Mutual Assault
Running into a robber at the convenience store was a completely unforeseen incident.
Then again, it was the kind of thing that could happen to anyone.
Like getting your pocket picked while strolling through a busy shopping district.
In Murim terms, wouldn't it be the equivalent of running into mountain bandits or water bandits on the road?
The only real difference was that beating bandits senseless on the spot was perfectly legal back there, whereas here, taking justice into your own hands was itself a crime.
That's precisely why this place isn't the barbaric one — though getting mugged all the same did leave me feeling a little frustrated.
Anyway, even in that flustered moment, I believed I'd made the best choice available to me.
If there was one mistake, it was that I'd gone and called the police.
I'd made that call because I figured things would get complicated if another customer wandered in, but thinking it over now, I hadn't really given the company much time to prepare, had I?
But I trust Flame.
Go on, Flame. Show me what you've got.
(Cheon Yoo-ah, Flame Entertainment)
Just as Baek Si-woo hoped, the moment word of his situation reached the company, alarms went off across the building.
Thanks to Cheon Yoo-ah — the company's ultimate decision-maker — actually residing on the premises, judgment and decisions came with astonishing speed, and every employee began moving in lockstep.
"Assaulted a knife-wielding robber... at a convenience store?"
"Yes, that's what we're hearing."
"Mr. Si-woo does have a knack for trouble, doesn't he. Is this footage of the incident?"
"Yes. Mr. Si-woo obtained it himself and passed it to his manager, and the manager had the related CCTV footage deleted. There were apparently some clips that could have been unfavorable to him."
"Oh, really? Let's have a look. ...Ooh, it's like watching a movie. Did Mr. Si-woo study swordsmanship separately?"
"I wouldn't know about that..."
"Well, now I understand why the footage was deleted. He beat them down absolutely, thoroughly clean."
The footage of Baek Si-woo subduing the robbers was as dazzling as an action film.
It was polished enough that even Cheon Yoo-ah herself found it genuinely impressive.
The one problem was that he had pounded his opponents into the ground with total thoroughness.
Beaten down that way, they'd look fine on the surface — but internally, they must have taken quite a serious battering.
She'd wondered why he'd gone so far as to make the reckless move of deleting the CCTV, and it turned out it was because the material could have been used against him.
"So where does this leave us legally?"
"Mutual assault is the most likely outcome."
"For this?"
"Yes. In Korea, unless it's something egregious, it's usually written off as mutual assault. The fact that they drew the knife first works in our favor, but the accusation of excessive self-defense is bound to come up. And they're juveniles below the age of criminal responsibility, besides. Which means, in the end..."
"So a settlement really is the cleanest route?"
"We've dispatched a lawyer, and I suspect that will be the case."
She could hardly argue. From the police's standpoint, mutual assault was the most convenient resolution possible.
After that, they nudge both sides into a settlement, and their job is done.
Especially since one party was an underage juvenile and there wasn't much else they could do, they'd push to wrap things up as quickly as possible.
For Baek Si-woo's side — dragged into a robbery out of nowhere — the whole situation was absurd, but having pounded the other party into paste, there wasn't much room to complain.
"The real issue, as always, will be public opinion."
"Yes. It seems certain reporters have already caught the scent."
"Well, this is that kind of neighborhood. No helping it, then. We have good material on our side, so let's make the first move. We're the only ones holding the original footage of the incident, aren't we?"
"We are. And the witness who saw the whole thing is friendly toward us — says he's a fan of Mr. Si-woo. We should be able to secure favorable testimony."
"There's our answer. Circulate it immediately and act accordingly."
"Understood — and in what manner should we..."
"The usual way."
"Yes, understood."
Representative Ju, who had spent nine years supporting Cheon Yoo-ah's acting career, maintained fairly solid relationships with a wide range of reporters.
Partly because Cheon Yoo-ah was such an enormous star, but also because he was never stingy when it came to wining and dining the press.
And among them, of course, were some truly unhinged tabloid vultures.
Though with those, he managed the relationship by holding leverage over them rather than offering gifts.
An infrastructure built that way — with whip and carrot both — proves its worth the moment the company hits trouble.
The vultures get the treatment befitting vultures, and the proper journalists get the treatment befitting proper journalists.
And so, Flame Entertainment mobilized every ounce of its connections and threw itself into what could only be called the Save Baek Si-woo Project.
The two most crucial pieces of material were the footage of Baek Si-woo felling the robbers with a mop handle,
and an interview with the robbery's victim — the convenience store owner.
The footage of Baek Si-woo beating the robbers unconscious, naturally, had been trimmed down to a tasteful degree.
The advantage of being the sole holder of the incident's only footage is that you can release it in exactly the light you choose.
There was no reason whatsoever to give up that advantage.
With the material curated to win over public opinion now posted, the cleanup began — handled precisely the way it always was.
When I got to the police station, the conclusion came down to mutual assault.
Something about excessive self-defense, apparently.
It stung, honestly — they'd come at me with a drawn knife first, and yet things ended up like this. But the fact remained that I'd disarmed them and then kept swinging until they were out cold, so I didn't press the point.
It wasn't as if arguing would have changed anything anyway.
Besides, the truth was that I'd acted that way knowing full well it would come to this, because I hadn't been the only one at the scene.
Those underage brats were, by nature, creatures with zero judgment, and while their age was young, their bodies were anything but — even stripped of a weapon, there was more than enough chance they'd grab a hostage and make my life difficult.
A convenience store had no shortage of things that could serve as a weapon, and in a world without internal energy to fall back on, getting cute and holding back could have complicated things far worse.
"A settlement? What settlement! Our kid was the only one who got hit — what is there to settle?"
The police were, of course, trying to resolve everything through a settlement, so with the other side being juveniles, the situation wasn't easy.
Think about it in the crudest terms: if mutual assault gets both sides convicted, then I'm the only one who actually does time, aren't I?
Because they're juveniles.
Judging by their attitude, they'd decided the law was on their side, because they came out swinging hard.
Whether the goal was squeezing out more money or just sour pride over their children taking a beating, I couldn't say — but the settlement wasn't looking easy.
If the parents were even slightly reasonable people, they wouldn't have dragged things out like this — but then, reasonable people don't raise their kids into lawless little punks in the first place.
I'd more or less expected this, so it wasn't the least bit surprising.
"We'll hold off on the settlement for now, I think."
"That's what it looks like."
"But rest assured, we will secure a settlement. Please trust us on that."
"Mm..."
The lawyer dispatched by the company had already arrived before I'd even shown up at the station.
And through every moment of my questioning, he'd watched the proceedings with the eyes of a starving hawk.
The other side kept throwing tantrums, and things weren't going smoothly, but the man radiated pure determination to wrench a settlement out of them one way or another.
"Then I'll leave it in your hands."
"Of course. Go on in."
Legal matters were entirely beyond my control anyway.
The questioning was done, so heading inside was the right move.
It wasn't as if this were some pretrial detention case — a settlement can proceed at its own pace.
Still, watching my lawyer vow to scrub the assault record clean through a settlement, I couldn't help thinking: is that really necessary?
Yes, fine. Settlements are good.
Having even a minor assault record beats not having one, no question.
But is it truly worth forcibly extracting a settlement the other side doesn't even want?
Prying one out of this situation would probably mean us giving up a great deal, wouldn't it?
It's my first offense, and once mitigating circumstances are weighed, the actual verdict would amount to nothing more than a fine.
"The real problem, in the end, is public opinion."
When a celebrity faces legal trouble, the judgment of the courts or the police often matters surprisingly little.
What I mean is this: even if you commit a crime the courts would absolutely convict you for, so long as the public screams innocence, you can lie low for a while and return to work.
Conversely, even if you were falsely accused of sexual harassment and fought all the way to a clean acquittal, if the public screams guilt, you will never set foot on a broadcast set again.
And honestly, the latter case makes up the overwhelming majority.
We saw it with Jo Yooshin, didn't we?
The sight of tabloid vultures taking flight.
Off a single scene of Elder Yoon bowing his head in apology, those vultures turned Jo Yooshin into the most despicable elder-abuser alive.
I'd engineered the situation to a degree, but I never imagined they'd detonate it that spectacularly.
Transforming one apologetic bow into an act of cruelty against the elderly —
At this point, it was a terrifying command of the written word that could make even drama writers weep with envy.
Which meant the real crux of my current problem came down to one thing: how the company called Flame would handle the vultures now circling overhead.
Used well, the materials in our possession would clearly secure us a favorable position — but this is the entertainment world, where vultures in a frenzy can conjure problems out of thin air.
"Somehow I get the feeling Flame will handle it, but I suppose I'll just have to watch and see."
Cheongdam, this stretch of Seoul, is packed wall-to-wall with entertainment agencies, which means the population of resident tabloid vultures is nothing to sneeze at.
What lunatic celebrity would cause a scene near their own company?, you might ask — but for the vultures, a place where celebrities pass by constantly is a genuinely attractive hunting ground.
One well-timed photograph could send countless fabricated stories soaring into print.
Even without that, a suspicious-looking snapshot alone could be parlayed into a tidy little side income — meaning it was, in every sense of the word, a gold mine.
And yet, even with the accident breaking out in a district crawling with vultures, Flame moved one step faster.
Before the scent-tracking vultures could even begin their work, the company had already blasted out its own coverage of the incident.
They even quietly leaked the incident's CCTV footage onto the internet, snuffing the controversy in its cradle.
The vultures who'd been preparing to run headlines exactly like that one found themselves speechless in the face of the CCTV footage — footage of that "minor" drawing a knife and charging first.
And then, one more thing.
The moment the incident hit the press, the identities of the underage punks were made public.
The tabloid outlet that detonated it openly vanished without a trace the instant the names went up,
but the exposed perpetrators' personal details — along with a full record of how they'd lived their lives until now — spread across the net in exhaustive detail, and they began drowning in an unending torrent of abuse.
Granted, this catastrophe would never have happened if the punks had lived like decent human beings — but the handling had a malicious precision to it, a unmistakable air of we will destroy you no matter what it takes.
"...That is exactly Demonic Cult style, that is. And if it's the Cult, I doubt they'll settle for stopping here."
And just as I predicted, it didn't end there.
Starting with the punks' identities, then their parents' identities, then every last incident those families had ever stirred up — it all began drifting across the internet, until at some point even I started doubting whether any of it could possibly be true.
Because the Demonic Cult I knew never contented itself with hammering opponents with facts alone.
If the enemy was on the other side, then smears, fabrications, and rabble-rousing were all fair game — that was the Cult to its core.
And something told me today's Flame wouldn't hesitate to pull exactly those kinds of tricks either.
"Even five years from now, I should think long and hard before leaving this company."
Was it that the best defense is a good offense?
Somehow, my company seemed far more passionate about crushing the opposition than about protecting me.
Getting the settlement stamped in a mere three days, no matter what they did to manage it, was impressive — but with things in this state...
Maybe Flame is an even more ruthless place than I gave it credit for.
Though, admittedly, it felt utterly familiar to me.