"...do you do that, Woo-young?"

"Don't change the subject. What do you want? Really, really? No bullshit, full honesty?"

"...I feel like you're fishing for an answer."

"Okay, then, I'll start for you. You want sunbae to not die—"

"Obviously."

"—and you also want him to be happy and healthy. You want all of your people to be happy and healthy, obviously, but the one you're failing the most blatantly is him."

"Why does everyone insist on saying I'm failing him? It's self-inflicted!"

"I know that, you know that, sunbae knows that, but you still feel responsible for it and it eats away at you and you hate it when it's pointed out."

"Can we go back to last week when you didn't talk to me like this?"

"You're the one who decided to get me involved, prez, so lie on the bed you made."

Grumble grumble.

"And obviously the fact that he's the face of the Guild, Korea's most powerful esper, plausibly single-handedly responsible for over ten percent of the lives saved from dungeons in the country, is weighing heavy in your considerations, too."

"...Min Woo-young. No."

"No?"

"No. If I treat him differently, it's because of who he is as a person. He is not a tool and he is not just 'the face of the company' or 'the most powerful esper in Korea'."

He pauses and scrutinises prez's face. "Huh. You mean that."

"If only Kim Hye-jin could see that too!"

"Aaand you feel guilty."

"I see we're back to stating obvious things."

"No, I mean... you were considering her one of our people already, weren't you? That's... that's why. Huh. You'd... just already bucketed her in your head as one of us so you acted like she was. And so the fact that she refused is..."

He flinches at that. Being read like filth is not pleasant to experience.

"...man, that sucks."

"You should've seen her, Woo-young. She looked... sad. It felt like I'd stabbed someone in the back. And it, it was such a small thing—"

"Prez, she wasn't one of our people. She isn't. She's a stranger, we're strangers to her, and such a small thing will definitely colour her impression of us, and when you meet a stranger who treats you callously especially in a way that rings so close to something that just happened you go to the next bar and try your luck again."

"Okay, seriously, do you—"