By week three, Yoo Minjae occupied the chair—present, there, yet absent.
He was an employee everyone knew to be there but no one quite remembered what he did during brown-bag lunch. He spoke when addressed, worked the hardest with nary a complaint, and never volunteered for himself. In a company founded upon pecking order and backroom politics, being out of the way was generally the best one could do.
particularly for someone observing.
"Minjae-ssi," Park, the Team Lead, leaned over his cubicle, one hand on the divider, voice low and curt. "Director Jang needs a backup financial model today, this afternoon. Can you handle that?"
Minjae stopped typing just long enough to glare. Not surprised—just measuring. "I'd need more information."
"Foreign subsidiaries, profit erosion trends," Park replied, looking left to right before speaking quietly again. "He's going to mention it in the pre-review. Wants to get a clear picture."
There it was, that unspoken assumption that certain things, technically beyond the job description, nonetheless fell to the competent and the unobtrusive.
Minjae nodded once, already intently looking at his screen. His fingers flew over it without letting up. New workbook. New sheet. Preloaded templates flashed into view.
Two desks away, Joohyuk rolled half an inch in his chair and hunched forward under his breath. "That's not even our assignment, right?"
"It is now," Minjae said, not raising his head.
It wasn't a question of sucking up to Director Jang. Minjae didn't need to brown-nose, but circumstance. In a firm like theirs, whoever constructed the story into a pre-review didn't merely schedule that meeting—they determined the path of all internal capital flow for the quarter.
And whoever constructed the facts in that story had another kind of influence: the unobtrusive sort. The sort that only came when freedom of access prevailed.
The office hummed around him. Phones ringing. Greetings sparked and died. A fresh face with too much hair gel walked past him asking about where printer queue errors were fixed. Someone grumbled near the breakroom as the coffee machine clogged once more.
But amidst it all, Minjae was listening.
Not to what was being said—but to what wasn't.
Who was rushing. Who kept scanning mail. Who spoke louder than he intended when he thought nobody was there. The office pulsed, and it had tells.
At noon, the model was finished.
He did not rush. He did not overcook it. He checked cell dependencies twice, made assumptions, then charted major findings with elegant graphs. No corporate fluff. Just facts—and just so much framing.
But in that fact was a subtle reminder: the recent profit decline was confined to a single site. One foreign subsidiary, under-hedging recent currency moves, The losses were reversible.
More significantly, they could have been avoided—if the executive board had not delayed acting on the revised hedging policy last quarter.
Minjae didn't say that.
He let the numbers do his talking.
He printed out the report and walked over to Seori's desk with it. She was typing away in the middle of an email, earbuds in. He waited for a moment before leaving it quietly on top of her keyboard.
"Could you just send it out under your name?" he asked. "Director Jang likes your formatting."
She blinked, removing one earbud. "You don't want your name on it?"
Minjae shrugged ever so slightly. "Let the report speak for itself.".
Seori glanced at the first page, then skimmed. She slowed halfway through, eyes narrowing with interest. Then she smirked, holding it up like a prize.
"You know you're doing more than entry-level work, right?"
He didn't answer. Just that same faint, unreadable smile.
Seori studied him a second longer. "Alright. I'll send it up."
She was being laid back, but Minjae caught the extra effort she put into formatting the subject line of the email. He noticed the way she tugged at the spacing on the summary paragraph, as if unconsciously trying to keep up with his brevity.
That afternoon, Director Jang walked past Minjae's workstation, the hard copy report still gripped in hand. He didn't break stride. Didn't miss beat. But when he walked past, he complained just loudly enough:
"Useful."
One word. But it landed like a sledgehammer.
Joohyuk raised his head up over his monitor. "Did he just compliment you?"
Minjae raised an eyebrow. "He complimented the report."
"Not which you did."
Minjae was silent. But Joohyuk whistled anyway, low and quiet. "Damn, man. Just stealth murders, huh?"
Seori came thirty minutes later with a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of Minjae's desk. She pushed it out to him without so much as a greeting.
"For you. Courtesy of the formatting fairy."
Minjae accepted it with a small nod. "Thank you."
She didn't leave right away. Just sat there, her legs swinging slightly. Her voice dropped into something softer, less playful.
"You're weird, but you're not cold," she said.
He looked up. She wasn't teasing. Her expression was more curious than anything else.
"That's rare," she added.
A pause stretched between them before Joohyuk interrupted, sliding his chair over with exaggerated interest.
"He's mysterious, not arrogant. Right, Minjae?"
Minjae tapped his pen twice on the desk. "I'm just practical."
They all laughed quietly. It wasn't loud. It wasn't deep. But it was the kind of moment that made long days seem shorter.
And yet—even in the warmth of that camaraderie, Minjae remained slightly apart. Not excluded. Just distant by design.
A little later that evening, the office cleared again. Laptops were shut. Chairs were wheeled away. Someone bid goodnight. The coat rack slowly emptied one piece at a time.
Minjae stayed.
Not because he had worked harder. He hadn't. But the silence that followed—the one that settled like fog in cubicles—was familiar to him. It was like the nights of mountain heights in a past life, when wind wrapped itself around ancient spires and fire runes and distant stars guided him.
He rested back in his chair, watching the rows of black screens. The city outside the window throbbed like an electric motherboard. Traffic below from so many feet up was veins shining under skin.
The moon started its slow ascension through floating clouds. White. Distant. Observing.
A silent guard in a world of changing patterns and unseen power.
Minjae crossed his arms over his head. The edges of his mouth curled up—no, not a smile, exactly, but awfully close.
He didn't require a stage.
Just an observation point.