Kneel
Namsan Department Store—the very one that had housed the shop where Kim Taeyoung used to work. He hadn't chosen it for today's shopping for any grand reason. It was simply the closest place to home. Without a car, anywhere but Namsan meant a taxi, and he already knew the inside of the store by heart. Shopping, as far as he was concerned, was something you did where it was easy.
Might as well go see the kids first.
He wasn't wondering whether they'd made it in all right yesterday. He'd already confirmed every one of them over KakaoTalk. It had only been a day, and still his chest was light with excitement. He wanted to know how they'd react once he unveiled a version of himself that had changed completely.
He'd spent big yesterday too, but that had only been playing with money he already had on hand. Now it was time to show them a man who was different all the way through.
That was how he arrived at the luxury hall. Peak hours there came in two waves. Between eleven in the morning and two in the afternoon, wealthy wives with money and nothing to do flooded in; between six and nine at night, it was office workers just off the clock, and couples out on dates.
He shouldered through the crowd and reached Ecobloom, only to find the shop a little too loud. Had another jin-sang turned up—one of those customers who lived to make a scene?
"Stop it! She doesn't like it!"
"What? Hey! The two of us are talking—who the hell are you to butt in? You pin on a manager badge and suddenly nothing's above you?"
The man shouting inside the shop was someone Kim Taeyoung knew all too well. Baek Yuhyeon, subsection chief of Overseas Fashion under the Merchandising Headquarters at Namsan Department Store. Taeyoung had no idea how the man was treated back at headquarters. To a dispatched employee like him, there wasn't a bastard alive who was more of a bastard.
Baek squeezed kickbacks out of the managers at every shop, and when something caught his eye he pressured them to hand it over at cost, zero margin. From a floor manager's seat, it was a truly shitty way to do business. Refuse him and he found fault in everything. As subsection chief he wielded real power inside the luxury hall, an absolute superior with no shortage of ways to pick a fight with a shop and its staff. A headquarters man could bury you under a mountain of work, and if it came to it, he could even get you fired.
On top of that, the bastard had a nasty habit of going after pretty young girls. Thirty-six this year, or was it thirty-seven—old enough to know a hell of a lot better—and he still set his sights on girls of twenty, or barely into their early twenties.
Jo Sua was one of the women who had landed on his radar. Kind, bright, and pretty besides, of course people's eyes gathered on her. Unfortunately, Baek Yuhyeon's had been among them. While Taeyoung was manager he'd gotten by on quick instincts, pulling her into the break room or sending her out on errands. Jonghun, it seemed, hadn't had that kind of room to maneuver. He was hitting Baek Yuhyeon head-on.
"Nothing above me? I can see just fine. Aren't you ashamed? Creeping on a girl who hasn't even graduated high school."
"C-creeping? Hey! I said she was cute and offered to buy her a meal—what are you turning that into? This lunatic's making me out to be some kind of creep!"
Baek Yuhyeon's temper was about to blow. Kim Taeyoung cut in fast.
"Hey. Chief Baek."
"Manager Kim? Don't tell me you just called for me. Ha... both of you lose your minds today?"
"Lose our minds? You're saying that to a customer. Looking to get your name on a CS report?"
"Ha..."
Baek Yuhyeon let the breath out with a face burning hot. Before he could spit another word, Taeyoung called Jonghun over.
"Jonghun. Run this first and ring up some product. You know this season's new line. T-shirts, sweaters, jackets, pants. All of it. Oh—size L. Pants in a 42."
"H-hyung. This is..."
"Go ring it up."
Ecobloom carried menswear too, though the prices were brutal. The cheapest T-shirt ran four hundred thousand won, and the most expensive two million. Pants and jackets climbed far higher; the priciest jacket in the new line was 9.14 million won. Eighteen pieces of that line had come into the shop. He hadn't added it up, but all together it would land around fifty million won, and at the order to charge the whole lot at once, Jonghun—who had just been squaring off with Baek Yuhyeon—froze.
Taeyoung shut down any further protest with a hard look and a nod. He and Jonghun had the tight bond of men who had been through the trenches together. Sometimes a glance was all it took for everything to pass between them.
"Wh-what the hell are you doing?"
"Hold on. The satisfying part's still a long way off. Jonghun. How much?"
"J-just a second. Fifty-one million two hundred ten thousand won."
"So that makes me Platinum? I barely spent anything. Jonghun, run next door to Infinity and buy me a watch, will you? The Aqua Red One. You know the one."
"Sorry...? That one? The seventy-million-won one?"
"Yeah. Buy that and I clear a hundred and twenty million on the nose. What are you standing there for? Hurry up and get it. Then I can have a conversation with Chief Baek."
The department store kept a hierarchy called VIP, lining customers up by how freely they spent, and anyone who cleared a certain rank could be a king inside those walls. Diamond and Platinum received their own measure of deference, but from Crown on—anyone who spent a hundred and twenty million won or more in a year—the treatment belonged to a different order entirely. The Royal class, for its part, Another Class running down through the 999th rank, were gods.
Crown, at any rate, was treated like a king. Section chief at headquarters, subsection chief—so what? Did that make him stronger than a Whale? No. When Crown collided with a headquarters chief, the chief broke a hundred times out of a hundred.
"Yes! I'll be right back!"
Jonghun sprinted for Infinity, the boutique beside Ecobloom, and Baek Yuhyeon forgot even to be angry. Shock took his face instead.
"H-how did you...?"
"You? Hey. Chief Baek. You talking down to a customer right now? I'm not liking this. Guess I'll have to file an official complaint with the store."
"N-no. That's not—"
"And your face is ruining my mood too. Shall I say you smell rotten? Why do you keep looking at me like we're on the same level. You know perfectly well what a Crown can do, don't you?"
From Crown on up, the customers who spent real money, the store's own executives looked after them in person. There really was a director whose job was guest service. Say the word to that director, and sweeping away one subsection chief was nothing at all.
"I'm sorry, sir. I believe I've been terribly rude."
Baek Yuhyeon, who had been flailing with no idea what was happening, came to his senses. He couldn't fathom how a nobody like Kim Taeyoung could burn through a hundred and twenty million won in a single stroke, but the money had actually been spent. Crown, without a doubt. And once the man was Crown, a mere headquarters employee was thoroughly the one underneath.
Having read the situation, Baek Yuhyeon bent ninety degrees at the waist just to survive. Taeyoung still wasn't satisfied.
"No, no, no. What are you doing? Why are you bowing. When someone talks to you, you look them in the eye."
"Like this, sir?"
Still bent at the waist, Baek Yuhyeon lifted only his face. One corner of Taeyoung's mouth curled.
"You playing with me? You really don't know what you're supposed to do? Fine. I'll say it myself. Kneel. You son of a bitch."
"..."
Baek Yuhyeon's face and body locked.
"What? Can't do it? This is exactly what you pulled, what, three months ago. When the manager at Baridi begged you not to fire them, what did you say? Don't remember?"
"..."
Baek Yuhyeon couldn't answer.
"Don't want to kneel, then don't. What was the number for the VIP customer center again."
Taeyoung took out his phone. Baek Yuhyeon wavered. He needed a way out of this, and as he thought furiously, people gathered in his line of sight—department store customers drawn in by the noise and the cursing.
That. If he used that, he might still turn this around. Already one of them had a phone out. Kneel, right here, as things stood, and he could be the victim.
"I'm sorry. All of this is my fault."
"There. Chief Baek. Wouldn't it have been nice if you'd started out like this? Hm? And..."
Taeyoung knew perfectly well that someone in the crowd was filming. They were recording out in the open; only a fool would miss it. He turned toward them.
"Everyone. You're welcome to film, but please understand this much. This bastard is a genuinely rotten bastard. Demanding kickbacks is the baseline, and he also demands luxury goods handed over far below the regular price. The moment he sees a young woman, he creeps on her. Today he was all over a minor who isn't even an adult yet, and he got into a fight with the shop manager. That's why I stepped in. Feel free to put the video online, but I'd appreciate it if you blur the faces."
The people who had gathered weren't sure what to make of it. But you only had to watch the faces the shop staff wore as they came toward him to grasp the truth easily enough.
"Manager!"
Jo Sua came up to Kim Taeyoung, and he gave her shoulder a light pat.
"It's been rough because of that bastard, hasn't it? That won't happen anymore. Chief Baek. The apology isn't for me. It's for her. She's the one who's had it the worst."
Taeyoung pressed him for it. But Chief Baek's nerve had already crumbled like a dry biscuit. It was over. Everything was over. The decision he had made in a panic had been the worst possible move.
He had thought he could come out the victim, and one sentence from Kim Taeyoung had ended all of it. Whether the words were true or not, headquarters would open an investigation, and he really had done plenty, so his career was as good as finished. Baek Yuhyeon stared blankly up at the ceiling like a man whose soul had left him.
"Th-the apology is enough. If he just stays away from me from now on, that's all I need."
"You sure? He must have put you through a lot."
"I'm fine. I've already forgotten it. Um..."
Sua was about to say something more. Just then Jonghun pushed through the crowd, a shopping bag in his hand with the Infinity logo stamped large across it.
"Hyung! I bought the watch! Uh—is it over?"
He said it while looking at Baek Yuhyeon, down on his knees with his mind gone. Taeyoung met his eyes and nodded. Before long, security officers swarmed in and took Baek Yuhyeon off somewhere. The head of security asked Taeyoung to cooperate as well, and Taeyoung refused on the spot, making it plain he had no intention of doing any such thing.
"Hyung! What actually happened? Did you make that much on coin? How much did you buy?"
"Secret, you punk. That's not the kind of thing you walk around telling people. Still, I did push it a little today. Wanted to look good in front of you guys."
"Hyung..."
"Manager..."
After the whole incident, they closed the shop for a while on the excuse of straightening up. In the break room, Jonghun and the staff looked at Kim Taeyoung with open admiration. The envy of his old comrades-in-arms—yeah, throwing money around had been the right call.