Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik

What on earth was that Number 49 I saw on Saturday…

I got to the office and sank into thought on the ride up. The WD-401 I’d handed over a fortune of three hundred million won for sat under my shirt, and even so, the face of Number 49 from the auction floor kept flickering through my head.

— Ding!

The doors opened, and only then did I come back to myself and head for my desk.

“Huh?”

Except something about the desk had changed. The cramped little thing that had held nothing but an old computer and a small tablet was gone; this one was wider, obviously, with two monitors on it now, and the tablet had gone up a size as well. The name on the partition had changed too, from ‘Staff member Im Taeseung’ to ‘Assistant Manager Im Taeseung’.

So this is what it feels like.

I fiddled with the brand-new tablet, its screen film not even peeled off yet, and thought about it. A cruel system, where one slip drops you straight into the abyss, but where every rung you climb pays a reward to match. Something in Beyond Villain’s management philosophy went to work on a person’s appetite to rise.

“Ah! Taeseung, you’re in!”
“Yeah. Good weekend?”
“Mine was great! Oh — should I be calling you Assistant Manager Im now?”
“I told you to keep it casual.”
“Hehe.”

I’d been sitting in the assistant manager’s seat a little while when Yang Hayun came over.

“Wow, the monitors and the desk and the tablet… Making Assistant Manager really is different, isn’t it.”
“Right? Looks like they swapped it all out over the weekend.”
“I want to peel my staff sticker off and pin a Senior Staff one on already, even just that…”
“Work hard and you’ll get there.”
“I’ll have to… Oh, since you were promoted to Assistant Manager, your quota’s gone up this time too, hasn’t it?”
“Quota?”
“Yes. Mine’s the same as ever, a million won going to one and a half million.”

Curious, I reached for the tablet. Come to think of it, Kwon Hyeri had said something along those lines before I left the team leader’s office… I switched it on and pulled up the Hero Gamble site, and sure enough, things had changed.

The money in the account has tripled… And so has the target amount.

Some people might look at that and see no difference. A million turned into one and a half, three million turned into four and a half; the return rate comes out exactly the same either way. But that isn’t how human psychology works. The bigger the pot gets, the less boldly a person acts. If it worked otherwise, wouldn’t everyone in the world skip real estate and savings accounts and pour their big money into stocks and crypto?

Not that any of it has anything to do with me.

Gambling when you already know the result is money for nothing. And what if the method isn’t some ordinary bit of cheating, but a ‘Gift’ that can never, ever be caught? There was a reason Belia had wedged me into the Strategic Analysis Office.

“Right, we’re starting work. Get ready for the Wake-Up Call Villain.”

— Clap!

Kwon Hyeri had come out of the team leader’s office, and one clap of her hands brought the room to order. Yang Hayun threw me a little fist-pump of encouragement and headed back to Team 4. I was on my way over to the printer, same as always, when…

“Assistant Manager Im, I’ll do it.”
“Sorry?”
“You’ve made Assistant Manager, so it’s my job now. I’ve been doing it since before you got here anyway.”

The staff member had been talking to me in plain casual speech right up until today. Now here they were, wearing a goofy grin and addressing me in polite speech. Last week they’d been on my back nonstop about how slow I was on my feet… I stood there dumbfounded, staring at nothing, until someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Assistant Manager Im. Congratulations on being free of the odd jobs as of today.”
“Ah, th-thank you…?”
“If you joined last week, this’ll be your first time seeing me. I was tied up in the Villain Planning and Management Office all last week. Ko Hyeonsik, Assistant Manager.”

Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik was a man in his thirties with the warm, comfortable presence of a bear. He called me over amiably and led me to his desk. It was set up exactly like mine, and on its dual monitors sat the Villain sheet Kwon Hyeri had handed me.

“Staff have their hands full just doing Hero Gamble. From Senior Staff up, you’re analyzing the results it throws out, planning the fights off them, and so on…”
“And at Assistant Manager level you manage the Villains directly?”
“That’s right. A two-rank promotion really does make a difference, doesn’t it?”

Sum an Assistant Manager up in a word and you got ‘middle management’. A post that stands in for the Manager’s duties, and the post where they finally put you into the company’s real work. Time to go beyond Hero Gamble and do the work of the ‘Strategic Analysis Office’ proper.

“Assistant Manager Im, you’ll be working as my junior. The work isn’t hard. Go over to the Villain Planning and Management Office, meet the Villains face to face, run consultations with them — about that much?”
“Consultations… you say?”
“That’s right, consultations. It’s called a consultation, but just think of it as being a punching bag. Hahaha!”
“…”

I couldn’t laugh at Ko Hyeonsik’s joke. Who in the world could laugh at being told they were off to be a punching bag?

All at once, something Kwon Hyeri had said last week came ringing back in my ears.

“Now that you’re an Assistant Manager, you’ll be handling Villain management from here on too.”
“What does Villain management involve, exactly?”
“It’s not that difficult. When to deploy which Villain. What strategy to market a Villain with…”

The work lived up to the name Strategic Analysis Office. Only, Kwon Hyeri had written it off as good as meaningless: far too many variables, and neither the Villains nor the Office’s own people took any of it all that seriously.

Which does make you wonder why the job exists at all… well, I suppose a company has jobs like this too.

As a South Korean adult male who had done his stint in the army, I had a rough idea. Any organization that looks from the outside as though it runs without a hitch turns out, once you dig in, to be full of things no reasonable person could make sense of. The standard examples are those legendary cushy postings, the fish-tank keeper and the fish-bread soldier¹. Though going by ‘punching bag’, this one didn’t sound like a cushy posting to begin with.

“Seeing is believing, as they say. Let’s go take a look ourselves.”
“Sorry? Right now?”
“Odd jobs are for Staff, battle analysis is for Senior Staff. From Assistant Manager up, you’ve got to do work worthy of the company.”

He set off, the documents some staff-level employee had printed for him tucked into a folder. He must have been an Assistant Manager a good long while; confidence came off him with every step. The looks he gave the staff-level employees in particular carried a thin sense of superiority.

He’s still only a Team 5 assistant manager, though…

Teams 4 and 5 of the Strategic Analysis Office held down the bottom. Above them sat Teams 2 and 3, and Team 1 had to be the highest department of them all. With nobody under him yet but Staff and Senior Staff, Ko Hyeonsik still seemed steeped in that superiority.

“Hm? What are you doing back there instead of keeping up, Assistant Manager Im?”
“Ah… I’m coming.”

I followed along behind him, keeping a little distance all the same.

— Ding!

The elevator stopped on the second floor of the Beyond Villain building.

“This second floor here is the Villain Planning and Management Office.”
“Haha… I see. The ceilings are high on the second floor, though, aren’t they?”

In most company buildings it’s the first-floor lobby that has the high ceiling. A high ceiling opens the space up, which is the whole reason for it. But there was no reason for the second floor to have one too.

“That’s right. The first and second floors both have high ceilings, because there are Villains whose bodies grow to an enormous size.”
“Ah…”
“Over this way. And don’t gawk around too much.”

I followed behind Ko Hyeonsik without a word. It was the Villain Planning and Management Office, so the floor had noticeably more Gift awakened on it. Most of them were unmistakable at a glance, the awakening written right into how they looked.

I suppose that stands to reason. Look different and you run into that much more trouble…

More than half of all Gift awakenings come with a change in appearance. Some are only a change of hair color, like Belia’s. But Villains like the ones in front of me now, with hands turned into shears or whole bodies turned to stone, have a hard time getting through ordinary life. The ones among them with outstanding combat ability become Heroes. For the rest, there are two options.

Live on the state’s subsidy and get by among ordinary people somehow… Or come into the Villain Special City and become a Villain.

I was hardly any different from them myself, and for some reason it made my heart ache for them.

“Right, Team 5 of the Villain Planning and Management Office is ours. Easy to remember, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But you have to be careful. A lot of them joined Beyond Villain relatively recently.”
“Careful because they joined recently?”
“Because every one of them has their own story about what happened before they became a Villain.”
“Ah…”

For an ordinary person who has awakened, deciding to become a Villain isn’t easy. Living as one means giving up more than the life you had before; it’s as good as declaring you will commit every sort of crime. Something must have pushed that person to it, every time. Whether that was the people around them, or hardship making ends meet, or their own will.

“Mm, well, watch what I do from beside me for now. You’ll only get it by seeing it.”
“Understood.”
“Then let’s get moving. The one we’re meeting today is… ah, here we are.”

Oddly enough, Team 5 of the Planning and Management Office was mostly meeting rooms, one after another, with not all that many people about. The rooms must all have been well soundproofed; nothing came through but the occasional low droning.

Ko Hyeonsik opened a door marked ‘Meeting Room 12’.

“Hello. I’m Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik of Strategic Analysis Office Team 5, here for today’s appointment.”

Ko Hyeonsik walked through the door wearing a manufactured smile, and I went in after him. The room was about the size of a modest studio apartment, and it held a table and four chairs and nothing else. In one of the chairs sat a crab-person who had to be a good two meters tall.

What… on earth.

A crab-person, with enormous pincers where hands should be. And naturally, a red shell hung over the whole body like armor. Curiously enough, they were wearing a woman’s one-piece dress, stretched so tight it looked ready to burst at any second.

The moment they laid eyes on Ko Hyeonsik, they clacked both pincers together in a threat.

“A whole minute late for the appointment? You looking down on me? Huh?!”
“I apologize. I was a little late because I was training my junior.”
“Junior?”

Those antenna-like eyes swung around to me. The instant our eyes met, gooseflesh rose over my whole body. Even so, I forced out a smile and bent at the waist.

“H-hello. Assistant Manager Im Taeseung, Strategic Analysis Office Team 5.”
“…The hell’s that look? You think I look like shit too, is that it?”
“Yes?”
“‘Yes’? You just said yes, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Why, you little—!”

— Bolt!

The crab-person came up out of the chair and brandished a pincer in front of my face.

“Ah, oh dear! Queen Crab, you mustn’t! If you assault a staff member, the security robots come! And that’s dismissal, obviously!”
“Tch… Watch yourself!”
“I-I’m sorry.”

Thankfully Ko Hyeonsik wedged himself between me and Queen Crab, and that was the end of it. They evidently had no real appetite for a fight either, and sat back down. I got my startled heart back under control and took a seat at the table after Ko Hyeonsik.

…Just like that, I missed my staff days, running around on odd jobs.