The Red Balloon

The third game of the series against the Superstars ended surprisingly early.

Eight runs crossed the plate almost immediately after first pitch, reducing the Superstars' starter to smoldering ashes.

This, from Jeong Hwi-wook — a pitcher with perpetually shaky command who had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠finally been handed another starting opportunity.

"You won't be getting another chance, not even in hell!"

Walk. Walk. Single. Walk. Single. Walk. Home run. Out. Home run.

Nine batters, eight runs — a scorecard of genuinely miraculous design that dragged every fan watching straight into hell.

Unable to endure another second, the manager trudged out of the dugout, and his starter was subjected to an almost total Zero-Quick — pulled having recorded exactly one out.

A pitching machine that threw balls, and every so often, one right down the middle, was banished from the mound. In his place came a bullpen that had been ridden hard all series long.

"Hey, you shut them down yesterday. What makes you think you'll shut them down today?"

"BURN US UP, WHY DON'T YOU...!!"

Of course, a lineup that had caught fire never goes out easily. The next out cost two more runs. The one after that needed two more on top of that.

"Shame, really. Two more runs and that would've rewritten the KBO record books."

Noh In-seong smacked his lips, openly mourning the bottom of the first that had ended before his turn came around.

When a player said something like that it was a manners problem, but In-seong was a man with zero manners to speak of, so it meant nothing at all.

What followed needs no elaboration — a one-sided beatdown, delivered pitch after pitch.

Which is to say: from the Doubles' perspective, there was no need to score any more.

Their rotation ace, Caleb, bulldozed through the opponent's half-innings like a heavy machine, and the Superstars — facing bedrock granite in the form of Caleb — picked up shovels and tried to dig their way to a win without a single slugger in the lineup.

No wonder the Korean dictionary had just added a new entry — shovveling, one word, no space.

Where there's a will, there's a way! they cried, hacking away at the earth, but all the ground returned was a steady clang of steel on stone.

For all the Superstars knew, the sound was coming from inside their own skulls.

A pitcher already groomed to MLB forty-man-roster standard.

Caleb James quietly handed down his verdict on the Superstars' lineup: construction prohibited.

And that was that. By the final out, it was 17-0. Another crushing defeat by a landslide margin.

The third victim of the sixteen-game homestand was marched out of Jamsil Dome, thoroughly beaten, and deported.

The fourth victim-in-waiting was the Suwon Magicians.

They were another team that had pulled off a respectable rebuild, but they remained one of the franchises with a very, very long road ahead.

Their starting rotation was fully stocked — it was the lineup that was the problem.

Kim Jin-il was single-handedly shouldering the entire team like one man holding up a fallen log, and while they had at least added a bat named Song Hak-joo...

"Swing! Strike three! Batter out!"

"Damn it! What the hell am I! Missing?!"

As Song Hak-joo's bat-shattering tantrum made abundantly clear, that log was still awfully heavy.

In truth, across the entire series he had managed one hit — not even an extra-base knock, just a lone single.

Swing path, hitting approach, batting form — everything from crown to instep was being torn out and rebuilt from scratch.

A man playing first-team games with no preparation whatsoever was never going to produce results.

"But taxes must be paid. We're a team betting on next year — or the year after."

Aside from a Suwon front office patiently consoling itself and running him out there every single game, he was a player who had no business anywhere near the first team.

Facing the team that had cast him aside, Song Hak-joo — who had embarrassed himself plenty — turned to look at Noh In-seong.

CRAAAAACK—!!

And then Song Hak-joo turned his head away. Next to In-seong, he looked all the more pitiful.

Neither he nor his team had anywhere near the distance left to travel.

Until they could at least call themselves competitive, more time was going to be required.

A subtle change had come over the Doubles' starting rotation.

Noh In-seong would no longer be cycling through it.

In fairness, if they'd run a six-man rotation from the start of the season, he could have kept spinning through it right up to the final week — but having already eaten a healthy stack of innings, the coaching staff saw no need.

And so the rotation now read: Caleb, Andy, Jeong In-woo, Kim Jeong-mook, Jeong In-young.

If anyone needed extra rest, or a Targeted Outing was called for, In-seong would simply slot in on demand.

With In-seong staying off the mound and resting up for a while, the reporters got curious.

"Exactly when do you plan to take the mound? You've got Incheon coming up soon."

"Incheon? Don't think those guys are making fall baseball."

In other words: he had no intention of wasting innings on a team with virtually no shot at the postseason.

"What I want to hear is the screaming. The 'why does it have to be our team?!' kind of screaming."

Say, a second-place club half a game out of first, bleeding out with every single contest. Or a pack of teams from fifth to seventh separated by one game, stumbling at the decisive moment.

"Or maybe they're just a guy I purely can't stand, so I'll trip him myself."

The announced start against the sixth-place Busan Marines fell squarely into that last category.

"So here's the deal, everybody. Either watch your mouths—"

—or come fight me fair and square. That was the offer.

Noh In-seong was openly extorting the teams for whom every single game was precious.

Thanks to In-seong's little declaration, the negative comments aimed his way dried up for a while.

So what was the man who had frozen the entire baseball world solid in terror doing come Monday?

"...Ugh."

What else? Cleaning his room.

He'd been abroad last week, then played a full week of games and come stumbling home without so much as a proper tidy-up. Roughly two weeks' worth of dust and garbage greeted him at the door.

And since the house did not, in fact, belong to him, the filth in his room was his alone to deal with.

"Aigoo, how do I deal with a pigsty like you... And you call this living on your own? At your age..."

BANG!

In-seong answered his mother's psychological warfare by slamming the door — and while digging through his drawers, he found something.

"...Huh? I had these?"

A box stuffed full of balloons — the very ones he'd recently been using to shoot down drones for sport.

In-seong abandoned cleaning on the spot and slipped out of the house.

"In-seong! Where do you think you're going, mid-cleaning...!!"

BANG!

This time it was the steel front door, so it rang a little louder. He didn't care one bit.

Mom's nagging? That was a problem for Future In-seong.

Present-day In-seong, who had decided blowing off a little accumulated stress took priority, bolted outside.

Helium, as it turned out, was surprisingly easy to get your hands on.

It was sold retail to the general public, after all.

Nostalgia for his younger days, maybe. In-seong blew up strings and strings of balloons and handed them out around the neighborhood.

"When I was a kid, I remember always going up to the vending machine — 'One balloon, please.'"

That was, of course, from before the soul-merger. Afterward, he'd taken one look at the balloon-vending machine prices and quit on the spot.

Before that? You're kidding. Even back then, three folded bills got swallowed like some premium luxury good.

"Oh, squirt. You're here too."

"Hyung! Why are you handing out balloons? Did you open a shop or something?"

"Since when is giving out balloons part of opening a shop? There's no such thing, you little punk."

He crammed every leftover balloon into the kid's arms, then took one lone balloon for himself and went strolling the streets.

Whether it was the veiled threat of skipping straight overseas, no reporter so much as showed his face. Blissfully quiet.

Come lunch-snack hour, he grabbed a quick toast at a street stall, and by the time his balloon had shriveled and dropped to the pavement, he was trudging home with lead in his shoes when—

"Hey! Your balloons wrecked my drone!!"

"Waaah...!!"

The squirt he'd given the balloons to was getting chewed out by some random unhinged adult.

"Hey, squirt. C'mere. Over here."

"Hic... huh?! Hyung!"

The little kid, bawling his eyes out, without a single one of the balloons still in hand.

There was simply no way to stand by and watch this. If anyone was going to scold him, it was me or his mother, thank you very much.

Why me, you ask? Because he took my balloons and lost every last one, that's why. I was coming over to claim one.

"Where'd all the balloons I gave you go? And why are you crying?"

"That lady... she pushed right past me without even looking... and I dropped them all... hnnng."

"Are you this child's guardian?! He wrecked my drone! You'll be paying for— ...Player Noh In-seong?"

From full-throated fury to dead silence, just like that. Now that's novel.

"...Do I know you? Pretty sure we've never met."

"N-no. I'll be going now..."

Watching her bolt off like that — something about this was far from normal, no?

In-seong told the kid he'd handle it and to head home, then tailed the woman.

"So what am I supposed to do about today's shoot, then? I came all the way up to Seoul for this... Aagh!"

"I'm sorry, there was an accident and the drone— ...Gulp."

"You again? Oh Yeon-seok. You sorry son of a bitch."

At this point nothing surprised him anymore. What karmic grudge from a past life was binding this bastard to him, exactly?

"You're yelling at a kid because your drone got knocked out of the sky by a balloon — while you were filming in a densely packed neighborhood?"

"What are you even talking about?! You just appeared out of nowhere—"

"I-I-I-I—!!"

Unlike Oh Yeon-seok, who glared back with a baffled face, the woman beside him was trembling like a leaf in a storm.

You're dead, you two. Think about it — you're a fourth-place club with a lousy record. Right now.

And since you've thoroughly pissed me off, don't you think it's time for a little REWARD?

"Anyway, you at least look like a dead man walking. So go ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠take it all out on that filming-staff guy or whoever's standing next to you."

Having terrorized the pair of idiots, Noh In-seong turned and walked away.

Night was creeping in, after all. It was time to head home.

"In-seong! You never cleaned that room, so I had to do it! And you want to live on your own? You can't even..."

"...GRAAAAAGH...!!"

And so, through entirely his own fault, he had to sit through the nagging after all.

"Oh Yeon-seok... and Gwangju... those cursed bastards... it's all your fault...!!"

The people already getting on his nerves were converted, in an instant, into Noh In-seong's sacrificial lambs.

Oh Yeon-seok was one thing, but Gwangju had done absolutely nothing — a bolt out of the clearest blue sky. Then again, natural disasters have never been known to strike only the guilty.

Grinding his teeth audibly, In-seong crammed himself into his freshly made bed.

The next day, before the game against Incheon, Noh In-seong held a press interview.

He'd apparently seen it somewhere and showed up out of nowhere in a full suit — script in hand, no less.

Everyone scrambled to get cameras rolling, gushing, "Whoa, this is a ratings goldmine" — but the interview In-seong delivered, exactly as written, nothing but the truth, turned out to be spicier than anyone could have imagined.

"Owing to the heinous and unforgivable invasion of Seoul committed by Oh Yeon-seok and the Gwangju Tigers, harm was inflicted upon the speaker's acquaintance."

A deliciously pungent choice of words — and the sly refusal to specify exactly how that harm had been inflicted.

"The speaker hereby declares that his next two starts shall take place across the remaining four games against the Gwangju Tigers."

And far from merely tripping a team in a hurry — an open declaration of intent to snap their legs.

The reporters, presented with this suddenly delicious bounty of clickbait, erupted in cheers.

"Hey, what happens now?! The teams above and below you are going to be thrilled, but—"

"Player Noh In-seong! Is this true? Has this been settled with the club?"

"Just one comment, please! If the start gets cancelled, what will you do?!"

At that, In-seong flashed a wolfish grin and answered.

"If the start gets cancelled, then at the very least Oh Yeon-seok won't be walking out of that stadium on both legs."

Player Noh In-seong! What on earth does that mean?! Player Noh In-seong—!!

Click.

The monitor went dark. Two people let out long, weary sighs, then turned to the man and the woman standing before them and asked in unison:

"...Anything else you'd like to say?"

"...No, sir."

CRASH...!!

—No, the season was already hell enough for this team, so why are you two creating incidents—!! You absolute lunatics—!!!

Glass shattered. Desks and chairs took flight. A veritable gravity-free zone.

Thus did the Gwangju Tigers' general manager's office enter a new era — of deafening chaos, in every possible sense.