TW 3

Chapter 3

The next day, and the day after that, Hae-il showed up in another perfectly tailored suit, looking as though he had stepped straight out of a fashion magazine.

It was a stark contrast to the world of developers, where wrinkled hoodies and faded plaid shirts were the norm, and black short-sleeved T-shirts became the unofficial dress code in summer.

The female employees were happy enough, saying he was nice to look at.

Danbi, however, couldn’t help seeing another version of him layered over the man standing before her now—the boy who had always worn his school uniform with every button fastened neatly to the throat and his tie perfectly straight.

It filled her with an uneasy feeling.

It seemed to confirm that his obsessive perfectionism hadn’t changed at all.

And somehow, Danbi instinctively knew that trait was going to cause trouble.

In development, where every day was an endless cycle of Why does this work? and Why doesn’t this work?, the word perfect was usually meaningless.

There were plenty of times when something refused to work even though you were absolutely certain it should.

Most of the time, you didn’t even know why.

So if it worked, you said thank you and moved on.

And unless the DBA contacted you to say your code was eating the database alive, the unspoken rule of the industry was simple:

Don’t touch it.

The team manager’s desk was in the spacious area at the very back of the office.

Unfortunately, it was also the closest seat to Danbi’s.

All she had to do was stand up, and she could see him over the partition.

Which also meant that if Hae-il leaned his head out even slightly, he could see Danbi’s monitor and every movement of her hands.

It felt as though she had been forcibly absorbed into his territory.

Their proximity came with several unavoidable side effects.

For one thing, whenever Hae-il called a team member over to talk at his desk, Danbi could hear every word.

“I’ve been wondering about something. Wouldn’t combining A and B make them much more useful? Why are they kept separate?”

Whether he had thoroughly combed through the company’s internal systems and documentation before arriving, or received some kind of detailed briefing from someone, Hae-il had managed to pinpoint the very first problem the company needed to solve within a week of joining.

It was also the exact problem everyone had been desperately pretending didn’t exist.

The senior developer, Yoonseok, had been called over.

A long, exhausted sigh escaped him.

“Ah…”

At that exact moment, the sound of keyboards throughout the office suddenly exploded.

Please.

Oh, please… ㅠㅠㅠ

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

No wonder I had a terrible dream last night.

What do we do? ㅠㅠㅠㅠ

There was a cursed project in the company known as the “manhole cover.”

The Integration Project.

It was a massive, tangled mess of legacy code, so huge and complicated that no one dared touch it.

Put nicely, it was a long-term project and one of the company’s biggest unresolved goals.

Put less nicely, it was a nightmare that had been consuming years without making any meaningful progress.

And to be completely honest?

It was a digital ruin.

A project that had been left exactly as it was three years ago.

Everyone who had worked on it in the past—planners and developers alike—had been ground down to the point of seriously considering resignation.

Just hearing the word integration was enough to make some of them break out in hives.

Danbi herself had been assigned to the project as a new hire.

Without question, it had been the darkest and most miserable period of her entire working life.

Everything she touched seemed to fail.

Every problem that appeared somehow felt like it was her fault.

She had been so miserable that after work, she once collapsed into her mother’s arms and sobbed.

“I don’t think I’m cut out to be a developer.”

That was how horrible the project had been.

It had been bad enough to make her want to voluntarily leave the company she had once dreamed of joining.

Everyone had worked together to keep the lid on that manhole, pressing down on it with all their strength.

And then Hae-il arrived.

And as casually as if he were kicking aside an empty can, he nudged the heavy lid open with his foot.

It felt as though the stench of everything rotting underneath was suddenly spreading through the entire office.

“Ah… well…”

Yoonseok dragged out his words with obvious difficulty.

“The A-B Integration Project has technically been ongoing for three years now. But B’s code is just… um… a complete mess, so dealing with it has taken… quite a bit of time…”

He had worked on the project himself.

There had even been a time when he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day because of it.

“Hm. Even so, I don’t understand.”

Hae-il’s voice was calm.

“Why has it been delayed for three years? Was it a technical difficulty?”

A brief pause.

“Or was another team uncooperative?”

Another pause.

“Or perhaps…”

His voice sharpened.

“…was someone simply incompetent?”

The word incompetent carried a cold edge.

The temperature in the office seemed to drop instantly.

The furious typing that had filled the room just moments earlier stopped.

Completely.

Everyone was listening.

Danbi didn’t even have to turn around to imagine Yoonseok’s face turning pale.

LD had always had a relatively flat company culture.

A team manager wasn’t some terrifying, untouchable figure.

They were just another person suffering alongside everyone else.

Their previous manager had never been particularly harsh. At most, he would say something like:

“Hey, the department head is giving me hell, so let’s just get this done.”

He wasn’t the type to publicly scold his team.

But this wasn’t just a team manager criticizing Yoonseok.

This was potentially the CEO’s son.

And that was why everyone was sweating.

He wasn’t simply another employee.

He was, in a sense, the employer.

Someone who might actually have a hand on their livelihoods.

“W-Well… the initial design of the project was flawed. And after that, there were frequent feature changes and additional requirements, so the code became severely tangled. Problems started appearing simultaneously in completely unexpected places, and…”

Before Yoonseok could finish explaining, Hae-il cut in again.

“So you’re saying the difficulty was impossible to overcome?”

“It wasn’t completely impossible to solve, but…”

“But what?”

Hae-il pressed on.

“Were there not enough people assigned to it? Or was there simply a lack of motivation among the developers?”

His voice grew colder.

“Or was it just a lack of skill?”

He continued demanding an answer.

On the surface, his questions sounded like a logical attempt to improve development efficiency and solve a problem.

To the rest of the team, however, it felt like a public interrogation.

The last fragile hope that their new manager might be as perfect on the inside as he was on the outside was rapidly falling apart.

“W-Well… aside from the technical difficulties, new projects kept coming in, so realistically, there were limitations on the amount of time and manpower we could dedicate to this project.”

A few team members unconsciously nodded.

It was the most reasonable answer.

And the most realistic one.

Development work never ended.

Before a release, there was always too much to do.

After a release, there were bugs and fixes.

Old code had to be cleaned up.

Servers had a habit of crashing at the most inconvenient times.

And work notifications never stopped piling up in the company messenger.

So saying we don’t have time was both an obvious excuse—

and an undeniable truth.

Then, from beyond the partition, Danbi heard a faint, humorless laugh.

“Limitations…”

Hae-il repeated the word quietly.

There was a cool trace of amusement in his voice.

“People make time.”

He paused.

“Could it be that these so-called realistic limitations are simply proof that no one had the will to overcome them?”

His tone remained almost casual.

“Maybe it wasn’t that you couldn’t do it. Maybe you simply chose not to.”

…

??

“The major update ended nearly two months ago, didn’t it?”

Hae-il continued.

“This should be a relatively quiet period, shouldn’t it?”

“Ah, it’s only been about a month since deployment, and we’re currently busy with fixes and ongoing support—”

“That work always exists.”

His answer came immediately.

“If you don’t deal with this now, then when exactly are you planning to do it? After you’re dead and buried?”

Silence.

“Or was the plan to keep pretending it doesn’t exist until the day you resign because dealing with it is too much trouble?”

Yoonseok broke into a cold sweat, trying desperately to salvage the situation.

But his arguments were already being torn apart by Hae-il’s sharp, relentless questions.

“Hah…”

Hae-il exhaled.

“Let’s take our work a little more seriously.”

His words landed heavily.

“The company pays us to produce results. Isn’t that right?”

He sounded like a drill instructor chewing out a recruit who had lost all discipline.

Every word Hae-il spoke became another sharp spear that flew across the office and buried itself in the team’s collective chest.

The worst part was—

he wasn’t technically wrong.

Still, something about it made Danbi’s blood boil.

It wasn’t as though anyone here had ever joined the company and spent their days lazily collecting a paycheck.

Developers had to open their laptops if the servers crashed.

On weekends.

In the middle of dinner.

Even in the middle of sleep.

During crunch periods, they practically lived at the office.

Their salaries might have been relatively high, but considering the brutal workload, the job was hardly a bargain.

“…Yes.”

Yoonseok was the one being publicly grilled, but it felt as though the entire team was being reprimanded alongside him.

By now, every keyboard in the office had gone silent.

The room was as quiet as a graveyard.

He had been like this in school, too.

He would corner people with logic until they couldn’t get a single word in, then stomp all over them with his arguments.

Apparently, that horrible habit hadn’t changed.

Danbi couldn’t help feeling that Yoonseok was being treated somewhat unfairly.

But there was no obvious flaw in Hae-il’s reasoning.

And considering the possibility that he really was the CEO’s son, arguing back would have been less like bravery and more like professional suicide.

Sometimes, the wisest way to survive corporate life was simply to do what you were told.

If they tell you to do it, you do it.

Danbi could already picture Yoonseok heading straight to the rooftop afterward to chain-smoke.

She hated cigarette smoke.

But today, she felt like she should follow him up there anyway.

Maybe pat him on the shoulder.

Offer some kind of comfort.

She didn’t need to experience it herself to know how humiliating it must have been to be publicly dressed down by a boss who looked younger than you.

Danbi was still lost in those thoughts when—

“Ah, I believe Danbi was one of the original members of Project A.”

Yoonseok suddenly spoke.

“And she was involved with Project B afterward as well…”

In an instant, Yoonseok dragged Danbi onto the same merciless stage.

Her name had come without warning.

Danbi froze from head to toe.

Yoonseok had pointed her out as someone deeply familiar with the ancient nightmare of a project.

As though casually tossing a burning hot potato straight into her lap.

Hae-il’s gaze shifted from Yoonseok to Danbi.

With a short tilt of his chin, he dismissed Yoonseok back to his desk.

Then he called Danbi over.

It was only a few steps beyond the partition.

But to Danbi, it felt like walking toward the execution block.

“Danbi, you worked on this project?”

Of course.

Of course it had come back to haunt her again.

That damned manhole project.

Three years later, and it was still grabbing her by the ankle.

“Yes, Manager Han… but only very briefly.”

Danbi quickly added emphasis where it mattered.

“I was a new hire at the time. I was basically just assisting my senior…”

Hidden inside every word was a desperate plea.

I was new.

I didn’t know what I was doing.

Please find someone else.

The truth was, she had stepped into the nightmare that was Project B from the very beginning of her career.

Problems had exploded faster than anyone could solve them.

Eventually, they had been forced to abandon the whole thing because they simply couldn’t move forward.

Danbi remembered it vividly.

Which meant she also understood better than anyone how complicated and deeply broken Project B really was.

And somewhere inside that massive pile of garbage code were undoubtedly plenty of awful little chunks of code that Danbi herself had produced as an inexperienced new hire, after staying up all night.

It was a Pandora’s box she had absolutely no desire to open ever again.

Hae-il looked at her.

“This seems like the first problem I need to deal with after coming here.”

“…Excuse me?”

“That Integration Project that stopped three years ago.”

His eyes gleamed with calm certainty.

“I’m going to finish it.”

Danbi stared at him.

“First, we’ll clean up B’s legacy code. After that, if things look good, we’ll move on to integrating the databases.”

“Uh…”

Hae-il looked like a man pulling the safety pin out of a time bomb and smiling.

Was this really how things were going to happen?

Before Danbi even had time to object, he extended his hand toward her.

“I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”

His smile was almost unbearably pleasant.

“So I need you to trust me and give it everything you’ve got too, Lee Danbi.”

He had somehow managed to ask her to shovel through a mountain of crap with a smile.

And Danbi was a salaried employee.

When the boss told you to do something, you did it.

So she had no choice but to take his hand.

“Ah… yes…”

Their clasped hands shook briskly up and down.