The Second Dark History
Ah... I messed up.
That was the first thought that hit me the moment I looked down at the man sprawled on the floor.
If I were to offer something resembling an excuse: a human body has its limits. You cannot see what is happening behind your back, and that is precisely why anything approaching from the rear always sets the nerves on edge. On a battlefield, where an enemy might burst out of anywhere at any moment, that reflex only grows sharper.
Of course I knew this was not a battlefield. But senses honed over years do not vanish in an instant. If someone grabbed you from behind without warning, striking back would hardly have been strange.
Honestly, I had not expected him to go down that easily. Even with a trip, you still need a certain amount of strength—the way no adult winces at a child's punch. With Lee Harin's body, so slight I had to wonder whether muscle even existed in it, knocking down a grown man should have been impossible.
It was probably because he had been completely unguarded, every bit of tension gone from his frame. Which meant, in a way, that Baek Dojun was partly at fault for standing there defenseless.
I knew how ridiculous that sounded. This was not a war zone, and nobody lived every second on a knife's edge. How often, in ordinary life, does anyone's life actually come under threat? Most people do not scan their surroundings for a danger that might lunge out at any moment. Naturally, it would never occur to them that laying a hand on a woman's shoulder might earn them a leg sweep.
"What's going on?"
"I heard a huge noise."
I was just thinking I ought to apologize, at least, when people who had heard the crash began gathering one by one to see what had happened.
People have a habit of looking at an outcome and filling in the process themselves. They take in the scene, the surrounding details, and decide with perfect confidence that such-and-such must have occurred. A person on the ground and a wrecked car in front of them, for instance, and anyone would assume there had been a traffic accident.
Apply that to the present moment: a man on the floor, and a woman standing over him, looking down. If they had settled for "she knocked him over by accident," that would have been a blessing. Unfortunately, human imagination has no ceiling.
"Was he trying something on that girl?"
And that is how a simple accident can turn, in a heartbeat, into a crime scene. Whether it was mob psychology catching from that one man's words, the faces of the people clustered around us turned ugly all at once. Someone even pulled out a phone, talking about calling the police.
"No... it's not like that!"
Baek Dojun shook his head hard, shouting that they had it wrong, but the crowd already seemed to have branded him a criminal. And really—who, in their right mind, would believe a grown man had been knocked down by a woman alone, by accident? In their eyes he was nothing more than a creep who had tried to put his hands on a girl in an internet café in broad daylight and eaten dirt for it.
If I left it alone, the police would show up and the whole thing would get messy. Checking the CCTV later would have cleared it up as a misunderstanding, but I had no desire to inflate something a single sentence could fix. In the end, it was my fault too.
"I'm sorry. I knocked you over by accident. Are you all right?"
I apologized and held out a hand to help him up. Only then did people grasp that nothing serious had happened, and they began to drift away one by one. Someone in the middle even muttered a doubt about whether falling could really make a noise that loud—but with the person involved calling it an accident, they could hardly keep picking at it.
"Still, you must've learned self-defense somewhere. I never saw that trip coming."
Baek Dojun said it while getting to his feet, brushing the dust off his backside. Oddly, he seemed warmer than before; a strange sense of familiarity hung off him. People often said games brought you closer, but could a single sparring match really change someone this much?
A flicker of doubt aside, I nodded and answered.
"I've had plenty of chances to pick up this and that."
"Wow. Even if you had the chances, being able to actually do that? I don't think I ever could."
I looked at him in silence as he piled on the praise. No matter how I turned it over, the idea that one game had closed the distance between us overnight did not hold water. And not long ago, hadn't he been looking down on me, dismissing me as a cheater? Even with the accusation cleared, suddenly gushing compliments and acting friendly was strange.
"Is there something you want from me?"
The most important part of asking someone for a favor is matching their mood. If they are in a foul temper, they will refuse even a request they could easily grant—so when you are the one in the weaker position, keeping them pleasant matters. In my mercenary days, I had seen it often enough: people showing up with gifts, smoothing the way, all to stay on someone's good side. And usually, that meant they wanted something.
"Was I... that obvious? Then I'll cut to the chase. Would you consider appearing on my stream?"
The request was so sudden I could not even find the words to refuse. I had already heard he streamed, but I had never imagined he would ask me to come on.
What was in it for me, anyway? The original goal—clearing my name as a cheater—was as good as done. There was not a single reason to go on a broadcast that offered me nothing.
I was no expert on streaming, but I knew a collab, by its nature, meant sharing viewers, and that it tended to grow both channels. I, however, did not stream at all. If I did go on, I would only become a target for the crude insults and harassment pouring through the chat.
"I'll pass."
"You don't have to show your face or anything. We just talk a little on Discord and play a few games together. That's it."
"I'm not that free."
Time is worth whatever you spend it on. An hour of studying and an hour of gaming are not the same hour. Appearing on Flash's stream was worth less to me than lying at home. A request only gets accepted if it is worth granting.
I turned toward the exit, meaning to head home, when Baek Dojun's voice caught me from behind, urgent.
On any other day I would have ignored it. Right now, I could not. With no income to speak of, I needed money. There was still about two million won in my account, but looking at what would keep draining out of it, that would not last long.
All the donations was a sweet offer, on the face of it. But you always had to look carefully before entering into any kind of contract. "All the donations" sounded like a lot—until you remembered that the actual number was what mattered. If nobody donated, the take was zero. I had no precise sense of Flash's stream size; it was as good as a gamble. In the worst case, I could end up working a full day on stream for nothing but exposure.
I should turn him down after all...
"For reference, I average around two to three thousand viewers, and I've got plenty of whales, so donations can hit a million won or more."
"Deal."
I heard myself accept before I even meant to. At numbers like that, at least I would not be working for free. He had said it was just a few games together. What could possibly go wrong?
On the way home I looked him up, and Flash turned out to be a fairly well-known streamer. His Newtube channel alone had over six hundred thousand subscribers, and the average view counts were solid.
The comments were full of people tearing him down or laughing at him, but that was a separate matter from his popularity, which was obvious. One look at the chat scrolling without pause along the right side of the videos was enough to feel it. A small audience could never produce firepower like that.
Donations seemed to pop off fairly often too. Most were in the one-thousand to ten-thousand-won range, but every now and then someone would drop a hundred thousand or more on a mission. He had said all the donations, so those would be included.
Watching it, I caught myself wondering if I ought to try streaming. Play games and make money—how good would that be? Not that I took the job lightly. Nothing in the world is easy, and streamers have their own kind of grind. It is only the people who know nothing about it who think the money comes easy.
At any rate, my appearance on Flash's stream was set for ten o'clock tonight. He had originally wanted to do it tomorrow, but it had been moved up at my request; I had wanted the cheater accusation cleared as fast as possible. Checking the time, I had roughly seven hours left.
"Maybe I should stop by a convenience store."
I had rushed out without even eating lunch. There was nothing waiting for me at home either, so I figured I would grab something on the way back.
What I did not know then was that my second dark history would be waiting for me right in front of that convenience store.