Chapter 160. Prelude to War
In the end, Yanbian Hyung and all his little brothers were rounded up and sent to the police station.
His men had come from Incheon, while the hired muscle arranged by the Masan president had set out from Masan.
Masan was much farther away, but apparently the wide-open East Coast Expressway had let them arrive at around the same time.
I'd tried to settle things through peaceful conversation.
It failed.
The Yanbian guys had been too aggressive.
Fortunately, the Masan crew were bigger and had the advantage in numbers, so no one was seriously injured.
After tying the Yanbian guys up tightly, the Masan men casually left the scene.
Then I called the police.
Dae-hun arrived a little before the police did, so the officers ended up believing that the two-man team of me and Dae-hun had subdued all those Yanbian guys ourselves.
Naturally, the story immediately hit the news.
The police confiscated all the merchandise too, so the photos I'd taken were no longer even necessary.
According to the officers, Yanbian Hyung would probably be banned from entering Korea.
"This is seriously insane. I knew something was wrong when you suddenly decided to use our services. You said there'd be five or six guys!"
"How was I supposed to know they'd show up in a whole swarm? I expected six or seven, so I gave you a slightly smaller number."
The day after everything was settled, the Masan president called to complain.
Everyone who'd come knew there might be a fight.
They simply hadn't expected it to become that much of a disaster.
At first, both sides tried to hide their surprise and bluff at each other.
But in the end, things turned out exactly as you'd expect.
You had to see it with your own eyes to understand the sight of dozens of grown men tangled together, grabbing one another by the hair and shaking each other around.
Dialects from the northernmost and southernmost ends of the Korean Peninsula mixed together in one place.
No crime movie could ever recreate that scene properly.
Whenever the Masan guys spotted anything resembling an axe or blade, several of them rushed in together, wrestled it away, and threw it far outside the warehouse.
"Next time, only call us for jobs where nobody has weapons. Those boys are scared of blades too, you know."
"There won't be a second time."
"Yes, yes. And I saw the photo in the article."
The Masan president hung up after saying that.
He was talking about the picture of me in the news.
After the police arrived with reporters, one of the officers had given me a blanket.
A Seoul newspaper published a photo of me wrapped in it.
[Shock! Two Entertainment Executives Threatened by Counterfeit Merchandise Producers Fight for Their Lives Against Nearly Twenty Armed Attackers...]
Kwon Dae-hun, who had somehow become my partner in the story, looked a little dumbfounded.
But none of it had been intentional on my part either.
[At this point Do hyung might actually be good at fighting. Philippines too. Guess entertainment companies have so many gangsters that he didn't have a choice.]
[Do hyung and Director Kwon Dae-hun went in together to expose counterfeit dealers? For real?]
[Apparently the arrested guys are claiming they got jumped by more than thirty people.]
[┗ ???: Those were merely my afterimages.]
[Do hyung has the face, the fighting skills, the planning ability. What can't he do?]
The downside was that the article caused people from everywhere to start contacting me.
But thanks to the buzz, Blue Moon's solo concert and Super Bowl Halftime Show were being promoted extremely well.
Entertainment reporters seized the opportunity and began covering the Super Bowl invitation on a massive scale.
Dae-hun and I, having stayed awake all night, went straight back to the company and started working again from the afternoon.
The sun had already risen anyway.
Sleeping was a lost cause, so we decided we might as well get some work done early.
"Haa. Let's never do something like this again. I think I've developed diminished responsibility or something. Can't we just report counterfeit merchandise to the police whenever it shows up? We could've taken the police with us yesterday too."
"How many street stalls are there nationwide? How are we supposed to report every single one? We need to cut off the supply before it spreads. And do you really think a single report from me would've brought armed police? Three or four officers would've casually shown up carrying Tasers, gotten smacked around a few times, and only then called for backup. My life matters too, you bastard."
Even if I'd taken the police with me from the beginning, all that would've accomplished was keeping me safe.
Meaning we probably never would've reached the warehouse.
"Feels like things keep getting worse. Honestly, I think I liked it better when we drove around in a Starex and got excited over every single radio appearance."
"Yeah. You're right. How many years ago was that now?"
Dae-hun's words suddenly brought back memories.
Back then, I'd had plenty of worries.
But everyday life had probably been the most fun.
That didn't mean I could've stayed there forever.
"Then again, how could a lunatic like you ever sit still? You had to be that kind of person to grow Victory that much too. Didn't they hit 1.5 million first-week sales in just three years?"
"Isn't it about time you stopped talking about Victory?"
"True. Our girls have much more influence now anyway."
At this point, Dessault alone was enough to handle Victory.
And Heenari was growing steadily too.
Sang-do's song for Heenari and Seung-tae's choreography were already complete.
All that remained was to pick the right timing and release the new track.
We'd reached a point where the system itself could produce songs that were fundamentally likely to succeed without me personally forcing every part of the process.
Just like Dae-hun said, maybe all those years of launching businesses like a madman had finally created a stable operation.
"Oh. Chairman Shin Hyung-geol contacted me too. This guy actually worries about me more than you'd think."
"Chairman Shin Hyung-geol?"
"Yeah. How's he been doing lately?"
He'd texted telling me to take care of myself, so I replied that I would.
Dae-hun said Shin Hyung-geol had recently been sticking to straightforward business.
Meaning he wasn't launching ambitious projects like 〈Rebooting〉 or 〈Deep-Rooted Girls〉 anymore.
"Really? Then Shin Hyung-geol's whole faction must've completely fallen apart."
"Pretty much. Entertainment-company stock prices dropped quite a bit after everything that's happened, right? ZJ is apparently buying all of it up."
"Really?"
Things had been strangely quiet since they told me they were building a broadcasting station.
Apparently, they'd been preparing much more thoroughly and aggressively than I'd thought.
Minimizing future trouble before expanding was certainly the safest method.
They were slowly establishing influence over the entertainment industry.
Having a proper chaebol secret friend was surprisingly reassuring.
"Ah, and the fans say they're really excited about the concert, but they have no confidence they'll actually get tickets. They're asking whether we can announce another concert schedule in advance. Isn't that a reasonable request?"
"It's reasonable, but... we don't have anything planned besides the solo concert yet."
Basically, they wanted us to hold more concerts.
Naturally, we'd do that after returning from America.
Still, I'd promised to let the members rest again for a while after the Super Bowl, so we decided to consider it gradually.
The eighty copies of the second album that I'd given Yanbian Hyung and then taken back were reserved as concert raffle prizes.
Time passed, and the advance ticketing period for fans who owned official merchandise began.
The instant ticketing opened, I refreshed the page.
All three days of Royal seats were already sold out.
Exactly as expected.
More than a thousand people had verified their albums or photocards and received temporary priority ticketing accounts.
Now that Royal-seat ticketing was over, the war against scalpers could begin too.
Seo Hoe-dong and the other PDs had apparently refined the project further.
Seo Hoe-dong's original concept had been to ambush people buying scalped tickets.
That was before Dae-hun proposed a format where Blue Moon personally met fans trading photocards and other merchandise.
Then Aran and Anna added another idea.
As Dae-hun had pointed out, if Blue Moon kept appearing at sites where fans bought scalped tickets, the show might actually make scalping seem more appealing.
So they suggested clearly announcing that Blue Moon would only do it once.
