Lee Sua Is the Problem
The CEO's office at CT Entertainment, the agency Yang Ha-rin belonged to.
He had a laptop open, and his expression was softer than it had been in a long while. The screen was given over entirely to the Busan International Short Film Festival.
The aide at his side spoke.
"It's ten in the morning. Which means Yang Ha-rin's Wind should be starting its screening right about now."
The CEO nodded, quiet.
"Ten isn't that early. There ought to be a decent crowd by now, no? Nothing going wrong?"
"No, sir. Word from the site is that the turnout is the biggest they've ever had. I don't think you need to worry."
"Heard they spent real money this time. Paying off, then."
"Yes. The tide's already in. All we have to do is row. Everyone who walks through those doors ends up interested in Ha-rin, and the Rookie Award won't be difficult either."
"The Rookie Award. Right. That's Ha-rin's. Obviously."
He nodded, thoroughly satisfied.
"That the whole report?"
From the sofa, where she had sunk so deep it looked as if the cushions had swallowed her, Yang Ha-rin broke the silence for the first time. Her fingers never stopped hammering her phone. That damned forum addiction.
"Director Park Joon's film. You left that report out."
What CT Entertainment was hunting came down to two things: Yang Ha-rin's Rookie Award, and the chance to grind Mystic Entertainment under a heel.
For Yang Ha-rin, whose ending with Sua had been anything but clean, the curiosity was unavoidable. What had Director Park Joon managed to make out of a script that had been kicking around a trash can? And more than anything else—what had Lee Sua's Wi Ji-hye been like?
The aide answered at once.
"Sword should already be done screening. It was the slot right before Wind."
"The reaction?"
"We don't know yet. The report ought to be in soon."
"Well. We don't really need to hear it."
The CEO snorted.
"They just so happen to be programmed right up against us. Doesn't matter how proud they are of what they made. People sit through Wind once, and garbage like that won't even stick in memory."
"Ah—a text just came in ahead of the full report. It says the finish on Sword, and the reaction to it, aren't as bad as we thought..."
"What, you think they're going to pan it out loud on the floor? 'It's fine' is just another way of saying it's bland. If they aren't cheering, it doesn't count. We'll set it next to the reaction after Wind and compare."
The smile steeping in the CEO's face only deepened.
"That Park Joon was a joke from the start. A perfectly good Ha-rin sitting right there, and he casts some rookie and pitches a fit about it? An eye that worthless, of course he rolls further downhill every year that passes."
And then, from that laughing face, the smile was simply gone. A moment later the CEO spoke, eyes burning.
"Start working the phones. Every reporter. We win this on volume, so Wind gets pushed everywhere it can be pushed, and anything touching Sword—you plant it as the shit-brained picture that kicked Yang Ha-rin to the curb. Day one, we move first."
"Yes, sir."
"Turn the people behind Sword into the fools of the age, the ones who let Yang Ha-rin slip away, and hang a frame on Wind as the masterpiece that barely clawed its way into the world after every kind of ordeal. You know the feeling."
"Of course. Give Ha-rin a tragic-heroine story, and the networks will come pouring in."
And then the conversation ended.
"..."
The face of the aide who had just taken the field report went strange. At the same moment, he began stealing glances at the CEO.
The report was the problem. What was surging in had blown straight past every forecast they had.
Afternoon. The first day's screenings had closed.
A staffer burst into the CEO's office, urgency all over his face.
"Sir! Sir!"
He was the one who had been sent to the site today, and it took only an instant for every eye in the room to lock onto him.
"What's with all the fuss?"
Did it go that well? The CEO was already brimming with it.
"No. It's—it's about Sword, sir."
"Drop the sob story about the flop that got crushed to death just for having the bad luck to screen before us. Say something nice about Wind. How hot was it down there?"
"It was hot, sir. But..."
The man they'd dispatched pressed on, looking thoroughly stuck.
"Sir, the whole site was on fire with talk of Sword. If anything, it felt like every mention of Wind got buried under it."
"What?"
The CEO's face crumpled, as if he had just heard something grotesque.
"Mystic's Seo Yeon-ju and Kim Seonil acted well, of course. That much sat inside the range we'd already expected. What we didn't expect was the film itself. The finish on it was honestly quite high."
"Does that even make sense? It's a short, at best. The runtime is nothing, and quality alone burying every other title in the conversation? That doesn't happen."
"Yes. The real problem was somewhere else."
The staffer swallowed, throat dry.
"...?"
"Lee Sua acted too well."
"..."
The CEO and Yang Ha-rin went blank at the same time, struck stupid.
Lee Sua, embodying Wi Ji-hye, and doing it well. That possibility had never once lived in either of their heads. They had only been waiting—for Sword to screen, and for the ache of Yang Ha-rin's empty seat to hit everyone in the room.
"Articles. Flood them. All of them."
It was a long while before the CEO got his mouth open, and even then the shock was too large. He couldn't wrangle his stumbling tongue.
"It's not as if Wind came out unwatchable. So—"
"Sir."
This time it was the staffer on the spin. He had been reading the room all along, waiting only for the moment to speak, and now he opened his mouth because he no longer had a choice. It was a truth that would have to be delivered eventually.
"The spin's already been eaten."
"What?"
"Word is, Ha-rin's absence isn't particularly felt. No—if anything, they're saying it's a feeling Ha-rin never could have given them..."
Silence held after that.
Yang Ha-rin, who had been on her phone the entire time, rose quietly and let out a long, sunken breath. Then she picked up the potted plant in the corner of the office. That was the start of it.
Crash—!
"..."
Yang Ha-rin said nothing.
Crash—!
She only kept throwing things, and breaking them.
Meanwhile, the production team of Special Task Force 808 was hard at work today, same as every other day.
Busier than any of them, though, was the crew running the Mutube channel for Special Task Force 808. Why else? Today was the day the teaser went up.
Thirty-one seconds, exactly. A brutally short runtime, and for that very reason nothing in it but the core—the sharpest cuts, packed tight, the choicest of the lot. From a viewer's side of the screen, there wasn't even time to blink.
It began with Seo Yeon-ju's voice, standing before the reporters. The picture cut at once. This time, Kim Seonil.
While that low voice laid the words down at a measured pace, shots flickered past. Yellow tape lettered Special Task Force 808, struck across a murder scene. Park Dohui, her expression loaded. Hwang Myung-pil, smiling like something foul. Kim Seonil, already running.
And then. A certain moment.
One line, slipping in like a joke and wrecking the air. White bangs long enough to swallow the eyes. For a second you might think: the culprit. No. He was clearly wearing the same uniform as Lee Kang-cheol.
An androgynous voice. The kind you wanted to hear once more, precisely because you couldn't place what kind of voice it was.
And then the line that decided it.
The comment section, and every forum on the internet, detonated.
Short as it was, this was still the first time Kim Yu-han had shown his face. Among everyone who had been waiting on Special Task Force 808 with their interest already in hand, it became an enormous topic. Naturally.
...And one more, right here.
"..."
Someone watching a phone, a hand wrapped in bandages.
"..."
Yang Ha-rin, her mood driven down and nailed to the floor.
...What?
They had only met eyes through a screen. All she had done was see a single smile.
Thump... thump...
For the first time in a long while, Yang Ha-rin's heart beat.
The same hour. Gwangalli Beach, Busan.
"All right, then. How about you explain it to us? Nice and slow."
"..."
Sua was hemmed in on every side by her group-chat friends.
What am I supposed to explain? Thinking about it, there isn't even anything to explain.
So Sua simply told the truth.