The Author NTR Drifted (3)
Yu Riyeon. The name had a faintly North Korean ring to it, but she was pure-blood South Korean through and through.
She had a figure with serious volume and the looks of a classic cool beauty. Her default mode with everyone was icy and businesslike, a permanent crease between her brows giving her a permanently forbidding glare.
One more thing worth adding: she had quite a few piercings in her ears. For some reason yesterday she’d shown up with them looking clean and minimal, but that was beside the point.
Her hair was secret two-tone too—black on the outside, blue on the inside. The overall vibe was someone skating right along the razor edge of what a working adult could get away with styling-wise.
And that was the woman who, right in the middle of work hours, pinged me not on the company messenger but on private chat.
I was not some generic “hey.” I was a person with an actual name—Gam Injae. If she didn’t want to use my name, the least she could do was call me Manager or something.
Less than thirty seconds had passed since the first message.
Where had the cool beauty Riyeon gone…
Aigoo, seriously—why keep asking!
But I could put up with it. Riyeon was a cool beauty, after all. The world had a long-standing habit of giving beautiful women a free pass, and I was the type who went along with that habit.
The second I replied, the read receipt lit up and another message arrived. Why was she hounding me like this?
A flicker of irritation rose—then my entire thought process seized up.
Injae. Hold on a second.
You are currently having a private messenger conversation with a pretty woman.
Is this real life?
I was chatting with Riyeon from the next desk over? And on messenger, no less?
Wow. Just exchanging words with her would already have been a blessing, but messenger meant the whole conversation history stayed forever. And she was even giving me instant replies!
Was this finally the moment in my life when I could talk to a woman without any pressure?
Trivial small talk, whatever—I didn’t care. For a beauty like her, I was confident I could take anything she threw at me!
This was a completely different story!
Just yesterday the two of us had taken serious emotional damage from the NTR Drift of Even After Knowing Everything of You and had gotten completely wasted drinking until dawn. My shredded heart was still in the middle of being stitched back together.
Even on the way to work I’d been scouring Korean and Japanese local communities, reading posts condemning the author and the publisher for comfort, all while suffering over a past that had already happened and a present that refused to change.
Setting aside the fact that Riyeon was a beauty—we were comrades who shared the exact same wound. Instead of offering the consolation of “let’s go on a date,” she was actively digging the knife back in!
“Wow, he’s taking a hiatus over this? His conscience finally exploded.”
Still, the title was far too clickbait-y to just scroll past. I followed the link she’d sent. Starting in Japan and spreading worldwide, our author-chan—better known as that Trashy Inversion Guy, or “Inversion Whore” if you were feeling unkind—had been hit with every kind of attack over the NTR Drift. Now, citing reasons of mental and physical health, he was going on a two-week hiatus.
The site the news was posted on wasn’t major, but it still had a decent amount of credibility. Under the headline they were explaining the “Mizuki drug-affair incident?” in carefully sanitized newspaper language. Online communities, of course, had already christened it the Mizuki Drug Bulgogi Incident.
If you wanted to be precise, the correct name was the Mizuki Drug Gangbang Bulgogi Incident, but somehow “Drug Bulgogi” just hit harder and was easier to say, so that version had stuck. The first time I saw the nickname I almost cried—not as a joke, for real. Until lunchtime yesterday she had still been my absolute favorite heroine. I never imagined I’d end up calling her by a slur like that. Last night while we were drinking and browsing the communities together, Riyeon had even teared up a little when she saw it.
It had only been two days, but like Riyeon said, the experience of having your skull repeatedly cracked open was not pleasant. And the ominous feeling that it was going to keep happening an unknown number of times was driving me insane.
That said, I was still a pretty optimistic person at heart. The kind who always looked for hope inside despair. That was why I’d quit smoking, after all. I always hoped the world would get a little better… though I also had a selfish streak that wouldn’t mind secretly siphoning some of that bright light for my own life like an electricity thief.
Yesterday she’d said the idea of it was kind of hot as pure porn material. She’d still claimed she hated it, but when my face hardened she’d hurriedly clarified that it was a genre she could never, ever forgive.
And me? How did I feel?
NTR as pure porn material was ridiculously hot. If you yanked your brain out and just skimmed the important scenes the way you watch porn, it delivered an undeniable jolt. So if someone was going to write NTR, the right way was to treat it as that kind of emotionless consumable product.
Giving a heroine who’s going to get stolen a full narrative and emotional investment was basically making the reader project onto her and experience their girlfriend’s or wife’s cheating by proxy. In other words, NTR was a destructive, unnecessary genre whose very existence was a sin. In real life NTR was an unethical crime, period.
What? Incest genres would also be unethical if they happened in real life, so why wasn’t I complaining about those? Shut up. I was absolutely not speechless, so just shut up. Who brings such a cowardly, dogshit argument into this?
Whatever the case, for me NTR never rose above one-time disposable jerk-off material. For a main story I actually wanted to emotionally invest in and sit down with, it had to be pure romance—maybe a harem if I was being really generous with the action. I didn’t discriminate between male-oriented or female-oriented, but I did discriminate by genre.
After running through that whole chain of thought, I calmly typed my reply.
So now I got scolded for answering quickly too?
More importantly, don’t send me stuff over chat that you could just think to yourself. The way she kept switching between formal and casual speech was confusing.
Hmm…
Thinking about it again, this was starting to feel a lot like the pointless conversations the popular kids used to have with girls back in college. A messenger conversation led by a beauty—this was rare merchandise, you know.
Alright. Once again I had found the drive to endure unreasonableness. As expected, beautiful women were creatures who delivered both unfairness and joy at the same time.
“Injae~. Did we finish processing that workplace accident claim from last week? I need this year’s accident occurrence count and the list of people due for health checkups by end of day.”
“…Yes.”
That particular truth, however, did not apply to handsome men.
Our good-looking Management Support Team Leader had no idea that health checkups fell under general affairs. And he was supposed to be a team leader.
I would keep stressing this: at this company, general affairs and HR were split into separate parts. Was he dumping this on me because general affairs had a lot of women? Because I was the only guy over in HR?
How very sweet of him.
Separate from the fact that he was a handsome man in his mid-thirties, the president liked him, so they’d stuck a marketing guy in as the manager of Management Support. That was how things like this happened. I could have protested this latest dump if I wanted to, but then I’d have to start by explaining the basic concepts of general affairs versus HR work. And honestly, health-checkup support sat in a gray zone between the two.
General affairs handled the checkup notices, but questions about special leave on checkup day went to HR. It felt like the gray was heavily tilted toward general affairs, yet the team leader was using that tiny speck of HR-colored gray as an excuse to score points with the other female employees.
So the problem wasn’t even that he was handsome, was it?
If my career hadn’t already been thoroughly wrecked, I never would have ended up working under a company and a team leader who didn’t even know these basics. In so many ways, I was a man with a lot of sins.
“Riyeon, want to grab lunch together again today?”
He asked in a soft tone, but the meaning was clearly “let’s eat together.”
I rolled my eyes fast. The gazes the other general affairs women were leveling at Riyeon were not gentle in the slightest. The same way I was wary of the handsome team leader, they were wary of the beautiful woman named Riyeon. The difference was that I was alone, and they were a collective—an army.
Female armies were terrifying.
“Is it a company dinner today too?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I’m fine. I’m on a diet.”
Ice-cold. So that businesslike attitude applied even to the handsome team leader.
“But I heard Injae couldn’t make it to the dinner yesterday?”
And now you’re turning the topic onto me?!
Every pair of eyes swung my way. Unwanted attention was bad for the heart.
“Ah… is that so?”
The team leader’s reaction was pure “Huh? You were there?” When he needed work done he could find me with his eyes closed. If it wasn’t work, people like me simply didn’t exist in his field of vision. I was definitely going to dig into his background later. There had to be a few office romances in there.
“Yes, yes. I told you I couldn’t go because of work.”
“Did you?”
I absolutely had not.
“You’re always so busy, Team Leader. It just kind of slipped by.”
Even so, he was my team leader, my superior, so I covered for him so he wouldn’t lose face. Dale Carnegie said it: a person who has been humiliated never forgets it—whether it was their own fault or not. A truly shameless mechanism.
“Then let’s definitely eat together next time.”
“Yes.”
“You too, Riyeon—enjoy your lunch.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone, shall we head out for lunch?”
The handsome team leader led the female army out. Just like yesterday, I was left alone in the office.
Great. Once again it was convenience-store sandwich time.
I was rummaging through my backpack when a question flew in from the next desk.
“What do you want to eat?”
“Huh?”
It was Riyeon.
“What do you mean ‘huh’? You have to eat lunch.”
“Ah, right?”
She was a beauty.
“Pick a menu already.”
“A menu?”
Normally beauties didn’t talk to me.
“Yes, a menu… ugh, this is so frustrating!”
Normally beauties didn’t act this casually with me either.
“I said let’s go eat!”
And yet the beauty named Riyeon was telling me to go have lunch with her.
“We drank yesterday, so hangover soup. No choice. You should’ve decided while you still had the chance.”
Hmm.
Huge win!