The Original Work Refuses to Let Go
Min Team Leader fidgeted, sneaking glances at Dohyun. Surely he hadn't overheard them, had he?
Then again, everyone knows the Division Head can't stand his fiancée.
They'd been too far away for it to carry, and even if he had heard, Dohyun wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
Min Team Leader put on a careful smile and spoke in his smoothest voice.
“An honor to meet you. I've admired your work in the articles.”
Dohyun stared at him coldly, as if looking at something beneath an insect.
“Your articles? You mean the ones about my demotion from Kangseong Electronics?”
Min Team Leader visibly panicked.
“N-no, sir! That wasn't what I meant to—”
“And since when is sexual harassment an acceptable topic of conversation inside this company? If you don't even know such basic common sense, what exactly do you intend to do here?”
Min Team Leader's shoulders jumped. Dohyun stepped close to him and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Consider this a warning. I had better never hear this kind of vulgar filth from you again.”
Dohyun withdrew cleanly and walked away.
Outside the building, Ji-hwan had the car waiting.
“Division Head, has something unpleasant happened?”
“There's some strange rumor going around the office about Planning Team 2's Team Leader. Handle it.”
“Ah… yes, sir.”
“Seriously, at this point shouldn't they just fire her?!”
Sojin had stormed out of the company and was stomping her feet in frustration.
She had behaved even more bizarrely than Yeji ever had, and yet the company hadn't said a single word to her.
Her own teammates, if anything, seemed to have grown accustomed to her antics.
“She doesn't work, she just acts insane—why won't they fire her? Why?!”
Dohyun, her direct superior, now treated her like so much air, ignoring her completely. Even when they passed each other in the hall, he wouldn't so much as meet her eyes, let alone greet her.
“So this approach doesn't work, huh?”
In the original story, Sera didn't leave the company until close to the ending. Even after the bribery scandal came to light, she hadn't been fired—merely stripped of her duties.
“The original hasn't blocked anything so far, though…”
Since that day, no dialogue had appeared, and her body had never frozen up on her.
“It hasn't exerted itself without my knowing, has it?”
Sojin clutched her head. As the anxiety swelled, nothing but vague, formless dread filled her mind.
A sigh escaped her on its own.
If things went on like this, she might have to keep showing up to work while being treated as nothing but a lunatic.
“At this rate, I might actually become a villainess…”
Everything she'd done at the company was exactly the kind of thing a head-in-the-flowers villainess would do.
Sojin pulled out her phone and checked the time.
“I'll go rest in the employee lounge.”
Just as she was about to head back inside, she spotted her teammates approaching in the distance, returning from lunch.
Without thinking, she ducked out of sight. Fragments of Hyeonju's voice drifted over.
“Kwon, have you been working out? You've got so much energy lately.”
“Actually, I just started going to the gym.”
“I should exercise too. I keep putting it off because it's such a hassle. So, is the Team Leader going to be late again today?”
Eunha's brow furrowed deeply.
“She'll stroll in past two, like always.”
“Shouldn't the company at least give her a warning at this point? She's late every single day…”
Hyeonju let out a short laugh at that. Then, in an icy voice:
“She's a parachute hire. That's why the company looks the other way.”
Sojin's eyes went wide.
Yes! Finally, they're trash-talking me! Keep going, more!
Minjun eagerly chimed in.
“I guess Manager Song is right. There's no other explanation—she has to be a parachute hire.”
“You're too naive, Kwon. I told you back then too—she's a parachute.”
“She does seem sweet, though…”
“Of course she seems sweet. She doesn't do any work, just plays around all day—she'd better be sweet. But a parachute is a parachute.”
Sojin slipped past her teammates and slipped back into the building.
Her shoulders were bobbing, a tune almost rising out of her.
Her teammates' resentment would only deepen from here, and when employee review season came around, they'd write every bit of it down.
And then—bam—right on schedule.
She gets fired.
Sojin hummed to herself as she walked toward the office.
She was mid-fantasy about life after being fired when her steps suddenly stopped.
Parachute hire—the words Hyeonju had used flickered through her mind.
Why does that word bother me so much?
What if—just what if—she couldn't actually quit?
What if the employees came to see her as untouchable and simply gave up on driving her out altogether?
“…That gives me a bad feeling.”
She'd known, hadn't she? She'd known all along that her behavior could paint her as a nepotism hire.
She'd accepted that risk and acted anyway.
But the anxiety kept rising.
What if she failed to get herself fired after all this?
What if she got swept along in the original plot, exactly as written?
“Don't tell me… I go straight to the death ending…?”
Despair washed over Sojin's face. She felt so wronged she could scream.
I was never even the villain. I'm not Sera. Why do I have to die?
Sojin buried her face in her hands. Her chest felt tight.
She had never, not once, wanted to enter this drama.
She had never wanted to act like Yeji, either.
And all this time she'd spent playing the madwoman… had it been wearing her down too?
Some days, no matter how often she told herself it was all just an act, she felt genuinely unhinged, and her heart grew heavy with it.
But I can't give up like this. I need to steel myself.
Even if she died, she refused to die inside a drama.
Sojin lifted her head.
“Fine. I'm just not going to show up at the office.”
She'd been planning to keep attending work out of deference to Chairman Lee's watchful eye. But given the situation as it stood, getting thrown out of the house wasn't the real problem anymore.
Quitting the company—that was the urgent priority.
“Focus on what matters most right now. Everything else…”
…could wait until she'd escaped this place.
With a resolute expression, Sojin set off.
The next morning, Sojin opened her laptop at home.
Even if she stopped showing up, she intended to send at least one email.
“We were never close, but… they should at least know their Team Leader isn't coming in anymore.”
Sojin pressed send. Her heart pounded, half-afraid the original story would intervene and block the transmission this time too—but nothing of the sort happened.
She let out a sigh of relief.
“Now it's really over.”
Sojin closed the laptop and flopped onto the bed.
“I'll explain to Chairman Lee later. He's a doting-dad archetype—what's he going to do about it?”
Just then, the phone resting on her desk rang.
Sojin glanced at it.
“I'll check it la—”
Ring! Ring! Ring!
In that instant, her phone began buzzing with notifications like something possessed.
Sojin bolted upright and grabbed it. A message flashed across the screen.
“An unauthorized intruder? What on earth…”
In the wake of the incident, the company announced it would remain in a state of suspended operations for the time being.
As a result, Sojin was no longer “the employee who quit without notice” but merely “a staff member on a brief pause from work.”
In other words: she had been prevented from quitting.
Sojin grabbed her head.
She'd even called HR directly to announce her resignation, but no one picked up.
Of course not.
Every single employee was at home right now!
Wow. So they've cut off my contact entirely?
It was painfully clear that this insane original story would stop at nothing.
It would fabricate a whole bizarre incident just to keep her chained to the company?
And a major conglomerate, no less—not remote work, not anything reasonable, but a full suspension of operations?
In the real world, this would never, ever have happened.
“…I'm going out of my mind with frustration.”
Sojin rushed onto the company intranet. It was already in complete chaos.
Arguments raged back and forth over who the intruder was and what exactly had happened.
Then, suddenly, one particular post title caught her eye.
Sojin clicked on it without thinking.