Staring at Me Like That Is Embarrassing, You Know
The All-Star Game—the man who had turned every single one into a wasteland, a two-time winner of the most All-Star votes in history.
When Noh In-seong's half-No show blazed to life yet again, the fans, astonishingly, didn't react with much of an uproar at all.
Really, whether it was proper or not wasn't even the point...
"I just figured he wouldn't show up at all. So he does know how to put on a show before he leaves, huh."
"W-well, I'd say the fact that he actually showed up earns him some bonus points..."
The lazy, foul-tempered, untouchable, rampaging brute had actually put something together, and it had delighted the fans. That alone counted for a massive amount of credit.
"Wait, hasn't he just gaslighted all of you?"
All that emotional payoff, from a guy doling out a few scraps of entertainment? The pro players who knew the inside story couldn't make heads or tails of it.
"Right. But then, this is Noh In-seong we're talking about—he had to be that much of a lunatic."
They'd all assumed he'd make up some excuse about being a little sore, declare a no-show, and head off to film an ad instead. Hearing that he'd actually come to their playground and played along before leaving early, they had no choice but to accept it.
His image was such a total disaster that a single token gesture left everyone moved to tears.
"...It's like a son who spends every single day out drinking suddenly making you seaweed soup on your birthday?"
"Ah. Yeah, I get it now."
It was the older and wiser Jeong Im-taek who supplied the answer to this strange phenomenon of Noh In-seong's.
To the Korean baseball fans who were, in effect, his parents, Noh In-seong was the kind of brat who only behaved on their birthday.
Well, whatever. Noh In-seong couldn't take anything resembling a proper break.
For starters, there were the various ad shoots he'd promised his only friend from high school.
"Agh, you guys are standing tall in the industry now—shouldn't you quit exploiting me already?"
"Not a chance. Why on earth would I take that risk when I have the friend pass?"
What's more, this ad was tied directly to his current workplace, so there was no skipping it.
At least these weren't the bastards who'd taken his likeness and tried to build an absurd game out of it.
At minimum, bread was edible, and it even tasted good—so he couldn't exactly complain.
And so, grinding his teeth, Noh In-seong had to prepare for the second installment of the Doubles Baseball Bread ad.
"This time, to match the away uniform, it's a speckled black-sesame military-style flavor."
"...Is that going to sell?"
A flicker of doubt crossed his mind, but it was a trend making a comeback, and he had no grounds to argue.
With suspicious eyes, Noh In-seong dutifully shot the ad anyway and moved on to his next schedule.
Up next was a commercial featuring his two view-count-generating slaves, wailing as usual.
A proper advertisement for Noh In-seong's Gaming Channel, home to Jung Byung-wook and Joo Han-chul.
It was a shoot for a card game born in Japan that had spread across the globe.
"...Hold on, didn't I trash this game to hell and back? How did I land an ad for it?"
"Honestly, I think that's exactly why it's fine—everyone plays it while cursing it out."
Jung Byung-wook was mid-duel, screaming, "Damn it, is this even a game?!"
But to Noh In-seong, who had won both matches back to back, it just sounded like the laments of a loser.
For a man who'd spent his life with editor Pyeon Gang, a legend of foul-mouthed abuse, this blatant favoritism was a deeply novel phenomenon.
In truth, though, the company's real aim lay somewhere else entirely.
One of the company's other titles was a baseball game.
They'd made their fortune on card games, but what they actually wanted was the relationship that would funnel publicity toward that side of the business.
'The WBC is coming up soon... Who knows. I can't speak for the Power series, but the Spirit series might actually be doable.'
And worst case, they could always sell a special edition or a definitive edition separately, or squeeze it out as DLC.
Revenue concerns weren't anywhere on their radar.
The MLB title held a near-monopoly on the baseball game market, but their scheme was to lock up Noh In-seong in advance during years with international tournaments.
As expected, big corporations played the selling game on a whole different level.
"...By the way, shouldn't you tell him to stop with the cursing already?"
"What can you do? People like him exist to absorb the gacha hate, that's all."
Tears welled up in the eyes of Pyeon Gang the Second, who had joined the company like his father before him and absorbed the abuse the same way.
Why the gacha gods insisted on targeting his card luck was a mystery no one could solve.
Domestic and abroad alike, nearly everyone was throwing money at Noh In-seong to buy his time. But quite apart from all that, there were people swarming around him for no money and no reason.
"Here's what I really can't wrap my head around."
"In-seong equals commerce. Greetings. I'm Tanaka from the Japan Broadcasting Association."
Reporters and interviewers. What infuriated him most was that they weren't even Korean.
March of next year. With the WBC creeping closer, it was the relatively laid-back second-half prep season, and people from every nation came swarming in droves.
The other countries didn't really need his attention.
Those nations' scouts were mostly camped out in America and Japan anyway.
Better to track which players emerged from those pipelines, whether they were first-tier or second-tier talent—and if they made the main tournament, to know exactly where they'd cross paths.
America and Japan, on the other hand, had come to Korea—specifically to keep an eye on a handful of Korean players.
The WBC was rumored to be a tournament invented so MLB could poach players.
The world's greatest league, flailing desperately to drag every promising young talent back to its own turf. Naturally, their gaze fell on this bastard who was infuriatingly good at the game.
"A nearly finished dish. One of the perfect ones."
"A complete prospect you can use straight out of the wrapper. Signing him is a guaranteed win."
Practically every MLB team was confirmed to be swooping in. Lately there was even a running joke that any strange foreigner appearing in Jamsil was automatically a scout.
Then why Japan? One might ask.
If anything, Japan's stance leaned closer to outright wariness of Noh In-seong.
This was the man who, back in his youth national team days, had nearly set the entire nation of Japan on fire (so to speak).
First of all, a first-year high schooler dismantling veterans who'd bled for years at Koshien was astonishing enough.
But every single word out of that man's mouth had functioned as, more or less, a seizure button for modern Japan.
"Stop him right now! That lunatic brat is causing an international incident as we speak!"
"Ha... be my guest. You really think he's going to listen to us?"
When the Japanese side blamed the opposing federation, the Korean federation just shot back, "Try stopping him yourselves." What kind of sophistry was that? Since when does a subordinate not obey his superiors?
He'd hit a home run and followed it with a Hiroshima–Nagasaki ceremony.
At the summer tournament, Liberation Day just happened to fall during the event, and the man had brought up the Stone Age unprompted.
What kind of nerve did it take for a single student to pull this off?
"The dirty Korean Baseball Association must stop using its students for political statements and apologize!"
Under external pressure, the Koreans had naturally told him to knock off the politically charged ceremonies.
"It's just such a shame that Korea–Japan games end with something as trivial as this."
"...Excuse me?"
"Both sides should draw weapons, and there ought to be a mass brawl in the stands at the very least, don't you think?"
— Cue both sides screaming "Chosen-jin!" and "Jap!" while some thirty or forty people landed in the hospital from the brawl.
"Look, everyone hates each other anyway—since we're already at it, let's gather all those people and stage a bonus brawl on the side."
Only after witnessing the state of this lunatic's rambling did the Japanese federation finally understand what the Korean federation had meant.
"Oh. He's genuinely insane."
And that insane man, after delivering the most humiliating defeat imaginable to the samurai of Japan—
"What was the hardest part of the tournament?"
"Your food is disgustingly bland. That's why I dumped extra broth into my udon."
— Hey! No dirty tricks! If you keep quantizing every pitch, when am I ever supposed to land a hit on you?! He conducted the interview while playing a video game with the catcher who'd been catching for him at the arcade. Double the humiliation!
The youth national team, once hailed as the coming Golden Generation, was treated not as an ugly duckling but simply as an ugly duck.
Draft disadvantages piled up, their future prospect rankings were quietly shoved deep into the back pages—an unspoken murahachibu, a collective ostracism, descended upon them all.
The sole prospect to survive that shunning was the starting pitcher: Hamashita Jiro, and Hamashita Jiro alone. That said everything.
They'd been evenly matched until the pitcher came out, then lost on a walk-off hit—so only his stamina ever got questioned. The reason the Yokohama DeNA BayStars picked him in the first round was simple: he was the only player free of that generation's curse.
This PTSD still burned hot and strong in Japan's reporters to this day.
"I shall personally scout out whether this madman spouts the same nonsense at next year's WBC!"
"Excellent. I'll see your travel expenses are covered. Do bring back plenty of articles."
And so, souls aflame, the Japanese sports reporters crossed the East Sea, sought out Noh In-seong, and thrust microphones in his face—
only to discover that ever since the day this country's press corps had been trampled by Noh In-seong, not one of them had been able to secure an interview with him first.
"So, do you need tea poured straight down your throat to come to your senses? Or will ochazuke and a quiet exit do?"
A man who screamed at even his own country's reporters to get lost was hardly going to grant interviews during his precious sliver of rest.
Naturally, the answer that came back was a flat refusal and an order to leave, delivered with surgical finality.
"Aaagh! Th-this is discrimination against the press! What is the meaning of this?!"
When they thrashed about in front of him, the psycho responded by hurling cameras and drones without hesitation. The reporters, suffering humiliations they'd never known in their lives, kept coming anyway—
"Shut up! I've smashed reporter drones, I've threatened reporters, and I've ended reporters' entire careers!"
For the mosquito-like vermin who dared interrupt his rest, the answer was not hospitality but assassination.
After two full days burned on ad shoots, only two days of actual rest remained.
And in principle, from Thursday through Sunday, a four-game bloodbath against the opening opponent was already on the books.
The first series of the second half. With a war against Busan—currently second place—fast approaching, there wasn't a drop of stamina to spare for these damn mosquitoes.
Having mastered not the Kyoto art of indirection but Goh's pain-based scalding technique, Noh In-seong lunged at them with every intention of actually pouring boiling tea in their faces.
"KYEAAAAAH—!!"
"Get out! And never come back!"
The reporters who had come early to get any read at all on this madman before the tournament were forced into a mandatory return home.
But two days was short. Painfully short.
First, Noh In-seong attempted to hang out with his little sister.
Mid-July was the exact midpoint of summer vacation for an elementary schooler.
"...Amusement park..."
"Oppa, are you insane? Do you have any idea how many kids are about to come pouring out of there?"
When you could stay home in air conditioning, watching your favorite shows and videos? Getting slow-roasted outdoors, hand in hand with parents who'd had the same brilliant idea as Noh In-seong, turning into elementary-schooler yakiniku? No thanks.
"Do that stuff during the school term at least. Then you can skip class and go play legally."
"...Hing. Fine."
Even an elementary schooler had no answer for the heat, so Siyeon flatly refused to play with her brother.
Rejected by his own little sister, Noh In-seong set off in search of someone—anyone—to play with.
"Damn it, everyone's got a schedule."
Led by the broken-ribs man living with a pregnant wife, the entire Doubles roster had gone home to their families.
"God. Now that I think about it, I literally have no one to hang out with."
Joo Han-chul, the editor busy cutting his ads, was no exception.
And Deok Jin-man surely wasn't editing his commercials for free either.
The neighborhood kid? He'd gone on vacation with Reporter Jeong.
"I'm the one who gave him material for articles, so why the hell is that guy the one making the money?"
Grumbling all the while, Noh In-seong ended up spending his two days off entirely alone.
After the All-Star break, he'd rested, shot ads, and generally been run off his feet—and now every last day of Noh In-seong's holiday was gone.
In fairness, the All-Star Game had fallen on a Saturday, so even the other players grumbled about getting only Sunday through Wednesday off.
Noh In-seong got a grand total of two days.
A soldier's leave was three point four seconds in this world—what did that make 0.23 seconds? He blinked, and it evaporated.
"GRAAAAAHH...!!"
Noh In-seong flipped out in the locker room and began to rage.
"GRAAAAAAAHH...!!"
Meanwhile, another man—ribs fully healed, crawling out at his own leisure—was screaming right beside him.
"...Hyung, why are you screaming? You got to rest! You didn't even play in the All-Star Game, why!"
"Aaagh, honestly, it was so relaxing...!!"
Thwack—!
Song Jin-wook would end up screaming again shortly after, for slightly different reasons.
But this was such a daily occurrence that not a single soul on the Doubles paid it any attention.
Amid this pathetic tableau, Jeong Im-taek—wearing the faint smile of a man relieved to have his players finally back—gathered them all together.
"Alright, everyone, let's get back at it and go lock up that championship!"
He fired them up, sent them off with a cheer, and pushed them out of the stadium.
Four games against Busan. The second half of the season was about to begin.