The Dragon and Meeting Preparations
Once we'd shown them to their rooms, we decided to give the three of them a little time to themselves.
They'd have things to talk over among themselves, and we figured they needed a while to get used to the space.
Having confirmed they were safely settled in, it was time for us to get on with our own work.
"Did you assign Homunculi to the kids?"
"Not as full-time maids, but I told them to help the three adapt to Korean culture. The big things they'll have to handle on their own, though. I only ordered intervention if someone else is about to get hurt, or if things turn truly urgent."
"Well, it's not like they know nothing about Korea. They aren't hermit mages who grew up sealed off from the world inside mage society, either."
They'd looked a little rattled at the sudden news that they'd have to navigate Korean society for the entire summer break with no attendants and only their own strength to rely on—but Teave, who'd been carefully reading my expression, seemed to have caught on that this, too, was part of the lesson.
Hmm. Nope. Never even thought of that.
His instincts were so sharp he'd zeroed in on the wrong target—but it wasn't a bad kind of sharp, so I decided to leave it alone.
There was no harm in him thinking that way, after all.
And since he'd already dragged Lily and Silvi—who'd been trying to hold us back—into their lodgings and shut the door, they could figure the rest out themselves from here.
"Those kids will manage just fine on their own. Shall we start cleaning up this filthy mess that just dropped into our laps? Honestly, I'd rather handle it alone—but you're not planning to let me, are you?"
"Hehe. You already know the answer, don't you?"
"Tsk..."
There was already a faintly unhinged gleam in Ha-yan's eyes as she looked at me.
As if...
"Those crazy bastards.... They dare touch us?"
"Whoa..."
It felt like someone had just prodded something that should never, ever be prodded.
This was the same expression Ha-yan had worn years ago, back when I'd nearly crossed the line her mother had drawn.
The kind of look that said: if you touch anything of mine, we all pile in and kill you together.
My dragon instincts kept blaring the same warning: do not, under any circumstances, mess with Ha-yan right now.
I would do exactly what she said, and nothing else. For the sake of my own life, if nothing else.
"It's been a long time since we've had this kind of atmosphere. I still remember the day you stormed into the conference room a few years ago, Master—when you were so furious you were ready to flip Wall Street upside down—and Lady Ha-yan walked in looking so utterly composed. Of course, she was much smaller then, which made the whole thing rather adorable. Positively charming, one might say. But no one present even considered trying to stop her. Not even you, Master—and you were a dragon."
"I know the old stories just fine, thanks. It's a little ironic seeing Ha-yan sitting in that seat now, though. She's helped me with company business now and then, but this might be the first time she's taken the lead herself."
"Still, isn't it nice? Being demoted so suddenly, I mean."
"Yeah, well. Not a bad feeling. Nothing I have to take responsibility for."
"You're not actually going to sit on your hands, though, are you?"
"Of course not."
Leaving the trio behind, Ha-yan and I returned to the company and headed straight for the underground conference room Rhea had prepared.
And the person who walked to the head of the table wasn't me—it was Ha-yan.
Because it was the underground conference room, everyone present aside from Ha-yan and me was a Homunculus.
They all knew exactly what kind of relationship the two of us had, so when I casually took the lowest seat and Ha-yan sat at the head of the table, the shock on their faces was unmistakable.
But the matter had already been settled between us, so Ha-yan began from the seat of honor.
"I imagine you're all a little thrown. Me sitting here, I mean. But you'll understand soon enough. Rhea—hand out those materials, please."
"Understood."
Ha-yan launched straight into an explanation of why she was sitting where she was. Once Rhea had distributed the documents to the Homunculi serving as department heads, and they grasped just how thoroughly those high-ranking people intended to crush Ha-yan and me, the Homunculi all reacted with the same ferocious intensity.
"Shall we kill them?"
"Should we?"
"How should we kill them? As cruelly as possible? Or so they never even realize they're dying?"
"What about wiping out their entire bloodlines? No—how about erasing the very fact that they ever existed?"
"Ahem. That's my Homunculi for you."
"That is absolutely nothing to puff out your chest and say with pride."
Their responses were violent and unanimous. Each Homunculus had her own personality, but the source of the power that moved them was still my mana.
So just as I'd reacted so fiercely myself, their methods differed a little—but their thoughts were more or less the same.
And Ha-yan had long been recognized among the Homunculi as someone who ranked even higher than I did.
(For the record, above Ha-yan sat only Ha-yan's mother.)
As if she'd expected exactly this, Ha-yan raised a hand to silence them, then gestured to Rhea. A presentation lit up across the dark conference room.
"In a situation like this, their line of thinking is probably something like this. Almost nothing is known about Siu—and on top of that, someone as thoroughly shrouded in mystery as me has been walking around the streets in a school uniform with him? They're thinking: Siu coerced me somehow—blackmail or worse—into putting on a uniform, and has been doing things in public he can't afford to have seen."
"Heh heh heh..."
"Hah hah hh..."
At that, the Homunculi settled into faintly mocking expressions and simply listened.
And from Ha-yan's tone alone, I could tell.
She was properly furious this time—and she had no intention of letting it slide.
Her explanation continued.
"Honestly, if we just used magic, we could end this situation immediately. Find the ringleader and wipe their memory, or scrub our existence out of their heads entirely. But to do that, everyone in this room would have to move at once and erase the memories of every single person involved—which would be an enormous hassle. And there's no guarantee the same thing wouldn't happen again afterward."
The Homunculi nodded in agreement.
Magic was incredibly convenient. But convenient was all it was. Cleaning up after it was no different from cleaning up after anything else.
As useful as it was, it didn't solve absolutely everything.
Memory erasure is easy? Sure—if you're only dealing with one person's memory. But right now, there was no telling how many people's memories would need to be scrubbed.
Of course, if I truly set my mind to solving this with magic, there was nothing I couldn't do. The problem was that I'd have to cast something on at least the scale of the entire Korean Peninsula—which would take an absurd amount of effort.
And Ha-yan knew that. She knew that if I did, the two of us wouldn't be able to have a proper conversation for at least a month.
Magic on that scale was hard even for me; I'd need a month of recovery that wasn't quite recovery.
Given that official documents of this kind had already been sent down to the company, Ha-yan's judgment was that the matter had already passed through a huge number of hands—and that the people at the top who'd planned it had already prepared for every contingency. In short: the point where magic could cleanly solve everything had already come and gone.
So what was the conclusion?
"So we're going to turn their meeting against them. We're going to make the whole board disappear."
In other words: we were going to burn it all down.
"We'll send the official reply saying we're attending, and we'll need to assign Homunculi to the people around me—and to Mom and Dad, too. Otherwise, how could they have gotten information this detailed about me?"
"Just because they can't use magic doesn't mean they can't use science. Even with Homunculi always near us, there are always gaps."
"Here. A compiled collection of every wiretap device and suspicious individual identified around the young lady."
"Huh? There were enough that you needed to make a collection? And we had no idea?"
I stared at the rather thick stack of documents Rhea held out to Ha-yan and asked in surprise.
"We can only detect things that possess 'mana.' As Lady Ha-yan said in the meeting just now, magic is not omnipotent. There is no spell in this world that can check every scientific measure."
"Still, this is way too many, isn't it? What do these people think I am? We're not special-forces murder weapons. Why are they putting this much effort into me? They went this far with the wiretaps and the secret photos—and all they got was a single picture?"
"Well... that is..."
"...?"
At Ha-yan's last remark, Rhea—uncharacteristically—hesitated instead of answering right away.
So I stepped in and said it for her.
"That would be because they think you're my weakness."
"Weakness? What kind of weakness is a high school student?"
"Those people don't care in the slightest whether you're a student or not. The school uniform is the weakness."
"The uniform...? Ah. W-wait. You don't mean—that kind of—"
I simply nodded without a word.
What kind of "that," you ask?
Well... they could think of Ha-yan as my weakness. But did they really think I wouldn't have prepared for that?
Inside the company, Ha-yan looked like a woman in her twenties. The moment we left, I released the spell. And as I'd mentioned before, people leaving the building forgot that fact as if it had been a dream.
But they didn't forget it completely—so word had filtered out, bit by bit, that there was "that kind of woman" at my side.
I checked and scrubbed those identities one by one with magic myself, but even that wasn't a hundred percent.
"In the end, those bastards don't care about your actual identity, Ha-yan. All they care about is the 'school uniform.' It's a tool they can use to drag me into hell."
Having reached the same conclusion, Ha-yan's face went scarlet and she shouted at me.
"Th-those insane bastards—what the hell are they even thinkinggggg!!!!!"
I just shrugged.
"It means they're power-crazed lunatics with nothing between their ears."
In more than one sense of the word, they were completely out of their minds.
"You're really going to that meeting in a week? Knowing what those bastards are thinking? You'll probably end up red-faced more than once if you go. From what we've dug up, they've already started spreading that kind of gossip."
"And if we hear that and hide? What do you think they'll assume?"
"...That we hid out of shame."
"And if we show up openly?"
"Not all of them, but a few will start to wonder. 'They're that confident?' Something like that."
"You already know that, so why are you even saying it?"
"..."
After the meeting, Ha-yan and I spent the week with no particular outside schedule, discussing how we'd handle ourselves at the first related conference two weeks out.
In between, we also took reports from the Homunculi assigned to the trio and checked their progress. The three of them seemed a little clumsy, but they were adapting to Korean culture without any real problems.
At one point, while Ha-yan was flopped on my bed at home, I asked her this:
"But seriously—what if those bastards really dig in and try to bury us? You said you weren't going to kill them."
Ha-yan still showed zero interest in relying on magic alone. She would use an appearance-alteration spell to project a more mature look and cover her younger face—but as for the people who'd come to that meeting determined to bury us, she said she'd handle them herself.
At my question, though, she only shrugged.
"I said I wouldn't kill them. I never said I wouldn't destroy them."
"...What does that mean?"
When I asked again, Ha-yan gave me a distinctly criminal little smile.
"People so blinded by power that they'll use unverified information are full of holes. Rhea's already told me eeeeverything."
Rhea, wasn't I your master?
What the hell did you do without telling me?
Could you please fill me in, too?