Grab the Manual and Debut!-Chapter 26: ✦Scandal [4]✦

Kang-joon pulled his hoodie tight, his face hidden behind a black mask and a low-brimmed cap. In this outfit, he looked like any other twenty-something hiding from the world, but the weight in his chest was anything but ordinary.

He checked his phone. No messages from the other trainees. No "Are you okay?" from Jae-hyun. Even Gun-woo, who usually had something to say about everything, was silent. It shouldn’t have hurt—he had lived ninety-six lives where he was nobody—but this time, he had allowed himself to believe he was part of a team.

Being erased was a quiet, suffocating process.

"Kim Sang-hoon," he muttered, the name tasting like ash.

In Loop #72, Kim had been a bottom-feeder, a man who sold trainee schedules to sasaengs for a quick buck. If he was the "witness" now, it meant he had been paid off by someone much higher up the food chain. Kang-joon knew the type of places Kim frequented—low-rent PC cafes and illegal gambling dens near the docks. Places where people without a future went to burn the present.

As he walked toward the bus station, his phone vibrated. It was a news alert.

[EXCLUSIVITY: TRUTH BEHIND KANG-JOON’S ’MYSTERIOUS’ BACKGROUND] Internal sources reveal the Starline trainee grew up in a state-run facility. Experts weigh in on how ’unstable’ environments contribute to juvenile delinquency.

Kang-joon stopped mid-stride. He felt a sudden, sharp nausea. They hadn’t just called him a criminal; they were using his lack of a family as proof that he was broken from the start. They were taking his quietest, most private pain and turning it into a headline.

"Is that all I am to you?" he whispered, his eyes stinging. "A case study?"

He gripped his phone until his knuckles turned white. He wanted to scream, to tell them he had worked three jobs to stay in that facility, that he had studied until his eyes bled just to prove he wasn’t "unstable." But there was no one to listen. He was alone in a crowded street, a ghost waiting for the world to stop haunting him.

Ji-hye’s POV

"Are you kidding me?!" Ji-hye shouted, slamming her hand onto her desk.

On her screen, the legal forum thread she had spent all night drafting was gone. In its place was a red banner: This post has been removed for violating community guidelines regarding ’Spread of Misinformation’ and ’Ongoing Legal Investigations’.

"Misinformation?" she hissed. "I had the metadata! I had the light-source analysis!"

She looked at her phone. Her notifications were a nightmare. Anti-fans had found her account.

– [User442]: Why are you defending a hit-and-run monster? Are you his girlfriend or just another delusional fan? – [JusticeSeeker]: I’ve reported your account. Stop trying to hide the truth with fake ’science’.

Ji-hye felt a lump in her throat. She was just a student in a messy room, but for the first time, she felt the sheer, terrifying scale of the machine Kang-joon was up against. It wasn’t just a scandal; it was an organized erasure of the truth.

She looked at her wall, where a small, unofficial polaroid of Kang-joon was pinned. He wasn’t smiling in it; he was just focused, his eyes fixed on a lyric sheet.

"They’re picking on you because you don’t have anyone to speak for you," she whispered, her voice cracking.

She thought about her own parents, who called her every Sunday to make sure she was eating well. She thought about the "Evergreen" leak she had just read. Kang-joon had no one to call. No one to tell him it would be okay. No one to hire a lawyer.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, the grief for a stranger she’d never met fueling a new kind of resolve. She wasn’t just a fangirl anymore. She was a witness to an injustice.

"Okay," she said, her voice trembling but firm. "You want to play dirty? Let’s see how you handle a Law student with nothing to lose."

She grabbed her coat and her laptop. She couldn’t fight this from her bedroom anymore. She needed to find the original footage of that accident, and she knew only one place that kept archives that the internet couldn’t delete: the National Digital Library’s restricted wing.

Kang-joon’s POV

The PC cafe at the edge of the docks was dark, smelled of stale cigarettes, and was filled with the rhythmic clicking of keyboards. Kang-joon moved through the rows of glowing monitors, his eyes scanning for a man with a nervous twitch and a penchant for cheap energy drinks.

He found him in the very back corner. Kim Sang-hoon looked worse than he did in Loop #72. He was thinner, his skin a sickly grey under the blue light.

Kang-joon didn’t hesitate. He pulled out the chair next to him and sat down.

Kim didn’t even look up from his poker game. "Seat’s taken, kid."

"I heard you saw something in Gangnam in 2019," Kang-joon said, his voice cold and devoid of any ’Professor’ logic. It was raw. It was the voice of a man who had been pushed to the edge.

Kim froze. His mouse hand trembled. He slowly turned his head, his eyes widening as he recognized the face under the cap.

"You..." Kim gasped, trying to scramble out of his chair.

Kang-joon grabbed his arm, his grip like iron. "Sit down, Sang-hoon-ssi. We’re going to talk about that video. And you’re going to tell me exactly who told you to lie about a boy who was miles away stocking shelves while a man was dying."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about!" Kim hissed, looking around frantically. "The police... I told the police the truth!"

"The truth?" Kang-joon leaned in, his eyes burning with a quiet, terrifying fury. "The truth is that I spent my whole life trying to be invisible so no one would see how lonely I was. And then you people took that silence and filled it with a crime. You didn’t just frame me for an accident. You tried to kill the only thing I had left—my name."

A tear of pure, exhausted frustration escaped Kang-joon’s eye, tracing a path down his mask. He wasn’t a genius right now. He was just a kid who had been betrayed by a world he had tried so hard to join.

"Who paid you?" Kang-joon whispered. "Tell me, or I’ll make sure the police find out about the illegal gambling accounts you’re running right now."

Kim Sang-hoon’s face went white. He looked at Kang-joon, then at the exit, then back at the boy who looked like he had nothing left to lose.

"It wasn’t a person," Kim whimpered. "It was an agency. But not yours. They sent the file through an encrypted drop. They told me if I didn’t testify, they’d release my debt records to the mob."

"Which agency?"

Kim opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of the PC cafe’s door slamming open cut him off. Two men in suits—not police—stepped into the dim light.

Kang-joon’s heart hammered against his ribs. He realized then that he wasn’t just investigating a scandal. He was in the middle of a war.

"Run," Kang-joon commanded himself, the survival instinct of ninety-six lives finally kicking in.