2:40 PM
The number on the scoreboard glowed in the still air.
The wall clock in the office wasn't moving — not even the second hand.
And on the screen of his smartphone, a single message shone with stark clarity: NO SERVICE.
Then there was the scoreboard, right in front of him.
None of this could be a malfunction. Not all of it at once.
"... Time has actually stopped?"
He looked around.
Come to think of it, the noise of the road that had been audible just moments ago was gone — even the birdsong from somewhere in the distance had vanished entirely.
He lifted his eyes to the sky and spotted a pigeon. It was flying.
No — it was frozen in midair, suspended in the exact shape of a bird mid-flight.
"·····."
Confronted with a phenomenon that thumbed its nose at the laws of physics, he pinched his cheek hard, half wondering if this was a dream.
It hurt.
It wasn't a dream.
Should he play the madman and bolt for the exits? But then he remembered the entrance doors, locked fast, and a quieter question followed: was rushing around blindly really the right call in a situation like this?
Calm down. Figure out what's happening first.
His gaze returned to the scoreboard. 2:40 PM.
That was the last time he'd checked his phone — right before starting his set of fifty shooting drills.
And then there was the number beneath it.
Fifty. Exactly the number of shots he'd just taken.
No way... Something was clicking into place in his head.
Then what was that second number? One million... ten million... a hundred million? What on earth was that supposed to mean?
The questions chased their own tails, and nothing more could be known right now. But one thing, at least, was certain.
If that fifty really did count his shots, the way he suspected—
"...Then one more kick should tell me."
His heart began to pound.
If he was right...
He walked toward the nearest ball.
He set it down near the penalty area, and strangely enough, he felt nervous. Nothing about this was different from the shooting practice he'd been doing minutes ago — and yet it felt completely different.
He struck the ball with everything he had.
BANG—!
The sound of the kick rang out across the empty stadium, unnaturally loud.
The ball sailed in a graceful arc and buried itself in the top corner of the goal.
A satisfying trajectory, certainly — but the goal wasn't what mattered right now. The instant he confirmed the net rippling, he whipped his head around to the scoreboard.
The number... had changed. Fifty had become fifty-one.
I knew it!
His guess had been right. That number was keeping a record of every shot he took.
"Then... what exactly counts as a valid shot?"
Curiosity flared up out of nowhere.
What if even the laziest little toe-poke made the number climb?
Without much thought, he idly shanked the nearest ball forward.
It wasn't a proper kicking form. He hadn't aimed at the goal. The only meaning in the motion was the bare fact that a ball had been kicked.
He looked at the scoreboard.
... Unchanged.
"Hmm."
Maybe he hadn't tried hard enough, he thought, and this time put a bit more into it — a light inside-foot tap toward the goal.
The scoreboard didn't react.
"...Ha. So half-assing it doesn't cut it, huh."
Apparently only a genuine, properly executed shot could move the count.
Why shots, of all things, he had no idea. What that figure of one hundred million was supposed to mean, he didn't know either.
The front number counted the shots he'd taken. So then — a hundred million? Was it seriously telling him to hit a hundred million of them?
A hundred million shots would take more than a lifetime of nothing but football.
And before that — did filling the counter even break the frozen time?
Is there anything else? Any other functions?
Just like in the webtoons and web novels he'd read, he tried issuing commands to the scoreboard in his mind.
Status window. Explanation. Help.
But naturally, nothing changed.
Did he need to say it out loud, then...?
On the off chance, he shouted with genuine conviction.
"STATUS WINDOW!!"
"STATUS WINDOOOW!!"
All that answered him was the indifferent scoreboard.
Damn it.
A flush of embarrassment washed over him. Thank god there wasn't a soul around to see it.
Alright. Then there's nothing to do but test this place myself.
First, he needed to find the boundaries of this space.
Was the time-stop confined to the pitch, or did it extend beyond the stadium?
He went back to the entrance door that had refused to open earlier.
Rattle, rattle.
It didn't budge. Of course it didn't.
He tried the other entrance, and even the emergency exit, but the result was the same every time. Every route out of the stadium was sealed.
"I think I'm screwed..."
The curse slipped out before he could stop it. So he was trapped inside this stadium? Then for how long?
Until time started flowing again? Until that counter hit a hundred million? Worst case — forever?
What happened if he grew old and died in here? No, wait — what about water? Food?
Dread crept over him, but he forced himself to shake his head.
It was too early to conclude anything. There might be another way.
"Oh, right! The office! What about the computer?"
He sprinted back to the office and checked the computer. The power was still on, but the clock still read 2:40. The internet connection was, unsurprisingly, dead.
He hammered at the keyboard on the off chance it would help. Nothing. His phone was the same story — the NO SERVICE icon sat stubbornly in the corner, and no matter which app he opened, all he got was an endless loading screen.
The connection to the outside world had been severed completely.
The only thing left to lean on was whatever was happening inside this stadium.
He walked back out onto the field.
No way to contact anyone. No way out. The vast, sprawling pitch felt like a prison.
And yet, at the same time, this absurd situation was — crazy as it sounded — maybe a chance that had been given to him...
No. He was losing his mind.
"...It's a chance."
A pigeon suspended mid-flap, a world stuffed like a taxidermy exhibit — no matter how he looked at it, this situation was completely unreal.
So then, he thought, why not throw out all those mundane worries — food, water, lifespan — and actually think?
The exhausting part-time jobs. The football he'd turned his back on, telling himself he had no talent. His father lying in a hospital bed, his mother wearing herself down caring for him. This might be the chance to change all of it.
The very opportunity he'd spent his whole life grumbling about might have finally come knocking.
He steadied himself and stared at the scoreboard once more.
The number remained where it was.
Fifty-one was the count of his shots. Then a hundred million was — the goal? The unlock condition for escaping this place where time stood still? He didn't know.
He couldn't know. The only thing he actually understood was that the number changed with every valid shot.
Which meant he had to use this time as efficiently as possible.
A thousand shots. Then weights.
He laid out his own training routine.
Anyone who saw it would have called it insane.
For an ordinary person, three hundred shots a day was already enough to grind the ankle down. His plan: five hundred with the right foot, weights, five hundred with the left. Then rest.
Decision made, action swift. He gathered the balls scattered across the field and lined them up in front of the goal.
First drill — right-footed shooting. In the beginning, he focused entirely on form and accuracy.
BANG—! [ 52 ]
BANG—! [ 53 ]
Over hundreds of repetitions he fine-tuned his posture by the smallest degrees, experimenting with every kind of kick. Curling shots, knuckleballs — he imitated even the shots he had no business attempting, desperate to absorb the feel of them.
Past the three-hundred mark, his calves and ankles began to scream right on schedule. Sweat poured off him like rain, and his breath grew ragged.
By the five-hundredth shot, his right leg tingled so badly it barely felt like his own.
The scoreboard read [ 500 / 100,000,000 ].
Even through the pain of muscles he'd never worked this hard in his life, a sense of accomplishment bloomed — he'd done it.
Come to think of it... I'm not thirsty at all. Not hungry either.
He had soaked through an enormous amount of sweat and burned through energy from head to toe. Under normal circumstances, he'd have been desperately hunting for water by now.
But now? Forget thirst — his mouth wasn't even dry, and his stomach showed not the faintest sign of hunger.
Hours had surely passed, and he didn't feel so much as a twinge of thirst.
Anyone sweating this much would be parched by now. The fact that I'm not... means I can't treat this place like the real world after all.
Then again, with a pigeon hanging frozen in midair, quibbling over what counted as "real" at this point was its own kind of joke.
His muscles were still fatigued, though, so after a short rest he moved to the gym.
He knew nothing about proper weight training, so he simply threw himself at whatever was in reach.
Squats, leg presses, bench presses, deadlifts — he had no idea whether his form was right or wrong, so he just went at it like a man possessed. Feeling his whole body begin to wobble, he headed back to the pitch.
He pushed through the hardest stretch of all — five hundred left-footed shots — and collapsed onto the office sofa. By then, the scoreboard read [ 1,000 / 100,000,000 ].
He fell asleep to the ache of every muscle in his body screaming at once.
How much time had passed? He woke to a feeling that was less stiffness than outright refreshment.
Something was off the moment he tried to sit up.
Huh? Why do I feel so light?
Just yesterday, he had driven every muscle in his body to its absolute limit.
Back in middle school, after brutal training sessions, the next day's muscle soreness had made even descending stairs an ordeal. He'd be wrecked for days, groaning through it — that was simply how it went.
And his body now? He moved his limbs carefully, then tried a few light jumps in place.
A faint heaviness lingered, but beyond that, his body felt so loose it was hard to believe he'd put himself through yesterday's punishing routine. There was almost no pain worth calling soreness.
If anything, he felt firmer, more alive than before.
"...This is impossible."
A hollow laugh escaped him.
Was it connected to the stopped time? Inside frozen time, did even the body's recovery process operate by different rules?
Like a game character whose HP and MP refill completely after a single night's sleep?
He hurried to the gym and stood in front of the mirror.
He peeled off his jersey top, and there it was — a body subtly, unmistakably different from before.
He was still lean, but the muscle lines across his shoulders, chest, and arms seemed just a shade, just a shade sharper.
In a single day? For a normal person, a change like that took weeks or months of consistent training, and even then it barely showed.
Goosebumps rose on his skin.
This place didn't just stop time — it granted miraculous recovery and growth on top of it.
This was a cheat. An enormous, reality-breaking cheat.
Muscles grow through rest and recovery. So what happened when that recovery ran abnormally fast?
It meant he could push through extreme training every single day, and his body wouldn't just survive it — it would come back stronger, faster.
"...It's insane."
And on top of that, even a serious injury would presumably heal by the next morning.
Then accounting for fatigue in my legs, I'd set it at five hundred per foot per day — but if this holds, I could double it to a thousand and train without worrying about injury at all.
If his theory was right, the time he'd have to spend trapped here had just shrunk dramatically compared to the plan he'd sketched out yesterday.
Heart pounding with that thought, he pushed open the gym door and stepped out onto the field.
And the moment his foot touched the grass, his stride broke.
"...Huh?"
Every football ball he'd blasted around the goal in yesterday's shooting practice was back in place, arranged in a neat row.
As if the very fact that he'd trained here yesterday had never happened, the training ground had returned to the exact state it had been in when he first stepped onto it.
He'd spent all of yesterday confirming it: there was no other presence in this space. No one but him.
Which meant...
"...A reset?"
The space itself might reset on a fixed cycle.
Perhaps keyed to him falling asleep and waking up?
Was this a system where, like in a game, everything restored to its original state whenever he took a rest?
After the miraculous recovery, here was yet another impossible phenomenon — but at this point, it registered less as shock and more as something almost expected.
Common-sense physics didn't apply here. Neither did the flow of time.
Rapid recovery, and the automatic reset of the space itself.
Together, those two facts meant one thing: this was a place where training efficiency could be pushed to the absolute limit.
He'd never need to tidy up the wreckage of a hard day's training by hand. He'd never have to worry about balls wearing out from endless repetition, the turf getting torn up, or his boots falling apart.
It was a near-perfect environment — the kind he had dreamed of his whole life, where nothing existed but the training itself.