The Author NTR-Drifted (1)
This was a tragedy.
There was no other way to put it.
At lunch, with no one offering to eat with me, I bolted from my desk alone and wolfed down a convenience-store sandwich. After that, I opened my phone to the latest chapter of a Japanese romance manga — the one that had pinged me with an upload alert exactly ten minutes earlier.
The world really had gotten better. Pay a little money and you could read foreign comics in real time, the second they dropped. It was still in the original Japanese, but with the rough Japanese I'd picked up by ear and eye, I staggered through the dialogue and savored the solid art.
This chapter was supposed to be the one where the heroine I'd been shipping as the official wife — the girl closest to true-heroine status in the story itself — finally confessed to the male lead. Last chapter had ended on her calling him aside and, with difficulty, saying she had something to tell him. It was locked in.
Readers, myself included, were swollen with anticipation.
Sure, we'd gotten irritated at the author for dragging things out — the pair never properly expressing their mutual feelings, wounding and being wounded, dumping every scrap of their pasts — but their pure love, the way they felt about each other, was genuinely tender. Whatever else you could say, the author's direction when it came to that was insane.
Every time the plot took some incomprehensible turn — why would the male lead do that here, why would the heroine, why this disaster at this moment — you'd boil with rage, and then, at the end of the episode, some pure-love moment so soul-scorching you'd go, damn it, just this once, and the forced logic would seal the cracks in your brain all over again. I had no idea how many times my skull had been stitched back together.
Even recently, the male lead had finally gotten his head on straight and started making textbook-perfect appeals — and still the heroine kept dodging at critical moments or ditching him for other plans, stacking irritation and fury right up to the ceiling.
But?
As of today, all that irritation and fury were going to melt away like snow. That was the promise.
If it was our dear author-chan, Trashy Inversion Guy, he was absolutely going to reward all the patience so far. And not just any reward — a full, seamless D-cup of pure euphoria, no gaps allowed.
I was furious and humiliated at how thoroughly I was still being played by author-chan even knowing better, but on the other hand my heart was already doing cartwheels.
Whew. Weirdly, the office internet was garbage, so the latest chapter took a little longer to load. I forced down the swell of happy anticipation and scrolled.
The male lead's tense face. The heroine flushed pink.
Strange. No speech bubbles.
No speech bubbles, and yet the heroine had her eyes closed, speaking to him. As he listened to her confession, his expression flinched, then kept looking worse and worse.
In the next panel below, a black gradient swallowed the frame and dropped us into some inner monologue — flashback or truth, hard to say. It cut back to a much earlier day, a chance near-miss with the male lead, and then: a cocky, sleazy extra guy doing the heroine a small favor. In thanks, she makes a private plan with him.
On that nearly-100-percent date, she somehow ends up spilling her worries about the male lead. The extra listens kindly, then with a greasy smile says she needs to put the pressure down. She feels a little freer but says it isn't easy — so he offers a "special drink." She takes it without suspicion. Her vision suddenly brightens; she finds it amazing. Then she looks at the extra and, with some unknown bodily reaction, flushes—
Wait. What is this?
Hang on, the two of them are leaving the café — where are they going? Why is a love-hotel strip appearing? Why are they going in? Why are they coming out at night?!
Hey. Hey. Wait a second!
In just a few panels, why is the background some mansion interior, and why is it not just the extra around the heroine but a whole pack of thugs, and why are you guys shooting up your arms? She's doing it too?
And, for contrast, in the same timeframe: the male lead alone, grinding through part-time work or studying.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, you son of a bitches—!!!!!!!"
My rage-soaked roar tore through the office. Everyone else had gone out for lunch; no one was there to hear it.
Yes. This was a tragedy.
An indescribable, wretched end that had abandoned pure love. There was no other way to explain it.
Over three hundred chapters of the heroine's chastity and pure love, trampled for nothing. Without any warning — no, maybe not without warning. There had been foreshadowing. Nearly fifteen chapters of it. This bastard of an author had been stacking it carefully, hadn't he?
The official platform tags for this manga read romance, comedy, pure love, bold as brass. So I'd told myself, surely not. I'd soothed myself that the genre tags meant this was just a device for healthy tension.
"Son of a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch—!"
Even After Knowing Everything of You — the breakout hit of the author who'd crawled from the underground into the light, Trashy Inversion Guy. The work that had been aggressively marketed as a pure-love story of young people stumbling through mistakes and growing past them, sweetness at 1000%. In its fifth year of serialization, at chapter 316, it yanked a hard NTR Drift into a drug orgy for the girl everyone had treated as the true heroine — and carved a deep, ugly line through manga history, Japan and beyond.
It drove a railroad spike through readers' hearts the same way it did the male lead's, shredded them, and earned massive protests and boycotts on- and offline. The one drift you were never, ever supposed to make.
The reaction to the latest chapter? Of course it was a dumpster fire.
After the fastest illegal Korean scanlation spoilers in history hit the net, the entire loyal readership that used to scream "Author-chan's pure-love beam grew me a uterus I never had—!" flipped into antis overnight. Collective intelligence brainstormed how best to fillet author and publisher so they'd die screaming, while the archaeological dig into why this disaster had happened kept right on going.
Looking at people on the boards who'd taken the same psychic damage I had, the only comfort I could scrape was the miserable thought that at least I hadn't been alone. There was no way I was getting into work mode after that.
Question marks kept spinning through my head. Author-chan — no, Inversion Guy — no, that Inversion whore bastard — what the hell was he thinking, staging a sit-in to force this through? And what kind of guts did editorial have, printing it as-is?
The community boards swarmed with speculation — the author and editorial had always hated each other; the editor in charge was a gay sex slave who deep-throated the author's dick — but all of it was pure guesswork. On posts saying editorial would respond and order a revision, I privately agreed, please God let that happen. Even so, the timeline where our favorite heroine's treatment had been thoroughly wrecked would stay burned into our memories forever.
I was staring at my phone, trying to settle a stomach that churned like I'd been drinking hard, when a cold voice cut in from beside me.
"Injae-nim."
"Yes? Ah — yes."
"When are you sharing the marketing department personnel list? I mentioned it this morning."
"It'll be ready shortly, yes."
"Please hurry. I need to place the order."
This, too, was strange.
The woman at the desk next to mine, with that stiff way of speaking, was in General Affairs. Her name was Yu Riyeon. Riyeon had a faintly North Korean ring to it, but she was pure South Korean, born in Seoul. I'd checked her personal file myself in HR. That much was solid.
The reason I found Riyeon strange had nothing complicated about it. Right up until she spoke to me, she had been in a good mood. Good since morning, even.
When lunch came and, at the handsome team leader's invitation, the whole Business Support team headed out for a group lunch, the smile never left her face. For the record, I was also on Business Support according to the org chart — and they left me behind.
A woman whose default setting with people was ice-cold had, for some reason, been grinning to herself alone since morning. Then she went to lunch with the handsome team leader and seemed even happier — only to snap straight back to baseline the second she addressed me.
What had I done wrong?
I didn't know. Today's me knew nothing.
"Riyeon-nim, I shared the marketing department list over messenger."
"Yes. Please also send this year's national health insurance enrollees and the exam item lists by partner hospital."
Why was health insurance coming to HR…? That was General Affairs work. Plenty of companies bundled HR and General Affairs into one team, but ours kept them separate. And after not taking me to the team lunch, she was dumping work on me?
Something surged up my throat, but I summoned Buddha, Jesus, and Allah and, as always, HR endured. Endured — but today was the limit. My mental state was already shredded to hell.
Maybe that was why my work crawl was glacial. Everything was simple stuff that would've been done in minutes if I'd just kept my files tidy, but I kept opening extra browser tabs and losing the thread.
I checked the time: 7:30. Six o'clock quitting time was long gone. Everyone who was going to leave had left; only Riyeon at the next desk remained.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
The sound of her typing and mouse-clicking was pure irritation. I felt eyes on me. On impulse I stood and dug through my pockets, but I was in the middle of quitting smoking — and putting on weight because of it. Sitting back down felt awkward, so I headed for the break room.
Coffee. Get a grip. Whether caffeine could resurrect a mental state ground to powder was another question. Nothing sweet appealed, so I dumped a sugar-free Americano mix and hot water into a cup and stirred halfheartedly.
That was when it happened.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, you son of a bitches—!!!!!!!"
I nearly spilled the coffee. Startled, and wondering what the hell had exploded, I rushed out of the break room.
And I saw it.
"You're supposed to drop the confession there! That you liked him! That you've liked him forever, kept yourself pure, took care of your body, looked only at him! You fucking bitch! What is drug sex supposed to be! Drug sex! If you were going to do this, why drag the will-they-won't-they for over three hundred chapters! You should've stamped the free-use whore certification on her from chapter one! Why do this now! What about my emotional damage—!!!!"
Riyeon, slamming her desk like she meant to break it, thrashing in full meltdown.
Our eyes met. I flicked a glance at the phone in her hand.
Familiar. Familiar cover, familiar art style. And that lethal content I'd scrolled through once — no, many times — at lunch. The critical hit landed all over again.
"Whuh-heh?!"
"Eh?"
"Ughk?!"
I clutched my solar plexus and dropped to one knee. Damn it — this was past the point of recovery!
"A-are you okay?"
Don't come closer! Do not come closer!
I jabbed frantically at Riyeon's phone.
"What? Should I call 119?!"
"No, that's not—!"
I couldn't breathe! But I flailed hands and feet in a desperate bid to communicate enough to stay alive.
"Put that away! Put it away! Get the NTR out of my face!"
She sucked in a breath. I couldn't get air in or out. Riyeon hurried over and shoved the phone screen at me.
"You… you've already seen it, haven't you?"
"I said put it awa—!!"
Automatic evasion protocol engaged under extreme mental-collapse risk. My thrashing hand smacked her phone and knocked it flying. With malicious luck, the phone landed face-up without a single scratch and beamed its NTR-laden screen straight at us.
"Kyaaaaaaaaaa—!!"
"Gyaaaaaaaaaa—!!"
A woman's scream and a man's scream tore through the evening office.
That was how I learned it.
The girl at the desk next to mine absolutely hated NTR.