The Kill Screen
976 Words
[PARK MIN-JI]
Thirty to zero.
I stared at the "DEFEAT" screen flashing in aggressive red letters on my $4,000 monitor. My hands were shaking over my mechanical keyboard.
It wasn't just a loss. It was a dismantling.
For twenty minutes, the man sitting next to me—the Boomer in the tight t-shirt who smelled like soap and violence—had turned the Shadow Verse arena into his personal slaughterhouse.
I am QueenSlayer99. I have sponsorships. I make grown men cry on Twitch streams.
But he didn't play like a pro gamer. Pros have patterns. They have meta-strategies.
Jin-Woo played like a starving wolf dropped into a pen of baby chickens.
He didn't use cover. He didn't strafe. He just moved forward, his crosshair snapping to heads with terrifying, robotic precision. Bang. Dead. Bang. Dead.
I glanced sideways at him. He wasn't hunched over in intense concentration like I was, sweating and chugging caffeine. He was leaning back, looking almost bored, his large hand moving the mouse with casual, microscopic twitches.
He landed the final kill—a no-scope headshot through smoke across the entire map—and immediately closed the game laptop.
"Latency feels fine," he grunted, standing up and stretching. His spine cracked like gunfire in the quiet room.
He looked down at me. I felt small. Humiliated. And, much to my annoyance, incredibly impressed.
"You... you really are Ghost_KR," I whispered, pushing my glasses up my nose. My ego was bruised, but my hacker brain was churning. A man with no digital footprint who plays a tactical shooter like a real-life assassin? The puzzle pieces were starting to form a terrifying picture.
He didn't confirm or deny it. He just pointed to the mini-fridge under my desk.
"Grape soda. Payment due."
I numbly grabbed a cold can and handed it to him. He cracked it open one-handed and took a long pull.
"You won," I said, my voice tight. "But we had a deal. If I played, you’d tell me about the scar."
I pointed a trembling finger at the jagged white line running from under his jaw down into the collar of his t-shirt.
He stopped drinking. The room temperature seemed to drop five degrees. He lowered the can slowly, his dark eyes locking onto mine. They weren't bored anymore.
"Curiosity killed the cat, Hacker."
"I'm not a cat. I'm your employer. Spill."
He touched the scar absently. His expression didn't change, but the air around him felt heavier.
"Beirut. 2019," he said, his voice flat, like he was reading a grocery list. "A Hezbollah commander didn't want to pay his bill. He had a curved dagger. I had a stapler."
My jaw dropped. "A... a stapler?"
"It was on the desk. Improvise, adapt, overcome." He finished the soda in one gulp and crushed the can flat in his fist. "Go to sleep, brat. School night."
He walked out of the room without looking back, leaving me alone in the blue glow of my monitors.
I stared at the crushed can on my desk.
Beirut. Daggers. Staplers.
I looked back at my screen, at the "DEFEAT" message. I had just tried to go 1v1 with a man who brought office supplies to a knife fight and won.
Holy s**t, I thought, a shiver running down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold soda. Unnie really did buy a monster.
[PARK SEO-YEON]
The next morning, the penthouse kitchen was quieter than a morgue.
Usually, breakfast was chaos. Ji-Eun singing vocal warmups at top volume, Min-Ji complaining about the sunlight, me trying to manage three crises on the phone simultaneously.
Today? Silence.
I sat at the marble island, sipping black coffee.
Ji-Eun was pushing a piece of melon around her plate. She wasn't wearing makeup. She looked subdued, her eyes darting toward the hallway every few seconds like she was expecting a tiger to walk in.
Min-Ji was buried under a blanket, staring into her coffee like it held the secrets of the universe. She looked humbler than I’d ever seen her.
"Okay," I said, setting down my cup. "What happened last night? You two look like you survived a horror movie."
Ji-Eun shuddered. "You don't want to know, Unnie. I saw things. Things that cannot be unseen."
Min-Ji just adjusted her glasses. "He's real. The hardware is damaged, but the software is lethal level."
Before I could demand an explanation, heavy footsteps echoed on the marble floor.
Jin-Woo walked into the kitchen.
He had finally changed out of the t-shirt. He was wearing one of the black suits I’d had my assistant emergency-order overnight. It was an expensive Italian cut, tailored to perfection.
It didn't help.
If anything, the suit made him look more dangerous. Like putting a tuxedo on a grizzly bear. It barely contained his shoulders. He wasn't wearing a tie, leaving the top button of his white shirt open, showing just the start of that scar on his neck.
He walked straight to the coffee machine, ignoring all three of us.
The shift in the room was palpable. Ji-Eun stopped breathing. Min-Ji shrunk further into her blanket.
My own heart rate kicked up a notch. Velvet woke up instantly, purring at the sight of him cleaned up.
He poured a mug of black coffee and turned to face us, leaning against the counter. He scanned us like he was assessing threat levels instead of saying good morning.
"0800 hours," he checked his cheap wrist watch. "Wheels up in thirty minutes, Boss. You have a board meeting at 9:00 AM to explain why your stock dropped four points yesterday."
He looked at me. The corporate mask was back in place, but I remembered the heat in his eyes in the alley.
"Time to go to work, Princess. Let’s see if the boardroom is as bloody as the backstreets."
- Writer
