Advancement Match

At nine on Monday morning, I headed not for the TF team but for the main auditorium at Beyond Villain’s head office. From this point on, the hall that had hosted the month-end evaluation a few days earlier was the ‘Advancement Match venue’. That was one of the things the work email had passed on to me.

“…All right.”

A security robot walked me down to the very front of the auditorium. Inside a cordon so tight that robots stood watch with their eye-lights glowing, someone was already waiting there. Her name, of course, was Kwon Hyeri.

“Good morning, ma’am.”
“…You’re looking well.”
“And you don’t look so good yourself, ma’am.”
“Hoo-hoo. You’ve got the energy for that kind of banter, I see.”

Two desks stood facing each other up on the auditorium platform, and the documents heaped on top of them rose well past the height of a grown man, stacked like a fortress wall.

Seventy-two hours of isolated combat, every contact with the outside cut off but a trip to the restroom. That was what the Strategic Analysis Office’s Advancement Match actually was.

The criteria: how fast the documents are processed, and how much profit that brings the company.

Processing all these documents fast is not what wins it. Every document handled here goes to the department above the Strategic Analysis Office for exhaustive review. Exactly how large a profit it brings the company is examined in detail, and a score assigned. Whoever records the higher score wins the Advancement Match.

“I’ll be in your care for the next seventy-two hours.”
“It’s been a while since my last Advancement Match. I’m rather nervous.”

I yanked my tie loose and sank deep into the chair. At the desk opposite, Kwon Hyeri was tearing open a box of energy drinks with practiced hands. I vaguely remembered being told you could bring in whatever you liked, so long as it wasn’t a weapon with an edge on it.

“I’m ready.”
“Same here.”

— Tick-tock.

At the security robot’s words, the electronic clock on the desk started running. Kwon Hyeri and I both reached into the piled stacks at the same moment, took out a single document, and opened it.

I spread the first file open and swallowed the bitter saliva pooling in my mouth. The document read: ‘F-Rank Villain Black Panther, suspected of leaking information, immediate disposition requested’. Attached to it, oddly enough, was his certificate of family relations.¹ Wife deceased; beneath her, three daughters and no one else. Why on earth would a family certificate be enclosed?

…I don’t know.

What the certificate of family relations was for, I couldn’t say, but one thing was certain. The moment my signature went onto this page, his disposition was settled. I could kill the head of a family, or let him live.

Disposition: test subject

Reason: risk of information leak upon separation from the company.

Processed by: Manager Im Taeseung, Strategic Analysis Office Team 5

If family mattered to you that much, you shouldn’t have gone leaking information.

I made the best judgment I could. There was no putting a man who had leaked information back out into the world as he was. Let him resign, or keep him working here… either way, for the company it’s a minus.

Damn it.

The next document, and the one after that. The certificate of family relations was always enclosed. Among them was someone who lived alone, caring for an aged mother. Belatedly, I understood the essence of the Advancement Match.

Exclude emotion utterly. Consider nothing but the company’s profit and loss.

An ordinary Korean company can’t cut an employee loose as it pleases. Employees can form a labor union, and if the company treats them unfairly they can report it to the labor office. But to a Villain organization that ignores the law, none of that meant a thing.

So they select for people who will give no thought to the law and think purely of the company’s profit. They wash away the common sense and the moral instincts of civilized society. Then they fill the company’s ‘head’, the department above the Strategic Analysis Office, with the people who speak for it.

That was the real meaning of this Advancement Match.

“Taeseung, why have your hands stopped? Frightened already?”

Kwon Hyeri murmured it low, without lifting her eyes from the documents. She already had twice as many processed documents in front of her as I did. She must have taken up this kind of work months before I did, at the very least, so it was only natural.

“What’s there to be frightened of? Somebody has to clear out this trash anyway.”

“…”

“I think I understand why you’ve held on to the team leader’s seat all this time, ma’am.”

Beyond Villain was clever. Ghastly work with no proper rest and no end to the processing. By defining it as the penalty handed to ‘the loser of the Advancement Match’, they had cut internal resistance off at the root. For proud elites, the logic that you stay behind and clear away the filth because you lost would serve as justification enough. Justification that said: if you hate this, climb higher.

“Do you really know why I’ve been holding this place?”
“Of course. Because you want to climb higher, isn’t it? Because you want to win the next Advancement Match.”

“…”

“Why are you making that face?”

Kwon Hyeri looked at me and frowned for the first time.

“Because you’re wrong.”
“What was that? Then you’re saying what I said is wro—”

— Bzzzt—!

Pain like my retinas burning through made me clutch at my eyes. Future Observation had forced its field of vision open without warning, and graded documents went scattering across my sight.

…These include the documents I’m looking at right now, don’t they?

The place looked like an office, though the desk was unfamiliar. There, I was handling the graded documents. Why I would be looking at them I had no way of knowing, but…

The betrayal risk that came of ‘rehiring’ a particular Villain. And the personnel score earned by ‘disposal’, both reduced to figures and marked right there on the document. Presumably the scoring done by the department above the Strategic Analysis Office.

This is no different from cribbing off the answer sheet.

Without a moment’s hesitation I signed the ‘disposal’ box and threw the document to the floor. Ending a person’s life took all of half a second. Thanks to it, I could close on Kwon Hyeri’s pace, if only a little.

About two and a half hours in, the two of us had processed roughly the same volume of documents. Future Observation kept going off and leaving my eyes throbbing, a minor nuisance… but peeking at the grading sheets taught me their standards, and my speed picked up. When I cleared this one too inside a minute, Kwon Hyeri suddenly spoke.

“Taeseung… it really does seem the people written on that list look like nothing but numbers to you.”
“Sorry?”

The remark came out of nowhere, and I let my puzzlement show. What was she after, dropping that on me now? Keeping me in check? Or plain curiosity? Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth agonizing over.

I pulled out a fresh document and answered.

“What are they if not numbers? A loss on the company’s books, no more and no less. It’s not as if they’re standing in front of me.”

“…Is that so.”

Kwon Hyeri seemed to accept something, and asked nothing more after that.

Around the twenty-hour mark, Kwon Hyeri and I took a short stretch of sleep. We asked the security robots to turn the auditorium lights off for us.

When I opened my eyes, the documents both of us had poured a full day into were gone. For a moment I wondered whether she had pulled some trick while the lights were out. When I asked a security robot, though, it answered that they had been taken away for grading, and Kwon Hyeri scolded me for suspecting things for no reason.

It went without saying that we could order whatever meals we wanted along the way. We were told that delivery from somewhere nearby, or anything from the company cafeteria, could be brought in easily enough. I had cafeteria food sent up now and then; Kwon Hyeri worked through lunchboxes she had prepared in advance.

Neither of us could wash properly and we both turned grubby, and beside Kwon Hyeri’s desk the empty cans piled up like a burial mound. I topped up my own sugar with a chocolate bar I hadn’t even known was in my pocket. I’d meant to give it to Director Amos the next time I saw her, then forgot and left it sitting there.

As the time wound down, I reached the point of not knowing whether I was looking at the documents or the documents were looking at me. An extreme situation, where they let you sleep in snatches and you were back on the paperwork the moment you woke. The Advancement Match ate away at a person’s will.

What kind of person was Kwon Hyeri, to have gone through a match like this more than once?

The long match was beginning to draw to a close, and the difference between her and me was already plain. I had checked the answer sheet with Future Observation here and there, grown used to the paperwork, and picked up speed; she had simply been working at a pace all her own the whole time. Before I knew it, the gap had widened from one and a half times to twice.

Why on earth…

And I couldn’t understand it. I picked out nothing but the optimal answers and filled the documents in mechanically. She, by contrast, went carefully through the certificates of family relations, and even the useless enclosed paperwork, as though it were some mission of hers.

I couldn’t hold it in, and ended up speaking.

“How can you work like that, when it slows you down so much?”

“…”

“At this rate you’re going to lose, ma’am. And you’re satisfied with that?”

I couldn’t make sense of it. To get into Beyond Villain’s Strategic Analysis Office at all, you have to be the sort who graduates top of the class at the finest university in the Republic of Korea. Yang Hayun and Hong Jangwoo were both cases like that, so Kwon Hyeri must have had the same kind of brain. So why in the world was she handling the work this inefficiently?

“Is that the victory you wanted?”

“…Sorry?”

Kwon Hyeri looked at me with hollow eyes and asked it back.

“For some of them their livelihood is on the line, and for some their life. Can you flatten all that in the name of efficiency and judge it however you please?”

Contempt for me sat in her eyes.

“I’m only working to win. I’m doing my best for victory, that’s all.”
“Right now you’re no different from a racehorse in blinders. You never look around you, you only run straight ahead…”

She said it in a murmur, almost a sigh.

“And there’s a cliff ahead of you, and you’re treading on corpses as you run, and you can’t see any of it.”

— Halt.

Her words stopped my pen. I ran for the win and nothing else, and she was telling me to look around me. Telling me to look at the ‘essence’ she was so fond of.

“A win is a win. What does the method matter? And that is the key to winning this Advancement Match. I understand the essence perfectly well myself.”

Kwon Hyeri had once said something to me in connection with Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik.

“Think about it. What kind of company ours is.”
“Beyond Villain…”
“Let me ask you, Assistant Manager Im. Is our company a Villain company? Or a Hero Gamble company?”

Back when I was an Assistant Manager, handling the consultation and management of Villains. She had gone back on her own words then and told me it wasn’t window dressing but important work. Beyond Villain was a Villain organization, not a Hero sports-betting company, so of course that work mattered.

“Im Taeseung, let me ask you one last thing. What is the essence of the Advancement Match?”
“A test to gauge whether you have the qualities to climb higher.”
“Half right, half wrong.”

“…What was that?”

Kwon Hyeri closed the last of her documents, rose from her seat, and looked down at me.

“Under a company called Beyond Villain, raising a dog that rolls over and barks and pants on command.”

“…!”

“That is the goal of this Advancement Match. A test that raises a dog which carries out any order without hesitation, however unjust, however immoral.”

— Beep-beep-beep! Beep-beep-beep!

Her words ended and the clock ran out with them. I looked up at her blankly through the alarm blaring away.

Thinking only about the conditions for winning, I had failed to think from the company’s side. Just as she said, this test was… much like the process of breeding a dog.

Before the security robot had finished its announcement, Kwon Hyeri was on her feet.

“Congratulations. On becoming a fine dog for Beyond Villain.”

She trudged out of the auditorium on exhausted feet. Without thinking I moved to chase after her, to catch hold of her… and then I simply stopped dead where I stood.

And say what, once I’d caught her? That I’m not like that? Or that I’m not the one in the wrong?

Something felt jammed hard in my throat. In a test for breeding a dog, I had barked and panted and wagged my tail with everything I had. The result of the Advancement Match would come out as my win, no question about it.

And yet, why was it? This feeling that I hadn’t won at all, but had lost to Kwon Hyeri.

“…Let’s just head back for now.”

I forced my uneasy mind and my aching body into motion and headed home.