| Chapter 139. In-House Retaliation (5)
“What happened to PD Yu-nim?”
“Don’t attach nim to a human like that. You really want to use honorifics for the lowest of the low?”
Lee Cheonghyeon snapped.
You think I’m using it because I want to? It’s because you never know who might be listening.
I was about to say something back right away, but held it in when I saw the state of his face. I couldn’t leave Spark’s best visual looking like a cold, soggy bun forever.
“I heard earlier that he was at the police station, but there’s been no news since then. All they said was that he’s being uncooperative with the investigation.”
Even in Jeong Seongbin’s words, honorifics for Yu Hansu were strangely absent.
For that polite kid to be like this. At this point, Yu Hansu wouldn’t make it to heaven even if he died.
“From what I heard, he held a lot of grudges against hyung……”
“Even so, how does it make sense to hit someone? That crazy son of a—”
“Tsk.”
I barely managed to calm Choe Jeho down as he got heated again.
‘You told that writer about me, didn’t you?’
Yu Hansu had definitely said that. He’d also asked whether I’d been going around talking behind his back.
Even though I had never told anyone about Yu Hansu’s abuse of power except the Planning Team’s team leader and Min Jugyeong.
He must have thought that, because of me, he started off at UA with his position already narrowed, then got internally reported on top of that, his reputation got dirtied, he was completely demoted, while I alone kept rising without a hitch.
But I hadn’t had him publicly executed, nor had he been fired from the company, so I hadn’t thought he would go this far over something like that. As expected, he really was a worthless loser.
It seemed the part that pulled Yu Hansu’s trigger was ruining his glorious achievements. That career he’d built by stealing other people’s accomplishments, that is.
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[SYSTEM] A work directive from the “Person in Charge” has arrived.
▶ I knew that Mr. Yu would cause trouble. I told you that man had a weird look in his eyes, didn’t I? He had the exact face of someone who’d cause an incident. So why do you keep doing things I told you not to do? I definitely warned you, okay?
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The system had known Yu Hansu would do this.
Why didn’t you just hold a ritual praying for me to die while you were at it? Judging by how excited you were counting down and everything.
Grinding it up and drinking it still wouldn’t be enough to cool my anger, but it did stop me from getting seriously hurt, and even gave me an incentive, so I’ll let it slide.
Still, seeing Yu Hansu go this far, he must have genuinely been afraid of ruining his image, for all his pathetic posturing.
Did he never think about the things he himself had done? Just looking at Job Planet, he had enemies on all sides. If it were me, I’d be too scared to live my work life like that.
More importantly, the investigation.
Had the time finally come for the sayings of Yu Hansu, which I had been collecting for months, to shine?
My chest trembled. Was it because this was my first proper, cathartic revenge during my work life? My heart pounded and energy welled up in me.
“There’s a folder with my name on it in our shared folder, right? The password is ‘zkfxhlrldnjs214dlfck.’ When you go in, the third or fourth folder should be named ‘[Misc.] Target of Revenge—Yu Hansu.’”
“Hyung, you had something like that inside our shared folder?”
Lee Cheonghyeon asked with a dumbfounded expression.
“I collected it all because there’d be a use for it. Move everything inside onto a USB and give it to the manager. There are lots of empty USBs at the office, so don’t waste money buying one.”
“What’s in that folder?”
“Screenshots of the texts the producer sent me and recordings of our phone calls. My work schedules organized, and there’s also a diary where I pressed down all the feelings of suffering I went through because of the producer. If they say they need the originals, you can just submit my phone. I haven’t deleted any texts.”
“……”
“They say the more records, the better.”
To think the methods for collecting evidence of workplace harassment that I’d looked up once in my life to report Department Head Nam would shine like this.
A criminal investigation, right when the internal investigation at UA must have been nearing its end.
Good, you XXX. I’ll make sure you’re buried not only in the company, but in society too.
As I was savoring the feeling of my insides clearing out, my eyes met Gang Giyeon’s as he looked down at me with a strange expression.
“Hyung, aren’t you angry?”
“About what?”
“Do you really not have any thoughts except that we were startled and that you’re going to report Yu Hansu?”
There was a chill in Gang Giyeon’s expression.
“Hyung.”
“What?”
“Earlier, I stopped Jeho hyung because he seemed too worked up. But you too……”
Then Gang Giyeon shut his mouth.
There were only two reasons that guy did that. Either he didn’t feel the need to say it, or after thinking about it, he felt his words were too harsh.
They were already the type to avoid harsh words in daily life because they were trying to be formal.
It wouldn’t be bad to hear his true feelings while his dissatisfaction with me had burst open.
“If you have something you want to say, say it. Just leave out the profanity.”
“……”
“Hurry. You won’t say it unless I set the stage for you. If it’s hard to talk about in front of the others, should I tell them all to leave?”
“Ha……”
Gang Giyeon let out a sigh.
“I know you’re a consistent person, hyung. But sometimes, I wish you’d take it in moderation.”
“……”
“We were really worried about you, hyung. We were angry at Yu Hansu too. But the person involved is completely fine, and we’re the only ones fretting, so it makes me feel like an idiot.”
Then silence flowed.
Gang Giyeon furrowed his brow and turned his head.
It wasn’t as if I wasn’t angry at all. I’d nearly had a hole put in my head.
But that was what it meant to be an office worker, someone who had to take care of their own business.
You earned one month’s living expenses one month at a time, and if you rested because you were sick, it was unpaid leave, so you couldn’t make money.
If you showed that you were sick, all that came back was scolding, so you tried by any means not to give anyone an excuse to find fault with you.
I had seen more than a few employees who, because they couldn’t be absent for a long period of time, tried to somehow squeeze surgery around a weekend or a public holiday. When you lived like that for a long time, your own safety became a lower priority.
And what about your feelings? If you got angry because you’d been insulted, more often than not, you alone became the strange person. How could you express it honestly?
My thoughts keep drifting into self-pity. I should restrain myself.
There were a lot of things I wanted to say to Gang Giyeon. Like how thirty million office workers would understand me, or that it wasn’t as if I didn’t want to rest.
Still, this time, I decided to back down. I didn’t want to have a tear-soaked argument.
“Thanks for thinking of me that much. I’ll try not to do that.”
When I looked at Gang Giyeon again, his face was saying, “As if.”
It was a fuss if I did this and a fuss if I did that. My head was starting to get tired.
If I followed my heart, I wanted to tell them to pull themselves together now and go practice. But if I did, a few of them would probably glare daggers at me and nag me again.
Suppressing a sigh, I decided to take a step back.
“All right. Everyone worked hard today, so go back and rest. Tomorrow, when there’s time, Seongbin, contact me as the representative. Let’s discuss what to do about the final round.”
“The final round?”
Gang Giyeon asked back.
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to have a meeting tomorrow?”
“Then should we not? Are we not going to do the round?”
“Hyung, you didn’t hear a single thing I said, did you?”
“Giyeon, don’t push him too hard. Hyung, the final round was postponed by two weeks.”
Jeong Seongbin stopped Gang Giyeon, who was flaring up.
The final round being postponed was something I hadn’t expected. In a survival program, the finals—especially for a program usually held live—were incredibly important.
There was a mountain of work to do, from renting the venue and recruiting the audience to expanding the tallying program. If they pushed it back by two whole weeks, the production team would have to redo almost all the groundwork from the beginning.
“Why?”
“One of the cast members got into an accident. You think they’d just proceed like nothing happened? It wasn’t even some other accident. It happened because a conflict broke out while preparing for Awangsil.”
Choe Jeho clicked his tongue.
Jeong Seongbin took out a wet wipe and rubbed it through my hair as he spoke.
“A lot of articles came out too, and it became an issue…… The situation got a little bigger.”
Thick black blood smeared onto the end of the wet wipe.
“So for now, don’t think about anything else and just rest well.”
Jeong Seongbin smiled awkwardly. As if he were trying hard to hide his anxiety.
At this rate, it was as if……
‘I’m making them worry about me even more.’
But I couldn’t take back words I had already spoken.
I said I understood, that I wanted to sleep a little, and pushed the guys to hurry up and leave.
* * *
Only after I watched the guys leave the hospital room with the manager did the tension ease a little.
No matter what, wasn’t it illegal for five people to gang up on a patient and harass him? I cried inwardly from the injustice.
But there was no time to cry. I needed countermeasures for the final round.
Originally, there had been about three weeks left until the final round.
And now, two weeks had been added to that.
It was rare for an entire group to drop out of a program just because one member was injured. Usually, only the injured member was excluded.
But now, the case was a little different. It had happened, of all times, while we were preparing for that very program, and it was also tangled up with internal agency issues.
In that case, UA might pull all of Spark from the program in order to protect its artists and settle the incident.
Dropping out right before the finals wouldn’t be an easy choice, but if it was UA, they were more than capable of doing it. At least UA was a company that valued its singers’ safety.
There was only one conclusion.
I absolutely had to make a complete recovery, put on a perfectly fine face, and shout, “I’m perfectly all right! Now let’s run toward Awangsil’s final stage!”
Judging by the state of the Spark guys earlier, if I wasn’t fully healed, far from letting me onstage, they wouldn’t even let me participate in meetings.
But who was I?
Wasn’t I someone who had held out with one healthy body, never even catching that common flu?
On top of that, I had my reliable labor support service.
As long as I had this, even I could recover quickly and return in good health……
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.
.
.
Cumulative fatigue: 65% (Labor Support Service in effect)
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……Apparently not.
Why is it still 65%?
Doesn’t that mean it’s 85% without the support service? Then doesn’t that mean I’m still in danger?
It didn’t feel real. I think it felt even less real because there was no pain.
Just then, someone entered the hospital room. It was the nurse.
“Patient, how is the pain?”
“I’m all right. Um, is my injury very serious?”
“No, the surgery went well!”
No, then why on earth is my fatigue at 65%?
I’m not even having a nosebleed right now. Isn’t that a system error?
“Then when do you think I’ll be able to be discharged? I’m not in any particular pain, so once the wound heals, I’d like to be discharged.”
“Discharged? Oh dear, your guardian must not have explained it to you yet. The professor said you’ll need to be hospitalized for about eight weeks so we can monitor your progress. Do you have an urgent schedule?”
Excuse me?
A recovery period of…… how many weeks?
But…… I have to go onstage……?