Dragon and Emptiness
"Hmm. So you've arrived. CEO of CS Investment, Mr. Cha Siu. And the young lady known as his lover... Lee Ha-yan. A pleasure to meet you."
Ugh. That look is vicious. Or is it sticky? Wait—he's staring at my legs right now? Well, I do look good in stockings.
That bastard's a man too... No. Forget the plan—should I just kill him? I really hate it when other guys look at you like that, Ha-yan.
Hold on a bit. He's already drunk on mana and out of his mind. Just turn on the recorder.
When we stepped into the room, a familiar mana signature washed over us, and the only one there to greet us was a single fat man.
The moment the door opened I had felt a little awkward, but the second we crossed the threshold I already had the entire situation figured out.
That bastard was currently under the exact same spell we had used on the spy, and the remaining nine people surrounding him were all homunculi born from my mana.
Naturally their original forms were all female, but here they had used appearance-altering magic to disguise themselves as men.
Honestly, did we even need a separate plan for this? It's going to end way too easily.
Ha-yan must have read my thoughts, because she scrunched up her face and snapped at me through mana voice.
Do you have any idea how hard it was to set all this up? We had to knock every single one of them out while they were alone and cast the spells. Especially Rhea—she worked harder than I did.
Really? Well, yeah—the other nine were all pretty high-ranking people, so that tracks. But even if it was hard, one spell takes care of everything, right? You didn't even cast it yourself.
That's just a figure of speech. The kids worked their butts off, okay?
While we bickered back and forth through mana voice, the fat man glared at me and spoke.
"Hmm. You're certainly far more handsome in person than in the photos. Your companion as well. Ah—I heard Ms. Lee Ha-yan is registered as the company's vice-chairwoman. Is that correct?"
"Yeah, something like that."
He was already under a spell, so I had zero desire to answer politely. I dug a finger into my ear and replied half-heartedly.
Actually, even without the spell I wouldn't have given him a proper answer either.
Of course the guy, completely out of his mind, failed to notice our attitudes at all and continued speaking as if he were still some kind of king, full of self-importance.
"Keh-heh-heh. I see. Well then—since you're a busy man, let's get straight to the point."
"Sure, sure~"
"There's a project the government is actively pushing right now. Regarding that..."
And the story that followed was the exact same nonsense I had heard drilled into my ears for the past two weeks.
Amid the endless stream of chatter, the final words out of his mouth were:
"...Given the situation, we really must ask for your cooperation. If not... well, I suppose we'll have no choice but to make use of certain information in our possession."
"Tsk."
Even though he was under the spell, I still looked at him with open irritation.
But there was something odd here.
Why go through this whole annoying process even after casting the spell?
If he was already under magic, shouldn't we just knock him out on the spot, wring him dry of everything useful, and toss him aside?
I had thought the same thing at first.
But as I keep saying—magic isn't omnipotent.
If I had decided to end everything right here, that approach would have been fine. Whatever this pig said, we could just pluck the information straight out of his brain and leave.
The problem was that the spell I was planning to use afterward would make the rest of the plan impossible.
Simply put, the magic I intended to cast was single-use.
It could extract every single thought and memory from the target in one go—but afterward, the victim was left a complete vegetable.
In other words: extract the data, then format the hard drive.
Didn't we have other options? All the mind-related magic we used worked basically the same way.
That was why we had to go through this bothersome, large-scale preparation instead.
Soon I felt mana activating from outside, and the pig-man's pupils in front of me began to glaze over more and more.
Looks like it's starting.
I smirked, switched on the recorder in my inner pocket, and spoke to the pig.
"Shall we begin, then? Exactly what kind of leverage did you think you had to dare try shaking a dragon like me?"
Flinch.
Ah—the ones who flinched just now were the other nine homunculi sensing my angry mana.
I actually held back pretty well this time since the kids are inside.
If they faint it'll just be more trouble.
"This is bullshit."
"Yeah. Total bullshit."
"Utterly, completely bullshit."
It was hollow. How could something end this emptily?
"Are they insane? Trying to frame someone as a pedophile?"
"That just means they had no other dirt, doesn't it? For the record, we prepared for every possible scenario, which is why we're reacting this way—but information like that is normally enough to destroy a company. Even without legal force, the power of social media these days is enormous."
"Yeah, I get that, but it's still so damn hollow. The only 'evidence' they brought to try and drag me into this was a single photo? Just one shot of me and Ha-yan in school uniforms? Who would have guessed that was literally all they had?"
"That part... I'll have to give the responsible homunculus a bit of a talking-to. Seeing that they only managed one photo, the person in charge wasn't completely slacking, but a mistake is still a mistake."
"Go easy. They probably don't even know how they got caught."
"Still, work is work. They put the two of you through all this trouble—there has to be a price."
Rhea, looking slightly irritated, stepped away from us while making a call on her phone.
After such an anticlimactic end to the meeting, I let out a hollow laugh and spoke to Ha-yan.
"Thirty-year-old celebrity uncles wear school uniforms on TV all the time. What's the big deal?"
"If they say it's a big deal, then I guess it is. If we'd been at an amusement park in uniforms maybe it would be different, but we were just walking down the street like that. And we forgot to cancel the appearance magic."
"I can see why Rhea would react that way, but it's not like we need to care about it now."
What those bastards had tried to use as a half-assed threat was nothing more than a photo of me and Ha-yan walking to school in our uniforms that morning.
And we had forgotten to undo the appearance-altering magic.
I remembered that day.
Rhea had called and told us to cancel the magic, so we had undone it right before meeting Do Ji-yeon.
But somehow they had managed to snap a photo in that tiny five-minute window.
"They must have been watching us for quite a while. If they only got one photo in that short time and still tried to blow it up into something this big..."
I gave a wry smile at how hollow and sloppy the whole situation felt.
Ha-yan gently patted my shoulder and said,
"At least it's simple, right? We just join the overseas trip a few months from now and squeeze them a little."
"A little? With the info we have, we should grab them by the throat."
Even though the meeting had ended so emptily, the official reason they had called us wasn't actually the blackmail.
There was an overseas tour scheduled a few months later, and they wanted me to participate.
Just me, of course. Only one secretary was allowed.
"But a few months from now is after the second semester starts. What are you going to do?"
I thought for a moment after Ha-yan's question, then spoke once we were in the car.
"What's the problem? Just apply for field study and go. Pop out every now and then, snap a few photos for the field report, done. Missing a few days won't wreck my admissions score."
"Hmm. Ji-yeon and Hoon are going to get suspicious if you go alone..."
"Let them be suspicious. If I say it's company business they'll accept it. They both know about my company now, don't they?"
After the meeting we settled that only I would be going on the overseas tour a few months later.
There was no real need for Ha-yan to come along, and with Rhea also going, there would be no one left here to teach the trio if Ha-yan left too.
Still, Ha-yan seemed uneasy about me going alone into that rough place.
"Or maybe ask Ho-jin to—"
"Don't even think about it. Once school starts he'll be busy enough without dumping that on him too. I'll be back within a week, so just hang in there. Or after I get to the hotel I can just teleport back for a bit, right?"
"Mmm..."
Ha-yan still didn't like the idea of me going alone, but she seemed to understand there was no other way.
I pulled the recorder from the inner pocket of my suit jacket and handed it to Rhea, who was sitting in the front passenger seat.
"Start the media play with this. Distribute it to all our journalists and tell them to hit hard. Make sure the kickbacks are generous."
"Of course. Though honestly it would be even better if we used the video as well."
"Hold off on that. We need to keep a decisive trump card. Those guys probably don't even remember when they said the things on this recording."
Inside the conference room we had thoroughly cleaned out every last scrap of information inside that bastard's head.
Ha-yan had prepared everything, but once we got going it was actually me who got excited and started asking the aggressive questions.
"That guy was pretty outrageous though. He tried to pin that kind of false charge on me, but he was even worse himself?"
"I thought my ears were rotting. How could anyone target kids that young..."
"Hey, stop there. Let's just say we learned that the world is wide and full of complete lunatics. Better to handle the rest through 'law' and 'principle,' the way Mom always said. That way we don't have to dirty our own hands."
I gently stroked Ha-yan's ears, which had been polluted by hours of filthy talk.
She seemed to enjoy my touch; she slowly lowered her head and rested it on my thigh.
"Heheh. That feels nice. Keep petting me."
"Like this? Or like that?"
"Ehehe..."
I mercilessly ruffled Ha-yan's cheeks and hair.
"...Tsk."
As always, Rhea glared at our flirting and simply raised the partition between the front and back seats.