The Last Bastards
With the Doubles' sudden slide, Noh In-seong sprang into action to get to the bottom of whatever was going on.
"And, honestly, the holiday's pretty much over, so I guess it's time to... work out again?"
He'd eaten well over the holiday and given every muscle a full rest — the fatigue was gone and his body felt fresh and primed.
Time to give it one more tune-up, tighten everything down, apply a fresh coat of oil, and come back at a hundred percent.
Noh In-seong boarded the bus to Jamsil for work.
"Ugh, on second thought, maybe I should've just stayed home."
And less than a second later, packed among the dense, compressed mass of humanity, the regret began.
Inside a bus stuffed wall-to-wall with people, the weariness came creeping back.
CREEEAK--!!
"Hnnggh!"
"In-seong, you really did rest up. Feels like the workout itself is the hard part, huh?"
"Argh... you cranked the weight up again, you maniac — the bat is the main body, not the barbell...!!"
"What! Unacceptable. I'll raise your 1RM in return!"
"KYAAAAH...!!"
As Song Jin-wook and Noh In-seong went about their usual routine, ripping through their upper-body muscles, a few Doubles players wandered into the team gym and froze at the sight.
"Huh? Yo, In-seong's back?"
"What? Isn't he suspended? Shit — don't tell me this is Season 2 of the stands-cursing-parade?"
The players spotted In-seong hoisting plates and Song Jin-wook spotting him, and trembled in terror at the arrival of another day of mental discipline — a day destined to have their psyches shredded from morning to night.
"I already did that to Gwangju, and since I didn't get my cool in, all of you can clear out and go train."
"Thank you... In-seong."
"Damn right. We're counting on you!"
Having re-bared his fangs at them once more, In-seong got right back to his lifting.
After the workout, Noh In-seong moved into his cooldown.
"Ngh, c-cold...!!"
While undergoing cryotherapy, he mulled over who to ask about the team situation. The answer was always the same one person. Who else — the manager.
'Nobody's faces show any sign of exhaustion, so either they've shifted into conditioning mode...'
Or maybe they'd just been losing and hated wearing it on their faces. Either way, he'd have to ask.
And wasn't Wednesday the very day fresh snacks arrived at the manager's office?
"Workout, a meeting, AND snacks."
"...Is the goal the manager, or the snacks?"
Song Jin-wook, waiting his turn at the cryotherapy machine, gave In-seong a look of pure pity.
"Fifty-fifty, obviously."
Eat the snacks, pick up the intel. Kill two birds with one stone, no?
"It's fifty-fifty, all right."
"What's fifty-fifty, tonight's midnight snack order?"
In-seong retorted, cramming a sablé into his mouth.
"...Argh, dammit. Those aren't even store-bought — they're the expensive kind..."
What was the point of carefully sourcing pastries from a top-tier bakery when this guy was going to eat them all anyway?
Manager Jeong Im-taek, who'd long grumbled that "lost snack cause" was always the same one name, launched into his explanation.
"First — you know the roster cap for fall baseball, right?"
"Sure do. Thirty players."
"Good. So let's assume we're taking basically all our regulars."
Starters one through six. Nine position players. Plus two lockdown relievers, backup Lim Jae-min, Jin Joong-seok, Joo Hak-soo, Jin Joo-hyuk...
"...There's not much room left, is there?"
Quite a few rookies had been developed over the course of the season, and more players had been pulled in via trades — so excluding the backups, the Doubles' squad had gotten surprisingly deep.
"Which is why the guys in the minors are being made to compete like they're fighting for scraps."
"Sharp as ever. What can I do? The roster has no slack, and the quality isn't there, so we keep losing."
As it happened, the opponents were on a stretch against bottom-tier teams too, so he'd figured, perfect timing — and made mass substitutions...
"Pop quiz: in the draft, who picks first?"
"Hmm hmm... last place? Oh. So that's why you lost."
Given that teams with bad records hoard the best prospects, it was, naturally, a deliberate loss-accumulation strategy.
At worst, with a few core players left on the field, they could have scrapped out a win or two.
"Anyone not chasing a record got rotated out for pinch hitters."
And how much could a pinch hitter really contribute coming off the bench?
There were cases where a pinch hitter delivered in the clutch, but at the end of the day a batter succeeds three times out of ten.
No manager alive converts every pinch-hit chance. Naturally, they lost.
"Whatever — from here on out, going five hundred is plenty."
Breaking records was nice and all, but what really mattered was, as always, fall baseball.
The September record currently stood at 9 wins and 9 losses. As long as they hit .500 the rest of the way, he considered that par for the course, and his mind was at ease.
"Even if all we do is reach 100 wins, that's the kind of team people only see in America. Nobody gets to say a word to me about it."
Once the Korean Series roster was finalized in step with In-seong's return, the regulars would go right back into the lineup anyway.
He planned to ramp their condition back up, so there was no particular burden either way.
"So build your body back up properly before you ret— are you even listening to me?"
"Mmmphf mmflmm mmflm?"
"...Argh, fine. Eat it all. Eat every last one."
Listening to the mumble of a man who had stuffed five chocolate sablé cookies into his mouth at once,
Manager Jeong Im-taek felt his explanation dissolving into a sermon delivered to a brick wall.
As payment for spiking the manager's blood pressure, Noh In-seong — his own blood sugar now similarly elevated — left the manager's office.
Munching on one sablé after another from his stuffed pockets, he pondered what to do with himself.
"Hmm, what now."
In-seong was still suspended. Two whole games left to sit.
Considering tomorrow was a rest day after the two-game series, that left him three days of free time.
"Can't think of anything I never got around to for lack of time, honestly..."
As he wandered blankly toward the edge of the neighborhood, he found the Jeong kid and Siyeon together.
"What are you two up to? Are you dating?"
"Hyung! Hi! We're doing school homework!"
"Holiday runs through today, so you're cramming all your overdue assignments into one go?"
"...No, hold on. We're just doing different subjects and then copying off each other."
A durot? A labor exchange? No — you share homework now too?
There they were, copying each other's answers onto the screens their school had loaned them.
"I've got math, she's got science, Ju-hee across the way has social studies..."
"We don't normally do this! Only during summer break or homework bombs!"
The two kids scrambled to justify themselves. Fair enough — they'd probably figured that if he was in a bad mood, he might snitch.
"I wouldn't snitch. I just didn't do homework at all."
The homework-submission score could just barely be covered by test scores, after all.
Once he hit middle school, neither Mom nor Dad touched him about grades.
He'd eat the homework penalties and then ace the exams, keeping himself comfortably mid-pack every time.
Then again, that seemed like a lot of work for the last day of the holiday — and it wasn't even vacation season.
"Seriously, Ms. Hwa-jeong goes too far. A book report? That's not even a dura-magi assignment."
"Everyone thinks their own class is the only one that matters."
"...Why does this feel exactly like college."
Apparently, with the long holiday, the school teachers had gleefully dumped homework on the kids.
"If we don't do it this way, it won't be done by tonight. Then we get in trouble."
"You know how it is, hyung. Even if nobody touches you, my allowance gets cut if my grades drop."
Aigoo, these poor kids. Fine. Go nuts.
No, wait — if they pulled stunts like this, could the teachers who graded them every day really not notice something was off?
The kid answered that question with a demonstration.
"So you copy it like this... then hit AI Rewrite here... and done, right? Changing just the phrasing isn't outsourcing."
"No — what the hell. Am I watching homework dura-magi, or a drug manufacturing process?"
This was 2051, and the convenience was on a whole different dimension from what In-seong remembered from his first life.
"Damn it all. I was born way too early."
It was the lament of a pitiful soul who'd once had to type out every homework assignment on a tablet by hand.
Maybe it was thanks to the Korean Series roster slowly being locked in, name by name, as the holiday wound down.
"Time to start slotting this one in... and that one in..."
Players, sharpened bit by bit, were being fed into the lineup — and the Doubles took wins in the second game against the Superstars and their first game against Suwon.
The record now stood at 98 wins, 1 draw, 42 losses. Most wins ever, and the best winning rate since the league went to 144 games.
Of course, even winning all three remaining games wouldn't quite reach the all-time best winning percentage.
"We'd be tied at 70.6 percent, but the next spot back then had a real gap."
Don't want to play the Korean Series? Simple — just win the entire first half and second half.
That insane logic had actually been put into practice by one team, and its winning percentage sat right there in front of them.
"Well, water under the bridge. If we put In-seong in the leadoff spot..."
There it was. This was their fall baseball roster.
'Considering what a patchwork quilt the early season was, this looks like a genuine treasure map.'
A smile of pure satisfaction spread across Jeong Im-taek's face.
"...Ah, right. Plenty of people are still scared of that guy, huh."
And then In-seong, returning to the lineup with a solo homer in his very first at-bat, kept adding hits on top —
'Hm, that one manages himself just fine. No need to babysit him,' Jeong Im-taek had thought, relaxing — right up until he watched In-seong draw three consecutive intentional walks and his face twisted.
To be fair, the hitters after him did manage to ferry the base-stealing In-seong all the way home. But it didn't change the math.
If the next batter couldn't reach base, then even when the follow-up hits came, they were just hits — nothing more.
"Even if I cross home plate, if you guys don't move, the scoring ends at one run, doesn't it?"
"Honestly feels like the call-ups from the minors are playing better than the regular Suwon guys..."
Song Jin-wook's excuse — that it wasn't his own skill falling short but the opponent playing well — did not fly.
THWACK-!
"Ow! Right on the bone! Ow!"
"You lunatic! Dustin and In-soo hyung are both slumping — somebody has to break out of it, so why can't it be you?!"
When Dustin or Jo In-soo connected, they were run producers; when they didn't, they were strikeout machines.
The team already had too many guys swinging from their heels with their brains switched off — what fresh hell was this supposed to be?
In-seong's first game back ended, in the end, in a 9–7 loss.
It was a game where both sides bled runs inch by inch — there was hardly an inning where someone failed to score.
And the Doubles, who couldn't manage that inch-by-inch scoring until the very last out, held a session of reflection.
"At this rate we might not get to 100 wins. Let's do our jobs when we go to Gwangju. Yes?"
As if he'd done his job — In-seong, the team's real power behind the throne, urged everyone to wake up,
and everyone whose pride he'd just curb-stomped nodded with bitter smiles — hardly in any position to help a guy chasing .400.
'He just plain doesn't like those guys, that's the only reason...'
'Argh, if he didn't have the talent to back it up we'd have decked him already... but he's not wrong, is he.'
'If I get mocked as a ^fraud^ for not hitting .400 from here on, I'll take another punch for sure. Ugh, my bones ache.'
The grumbling teammates listened anyway — because the fist was always within reach.
That was the advantage of rule-by-fear administered by a man with actual skill.
Meanwhile, on the other side, rule-by-fear was claiming its own victims.
"...Argh, for crying out loud. In the end we couldn't widen the gap at all..."
The mood in the Gwangju clubhouse was plummeting by the hour.
Because right up to the end, the Grizzlies had clung stubbornly to their heels.
One game apart. The gap between the Seoul Grizzlies and the Gwangju Tigers.
Their final two games would be played on the same days, at the same times.
One stroke of bad luck and the standings could flip in an instant.
Surely, against a weak team, they could have gone all-out, clinched it, skipped the wild card round, and rested.
"Of course our ace is starting the last game — what were you expecting? Expect it. He pitches AND hits."
The opponent was the Doubles — of course they'd field a full squad, all to reach that symbolic number called 100 wins.
Listening to that lunatic's interviews, the Doubles clearly had zero intention of resting a single player.
They'd clinched first place long ago and preserved their legs beautifully, while Gwangju had sprinted flat-out to the finish — the gap in condition was glaring.
"We're planning to win both games, by the way? Don't want to get overtaken, you'd better play well."
Watching that insufferable bastard's interview, the Gwangju manager groaned in despair.
"Argh... I'm losing my mind! We were THIS close, and the last obstacle is THOSE guys!"
The Gwangju fans, who'd believed victory was nearly theirs, found their rage swelling to dangerous levels.
Few things in this world are more miserable than hope used as an instrument of torture.
Back in midseason, when the Doubles had beaten them down and the gap started to open, everyone thought it would end quickly.
And yet the Grizzlies' last leaf was still hanging on, green and defiant.
"Bear—hahaha! Damn it! Twins! I like you guys!"
Those fans were cheering for the Doubles' rival team, sitting right there in the stands.
"Just looking at them twists my stomach and makes me feel physically ill."
Rage-filled Gwangju fans rallied on social media to denounce Noh In-seong.
"...What kind of degenerate IS this guy?"
Sitting on the toilet, Oh Yeon-seok stared at the message Noh In-seong had left on his burner account, aghast.
Truly, this was 'a bastard whose entire operating system ran on different code from the rest of humanity.'