Enemies Under the Same Dome
Ever since Noh In-seong demonstrated to the camera drones that water holds the answer, his life had carried on.
He went home, grabbed a children's jacket, and headed back out the door. It was a gift for the stationery store owner who had lent him a faucet and helped dump ice on his head — and for the mother of the neighborhood kid, his benefactor in that whole affair.
"...Now that I think about it, I owed the little guy a jacket, didn't I?"
It only felt like ages because so much had happened, but in truth not even a week had passed. Either way, Noh In-seong hated shattering a child's precious memories if he could help it, so he kept his promise.
"Lend me a marker for a second."
Scribble, scribble...
He signed it nicely, handed it over with a word to deliver it, and went on his way, enjoying the peaceful stroll he'd set out for in the first place and calling it a day.
The next day, the neighborhood kid sat sulking in the shade, a gloomy cloud parked permanently on his face.
"...What's with you? I kept my promise. Why are you moping around in the shade like that?"
"Yeah... I got it. But Mom won't let me wear it. She says I'll thank her for it later."
"What are you talking about? I brought it for you to wear..."
A grown man who couldn't grasp what that jacket was actually worth bought the little guy a pile of snacks to console him. For turning a shadowed face into full sunshine, one snack shop near the school was more than enough.
"I don't know what you're thinking about, but eat up anyway. Consider us square."
The kid's satisfaction shot through the roof. I'll have to think of something else to ask of him next time.
'...Still, why would she want to keep the jacket safe like that? He'll outgrow it soon enough anyway.'
He wasn't wrong. Noh In-seong had simply failed to properly appraise its value. It was a gift meant for practical everyday use — but to the kid's mother, it was a collector's item.
'Sweetie, Mom is doing this all for YOU! If you need a jacket, I'll buy you a separate one to wear!'
The worth of a promise-signature given 'personally' by the man who shattered every rookie record there was to shatter. A man planning, some thirty years down the line, to gush, 'I finally understand... I bought in at rock bottom, GOSU...!!'
It was a realm of baseball foresight only a small man could appreciate once he'd grown into a big one.
Tuesday — the day baseball officially resumed.
Two nights and three days. If you called it a vacation, it was that magic stretch of time that vanished between one blink and the next.
So much had happened over the break that one man in particular was spiritually exhausted. Noh In-seong trudged into the team-exclusive clubhouse early, his face gray and overcast.
"Good morning, everyone... is it?"
"...This kid's speech gets more bizarre by the day. What is wrong with him?"
Jo In-soo had a protest halfway up his tongue — 'A greeting is supposed to be a question, not a command, how does that even work?' — but he swallowed it. The kid had high marks for punctuality at least, so he simply stared at him with an expression of pure disbelief.
The routine: arrive an hour before training, get his massages in faithfully, then surrender his body to the electrical stimulation recovery equipment.
"Uuuuugh.... AAAGH!!"
"You look like a man being tortured... hold still, would you, In-seong."
Downside: the way he writhed and twisted through the pain meant the massage therapist never got a moment's rest.
"It's not just me, everyone does this! KYAAAAHH...!!"
"......"
The truth was, ninety games into the season, everyone was quietly worn down. There were plenty of souls who'd howl if you so much as touched a knotted muscle.
"See, In-soo? You were screaming your head off too when she pressed on you earlier."
"......"
Even captains are human.
After that came the standard stretching, loosening up. On days he wasn't starting, he'd follow his routine and split his weight training according to the schedule. And before batting practice, he'd quiz a rotating cast of teammates on whether they'd memorized the opposing starter's data.
"Everyone's got the scouting report down, right? Pop quiz. Noh In-seong! Today's starting pitcher is..."
"Hector. The guy obviously can't locate anything, so I'll just watch out for the ball coming at my body."
"......"
Granted, the constant flexing about how great he was was hard on the eyes. But a guy who rakes gets to be king.
After that they filed out to the field, where a short session of fielding and batting practice began. And in the middle of it, in the defensive drills he was actually responsible for, he went around corralling his teammates in everyone else's place.
"Hey, damn it, your footwork's all tangled up — have you been drinking?! I told you, don't shift your weight toward the ball when it's an emergency throw!"
His keystone combo partner, Sung Hyun-tak, was a far more senior player, and got chewed out all the same.
"Ugh, catcher kid! I was covering second base just now! Don't focus only on receiving the ball!"
Reserve catcher Lim Jae-min was just a classmate, so he got chewed out too.
"...My bad. Can't I just... not play defense? What is wrong with my eyes that I have to watch this stuff."
"...Everyone else gets cursed out, why am I the one getting special treatment?"
One of them had simply given up. In any case, the players who actually fielded well didn't make much fuss about it.
"Nice catch. If that junkballer's on the mound, you'll shade back a bit, right? If you're drifting, pull me toward you too."
"Wouldn't it be better to lean toward left field rather than center? Dustin's range is tiny."
"I'll just try to catch it where I'm standing. They're going to be pulling everything my way anyway."
The new center fielder Song Joo-in and right fielder Pi Jeong-doo rarely found themselves on the receiving end of his abuse.
"If you're going to fake a throw, sidearm might actually be better. Lines up straight with the runner's head..."
"Can't say if that works from third, but from out here, an over-the-top motion is better for freezing them..."
With Ji Hak-seong, it seemed they'd formed some kind of informal research society devoted to studying exactly which actions would most infuriate an opponent.
For a certified lunatic, he got along remarkably well with the team's starting pitchers — which was, honestly, a relief.
"Alright, that's everything done. Shall we go get our hate on properly, then?"
"...Life would be so much nicer if he just skipped that part."
It would have been lovely if he got along with opponents too, but that was probably asking for too much.
Jo In-soo deliberately ignored Noh In-seong as he headed off for his pregame interview.
The Grizzlies and the Doubles had never gotten along to begin with.
This was a league where siblings sharing a room in the same household would immediately find kill_them_all.EXE installed on their relationship. Two clubs sharing one stadium? Haha. What a hilarious premise, as jokes go.
Of course the atmosphere was never serene between teams battling each other for the championship cup year after year.
It helped that their respective golden eras had rarely overlapped — but it cut both ways: whenever one side was happy, the other was doomed to be miserable.
Just look at last year, when the Doubles were headed to the postseason — no wonder Noh In-seong got needled so relentlessly. And even in seasons when one of them fell out of October baseball entirely, the winners never failed to sprinkle a little Chill-l over the wounds, grabbing at their legs: Either fall down here with the rest of us trash, or crawl your way back up the hard way.
Things got so bad the year the Grizzlies stumbled out of the playoff race and got mocked for it that they declared total war.
On top of an already poisonous relationship, this year had turned outright ugly. From the Grizzlies' perspective, a lunatic had walked in the door as a rookie and was committing one public nuisance after another.
He dragged out every ugly chapter of their history, he tormented them on the field — and now even a routine pregame interview was never, ever boring.
Q. The rivalry game is upon us as the final series of the first half. Your thoughts?
"Huh? Those bastards were our rivals? I thought they were just a pack of homeless strays with nowhere to go."
Q. Still, yours is a rivalry with deep history and tradition...
"By this first half's standings at least, they're nobody's rival. It's just been 'well, look who walked into the chump store.'"
Q. The game starts right after this interview. Aren't you worried about the consequences?
"Weren't we always fated for exactly one of us to survive under the same dome?"
Just as Noh In-seong said: 5 wins, 1 draw, 1 loss. That wasn't a rivalry record — that was a mugging record.
With his proclamation of being Irreconcilable Under the Same Dome, Noh In-seong promised that this rivalry series, too, would be a bloodbath.
"What in God's name are we supposed to do about that cursed little brat?"
"Tell me about it. At least he's not taking the mound this time, but still..."
Before the game, the Grizzlies' analytics team looked like a funeral parlor.
60 wins, 1 draw, 21 losses in 82 games. A .741 winning percentage.
The Doubles' monstrous July rampage — first team in the league to 60 wins — was one thing. Worse still was their luck: they'd caught the Grizzlies riding a nine-game wave of momentum, of all times.
Below second place, everyone was more or less the same anyway, the gaps between them razor-thin. Whether the third-place Grizzlies survived this series against the Doubles could determine whether their fall ended entirely outside the postseason picture.
"Good lord. Only now am I realizing it — what on earth did Busan do to that kid?"
Plug that irregular into most any team and they jump straight into playoff contention. And they passed on him? A guy who only fell because a season-long injury parade knocked them flat?
"The end times are upon us. Damn it all."
As the analysis team ran Noh In-seong's numbers again and again, the faces around the table were curdling by the minute.
About an hour later.
"...The end times are upon us. Fuh-cking..."
For the pitcher facing Noh In-seong, those exact words came spilling out once more, verbatim.
Hector stood on the mound, head buried in his glove, slowly shaking it side to side.
One ball, cracking off the ceiling of Jamsil Dome and dropping dead in front of the outfielder's frozen face.
Estimated distance: 143 meters and beyond. Noh In-seong's first ceiling-scraping home run at the Jamsil Dome had arrived.
"Shame. If this place were fully retractable, I think that one clears the stadium entirely."
"...Aren't you going to run? Hector's been staring a hole through you this whole time."
And from the moment the ball left the ceiling until the outfielder stood there gawking at it where it lay — Noh In-seong had taken exactly five steps from home plate.
The home-run staredown. Followed, as a bonus, by a fashionably delayed bat flip tossed behind him and a little smile flashed up at the pitcher.
In the Majors, this would have earned Noh In-seong all three stages of a formal duel challenge.
"What are you looking at? What, never seen a guy like me before? Figured as much."
He kept staring the whole way, taunting, strolling instead of running.
Noh In-seong touched home having walked every base.
WOOOOOOO——!!!
A baserunning performance soaked from head to toe in one message: come at me whenever you've got the stones.
Before the game, the Grizzlies' manager had gathered his starters and hammered on one point above all: that damned little punk Noh In-seong had no intention whatsoever of showing them any respect.
'That kid... he's planning to provoke you and J-Lo nonstop...'
"...And I'm just supposed to watch this clown act and swallow it?!!"
Hector's gut had been boiling since the first inning. But what could he do? Korean baseball was a culture where even superstars were resigned to hierarchy eating the young — and he wasn't even a true Major-league-caliber pitcher to begin with.
Twelve straight home games had chewed through the bullpen and left the rotation running on fumes. If he flamed out in the first inning, his team was guaranteed to flush this game straight down the drain.
He burned nineteen additional pitches just to record the remaining outs of the first inning, but Hector gritted his teeth, forced his heart rate down, and walked off the mound having at least prevented further damage.
"Cuuuunt—"
The moment the memory of that stroll resurfaced in his head, he hurled his glove to the ground and started raging.
"I am begging you — would it kill the plan if I just drilled that bastard in the skull and took the ejection?!"
Looking around at the stunned faces of his teammates, one could see Hector's usual conduct for what it really was.
"Easy, Hector. I had no idea this was the kind of thing that set you off...!!"
Starting catcher Jeong Han-sol first, then the whole group converged on him, scrambling to defuse the bomb. Hector — a man who had never once caused a personality problem for anyone in his career — flying into a rage this monstrous.
"One more stunt like that, and even if it costs me a suspension, I will end that son of a bitch."
CRAAACK—!!
"...What? No, hold on. NOW he runs? Suddenly he's installed with manners?"
Getting shelled in consecutive at-bats was infuriating, and the bat flip still grated — but now, watching Noh In-seong suddenly bounce around the bases at a respectable clip, Hector could only stand there, bewildered.
'...Then why the hell didn't he run the first time?'
'Wait. Was there a reason? Did I just blow up at him over nothing?'
His head tangled itself into knots in an instant. And baseball, whatever else it was, was not a game you could play properly through that kind of emotional fog.
CRAACK—!!
In the blink of an eye: eight runs allowed on four hits and two walks, two of them home runs. Yanked before he could even finish three innings, Hector hung his head.
Meanwhile Noh In-seong sat on the bench, yapping away with Lim Jae-min.
"In-seong, why'd you run fast this time?"
"Because it keeps them guessing. Makes them stop and think about whether it's on purpose or not."
Drop your pants suddenly in the middle of the street, and you're a lunatic. But if a hornet flies out of your pants, an emergency evacuation comes first. Same principle.
"And in the middle of all that second-guessing — unlike someone like me, who couldn't care less — normal people have this thing called guilt."
Because guilt exists, ordinary humans stop being able to bring their usual form to the mound.
"Me? I just wanted to shake up one starting pitcher. That's all."
— Figured I'd knock a home run or two out while I was at it. Worked like a charm.
"...Wow. I am genuinely so glad I got drafted right after you, In-seong."
Lim Jae-min belatedly realized that what he'd endured back in high school had been the mild flavor.
Noh In-seong's vicious little schemes had landed flush.
The battered starter got pounded, and then the exhausted bullpen came in and got pounded with perfect fairness.
The Doubles' paper-thin relief corps got tagged in the same stroke.
The game ended 11-6, but Noh In-seong was not satisfied.
"...Next time, I'm going to have to do something about that guy."
The Doubles had won — and picked up their next homework assignment in the process.