A Nose for Ruin
The office was as quiet as the grave.
No clatter of keyboards, no idle chatter—and, of course, not a single bark of Park Jin-chul's shouting to be heard anywhere.
It was positively peaceful.
Well, of course. None of them can come to work, can they?
Field Exploration Team 1—and Park Jin-chul in particular, the man who turned the office into a war zone every single day—was at this very moment being patched up at the medical center.
At this point, he probably spent more hours there than here. Maybe we could just move his desk over?
That useless stray thought barely had time to form before I let it go. In any case, for the first time in what felt like forever, I leaned back in my chair without a soul to bother me and gazed at the monitor.
On the screen floated the operator system that supported the exploration teams—a system that had once amplified my own abilities to the point where they could be leveraged on a strategic, company-wide scale. The AI Operator System.
The green-glowing status window caught my eye.
On the surface, it looked as flawless as ever, humming along without a hitch—but...
The prediction reliability is set awfully high, isn't it?
To my eyes, honestly, it was riddled with holes.
This was, after all, a system built on data synced to my own sensory perception. Strap a pair of knothole eyes onto that, and there was no way it could run properly.
Well, for now it at least looked fine from the outside...
Let's see how long that lasts.
New variables. Irregulars. Shifts in the environment...
One thing was certain: the Tower changed from moment to moment like a living, breathing creature, and given enough time, the whole system would rot into a completely useless tin can.
Even now, exploration results run through the operator system were already coming back subtly worse than before. I didn't need to look to know how the rest of the story went.
The moment they schedule a deep-floor expedition instead of a routine survey, things are going to get entertaining.
And when that day comes, he'll understand. Even Han Tae-seok, that fanatic preaching that the AI Operator System is the pinnacle of Yu-sung Group's peerless AI technology, will finally grasp who it was that kept the thing running at a cutting-edge level all this time.
Not that he'll realize it until it's far too late to turn back.
Watching the system they worshipped come crashing down—I decided to save that pleasure for after my resignation.
Between now and then, maybe scraping together every won I could find and shorting their stock would be fun in its own right.
I tore my attention away from the monitor, my interest already spent, and out of habit opened a browser window.
In a silent office with no work to do, what else could I do but play the salaryman parasite for a while?
The portal site's trending news was completely flooded with yesterday's "Frozen World" incident.
Usually dungeon accidents don't get blown up quite this much... but I suppose the circumstances were unusual.
A Midas hunter escalating the scene, the appearance of a catastrophe-class Irregular, and then...
The public's attention was fixed squarely on me.
The hunter name I'd registered—Corporate Slave Life—and the whole "business suit with a box cutter" getup. It wasn't some calculated scheme; I'd simply been clocking out of work, and surplus funds had made it happen.
Apparently it had become an all-out meme by now.
Meanwhile, the bizarre scenery that could never appear in an ordinary dungeon had spawned every crackpot identity theory imaginable, and the comment sections were a tapestry of conspiracies.
And the crown jewel among them all was a video posted by a hunter from Midas.
The uploader's name is... Kim Pildu?
Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked. Sure enough, in the latter half of the video, Kim Pildu slammed his head toward the camera and wailed.
...Is this guy insane?
Hunters did tend to be eccentric characters, and Midas in particular—being a broadcasting company—had plenty of people with strong personas, but this was a bit much...
No idea whether I'll ever run into that guy, but I'd better steer clear of him anyway.
I shook my head. Below that, the press releases marched on in an unbroken line—and would you look at this.
...Ha.
I knew they wouldn't let this go to the press unedited, but seeing it with my own eyes still left me clicking my tongue.
The gist of it: Team Leader Park Jin-chul, to protect his fellow hunters, drew the Irregular's aggro and tanked it, and while the monster was occupied, Suit Guy moved in for the finish. That was the storyline, anyway.
Looking at the script Han Tae-seok had penned, I found myself thinking the man could have debuted as a novelist.
Well, he doesn't do this just once in a blue moon. This is how it's always been.
The art of subtly twisting facts to manufacture outcomes in your own favor. Call it a skill, and it was one.
The man hadn't clawed his way to his position by luck alone.
But the essence hadn't changed. For now, they'd run articles like this to plug the dam, inflate Park Jin-chul into a hero, and smugly congratulate themselves on protecting the company's image.
But the inside is rotting away, and all they're doing is patching the hole on the outside...
Worse, the AI Operator was all they had left, and even that was far from functioning normally. With Park Jin-chul poised to botch every future expedition on top of it all...
Was propping him up as a hero really a net gain?
The higher they fly, the harder the fall hits.
Nothing but comedy, really. Granted, Han Tae-seok probably had something in mind—but honestly, I doubted it was anything resembling a sound plan.
A quiet certainty settled over me that what little remained of my corporate life would be anything but boring, and I laughed out loud.
"Team Leader, what's got you so entertained over there?"
Out of nowhere.
At the voice behind me, I turned my chair around without missing a beat.
Assistant Manager Lee Seo-yeon.
Every other teammate had been hauled off to the medical center and was groaning in a hospital bed, yet this woman hadn't so much as a hair out of place.
Come to think of it, she wasn't there that day, was she? Assistant Manager Lee Seo-yeon?
It should have been an exploration day for her. Puzzled, I pulled up the schedule on my monitor, and there it was—a leave request filed for that exact date.
Filed on the very day my resignation was decided, no less.
Her instincts really are something else.
"Oh, Assistant Manager Seo-yeon, you're in? I was so absorbed in my web browsing I didn't even sense you coming."
"Haha. Must be boring for you. There's no work left, and everyone's laid up in the hospital, so the office is a ghost town."
She leaned in over my desk and glanced at the screen I'd been staring at.
"Ah—that article! I saw it too. The footage, though—the way he moves is no joke, right? Not a wasted motion anywhere, like a complete machine. But when you slow it down, he seems to be in exactly the wrong place from the very start, which is so strange... Honestly, I've got a pretty good hunch who it is."
"...!"
Lee Seo-yeon edged closer, pressing on with her analysis.
"Look—he reads where the punch is coming before the opponent even moves, so their attacks just slice through empty air. The way he does it... that's not simple evasion, is it?"
"Then...?"
"Team Leader. This guy's identity is the wielder of Cognitive Manipulation—it's Ranker Park Jung-hoo of Dokkaebi, isn't it?! He layered Cognitive Manipulation to bait the attacks into empty air!"
"......"
She stared at me with shining eyes, practically begging me to confirm she'd gotten it right... but I had no idea how to answer.
Whiffed completely.
Well, Seo-yeon had never seen me in the field, and she didn't even know whether I held a hunter's license. Maybe it was only natural she couldn't tell.
"Uh... no? Ah. If we say Team Leader is an operator who ordered the movements in advance, then it's not evasion, and the focus should be on offensive power instead. In that case... Kim Tae-seok of Ohsung?"
Now she was just throwing out names at random.
And the way she watched my face for any hint of a reaction was, I had to admit, a little funny.
But her next remark caught me slightly off guard.
"Clean work, fast judgment calls. Exactly the kind of talent this company needs... If we had someone like him, Team Leader Park would never have had to go through all that. Don't you think?"
...She might have a point there.
Though since Park Jin-chul had never once followed an operator's orders as given, it was hard to even picture.
She was watching me with a smile.
Sometimes her instincts really do cut razor-sharp like this.
I couldn't get a read on her. At the same time, I answered with practiced blandness.
"Oh, come on. You think a guy like that would come to our company? Even with a blank check for his salary, we'd be lucky. And Korean hunter regulations are no joke. Someone that skilled would've bolted for America ages ago—over there, money and connections rule everything."
"Hmm... you think so? Well, even from my angle, I suppose that tracks."
Lee Seo-yeon smacked her lips in disappointment and backed off. Thankfully, she didn't seem suspicious.
"By the way... you weren't at the site yesterday, were you, Assistant Manager? As far as I knew, it was an exploration day for you, but the schedule says you were on leave."
"Ah~ I got it approved days in advance. Something suddenly came up at home. I do tend to handle my paperwork early, after all."
She'd gotten it approved—by Team Leader Park himself?
Unbelievable.
Where Choi Min-woo had bolted like a deserter, burning his leave in one desperate grab, Lee Seo-yeon had sidestepped the minefield through perfectly legal, spotless procedure.
All the more impressive, considering Exploration Team 1 would be in recovery mode for the foreseeable future.
"And."
Lee Seo-yeon edged up beside me and dropped her voice to a whisper.
"In my experience crawling around this industry, you can smell it—on teams or projects that are about to go under. The scent of doom, shall we say? And I happen to have a gift for catching that scent like a ghost."
Her parting grin sent a chill down my spine.
Could Lee Seo-yeon actually have some kind of ability? A sixth sense? Psychic sensitivity? Something like that would be the only explanation...
Then again, she was oddly hard to resent. Sly and self-serving, sure—but weren't those exactly the virtues you needed to survive?
"Anyway, thank goodness. Getting swept up and injured for nothing would just be unfair."
"Right? If I end up in a hospital bed too, who's going to keep you company, Team Leader?"
She tossed off the joke, then dropped her voice a register lower and turned the conversation with a deliberately grave expression.
"Oh, and Team Leader. When you leave and land somewhere new, you'd better remember me, okay? You know what I mean?"
"We can't even work in the same industry after this, and where's this sudden talk of job-hopping coming from?"
"Oh, come off it, Team Leader. You never know how things turn out. It's insurance—just give me a call if a good position opens up somewhere down the line."
"Heh. A guy like me, honestly..."
"Modesty doesn't suit you. In exchange, I'll give you one piping-hot, premium piece of intel."
"What is it?"
Once again, Lee Seo-yeon swept her eyes around the room, bent close, and whispered.
"You know the mess Team Leader Park made this time. That artifact he swaggered off with, banking on the Managing Director's backing."
"Ah, that thing?"
I'd seen it myself, and it had been blown to bits, so naturally there'd be hell to pay. But what Seo-yeon told me went beyond anything I'd imagined.
"They say it wasn't just broken—it's been ruled beyond repair. The R&D Center and the Technical Support Team are in full mourning-house mode right now. Do you know how much a single one of those costs?"
"..."
"Managing Director Han is busy playing hero-making and media games with Team Leader Park... but you can bet he's burning up black on the inside? Because if that registers as a book loss, this year's earnings could flat-out go negative."
Oh ho.
I feigned surprise, but inside, I was cheering.
The damage is on a far bigger scale than I thought?
This wasn't just an ordinary loss from a failed expedition.
An artifact was a core strategic asset—and it had been vaporized into dust...
For all I knew, this incident might ignite a full-blown war within Arc Industry's executive ranks.
"I see... Thanks for the intel, Assistant Manager Seo-yeon."
"Don't mention it. So—remember me later. Don't you forget."
With Lee Seo-yeon gone, I turned back to the monitor.
On the screen, that steady green glow reading SYSTEM STATUS: STABLE, blinking away in its pretense of calm, looked somehow funnier than it had all day.
And that's when it happened.
I laid eyes on a face I'd assumed I'd never see again for a good long while.
Park Jin-chul...? Why on earth is a man who should be nailed to a hospital bed here?
"A sight for sore eyes" didn't begin to cover it. Crutches jammed under both armpits, a cast on top of everything else—he looked closer to a mummy than a man.
Wondering why he'd crawled out at all, I watched as he used his uncasted hand to gather up the tablet on his desk and his personal belongings, one by one.
Presumably he'd been hauled off in such a hurry that he'd left everything behind.
The sight of his back, wheezing as he propped himself on the crutches to pick up his things, was almost pitiable. For a moment, a hush fell over the office—but then...
"Team Leader!!"
Lee Seo-yeon shot over like a bullet and rushed to help him with his things.
"Good heavens, how are you holding up? I was just about to visit you at the medical center."
"Ah... yeah. Assistant Manager Lee."
Park Jin-chul managed a haggard reply, his face drained of color.
"You've been through so much! I read the article this morning and I can't tell you how moved I was. Throwing your body in the way to save hunters from another company? Wow... just, wow..."
"...Huh?"
"Honestly, Team Leader, you scared me sometimes, but I had no idea you had that side to you. You've earned my respect all over again. You're the best!"
Lee Seo-yeon thrust her thumb into the air.
And then, adding insult to injury, the unthinkable apology—
"And I'm so sorry... of all days, I had to use my leave yesterday because of family matters..."
"