Chaennie Oneshots

The Silk and String Theory III

The night air outside the university student center was sharp and cold, carrying the faint, humid scent of damp concrete and late summer rain.

Roseanne was walking back from the physics research wing, her heavy canvas bag slung over her left shoulder in its usual geometric alignment. Her mind was occupied with an intricate matrix of quantum entanglement equations, her fingers lightly tapping out a steady rhythm against her thigh. She was taking the shortcut past the gravel alleyway behind the sports complex, a route that cut exactly four minutes and twelve seconds off her walk to the main gates.

Then she heard her lover's name.

"I'm telling you, man, Jennie stooped so low it's actually embarrassing," a loud, arrogant voice echoed off the narrow brick walls of the alley.

Roseanne stopped. Her sharp, hyper-attuned senses locked onto the sound immediately. She stepped back into the shadow of a large concrete pillar, her posture completely still, her breathing dropping into a slow, measured cadence.

Standing by the rear entrance of the athletic lockers were three guys from the varsity rugby team and business department. Mark was leaning against the metal railing, a half-empty plastic cup in his hand, while Kai stood beside him, clutching his jacket against the chill. Chanyeol, a fellow upperclassman from the same department, was laughing loudly with his phone out.

"It's ridiculous," Kai sneered, tossing his cigarette butt onto the wet gravel. "Jennie Kim used to have actual standards. Now she's holding hands with that absolute freak from physics. The girl doesn't even talk like a human being. She looks at people like they're bugs under a microscope."

"Oh, come on, Kai, you're just mad she dumped you for a walking textbook," the third guy snickered, leaning against the wall. "Though I gotta admit, Jennie's body is a complete ten out of ten. Those waist proportions during the gala promo photoshoot? Insane. She's way too fine to be wasting her time with some antisocial robot who probably doesn't even know how to touch a woman."

Mark let out a harsh, booming laugh, taking a long drink from his cup. "Seriously. If Jennie's standards have dropped that far into the dirt, maybe one of us should step in. I mean, we could easily do better than Park. If Jennie's that desperate for attention, she'd probably fold the second a real man actually takes her out."

Kai grinned, nodding along with a vulgar, dismissive shrug. "Yeah. She's just going through a weird phase. Park's an easy mark. Once Jennie gets sick of playing nurse to an autistic weirdo, she'll come crawling back to someone who actually has a life."

Inside Roseanne's chest, the quiet, analytical hum of her logical mind vanished instantly.

It was replaced by a sudden, terrifying spike of pure, blinding rage.

Her heart did not race frantically; it slowed down into a deadly, ice-cold rhythm. Her hyper-observant brain, which usually spent every waking second analyzing equations or calculating spatial efficiency, narrowed its entire processing power onto three specific targets.

Nobody on campus knew. To the university, Roseanne Park was merely a frail, brilliant, highly sensitive theoretical physics student who flinched at loud noises and avoided physical contact. They did not know that from the age of seven, her father had enrolled both her and her older sister Alice into a strict, traditional taekwondo and mixed martial arts academy back home in Australia to balance their intense academic pressure with physical discipline. They did not know that Roseanne was a third-degree black belt, nor that every summer she spent four weeks acting as a senior assistant instructor, quietly breaking wooden boards and executing flawless spin kicks for youth classes.

To Roseanne, physical combat was not a chaotic street brawl. It was applied physics: force, velocity, torque, and structural impact points.

She unbuckled her canvas bag, setting it down on a dry concrete step with gentle, deliberate care. She removed her glasses, folding them carefully and slipping them into her hard coat pocket.