The First Company Dinner
After we returned to the base, I finally got a proper look around, with Dusick showing me the way.
Through the front entrance, a wide hallway opened onto what I supposed was a living room on the far side. A living room? It was a little too spacious for that. A hall felt closer to the truth.
The hall sat dead ahead, with rooms lined up along both sides.
How on earth had they even found a building laid out like this?
"How did you even find a place like this?"
"We remodeled it, obviously."
Keru had sidled up beside me at some point, the words trailing out of him around a long, lazy yawn. He'd zipped through the air just fine at cat size, but now that he was panther-sized, he was walking. Then again, something that big buzzing around overhead would have come with its own set of problems.
"The rooms are where the Mains stay. We used to have medium and large ones too, but we can't produce those right now. Doesn't matter anyway — while they're living here, they're all human-sized."
"How many to a room?"
"Three? Four?"
Seven rooms in total. Three to a room put us at a whopping twenty-one people.
"That's it? How do you fight magical girls with that?"
"We don't. That's the point."
Ah. Right.
"The production facilities should be fully repaired in about four days. You blew the place up so spectacularly that things went wrong all over."
"Did I? You should've built them sturdier."
"You were a lot stronger than anyone expected."
"That's not a bad thing, is it?"
"Fair point. While we're fixing it, we're reinforcing everything so it can actually handle your output."
It wasn't as if the place were some multi-level villain lair with floors upon floors, so the tour didn't take long.
Every time I knocked and stepped into a room, the occupants sitting inside — the perps… no. The Mains. I was going to have to get used to calling them that — would look up from whatever they were doing, snap to their feet, and throw a salute.
I'd never even been in the military. Receiving this kind of treatment felt faintly ridiculous. Then again, people stood up and said hello when the company president walked onto the floor, too. Not that strange, if you thought about it.
And if you really thought about it, I was the president of this company. A salaried one, sure. But still.
"Boss. You've arrived."
They could talk. This was the first time I'd actually heard their voices since I'd gotten here yesterday. I was still standing there with an oh stuck on my face, staring at the Main who'd greeted me, when Dusick jumped in.
"Mains ignore anyone who isn't stronger than they are. They saw you one-punch that magical girl unconscious yesterday, Unni. That's when they finally accepted you."
"Is that right?"
So they ran on some kind of survival-of-the-fittest rule. I was still turning that over when the Main who'd greeted me cut in, a little too quickly.
"Boss. That is part of it, yes."
"Hm?"
"But the other reason is that the Boss is so beautiful, none of us could work up the nerve to speak to you."
"What?"
That was not me. That was Dusick.
"Hey! You told me you'd only talk to people stronger than you!"
"Objectively speaking, compared to the Boss you're—gurk!"
Dusick's kick slammed into the Main's groin with feeling. It was an organ I didn't even have anymore, and somehow I still felt it. I twitched.
A dull whump went off, and Dusick transformed. A hulking man was suddenly standing behind me, and I flinched right along with everyone else.
"You little shits. Tonight, everyone from my rank down to yours is assembling. Got it?"
The deep, low voice filled the room. I patted Dusick on the back, told her to take care of it, and walked out, leaving the Main face-down on the floor and foaming at the mouth.
Men really were a miserable species.
"Keru. So there's nothing on the schedule for this evening?"
"Mm. Not really."
"Do the Mains eat?"
"They've got to eat if they want to have any strength."
"Do they get paid?"
"They do. And not just a salary. Hazard pay by the hour whenever they go into combat, and if a fight runs into the night, they get overtime on top of that. Overtime's one and a half times the hourly rate, same as anywhere. The amounts aren't huge, though. It's not like any of them have a family to feed."
"Okay, but what do we even make money from?"
If we were covering all of that, where was the money coming from? As far as I could tell, this organization did not engage in a single productive activity. It was just money going out.
"Sponsorships. Originally the idea was, once we conquer the world, what's money? …Not that things have gone anything like that."
Unbelievable. An organization with "evil" in the job description, and there were actually people out there bankrolling it. Bankrolling it enough that the whole thing kept running, no less.
The world was ending. Ah — but before I got too philosophical, there was something I needed to take care of first.
"I am getting a salary, right? I haven't even signed a contract yet."
Getting stiffed from month one was not an experience I was interested in repeating. I'd worked enough small companies to know what a skipped paycheck felt like, and every time it had happened I'd wanted to die.
"Luckily, after you hit the airwaves yesterday, the sponsorships poured in. We've got enough to last two or three months."
"And before that? How did you even survive?"
"Well. The previous Mother would go on TV, do variety shows, that kind of thing… we scraped a little together here and there. Enough to keep the lights on. Barely."
No production, nothing but expenses, and the organization had still somehow functioned. I couldn't see a single hole the money was coming in through, and the outgoing holes were everywhere. The fact that it had worked at all was the real mystery.
"Wait."
"Hm?"
"I've got a question."
"Ask."
Keru ambled over and flopped down at the foot of my chair, then yawned so wide I thought his mouth might split. He seemed to yawn every time I looked at him.
"When they fight — if they die, what happens? Do they actually die?"
"No. Nothing like that."
They were quasi-living things shaped out of magic, he explained. Taking a killing blow in combat didn't actually kill them. They simply returned to the magic of their creator — which, in this case, meant me. The Mains we had left had been cut off from their original creator, so if anything happened to them now, they'd come back as my magic instead.
"If you want a word humans would recognize, I suppose they're something like a homunculus."
"Got it. So what do they even spend a salary on?"
They didn't die in a fight. They just turned back into magic. So…
"They buy good food. They buy things they want. Quasi-living or not, they've got wants — everything except the sexual ones."
"Ah."
Quasi-living things shaped from my magic. They breathed, they ate, they carried on the business of being alive, but they weren't living creatures the way humans were. And they still had desires. I'd briefly wondered whether we even needed to pay them, but they had to eat, and while they were up and walking around they did everything a person did. So yes. We had to pay them.
"Then if anyone actually dies, it's only the magical girls."
"That's about the size of it. Magical girls are real people. If they die, they die."
"Hard to call that a serious penalty on our side. In theory, as long as the creator has infinite magic, you can just keep making more."
"In theory, sure. The catch is that nobody has infinite magic. So there's that, at least."
"Right. In theory."
"Anyway, that's enough of that. Look at the time."
I checked the clock. It was already past seven. Dinner time, more or less.
"The Mains. You said they eat, right?"
Office workers come in two kinds: the ones who love a company dinner, and the ones who hate it.
Even the ones who hate it usually aren't objecting to the dinner itself. What they can't stand is being frog-marched through round after round of drinks, or sitting through another back in my day lecture from that particular breed of boss.
Me? If you'd asked whether I liked them, I wouldn't have said yes. I wouldn't have said no, either. I suppose that made me what people call a fence-sitter.
The sales director at my old job was the kind of man who could not bear the sight of an empty glass. On top of that, he had a whole routine about how kids these days had no fire in them, how back in his time he'd stay up three nights running pouring drinks just to close a single contract, and so on, and so on.
I hated that part. But the sales dinners were always Hanwoo beef, and I loved that part. So I liked them and I didn't, in roughly equal measure.
I'd always told myself that if I ever had enough seniority to host one of these things, I would not force drinks on anyone. I'd run it so that people could actually enjoy themselves.
And yet.
"Boss. Let me pour you a glass."
The idea that I, the person hosting the dinner, would be the one getting force-fed alcohol had honestly never crossed my mind.
When everyone lit up at the news that it had been almost a year since the last company dinner, I'd been happy too. Watching them brighten at the promise of meat had felt genuinely good.
In my heart of hearts, I'd wanted to treat them to Hanwoo — or at least some kind of beef — but Keru had informed me that even that was a stretch, so I'd settled on a pork-belly barbecue joint. Fine so far.
There were enough of us that we booked a private dining room, and I took the seat of honor. Dusick sat immediately to my right. The Mains filled in the rest of the table, and we ordered the meat.
The charcoal came in. The grill was set down. Side dishes and bottles of soju stacked up around it in careful layers. The meat we'd ordered arrived on trays, arranged with almost ceremonial care.
A thick, gorgeous sizzle filled the room.
So this was what people meant when they said a sound could taste good.
And it was still good when the meat had cooked through and everyone raised their glasses and shouted, together, Alright — Bravo!
There were twenty-four Mains left. Add me and Dusick, and that made twenty-six. Keru had announced that he didn't particularly need to eat, thrown on an invisibility charm that siphoned a little of my magic, and parked himself beside me.
All twenty-four Mains took turns coming over to pour me a drink. Refusing was not an option. I should have turned down the first one. I accepted it, and after that it was why won't you accept a drink from me? and there was no situation in which I could gracefully say no.
I was not, to be fair, a lightweight. I didn't get drunk easily. But twenty-four glasses was three and a half bottles of soju. Downing three and a half bottles in a short span, I was nowhere near sober myself.
"Boss. This might be a good time for an inaugural address."
Dusick murmured it low against my ear. Hadn't I already done that at the start? Apparently not. All I'd done was shout Bravo once. That did not count as a speech.
Well. I was the new boss, in name at least. A proper inaugural address would give the whole thing a little shape. I thought that, and I eased myself up out of my chair.
Dusick took the cue and clapped, sharp and bright, pulling every eye in the room toward us.
"All right. Fill your glasses."
Anyone whose glass was empty poured themselves another shot of soju.
"Waaaaah!"
Dusick was first on her feet, looking around the room as she clapped. Those fierce, bulging eyes of hers said read the room as clearly as any words, and the Mains lurched up out of their seats and gave a standing ovation.
"All right, all right. Eat, drink, have a good time. It's our first company dinner. Our first one."
It was a good night. Everyone put away a lot of meat and a respectable amount of soju. Someone told me I was beautiful, Boss, and I laughed, ahahahaha, and the evening rolled on.
"This card… it says it's been declined?"
The bill came to 730,000 won. And the corporate card I handed over had been suspended.
"I'm sorry?"
"The card's been stopped, so I can't run it. Do you have another one?"
Keru was nowhere to be seen.
Dusick was nowhere to be seen.
The Mains… ah, hell. I couldn't exactly pin this on them.
"H-here, p-p-please put it on th-this…"
I held out my personal card. I didn't even use credit cards. It was a debit card.
"O-o-o-o-one p-p-p-payment, p-please…"
730,000 won. Paid in full.
I wanted to die.