Media PR Office

“Haah…”

On the way to the Media PR Office. In the elevator, in the corridor, Hong Jangwoo kept heaving sighs, and there was something unusually irritable in the sound.

“Senior Staff Hong, why the miserable face? Is the Media PR Office really that rough a place?”

Hong Jangwoo, about to spit out the gum he’d been chewing, stopped and screwed up his face.

“It’s not the Media PR Office that’s the problem. Director Narci is. That Envy bastard isn’t right in the head.”
“Worse than Director Amos?”

At my question he burst into a hollow laugh and stopped walking.

“Might even be worse, actually. Director Amos at least has her moods. Narci… it’s that trademark hysteria that drives a person out of their mind.”

He gave a genuine shudder, then started unspooling the stories he’d heard.

“The way I hear it, it’s the department that stays latest on overtime in all of Beyond Villain. And on top of that, being cut the moment you’re not liked is just an ordinary day over there.”
“…”
“Picture a colleague you worked beside yesterday getting cut overnight. Well, that part’s no different in our own Strategic Analysis Office — but at least we don’t work overtime, do we?”

I nodded along to Hong Jangwoo’s scaremongering. He was right. The Strategic Analysis Office was busy enough to leave you no time to breathe, but only inside working hours; it never went in for unnecessary overtime.

Even so — worse than Amos?

Hearing the stories had at least given me a sense of what kind of personality could leave Hong Jangwoo shaking like this. However I turned it over, though, Amos still seemed the worse of the two. At the very least, Narci doesn’t turn parts of a person’s body into animals or insects.

More to the point, there was something I had to settle before we reached the Media PR Office.

“So you’re planning on keeping up the casual speech out here as well?”
“…What?”
“Inside the office, fine. But I don’t see any reason to keep speaking politely to you outside it.”

The dumbfounded look on Hong Jangwoo’s face made me want to laugh. It had been grating on me for a while now, and it needed settling once and for all: there was no reason at all for me to speak politely to him.

“Once the TF team ended, things were supposed to go back to how they were… were they not?”
“I never said any such thing.”
“…”
“Or would you rather I called Director Amos in and the three of us hashed it out face to face?”

Hong Jangwoo shook his head furiously.

I don’t much want to do this either. But the moment I come in as his junior, he starts walking all over me.

“The only reason I used polite speech inside Strategic Analysis Office Team 2 was that I was thinking of your reputation. You’ve got a reputation of your own to consider, haven’t you. Right, Jangwoo?” “…” “You’re supposed to answer.” “Yes, yes! That’s right.” “And yet out here, with nobody but the two of us, is it all right for you to be this graceless, or is it not.” “I’ll correct it at once!!”

Hong Jangwoo bellowed it at the top of his voice, standing rigidly at attention. I patted his shoulder as he stood there.

Honestly. He could have just behaved himself before I had to spell it out.

I made up my mind to live like a human being. I never made up my mind to live like an easy mark.

Yang Hayun, Belia, Scorpion, Amos. The people who worried about me, who looked out for me. There are plenty of people like them, people I ought to take care of and go on treating well.

But there was no seat for Hong Jangwoo among ‘my people.’ That much was certain. Was there any need for me to be good to a man who ignored me and looked down on me at the drop of a hat?

“Jangwoo.”
“…”
“No answer?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Let’s do this properly. Look, I’ll use polite speech in front of Team 2 and so on, to save your face. But here’s the thing.”

I clapped Hong Jangwoo on the shoulder and dropped my voice to a whisper.

“Stop swaggering around on the strength of being my sunbae. You never know when I might go straight past you on the way up.”
“…!”
“Smart as you are, I think you understand what that means.”

Hong Jangwoo nodded slowly, his face pale. It would be nice if he simply got it right from the start, but he always has to make you say it several times over. It’s not as though my standing with Amos suddenly disappears because I came in as his junior.

“Jangwoo. Let’s go.”
“Yes, yes…”

The Media PR Office at last, Jangwoo at my side with his shoulders slumped. The moment the automatic doors slid open, a wall of stifling heat greeted us. I screwed up my face as I looked the place over, and could only be appalled.

…What is this? This is supposed to be an office?

The place was different from every other department in Beyond Villain, starting with the way the desks were laid out. Several hundred staff sat at desks packed tight together like a call center, pounding mechanically at nothing but their keyboards. Under the half-dimmed lights, an atmosphere grim enough to make you wonder whether these people had genuinely been press-ganged in from somewhere.

When I looked closer, they were all on… internet forums. Every one of them was in a different forum, busily putting up posts and leaving comments, and a glance to the side showed windows open for manuals and copy-paste text as well. Only then did I grasp what the Media PR Office really was.

Hold on… this isn’t a Media PR Office, it’s an opinion manipulation team?

You’ve heard the term ‘comment part-timer,’ haven’t you? It means someone paid by the hour to haunt forums and the like, rigging public opinion and plugging companies. I’d only ever heard such a thing existed; this was the first time I’d seen it for real.

“What brings you here?”

As we stood there gawking, one of the staff came over. Hong Jangwoo went first, holding out the paperwork and letting him know we’d been sent from the Strategic Analysis Office as support. The staffer checked it over, then set off somewhere.

“Come through to the inner room.”
“There’s a separate area inside?”
“This is the Opinion Manipulation Team. The Content Production Team is further in.”

The Strategic Analysis Office ran from Team 1 to Team 5, but the Media PR Office had apparently given its teams names of their own.

We stepped into the inner space the staffer led us to. The whole place was one enormous tiered structure, like a university auditorium.

Plenty of computers in here as well.

A dozen-odd computers installed along every row of the tiers. In front of them, staff were hard at work editing video and photographs, though the work looked more like malicious doctoring of Heroes, or an effort to tear their authority down. If the Opinion Manipulation Team rigged public opinion with text, the Content Production Team seemed to be actually distributing fake content.

“Director Narci is down at the bottom there.”
“The Director?”
“Yes.”

The staffer pointed a finger at the very bottom of the tiers. An enormous expanse of wall, where in an auditorium the platform would have stood. Dozens of monitors filled the whole of it, and…

A man sat in a rocking chair set directly in front of it.

That man is… the Director in charge of the Media PR Office?

Amos of the Villain Research Office, Belia of the Strategic Analysis Office, and… Narci of the Media PR Office.

One thing stood out: he was wearing a bizarre pair of glasses that covered half his face. He sat like that, staring at the screens, his right hand twitching.

And what’s that? …A Gift?

His right hand was only gripping a computer monitor, and yet the screens switched wildly. The footage inside them recombining itself, replaying from different angles. A strange phenomenon. Nothing but a Gift could explain what I was looking at.

“Um… Director.”

The staffer approached cautiously, but the man seemed not to hear a thing. A closer look showed that the glasses and a headset were one piece, as though he were wearing a VR rig.

Left with no choice, the staffer moved to block Director Narci’s view of the screens. The instant he did.

“Ah, fuck! How many times have I said not to call me when I’m concentrating?! Can’t you see my eyeballs are falling out of my head?!”
“H-Haaah…!”
“You want to be fired right here and now? Huuuh?!”

He flung the glasses off in irritation and bellowed. The sound was so loud that my ears rang even from several steps away. The others, though, were absorbed in their own work as though this were an everyday occurrence.

…What Hong Jangwoo had said on the way here, about the man being hysterical, flashed through my mind. Severe hysteria, frequent overtime, and people forced out of the company overnight. This was the personality that made sense of every one of those stories.

“I’m sorry. It’s just… some people from the Strategic Analysis Office are here.”
“What? The Strategic Analysis Office?”

— Whip!

The man turned our way and glared at me and Hong Jangwoo. With the glasses off, his face came through much more clearly. His hair had fallen out in patches, and his cheekbones were hideously hollowed, as though he never ate a proper meal.

If I’d spent more than ten years shut up alone in a corner of a room… I’d probably have turned out like the Director in front of me, wouldn’t I?

In any case, he was not the likeable sort.

Whether or not he knew what I was thinking, a nasty smile spread across Director Narci’s face in an instant. Then he came striding over and abruptly offered a handshake.

“Hahaha! Somebody from the Strategic Analysis Office finally came! I nearly craned my neck off waiting!”
“I-Is that so?”
“So you’re the one Amos has been raving about, the one she calls her No. 1?”

Narci’s gaze swung to Hong Jangwoo, who shook his head in horror.

“No! This gentleman beside me… no, this fellow is Staff Member Im Taeseung. He did a great deal on the TF team, and Director Amos favors him.”

Hong Jangwoo was shaking like a leaf, and yet he somehow managed not to stumble over his words. Then he ducked straight behind me. Just how frightening was Narci, to make him act like this?

Narci turned his head to me at once, narrowing those sunken eyes.

“Hoh, so it’s you. Turned in results on that TF team, did you…”
“I was lucky.”
“I don’t believe in luck. In this false world, the only thing I believe in is performance.”

Up close, two bloodshot eyes. Narci rubbed at the corners of them, then walked off somewhere and came back with a thick file of documents in his hand.

“Right. I’m counting on you to have an idea that’ll break this dull situation open in one stroke.”
“A dull situation…? What sort of thing do you mean?”
“See for yourself. Some very nicely editable source material came in. I’ve been agonizing over how to cook it up into something tasty.”

Narci showed me the file with a crooked smile. It was full of photographs. …Photographs I couldn’t fail to recognize.

“This is…?”

Cha Huigyeong, a few days ago, losing catastrophically to Yoyomonkey and being carried out smeared in tears and snot. Cha Huigyeong, infiltrating Villain Special City and fighting me. And… Cha Huigyeong, fleeing while clutching her severed shoulder. The file was crammed from end to end with photographs of Cha Huigyeong.

At the sight of a face I couldn’t stand to look at, my expression got away from me. Narci must not have caught it; he looked at me with a broad smile.

“I want to blow this Speedgirl affair up properly. Any good ideas?”
“…!”

Belatedly, I realized what he was getting at. It meant I was free to tear into the photographs of Cha Huigyeong he was showing me and taste them however I liked. That an opportunity like this should be handed to me, of all people, the one person in all the world who bore Cha Huigyeong the worst ill will.

I looked Director Narci in the face and smiled back.

“You’ve certainly come to the right man.”

As it happened, I’d been regretting that the Cha Huigyeong on the news was getting off with nothing worse than a heavy disciplinary measure. I’d resolved to look after the people around me. I had never said I wouldn’t take revenge on the woman who ruined my life.

How could I drive Cha Huigyeong down into the abyss?

“Hoh? The right man, you say?”
“Yes. This sort of work is right up my alley.”

It was time to smash the sandcastle Cha Huigyeong had built up so painstakingly.