakes in it.She was almost ready to leave. This was Sunny’s cue to pack all of her equipment into her silver suitcase. She used the emergency staircase at the side of the building to get down onto ground level without anyone noticing. During her trailing of her new victim, she had contacted one of her boss’s trusted workers to place a vehicle in the large alleyway so that she could transport the woman to the client.

Once Sunny has placed both of her feet on solid ground, she looked at her watch while moving quickly towards the gloomy alley at the side of the café.

1 hour.

The woman was packing up her things and finishing off the coffee.

“Show time.”

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Hyomin gulped down her wonderful tasting coffee, paid the usual tab, and exited the now crowded café. It was always filled up at this time of day. She could not concentrate once the noise of chattering customers starts entering her ears. It was a good thing that her thesis was almost done. One more day and she could enjoy the rest of the week with her friends!

She looked at the street in front of her, and then up at the sky.

‘It’s dark already? I better go home before I can’t even see anything.’

She walked a bit faster than her normal speed towards the usual alleyway she used. She stopped in front of it. A small figure was crawling around, looking under a black car parked there. She looked like she was searching for something important. Being the Good Samaritan that she is, Hyomin approached the person in front of her.

“Excuse me… are you looking for something?”

A woman, that looked like she was younger than her, turned to Hyomin and she was met with a pitiful yet cute-looking expression. Hyomin felt her face getting warm…

“Oh thank goodness! Please help me! I really need to find this really special ring that my boyfriend gave me! I wanted to admire it a little more by pulling it out from my finger, but it slipped and then it rolled under my car! Now I can’t see where it is because it’s so damn dark here!” the tiny woman exclaimed in an overdramatic cutesy voice.

Hyomin gave her an ‘Are you serious?’ look.

‘What kind of lame reason to admire a ring is that!? *sighs* Oh well, I’ll just help this poor girl out.’

Hyomin got into the same position as the stranger beside her, and started blindly searching for the tiny jewelry under the four-wheeled vehicle without the help of any source of light. If only this place wasn’t so utterly dark and gloomy. The woman beside her had gotten up from her crawling position, and was standing behind her. The student gave up after a few minutes of looking and grabbing around the area at the bottom of the car, and also began to stand up.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t find your ring either. Why don’t you-“

Just as she was about to turn around to face the petite woman, something soft that felt a bit like cloth covered her whole face and she was pulled into a very tight hold from behind. Hyomin kept struggling to break free but the ambusher was way too strong for her. She could not manage a scream as the cloth muffled her voice. The smell of the cloth was strange… She suddenly felt dizzy and disoriented. Then her legs started to feel like jelly…

‘This… is the last time… that I’m… gonna help… another person…as cute as she is…’

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Sunny carried the awfully easy target after she tied her hands and legs up with some wire she brought, and placed her roughly inside the back of the car.Nothing like a bottle of anesthetic to quickly knock out her victims without alerting anybody around the area… She took her prey’s shoulder bag to look for anything that would interrupt her mission. Some books, notepad, stationeries, a make-up set, chewing gum, a purse, and a phone. She took out the trendy Samsung phone and stomp on it with such force, breaking it into a million pieces. What a waste of a good gadget…

Now that there were no other tracking devices inside the bag, it was also placed inside the car, along with the unconscious woman. It was better to leave the crime scene with as little evidence as possible, except for the bashed-up mobile phone on the ground.

She finally went into the vehicle, pushed the key into the ignition, and drove off. While holding the steering wheel, she took out her own secured phone in one hand to contact her boss.

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“I’ve got the girl… now where am I supposed to take her?”

The man in a suit sitting comfortably behind his desk listened to the cold voice coming out from his phone’s receiver, while releasing a long drag of smoke from his nostrils.

“Our client would like you to send her to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Seoul, near the countryside where it’s almost uninhabited. It would take you several days to get there by car, so I guess you will have your hands full with this one, Soonkyu."

An audible silence can be heard from the other side of the line.

“I’ll send you the location of your rendezvous with the client through your phone. Good luck.”

He disconnected his conversation with her to call up another person.

“You will be getting the woman you asked for very soon, sir.”

“Good… I’ll be waiting.”

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