Just Two More Wins (Part 1)
Monday afternoon.
In one corner of Noh In-seong's gaming channel studio, Si-yeon sat wearing the Doubles mascot head.
"Ugh, this thing's suffocating."
It wasn't that breathing was hard—she just hated wearing the mask, plain and simple, and complained about it accordingly.
"Well then, show your face and piggyback on your big brother's killer fame, why don't you."
She knew, of course, that this mask was the only thing capable of hiding the notoriety of a brother whose infamy was national in scale.
"...That's a bit much."
"Then you'll just have to wear the mask, won'tcha? Ain't takin' it off for ya."
Having to suffocate inside this thing to help out this hateful excuse for a brother made her blood boil—and yet.
"...Haaah. Well, it is nice and cool in here."
Who knew what her brother had stuffed inside it. The interior was brisk and refreshing, so honestly it wasn't a bad experience.
She'd tensed up for a moment right before the stream went live, but—
"Three... two... one... Uh, hey, it's your big brother. Big brother plays games all the time."
"...That's a greeting?!"
At an opening greeting so absurdly unconventional it defied belief, the empty studio filled not with tension but with mortification and disbelief.
"Now, now, come on. You have to say hi too. You learned that at school, didn't you? When you meet someone new, you greet them!"
"...Haaah. H-hi, it's your little sister. Your little sister is always embarrassed by this insane big brother..."
A fourth-grader's sigh and greeting, freighted with the surrender of so many things, went out over the airwaves.
It was the moment Noh Si-yeon made her debut on Noh In-seong's gaming channel.
The upshot was that Noh In-seong, whose bread she had stolen, sentenced the prisoner who'd committed a good deed—number 24601... no, wait, Si-yeon—to a labor sentence: work off your crime instead.
On the evening of the day that sentence was handed down, he had their mother fill out a few documents, signed his own name to them as well, and then handed the whole stack over to his channel manager—a man seeing the paperwork for the very first time.
"Um, hello..."
"Good day. I'm Jung Byung-wook, the man who was threatened with a baseball by that lunatic and hired on the spot."
Having gotten his butt kicked as the price of spilling the shocking true story of his own employment to the little sister, Jung Byung-wook vanished from the scene.
After that came an epic war of words between Noh In-seong and his advertisers.
Several calls with sponsors, filled with screaming and profanity—'Get lost!', 'How many times do I have to say I don't WANT that? Why the hell would I run a gambling ad...'—and counter-threats like 'I'm telling you, I only took this ON because I figured you'd leave me alone otherwise!'
And once the smoke cleared:
"Yes, of course, absolutely. We'll steer clear of anything problematic. Yes. We'll be happy to negotiate the rate a little, too."
Noh Si-yeon watched, with her own eyes, this unhinged specimen of humanity wrap up the phone call on the warmest of terms.
So why, exactly, had she ended up appearing on her brother's gaming channel?
"Hing. Do I really have to do this one? I've never played games like this."
"Thou shalt be scolded! Know you not that this is a world where stealing another man's bread can earn you a beating with silver candlesticks!"
Nobody knew when Les Misérables had become the story of a battle-priest who shattered kneecaps, but nonsense came spewing out of the mouth of one Noh In-seong—a man who had stolen other people's snacks on far more than one or two occasions himself.
His bread had been stolen, so it was either tearful atonement, or she worked for him and the bread counted as her signing bonus.
"Hing, fine... I'll just work hard, okay."
A little kid who didn't work had every right to eat, under child protection law.
But a little kid who stole Noh In-seong's bread was legally obligated to work for Noh In-seong. Obviously.
That said, he hadn't put his little sister up to anything nasty or backbreaking, of course.
He'd simply assigned her the games that annoyed him too much to play himself.
Specifically: the absolute outermost line of games a grade-schooler with a legal guardian could get away with. Something with a bit of gacha, where you pulled cute girls and boys who all sang together in perfect harmony—
— Emergence-ssi, 0 o'clock...
...Whether that counted as heartwarming singing nobody could say, but either way, it was a rhythm game about mashing buttons in time with the music.
She was his little sister, but even so, the gacha elements—the kind that encouraged gambling—had been stripped out entirely, respawn grinding excepted.
"Alright. From this moment on, you are going to attempt every single one of these songs. A long march of hardship awaits you."
He'd been planning to script a classic underdog growth drama—a total beginner flailing her way toward real skill—
"Hehe, look at this! New record!"
—but astonishingly, blood really was blood. His little sister's dynamic vision and reaction speed were no joke.
Si-yeon, who had started with a few basic songs, fully adapted in less than an hour.
Of course, unlike the countless petroleum and carbon-based fuels of this world—or those Paleozoic fern fossils—her talent hadn't taken eons to form, though the accuracy was another matter entirely.
The girl could hit a note the instant it arrived. Even on genuinely vicious songs, she hammered away rat-a-tat-tat and cleared them without dying.
Bam-ba-ba! Bum-bum-BUM!
"Much appreciated, you idiots who blew yourselves up of your own accord. I'll be pocketing these nice and easy, thanks to you."
"...Aigo! Oppa! What kind of way is that to talk to people who are giving you money!"
With all the mission bonuses collected on top, the two-hour homework stream came to an end.
"...Wow. Turns out you've got a knack for this too. Your grades are painfully average, but this kind of talent?"
For once in his life, Noh In-seong found himself genuinely impressed by his little sister's usefulness.
Si-yeon puffed up her cheeks at her brother's condescension—
—but puffing up your cheeks inside a mascot head was invisible, and therefore pointless.
And anyway, whatever indignation her puffed cheeks might have held was swept clean away by his next words.
"Half the mission money's yours, and Mom's going to put half the ad revenue in a savings account under your name."
If nothing else, Noh In-seong was not the kind of man to smash people over the head over money.
Homework for a gacha-hating man like him had landed on his lap—and since his little sister had done it in his place, then minus the 'broker's fee,' the fruit was hers to eat. Obviously.
"Hehe! Love it!"
On that heartwarming note, the First Noh Family Bread Incident drew to a close.
As a bonus, now that one job had come in, ads for similar games started rolling in too—
"No. She can't film without a guardian anyway, and I only did it once because it's her winter break."
"Aaagh...!! But this one's paying big, though!"
At Noh In-seong's utterly merciless veto, channel editor Joo Han-chul was left to mourn.
From the editor's perspective, it was like striking gold in the neighboring lot while out selling petroleum—but you can't mine gold without the landowner's permission.
Thanks to Noh In-seong's ironclad block, Si-yeon's appearances were demoted to a rare event that only happened once in a while over winter break.
"Hehe, the kiddo's adorable!"
That said, thanks to her rare appearances—and the fact that the channel covered games entirely outside its usual content—the channel owner gradually got upstaged by her own guest. But what could you do?
If it bothered him, he should have quit baseball and streamed games every day. It was karma, plain and simple.
Incheon—at least under its current management—wanted to chart a different course from the man who'd run the club before.
In other words: burn fewer pitchers, quit the dirty tricks, and develop players properly, the honest and orthodox way.
The front office was done with the team-gutting blade of torching club assets like fireworks just to drag in some fossil of a manager. And besides, wasn't the current manager the very man who'd staged a coup after watching his own little brother get chewed up and spit out?
The Incheon fans, too, had come to accept this long era of ruin and defeat.
"...Except, this... the fans are not going to accept this..."
"Haaah. Of all the streaks to break, it had to be that bastard Noh In-seong's pack coming for it..."
That was, of course, assuming the Doubles hadn't come to smash the greatest achievement in Korean baseball history.
It was an achievement far too precious to hand over to those bastards.
Relations between the Doubles and Incheon currently sat somewhere around the level of open warfare—a situation of near-constant provocation.
Or, put simply: one of them was the foot, and the other was what the foot stepped on.
How had they piled up this much hatred in barely a year, a year and a half?
"The lunatic's still got our starting catcher laid up in a hospital bed, and expansion roster is right around the corner!"
The team's starting catcher was still bedridden, and the second baseman was still lamenting his way through a long rehab.
Center fielder Ji Yong-jae, ever since getting stamped by Noh In-seong, had fallen into a slump of geological proportions and lost his national team spot to boot.
"A .151 average... it's driving me insane. Honestly, if the club hadn't kept running him out there, he'd have been sent down to the minors long ago."
He couldn't hit, and he was now terrified of even taking the field against the Doubles. What was anyone supposed to do with that?
Noh In-seong himself remembered him as roughly 'there was a guy like that, right... ah. Right, him.' But for Ji Yong-jae—the man whose career had been ended by overuse—trembling was only natural.
"It still means something as a defensive replacement, but... haaah. We're a rebuilding team, so of course the starter's a kid."
The manager had his reasons for the bold move of playing a rookie in center field this year.
And mercifully, it made things easy for the fans to spin it as 'the kid got ruined by Noh In-seong trauma' rather than anything else.
Amid all this, more Incheon fans lamented over the wreckage of last year's team than anything—but a rump of them remained, blaming it all on 'that Noh In-seong' and demanding the son of a bitch be run out of Korean baseball entirely.
They were worshippers of the fired former manager.
They didn't cheer for the team. They cheered for the 'drama' that had been built around the manager himself.
These were people convinced that if not for Noh In-seong, their 'great manager' would still be at the helm, hoisting another championship.
To such people, the winning streak record set by the previous manager—a man much like their fallen leader—was like history preserved in some ancient text.
"If our manager were still here, he'd have reclaimed that record someday, you mark my words!"
In other words, it was a root—nothing more than raw material for the great engine of 'what if.'
"Because of that son of a bitch, our team—a legitimate powerhouse—got ripped out by the roots and smashed to pieces!"
"Sob... poor Manager. Betrayed by his own disciple, nailed to the cross..."
"And if they steal the winning streak record on top of everything? We're literally the people who set a stadium on fire back in the 2010s."
These hardliners invoked the old stadium riot and demanded, forcefully, that this record be defended.
Of course, unlike the old days, public opinion was split now, and since they were a relative minority, actually storming the stadium was off the table—
"At the very least, hating the Doubles is something you people and we share, isn't it!"
Real Incheon fans and manager-nostalgics alike spoke with one heart:
"Just try letting them take this record. You won't walk away fine either!"
They refused, absolutely, to hand a record-breaking victory to the Doubles.
"...So I really have no choice but to become the man I least want to be."
Only Manager Jin Woo-jeong of Incheon, cornered into burning through his entire pitching staff just to scrape out a single win, wore a face of pure anguish.
And so the result of dumping every single pitcher he had into game one was, in a word, miserable.
CRAAACK---!!
"That ball---!! Off the wall! It's gone! Wow, Nicholas just detonated a three-run homer! It's 5-1!"
All of Jin Noh-ryuk's grit—the way he'd battled through after finally escaping Song Jin-wook—came to nothing as the six-hole hitter blew the game wide open.
"Nicholas was always rated as a hitter who'd need time to adjust, defense aside..."
"Yes, and the Doubles have to be feeling fantastic right now! The mercenary's bat is coming alive!"
"SIBAL, now that's a home run!"
A man so thrilled by his first homer in ages that he flung his bat clear up into the sky.
Nicholas—the second baseman brought in on his glove alone, or so the critics sneered—roared a wordless roar: never ignore me again.
When Noh In-seong rested, Andy was king.
He worked his fielders hard, ground his teeth, and somehow, someway, strangled six innings down to a single run.
And after that—exactly the way their old dynasty used to do it.
"Yes, that's the Doubles' fourth pitching change today. Kang Ji-hoon steps aside and... haha. That has to sting."
"Cho Hyo-jin, yes. There are those who say the team's slow decline began the moment this man walked out the door."
The work of deploying as many trustworthy arms as possible, in relay, to wring the fight out of the opposing lineup.
The swarm that had once called Incheon home had returned, and begun gunning down their enemies in cold blood.
Of course, the most miserable people in the park were the Incheon faithful, because this time the swarm was from out of town—and they were the ones catching the bullets.
And watching the queen-bee candidate in their midst plunge her stinger into them, over and over—that went beyond misery into pure futility.
"You should have been OUR player! This was the front office's fault!"
"Come back! Come back to Incheon!"
Back in the day, whenever Cho Hyo-jin took the mound, everyone had scrambled to chant 'traitor'—but that era was gone.
Past the laments of the defeated, they now stood in the rubble of a collapsed building, staring up at nothing but sky.
Their emotions had swung all the way around to: please, please come home in free agency...
"...So. Are you coming back when you hit free agency?"
Cho Hyo-jin, having just returned from ruthlessly administering anaphylactic shock to three straight batters, shook his head.
"You know what they say—guys who've finished their military service get full-blown PTSD the second a schedule pops up back at their old unit, right?"
Wasn't his finger already pointing east?
"...Ah. You're going overseas."
"Well, if I keep grinding on the national team, somebody's bound to figure out I'm useful eventually."
Japan next door, the land of "yeeehaaaw" across the ocean—didn't matter.
He had absolutely no intention of crawling back to that godforsaken unit.
By the time the game ended, the screams, the fury, and the boos of the Incheon fans were ringing off the rafters of the stadium.
Today's starter was Jin Noh-ryuk's comeback bid—with Jin Sa-rang dragged out of the bullpen in the middle of it—and they lost?
Tomorrow's starter was a foreign pitcher, and his numbers were nothing to write home about.
He'd eat innings for you, sure, but his ERA sat in the high fours.
The opposing starter, meanwhile, was Jackson—a proven innings-eater running an ERA in the low-to-mid threes.
"Our lineup has literally nothing left standing, and they want us to break a winning streak record? How?"
With Noh In-seong coming back into the lineup, winning behind pitchers like these looked less like a long shot and more like a contradiction in terms.
At least, for the people who had already missed their last chance, it did.
"Miss me? Been a while, huh?"
"IT'S IN-SEEEEONG---!!"
Blocking the Doubles' 22-game winning streak was, for all practical purposes, impossible.
The one silver lining: at least, in his comeback game, they hadn't surrendered a home run to Noh In-seong.
The bad news: that was pretty much the only good news there was.
"Ah... this is, honestly, a genuinely painful thing to watch. A reliever comes in, and then another reliever follows him..."
"And when that one can't put out the fire in the opposing lineup, yet another one has to come in, and..."
CRACK---!!
"Aargh! Stop hitting them already, you bastards!"
"You stop getting hit! Are you people insane? The game started over three hours ago—what is even happening anymore!"
The Incheon fans had long since packed their bags; nearly all of them had given up, scattered in clusters across the stands, drinking.
Booze in hand inside the stadium, they were enjoying the rare privilege of venting their rage on-site, wailing all the while.
"No, seriously—do these bastards not know the words intentional walk or merciful stop?!"
"Don't care!"
Noh In-seong, after all, belonged firmly to the 'why would your feelings matter? Mine matter' school of thought—
—and so he was now jogging out his third double of the game.
"Song Jin-wook lines a double into the gap---!! And runner on second, Noh In-seong, is already crossing home! An RBI double!"
"My... it's only the top of the seventh and it's 17-5. Which is sadder—the scoreline, or the fact that they've got no closer left to bring in?"
Song Jin-wook, whose English was shaky at best, apparently took 'doctor stop' to mean Doctor—STOP!, because he was now delivering the finishing blows to an opponent still twitching on the canvas of the ring.
As the two oblivious fools kept hitting and hitting and hitting, the Incheon fans drifted ever closer to enlightenment.
And in the middle of all this—if this were the Incheon of old, a mere ten-run deficit would have had them starting to pick fights by now.
Even Jin Woo-jeong, a man trying to build a fundamentally different Incheon, could feel the words shouldn't we just rough them up a little and call it even crawling up his throat.
He'd actually picked fights over exactly this sort of thing before. He had a track record of butting heads with any number of players over it.
And yet, for this one game at least, Incheon couldn't even entertain the option.
"...Ugh. All of this, because of that one lunatic..."
Records as honor. Suspensions as the whip. A place in the history books as the carrot. The mental shackles of seniority between veterans and rookies.
There existed a human being who had declared every last one of these things utterly worthless—who regarded the act of shattering an opponent's face as bliss itself.
And if another player vanished from a rebuilding squad that was already strapped for bodies?
It could spiral all the way into the mother of all catastrophes: calling up the entire minor league roster.
Another young reliever, hammered into the dirt by Song Jin-wook, got pulled from the game, swallowing back tears.
"Aigo, the kid's confidence is probably shattered all over again...!!"
Only in his second year. A young gun who'd rolled around in the minors all last year and finally gotten his shot this season.
Jin Woo-jeong genuinely feared the boy's spirit might snap after today's beatdown.
And the saddest part was that even the inevitable accusations—you stomped a young sprout to death—meant nothing here.
"He's the youngest of the bunch taking punches today. You think that guy feels a single pang of guilt?"
Considering they were all his own generation—guys his own age—Noh In-seong would feel absolutely nothing about smashing in their faces or their pride.
Sending his eighth pitcher of the day out to the mound, Jin Woo-jeong could only pray.
'Please, I'm begging you—just let those lunatics all come down with a case of food poisoning before the next game...'
Whether God would grant that prayer, nobody could say.
But for a manager who was going to be bludgeoned by the footage of today's game today, tomorrow, and for the rest of the entire year—
the devil's hand, a monkey's paw, anything at all would do, so long as something terrible happened to those damned bastards.
The Doubles now stood at the summit of the mountain called the winning streak record, planting their flag right there at the peak, beside it.
All that remained was to kick away the Incheon flag that had been planted there so long ago.