Any office worker dreams at least once about getting revenge on the boss or workplace making their life miserable.
I wasn’t any different.
Whenever the resentment piled up, I wished Director Nam would get thoroughly chewed out by upper management or step on gum during his commute home and have to throw away his shoes.
Sometimes the anger crossed human boundaries.
Consumed by emotion, I imagined things no person should imagine. Then after calming down, I’d question my own humanity for having thought such extreme thoughts at all.
At first glance, hatred toward a superior seemed to follow a steady graph.
A gentle curve that spiked when you got angry and gradually settled back down with time.
But without realizing it, the axis beneath those waves slowly sank lower and lower.
The highest points, where you felt okay again, never even reached half of what they had been before joining the company.
And once the lows bottomed out, everyday life itself started becoming difficult.
Like a person slowly getting sick.
Even that, I didn’t realize at the time.
Only now, looking back, could I see it.
“I hate Director Nam” and “I never want to rejoin Hanpyeong Industry” weren’t wrong descriptions.
But they weren’t entirely accurate either.
I was afraid.
Just imagining myself reliving the time I spent there, imagining the things he’d say and the future where I’d know exactly what was coming yet still be unable to escape—it was enough to suffocate me.
Once hatred grows too large, it stops being about revenge and becomes a desperate desire to never even run into that person by chance again.
Director Nam taught me that.
Back when I didn’t know what an ideal world looked like, it was bearable.
If I believed everyone lived similarly miserable lives, complaints never surfaced.
But once you spend a long time working alongside good people......
Once you repeatedly experience a company slowly but surely changing, once you repeatedly taste the sense of accomplishment born from effort, you inevitably realize just how deeply that place wounded you.
That was why I wanted to avoid it forever.
I wanted to carve it completely out of my head.
And yet there were people I couldn’t bring myself to forget.
Assistant Manager Hwang and Assistant Song.
The coworkers who would end up walking the same road in my place became the reason I had to seek out the Director Nam whose obituary I didn’t even want to hear about.
If this had been before my regression, I would’ve had countless cards to play.
Recordings, screenshots, piles of unused vacation records and work logs.
But now all of that had become nonexistent.
Unfortunately, using past incidents to get revenge was impossible.
It also didn’t feel particularly meaningful to investigate whether there were other victims.
I’d never once heard of Director Nam tormenting anyone in Hanpyeong Industry as badly as he tormented me.
That part gave me pause.
Still, it wasn’t as though there were no methods left.
Humanity built pyramids from bare dirt.
If there wasn’t a path already there, then I’d simply make a new one.
The fundamental goal was making Director Nam stop abusing his power.
Exposing past humiliations and venting my resentment would’ve been ideal, but if another method could still put brakes on him, I was more than willing to choose the second-best option.
“The strongest weapon would be influence.”
The impact carried by an idol personally beloved by his daughter couldn’t even be compared to that of a subordinate employee buried far beneath him in rank.
The risks were lower too.
Unless someone was a close industry insider tied directly to Spark, some random middle-aged department director ranting about me wouldn’t attract much attention.
Director Nam also wasn’t the type with enough talent to stir up internet controversy among younger generations.
On the other hand, what would happen if subordinate employee Kim Iwol openly rebelled against his boss?
If I managed to walk home with both legs intact, I’d already be lucky.
Even if I resigned, he’d obviously block my future every time someone performed a reference check by spewing insults about me.
Generally speaking, scandals placed celebrities at a disadvantage.
People with more to lose had to act carefully.
But idol Kim Iwol had already gained a sort of protective buffer thanks to several prior rumors and the whole channel-clipping scandal.
And the fact that there were people willing to stand by my side wasn’t insignificant either.
Besides......
“I’m not alone.”
There were five people with me.
If Director Nam tried throwing something, surely at least one of them would stop him and ask what the hell he was doing?
I joked about it lightly, but I was serious.
Honestly, I didn’t think I could stand up to Director Nam alone.
The years spent being beaten down one-sidedly crushed people regardless of any actual physical strength difference.
Wasn’t the entire reason the system borrowed Director Nam’s speech patterns because “using Director Nam’s authority was the most effective method against Kim Iwol?”
Just as the system judged, I was still trapped beneath Director Nam’s shadow.
Even though I could’ve created countless excuses to go there, I kept hesitating.
My mind screamed at me to go and do the right thing, but my body refused to move.
Still, if everyone went together, then even if Spark never directly intervened, I felt like I wouldn’t just stand there helplessly taking it.
After constantly lecturing them all this time, I’d at least force myself to say something out of embarrassment in front of them.
Or rather......
Just having them nearby would calm me down tremendously.
Like it had at the rooftop garden where we all watched the night view together.
Nobody else should ever become like me because of Director Nam.
I didn’t want anyone to suffer like that.
That was all I wanted.
It felt like there would never be another challenge in my life this difficult.
Not one I could face unless I had people on my side.
So it had to be now.
The last thing left to decide was:
“What method should I use?”
No matter how warmly the other party regarded me, the current Director Nam and the current me were complete strangers.
Persuasion and gentle negotiation would take too much time, and there was a high chance Director Nam wouldn’t seriously listen anyway.
One-time events or rewards lacked permanence.
A shallow line like, “If you do me this favor, I’ll get your daughter an autograph,” could never reform a man like Director Nam.
I needed a hardline approach.
Inside a closed environment where I couldn’t ask anyone else for help, I had to place myself in an overwhelmingly superior position where he’d have no choice but to listen.
And for a very long time—
probably until the day Director Nam retired—
I needed to make him feel constantly watched by the person closest to him.
I had to plant fear inside him.
So that the restraints wouldn’t loosen even briefly.
So he wouldn’t vent his frustrations on weaker people again.
It was time for him to pay the price for forcing subordinates to endlessly monitor their own behavior around him.
Using what I had, I would force Director Nam to reform whether he wanted to or not.
There couldn’t be a simpler plan than that.
I had already decided the method.
All that remained was confirmation.
“System.”
The moment I called it, a glowing dialogue window appeared.
Given the perfectly arranged stage, the conclusion I’d reached about confronting Director Nam, and the particular solution I’d chosen to exploit......
I wasn’t naïve enough to dismiss all of this as coincidence.
If the table had been set this perfectly, then the system’s intentions were equally obvious.
“I think I know what kind of ‘small reward’ you said you’d prepare for me, so I want to confirm something.”
If the system truly wanted me to overcome obstacles in life that badly, then it definitely would’ve prepared a proper safety mechanism.
The system immediately displayed its response.
▶ Assistant Manager Kim’s been working here for four whole years. Surely you can already guess what I’m thinking, right?
▶ External presentations for business expansion don’t count as leaking internal company secrets, so relax and have fun~.
The moment the system disappeared, the car gradually slowed for parking.
The exterior of the building looked as clean and polished as ever when I stepped out and looked up.
From the outside alone, you’d think there was no better company in existence.
People obsessed with appearances tended to invest in things that looked good rather than things with actual substance.
Hanpyeong Industry was overflowing with people like that.
They’d outsourced construction cheaply to an acquaintance running a contracting business, ended up with leaking ceilings and toilets with absurdly weak water pressure, then caused a massive uproar demanding the company building be displayed prominently in recruitment postings as though it provided an incredible work environment.
“Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.”
I’d worried I might lose my nerve, but my condition was surprisingly stable.
Maybe because I had fully prepared myself mentally before coming.
If anything, I felt calm.
If even a trace of affection remained, maybe I would’ve felt a little nostalgic.
But all I felt now was negativity.
The fact my hostility remained unchanged was a good sign.
Anger would be essential for what I planned to do next.
While I enthusiastically cursed them out internally, someone walked into the lobby.
It was a face I didn’t recognize.
“You’re here for the Spark filming, right?”
Bits and pieces of the conversation with the managers drifted over.
After digging through my memory for a while at the unfamiliar name matching the unfamiliar face, I finally realized who he was.
One of the eighty-three senior assistant managers who had passed through the HR department.
People I had desperately searched through meeting minutes, approval forms, and server records to learn about because they hadn’t even left handover documents behind.
If this wasn’t the graveyard of assistant managers, then what was?
Seeing the distant senior dressed neatly in a suit felt strange.
He was smiling, but the exhaustion clinging around his eyes and the slippers practically tearing apart erased most of the psychological distance usually present with strangers.
“How do you even know a place like this?”
Lee Cheonghyeon asked.
I leaned toward his ear and whispered quietly,
“I found it while doing research a long time ago.”
“Ahh.”
Lee Cheonghyeon, recalling the days before we had a dedicated team when we handled everything ourselves from beginning to end, accepted the explanation easily.
After riding the painfully slow elevator and passing through suffocating hallways, the familiar office finally came into view.
Once upon a time, I had managed this place.
A cramped office impossible to use because neither heating nor air conditioning worked.
It had sat abandoned for years before finally catching management’s attention, at which point employees got screamed at for “how the hell are you managing this company?” and personally converted it into a storage room.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t have randomly dissolved perfectly functional teams, tanked entire business divisions, and turned the company into an empty wasteland.
The office we’d actually be filming in was next door.
It was a space repeatedly assembled for temporary task forces whenever the company president read articles like “XX Corporation’s TF Team Achieves Miraculous Results! Flexible Organizational Structures Create Maximum Efficiency!”
At Hanpyeong Industry, they’d create a TF, run it for three months, then dissolve it when results didn’t appear.
Then someone somewhere would hear about another tiny TF creating a huge success story, so they’d start another new TF again.
It was practically an annual tradition.
Which worked perfectly for me.
Cheap filming location.
A legitimate excuse to come here and clash with Director Nam.
And thanks to the folklore-level company knowledge passed down through generations, I could already picture everything in detail—from where filming would happen to how I’d confront Director Nam.
While the staff rearranged desks in the rented office space, we were guided into an empty meeting room.
Right as we were reviewing everyone’s roles and the overall flow one last time before filming officially started—
knock knock.
Someone knocked on the door.
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