Monster Rookie

About three days had passed since the presentation. Three days was more than enough time to mass-produce fake content. One by one I worked through the doctored images and the templates for stirring up public opinion, all of them lined up across my monitor. Before I joined the company I’d drifted around the forums myself with nothing better to do, so I had a rough feel for how that world worked.

Pros really are different. There’s no way anyone would take this for rigged opinion.

The Opinion Manipulation Team was big enough that I’d had my doubts about its firepower and its expertise. Every post and comment template, though, came out of exhaustive meetings, and the workmanship showed. Ninety-nine percent of people probably wouldn’t recognize any of it as doctored content, or as a template.

I broke off from the material and moved over to a news portal.

Their handling of a job really is clean.

The portal’s main page had been scrubbed spotless at some point. The criticism aimed at Cha Huigyeong and the Association had thinned out little by little over a few days, and once no new articles came, it faded slowly out of the public’s attention. In its place came a top star’s dating rumor and news of a famous entertainer’s overseas gambling trip. The Association had clearly poured enormous funds into silencing the press.

I snorted in spite of myself. It was a maneuver of theirs I knew far too well.

“This is better, actually. Very good.”

“Director.”

Director Narci had turned up beside me out of nowhere, peering into my monitor.

“Keep making noise about the same subject and all you do is weaken the firepower. Putting the fire out for a while before you feed it more wood — that’s a technique too.”

I nodded and pushed the tablet lying on my desk over toward Narci.

“I agree with you, Director. The public only ever wants tasty prey.”
“Hoo. Prey, is it?”
“Things that are funny, or infuriating, or provocative enough to bring tears. …Aren’t those the only things that can hold the public?”

Narci closed his eyes as though savoring my words, and a broad smile spread across his face.

“Hahaha! I knew it — you and I speak the same language.”

He gave my shoulder a light smack, then stared at me intently with a look of genuine feeling in his eyes.

“What do you say — drop that Manager title and take a formal assignment to the Media PR Office? I’ll keep a seat open for you.”
“Sorry?”
“If you want it, I’ll even give you a team-leader-level post. It isn’t vicious performance-first management here the way the Strategic Analysis Office is.”

He kneaded my shoulder and whispered.

The Media PR Office was, without question, a place where I could take the revenge I wanted on the Association and on Speedgirl directly. But I gave an awkward smile and quietly shook my head.

“It’s more than I deserve, but once this project is finished, I’ll have done what I came here to do.”

This collaboration would achieve my goal. Once the Association’s true face was out in front of the whole world, there would be nothing left for me to do in the Media PR Office.

Narci smacked his lips and tipped his head back, looking honestly reluctant to let it go.

“That’s… true. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’m grateful for the offer.”
“Right. If you change your mind later on, get in touch.”

Narci rose from his seat and brushed off his crumpled lab coat.

“Anyway, you’ve worked hard these past few days. The missile’s ready now, so it’s time to push the launch button.”
“Is that so?”
“Come along. For you, I’ll let you push the launch button with me.”

I followed along behind Narci and left the Content Production Team.

The Opinion Manipulation Team’s office, hundreds of desks lined up without a gap between them. Under half-dimmed lights, dozens of staff waited with nothing but the blue glow of their monitors to see by. They looked like soldiers preparing for war, and the sight left even me tense for no good reason.

— Clap!

Narci clapped his hands loudly and broke the office’s silence.

“Right. From this moment we begin the operation to bring down the Association. A thing no Villain organization has ever pulled off! Ahh, what a heart-pounding piece of work this is!”

He clenched a fist and held it up toward the empty air.

“Operation name: ‘Tower of Babel’. We will smash their delusional tower and drag it down!”

“Yes, Director!!”

The booming answer rang against the office ceiling. Right after, the sound of dozens of mice and keyboards clicking all at once. In that spine-tingling clatter, I felt a strange thrill.

The revenge on the Association I had wanted so badly had finally begun.

The day after the Media PR Office launched the Tower of Babel project.

At nine in the morning, students gathered in Room 103 of Hanguk University’s Humanities Building for the day’s first-period class. Among them, nodding off in his seat, was a freshman named Kim Changmin. He patted his own cheek, working to drive the drowsiness out before class began.

“Man, I’m dead tired. Should’ve picked up a coffee on the way. You not sleepy?”

Kim Changmin turned to the classmate in the next seat. The guy had his phone gripped tight below the desk. Normally he’d have been busy sneaking in a game, but today he was concentrating like he was about to be sucked into the screen.

Changmin nudged the guy’s shoulder and whispered low.

“Hey, what are you staring at like that? If it’s good, let me see too.”
“…Hey. Changmin. Have you seen this? The Hero Association and Speedgirl, I mean.”

The guy scrolled the screen over and over with a trembling finger, without even turning his head.

“Speedgirl? Sure I know her.”

The B-rank Hero Speedgirl. A name that had been everywhere lately over the unauthorized invasion of Villain Special City. She was good-looking enough that Kim Changmin had known who she was well before any of that…

“Isn’t she the Hero who fell into the abyss recently?”

Starting with goofing off in the middle of a fight, all the way to that bizarre act of chumminess in a battle with a Villain. She’d set off one incident after another, and right now she was the most famous figure among the Heroes. What had really sealed it, though, was the unauthorized entry into Villain Special City and the extermination of a Villain there.

Kim Changmin thought back to the Association’s explanatory report he’d seen on the news a few days earlier and answered without much interest.

“Oh, that thing about her storming into Villain Special City? It’s been quiet lately, so I figured it got sorted out.”
“Sorted out? Like hell… the forums are going nuts right now. You really don’t know anything, do you?”
“What is it. Don’t tell me a Second Civil War broke out? Do we get classes canceled, then?”
“Dumbass.”

Changmin tossed the joke out with a snicker, but his friend’s reaction was ice-cold. The guy went straight-faced and shoved the phone up in front of Changmin’s face. On the screen sat a post with tens of thousands of upvotes, a red ‘HOT’ mark on it.

“…What is this?”

Changmin knitted his brow and played the video.

Speedgirl, lifting a child up into her arms at the scene of a fire. But in that video, meticulously doctored by Narci’s Gift, the woman’s eyes held no tenderness. In its place sat a vicious contempt, as though she were looking at filth.

“…Is this real? Why does she look like that?”
“The crazier part is this one. They’re saying the Association’s been lying to us this whole time.”

His friend’s finger moved on to the next post.

The post laid out the life story of Hyperman’s son, Im Taeseung. A Hero’s son who, after his father’s death, had staged a one-man protest, on the grounds that the cause of death had never been properly established and he hadn’t even been allowed to see the body. Attached to it was archive news footage from ten years earlier, showing a middle-school-aged Im Taeseung in the Association lobby, holding up a picket sign and wailing.

“Wow, these guys are insane.”

The further the post went on, the more of a spectacle the content became. To avoid handing over the compensation payout, the Association had kept the bereaved family under surveillance. Then came the exposé that in the end they had branded him a Villain and driven him into a death trap. And finally, that Speedgirl’s infiltration of Villain Special City had likewise been an attempt to kill the stubbornly surviving Im Taeseung. One look at the photograph of Speedgirl gripping Im Taeseung by the throat in Villain Special City left no room to doubt it.

The cunning lie mixed into seventy percent truth. It brought down the world of justice Changmin had known in a single stroke. Goosebumps prickled up Kim Changmin’s spine as he watched the video.

“Hold on… so the Association tried to kill a perfectly ordinary Hero’s son over nothing but money?”
“Yeah, and they’re saying the reason she went to Villain Special City this time was to assassinate him and shut his mouth.”
“Insane… the Hero Association was really this kind of place? That’s not a Hero Association, that’s a Villain Association.”
“That’s what I’m saying… wow, this is actually legendary.”

Kim Changmin rubbed his forearm and let out a hollow laugh. The Hero Association turning an ordinary person into a Villain to save money, and then going as far as trying to kill him? He was one of the ordinary people himself, and there was no telling when he might end up that kind of scapegoat.

“This really isn’t right. Let’s do something, us students.”
“What, you gonna go out and protest?”
“I don’t know whether this Im Taeseung guy is dead or not, but the truth has to be established. …First we put it up on the school forum and make it public, then we gather the students and issue a statement.”
“Not bad. I’ll help too.”

A sense of betrayal toward the Hero Association boiled up inside Kim Changmin’s chest. The professor’s lecture might as well not have existed; he pulled out his own phone and logged onto the forum. That Im Taeseung was at most about his own age played its part too.

This wasn’t Hanguk University’s business alone. All across the country, the faces of those who came across the news about Im Taeseung twisted much the way Changmin’s had. The fragments of the missile Narci had fired at the ‘Tower of Babel’ lodged themselves in the minds of the entire nation, and the once-solid trust in the Association was crumbling away.

“Hahaha! At last a genuine talent has come into our Team 2!”

Team Leader Ma Sangjin burst into a hearty laugh and tousled my hair.

He’d been skimming that report of mine on the desk for a good while now, grinning from ear to ear the whole time. I’d only come up to the Strategic Analysis Office to file it, and I hadn’t expected him to be this pleased.

Well, he’s got reason to be.

Not a full week had passed since the opinion manipulation began in earnest, and the controversy around the Hero Association had already spread across every kind of site and forum. My name had climbed the real-time search rankings and been written up on some information site or other… I’d posted astonishing results, if I said so myself.

“Hong Jangwoo, you did well too. You’ve had a hard time of it on this one.”
“Oh, not at all, Team Leader. What did I even do? Staff Member Im did all the hard work.”

When Team Leader Ma Sangjin kneaded his shoulder, Hong Jangwoo gave a start and waved both hands.

“He laid down his own painful past in an act of pure self-sacrifice. How could I go putting a spoon in on that?”
“Hahaha! Listen to the modesty.”

At Ma Sangjin’s words Hong Jangwoo gave a bitter smile. From the way he snuck a glance to read my face, his conscience must have pricked him a little. On this job he really had done nothing but what I told him to.

“I knew it. Forcing the issue to bring you over when Team 3 was trying to take you has paid off.”

Ma Sangjin nodded as if satisfied and fiddled with the end of his cigar.

“Anyway, the both of you can look forward to this month-end evaluation. As long as you don’t cause an accident on Hero Gamble, a promotion is as good as a foregone conclusion.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Off you go, then. Sorry for holding up busy people.”
“We’ll be going! Keep up the good work!”

Having said only what he’d meant to say, Ma Sangjin coolly turned his back and disappeared into the team leader’s office. I roughly straightened my mussed hair and jerked my chin at Hong Jangwoo, standing beside me. The report was over, so what was he standing around gawping for?

“We should be heading back about now. We’re going to the Media PR Office, so gather up all those documents. Jangwoo.”
“Yessir! Let’s go right now, Sunbae!”

Hong Jangwoo followed close at my heels without a word of complaint. The drag of his octopus leg along the floor sounded far sprightlier and more obedient than before. Starting at the TF team and on through this Media PR Office project, he’d witnessed the results I put up from closer than anybody… and the guy seemed to have worked it out on survival instinct.

That if he stuck by my side, rice cakes would drop into his lap even while he slept.

In effect, Hong Jangwoo had done nothing but lay a spoon on a table I’d already set. It did make me angry, watching him try to climb over me now and then, though. He was a guy you could see straight through, so by now it was almost cute.

I glanced back over my shoulder and looked at Hong Jangwoo’s beaming face.

“Jangwoo. Are you that happy?”
“Extremely happy! I swear I’ll serve you as my sunbae for life! I look forward to working with you from here on out.”
“Your whole life, my ass.”

Hong Jangwoo fawned openly and tried to catch hold of my sleeve. I let out a snort of a laugh and slapped his hand away. For all his talk, he was the kind who’d turn his back on me with uncanny timing the moment I slipped.

— Zzzing.

The heat of the monitors, hitting me the instant the Media PR Office’s automatic doors opened. This too was starting to feel familiar by now. Only, unlike the first time, the office had a festival atmosphere.

Word is the performance bonuses came out pretty big?

Once a severe blow had been landed on the Hero Association, the Beyond Villain building showered a special performance bonus on the Media PR Office. They said even the lowest-ranking staff got about half a month’s salary. So there was no gauging just how much the people above them had made.

Just then Director Narci, who’d been manning the front of the monitor wall, came running like lightning.

“Look who it is! If it isn’t Im Taeseung, the Media PR Office’s greatest MVP of the year!!”

Narci gripped my shoulders hard enough that he looked ready to lift me off the ground. Inside those bloodshot eyes, a happiness laced with madness.

…Just how big a bonus had this man gotten?

I smiled awkwardly and scratched the back of my head.

“I got lucky.”
“Luck? He got lucky, he says? Damn it, you might be right. Skill alone doesn’t cover this. The men I’ve raised up over years couldn’t come up with an idea like this!”

Narci’s reaction wasn’t excessive in the slightest. All of Korea was in a rage right now over the Association’s ugly true face, and the Hero Association, seemingly flustered, was busy paying off the major press outlets to keep quiet. But the harder they threw money at blocking articles, the more it backfired as ‘press suppression’, and the tighter the grip closed on the Association’s throat.

Fanning the flames of their own fire, is what that is.

Then Narci’s excited movements jolted to a stop. He worked his mouth as though something had come back to him, then brought his lips right up against my ear and lowered his voice.

“Ah, right. Now that I think of it, I nearly forgot.”
“Forgot what, Director?”
“Director Greed was asking for you. Told me to have you come round to the VIP ward.”
“Greed…? Surely you don’t mean Director Belia?”

At the unexpected name my eyes wavered faintly.

Belia, holder of Beyond Villain’s Director post of ‘Greed’. She was calling for me? And in the VIP ward, at that?

Narci gave a nasty little smile and patted my shoulder.

“She said it looked like there was a need to make good on a promise the two of you struck a while back. Very important information, apparently.”

“!”

The promise I had struck with Belia. The promise that every time I posted results at Beyond Villain, she would tell me a secret about my father’s death.

I changed my expression at once and nodded.

“…I’ll go right away.”