Time Stopped at 2:40 PM
"Coach, see you next time!"
The sight of the kids' heads bobbing as they turned away—each one throwing a deep, bellied bow—was almost too cute to bear.
After loading the children into the academy's van and waving them off, I headed back to the pitch they'd been running around on just moments before. A full regulation-size field of lush natural grass, light towers that could turn midnight into high noon, and even a proper office building—not some converted shipping container.
I'd heard the owner had sunk several hundred million won into the place, and seeing it up close, I could believe every won of it.
"Haah... when am I ever going to get all this cleaned up."
Of course, there was one small catch: to the part-timer who'd just sent the kids home, that magnificent football field was nothing but a mountain of chores.
"Nnngh..."
I gathered the scattered training cones into a pile, then arched my aching stiff back backward, and a groan burst out of me all on its own. As I kicked the stray balls together with my feet, one after another, a thought drifted through my mind.
I wished I could just kick a ball to my heart's content, without a care in the world—exactly like those kids had been doing a few minutes ago.
"...Wake up, Hanbin. Once this is done, I've got my shift at the convenience store."
Still, this job beat dealing with nightmare customers at the store. I got to hear people laughing, got to touch a ball—the hourly pay wasn't bad either, and above all, the simple fact that I could earn money while playing the sport I loved made it easily the best job I'd ever had.
And on top of that, they'd slapped the respectable title of "Coach" on a guy whose entire football résumé amounted to a middle school club career. By my standards, this was the best workplace in the world.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked the time. 2:40 PM.
"All right. Just fifty more shots, then I'm out of here."
Honestly, if I had my way, I'd have kept shooting until the sun went down... but ever since I showed up late that one time, the convenience store owner's gaze had turned distinctly frosty. In an economy this bad, falling out of favor with your boss was a dangerous thing.
Thwack—!
The ball flew off my foot and sliced through the air.
Thwack—!
Another one.
"Tch."
The results were far from satisfying. Whenever I kept the ball off the ground, it would annoyingly balloon into the sky or sail wildly wide of the goal. And just like that, the fifty shots I'd promised myself were done.
So this is it, huh. This is all I've got left. The disappointment rose up and lodged in my throat.
Even I knew it wasn't simply a matter of being out of practice. There was a wide gulf between the way my body used to glide across a pitch and the way it moved now.
Was it... quitting back then that did it, after all?
Memories I'd worked hard to bury deep in my chest came surging back. The days when I was training hard in my middle school football club, chasing the dream of going pro.
I wasn't brimming with talent, but I wasn't devoid of it either—just a thoroughly average, middle-of-the-pack player. Then my father collapsed in an accident out of nowhere, and in the face of surgery and hospital bills that snowballed beyond counting, our household began to tilt, helplessly, toward ruin.
Every single day felt like walking on thin ice. Even my mother, who had spent her whole life keeping house, had no choice but to plunge into work at a restaurant.
If I'd still been a clueless elementary schooler, maybe I wouldn't have noticed. But through the eyes of a middle schooler who fancied himself old enough to understand things, I could see it all too clearly—the way she smiled through exhaustion after grinding from dawn until late into the night, afraid that her son might lose heart.
To a mother like that, I could no longer bring myself to ask for club dues that ran into the hundreds of thousands of won, or a pair of football boots that cost a hundred thousand.
"I'm quitting football."
The day I said those words, when she told me she'd take out loans—even loan-shark debt if she had to—so I could keep playing, I lied to her.
I told her I'd given it a fair shot, that I just didn't seem to have the talent for it. Grinning, I declared that "football ends here for me."
My mother nodded without a word. And on her face, I saw two feelings at once that she couldn't quite hide—relief, and sorrow.
That complicated expression of hers... it's still vivid in my memory, even now, all this time later.
So I quit the club and threw myself straight into the part-time workforce the moment school let out. Had I written off studying entirely, deciding that easing even a little of my mother's burden mattered more? Or was it just an excuse to avoid hitting the books? Maybe, somewhere in there, I wanted to look like the dutiful son. Who's to say.
Whatever the truth was, the part-time life that started back then had clung to me stubbornly, all the way to now—just barely into adulthood.
"...Well, at least now that I'm legal, maybe I'll run into fewer of those trashbags who dine and dash on a kid."
The accumulated resentments surfaced, and a bitter smile crossed my face. It was a small comfort—but for once, being an adult actually meant something.
"Haah..."
With a long sigh, I shook off the memories of the past. I really had to go now. Any more dallying and I'd miss the bus too.
In the end, I swallowed my greed and gathered the balls up into the basket, one by one.
Scuff, scuff.
My footsteps toward the exit felt unusually heavy. As always, the moment of leaving brought the thought with it: I wish I could just stay here and keep kicking a ball...
Lost in one thought and then another, I walked—and before I knew it, I was standing in front of the pitch's door. Reaching out on autopilot, I took hold of the handle and turned it.
Clunk.
...What?
I tried again.
Clunk, clunk.
The handle didn't budge an inch. It's locked? This door had always opened freely from the inside...
I looked around, but nothing seemed out of place. Nothing was jammed in the gap of the door either. Tilting my head, I called the facility's caretaker, Caretaker Kim.
"Beep— The number you have dialed is currently outside the service area..."
A cold mechanical voice flowed out of the receiver. Outside the service area? That had never once happened before.
Yes, this place was out on the fringes of Gyeonggi Province, but a spot where the buses ran just fine didn't suddenly become a dead zone.
Puzzled, I checked the top right corner of my phone screen. There, next to the carrier logo and the antenna icon, an X mark glared back at me—the symbol of no signal. I was out of coverage.
"Did the cell tower nearby break or something?"
I was entertaining useless thoughts like that when my shift time abruptly flashed through my mind. I can't be late today! I hurriedly checked my watch again.
2:40 PM.
...Huh?
It had definitely read 2:40 PM when I started my shooting practice. A good twenty minutes must have passed since then—and yet the time was exactly the same...?
"Phone's busted. Five years of faithful service—guess it's finally time to retire it? But why now, of all times..."
There went my repair budget again. I sighed and rattled the door handle once more, but it stayed frozen as ever.
Nothing for it, then.
"Guess I'll try reaching someone from the office computer."
For once, the fact that this place had such top-notch facilities was a godsend. A place with its own gym and staff cafeteria was bound to have an office computer. If it had a messenger app installed, I could at least get a message to the convenience store owner.
I opened the office door, went in, and pressed the computer's power button. The office on a holiday afternoon, utterly empty, was silent as the grave.
While it booted up, I glanced at my phone again—but the time was still frozen at 2:40 PM.
"...Even when phones break, does the clock stop too?"
A flicker of unease crossed my mind. Just then, the computer screen lit up. I checked the time displayed in the bottom right corner of the desktop.
2:40 PM.
...?
The computer matched the phone to the minute. Something was off here. The office computer was obviously connected to the internet—it had no business showing the wrong time.
Half disbelieving myself, I opened a browser window. Nothing appeared but a lone [No Connection] error page.
"Oh, come on. Now what's wrong with it?"
A hollow laugh escaped me. Did a broken cell tower somehow knock out the wired internet line too?
Isn't there some other clock around here? I looked around and spotted an analog clock hanging on the office wall. Its hour and minute hands pointed precisely to 2:40. And the red second hand, stopped dead at fifteen seconds.
I checked the desk clock on another desk as well. 2:40 PM. Identical.
Every clock in the room was frozen at the same moment.
One commonsense-defying situation after another was unfolding before my eyes, and a grim premonition crept into my head.
...Has time stopped?
It was an absurd thought—but I had to check. Only one thing remained: the scoreboard at the center of the pitch. The owner had proudly bragged that it was the most accurate clock on the premises, synced straight to satellite signals.
So I left the building and sprinted—nearly flat-out—across to the pitch.
"Hah... hah..."
I arrived at the field, lungs burning from the all-out run, and looked up at the scoreboard at its center. The display that told the time glowed with the same words as every other clock: PM 2:40.
And beneath that, where the team names and score would normally be, numbers I had never seen before were floating on the screen.
[ 50 / 100,000,000 ]
"...And what on earth is that supposed to be?"