I had thought the place was run by rule of thumb, but being shown to my own desk at the tail end of the office stirred fresh feelings.
It was a part that had not existed in the original work, and I had never imagined a new character being added to the Ability Office, which consisted of a five-person mercenary team including the Captain.
On top of that, that character being the villain who had been the enemy is practically a development that strikes the original work's fans on the back of the head.
'Even as some fan work I read somewhere, it would be far too forced.'
Swallowing a hollow laugh inwardly, I leaned back against the chair.
Let us just celebrate an office job that was never in my fate.
"I am in favor!"
Sophia, who had been sprawled asleep with her legs stretched out on the two-seat sofa in the corner, suddenly shot upright and spoke.
I tilted my head, wondering if my inner thoughts had been caught, and Seo Mok, plopping down in the seat beside me, clicked his tongue.
Since this was the Seo Mok who had shown me around the office wearing a sullen face the whole time, I wondered what he was picking a fight about now.
"I'm against it."
...said Seo Mok, offering his conscientious opinion, and thumped both feet up onto the desk.
Sophia laughed brightly, dragged over a chair, sat down in it, and slid over beside me with a rattle.
"How about a welcome party for our new hire?"
"A welcome party?"
The kind where they use the new hire as an excuse to work off their own stress and eat something good on the corporate card? With the bonus of watching the new hire being cute, getting steeped in nostalgia about how it was back in their day, and turning sentimental?
Recalling the atrocities Sophia had committed at welcome parties in the work, I swallowed hard.
Do I really have to keep my professional relations smooth?
"Welcome party, what welcome party? The Captain isn't here and everybody else is out on external work."
"When they return, we can simply have another one, can we not?"
"How much are you going to milk one new hire coming in? Cut back on the drinking. Think about your age."
"My physical age is spry, you know."
"Yes, yes, eighty-eight years spry, you mean?"
Seo Mok fervently opposed Sophia's push for a welcome party.
Since Seo Mok was the one who had left behind the most dark history at Sophia's atrocities, it was not incomprehensible. But acting like that is perfect for being misunderstood as doing it because he hates me.
I slipped naturally into the conversation.
"By the way, when is the Captain coming?"
"Why would you be curious about that? Ah, I'll have to tell the Captain to throw you out when she gets here."
"Do you dislike me that much? Ah, so that's why the welcome party too......."
"Now, Seo Mok, were you such a petty human being? Come and have a taste of a physical age of eighty-eight."
"Ugh! Sophia, this is violence by rank!"
Having handed the constantly bickering, grumbling Seo Mok over to Sophia, my ears were finally at peace.
Was this overprotection, excessive meddling, or a radical protest?
I had asked because the only time an unbridled Seo Mok becomes a well-behaved, obedient dog is when the Captain is around. It seems the Captain is slated to be held up longer.
The Laboratory Director delivery commission Seo Mok received during his leave had the Styx Company mixed into it.
The principal party was someone else and the Styx Company had merely bridged the middle, but that job left the Ability Office holding a debt.
I am in no position to talk, being the cause of it, but the one who accepted the job was the Captain.
The Captain, with her thorough sense of responsibility, went to the Styx Company to clean the matter up, and apparently took on a separate commission to have the debt written off.
So the Captain was currently outside the Black Zone.
'And the other two are on commissions, too.'
I glanced over the two empty desks, then smiled at Seo Mok, who was being scolded with his head clamped in Sophia's grip.
'It cannot be helped. Sophia will have to use a little force.'
Because he was no small bother.
It was after lunchtime when Seo Mok, having been harassed by Sophia for a good while and lectured about welcome parties, love of humanity, altruism, and jealousy, dragged me off by the scruff of the neck and escaped.
***
"Is it all right to bolt like this?"
"Why would you, the new hire, worry about that?"
"Sophia's scary."
"You don't say things like that while beaming, you."
"Ah...... does it show?"
Seo Mok, who had dragged me to a nearby pork cutlet place claiming to introduce me to a good restaurant, did not return to the office even after we came out full.
Sophia would have left for the day anyway, he said.
Considering that the time was just past two in the afternoon, in broad daylight, I wanted to applaud the Captain for adopting flexible working hours.
"You're exchanging the gold bars, I hear. Sophia told me."
"Ah, she said she'd introduce me to someone."
As it happened, I had brought the gold bars with me when I came in to work today.
Without a single coin of cash in hand, I could hardly hold out a lump of gold and ask, would you like to cut off this much?
Seo Mok seemed to have judged that serving as a day guide was better than being harassed by Sophia.
I shrugged and followed the guidance of a high-performance navigation system.
Since the gold bars were, in their own way, tied up in crime, a dark channel was necessary. And with the Styx Company involved, of course more caution was required.
So the place Sophia recommended and Seo Mok guided me to could not be reached by ordinary routes.
Because, strangely enough, that place had set up shop inside an Other Side.
Occasionally a stable Other Side formed in the Black Zone, and as long as you did not break the rules you had to keep, you could come and go from the space safely, so they were put to various uses.
The rule here seemed to be the floor tiles.
Having memorized the order Seo Mok followed exactly, I presented him with a surprise.
"Are you smart?"
"Thank you for the compliment."
Afterward, when I took the lead in the gold transaction and produced a satisfying result as well, Seo Mok looked at me as though I were some monster.
Why does he not realize that it is not that I am strange but that he is simple? Perhaps he does not realize because he is simple.
"Hey, about those gold bars."
Seo Mok, climbing the dim stairs up to the surface, took the backlight on his face and looked down at me.
"Are they the Laboratory Director's?"
Oh.
"They're not tangled up with Styx, are they?"
Ohh.......
"You only shut your mouth at times like this. And you were yapping away, scraping at everyone."
"Ahaha......."
"It's got nothing to do with me, but don't do anything that puts the Captain in a bind. Well, nothing's going to leak out here anyway. I'm just telling you to conduct yourself well."
Seo Mok raked at his shaggy hair, said he had no idea, and climbed the rest of the stairs.
A founding member alongside the Captain, they said. Very tight-knit indeed.
'I know that too. Getting killed by the Captain while trying not to be killed by the protagonist is something I would decline as well.'
I am on borrowed time as it is, so why raise the odds of dying further?
It seemed Seo Mok had come out separately in order to give me that warning without Sophia knowing.
And to dodge Sophia's nagging while he was at it.
And to clock out early.
Mm.
"Heading back? Don't. Since we're already out, help me some more."
"Me? Why? What for? You? Ha?"
"Stop trying to crush me to death with question marks and let's go."
"......I'm not a navigation system. You do know that, right?"
"Ahaha."
And so, borrowing Seo Mok's fast route guidance, I opened an account with the number provided along with the gold transaction, bought a whole pile of clothes I needed, bought things to put on my bare office desk, and got my hair cut while I was at it.
"Spend like that and you'll be a beggar in no time."
"Ahaha. It's not as if I'll bundle it up and take it with me when I die."
"Why not. I'm going to make my coffin out of gold."
Seo Mok's nonsense is best let go.
I said something about clocking out early, but in fact this was one of the Ability Office's duties.
The work of wandering around the neighborhood and checking whether there were any anomalous phenomena.
City dwellers who had grown used to it recognized and handled things at the first warning sign, but the outsiders who flowed in now and then were slow to respond, and incidents ended up escalating.
Seo Mok not mentioning it separately was consideration for the fact that I was new, and knowing that, I made suitable use of Seo Mok. Something like that.
Perhaps I will buy Seo Mok a coffee later, with an apologetic heart for making him share the bags as the price of coming along.
***
"You want to sit at the terrace seats?"
"Ah, is that not allowed?"
"There's no reason it wouldn't be......, but it'll be cold."
Time had shot by while I was trapped in Room 404's Other Side, and the weather had plainly entered winter, so any ordinary person would have felt the cold.
Still, this much was nothing.
"If that's the issue, it's fine. I don't feel the cold."
The café owner raked his eyes over me up and down.
It was an expression that could not comprehend my outfit, a sweater and a thin coat and none of the usual cold-weather gear. Included in it was a look worried that, with snow apparently on the way and me insisting on drinking coffee outside in the cold wind, I might catch a cold and hold the shop responsible.
"Snow would be a problem, true."
"Ah."
"You can keep the terrace door shut. And there's nothing you need to fuss over for me."
"Still, the look of it."
"This is a secret......, but I'm an ability user."
"What?"
When I leaned in close and whispered low, the owner startled and put distance between us.
Why so flustered? I know Ability Office members come and go here constantly.
"Will you bring the drink outside?"
"Yeees......."
I picked a suitable spot on the terrace and sat down.
The faint red flame of the indoor stove stood in for soft lighting. With the door to the terrace shut the music was quiet, but it had a mellow quality that made it even better. So the source of the music I had heard that time was indeed here.
White breath scattering in the cold wind, and the work of wasting time while savoring the night lights coming on one by one.
"This is paradise itself."
I propped my chin on my hand and looked at the three-story Ability Office building across the road.
A building familiar enough to have graced a cover, and yet why did it feel so unfamiliar?
"It's what I wanted, but is this right?"
I had drawn up several plans, because the odds of them not taking me in were too high.
The five members as they now stood had been together almost from the very earliest days, and after taking in a new member partway and having a major incident, they had given up entirely on the idea of taking in newcomers.
However urgently they needed information, this easily?
"Mm."
It would be more persuasive to say that information had leaked from the Styx Company.
They used the information in my head as the reason, yet after I joined they never actually demanded it. Something about how a new hire should be doted on, how you should not work them from the start.
"No need to belatedly worry about appearances after flinging me straight into the Other Side."
And then there was the Captain, absent for quite a long time, unlike in the original work.
My plan had been to blend in with them well enough, appeal to their sympathy, and seek out a cure for my terminal condition.
The Ability Office's own clearance for accessing information was high and the skill they held was outstanding, so when every scrap counted, making use of people who were each worth a hundred was only natural.
Running a modest con in hopes of a peaceful, comfortable future is a forgivable matter, is it not? My life depends on it.
Well, that aside, the present problem was the urgent one.
Because there was a reason this world was a boys' comic.
Kyaaah!
A scream sounds in the distance,
RUMBLE-CRAAASH!
the sound of some building or other being blown away is heard,
"Hey! Get inside right now!"
and the frantic café owner, instead of the coffee I ordered, hurriedly pulls at the arm of me sitting on the terrace.
The author, with his excess of settings, really did love blood spraying.
"Author? This is a bit much."
This place, then, was a boys' comic in which, in the very middle of the government and the Resistance Army fighting until the blood burst out of them, Other Side monsters rose up and went around killing everyone.
Haa......, a three-way fight. A time-honored cliché.
"Ahaha, I told you it shows this much when I'm gone. Oh come now, I was away a mere ten days and the front of the office is a mess."
Now then, the remaining faction: the entrance of the Ability Office lunatic dispatched by the Styx Company.
I will just crack open some popcorn.