“Why me?”

Daeryong Group had climbed to ninety-ninth in the corporate rankings last year.

This is the director’s office of the Strategic Planning Team at Daeryong EcoCycle Co., Ltd., one of the group’s subsidiaries.

The cold metal fittings alone must have cost a fortune to install.

Executive or not, he shouldn’t be burning corporate funds this way.

Shff.

Director Go Dongyeol cocks his neck back arrogantly and looks at me. His eyes are as pitiless as a viper’s.

Behind thin, aggressively styled silver frames, a cold light glints.

Thirty-three this year. Short hair spiked stiff with gel adds to the swagger.

Designer clothes, and a designer watch you couldn’t miss if you tried.

An executive chair at a major corporation. An ordinary salaryman his age could never hope to land one.

But Go Dongyeol had been born into special circumstances, and that made all the difference.

His grandfather is chairman of the family group. His father is CEO.

His great-uncle was the founding chairman of a national daily.

One of Korea’s top-shelf gold spoons, in other words.

“You’re not really asking because you don’t know, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

This morning, out of nowhere, they’d put me on standby orders.

Grounds: lax work discipline, and personal use of the corporate card.

Baseless. Absurd. I can’t accept it.

It had plainly been a client entertainment function, and I’d had approval from above. I’d never used the card for anything else.

And they call that personal use?

Last month a project I’d poured a year into hit big. I’d pushed it hard after making assistant manager.

To land the patent I’d haunted my alma mater’s engineering labs like a lunatic.

I’d run a whole networking campaign, pulling in a business school professor to do it.

For a pittance I secured the newest production method for eco-friendly biodegradable plastic, still under research by a professor at Yeonguk University’s engineering college.

Groundbreaking work, with price competitiveness to spare.

I opened direct channels with European corporations sensitive about their environmental record.

We signed the final supply contract. For the next ten years all the company had to do was ship, and collect euros running into the hundreds of millions a year.

On the plant side it was a matter of bolting the patented device onto existing machinery. That was all.

Colleagues congratulated me and said I’d pull a massive bonus and land on the special promotion list. The office rumors ran the same way.

Word came down the line that my performance review was coming back an S.

And then today. Notice of dismissal.

“Doesn’t know……. Heh heh.”

Go Dongyeol sneered, openly.

Click.

Hissss.

He keeps this whole spacious office to himself. He lights up without a thought for the company smoking ban.

Hoooooo.

The smoke wells up and spreads in a haze across my face.

“Ha Tae-ung.”

“…….”

Go Dongyeol says my name.

“You tied to me somehow?”

“…….”

“School ties, hometown ties, blood ties. Something like that.”

“No.”

“Right, you’re not. Hell, we don’t even have smoking ties. Do we?”

“…….”

There’s no chance an ordinary man like me shares a connection with a third-generation half-chaebol.

“Every time I look at you, my mood drops. Sharply. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know.”

Go Dongyeol had been posted here only a few months back. Before that he’d been at another affiliate in the group.

“Heh heh. Right, of course you don’t. A clueless, appetite-killing little bastard. That’s you.”

He has to know every detail of how completely I lack backing. He insults me to my face anyway.

I want to put a fist through his jaw.

Outside these walls he wouldn’t be worth a single punch.

But I have to swallow it.

Outside, with no income coming in, it’s a war zone. Every crisis on earth has been landing at once.

Fractures between nations had started showing from 2020.

Nobody imagined a war between Russia and Ukraine.

Then came war between Israel and the Arab world, before the aftershocks of COVID-19 had even cleared.

And then, beginning in 2027, the global bubble peaked higher than it ever had in history.

All at once — pop. It burst.

Korea didn’t get to sidestep it either. It got hit, and properly.

Under high-interest policy, the property nouveau riche who’d built everything on gap speculation were wiped out in waves.

It made a joke of the landlords who’d once been said to outrank the Creator himself.

The feast of the new money came to nothing. Even the ones dragged down alongside them ended up on the street.

One near-state-of-emergency after another.

My luck with employment had been bad from the start, as it happened.

When I joined, the economy wasn’t especially bad.

Most of my university classmates walked into major corporations. We’d submit applications together and every time I was the one who got cut.

I cleared the first-round document screening at top-ten groups a few times.

But after the interview the rejection came. Every time. It wasn’t as though my credentials were weak.

My GPA at graduation was 4.33.

Near-perfect on TOEIC and TOEFL. Serviceable Japanese and Chinese too.

After that, getting shot down became routine even at top-fifty groups.

Korean firms, foreign firms — nobody would hire me.

The bad luck followed me like someone was trailing behind and working the strings.

After all that drifting, the group that took me was Daeryong.

Twenty-odd affiliates. Not inside the top hundred in the domestic rankings. That’s how it was then.

From the following year it was certain to climb several places. That’s the crux of it.

My project succeeding was what made it possible.

And in that situation, with no lead-up whatsoever, the standby order came down.

I still have student loans I haven’t cleared. The cost of living right now is murderous.

I had far too many reasons to hold on. I’m in no position to do anything but swallow the anger.

“There’s really no way?”

Fists clenched, teeth locked, I asked again.

“Obviously not, kid. Heh heh.”

Go Dongyeol grins wide. His eyes go on sneering at me.

“What’s the real reason?”

Even if I’m going, I want to know why. The early retirement wave had ended last year.

I wanted to know why they’d cut the man who brought the company a profit.

“All of it.”

“……??”

“Look at you. The insolent stare, the irritating way you talk, the face I can’t stand looking at. That pathetic little competence of yours. Nothing about you runs on my wavelength.”

This bastard. A supremacist psycho, heavy on the INTJ, with ISFJ mixed in.

He’s cutting me over personal taste?

“And your spine’s too stiff. Worthless background, carrying himself like he’s somebody. I hate that. So the lowborn goes. Heh heh heh.”

You bastard. I don’t like you either.

Go Dongyeol’s education: a study-abroad stint at some American regional private college nobody’s heard of.

The results of my project firmed up his standing in the group and nobody else’s.

His position and mine were never the same. I was rank and file. He takes nearly all the fruit of the work.

And still he’s petty enough to envy a nobody staffer.

He’ll never amount to much. The conclusion is in.

“I’ll submit my resignation.”

“Heh heh. Good thinking. I’ll see you get two months’ pay as severance.”

“How should I handle the handover?”

“What would someone like you have to hand over? Get your face out of my office.”

Crrk.

My teeth ground together. Not a shred of courtesy in him to the last. He insults, and he jeers.

Come to think of it, they hadn’t assigned me a project in a month.

I’d taken it as being handed a bit of a break.

Once that stretch ran out, they cornered me on lax work discipline. It had all been a planned piece of work from the start.

The rabbit is dead. Time to boil the hound.

A slow grin.

Venom rises fully in Go Dongyeol’s eyes. He looks like a man who’s gotten exactly what he came for.

He sneers at me the way a viper rolls its yellow eyes.

If I went with my temper, I’d bury a fist in the thug’s face.

I hold back anyway.

I’m not a raw street thug like him. I’m a decent, educated man.

Except for one thing.

Shff. I loosened the tie choking my neck.

“Hey. Go Dongyeol-ssi.”

I said his name, friendly about it.

“Go Dongyeol-ssi? You get fired and now you run your mouth?”

He glares, as if he can’t believe it himself.

“No. You and me, we’re the same age. Card’s off the desk, that’s the end of it. And is there one single thing about us running on the same wavelength? Kind words come back kind. What were you expecting?”

I looked calmly into both his eyes.

“Th-this bastard’s lost his mind!”

Go Dongyeol shot out of his seat and came striding at me. God, he’s short.

Ah. So that’s it.

I realized why I was being cut at this exact point in time.

Thud.

I took a long step forward myself.

“……!!”

Shff. I stretched my arm out and brought it near Go Dongyeol’s throat.

“Wh-what are you doing!”

He pulls up mid-stride and edges backward.

Scared.

“Watch yourself walking home at night. You know I’m ex-Special Forces, right?”

Tap, tap.

I brushed his shoulder off lightly with my palm.

A faint tremor.

His heartbeat, tight and quick, travels up through my palm.

A snort of laughter gets out of me.

It grates, living in a world where men who aren’t worth shit can throw their weight around and have it work.

Since the day I joined I’d given this company my best and my loyalty. No regrets.

I’ll leave clean.

“Keep the severance tidy. Thug bastard — you’re not worth the sole of my shoe.”

No attachment left.

So ends a working life that had guaranteed a stable income.

For a man with no school ties, no blood ties, no hometown ties — and no smoking ties — I lasted a long while.

I turn away clean. Fired, and the day still leaves my chest clear.

“Hey! Ha Tae-ung! I’ll kill you! You son of a bitch!”

CRASH!

Walking out, not looking back — the finger.

That was the first incident of the day.

(End of Chapter 1)