March 17th
Name: Jeong Hoon.
Twenty-nine years old. Male. Completed his military service.
Place of residence: XXX District, XX City, Gyeonggi Province, just south of Seoul.
Job seeker.
Not a bum. A job seeker.
A talent packing so much ability and potential that this tiny little country called the Republic of Korea couldn't possibly handle him.
It had been eight months since his last part-time gig ended, and right now he was riding Subway Line X, headed for a PC bang.
Why a PC bang, you ask? Do you seriously not know?
He had ranked games to climb. What other reason could there possibly be?
Sure, there was a computer in his monthly rental, but that thing was so slow it dropped frames. And when you get frame drops? You get the tiniest little delay, the faintest wrongness in your inputs. In other words: DPS loss. DPS loss, people!
Anyway. Today, no matter what it took, he was hitting Diamond. No more getting mocked by those bastard silver-gold trash-tier assholes calling him a silver-gold scrub.
Today's Jeong Hoon was more serious than he had ever been in his life.
Job hunting? That... would have to wait until after ranked was done.
He would finish before the sun went down! (He would not.)
And yet...
BEEEEEP——!
BEEEEEP——!
BEEEEEP——!
"Aigoo, fuck!!"
An extremely irritating noise drilled straight into his delicate eardrums.
He yanked his phone out of his pocket in a hurry. The truly shitty part was that the sound was coming from every direction at once.
And the people around him — everyone on the subway — wore expressions pretty much identical to his as they checked their own phones.
What the fuck. An emergency alert? Did another earthquake hit somewhere?
Last year, or the year before — he'd been so busy loafing around because he couldn't find a job... no, wait, so busy fighting tooth and nail on the job hunt that his sense of time had gone completely dull, so he couldn't remember exactly — but there had been an earthquake somewhere, Jeju or North Gyeongsang, one of those places. His phone had screamed like it was trying to blow out his eardrums, and when he'd checked, it was an earthquake, and he'd nearly shit himself.
Not that it had amounted to much. It had happened out at sea, and the magnitude was a joke compared to that island nation next door. He'd spent a good long while cursing out the government for scaring busy people (he was not busy) with an emergency alert over something that pathetic.
He'd been in the middle of a ranked match, too, so his rage had been extra justified, and he'd poured every ounce of that fury into his mouse and keyboard. He'd lost, of course...
"...Huh?"
He shoved the idle thoughts aside, unlocked his phone, and checked the message.
It was an emergency disaster alert, all right. But the contents...
April 1st
...Huh?
What was this? April 1st? Today was March 17th.
"What the hell?"
He checked his phone again. Dug through every text that had come in today.
"Dug through" was a generous way of putting it — the only messages he'd actually received were this one and a text from two hours ago telling him to open a credit card. Who even used regular texts anymore when everyone was on KakaoTalk? And a credit card? He didn't even have a job — how was he supposed to get one of those? He was lucky he hadn't already tanked his credit score! Was someone messing with him?
"...What, is this a prank text?"
He voiced the most ordinary possibility out loud, then immediately shook his head and rejected it.
A prank text — through the emergency disaster alert system? Was that even possible?
"Jesus Christ..."
"Is this a joke?"
"Babe, did you get it too?"
"Yeah, babe. Who would pull a prank like this on my baby?"
The couple sitting across the way was getting on his nerves.
Who would pull a prank like this — he'd heard that people turned into complete idiots the second they got into a relationship, and apparently it was true.
It came through the emergency disaster system. Who else could have sent it? Who but this goddamn Republic of Korea government?
The same shitty country that wouldn't even give a single job to Jeong Hoon — a smart, talented, healthy young Korean man who was ready to work at any moment?
Sending out a prank text just to scare people — must be nice having that much free time on their hands. Was this the government's idea of being young and MZ-generation-friendly?
Fuck, they should've just given him that job instead. Assholes!
"Fuck...!"
He slammed his phone shut, registered that the subway had stopped, and got off.
Today he was going to need at least twenty ranked games before he felt better. Diamond wasn't even the point anymore.
Eight months of nothing but dead ends had already left him in a foul mood, and now this brain-dead text had pushed him over the edge.
Today I'm going top lane no matter what.
Flame him all you want — he did not give a single shit.
Top lane only. That was the only thing in his head.
Huh?
He'd just finished four ranked games and was eating some ramen while watching YouTube when a KakaoTalk message came in.
This bastard. Radio silence for ages, and now he suddenly drops a message? What was the occasion?
Before he could even reply, the idiots had already piled on.
Quiet as mice most of the time, but the second someone dropped a message in the group chat they came running like dogs in heat. These absolute pieces of shit.
He wanted to gather every last one of them in a single room and beat them to death. These were his friends. Unbelievable.
That one? The prank text cosplaying as an emergency disaster alert?
Oh my god, even Minsu?
Byeongtae was actually making sense for once today. Of course his girlfriend cheated on a guy like that!
If that bastard were his boyfriend, Jeong Hoon would've cheated too. He'd have been out seeing every guy in town. Fuck!
These sons of bitches. Making fun of him had basically become a competitive sport.
These bastards he'd first met in high school had all gone their separate ways, landed jobs in different companies and fields, and were living their lives (everyone except him).
And yet they still talked on KakaoTalk, still went out drinking, still played games together. Somehow he was always the one left a little on the outside.
Was he getting bullied? No, not like that. It was just that every single time he tried to hang out with these damn guys, some completely bizarre disaster would strike him personally.
A water pipe bursting in his apartment out of nowhere. A blackout. A ball smashing through the window and nailling him in the shoulder. Getting shipped off to the military. On and on... It wasn't every single time — they'd managed to go on trips together — but the number of times he'd actually been with these guys over the past ten years, you could count on one hand. The memories they'd built without him outnumbered the ones with him by dozens to one.
It genuinely felt like the entire universe was cockblocking him from hanging out with his friends. Even when it came to games. Every time he actually wanted to play with them, something would go wrong, and they'd end up having fun without him.
And it was the same right now. These bastards... every last one of them had jobs, and he was the only one... the only one who was unemployed!
Ah — no, no. Correction. He was the only job seeker. Just him. Only him!!
Serves you right. You dumbass Minsu.
Off, huh... There he went again.
Minsu had always been like this — acting like he had some kind of sixth sense, running his mouth about weird shit.
Jeong Hoon still remembered how, the second they'd arrived at a lodging on one of their trips, Minsu had started spouting nonsense about how the energy there was too dark and gloomy and they shouldn't stay long, cracking everyone up.
...Wait. Come to think of it, that lodging... in the middle of the night the water pipe had burst and it had been a complete nightmare...
Nah. No way.
Without taking any of it seriously, Jeong Hoon and these bastards just kept enjoying the group chat.
Eventually the topic drifted over to ranked games, and everyone was shocked. Since when did he start acting like a functional human being?
Naturally, he called up the dumbass who'd mocked him the hardest and unloaded a double helping of profanity on him.
And just like that... he and his friends never treated the little incident as anything serious...
Two weeks passed.<|eos|>