Crushing the Second Division Tournament (4)
“One five-hundred over here!”
“Coming!”
“······”
Park Jimin glanced sideways. Calling him a close friend might have been a stretch, but an older guy he’d known for years was ferrying beers, and the kitchen — in plain view — was a whirl of motion.
“What’s so funny?”
“Huh? Nothing.”
His mother’s voice caught him off guard. Jimin was the type who didn’t even like his mom catching him in those little absurd daydreams of his. It wasn’t anything big — just that the ordinary scenery of this neighborhood hof felt strangely exciting today.
Was it because he’d spent every waking hour grinding practice and preparing for tournaments? Or because, for once, the practical side of life had gotten a little easier?
He didn’t need to overthink it. What mattered was that he felt better than before.
“Unnie, this tastes a little different, doesn’t it?”
“Oh my, does it? That’s the recipe the home-cooking teacher from that place taught me.”
“Just do it the way you always have.”
“Should I?”
“······”
His mother and the owner ajumma chatting away. Jimin hadn’t thought much of it, but his mom wasn’t the type to freely hand out advice like that — so maybe there was some real credibility to it.
She’s eating well.
He watched Kim Eunhye working through a plate of spicy whelk somyeon. The sauce might have shifted a little, but at least she was enjoying it. Honestly, he’d wanted to treat her to something pricier and better — but if this was the place she liked, what could he do?
“Have you made a lot of friends?”
“Huh?”
His mother asked mid-bite. Jimin set down the chicken drumstick he’d speared on his fork.
“Just, uh······ I’m getting by fine.”
“That’s a relief.”
A vague answer. It wasn’t that things were bad between them — far from it. Jimin felt he got along well enough with his teammates, but it was a different kind of bond from school friends. His mom would probably find the idea a little ridiculous, but he thought of them as something closer to comrades-in-arms.
“I heard you did really well there?”
“······Yeah.”
Jimin smiled, a little shy. He always told himself to stay humble — but a championship and an MVP. If he tried to deny those words with that kind of resume, it would just be lying.
“Here.”
“Huh?”
A cola appeared in front of him. Seok Woojin — the owner’s son and the one handling the floor — grinned at him.
“On the house.”
“On the house? Why all of a sudden?”
“Bribe money. So you play well once you hit the first team.”
“Ah······ haha.”
Woojin was a P1 fan too. Of course, he’d half-abandoned them for a few years and only come back once the roster had gotten dramatically stronger.
“It’s amazing.”
“What is?”
“My son suddenly streaming, becoming a pro gamer… even now, Mom still can’t quite believe it.”
“······”
Embarrassment, guilt, gratitude — a whole tangle of feelings poured into Jimin’s head.
“Just be happy going forward. That’s enough.”
“Yeah.”
The words his mother always emphasized. Jimin nodded.
“Did you get in touch with Dahye?”
“Ah······ I was going to.”
Jimin scratched his head lightly. He waited for a discreet moment, then checked his phone.
Dahye nuna.
The message he’d sent Dahye still sat there, unread. He’d sent a reply that morning, and she still hadn’t opened it by evening. He’d never experienced this before.
“······”
He couldn’t count how many times he’d thought about calling. No. She probably had her reasons. Obsessing like this would only look weird if she found out.
“Wow, your boy’s turned into such a handsome young man.”
“Sir? Haha.”
A friendly-looking old man at the next table had struck up conversation. Jimin vaguely remembered seeing him a few times over the years when he’d run errands here — a regular, then.
“Jimin’s definitely gotten cooler than he used to be.”
Woojin said as he passed by.
“You still in school?”
“Ah······”
Not wanting to make things awkward, Jimin stammered.
“Mister, listen — you have no idea how incredible this kid is.”
Huh?
The owner ajumma, still carrying dishes, launched into an explanation of Jimin.
“He’s Korea’s game king. Game king.”
She said it with her thumb up.
“Pfft—”
“······”
Game king?
While Jimin sat there flustered by the bizarre title, his mother burst out laughing. Pro gamer this, pro gamer that — to older folks that phrase might hit harder, but it was a little… childish. That much was true.
“He went to that tournament for the game all the kids go crazy for and won the whole thing. My boy did that.”
“I-It’s not the first team. It’s the second team.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“Ah. Never mind.”
The same Jimin who regularly dismantled every top laner he faced in competition tucked his tail between his legs for an ajumma.
“······”
A small smile. No matter what, in this neighborhood he was still just a kid. Jimin felt it all over again.
“······”
Back home, Jimin checked Dahye’s personal stream. Her last broadcast had been five days ago. After that — radio silence. She’d never been the most consistent streamer, but cutting off all contact like this was strange no matter how you looked at it.
Is something wrong?
The stubborn little “1” on his unread message. Jimin was starting to feel genuinely restless.
“······”
Just a little longer.
He wanted to burn through the time somehow, waiting for any reply at all.
He turned on the SCK finals broadcast, full of static and crowd noise. It was a rest day, and he’d come home early enough that the match still wasn’t over.
“······”
“If it goes like this, Baron’s free!”
“Maehwa Life!”
Gen.G Esports’ jungler Class got caught while setting vision, and Maehwa Life was calmly securing Baron.
They really shouldn’t give that up.
Set score 2–1, Maehwa Life leading, game four. Jimin could feel the series tipping.
“They’re going down.”
“Maehwa Life Esports! After last year’s Summer, now Spring too!”
“The scent of plum blossoms grows thicker. It’s covering the entire SCK.”
“GG!”
Jimin watched the nexus explode and shut the stream off.
“Ah······”
Dahye still hadn’t appeared — not on stream, not in his messages.
“Ugh, this is so annoying.”
“······”
While Jimin sat holding his phone, his roommate Kang Jun exploded beside him. A sudden outburst — but Jimin didn’t react, treating it like the usual.
Still no contact.
Of course, there was something else that had an even stronger claim on his attention.
Back from a short break that should have been sweet as honey. Not only hadn’t he gotten to meet Dahye — he couldn’t even reach her.
“If there’s still no news, that means they’re rolling with the same roster for Summer.”
“······Yeah?”
Jimin and Kang Jun were waiting for completely different news. Jimin wanted the call-up just as much as anyone, but the person who’d been nearby until so recently — someone who should at least still be around — was nowhere to be found.
“Hey, let’s go eat outside.”
“Huh? Okay.”
First day back at the dorm. Since they’d come back in the evening anyway, they left solo queue for later and headed out. For Jimin, whether he ate at the dorm or outside, it was all just more time spent waiting for a message that never came.
“Four servings of fresh galbi.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Isn’t this way too expensive?”
Jimin stared at the price list in shock.
“Do you know what land costs around here?”
“······”
“Don’t worry. I’m buying.”
“Let’s split it.”
“Nah. It’s not even my money.”
“Huh?”
Kang Jun waved him off like he shouldn’t worry about it.
“Maybe I should just start learning Chinese already.”
“I think we can wait a little longer.”
There was a reason Kang Jun was grumbling. Word had gotten out that a certain team in the same league was calling up second-team players. P1 hadn’t made a single move, so he was a little sour about it.
“I’m not letting this go. When I hit the first team and we do salary negotiations, just wait.”
“Haha.”
Kang Jun was as hot-blooded as his aggressive playstyle.
Sizzle. The smell of burning beef started to rise.
“You hear about that?”
“About what?”
“Maehwa’s Dexter.”
“Ah.”
Mid-meal, Kang Jun brought up the name of the man currently regarded as the world’s best ADC — and often as the best SOL player period.
“I heard. He got Finals MVP.”
“Not that.”
“Huh?”
Jimin tilted his head.
“His salary’s over five billion won. Highest paid in the entire league right now.”
Kang Jun said it with a serious face.
“I was wondering why he’d suddenly come back to Korea from China — oh right, Asian Games next year? He’s probably gunning for the national team. Chinese teams don’t like letting players go these days.”
“······”
For a conversation that had started with a name as massive as Dexter’s, it had taken a weird turn.
“Money follows if you play well enough anyway.”
“No. As a pro, you’re measured by the money.”
At first their opinions had roughly aligned. But Jimin — who had just finished the first half of the regular season as a second-team player — felt a little differently now. The feeling of winning matches, lifting a trophy, hearing the crowd roar······ it had made him forget the cold financial calculations he’d once made when weighing streaming against going pro.
“For me, salary comes first. And I need to be able to show someone.”
“······”
Jimin listened quietly.
“Show who?”
He asked back, a little puzzled. Having money was nice, but what was the point of broadcasting how much you made everywhere? He wasn’t a hip-hop artist.
“My parents.”
“Huh?”
The answer was more normal than expected, and Jimin was surprised.
“Jimin, you know what my dream is?”
“What?”
“To get richer than my parents.”
“Oh?”
So it wasn’t the “make money and take care of my parents” type of filial piety.
“My family’s really rich.”
“Ah, is that so?”
That explains it. Jimin had always thought Kang Jun had a certain refined look about him. He didn’t seem to dress up much, but still.
“I have an older brother and an older sister above me, and both of them are insane. My brother’s a Korea University med school grad, and my sister plays piano — her performance schedule is booked solid for a whole year.”
“That’s impressive.”
Jimin nodded along to the family brag. At these beef prices, he worried his reactions might even be underwhelming.
“Mom and Dad are both proud of my brother and sister. But me······”
Kang Jun shook his head side to side.
“They just don’t expect anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was in elementary school my dream was to be a judge. My parents loved that. Then I failed the foreign language high school entrance exam. And I’d studied pretty hard.”
“Ah······”
To Jimin, foreign language high schools were a concept that existed without really landing. Anyway, it meant he’d been a good student.
“And then Mom said, ‘You worked hard. So what if it wasn’t foreign language high? Just go to a regular high school and have fun.’”
“Wow, she sounds really nice.”
“Does she? Yeah. But it made me feel terrible.”
“Huh? Why?”
As expected, this guy was hard to understand.
“When I’d just started elementary school, my brother was in high school, and if his grades dropped even a little bit, all hell broke loose. And that was just dropping a bit from the top of the school — no, the top of the whole country.”
“Whoa.”
“But what about me? Looking back, they never once told me to study hard. If I did well, it was ‘oh, you did well.’ If I failed, it was ‘oh, you failed.’”
“······”
“My sister was the same as my brother. Skip piano practice once and they’d tear into her — ‘if you’re going to do it like that, just quit.’ Well, now Mom and my sister are always hanging out and get along great. Ha······ whatever. Meanwhile I’m just an afterthought. During school years, if my sister hung out with friends for even a second she got scolded. If I said I went to a PC bang, they’d give me money and tell me to buy my friends something nice.”
“I see.”
Jimin wasn’t exactly relating to what Kang Jun was saying. But the guy was being pretty serious, so he had to match the energy.
“Even if I hit Challenger in SOL, even if I join a pro team, my parents just don’t care. It’s just ‘oh, he must be good at games, oh, he must be having fun.’ Meanwhile they drag my brother and sister around everywhere bragging about them.”
“······”
Thanks to recent experience, this part at least Jimin could vaguely understand. If you didn’t know the game, it was easy to just treat someone like a kid.
“So I’m going to show them. That with this game, I can make way more money than the hospital my dad runs. Not just ‘make good money’ — that it’s not even a comparison.”
“Ah, so that’s why China.”
“Yeah. There’s a ceiling in Korea. You know how after the shutdown law got lifted a few years ago, SOL blew up massively in China, right? I’m going to go to China and vacuum up cash. And then marry the daughter of some Chinese conglomerate family that loves SOL. Make my mom’s side of the family look like nothing.”
“Haha.”
An absurd ambition. The monstrous level of effort Jimin witnessed from him every day. And the motive behind it was rebellion against his parents — a pretty one-sided, twisted kind of rebellion at that.
“Isn’t it funny?”
“What?”
“The stuff I’m saying.”
“Not really?”
“Weird.”
“······”
“I figured people would just say I was talking complete nonsense, so I’ve never told anyone this.”
“Hahahaha.”
Jimin hadn’t said anything like that, but if someone else heard it — if their friends heard it — they might think exactly that.
But.
The passion Kang Jun poured into SOL. The sheer scale of it was nothing to laugh at, so Jimin couldn’t take that mindset lightly either.
“······”
Had a message come through? Jimin picked up his phone.
“Ah, shit, but how am I supposed to handle the military? If I go to China they won’t send me to the Asian Games.”
Kang Jun grumbled around a mouthful of galbi.
“Aaaahhh!”
“What the hell—!”
Jimin’s yelp made Kang Jun jump.
“······”
Dahye had finally messaged him. The reason for days of silence was a little hard to swallow, but the fact that contact had been restored was what mattered. In the absolute worst case, he’d been afraid it might never come back at all.
Her stream…
Jimin didn’t mention that he’d checked her broadcasts too.
Beyond the grueling practice schedule, second-team life was a time of lying on firewood and tasting gall — of enduring and waiting for the right moment. Jimin hadn’t forgotten that yet.
“······”
Distant.
He was glad to be talking to Dahye again, and her considerate words made his heart flutter. But today, somehow, she felt strangely far away.
I want to call her.
Dahye, who said her throat hurt too much to talk on the phone. If he could just hear her voice, he’d feel a little more at ease.
“Huh?”
Near the dorm, after a full meal, a call came through to Jimin.
“Jimin, what are you doing?”
The next day.