Woe to Those Who Deceive and Mock for Evil
The Children's Day derby, with Noh In-seong as the starting pitcher.
For any Grizzlies fan who'd watched last year's matchup, it was a combination that would make them shudder all over again.
"Goddammit, what the hell did we ever do to this bastard...?"
In truth, it was nothing more than an automatic adjustment to the rotation order—mercenary, mercenary, In-seong.
And knowing that changed nothing, because baseball fans are people who stay perpetually furious over every last trivial thing.
Enjoying her newlywed life, and unlike her own younger sister—who preferred playing with numbers over baseball—a woman who had finally reached the dangerously high water mark where she had to start thinking about marriage.
Grizzlies fan Jeong Hwa-jeong was about to buy tickets to the game when she set her phone down.
"...With that damned bastard starting, there's no way I'm seeing anything good today, is there?"
It was a perfectly reasonable take.
Being an elementary school teacher is a profession that demands a certain amount of intelligence and patience, and she showed the good sense to know it.
Especially since she'd become a fourth-grade homeroom teacher—and once again the homeroom teacher of that darling little Siyeon this year.
If she watched a game with Noh In-seong in it and then looked at Siyeon and thought of Noh In-seong, she figured the rage would come flooding back.
Better to quit baseball entirely than let that happen. Children's pure little hearts were meant for dreaming.
Thus a teacher who hadn't forgotten her mission gave up her one and only dopamine-dispensing sport with great difficulty.
"Haah... this retarded ball game. Fine, I'll just quit..."
"Unnie, what are you talking about? Get a grip..."
Jeong Hwa-jeong, who occasionally claimed she was craving a cigarette and stared out the window, was being eyed with pure pity by Jeong Soo-jung.
With a look that said: Why are you coming to someone else's house to pull this crap instead of staying home?
"This is a Doubles player's house. Are you sure you're allowed to be here?"
Her brother-in-law was Song Jin-wook, the proud number-two contributor to the Doubles' offense—and yet here she was anyway.
This hopeless woman, Soo-jung thought, looking up at her older sister.
"Mom sent me to deliver this. You think I came because I wanted to?"
Since she shared a mother with her sister—and with that damned sister of hers—this errand had fallen to her.
A few side dishes, and a small box of fruit that had been bought in abundance before giving up on eating it all and shipped over instead.
And then—
"Haah, finding out you're going to have a child on Children's Day... you're a legend yourself, you know that?"
The baenaet-jeogori and bodysuit—the traditional newborn clothes and onesies—that they themselves had once used.
Not exactly a honeymoon baby, but the couple was in their first year of marriage.
An athlete marrying early, and planning his second generation early too.
So this was how the snowball rolled—all the way back to the time Noh In-seong had forcibly blocked Song Jin-wook's salary negotiations and grown into this.
"You're going to be the one to tell my brother-in-law?"
"...Hehe. I'll have to, won't I? Oppa's so oblivious he still hasn't noticed a thing."
As her baby-faced youngest sister beamed radiantly, the eldest sister watched her with worried eyes.
"Ah-choo! Ugh... why's my nose itching so much today? Hey! I told you not to eat my snack!"
"Too late~ Already went snip snip right into my mouth! Round and round it goes!"
"You little bastard. How come every single snack anyone brings to this team ends up in your mouth?"
Meanwhile, in the Doubles' locker room was a man who should have been thinking about his unborn child's name, but was instead defending his snack.
Song Jin-wook was too busy fuming over having his chips stolen to recognize his own benefactor.
Today's starting pitcher, who—unable to resist now that the manager's office snacks were empty for once—had turned to coveting other people's food.
"...Uh... In-seong. That wasn't yours, was it?"
"Please. Now that I've raised that guy's salary, whatever he buys is basically mine."
While the classmate catcher stood frozen, belatedly realizing the stolen chips had belonged to his senior—
BANG!
"Hey! Who's making all this racket on derby day, of all days!"
His results had been so good that for a while he hadn't been summoned anywhere by his superiors.
Then the Children's Day derby came around, and up he was called again.
Where he'd done nothing but nod along to the general manager's nonsense—'The owner is attending today, so you absolutely must win big...'
Doubles manager Jeong Im-taek kicked the door open with all the dignity he could muster.
Working through a holiday and getting lectured on top of it.
There was no way he was in a good mood.
"Today, you all know, right? By last year's numbers, instead of gaining child fans..."
Thanks to the heroics of a certain lunatic? Thanks to poking the children's compassion like a sleeping bear?
New child memberships had dropped considerably.
The general manager's face had twisted, but as if Noh In-seong cared about any of that.
Just yesterday he'd been going on about 'the merciful euthanasia of the Grizzlies... only that can save the child fans...!!'
With zero intention of listening to the manager's speech, he simply wished for the absent Jackson to pitch well.
"Look, you don't need to do anything spectacular. Just keeping quiet would be enough."
"Right, In-seong. If you have time to mutter to yourself, do you remember what I just said?"
Jeong Im-taek, veins bulging, asked him point-blank.
"Nope? I had no intention of listening from the very start."
Hearing that answer, the manager gave up.
Today's game hadn't even started, and already he could smell blood.
"Manager, your nose is bleeding."
"Oh, so it was actual blood. They do say people bleed from the nose under heavy stress."
...Or, alternatively, his health was quietly sliding into serious danger because of it.
The reporters were restoring the video of yesterday's fight between Noh In-seong and Jackson.
A scoop this big was hard for any single outlet to swallow whole on its own, and it required piecing together fragments of information besides.
No one of them could backstab the others and take the whole thing for themselves.
'Let's all break the story at the same time, from the same press conference, and publish simultaneously!'
Once the mutual agreement was settled, the priority, naturally, was restoring the evidence material to support the article.
"How long? At least good enough to run during the postgame interview when the game ends?"
"Rendering should be mostly done by then. The AI lip-reading pass is finished too..."
The plan: the moment the game ended, shove it in his face and pin responsibility for the team's internal discord squarely on Noh In-seong.
Of course, the question of where exactly did you obtain this footage? might come up—but if a reporter couldn't handle something that basic, he didn't deserve the job anyway.
"Won't people say we used the stadium CCTV?"
"Please. Our line is: someone deliberately caused this 'mysterious damage' to our car, and we caught them in the act!"
They'd left the cars parked right there, so the justification was ready-made: what if someone had done something to our vehicle?
In fact, they'd already been to the service center afterward, so if anyone asked, they could just produce the receipt as proof.
"And in the course of that, we happened to capture the two of them on camera. Nothing strange about it at all."
Their argument: they'd merely turned coincidence into opportunity, so there was nothing improper about it.
"...Whose car is that, exactly?"
"No idea. Some reporter of ours, supposedly."
And there was no time to nitpick the details, because the game was starting.
"Oh, here we go—first pitch!"
"Good. Let's have them run wild today too. Wild enough to land us an interview."
Everyone doubled down on their work with renewed frenzy.
The Grizzlies had no intention of losing two Children's Days in a row.
"No, honestly, we shouldn't have lost last year in the first place."
They'd played their usual game against a Doubles side that always observed Children's Day quietly.
What had been waiting for them there was a threat pitch sailing at head level—and a guy who flinched and squirmed even harder while running the filthiest bases imaginable.
It got so bad that even Jeong Han-sol, a man universally praised for his even temper and ironclad mentality, had briefly lost his mind.
So this year, they declared that they would not be the first to play aggressive baserunning or hostile pitching.
They even succeeded in getting internal buy-in from the whole roster in advance.
Ah—though a few problem children still glared around with resentful eyes.
But that, too, always quieted down the moment fines were threatened or someone pulled out the think of the children shield.
"This way we've got no provocation to answer for. Just keep that punk Sung Ji-chang on a leash and we'll be fine, right?"
Let's compete purely through baseball, no dirty business!
Baseball that looks good to children—that alone is the road to growing baseball's future population...!!
Onto this beautiful justification, Noh In-seong spat.
"Get lost. This is an era of kids stealing their mom's resident registration number to play battle royale games."
Only those who survive by playing hard can survive baseball—a solid lump of pure stress!
At the four-seamer thrown hard near his head, Sung Ji-chang's whole body went limp and he toppled backward.
"GYAAAH!!"
"Noh In-seong! It's Children's Day, damn it! Watch yourself!"
"What am I supposed to do? Children's Day or not, once the ball leaves my hand, it's out of my control..."
Noh In-seong had absolutely, positively no such intention.
Quite the opposite—when a brushback came at him, he tracked the ball all the way in and dodged by a hair's breadth off the tip of his uniform.
"Woo! Now I can shake down hit-by-pitches too!"
When that lunacy came out of his mouth, catcher Jeong Han-sol filed a protest—but then gave up.
"...Yeah, no point. Even if they don't call it a dead ball, it's ball four anyway."
He'd leaned his upper body backward and pulled his jersey clear of the zone—there was no way a strike was getting called.
Just as Jeong Han-sol abandoned any further attempt to stall—
Noh In-seong dropped to the ground where he stood.
"...What is he doing now. Lying down in the middle of the... what?"
Wiggle, wiggle.
This was the hot-tempered man who, if you took even a second too long running to first, would come at your ribs with a fastball your next at-bat.
And now, before the eyes of the opposing mercenary pitcher Case—face turning crimson—a performance unfolded: Noh In-seong crawling the entire way to first base.
"HEY! Can't you get up and WALK?! You want me to plant my boot in that filthy ass and send you there myself?!"
"Ooh, lovely Southern drawl you've got there! Can't understand a word of it, Redneck Case!"
The wretched coward, wiggling along the ground while mocking the man's home region—
then, declaring it hurt too much to keep crawling, he got up, walked the rest of the way,
and next began hopping up and down at first base as if jumping rope.
'This is driving me insane. How does that bastard come up with a brand-new pattern every single time?'
An unpredictable human being who couldn't care less about sportsmanship or manners.
After all, this was the lunatic who would gift a season-ending injury to any pitcher who dared plunk him.
You couldn't tell if he intended to run or not. Throw a pickoff attempt and he'd just dance back to the bag.
Leave him alone, and he'd pull every nerve-grating stunt in existence.
"SHIT! Umpire! Get that lunatic under control!"
"...There's no rule against it, so what exactly do you want ME to do?!"
Only the first-base umpire, absorbing the pitcher's petulant feedback, looked like he was suffering.
The children gasped in admiration at how cool he was, while the catcher and pitcher broke into cold sweat with every move.
And then, darting on Song Jin-wook's fifth pitch, Noh In-seong seized second base—
"You son of a bitch! Children's Day or not, I'm gonna lay you at your parents' grave and call it filial piety!"
HOLD THAT BASTARD BACK--!!! In-seong's about to get ejected again, STOP HIM--!!!
Crash-bang...!!
A full-on collision between players—and through it all, watching his teammates pile into the brawl on their own without him lifting a finger, Noh In-seong said:
"Man, with these kids around, the team's in good hands for the next ten years. They've earned their stripes—fight like pros now."
He stood there in high spirits, drinking in the scene.
"Best Children's Day present there is, isn't it, kids? Baseball's fun, right? THIS is what a violent, red-hot sport looks like!"
YEAAAH--!!
To the children, Noh In-seong delivered exactly what he wanted most:
a raw, unfiltered experience of live, violent sport.
From the old days all the way to the children of today, in the era when watching a man go flying beat watching a ball fly every time—
conflict and collision had always been the finest spice.
After the game, naturally, every reporter in the building swarmed Noh In-seong, the man who had manufactured today's carnage.
A bench-clearing brawl, on the sacred Children's Day, no less.
"What do you call this behavior! Weren't you afraid of what the children would see?"
The reporters, in full fury, denounced him—but Noh In-seong shot back:
"Go look at what those children posted. Every last one of them loved it. THIS is reality."
He was practically giddy, already thinking about finishing the interview and going to collect his denunciation of the press.
And in truth, baseball—a sport whose leisurely pace meant people generally had to reach a certain age before appreciating it—had always had an awkward problem with the younger demographic.
"Soccer's way faster! The ball whooshes all over the place!"
"We like basketball better! I'm gonna shoot threes!"
"If you're Korean, it's gotta be esports!"
Competitors were already maddeningly numerous, and the population curve had only just recently bent back toward normal.
What good did it do when a dad brought his kid along with 'This is the team your grandpa rooted for'?
The kid would come, enjoy the fried chicken, and leave—baseball itself wasn't fun.
Today's game had been quite different.
"That guy kept doing hilarious stuff and there was a big fight and it was SO fun!"
"Did you see the backflip? It was epic."
Last year he had planted fear in the hearts of kindergartners and fresh first-graders.
This year, he had planted longing in the hearts of the lower elementary grades. Progress, of a sort.
"So then—which of us is the last bastion of Korean baseball, the one better at recruiting child members?"
Noh In-seong flashed a wide grin at the reporters.
And the very men who should have been cringing—they grinned right back at him.
"Be that as it may, player Noh In-seong. We happen to have received a rather entertaining video."
The press corps, convinced they had him on the hook, played the footage of the fight between Noh In-seong and Jackson.
"Take a good look. Doesn't that look like someone you recognize?"
"Well, well. Only just found that, did you."
Contrary to their expectations of a flustered reaction, he received it with perfect calm.
"Yeah, we fought that day. So what of it?"
"...I'm sorry?"
"You're going to say your little piece, aren't you. Leadership this, character that—does a bastard like this deserve to be MVP?"
Sad to say, he had predicted every word of it.
"So THAT'S why you were desperate to manufacture a reason for the May MVP to go unannounced even after Children's Day came and went. Tough luck."
Noh In-seong made his declaration.
"From this day forward, none of you will ever get to put my name on anything."
A boycott of every award they had a hand in.
"I'll be happy to reset that trophy's value for you. Personally."
The best player alive driving the final nail into the coffin himself: 'That award is nothing but a useless hunk of metal!'
The fire came down squarely on the reporters' feet.
'Next step is to pay Jackson a visit, I suppose. Tell him: you're the reason we've come to this.'
The kid had better hold up under it.
Like prey that had walked step by step into a trap dug long ago, bleeding out a little more with every snare it sprung, slowing with every step.
Noh In-seong smiled slowly, savoring the sight of his prey dying.