Chapter 82: The Empty Street
"Junhyuk, are you there?"
"Sorry..."
As I uttered my apology, uncertainty flickered in Yuki's eyes as she gazed at me. I looked at her for a moment, then smiled faintly as I spoke.
"I was planning to talk first, but I missed the timing."
In response, with a sigh of relief, Yuki leaned her forehead against my chest and murmured.
"I thought you were going to reject me, and my heart was about to shatter. This idiot..."
Leaning against my chest, Yuki, with her small shoulders trembling, eventually burst into tears.
I hadn't intended to make her cry, but I hugged her while gazing at the sky with a composed expression.
That's when it happened.
"Oh... it's snowing."
I casually glanced at the sky, and I saw white snowflakes slowly drifting down. However, Yuki, with her face buried in my chest, didn't want to show that she was crying, so she replied.
"Lies."
"No, it's really snowing."
"I'm not falling for it."
Nevertheless, her words paled in comparison to the people around us who, watching the snow falling from the sky, became noisy.
"It's a snowstorm!"
"Wow, this will accumulate quickly, won't it?"
Yuki, poking her head out sneakily amidst the cheers of the people around her, looked up at the sky.
When her reddened eye met mine, she lowered her head, blushing, and I gently lifted her chin, a faint smile playing on my lips.
Naturally, I closed my eyes and kissed her slightly parted lips.
&
"Yuki, it's time for boarding."
"Just a moment. I'm almost done with my calculations."
Yuki, who had bought gifts for her parents and colleagues at the airport duty-free shop, asked me with a worried expression.
"We're not late, are we?"
"If we go down now, we can catch the terminal bus."
I quickly split her shopping bags and headed for the terminal.
Yuki ran after me with all her might, and in the end, we managed to board the terminal bus to the departure gate just one minute before the flight.
"Whew... thank goodness. I thought we'd miss the flight."
"It's a morning flight, and you almost overslept. Who's to blame for that?"
"Well, I wonder who kept me up all night..."
Oh, right, who was that?
Yuki glanced at me for a moment as if pretending not to know, then smiled brightly.
Around her neck, as she smiled at me, hung a small key necklace. It was the kind of key that couples visiting Namsan usually attach to the iron fence and leave behind as a symbol of their love.
"Are you really going to wear that?"
"Yes."
"Normally, people leave those under the railing."
"Still, I want to keep it. Just in case we break up later and I come back to Korea to unlock it."
"Are you planning to do that the day after you start dating?"
As I lightly flicked her forehead, she grazed her forehead with her finger and stuck her tongue out.
"Well, I guess you have a point. I'm sorry."
A little while later, after I saw her off at the waiting plane on the runway, I handed Yuki a ticket to Narita and asked.
"You'll be okay, right?"
"Of course."
"When you get home, give me a call."
"I'll be waiting."
I wanted to return together if possible, but taking the Shinkansen from Tokyo, where she lives, to Kyoto, where I live, would be very inefficient. That's why I decided to send Yuki to Narita first.
My flight was scheduled to depart from Osaka Airport one hour later.
"Thank you for bringing me to Korea."
"I didn't even properly show you around..."
"Then, let's plan to visit again and explore properly."
"Sure, let's do that."
As I patted Yuki's head, she closed her eyes like a puppy and gave me a gentle smile.
...
The next day.
After taking three days off following my Friday leave, I returned to work and started reviewing the approval documents on my desk.
Knock, knock... With a light knock on the door, Morita entered.
Unlike the slightly awkward expression I had seen in the break room before, Morita greeted me warmly as soon as she saw me.
"Mr. Kang, did you have a good trip to Korea?"
"Oh, you've come just in time. I was thinking of having a meal or something before I left."
In response, Morita scratched the back of her head with a characteristic awkward expression and said.
"When you come back from Korea, you said you'd show me the concept illustrations..."
It seemed that a new project was related to a dating simulation game, and Morita was showing a lot of interest even though it was in the early development stage.
Morita had decided to leave Mintendo at the end of the month. While some regretted her departure due to the success of Psych Battle, few actively tried to convince her to stay. The reason was that there were too many developers at Mintendo compared to the number needed for the game titles they were producing.
Under Shige's leadership, the development time for high-quality games was increasing, and currently, Mintendo's first-party games were being condensed into titles such as Super Marriage, Dong-Kong Com, and Karin's Legend.
In such a lineup, it was extremely rare for a specialist in cute girl illustrations like Morita to find a place.
And Morita knew it better than anyone.
"Since it looks like you've both made up your minds, shall we get started?"
I took out a proposal document containing concept illustrations from my bag and placed it on the table. It was still in the early stages, with only about ten pages, but as soon as Morita saw the proposal, her eyes lit up, and she eagerly picked it up.
Then, Hayashi, looking at the first page of the proposal in Morita's hands, muttered.
"The title 'The Empty Street'... Mr. Kang, isn't that a bit too depressing?"
I smiled and replied as I took a sip of warm green tea from a nearby teacup.
"For now, take a look."
With a somewhat doubtful look, Hayashi examined the proposal for a while, and after a moment, he raised his head with a strange expression.
"Mr. Kang, there are over ten different background designs and character sprites in this, and even if we push the special chips to the limit, it seems impossible to achieve this with the family spec..."
Morita, too, looking at the background art, added to Hayashi's words.
"It seems like this is supposed to be based on the actual streets of Tokyo, but with the color expression of the family, can we really achieve such detailed backgrounds with characters? It's easy to draw, but to produce it as pixel art would take days just for one background..."
Both of them, perhaps due to their background as industry professionals, started voicing their complaints as soon as they saw the concept proposal, even though it was only around ten pages. However, they seemed to have missed the important part.
"Um... have you seen the platform section?"
"Platform?"
When they responded to my question and looked at the platform markings in the proposal, they both raised their eyebrows.
"SFC...? That's a platform I've never heard of."
"It's a new abbreviation created this morning. The full name is Super Family Computer. 'The Empty Street,' the first-ever dating simulation game, is planned to be the launch title for Mintendo's next-generation gaming device."
"Really?"
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