Grandfather's Decree
“Why on earth? No matter how I think about it, I just don’t understand.”
“Honestly, I don’t get it either.”
“……Wasn’t it you who decided to go to the academy?”
“I did decide. But it was basically under semi-coercion.”
Even after eleven years of knowing her, I still had to yank her hair just to get through to her. The idea that someone could actually force a regressor with the greatest pride and worst personality in existence was absurd. If such a person existed, I would have noticed long ago—
“Your grandfather?”
At present, the only person who could control Cheon Mari through material means was the chairman of Nartika. As expected, Cheon Mari nodded.
“Grandfather has never done anything like this before. Not in any previous cycle.”
“How exactly did he force you? Did he say he wouldn’t give you company shares unless you graduated from the academy?”
“Something like that.”
Cheon Mari pulled out her phone and showed me a photo. It looked like a family picture, but given that it included both her and the chairman, it was probably a gathering of relatives.
“Here. This boy and this girl. They’re our cousins, the same age as us.”
“Cousins the same age…… Ah.”
“Today, Grandfather suddenly called us and the cousins together and made an announcement. He said he would minimize family support and give ten percent of the company shares to whoever graduates most successfully from Palaestra Academy.”
Ten percent of the company shares. That was an enormous amount. Yet it was also ambiguous. In an ordinary joint-stock company, that stake could sway the entire firm, but Nartika was not a publicly traded company. It was a privately held enterprise, meaning the company essentially belonged to a small number of owners. Of course, people often said that the major conglomerates in this country were the property of chaebol families. But with a private company, the degree of ownership was far beyond imagination. With no shareholders and lax legal oversight, the power wielded by the management was absolute. That was why Cheon Mari could openly commit corruption and cause trouble without consequence. A double-edged sword of immense power. Because that power was absolute, share transfers were extremely restricted. In fact, they almost never happened. Cheon Mari herself still held the thirty percent stake she had inherited from her late parents. If her cousins took ten percent, there was a high chance she would never get it back. Honestly, letting them have ten percent wouldn’t cause any real problems, but……
“This is ridiculous. Nartika has always been my property.”
Cheon Mari was the kind of woman who would proudly declare that the entire corporation was her precious. She would never hand over even one percent of the shares to anyone else.
“Hah, I roughly understand now. But why did your grandfather suddenly get that idea?”
Cheon Mari pointed at me with a sullen expression. I shot her a look that said, What could a mere high school student possibly have done?
“Our grandfather kept praising you so much. Asking why he didn’t have grandchildren like you.”
“……”
“Never misses first place in school, shows outstanding talent as a hunter, is polite and kind, and even preparing for hunter academy. He even asked when you were going to stop settling for second place, Mari.”
“……”
“He also talked a lot about when we shot the company magazine cover together last time.”
“Uh…… Didn’t you say no one reads the company magazine? He actually saw that?”
“It was a magazine no one reads, but the issue we appeared in sold so well that they had to request a reprint.”
“Good grief.”
“Especially, a lot of people started looking for you. So many that the magazine team even came to complain to me.”
I should have just done a promotional shoot for youth equipment instead. At least that would have been forgotten quickly. I had to curse my past self for suggesting such a disastrous concept. Now that I was practically archived in the minds of company employees, my mental state was starting to waver along with my pupils.
“Anyway, it seems your going to the academy became a stimulus for Grandfather. The very suggestion of sending you to the academy felt like he was comparing us to you.”
So that was why he had asked me again a few days ago whether I was going to Palaestra Academy. However, bringing up an outsider in front of his own grandchildren to spark competition was not a good choice. It only created more room for the family to split apart. On top of that, his vague wording only gave everyone a headache.
“So, since I can’t afford to lose the shares, I’m going to follow you into Palaestra Academy. I still don’t know what exact goal to aim for, though.”
Should I just aim for first place in the rankings? Or should I win every tournament in the academy? Or do all of it? Cheon Mari was struggling to interpret the phrase “most successfully.” This kind of worry was probably exactly what the chairman intended, but there was no need to overthink it to the point of a headache.
“‘Most successfully’ probably just means graduating without causing too much trouble.”
“Graduating without causing trouble? Nah, that can’t be it. How would you even rank people by that standard?”
It was the opposite. Using “causing fewer accidents” as the criterion would actually make it easier to determine superiority than personal achievements. Of course, if no one caused any accidents at all, ranking would become impossible, but I didn’t think anyone here was planning to avoid trouble. If anything, thinking about how that side of the family usually behaved only strengthened my conviction that this was the right standard.
“Considering the kind of things you usually do and how your family causes chaos every single time.”
“What do I even do? I don’t do anything except act like a lady.”
“Says the girl who got thrown in a holding cell for rioting because her baseball team lost.”
“No, those crazy bastards missed an easy out and blew a comeback! Even Gandhi couldn’t stay calm—”
“I’ll be honest. If I were your grandfather, I would have made this bet while telling my grandchildren to get their act together and stop causing so many incidents.”
“……”
She fell silent, perhaps realizing there was some truth to it. Honestly, I couldn’t say it to her face, but the possibility that Grandfather had targeted Cheon Mari with this bet was very high. Her cousins caused incidents that were socially and morally problematic, while Cheon Mari’s incidents were purely personal. In a good way, she was a walking comedy; in a bad way, she was an idiot. I suspected that back when she was a businessman in her previous life, she might have been somewhat popular with the public. Her personality was extremely authoritarian, yet outwardly easy to rebrand as anti-authoritarian. Though sometimes it veered closer to anarchism than anti-authoritarianism. In any case, to those close to her she was a source of suffering, but from a distance she was pure entertainment.
“Hah, it would’ve been better to just gather the three cousins and tell them to kill each other from now on.”
Man, that’s refreshing. That’s Cheon Mari for you. I shook my head.
“Please act your age. You’ve lived for over a hundred years through regression, yet you still do all sorts of crazy things.”
“Whaaat?! Mari is still a second-year high school lady!!! I’m nowhere near old enough to act my age according to what Oppa said!!!!!”
Suddenly I felt depressed. Why was I friends with this idiot? After grabbing her cheeks and scolding her to come to her senses, we ended up rolling around on the floor and bed, bickering. I flopped onto the bed, and Cheon Mari landed on top of me like a sandwich. I felt the sudden curve of her back against me. When I screamed and begged for help, she slipped her hands around my neck and legs around my waist, clinging tightly. By the time I was completely exhausted from being crushed under her weight, something I had forgotten while dealing with Cheon Mari came to mind.
“Oh, right. Mari, I heard something interesting.”
“What interesting thing?”
“Lim Hana. Her little sister said she’s preparing for Palaestra Academy.”
“Her?”
“Ah, and her friends too.”
With Lim Hana’s level of talent, getting in wouldn’t be difficult, but preparing together was hard to understand. A sigh came from behind me.
“At their level, they might pass, but once they’re in they’ll just be the ones getting carried.”
“Would drug addicts even think that far? Still, it seems like things worked out. It’ll be much easier to deal with them if they’re together.”
“Definitely. Once they’re away from their parents, it’ll be easier to make a move. They’ll probably drop out of the academy anyway.”
“They probably have no idea we’re thinking like this, right?”
Of course not, since they never showed this side of themselves when someone might be tailing me. It was ridiculous that they thought assigning a few clumsy tails to a student would gather useful information.
“Idiots.”
“Real.”
No matter how much they watched my actions, there was nothing they could do. We laughed at Lim Hana’s friends who had been wasting money for years.
“Ehehehehe.”
“Khehehehe.”
Eventually, we fell into a cycle of mutual positive reinforcement, hugging each other and declaring that we were right and the best. Since we had already made plenty of money anyway, it seemed fine to mess around like this today. With an implicit agreement in place, Cheon Mari took out her phone and started playing a mobile game full of random boxes. I quietly watched as she poured millions of won into the game trying to pull an S-rank hunter. A perfectly normal high school student scene. Just as I was getting lost in that reality, my phone in my pocket vibrated briefly. Without suspicion, I pulled it out. The screen showed a photo of Cheon Mari and me after accidentally defeating a D-rank boss in the Far North of Shareltea. It had been taken earlier this year with an Arcane Camera, a magical device, and a magical imprint was visible at the bottom as proof. But that wasn’t important right now. What mattered was the sudden notification that had appeared.
“Aaaagh!”
“Why? What happened?”
“Shit, we’re screwed! Sell the stocks right now!”
“What the…… Aaaagh! Fuck, it’s crashing!!!”
It was the winter of 2053.