It Was Never a Joke

It had never been a joke.

Mental exhaustion doesn't show. No—drawing a line between body and mind might be nonsense to begin with. People still toss around the word willpower, don't they? Looked at a certain way, mental stamina is just another kind of physical stamina, something that probably belongs under HP.

The real issue is stress management. "Stress is the root of all illness" is a phrase so stale it's practically carved into the inside of your skull. It would be nice if it were something you could measure as easily as blood pressure or blood sugar, but unlike those, this one is hard even to quantify. No matter how much of it piles up, there is no way to know.

Looked at that way, it is a lot like cancer. You don't notice until the symptoms appear, and the way the cells just keep fattening themselves up among themselves is the same. You go about your ordinary days, and then one day the stress that has been stacking and stacking shows up as a result. Only then do you think, Ah. I've been under a lot of stress.

Hair loss, for instance.

Which is why you need to manage the stress before you have to face that kind of outcome. A personal method of blowing off steam. A kind of civic literacy every modern person ought to have. There were people who just lived with it, of course. But what never gets released is bound to explode someday, so you have to vent it somehow.

In that respect, my method of relieving stress was a pretty niche one. Shooting. For me, the act of firing a gun was a kind of release. Focusing on a single point to hit a target. In the moment when every other stray thought vanished, a world of my own unfolded. A method that might look strange to some people. But I considered it a fairly wholesome one. I wasn't exactly running around spraying bullets and causing chaos.

Anyway, even setting other people's opinions aside, shooting wasn't something you could easily encounter in daily life. Especially in South Korea, where firearms are illegal. The only place you could really enjoy it was a live-fire range, more or less. And even there, between all the safety rules, it was hard to shoot with any real peace of mind.

In the end, this was the most popular stress-relief method available to me. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠A magic potion that brought psychological calm and, for a little while, made you forget reality.

That's right. I was drinking. There was no need to gather people and go to a bar. The process itself was stressful for me. A simple drink alone had its own charm. Enjoying being alone—once it happens, whether by choice or not, people surprisingly find themselves with room to breathe. There was no shortage of things to enjoy even at home.

With one bottle of soju, what else do you need?

This is the good stuff.

Clack-clack-clack.

Kang Ah-yoon's hands were rough on the keys. She slammed Enter as if she could not stand to hold the anger in, then snatched up the water bottle beside her and gulped it down.

She had come onto the board hoping Unknown's stream might go live. What she found instead was a complete mess. A considerable number of the posts were unverified fabrications, and more than a few comments were happily going along with them. She was in the middle of answering those posts one by one and picking fights.

Unknown's Slave. That was the nickname she had newly changed to. It had not been chosen as a simple joke. If it was for Unknown, she really would do anything. On top of that, she was already in as Unknown's editor. Strictly speaking, that was an employer-employee relationship—which, if you wanted to stretch it, made her a slave of sorts.

She kept posting rebuttals on every thread that went up, but dozens of posts were appearing every minute. Slapping a counter on each fabricated post being stamped out like a macro was eating a considerable amount of time and stamina. She hated hearing people who didn't even know anything run their mouths about Unknown. And even in the time it took to write a single rebuttal, the fabricated posts only multiplied in real time.

Crunch.

One comment that scraped her nerves raw. She squeezed so hard the plastic bottle crumpled in her grip and water spilled over, but she didn't even notice. Right now, dealing with those people was more urgent than a soaking floor.

In the end she couldn't take it anymore, and she sent Unknown a Discord message.

Kang Ah-yoon's hands paused over the keys. Before she knew it, the last time Unknown had gotten drunk and run a collab with Jump was rising in her mind. The way she had blurted out whatever came into her head had been rather charming, too.

You're not going to turn the stream on today, are you.

Unfortunately, it did not seem to be a day when her wish would come true.

She sent the reply with the disappointment tucked away behind it. Not getting to see drunk Unknown again was a shame. There would be another chance someday.

So she had noticed the changed nickname. That she would catch even a change that small. The face that had been knotted with anger already had a faint smile spreading across it.

A joke, she said.

Ah-yoon did not bother sending a reply to that chat. Whether that would stay a joke or become reality was something she would have to wait and see.

From the beginning, she had never been the type to joke about a thing like that.

It wasn't in her nature to like that sort of thing, either.