Want to Play a 1v1? (Reality)
Park Jaeseong appeared out of nowhere.
"Eunha, I am seriously your biggest fan!"
That was the line he threw out as he came running at me, and the meeting room went dead quiet, as if the words had frozen it solid.
It wasn't as if he'd said anything he shouldn't have. Jaeseong had even given me a shout-out in the finals interview, going on about how often he watched my streams. The reason everyone here had locked up was something else entirely.
"J-Jaeseong? Didn't you say you went down to your family home yesterday?"
The awkwardness started from a much simpler place. What is he doing here?
KZ had won the domestic league and punched their ticket to Masters, so the players ought to have been on vacation until they flew out to Japan.
The KZ players will be away on vacation, so please don't feel any pressure.
The year had opened with an international event, PCT LOCK//IN, then the domestic league, Project A Champions Korea, and after that Project A Masters, where a team's home-league finish decided who went. If LOCK//IN, the first international of the year, had never happened, it might have been manageable. Once it was held, the gap between the domestic league and Masters shrank, and the vacation shrank with it. There shouldn't have been much time left to rest.
So why was he still at headquarters? That was the part she couldn't let go of.
"Ah, about that..."
Not that the question survived long. Jaeseong answered it himself.
"I was actually going to head home yesterday, but Seungtaek-hyung said you were coming today. He said he'd show you around headquarters when you got here..."
"...And?"
"I asked if I could do it instead. Seungtaek-hyung told me to do whatever I wanted."
Coach Jaeha looked as if his soul had stepped out for air. Manager Han, seated beside him, didn't look much different. On the face of it, captain Kim Seungtaek had dumped his own job on the youngest player on the roster. Jaeseong had volunteered, so that much wasn't a problem. Swapping the role without a single word to Coach Jaeha or Manager Han was.
"Jaeseong. What happens if the two of you just decide something like that on your own?"
Someone might have called it old-man nagging, but let little things like this slide and an organization's chain of command eventually comes apart. In esports, especially, friction between players and coaches is constant, so a coach has no choice but to take it to heart. Coach Jaeha usually wore the face of an endlessly good-natured man. That stern voice was more than enough to knock the wind clean out of Jaeseong.
"Uh... well..."
Not that Jaeseong had meant to brush the coach's authority. Not even a little.
"I... I did tell the head coach..."
The moment the thoroughly deflated kid got the words out, a line Coach Jaeha had spoken earlier came back.
Ah. This had gone spectacularly sideways.
She had no gift for reading what people kept inside, but she was sure everyone in the room had landed on the same thought.
"Ahem. Sorry, Jaeseong. I thought you hadn't said a word to the staff."
The coach apologized at once for snapping. He had scolded Jaeseong for the sake of the org's hierarchy in the first place. He hadn't meant it from the heart. Owning a misunderstanding without fail already set Coach Jaeha apart from the people people usually call stubborn old-timers. That sort either tries to slide past their own mistakes in silence, or turns around and gets angry instead.
"Ah, no, Coach. But is the head coach feeling any better?"
Jaeseong wasn't the type to pocket a hurt and keep it, so he forgot the whole thing just as fast.
"We don't really know either. He only sent one text, saying he was sick and couldn't come today..."
"I see..."
Once the moment had settled, Coach Jaeha stood and dipped his head toward her.
"Eh?"
What? Why is he doing that?
"I'm sorry. Something came up on our side, so it looks like FOXY will have to show you around headquarters."
She understood why he was doing it. Unlike her, who remembered every year she had lived as Galaxy, a pro under KZ, to Coach Jaeha she was nothing more than a top streamer he had only just met for business. The email had named Spax, plain as day, as the one who would guide her through headquarters. KZ had swapped that role to FOXY over an internal mess and never told her. In a sense, they had been rude.
"N-no, not at all! I'd actually like it better if FOXY showed me around!"
Even so, watching a coach who had been an older brother to her for some three years, and another teacher besides, bow his head was not a pleasant sight, so she rushed to stop him.
"What? You'd rather I be the one to show you around..."
In the process, she seemed to have manufactured a brand-new misunderstanding.
God, I was actually going to lose it.
Once the incident was behind them, she and Jaeseong decided to look around inside headquarters.
You can start filming right away, but it would be better to look around headquarters once first. As we mentioned, Jaeseong will guide you, and aside from the players' dorms and the staff offices, you may go anywhere.
She had lived here for three years. She could have skipped the tour and gone straight to filming. He just looked too excited for her to get the words let's start filming out of her mouth.
"Okay, this is the first-floor lobby. You saw it on the way in, but there are paintings all over, and there's an aquarium too."
Jaeseong bounced from corner to corner, thrilled out of his mind, explaining the building as he went. She had no idea why the person giving the tour was more excited than the person receiving it. Still, a junior she had once been pretty close with was cute when he was this happy, so she decided to just go along.
"You know what kind of fish are in that aquarium? They're actually—"
"Sharks."
The tank decorating the first-floor lobby. In an entrance with nothing else worth a second look, it stole every eye in the room, and the things swimming in it were sharks.
"...How did you know that?"
Name the fish in one shot, and Jaeseong visibly short-circuited. How did she know? She had lived here. Of course she knew. And besides—
"Aren't they obviously sharks if you just look?"
Not knowing would make you an idiot, wouldn't it...? The tank wasn't covered, and nobody had neglected it until the water went cloudy. One glance and you could tell.
"You knew right away? I used to think all sharks were huge. Like in that movie."
Ah. There he is. The idiot.
"I-is that so..."
If anyone else had said it, she might have wondered whether they were leaning into a cute-airhead bit. It was that Park Jaeseong, though, so she let it pass with a quiet yeah, that tracks.
"You're really knowledgeable, Eunha. These sharks are the ones that lost out in the wild to, uh... what do you call it? When you get pushed out of that competition?"
"...Weeded out?"
"Ah, right! They say these sharks were weeded out in the wild. So when they get bigger, they donate them to a big aquarium."
"Ooh..."
She already knew every word of it. Knowing him, though, anything less than a proper reaction and he would visibly deflate, so she gave him one.
"Next—Coach already told you, but this is where our staff eat! The cafeteria~"
...What am I supposed to say to that.
Oh. Right.
"The cafeteria's pretty big. Looks like there are a ton of seats..."
"Ah, that's because the front-office staff use it too, not just the team."
Jaeseong broke into a proud little smile, as if he had finally scored a point. Right. That was the kind of guy he was. Put unkindly, he seemed like a fool. Put kindly, he was pure. That was Park Jaeseong, and it was why she had stayed close to him.
The first thing she had felt, walking into KZ Academy, was that people are genuinely hard. A relationship meant facing someone who was different in front of you and behind your back, someone who never took the mask off. Catch a guy you'd gotten along with fine casually running his mouth about you where he thought you couldn't hear, and the disillusionment came on its own. In that sense, this easy-to-read kid had been a very good junior. If he had a complaint, he said it without flinching. There wasn't a sharp edge on him to begin with. He was the kind of little brother you couldn't help but like—not liking him had never really been an option. His skill, the first thing that mattered in a pro, was outstanding, he had the talent to match, and his personality was good. Inside KZ there wasn't a single person who disliked Jae—
"Oh, right. We're just passing through now, but when we film later, they said we should do lunch here. That's okay, right?"
"...What?"
"The manager said a shot of you eating in the cafeteria absolutely had to make it in. A lot of fans are curious about the menu the KZ players eat..."
"W-wait a second. In the email it said, 'We'll take care of lunch on our end.' That meant cafeteria food?"
"Mm... I didn't send the email, so I'm not sure... Probably, though?"
Oh my god.
Someone could have called it a fuss over a single meal, but the headquarters cafeteria held no particularly good memories for her. She had grown up on Korean food from the housekeeper's uncanny hands, and eating Korean food made by anyone else was rough going.
"Eunha, why are you eating so poorly?"
"I just haven't had much of an appetite lately."
"Seungtaek said you snuck off to Lotteria yesterday."
"..."
The cafeteria auntie had even burned with determination to satisfy her palate somehow. She had failed, of course. Eunha had felt awful about it back then.
"Ah, all right..."
She was a guest, though, and picking at the hospitality felt rude, so she decided to endure it and eat.
"Aw, don't worry so much. Our cafeteria food is seriously delicious."
She knew that. She was only worried because her palate was pointlessly high. Telling herself that future-her could answer for future problems, she moved on with Jaeseong to the next stop.
"This is..."
"This is the practice room our players use."
As if she wouldn't know. Three years in this building, and if she had to name the place where she had spent the most time outside the living quarters, it was obviously here.
"It's the same..."
Half a year had passed by the time she retired. In this world she had never even debuted as a KZ pro, so things could have changed a little. The practice room was exactly as she remembered it.
"Huh? What's the same?"
"Y-yeah? No, I mean—it's just—it's exactly like what I saw in a video! The practice room!"
"...Headquarters has never been opened to the public, though. This is supposed to be the first time."
"I-is it? I must have seen it wrong!"
Jaeseong nodded along, an easy oh, I see, and let it go. Thank god. Of all the people to be standing in front of her when she slipped, it was this kid. While she let out a silent breath of relief, Jaeseong dropped into one of the seats and turned the computer on.
"Is this FOXY's seat?"
"Yeah. This one's mine. That's Seungtaek-hyung's, and over there—"
He pointed out each teammate's seat in turn. Strange, that not a single thing had changed. Right down to the chair he was sitting in now. The one that used to be hers.
"Um... Eunha."
"Yes?"
"Coach said earlier we just need to start filming whenever you're comfortable, as long as it isn't too late... so we've got a little time, right?"
"We... do?"
"The older guys all went home anyway, and there's nobody here who'd say anything if we sat down..."
He strung the words together carefully, one at a time. It was a different Jaeseong from the one who usually said whatever came into his head without thinking. The eyes that had been nothing but excitement while he showed her around had, before she noticed, turned bright.
Just like the moment they had first met at the meeting, both of Jaeseong's eyes were burning with the will to win.