What Even Is Going On
"Hello. Mr. Shin Suhwan, this is Deputy Jang Il-woon of the Precision Testing Department at the Superpower Association."
"Oh, it's been a while. Have the results come in?"
"Yes. The results are in. Ordinarily we'd just tick off a notice, send it, and be done... but you're a special case, Mr. Shin, so I thought I'd call and tell you myself first."
"Hahaha..."
I had no idea what to say to that, so I let out an awkward laugh. Still, figuring it couldn't do me any harm, I got straight to the point.
"How was the rank decided?"
"First, allow me to make clear that none of my personal opinion entered into the decision. Every determination was made by our superiors."
I flinched. Laying groundwork like that could only mean that, as far as Deputy Jang Il-woon was concerned, the result had not come out the way it ought to have.
"You mean...?"
"As for your superpower rank, the higher-ups have..."
"The rank?"
At his words, the strength whistled right out of me. I couldn't get a single word out. I'd tensed up for nothing, all because he'd gone and laid that useless groundwork.
Why is this guy laying groundwork at all?
I should have clocked it back when he started dressing his subordinates in spandex and making them howl in front of wolves. Deputy Jang Il-woon was not, it seemed, entirely normal.
Even so, normal or not, what mattered to me was that the rank had been decided. And as Supreme Rank, no less.
"That's a relief. I was worried about what I'd do if they stuck me at High Rank."
"Aww. You're not even surprised."
A hundred percent. He had laid that groundwork purely to mess with me.
"...It really is Supreme Rank, right?"
Which, of course, set me worrying all over again. The longer I listened to him, the more I suspected he was calling it Supreme Rank when it wasn't.
"Don't worry. I teased you for a moment, but I don't lie about that sort of thing. If I gave a false report of a decided rank, I'd be disciplined. The certificate has already been sent by registered mail, in any case."
"Then about when will that registered mail arrive?"
"That would be, hmm... about... ten..."
"Ten?"
I found it strange that he stopped mid-sentence. I understood why a moment later.
It was a text from the post office. The moment I checked it, Deputy Jang Il-woon's voice came through again.
"The text ought to arrive within a few seconds, no?"
"You're late. It's already here."
"Dang it!"
This guy really is strange. And how did he predict when the text would show up? He looked so sincerely disappointed that I nearly called him crazy—no. Not crazy. I shook my head at him instead.
"I should have said it just a little sooner. Anyway, the registered mail will arrive shortly, and if you need any additional documents, you'll be able to issue them on the Association website."
"Ah, yes..."
"If there's anything else you'd like to know, please call anytime."
Apparently finished explaining at last, Deputy Jang Il-woon left a light farewell and ended the call.
I hung up, killed a little time waiting, and before long the registered mail arrived from the post office. On the outside it was the most ordinary thing imaginable: a document envelope large enough for a sheet of paper, a stamp stuck to it, and nothing else.
"Oh...!"
I opened the envelope carefully so I wouldn't tear whatever was inside, looked in, and let out a gasp at once. It might not have been real gold, but there it was—a superpower rank certificate edged in glittering gold leaf.
Shin Suhwan
"Ooooh!"
My name was written across it in letters the size of a barn door, and I couldn't hold the admiration in. I did have one more certificate, since I also possessed the superpower of adjusting water temperature, but the thing in my hand now was incomparably finer. Certificates of Intermediate Rank and below were roughly printed on plain paper and mailed out as they were. A Supreme Rank certificate was, fittingly, supreme.
I photographed it, already thinking I'd buy a frame before long and preserve the thing for good. The only personal information on it was my name and my Awakened Individual number, so a leak wouldn't matter. My name had already spread through the news, and an identification number was useless for anything except telling you what ability its owner had.
The moment the photo was taken, I sent it to the people around me. Naturally, about ninety-nine percent of that was for the sake of showing off.
Bzzzt— bzzzzzt—
Proof arrived at once. Messages packed with envy started pouring in from my friends, and I was just getting drunk on all that admiration when a text came from someone who wasn't a friend at all. Auntie Jangmi, the reporter.
The more articles she wrote, the more I stood to gain, so I sent back an acceptance on the spot.
The result went beyond anything I had imagined.
"Where's the cat? Is it in the bathroom?"
"Ah, he's somewhere else. This is a cafe, so we don't really let him inside. Bringing him in is a bit of a problem under the Food Sanitation Act."
"Ugh... that's a shame. He looked so cute when I watched him on Mytube..."
The woman took her card back, glancing at me with a thoroughly disappointed look. The moment she stepped aside, a new customer claimed the spot and ordered.
"Did you really train that cat yourself, boss?"
"I did, yes. Though I'm not actually the owner here."
"Ooh..."
"What would you like to order?"
"Uh, just one iced Americano. To go. Oh, and would it be all right if I took a photo?"
"Sure, I guess..."
I nodded at the man waggling his phone, asking to take a picture together, and gave him a light smile. Once the shutter clicked and I confirmed the photo was taken, I worked the register and rang up his Americano.
Then a string of nearly identical performances followed. A question, a selfie, a payment. Again and again. Working on repeat like a machine, I looked past the customer in front of me. People packed the cafe until there was no room left, and more of them were peering in from outside. Through the glass, they pointed at me. Nothing about it felt familiar.
I never imagined a video and an article would set off a butterfly effect like this...
The whole situation was entirely the fault of Auntie Jangmi's article and the Mytube video I had uploaded. My fame had already been climbing steeply, and the news that I had received Supreme Rank blew it wide open. All that attention swung toward the video. The cafe's name, sitting by chance in a corner of the frame, had been exposed, and that was where everything started. People pinned down the location from the name, word spread across the internet, and they came pouring in for a look at a Supreme Rank Awakened Individual.
"Huuueeeeng..."
Thanks to that, Yeongji was the only one dying. On the verge of tears, she pulled espresso after espresso and turned out Americano after latte. Even so, she didn't make a single mistake, and she kept them coming at speed. Yeongji was a professional too—if you ignored the face that looked ready to crumple at any second. Noona, meanwhile, was humming to herself, perfectly pleased that her own cafe was booming...
Psssshhhh—!
Then, out of nowhere, a sound like air hissing out of a tank burst loose along with Yeongji's panicked voice.
"Ah— ah, ahhh?"
The source of the hiss was the espresso machine.
"This isn't going to work."
She pressed the button and got nothing but the sound of escaping air. The coffee refused to extract. One look was enough to tell the machine had given up the ghost. It had once worked at the same unhurried pace as Yeongji, but it had been pulling shots without a moment's rest, and now it had keeled over. At the news of her coworker's retirement, Yeongji broke into a radiant smile.
"Nothing we can do. Let's call it here for today. Yeongji's struggling too... and with the machine like this, there's nothing we can do anyway."
At Noona's declaration, Yeongji threw both arms in the air. The sudden rush of customers must have been hard on her after all. Unlike Yeongji, though, I still had work left: turning away the customers who were staring at me as if they fully intended to order. Aside from coffee, the menu was little more than hot tea and shaved ice, so it couldn't be helped. There weren't even seats to sit and drink, and ending the day's business here was the right call.
"Everyone, I'm sorry! The machine broke, so we won't be able to take any more orders! I'm sorry!"
Disappointed cries went up all around. There was nothing to be done. It wasn't that we had no menu beyond coffee, but most of it, like the shaved ice, could only be eaten in the cafe, and with not a single empty seat there was no way anyone could eat it. On top of that, the pests who were only pretending to be customers had left the place fairly filthy. It needed cleaning.
Even after I announced that orders were no longer possible, nobody showed any sign of leaving, and Noona suddenly shoved me in the back.
"Suhwan. Take one for the team."
Her demand—that I draw their aggro like the Pied Piper and fling the customers outside—left me dumbfounded. There was no other way, though, so I led them out at once. They hadn't come for coffee. They had come to see me and Namcat, and they followed as if spellbound.
Outside, I scooped up Namcat, who had been hiding in a corner, and started taking photos with people.
"Hey, you strike a pose too. Lift a front paw or something."
Namcat had learned that doing as I asked meant something tasty, so he raised one front paw toward the crowd exactly as ordered. Cries of admiration burst out of them, only to be buried under an even greater storm of shutters.
Either way, the people who had gotten what they came for disappeared one by one, and only after I had heard the click of a shutter thousands of times did the front of the cafe grow quiet.
But what had just happened was only the beginning.
The next day, and the day after that, an enormous crowd poured in, and we couldn't run the cafe properly. We had managed to fix the broken machine the same day, somehow, but the flood of people retired it all over again. In the end Noona and I had no choice but to close for the time being. There was no way the three of us—me, Noona, and Yeongji—could keep a place this packed open. All the more so when pests were showing up who tried to drag animals into the cafe, insisting they were going to test my ability. There was simply no staying open.
Even so, shutting the cafe down made it far easier to get moving on the preparations for everything I had been planning.