The Dragon Before the Meeting
The trio was adapting well enough in their own way.
The kids had more grit and stubbornness about all sorts of things than I'd expected. Whenever they hit a wall, they'd dig through their phones until they figured it out somehow.
And for kids from chaebol families, their pride wasn't all that fierce, either. When it came to something they didn't know, they fell in line without a fuss.
Well… honestly, it wasn't as if I hadn't imagined the kind of attitude you only ever see on TV dramas.
Truth be told, I'd been hoping for at least a 0.0001% chance they'd pull something like that—just so I could throw them out on the spot.
But the moment I pictured Ha-yan threatening my life(?) all over again if I did, that thought vanished without a trace. Watching them go grocery shopping and get their school uniforms fitted on their own, I figured it was fine to leave them with the Homunculi nearby until our own problems were sorted out.
"So how is tomorrow's meeting going to go?"
"Nothing particularly special, Master. It may not be their absolute top-tier VIP by their own standards, but a VIP just below that is expected to attend, so there will likely be discussion of the related security arrangements. And, well… according to the information I've confirmed, there's a high chance each company will receive instructions to 'handle it themselves.'"
"'Handle it themselves'?"
Was it just me, or did those three little words seem to pack an absurd amount of meaning?
"Isn't it obvious? They've gathered every CEO of what they call a major conglomerate—so of course they'll be asking for a little 'donation money.'"
"Tsk. Why are civil servants so obsessed with money…"
Yeah. Not my imagination after all.
Rhea continued as she worked the tablet PC in her hands.
"I've been hearing that they're rather short on funds lately in connection with some international exposition. I suspect that's what this is about."
"Isn't that a guaranteed losing game? They're still throwing their lives at it?"
"Their approval ratings are in the gutter, so what else would they do?"
Rhea only shrugged at my question, as if it were nothing of consequence.
About a week slipped by in no time, and before I knew it, the day of the first meeting was only two days away.
Calling it a meeting was generous, though. Our company was certain it was more of a notice than a discussion—a seat reserved for warning the CEOs who actually bothered to show up.
Ha-yan had been leading the preparations, but the one actually attending the meeting was me. She wouldn't be at that session; she was scheduled for the full-blown not-quite-a-party that came after.
"You did leak that Ha-yan would be attending, right?"
"Yes. We casually fed the information to their plant inside the company. I've confirmed the tip was passed along via Telegram."
"Man. Never thought we'd end up using those bastards for something like this."
"If we'd tried to resolve everything with magic the way you originally wanted, Master, it would have been far more difficult and complicated."
"I'll give you that one. Just looking at their faces made me want to teleport them a kilometer into the air and let them drop—and here we are putting them to work instead."
Once the company had started growing in earnest, a few people who'd come in from outside were confirmed as spies. When Rhea suggested we leave the ones who'd snuck into the company alone, I'd been pretty firmly against it.
The particular spy the two of us were talking about now had been around since before the recent interview incident, too.
Just leave alone the people who'd walked into my territory with rotten intentions?
But to me, sitting there with that mindset, Rhea had said this: if anything happened, she would take full responsibility. As long as she put a single spell on them, she said, there was no chance any important company information or assets would leak because of those bastards—so I shouldn't worry.
Back then I'd been dumping even more of the company's work on Rhea than I was now, so with that guilt on my ledger I hadn't really had a choice but to listen. And this was the result coming back to us now.
"Still, the more I think about it, the weirder it is. Why go after Ha-yan now?"
In just two days I'd be looking at the faces of the bastards who'd put us in this situation, and the question still wouldn't leave me alone.
Whether it was the government or some other company, they'd all been eyeing ours for a long time—but the one they'd always gone after was me. I was the owner of this company, after all.
Even so, Ha-yan had been walking in and out of our offices in plain sight long before this. On school days, her various circumstances meant a little magic kept them from confirming anything, but every so often on a weekday evening the two of us had walked into the building in our uniforms with no magic at all.
They'd probably spotted her then and started wondering how they could use her.
So why now? If they were going to make a move, wouldn't it have hit me harder if they'd done it back when Ha-yan was still in her middle-school uniform?
Even now they were trying to blackmail me with photos of a guy in his twenties walking down the street with a girl in a school uniform.
Rhea had an answer for my perfectly reasonable doubt.
"Haven't they simply run through every option they had left? The fact that they've started targeting the people around you means they don't have many cards left to play, Master. They did drag it out for quite a while. Nearly five years of needling only you."
She said it with a thoroughly fed-up look on her face. Not that I couldn't understand the feeling behind that expression.
Their attempts to swallow my company whole had been going on for years, but as a baseline, science simply couldn't punch through magic. Just as there were places where magic couldn't quite keep up with science, science was structured so that it could never pierce magic's strongest points.
Even if a single spell could shut down every scheme they tried, it still meant more work for Rhea, who was essentially running the company. That much was unavoidable.
"Heh heh. But now that they've laid a hand on Miss Ha-yan—no. Now that Miss Ha-yan has chosen to step into the open—those people will all be dealt with soon enough. And then my workload should lighten considerably. Heh heh heh…"
"What are you, a client who just put in a hit with an assassin guild?"
"Not quite a formal request, but I'd be grateful if you thought of it as something on that level."
While I was listening to Rhea's not-quite-a-complaint, a text notification chimed from the phone on the table. Checking it, of course, it was from Ha-yan.
I stood as I read it and spoke to Rhea.
"I won't be coming into the office tomorrow, so wrap things up and keep an eye on their situation a little longer. Don't make any other moves. The day after tomorrow, Ha-yan and I will handle ourselves—so leave it at that."
"Shall I station Homunculi around the conference venue?"
"Well… better than nothing. Prep a few. You said you were going to infiltrate the rest into the building, right? Don't work the kids too hard."
"Understood."
"Good work."
I gave Rhea a final wave and cast teleport on the spot.
"Why'd you call me all of a sudden? You said you were prepping materials to teach the kids."
Naturally, the place I'd teleported to was Ha-yan's room.
The smell of food drifting in from outside suggested her mother was getting dinner ready, and a glance at Ha-yan's desk showed she was, in her own way, putting together materials to teach the trio.
At my question she set down the ballpoint pen she'd been holding and looked up at me.
"It's nothing else. About the meeting in two days."
"The meeting? What about it?"
"Umm…"
"???"
In a very un-Ha-yan-like move, she suddenly dropped her gaze and spoke as if a little embarrassed.
"It's the kind of thing I've always told you not to do, and it feels a bit much coming from me, but this time… I really want to use a lot of it."
"Use? Use what?"
What was this young lady trying to say while reading my face like that?
"M-magic. This time I want to use it for real. I mean it."
"…Sigh. And here I thought it was something serious."
I'd been braced for her to drop something heavy, the way she was setting the mood. When I gave her that half-baffled reaction, Ha-yan flared up a little and raised her voice.
"Hey! I—I thought about this really carefully before saying it! What's with that reaction?!"
"What reaction? Excuse me? You're a mage, you know that? Why is a mage reporting to me about using magic? And besides, you're done being treated as a minor—the mage community already counts you as an adult."
"Th-that's true, but… I've said things about this until now. And so has Mom, to you."
I'd answered like it was no big deal, but something still seemed to snag at Ha-yan.
I could see how she'd think that. Like she said, she and her mother had both spent a long time trying to make me into a proper "person."
As a rule, don't use magic—that had been the gist.
And even now, I followed that as much as I reasonably could.
"Mom and I went on and on telling you not to use magic, and then the second a situation like this comes up, I'm the one saying we should use it… doesn't that feel a little off…?"
"Aigoo. Why are you worrying about something like that?"
I stepped around behind a thoroughly dejected Ha-yan, scooped her up, and settled us both gently onto the bed. She looped her arms around my neck without thinking and spoke in an even more drained voice.
"Mmm. Mom and I always told you the same thing. That it's better not to use magic if you can help it. That there are definitely problems magic can't solve. And that when you're spending time with me, not using magic is better for enjoying an 'ordinary' everyday life. We practically brainwashed you with it, and now here I am saying we should use magic… so it just feels a little…"
As if she were confessing something unspeakable, she buried her face in my chest and mumbled into it.
I felt a little empty.
"Brainwashing. Well, you could call it that, but it isn't like you and your mother forced knowledge into my head. I took it in naturally. Living with it, it just felt right, so I've been fine all this time. And it isn't like your mother banned teleportation or convenient household magic, either. Magic on that level is fine because it's more convenient—just don't get caught by other people. That's what she said, remember?"
She'd told me to restrain myself with magic. She'd never said I couldn't use it at all.
And the magic her mother had told me not to use was all the kind that could hurt other people—or potentially the environment of the planet itself. Ordinary household magic and defensive magic? She'd even asked me to use a little of that for Ha-yan.
"If we're going by that standard, what about the large-scale magic on our company, or Rhea and the other Homunculi who were made with magic?"
"Well. Uh. Umm…"
My counter left Ha-yan looking like she'd briefly lost her words. I let out another long breath, held her tighter, and said,
"Don't worry about that. Don't even think about it. I do listen to your mother, but I only did those things when there was a proper reason. Setting everything else aside—if I started throwing magic around however I wanted, would you hate me for it?"
"Nooooo!!! Absolutely not!"
At that, Ha-yan practically leapt like someone having a fit—then seemed to realize something and looked up at me with a faintly shy expression.
Watching that cute face of hers, I grinned.
"Yeah. Same here."
Hate Ha-yan for using magic?
Any version of me on a timeline where that could happen was already long dead.