"Wow," Min-jae spoke with his microphone muted. "People are so kind to newbies." He examined his inventory. After receiving a flood of in-game mail from his new guildies, his inventory lit up like a Christmas tree. Items of all sorts of rarities: consumables, equipment, mounts, pets were added to his inventory. He almost laughed.
Min-jae spent the next ten minutes mailing people back 'thank you' notes and cute emojis so people would think he's just some naive newbie.
If he was going to be treated like this, he may as well milk it for all its worth.
"I'm back," came that familiar voice over the microphone. Min-jae hadn't realised his friend went AFK temporarily.
"Ah, welcome back," Min-jae spoke formally and a laugh could be heard from the other side.
"How old are you?" The laugh turned into a question.
Min-jae was reluctant to answer the question, but out of politeness decided to. He was never good at dealing with peer pressure, but he was sure that his age probably wouldn't be linked back to KeuMinMin.
"I'm 23, what about you?"
"Oh, so I am older. I'm 29." Min-jae blinked. Older than he expected, but Jun's warm laugh made it hard to feel awkward.
Thankfully, W0nderjunjun carried the conversation further. "Are you going to be online tomorrow?"
"Ah, maybe. Work's been busy lately so it depends on if my boss lets me go home tomorrow."
"He doesn't let you go home?" Min-jae noticed his friend's voice quieted on the other side as he spoke, as if pondering something.
"Yeah," he took this as an opportunity to start venting. "He's an ass."
W0nderjunjun laughed and probed further. "What do you mean?"
"That bastard hates me, every time he addresses me, it's either to humiliate me or berate me. Or both."
"Surely he doesn't hate you?" Jun's tone was playful. "Have you talked to him?"
"Do you have a boss? Can't talk to them because they're always hardasses."
"I'm sorry, that's tough." Now it really was awkward. "Have you thought about quitting?"
"I'm a fresh graduate," he didn't expect his friend to humour him while he vented. "I won't be able to find a new job." Min-jae gave a weak chuckle after he realised the conversation got too serious.
"I can't think of a single nice thing the guy has ever said." He pulled on his mocking tone for the next set of words, "Redo this, your proposal is awful, your docs are formatted like a toddler."
Jun couldn't help but burst out laughing at that last part. "How does that even work?"
"He hates the formatting, font size and style, he hates that I even lay my fingers on the keyboard. It pisses me off more that the guy is handsome as hell."
"The amount of times I've had to stay so late because of this guy dumping things on my desk at the last minute."
"Actually, I can relate to that." Jun interjected. "Sort of. There's this guy that doesn't listen to anything I say. He's slow to respond to emails and ends up making more work for me. No matter what I delegate to him, I always have to redo it and spend hours checking over his work."
W0nderjunjun wasn't blind 2MinHae's discomfort, he changed the subject. "Ah man, why are these queues taking so long?" Min-jae could hear the guy running a hand down his face out of frustration.
The party played late into the night. They queued up dungeon after dungeon and explored cities to gain EXP, complete quests and level up as quickly as they could.
A couple of hours had passed and it was just after midnight. Daggers mopped up the last of the enemies, and the treasure chest at the end of the dungeon was within their sights. Min-jae hit level 40 and started to feel proud of his accomplishments; it'd been so long since he needed to level up his character that he forgot the dopamine hit from levelling up. His brain was hit with the happy hormone when he collected his level rewards from the NPC in Saint's Retreat, the main zone that they'd just unlocked.
Saint's Retreat was a quaint city that was divided into four parts: the north, south, east and west. The north of the city had a portal at the very back that led to Black Mountain - a wasteland filled with barbarians, criminals, vanguards and assassins of various affiliations. Inside the city, the north had other portals, primarily to raids and special event dungeons when they'd pop up.
The east of the city was the trading district and social area. There were a few in-game restaurants, cafés and outdoor seating areas where people of varying races and classes would come together and casually chat with each other. As well as a hot spot for bots and real money trade spammers.
The south was the primary entrance to the city, and led to the docks. Saint's Retreat is only accessible from this entrance for newcomers and finally the west was the farming zone. Oddly enough, the farming zone was a shared area. Min-jae never had any interest in farming, but the one time he attempted, all the plots had been taken and he didn't see the point in watering and fertilising other people's crops.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" The online friend asked through the voice chat when he saw Min-jae staring at the large castle centralised in the city. There were tall, strong stone walls all around the city with towers dotted around at each corner.
The top of the castle couldn't even be seen as it grew into the clouds in the sky. The party sat down by a waterfall, just outside of the entrance. The quiet hush of the running water was soothing, and the glisten of the water caught Min-jae's eyes.
"Yeah, it's nice."
Being a PvP player, he spent most of his time in the separate city for PvPers – this had all the special vendors for their equipment and exchanging combat medals. When he wasn't there, he was usually in their guild's territory as he had his own player room.
"Looks like we lost track of time. You should get some sleep."
Min-jae's eyes briefly darted to the corner of the screen. "Ah shit, it's so late. You should sleep too."
"I've still got some work to do tonight, before I can sleep. My junior left me with a lot to get through today. I hope I can see you tomorrow."
"Hopefully. Good night."
The other assassin smiled and logged out, then left the voice chat.
"Oi, what are you staring at?" A voice like ice that sent a shiver down his spine.
"Sorry, boss." Min-jae packed away some documents in his desk drawer and picked up the next one.
Min-jae was back at work today. Only a couple of hours left on the clock, but he couldn't help but think of getting home as soon as possible to play Eclipse with W0nderjunjun. His mind kept wandering back to their discussion last night and so far he'd managed to go the whole day without doing something wrong.
Or so he thought.
For most of the day, he had been wrestling with a proposal for a prospective client that recently got in contact with the company. The client was a good friend of the director of the company, but someone decided it would be a good idea for Min-jae to get his hands on this client and draft up the proposal.
Jun-ho, his boss, sat next to the subordinate under the pretext of 'helping', but it was definitely more like surveillance over Min-jae's alleged underperformance.
And it was utter hell.
"Why have you stopped typing?" The supervisor's voice cut through the busy hum of the office ambience, leaning back to make eye contact with Min-jae. His words were sharp as a shattered pane of glass.
Before Min-jae could answer, Jun-ho was suddenly behind him now and placed a firm hand on his slender shoulders. The smell of coffee on him was strong.
"You didn't answer me. Oh, is this the proposal? Let me have a look." Their heads were at equal height, and a hand found its way under Jun-ho's chin while he stared intensively as he read.
"I'm not finished yet, I just need to–" Min-jae's sentence was cut off by Jun-ho's other hand that slid over Min-jae's to seize the mouse.
The subordinate's breath hitched. Warm fingers brushed against his.
BADUM
Heart racing, he jerked his hand back and quickly ejected himself from his seat. His cheeks burned with a scarlet colour, but Jun-ho remained composed. The blank look on his face was concerning.
"The section on target audience is a mess. Have you bothered to do any research on this?" A crease carved into Jun-ho's forehead, he looked like he was about to snap.
"I just thought-"
"It's all wrong." His boss pointed to somewhere on the screen, the scope paragraph. "And the section here is completely unrealistic. Are you going to be working all day and night for the next two weeks to deliver this on time? How do you plan to meet their expectations?"
Min-jae swallowed thickly. He honestly didn't know what he did wrong. This is the first time he's had to do this. Jun-ho was right, and Min-jae knew it.
The younger lowered his head to hide his shame, and apologised profusely. "I'm sorry," he murmured, worlds nearly lost in the sudden hush of the office.
Jun-ho felt guilty. He exhaled. With tension so thick, it could be sliced with a knife, the rest of the office paused what they were doing to listen into this verbal beating.
"Listen…" he raised a hand and placed it on Min-jae's head. "Don't worry about it. You tried your best."
"I'll redo it."
Dismissively, Jun-ho waved him off. "I said drop it. I'll handle it."
The door swung open to Min-jae's apartment. The winter night sky peered through the windows casting a dark shade around the room, yet the air was stale.
"What a shitshow." Min-jae threw his bag to the side of the room. 'I'm so pissed off. Why does that jackass think he can treat people like that?'
He sat down in his chair and pounded his desk angrily. "What the hell?!" He was powerless to say anything against his boss, and it would be stupid of him to try. But he really wanted to wring that guy's neck.
He logged onto the game out of habit and a message popped up in the corner that lightened his mood somewhat.
[Whisper] W0nderjunjun: You made it :D