The Hitex Acquisition War (1)
An hour had already passed since Lee Jaseung’s private meeting with his father began.
Gil Donggyu paced the hallway, restless and unable to sit still.
Why is this taking so long? Don’t tell me something went wrong with the plan. No—if it had, he would’ve been thrown out in ten minutes. It’s going well, right?
…It had to be.
Then the doorknob of the office turned with a soft click.
The door opened and Lee Jaseung stepped out. In the brief moment the two men passed each other, Jaseung gave a slight nod. At that fleeting signal, Gil Donggyu’s eyes flared with hope.
Did the talk go well?
It had gone far better than “well.”
When Gil Donggyu entered the study and heard his father’s words, he nearly fainted.
“The group will support the acquisition of Hitex at the conglomerate level.”
“…What? Really?”
“Yes. Compile the progress report and submit it within the week.”
Gil Donggyu stared at his father, dazed.
Only a few hours earlier, in this very room, the same man had stubbornly opposed the plan. Now he was someone else entirely.
How the hell did he do it?
And the changes didn’t stop there.
“Also—that friend of yours, Lee Jaseung. Keep him close from now on.”
…What?
“Just a little while ago you called him a goddamn—”
“Ahem!”
“…”
Chairman Gil cleared his throat awkwardly and changed the subject.
“In any case, Hitex will be the first victory you bring home to KG Electronics.”
“Does that mean…”
Warmth softened the hard lines of Chairman Gil’s face—a gentle expression Gil Donggyu had almost never seen since childhood.
“Once the acquisition is finished, you will be promoted to president of KG Electronics as planned. So make the Hitex deal succeed.”
“!!”
Gil Donggyu drew a sharp breath.
President of KG Electronics!
At last!!
“I will make it happen no matter what!!!”
He left the chairman’s office with his chest full to bursting.
Hitex was no longer just another acquisition target.
It would be the trophy he carried with him when he rose to the presidency of KG Electronics.
“Whoa… is this a dream?”
“Hardly.”
Lee Jaseung was waiting for him, leaning against the wall. Gil Donggyu hurried over, bright with excitement.
Thank you for talking Father around.
“My father is not the kind of man who flips his opinion like a pancake. You little bastard—how did you do it? Wait. So Han Juhyeong’s been getting this kind of consulting the whole time? This is a whole new world.”
Silence settled over the hallway.
“…”
“…”
Ah.
He should have phrased that better.
Under Jaseung’s thoroughly unimpressed gaze, Gil Donggyu scrambled to recover.
“Ahem. So what’s the plan from here?”
“We’re going to knock Chairman Seon Kangsik out of the acquisition.”
“…Huh?”
Jaseung only tugged one corner of his mouth into a smile.
“Why? Isn’t this exactly what Seon Kangsik did to you?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“If someone hits you, you hit back.”
“…How?”
“You know Chairman Seon embezzled, don’t you?”
“There were rumors, yeah. That he took out a loan under the pretext of acquiring Hitex and poured it into gas futures…”
Mid-sentence, Gil Donggyu flinched hard.
“Hey. Don’t tell me—”
“That’s right. We’re going to use that to pressure Chairman Seon.”
“…”
Seon Kangsik had dismantled the consortium and locked Gil Donggyu out of the deal entirely.
At the time, wounded pride and raw anger had left him privately hoping Seon Kangsik would get a taste of his own medicine.
But answering a broken consortium with an embezzlement charge?
“Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“It’s the best method. If we compete head-on with Seonkang Group, the bid price will climb without a ceiling.”
Jaseung recalled the acquisition price he had seen in the future.
3.6 trillion won.
A full six hundred billion more than the three trillion originally expected—because both companies had written their bids to the absolute maximum in a rage-fueled auction.
“At that level, even if you win, the bleeding is too severe. You risk the winner’s curse.”
The winner’s curse.
The situation where excessive competition drives the bid so high that the acquirer can never recover the investment cost.
Gil Donggyu didn’t want that either.
The trophy he brought to KG Electronics could not be stained with a curse.
Still… I don’t want to provoke Chairman Seon like this. Leak the embezzlement? What if an investigation starts and he gets arrested? Making an enemy of that man is terrifying. The backlash will hit me later too!
“The embezzlement is just financial-sector gossip at the smear-sheet level. I don’t see how we can do anything with that. No evidence, no real impact.”
“Doesn’t matter. What we want is to knock Chairman Seon out of this game—not to launch an investigation and throw him in prison.”
Ah. So it wouldn’t go as far as an investigation.
Relieved, Gil Donggyu asked,
“So all we need is enough circumstantial evidence? But how?”
“There’s something I need you to do, hyung.”
Jaseung smiled with pure sweetness. Gil Donggyu instantly wanted nothing to do with it.
“What is it?”
In a future he had already visited, Jaseung had once torn through the risk-management division of Seoseong Securities.
They approved the loan based on a ten-page due-diligence report. No fund-use tracking report either.
“Tip off the Financial Supervisory Service. Tell them Seoseong Securities issued a bad loan.”
Gil Donggyu twisted his entire body in protest.
“Well… my father would handle that better than I would.”
“Of course—if the chairman applies pressure, the FSS will move faster. But then it escalates into a group-versus-group war.”
Hiiik.
“If you do it, even if it gets out, it can be spun as ‘Seon Kangsik dismantled the consortium, so we hit back.’ Chairman Seon will be annoyed, sure—but that much you can handle.”
Hiiiiik.
Terrified, Gil Donggyu fled into solemn dignity.
“I’ll need Father’s permission first.”
“Don’t worry. I already got the chairman’s approval.”
Fatherrrrr!
Chairman Seon Kangsik received a call from Seoseong Securities.
"The Financial Supervisory Service has notified us of a special audit of our firm. Things have become a bit inconvenient. You’ll need to prepare some materials related to the loan approval."
CEO Seo’s voice was leisurely even as he called it inconvenient.
“I apologize. I’ll send the additional materials.”
"Yes. The FSS doesn’t seem inclined to make a big production of it either, so that should be enough."
“All right. I’ll make sure to repay this favor next time.”
In the end he owed CEO Seo a debt. Seon Kangsik’s insides boiled.
“Someone tipped off the FSS!”
“It appears to be an attempt to pressure our funding line.”
“Gil Donggyu recruits Lee Jaseung and suddenly thinks he’s clever.”
Clever.
That was the full extent of his assessment.
A special FSS audit?
It wouldn’t actually block the loan. It would just make the paperwork annoying.
“Craft the materials carefully so they can’t find anything to pin on us, and send them.”
“Yes, Chairman. But with KG Group entering the field, won’t the acquisition price rise?”
In truth, that was the larger problem.
KG Group’s official entry.
This was no longer a simple corporate acquisition. It had become a pride match between conglomerates.
“To think they’d present KG Group with a governance-structure reform plan…”
Lee Jaseung had pulled an unexpected move.
What irritated him more was the knowledge that if he himself had received such a proposal, he would have been tempted. Governance reform was every chaebol family’s Achilles’ heel.
Now only the worst-case scenario remained.
An endless bidding war.
“Call the M&A team in. Right now.”
Fifteen minutes later.
The small conference room held the chief of staff, the head of strategic planning, and two M&A specialists.
“The only people who have discussed the acquisition price are the four of us in this room. If anything leaks, I will find out exactly who opened their mouth—so I suggest you be careful.”
After laying down the threat, Seon Kangsik moved to the point.
“How high do you think the Hitex bid will go?”
“We’ll likely need at least 3.6 trillion won. With the governance-structure reform on the table, KG Group will never walk away.”
“Damn it!”
“Chairman, what if we simply abandon the acquisition? If the competition continues like this, we may end up paying an excessive premium—”
“Absolutely not!”
Of course, Chairman Seon’s stubbornness did not rewrite reality.
Both groups scrambled for capital as if racing each other. When KG Group secured funding, Seonkang Group announced a rights offering; then KG signed a joint-investment agreement; then Seonkang again…
With both conglomerates throwing everything into a direct clash, the bid price soared into the stratosphere.
Even Seon Kangsik found it hard to keep digging in his heels.
The specialists carefully offered a compromise.
“Perhaps we should talk with KG Group. A joint acquisition—or each side taking only the business units it actually needs—could work well.”
“You’re telling me to bow my head and go to them first?”
“Th-that’s not what I meant. Just a conversation…”
Then it happened.
A meeting request arrived from the KG side.
The chief of staff spoke carefully.
“Chairman, KG just contacted us. They say they’d like to meet and talk.”
“About what?”
“Well… if this competition continues, both sides only bleed more, so let’s discuss it—wouldn’t that be the idea?”
“Of course that’s what it is.”
He had been sweating over the rising acquisition price himself. Relieved in secret, Seon Kangsik snorted.
“In the end they come crawling first. How delightful.”
“I think you should take the meeting, Chairman. At this rate both sides will pay more than necessary.”
He didn’t like it, but the approach was rational. If KG was the one bowing first, Seon Kangsik was willing to meet them halfway.
“Fine. Set the meeting immediately.”
“Um… they want to meet at two o’clock.”
Seon Kangsik looked at him as if asking why that needed to be mentioned.
“Two o’clock? Is there a problem?”
“No—it’s just… two o’clock in the morning.”
Seon Kangsik froze.
“…This lunatic?”
The first meeting with Seonkang Group.
The stated purpose had been left vaguely as a joint-acquisition proposal.
The real problem was the time. Seon Kangsik had sworn he would rather die than come at two in the morning, so Jaseung had been forced to sweeten the deal with a promise of valuable investment information.
Bouncing a ball against the floor as he waited, he checked his phone.
Two-thirty a.m.
Already thirty minutes late. Not a single call.
Jaseung’s lip curled in a cold smile.
The type who asserts his pride by showing up late.
He had expected as much, which was why he had set the appointment an hour early.
Gil Donggyu glanced over and asked,
“You changed phones?”
“Ah. I got tired of the old one.”
Jaseung answered casually and slipped the phone into his inner pocket.
“But is this going to be okay?”
“In what sense?”
“It’s two in the morning. He’s still my father’s friend—being this rude…”
Jaseung gave a short laugh.
“Doesn’t matter. It’ll be forgotten soon enough.”
“Huh?”
“Once we detonate the embezzlement, a little rudeness tonight will feel like nothing at all.”
“…”
The meeting itself was unimportant. Joint acquisition or negotiation collapse—neither mattered.
What mattered was which future he entered at three a.m.
I need to secure Seon Kangsik’s embezzlement information.
That was why he had tipped off the Financial Supervisory Service.
By now Seonkang Group would be frantically patching documents, destroying evidence, and plugging holes.
But when people move in a hurry, traces they fail to erase remain.
And the place those traces linger most is a phone.
So he had changed phones. The exact same model Seon Kangsik used, the exact same color—even the same case.
To learn the home-screen layout and the password, he had burned through countless futures.
All for this single opportunity tonight.
Which future will I enter?
The future he stepped into at three a.m. changed depending on who shared the space with him at that moment.
Until now he had mostly been alone, occasionally entering a future with one other person.
Tonight was different.
Gil Donggyu, Seon Kangsik, and himself—three people in one room.
Even among countless futures, ones in which all three of us are together won’t be many.
That alone would narrow the options.
Thump. Jaseung bounced the ball again, steadying his mind.
The conference-room door slid open at last, and Chairman Seon Kangsik walked in.
“You’ve got a real talent for working people at the crack of dawn.”
3:00 A.M.
The clock struck the hour.
Thump—the ball’s impact rang out in a long, lingering resonance, and Seon Kangsik walking into the room warped like a heat shimmer on water.
A sensation of his body sinking downward while still glued to the chair—
Still the same conference room.
Everything was exactly as it had been a moment before.
The teacup left sitting for over an hour, Gil Donggyu holding his breath in his seat, Seon Kangsik’s face thick with irritation—
Everything except one thing. The familiar sensation of the ball circling at his fingertips had vanished without a trace.
Chairman Seon dropped heavily into a chair and set his smartphone down with a sharp clack. The screen lit, displaying the time.
3:05 A.M.
“One minute.”
Eyes mixed with irritation and suspicion fixed on me.
“If this stops being interesting, I’m walking out.”
This work is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, place names, and events appearing in this work are entirely fictional and bear no relation to any real entities. Professional knowledge described herein has also been reconstructed and adapted for the story and may differ from actual information.