An Overwhelming Gap in Skill (Reality)
"I'll be heading out, then."
"Huh? Already?"
No matter how busy she was, Hwang Yeeun had always stayed long enough for a cup of coffee.
"Yes. I'm just too swamped. Sorry—we'll have that coffee next time."
Today, though, the moment the work was finished, she announced she was leaving.
It made sense. The PCK Promotion Series was scheduled to start the instant the grand final ended, so Hwang Yeeun, as team staff, would be buried in it.
Her presence at SC was impossible to ignore. She took on work that had never been a manager's to begin with, and where the matter at hand wasn't Project A itself, Coach Kim Sangho—the man ultimately responsible for SC—could give off a faintly lacking impression. That the organization still ran as smoothly as it did owed a very great deal to Manager Hwang Yeeun.
On the players' mental care, above all, his reputation didn't merely fail to count as a plus. It nosedived into the negatives, and Hwang Yeeun was the one covering that flaw.
"All right. See you next time, then."
The woman across from her could guess at the labor behind all of that, so she let Hwang Yeeun go without a fight.
"Right. I'll be off."
"Oh—wait."
Should she say it, or not?
After a brief hesitation, she decided to tell her. The information would be made public before long anyway, and letting her know wouldn't change anything of real consequence.
"Yeeun, you know JG—the team that won CL this time?"
"Of course. How could I not? Why?"
"Starting on day two of the Promotion Series, JG's Forest is coming back. And just so you know, this is under embargo, so please be careful it doesn't leak."
"Forest... from day two? Hmm. Is it really all right for you to tell me something like this?"
"It'll be announced officially two days after the final anyway."
"Hmm. I see. Thank you for telling me."
Her feelings had to be complicated. From the second division, only SC and JG had earned a chance to climb into the first league through the Promotion Series.
Add the ninth- and tenth-place teams coming in from the first division, and that made three rivals—and now one of those rivals was about to get stronger. All the more so when it was a team they had never once beaten.
"Good luck getting ready for the Promotion Series."
Yeeun was already buried under a mountain of work, but the woman had judged that knowing now would help more than finding out later, and so she had decided to tell her.
"The truth is, before I was assigned to guard you, I was guarding Madam. Up until about ten years ago."
Twenty years ago, Driver Kwon had been the bodyguard for my mother, who was working as an actress at the time.
Not that he had started out as a bodyguard in the entertainment world. Those were usually assigned by the agency.
"The Chairman hired me, and he gave the order to guard Madam."
He had only begun protecting Mother after she married Father. In other words, Driver Kwon had been Father's man even before that.
"Actually... the Chairman and I were senior and junior in college. Close, like older brother and younger brother."
The more shocking part was that he and Father had been quite close—older and younger brothers. Not merely friendly, either. Sworn brothers, the kind of friendship people boast is thick as blood.
"Wha—? Mr. Kwon, you're the younger one? Younger than Father?"
"...Miss?"
"S-sorry. Please, go on."
Thinking about it, it wasn't so strange.
If Father, who cherished me this much, was going to trust someone with me, it would be someone he could rely on like family. That someone was Driver Kwon.
Trustworthy, and outstanding as a bodyguard besides—he really would have been the best person to leave me with.
"Ahem. At any rate, while I was guarding Madam on the Chairman's orders, there was one person I treated as the greatest threat."
"And that person..."
"Yes. Park Jeongmi. You know her well, Miss."
Park Jeongmi. Mother's high-school classmate, and the stylist who had helped shoot my Newbie Guide.
And the mother of Hwang Yeeun, who had just blown through like a storm.
"I'd only ever heard of people with that inclination. I'd never seen one in person, so I had no feel for how far I ought to allow it. I chose to keep her under close watch. There was quite a lot of friction with Ms. Park along the way."
Come to think of it, he had gone out of his way back then, too, not to cross paths with the auntie.
At the time I'd only wondered if he wanted to rest in the car. A man willing to follow me all the way to the restroom just to stand guard would never sit in the car claiming he felt like resting.
And thinking back, when the auntie said that, it might not have been for my sake at all. She might have been saying it to get under Driver Kwon's skin.
A brother who was like family had asked him to guard his wife, and the greatest danger turned out to be that wife's own high-school classmate.
He really must have been dizzy.
"Anyway. Whenever Madam went out to work, it was often the three of us moving together—Madam, myself, and Ms. Park. We went on like that for a few years, and then one more person joined the three of us."
My mother, the actress. Driver Kwon, the bodyguard. And last, Auntie Jeongmi, the stylist.
Someone had been added, and he wouldn't be telling me this story without a reason. That someone was definitely...
"That someone was Hwang Yeeun, wasn't it?"
I'd wavered over whether to call her Yeeun-unnie or just Hwang Yeeun, and in the end I settled on Ms. Hwang Yeeun. We weren't close enough for unnie, and she was a full eight years older than me; calling her plain Hwang Yeeun felt too blunt, so the polite distance was better.
"Yes. That's right."
What he said next was about Auntie Jeongmi.
Both she and her husband worked, so she couldn't leave her daughter home alone, and she had asked Mother whether she might bring the girl along. Mother knew the situation perfectly well and agreed without hesitation.
At the time, Mother had a son at home by himself, too.
"Watching Ms. Park meant I ended up around Yeeun a great deal, and somehow we grew close."
It sounded like a long stretch of years pressed down into a few words.
"Even after Yeeun reached the age to start elementary school, she kept coming to set with Ms. Park. Madam was very fond of her, of course, so she allowed it."
Driver Kwon pressed his fingers to his temple, let out a quiet groan, and went on.
"Back then she said she wanted to become a stylist like her mother—that she was there to observe the work. Looking at it now, I think she simply wanted to see Madam."
"Ugh..."
So Hwang Yeeun had the same inclination as Auntie Jeongmi, and she had made time to visit the set just to look at Mother, who fit her taste exactly.
Genuinely creepy.
"Um... D-Driver Kwon?"
"Yes."
"What do we do if Hwang Yeeun comes at me again?"
This was the same Hwang Yeeun who had hidden what she liked from him for decades.
She was the daughter of a woman who had looked at no one but Mother across all those years. The fixation had to be severe.
Normally I could have trusted Driver Kwon and set my mind at ease. Hearing this, though, I was a little worried.
By his own account, he had spent more years with Hwang Yeeun than he had with me.
To begin with, my memories as Choi Eunha the girl only went back half a year. My bond with him couldn't possibly be stronger than hers.
For all those reasons, if Hwang Yeeun approached me, would he handle it indecisively? The worry got there first.
Hearing it in my voice, Driver Kwon smiled, small.
"I'm right beside you. Nothing you're afraid of is going to happen."
"R-really? You and Hwang Yeeun aren't exactly ordinary acquaintances..."
"Affection is affection. The job is the job."
One firm line, and he felt utterly reliable.
Only then could I set the needless worry down and breathe.
Well, of course. This was a man Father trusted enough to leave me with.
"We ought to head back. You've been away from the waiting room quite a while. Your party will be worried."
The waiting room? My party? Head back soon?
Oh.
"Ah—the final! L-let's hurry back, Mr. Kwon!"
I'd completely forgotten, because of Hwang Yeeun.
After hearing him out, I thought of the two people who would be waiting on us—vanished without warning—and hurried back to the waiting room.
I'd said I was going to the restroom and then hadn't come back for a long time, and on top of that my bodyguard had come running. From their side, they had to be pretty worried about us.
"Oh, Eunha, you're here. Popcorn."
Apparently that worry had been mine alone. When I got back, Zzangdol and Oldboy didn't look worried in the slightest.
"Sorry. I got held up talking with Mr. Kwon."
Well. With someone like Driver Kwon beside me, who would worry?
"Anyway, what's with the popcorn?"
I'd thought the smell was something you'd only get in a movie theater, and sure enough, most of the broadcast people in the waiting room were each holding a box.
"Rioat handed them out. Oh—and I remembered you said on stream that you like sweet things, so I got you caramel."
"Oh... thank you."
Caramel. Someone who actually knows what they're doing. And they'd remembered something I'd said on stream, and prepared it specially.
"Mm. So how'd the match go?"
Checking the time, thirty minutes had passed since I'd stepped out saying I was going to the restroom.
A long time. Trouble with that woman, Yeeun; calling Driver Kwon. And then the past between him, Mother, and Auntie Jeongmi. No wonder it had stretched like this.
Thirty minutes... probably the end of the first half, just heading into the second?
"What's the score... huh? Why'd it stop? Did someone call a pause?"
On the waiting-room monitor, the screen that should have been showing the game was showing only the players sitting in their booths. And it still wasn't time for the match to be over.
If one of the teams had requested a pause, that was entirely possible—
"No. Set one is over."
"...What? Already?"
"Yeah. It's break time."
What?
Zzangdol and Oldboy said it flatly. Their eyes weren't the eyes of people lying.
They had no reason to lie in the first place.
"But it's only been thirty minutes. How is it already..."
Thirty minutes. Even if the attacking side had full-rushed every single round, that was far too early for a game to end.
And there was no way a match like a grand final would produce something extreme, a 13–1 or a 13–2. How on earth—
"KZ won, 13–0. First time in a grand final, they said. A score like that..."
Zzangdol answered me at once.
"What...? What do you mean, 13–0..."
I knew immediately he wasn't lying.
There it was, in the upper left of the big monitor: the gap between KZ and F4.
Really. It really was 13–0.
In Project A, even a 13–6 was enough for people to call it a stomp. And this was 13–0.
F4 hadn't taken a single round. They had been crushed.