Normalization (1)
"Is he going to come today…?"
Night had settled over the park. Using the streetlamps as her only light, Shin A-yoon sat on a bench and stared at the ground, her face crumpled with worry.
Looking down at the tablet resting on her knees only made her chest ache for no good reason.
"I worked so hard getting everything ready. I really hope he shows up."
She closed her eyes and rewound the last few days in her mind.
She had poured coffee and energy drinks into herself while scraping together every scrap of information she could find on posture correction so Baek Yi-an could avoid injury, then thrown everything she had into building materials thorough enough to show anyone without shame—so he could put on an even better performance in matches.
If he actually took in what was in there, it would be a huge help to him even after he turned pro. She was sure of it.
"It's 8:54 now… six minutes left."
Watching the hands of the clock crawl toward their promised nine o'clock, she felt her chest slowly tighten.
Honestly, she wasn't sure Baek Yi-an would come.
After she sent the text she had gotten a confirmation that they would meet at the park, yes.
But there had been more than a few nights when she had waited endlessly for a Baek Yi-an who never showed in this darkened park.
Maybe tonight would end the same way.
Maybe she would wait on nothing but the belief that he would come see her, only to realize dawn had arrived and then trudge home alone.
But… at least for today, Shin A-yoon wanted Baek Yi-an to come meet her.
Because the reason she had come to see him tonight wasn't simply to hand over useful information.
"…I want to be honest about how I feel now."
Shin A-yoon liked Baek Yi-an. Not mere fondness—actual affection.
The first time she had felt that way was when they were kids.
More precisely, it was when she had been training as a track athlete and visited the house of her mother's friend, a teacher who had medaled in Asian Games track and field.
"Oh. Hell…o? Um, I'm Shin A-yoon…"
"Haha. We're the same age, so you don't have to talk so formal. You're Shin A-yoon, right? Let's get along."
Of course the biggest reason she had taken a liking to him back then was his looks—but he had plenty of other good points too.
Track and soccer were completely different sports, but he could still understand what it was like being on an athletic team.
Being the same age, they could talk about things and find common ground.
Even when I tore up my thigh and had to give up being an athlete, Yi-an was the one who comforted me here.
She had run out of the house like a child and been sobbing her eyes out in the park. Somehow Yi-an had found her, quietly come up, and held her tight.
She must have looked pathetic, sniffling and drawing stares from people walking by, ugly-crying even under the comforting touch of his hands—
Yet for hours on end, Yi-an had just taken her endless self-pity and kept comforting her.
That was when it started. The moment Shin A-yoon stopped liking him for his face and started liking Baek Yi-an as a person.
Once she gave up the athlete's path, she no longer had any reason to visit his mother's house.
But she still wanted to be near him somehow, so she twisted her career path toward becoming a performance coach just to keep going to his place.
Wanting even a little more time together, she used "I'll share info that might help you" as her excuse and met him at the park every night.
Before she knew it, more than thirteen years of that shared time had piled up.
And Shin A-yoon made up her mind.
She was going to be honest about the feelings she was carrying.
"Can I actually do this…?"
The feelings she held were sincere enough that she would never be ashamed of them in front of anyone.
She could swear to that.
And yet, for some reason, Shin A-yoon had no confidence.
Of course she didn't—because for the past few days, Yi-an had been different from the boy she knew.
"I'm wiped from training. I don't think I can make it all the way to the park, so just go home."
"Huh. You're telling me to copy that bastard Yoon Seung-hwan's form? You think I'm worse than him too?"
…He seemed so on edge.
Could she confess her feelings to a sharp-nerved Yi-an? Could she really reach him?
She didn't know.
She had no confidence.
She had no certainty that she could look at that bristling expression of his, refuse to back down, and finally spit out the words she had only ever kept locked inside.
But she also couldn't just keep carrying it alone like this.
So she threw the dice.
Even without confidence, she called Yi-an to the park first.
If she only kept retreating, another chance would never come.
No matter how cold his eyes stabbed into her, no matter how harsh the words dug into her ears—she would not back down.
Having made that resolve, she waited for Yi-an.
Beep!
And the moment the smartwatch on her wrist finally cried out that it was nine o'clock—
"H-huh? W-what did you just say? Yi-an?"
She was met with a scene she had never imagined.
"I'm apologizing. I've been snapping at you this whole time, so you must've gotten hurt. I won't do it anymore."
Yi-an is bowing his head and apologizing? Th-this isn't what I pictured at all?
Faced with a far gentler Yi-an than she had expected, Shin A-yoon stammered and just stared at him.
A park near Honam First Gate.
It wasn't a park with any official name—just a place the neighborhood people used for walking and exercise.
But to Jeonbuk fans, this park meant something a little different.
Not something good. Something bad.
It's a legendary spot, all right—the place where they hung that stupid banner saying "Who cares about that league crap" after the scout-and-ref bribery scandal came out and the league deducted points so we blew the title.
They claimed they put it up to celebrate the AFC title, but still…
No matter how you spun it, it was hard to understand that kind of thinking from people who called themselves fans of a K League club.
How bad was it? Even I, a kid of about five when the whole mess blew up, was too ashamed to lift my head.
It's a novel, but if they stuck to the history, the same thing happened here. I wonder what the guys who hung that banner are doing now. Still calling themselves Mad Green Boys?
If so, maybe they deserved to be recognized as real fans.
Their temperaments might be a little twisted and they might do things that embarrassed everyone else—but sitting there with your eyes open watching the team you loved collapse was never easy.
In reality, including me, the youth kids we raised so carefully finally exploded and the club fully revived. But this is a novel, so no.
Fans would keep cheering hard, thinking that someday they'd compete for the title again.
But according to the future I knew, they would win exactly once while Yoon Seung-hwan was here—and after that, the collapse would start all over again.
In that case… I'll just have to normalize it myself.
I didn't know if the author actually wanted Jeonbuk to fall. Maybe they had deliberately turned the club into a clown show just to prop up Yoon Seung-hwan.
Or maybe they really were a Jeonbuk fan who had grown sick of a club that still played garbage ball even with the K League GOAT owner on its back.
Either way, in the world the author had drawn, Jeonbuk was clearly a trash team.
So what a chaos agent like me had to do was simple: put everything I had into firing the signal flare for Jeonbuk's revival.
"Of course, I've got something else to fix first."
I looked at Shin A-yoon standing right in front of me, blank-faced, her eyes fluttering.
"Uh… you're apologizing to me…? For real? But why all of a sudden…"
Is me apologizing really that shocking?
It wasn't like I had done a full formal prostration or walked three steps and bowed once. I had just lowered my head and said I was sorry for talking roughly before—and yet Shin A-yoon was blushing like she had just been handed some enormous gift, teetering on the edge of passing out.
Just how viciously did that bastard Baek Yi-an talk to a soft kid like this that she cut him off and went over to Yoon Seung-hwan?
Shin A-yoon had a decent amount of page time in the novel, but most of it was her flirting around with Yoon Seung-hwan. The past barely showed up at all.
As for what I did know…
"A bitch who couldn't even take care of her own body and never even became a player, talking about posture correction? My ass…" Damn. Even thinking about it again, that was way over the line.
Just recalling a line from the novel sent a chill down my spine.
How devastating must that have been from her side?
She had gone through that hell herself, so she stayed up night after day studying just so her precious childhood friend wouldn't walk the same path—and then she handed over everything she had learned like volunteer work.
Ha… just how much of a piece of shit was that guy?
Shame and disgust welled up from deep inside me.
But I decided to leave it at that.
Anyway, I had stopped what was supposed to happen today. For now, that was enough.
"Uh… aah! My tablet!"
Shin A-yoon, who had been completely out of it, suddenly snapped back to her senses and looked down at the ground.
Her tablet was already falling toward the pavement.
Apparently my apology had fried her brain so thoroughly that she had let go of what she was holding.
Thud! Clack!
The moment it hit the ground the tablet bounced once, the cover flipped open, and it lay flat.
Luckily the park surface was the same kind of urethane they used on track fields, so the tablet itself didn't break.
But with the cover open the screen turned on, and whatever was inside started coming into view.
"Th-this is…"
"Ah! Th-that, um, Yi-an…"
The video that started playing as the screen lit up.
The star of that video was me. Footage of me playing in the Youth Championship final—zoomed in exclusively on my legs, no less…
What exactly had she been planning to explain with this?
I tilted my head. Beside me, Shin A-yoon fidgeted and finally spoke in a trembling voice.
"I-I didn't film it with any weird intention! It's just—! You have this tendency to run on your forefoot during matches, and I wanted you to fix that, so… Ah! I'm not comparing you to anyone, so please don't get the wrong idea…"
"It's fine. Keep going."
"H-huh?"
Shin A-yoon squeezed her eyes shut. Her whole face was pure terror.
Had she been bracing for me to explode?
Faced with a far calmer reaction than she expected, she carefully opened her mouth again.
"Y-you're really okay with this? Whenever I said you needed to fix your form, you used to get so mad and tell me to shut up."
"I already said I was sorry for that. I won't do it again. So just talk freely. What's wrong with me, and how I should fix it."
"Ugh… if you're going to put it like that, then I'll just dump it all out?"
She let out a long breath, then pointed all over the screen with clear, focused eyes as she explained—completely different from a moment ago.
"Watching the matches the whole way through, I think you need to change how your foot lands when you run."
"Change my landing?"
"Yeah. You land on your forefoot, right? Both your parents were track athletes, so it probably got baked into your form since you were little… Not that forefoot is bad. For short sprints it's actually the best landing technique."
Maybe it was optimal for short distances—but not for me?
Of course, the me of right now didn't land on my forefoot anymore. Still, I decided to just listen quietly for now.
"Forefoot only really shines in short distance. Sprinting matters in soccer too, sure. But you're a defensive midfielder. The position that runs the most. If you keep running with a landing optimized for short distance…"
I sat down on the bench next to her and focused on every word as she chattered through the explanation.
No need for big reactions. I just stayed quiet and listened.
In the original work, Shin A-yoon hadn't really been preparing materials because she wanted to become a coach—she had been preparing them to get time with the person she loved.
That was only my guess, but the Shin A-yoon in front of me was probably the same.
If time with me was what she wanted—if that was the wish of a character who had been one of my favorites—then I was more than willing to grant it.
"So I recommend switching to midfoot. It's similar to forefoot so it's easier to correct, and it's the best form for long-distance running like marathons. I'm not that great myself, but your dad was a marathon runner, so if you ask him he should be able to help. What do you think? Does it sound okay?"
"I'll fix it. By the next match, no matter what, I'll have it fixed."
"Huh? Wh-what are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"You asked if I could do it. I'm saying I'll change my landing from forefoot to midfoot. And for confirmation… you come to the next match yourself and check."
Shin A-yoon stared hard at my face under that serious tone, then let out a short laugh and waved her hand.
"Yeah, right. You think fixing form is that easy? There are tons of people who take years just to fix one simple thing. And come watch the match myself? What, are you already locked into the starting lineup?"
"Don't know yet."
"Come on. Then how are you so sure? And the next match is… the ACL round of sixteen away at Big Bird. What if I haul myself all the way to Suwon and you don't even play?"
Was she worried she would travel that far only for me to be left out of the squad?
Hearing that almost made a snort of laughter escape, but I held it in and just smiled at her.
"Whatever. Just come watch. You can make it, right? If you don't have a ticket, say so. I'll get you one."
"No need. I already bought them because I was planning to go anyway. Three days from now—the twentieth, right? I'll drag my whole family if I have to, so you better not sit that match out."
Unlike the gloomy face from earlier, Shin A-yoon was smiling brightly now.
I took that expression in with both eyes.
Whether I would play? She was asking the obvious.
If they still don't use me after what I showed in training… wouldn't that mean the manager's eyes are broken?
There were managers like that sometimes. Ones so obsessed with veterans that they barely used rookies at all.
Some even turned the whole squad into a nursing home.
But the Sun Ki-baek I knew was not that kind of man.
So I could be sure.
"Whatever. Just look forward to it."
"Pfft. Fine. You better bring that corrected form. I'm going to inspect it."
Looking at Shin A-yoon's bright smile, I ended up smiling right along with her.