INTERNET YAMERO
The moment Kang Min-ah truly understood the nature of Kim Yi-seon's internet life came during their week living together.
Spending every waking hour beside someone for a full week means you come to know their daily patterns in intimate detail, whether you want to or not.
At first she'd assumed his behavior was just a nervous tic, a lingering symptom of his anxiety. By now, however, she knew perfectly well it went far deeper than that.
"Yi-seon, how many hours a day do you think you spend on the internet?"
"Uh... a reasonable two hours?"
"Hoo... I can't even understand how two hours counts as 'reasonable,' but you're on longer than that. Every time you get a break between training, work, and everything else, the phone comes out first. Add all those little sessions up and you're past four hours."
To Kang Min-ah, who had never so much as set foot in an online community, it was genuinely hard to grasp what anyone could possibly do on the internet for that long.
He wasn't playing some absorbing game or pursuing a hobby that demanded focus. All he did was read simple forum posts and write replies. And yet he logged in multiple times a day and sank hours into it?
"Weren't you just whining the other day that there's nothing worth reading in manga these days, that you finish everything in an hour? So I got curious about why the internet takes you so long, and I looked—and you were all arguing over whether a dagger or a baseball bat would win in a fight."
"When did you even see that?"
Kim Yi-seon was flustered. He apparently thought he hadn't been caught, but when you turn on your screen and browse communities that often, it's harder not to notice.
"See this? He doesn't even know when he got caught. This is exactly how things like this whole incident happen."
"Kang Min-ah, aren't you overdoing it a little? Calling it an 'incident' when it was just their one-sided claim with zero evidence—"
"Stay out of it, Lee Ye-eun. That's not the point right now. And the internet was only an indirect cause. If we're being precise, isn't the direct cause you?"
Lee Ye-eun, who had just tried to push back, sank without a trace.
Kim Yi-seon apparently gave up on arguing entirely and switched tactics to playing the pity card.
"Min-ah, come on. It's not like I have some bad habit like other guys—manga and the internet are my only guilty pleasures, and banning them outright is just cruel... right? Let's just chalk this one up to a misunderstanding."
But Kang Min-ah was resolute.
"I won't ban it completely. In exchange, you only use it in front of me."
"In front of you?"
"Yes. As long as it's not community sites, social media, or ego-searching, I won't care if you read manga or watch baseball—so enjoy yourself freely. That should settle it, shouldn't it?"
"Look, I have privacy too—"
"Is privacy what divides 280 HP, key IQ, and—" she paused, tilting her head. "Whatever the third stat was?"
With that single line, Kim Yi-seon was knocked down for the count.
Bored. Painfully, agonizingly bored.
It had been barely twelve hours since ego-searching and community browsing were banned, and already I'd caught my hand drifting toward the app more times than I could count.
After finishing recovery training, after my checkup with the team doctor, after sitting in on the quick meeting between the players and the coaching staff—every single time, my hand made its way to my phone on pure autopilot.
Min-ah's argument had been so airtight that I'd been forced to admit I was a dopamine addict drowning in internet stimulation. But admitting it doesn't exactly rewire a personality overnight, does it?
So the moment Min-ah stepped out of the room, I couldn't take it another second. I pulled out my phone and opened the community site—
"Oppa. What are you doing right now?"
She'd materialized behind me at some point. I jumped, startled, and hastily killed the screen.
"Oh, uh? I was thinking I might read some manga for a bit."
Lies. I'd already finished every halfway decent translated series uploaded today.
I held my breath and stole glances at Min-ah's face. She let out a small sigh.
"Yi-seon, you don't have to keep checking my reaction. I'm not forcing you—it's a promise between us, remember?"
She'd seen right through me. No excuse was going to fly. But rather than getting angry, she simply wrapped her arms around me gently and continued in a soft, measured voice.
"Your private life and personal tastes are your own, so I have no intention of policing your everyday habits. Still—you did agree that abstaining for the duration of this tournament would be for the best, didn't you?"
Right. She'd come on strong at first with a flat-out ban, but what Min-ah had actually argued for was simply restraint during the tournament.
And honestly, she had a point. Hadn't I acted on pure bravado mid-game over community stuff? The results had turned out well, thank goodness, but frankly it hadn't been a smart thing to do.
Which is why I'd reluctantly agreed to her terms.
I barely restrained my finger from tapping the community site bookmark and opened the manga site instead.
And since I was already caught up on everything anyway, I figured I might as well use this opportunity to hold a little manga appreciation session with Min-ah, and started browsing for something to read together.
Would there be anything out there a current middle school girl—and a manga novice—could actually enjoy?
"Oppa. Isn't this the series you were reading before?"
"Hm? This one?"
As I scrolled up and down the list, she pointed at a single title with her finger. Iron Knight of Mars. A hardcore shounen mecha series that any observer would peg as strictly for core genre fans.
It wasn't so embarrassing I couldn't show it to another person, but I couldn't imagine it being her cup of tea.
"That one's all robots and mecha—no way you'd find it fun, Min-ah. Let's just pick something else."
"You're the one taking a break, not me—you're picking for your enjoyment, aren't you? So pick something you like."
No, seriously, I'm saying it's because I've already read—
But Min-ah coaxed me along with a warmth in her expression that was unlike her usual self, and I found it hard to get a single word of protest out.
And so we began a full read-through of Iron Knight of Mars from chapter one. No matter how I looked at it, this could not possibly match a girl's tastes.
Kang Min-ah had taken a profound shock the day she watched Lee Ye-eun handle Kim Yi-seon using her "mission and reward" training method. It was the first time in her life she'd felt herself defeated on the field of pure knowledge.
Chewing over that taste of defeat, she had spent every day since devouring psychology texts and acclaimed works on the differences between men and women and the nature of romance, steadily stockpiling wisdom. Nothing less than a campaign of heroic endurance.
And today, that stockpile was being deployed in full. First, negotiation. The opening move of any negotiation is to demand something extreme and apply pressure, then gradually relax your terms to soften the other party's resistance.
She had done exactly that. She'd opened by implying a total ban, then walked her conditions down step by step: permitted, but only in her sight; not permanently, but only for the duration of the tournament. And so on.
Faced with terms so difficult to reject on principle, even Kim Yi-seon had eventually caved. Just like that, she'd succeeded in cutting him off from the communities—at least for now.
Next came the plan to cure the addiction for good. In Kang Min-ah's analysis, the reason Kim Yi-seon couldn't stop himself from stimulus-heavy sites like community forums was simple: he had no one to talk to.
Because for all his dazzling exterior, Kim Yi-seon had no friends. Precisely speaking—no friends to share his hobbies with.
According to a certain romance handbook Kang Min-ah had read, men absolutely require companions who share and validate their hobbies. But for Kim Yi-seon, while he had people for baseball, he had no one at all to share his manga hobby with.
Since that need was going unmet, she concluded, he was outsourcing his hobby-sharing to stimulating community sites.
"Turns out the author put a ton of effort into building this world, you know? The mecha designs are seriously impressive too. Right?"
"It's better than I expected. Shall we read more together next time?"
That was why she had deliberately chosen a manga made for men. A manga women would enjoy was something she could already discuss with Lee Ye-eun, after all.
"Want me to recommend a few more in a similar vein? There's some even better stuff out there than this."
Look at him. Even now, the moment Kang Min-ah posed a few carefully chosen questions about the fun parts and her points of confusion, he lit up and rambled on and on.
That was exactly it. Because this hunger had never been satisfied, wasn't it obvious he'd been reduced to spouting nonsense on some bizarre community site like "Is Meteor a fire spell or an earth spell?"
The sight of Kim Yi-seon chattering away in high spirits right now was genuinely adorable. How to put it—like a giant dog wagging its tail furiously. To think a man years older and half a head taller than her could strike her as cute. Anyone would call it remarkable, but Kang Min-ah had felt this way about him for a long time.
If she had to rank his cutest moments, today's display sat near the very top, second only to those instances when he'd smashed a home run and radiated pure joy while desperately trying not to show it. By Kang Min-ah's personal scale, that was elite tier.
And the thought that she, and only she, got to see this side of him every time sent a tingling shiver up her spine and left her chest warm and fluttery. Surely even Lee Ye-eun—that insufferable show-off who strutted around claiming she understood Kim Yi-seon better than anyone—had never witnessed this side of him, had she?
Her motivation redoubled. Next time, should she come having pre-studied the manga and steer the conversation herself?
Before heading home, Kang Min-ah first extracted from Kim Yi-seon a recommendation list of his personal favorite manga. He'd seemed embarrassed, steering clear of anything explicit or harem-flavored, but the result was a long list of works he genuinely considered masterpieces.
Then, the moment she got home, she began researching where information about these titles was most abundant and most actively shared. For pre-studying, reading the commentary volumes alongside the textbook was simply more efficient. A model student's logic, through and through.
"...'Manga Gallery'?"
And there it was—a certain community site surfacing at the very top of every search. Judging by the interface, this was clearly the place Yi-seon was always browsing.
Frankly, even a glance made her brow furrow. It had looked bad enough in passing over his shoulder, but seeing the thread list up close, it was stuffed wall-to-wall with content she found distasteful. This kind of pure-stimulation site was exactly what she needed to pry him away from.
Still—if you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles. To understand which threads sparked his interest, and which aspects of the manga he loved hooked other readers, checking this place directly was the surest method.
So she suppressed her mild distaste and scrolled through the posts. And then, one thread caught Kang Min-ah's eye.
A post about Iron Knight of Mars—the very manga she'd just read with Kim Yi-seon. She looked over the handful of panels filling the screen, nodded along in mild agreement, and tapped the recommend button.
Her remark to Kim Yi-seon that Iron Knight of Mars was "better than expected" had been no polite fiction. She hadn't gotten much out of the robots and the battle scenes, granted, but the characters were more charming than she'd anticipated.
The operator in particular—the woman managing the protagonist's robot and daily life. The relationship and story between this female operator and the protagonist were genuinely compelling.
In a way, it felt close to the dynamic between a baseball player and the agent supporting him. By Kang Min-ah's personal reading, if this manga had a heroine at all, there was no candidate but the operator.
But the comments under that post were in complete opposition to everything she believed.
The childhood friend? Did they mean that character who showed her face a few times before chapter ten and thereafter appeared only in phone calls and flashbacks?
Kang Min-ah read fast. Very fast. As a result, though she'd spent barely an hour reading alongside Kim Yi-seon, she had blazed through forty-plus chapters. The current serialization hadn't even hit one hundred chapters—what on earth had happened in the stretch between?
Kang Min-ah purchased the entire series on the manga site that instant and began racing through to the latest chapter. Battle battle slice-of-life battle slice-of-life battle battle battle battle. In the remaining sixty-odd chapters, slice-of-life barely existed—almost everything was combat.
Even the modest slice-of-life scenes that did survive carried essentially no plot.
Wait. What? She turned down his casual invitation to grab a drink together, and so she got rejected at her own confession?
In the subsequent development, the childhood friend remains utterly useless. All she does is occasionally pop up on video calls and cling to him under the pretext of being an old friend. She contributes nothing to the protagonist—quite the opposite; she's a pure emotional burden. The story occasionally hints that she likes the protagonist too, yet she never once confesses.
How could a shameless woman like that possibly be the true heroine? If she loved him that much, the answer wasn't to cling and hover—it was to stand up straight and confess like an adult.
Kang Min-ah genuinely, sincerely could not comprehend how the Manboong-i of the world looked at a character like that and saw their heroine. So she left her questions behind in the thread, with utmost politeness.
It was absolutely, positively not because something else entirely came to mind.
But to Kang Min-ah's impeccably logical questions, the community users replied only with circular non-arguments.
She'd known all along this was a gathering place for the shallow and the dim, but the longer she conversed with them, the more they displayed a truly gifted talent for enraging people.
Kang Min-ah's expression as she stared at the screen was calmer than it had ever been—but her eyes burned as sharply as they did when she argued with Lee Ye-eun. Which is to say: she was extremely angry.
"Min-ah, what is wrong with your eyes?!"
The next day, Min-ah appeared before me with dark, heavy bags hanging under both eyes.
My fingers had itched all night without the community, but I'd remembered my promise to Min-ah and gritted my teeth and gone to sleep. If I had caved and gone scrolling anyway, the guilt would have crushed me.
She was stressing herself out worrying over even the tiniest corners of my daily life. What kind of person couldn't hold out for that?
I leaned in to examine the dark circles under Min-ah's eyes, guilt pooling in my chest. She must have barely slept at all last night.
"Were you that upset? I'm sorry. From now on I'll be careful about skinship with Ye-eun, and I'll keep the communities—"
"Oppa."
Her voice was somehow glacial.
"Huh? What is it, Min-ah?"
"Who do you believe the true heroine of Iron Knight of Mars is?"
Out of nowhere? And why manga, of all things?
Still, it wasn't a hard question to answer, and Min-ah's mood was clearly foul, so I replied immediately, doing my best not to provoke her.
"I'd have to say the operator, right? The childhood friend is a character in name only—she's basically background lore at this point."
She hadn't appeared in any of the recent chapters, so there was no way she was the heroine.
And then, for reasons I will never understand, the moment she heard my answer, the atmosphere around Min-ah thawed completely.
"...As I thought. The heroine-denial crowd was right all along."
"Huh?"
"Nothing at all. You're watching today's match from the stands, right? Shall we head over before the crowds arrive?"