The Founding Ceremony and the Business Plan (1)
Click. Click. Heels struck the floor, and the sound rang out.
It was the only sound in a conference room thick with silence. A woman in a black suit went to the seat of honor and sat, as naturally as water finding its course. Silver-white hair stirred as she settled, and her gaze swept the room.
They were all seated at the same height, and yet her look pressed down as if from somewhere far above. Those who met it shivered before they knew they had.
"A pleasure to meet you all. My name is Carisia."
Watching her, Arabelle thought it plainly.
No. There is nothing pleasant about this.
In the span of a few months, this enigmatic witch had appeared without warning, overturned the balance of the underworld, and ground several criminal organizations into nothing. When the brilliance of her light-attribute magic lit the darkness of the slums, worthless fools had muttered that she was a saint. Arabelle knew what she actually was. The magic she wielded happened to be of the light attribute, and that was all. The woman's temperament was far more vicious than any of theirs. Who, after watching a human being evaporate into gold before their eyes, could still babble about saints?
"Some of you in this room are meeting me for the first time. Others are not."
Arabelle let the words Carisia murmured drift in one ear and out the other, lowering her eyes. They were wrapped in courteous phrasing and respectful speech, but the summary was obvious.
This district is mine. Don't get clever. Bow your heads.
There was no arguing with it. Those who had tried were long since dead, and dazzlingly so.
"They say an organization with many heads cannot help but split. We, however, will be different."
Eight organizations, Arabelle's among them, had chosen to submit before Carisia. Count Carisia herself, and this room held nine heads.
"Shall we borrow a name from the old myths? From this day forward, we will be called Hydra."
Arabelle chewed her lip. The Hydra: a monstrous serpent of many heads. Those heads were not equal. Among them was one head set apart from the rest, the deathless central head. It was a metaphor that doubled as a threat, marking the gulf in rank between Carisia and the other eight bosses.
Bowing her head in humiliation, Arabelle entertained the thought of assassination, then immediately shook it off. The reason was the man who had stood in attendance behind Carisia all this time without speaking a single word. He was not imposing. Fail to concentrate, and you could hardly feel he existed at all. No adjective suited him better than faint. If Carisia was the Hydra's central head, that man was the venom the Hydra carried in its body.
Ortes.
Some called him Carisia's bodyguard. Some called him her strategist. Arabelle denied both, and affirmed them in the same breath. Bodyguard and strategist alike fell short of the man. If she had to name what he was...
A confidant.
The one and only limb with whom that inscrutable Carisia shared what she kept inside.
Signing the contract, Arabelle licked her lips. If she meant to remove Carisia, she would have to do something about him first.
I had a thought.
I'm fucked.
After more than ten years of living in this world under the name Ortes, I had finally realized who my employer really was. The nature of the world came along as a bonus. Carisia was the protagonist's enemy, and this world was a world inside a novel. Watching a scene for which coronation fit better than a president's inauguration, I started measuring the angles of an escape.
"Employer."
Once all eight bosses who had crawled in to submit beneath Carisia had withdrawn, I whispered it to her. Her head tipped, just slightly.
"I humbly beg to report, and ask whether you might graciously permit my resignation."
White light grazed the nape of my neck. Magic, fired in the most literal sense of the words at the speed of light.
Vicious. I side-eyed the stretch of wall where it had struck. She hadn't been entirely in earnest; the surface was only lightly scorched. From the moment we first met I had thought her personality badly twisted, and it seemed it had never been corrected. Mention leaving, mention quitting, and she overreacted. Every single time.
"And what, may I ask, is the problem this time?"
"Let me ask you the reverse. What problem is it that makes you want to leave?"
A bright, easy smile. Someone seeing it for the first time might have thought it beautiful. I, however, was a body that had already spent years being ground down under Carisia. How many moments are there, really, when a superior's smile is cause for genuine joy?
"What help could I possibly still be to you, Employer? You've acquired and merged every organization in this city, and the ones that haven't submitted are hardly worth the name. Even if I'm not here—"
I never finished. Carisia had both hands over her ears.
A blatant I'm not listening. A childish display impossible to imagine from her usual cold composure. I couldn't stop the sigh that slipped out. As a founding hand of the company, I had thought I'd already done everything that could be asked of me. Carisia, it seemed, still meant to work me harder.
"Really, why are you like this?"
"Your form of address is wrong, for a start."
Form of address. When we first met she wouldn't even tell me her name, so it had been Employer this, Employer that. She had never had this particular complaint before. I turned it over, and the people who had just walked out came back to mind.
Ah.
Carisia was officially a president now. Even if Hydra Inc. was a half-illegal enterprise scraped together from the illegal businesses clinging to the city's underworld, the title did not change. She must have been someone of high standing to begin with, so being sensitive about this sort of address was, in its own way, something I could grant her.
"Yes, President."
I whispered it with conviction.
At my words, Carisia's expression went crooked. Had I gotten something wrong? Surely not.
"Enough. Go on, get out."
Her hand stirred, gentle. I knew better than anyone that a soft gesture did not mean a soft heart. I bowed at the waist and left the room that would now be the president's office.
What work could there possibly be left for me? I walked on, groping through the faint remnants of my memory of the original.
Carisia sighed. Truly, he was a man she could never get a fix on.
I wonder if he even knows that my voice only comes loose in front of him.
She blinked twice, then touched the fountain pen kept in the pocket of her suit jacket. It was something Ortes had obtained from somewhere. Pale fingers stroked the barrel.
There was a great deal still to do. The founding of Hydra Inc. was nothing more than the first step of her vengeance against her house. The nameless magic tower of the underworld, the one she had cleared away—she would have to begin by renewing, in her own name, the tower qualification they had held.
Reviewing the documents to submit to the Mages' Alliance, Carisia lifted her head and looked at the door Ortes had left through. All the time they had spent together might as well have counted for nothing. The back of the man who had asked to resign, almost as if to tease her, still wavered before her eyes. Before she knew it, a sulky little truth had slipped out of her.
"...And I told him to call me by my name."
Right to the end, he wouldn't.
Back in my room, I checked the surroundings first. In this world, where that uncanny discipline called magitechnology had advanced so far, money alone could put in your hands goods matching the modern civilization I had lived in—or surpassing it. Which meant the danger of wiretaps could not be overlooked. We had swept the entire building once while smashing the organization that used to occupy it, but you never knew. One of the eight bosses of Hydra Inc. summoned today might have scattered items laced with eavesdropping magic about, all in the name of obtaining information.
I'm clumsy with magic, but.
There are people who sell premade spells for the likes of me. I plugged a USB into the port of my gauntlet. The proper name was Magic Inscribed Drive, but to someone who remembered a life on Earth, the word USB was far more familiar.
With a crackle, green mana-light swept the room. A few ornaments set out there—a flowerpot, a clock—were dyed the same green.
"My. You all do move quickly."
I found the listening devices hidden inside them and smashed them. A skilled mage might have traced the mana backward and caught the culprit by the tail, but I was no mage.
"I will let today's matter pass without further inquiry. Should something of this sort happen again, I will see that you are granted the opportunity to meet with the President in person."
One good thing about standing beneath someone important: you can sell their name. They had already been defeated once and signed a contract agreeing to acquisition and merger. They would not want to see Carisia's face one-on-one.
Right, then. Time to sort out the story of the original.
I picked up a pen.
Holding her breath in a corner of Ortes's room, Arabelle felt her composure crack. Optical camouflage from a cutting-edge stealth suit, and her own unique magic to kill any sign of her presence. Concealment pushed to the extreme—enough to hide even the tremor of the air and the trace of carbon dioxide that any breathing creature ought to give off. Magic she had honed in desperation, surviving by gathering information from the seams of the city's underworld.
He had seen straight through all of it as if it were nothing, and then said he would let it pass without inquiry. How overwhelming a skill was that?
Ortes had said he would grant "an opportunity to meet with the President." That could only mean Carisia had warned him in advance that the bosses would try to make contact. The plan to take the president's confidant by the hand and scheme a rebellion was dead. Arabelle carefully reduced the size of her body still further and slipped out through the crack of the door.
But surely that warning wasn't meant for the ones who planted the listening devices?
Arabelle shook her head.
Ortes had opened his mouth only after smashing the devices he found, one by one. The remark had plainly been aimed at her, the one hiding in the room and waiting. Biting her lip, Arabelle accepted that, for the time being, she would have to submit to the authority of Carisia and Ortes.