The Idol and the Secret Business Partner (3): All Because I Asked for Self-Introductions
Because everyone kept trying to kill off the “Haru” part of me, I made sure to draw a very clear line.
“I’m Primrose… My race is Synapse. Oh, and just so everyone knows, Haru oppa and I are strictly siblings! We are definitely not in the kind of relationship you’re all imagining!”
Once my introduction was finished, the globally famous idol “Red Butterfly” Nagase Yohiko gave her own self-introduction.
“Hello~! I’m Nagase Yohiko, all the way from Japan. I’m pretty busy with my idol work, so I won’t be at school very often. We might not see each other much, but please take good care of me while I’m here!”
Her voice was cute and bouncy, exactly like an idol’s. The whole classroom should have erupted with cheers the moment an idol transferred in. “Sign this for me!” “Do you have a boyfriend!?” “What’s your type?” “Can we take a picture?”—none of those questions came. Instead, a strange silence fell over the room.
“Whoa…”
The students’ attention wasn’t on the idol at all. Every pair of eyes was locked on me—on Primrose. My heterochromatic eyes, one sapphire and one ruby. The pointed ears that looked like they belonged to an elf or a demon. The silver tail that marked me as a Kasif. They were drinking in every detail.
“U-um… it’s really embarrassing when you stare at me like that…”
The second those words left my mouth, the classroom exploded.
“This is insane!”
“I’m dead, I’m actually dead!!”
“A girl who looks like that really exists in our world?”
“The way her tail moves is so puppy-like and adorable!”
Both the boys and the girls were cheering at the top of their lungs. Sorcia watched me with the gentle, proud smile of a mother looking at her own daughter. Inside, my Primrose self was screaming Euuu! from sheer embarrassment. Meanwhile, my Haru body was quietly observing Yohiko.
She wore a clearly displeased expression. Even though the idol herself had transferred into the class, she was being treated like she didn’t exist. When her gaze shifted to Primrose beside her and our eyes met, she instantly switched on the flawless, dazzling smile I’d seen on stage.
“Everyone, please calm down. As you’ve already been told, both Miss Yohiko and the other students who have joined us value their privacy. Absolutely—I mean absolutely—do not take unauthorized photos or upload their personal information online. If you do, something as unpleasant as last time could happen again, so please be careful.”
Last time? I asked Sorcia about it later. Apparently some students from the Serena Union had warned everyone not to post their photos or information online. A few kids ignored the warning and uploaded pictures anyway. The Serena Union embassy had dealt with it “according to the law.” It sounded like a major incident, yet I’d never heard a word about it. Even though I used to be a loner, I still exchanged basic information with people. Now it seemed I was completely ostracized.
With Primrose here too, it’s only going to get worse, I thought.
“Hey, Haru. Sorry about before.”
“I misunderstood the thing with you and your little sister. My bad.”
Several students approached me with apologies and suddenly friendly smiles. What’s with these guys? Don’t tell me—
“Could you introduce me to Primrose?”
“I heard your sister plays that game. I play it too—could you ask if she’d party up with me for some hunting?”
Just as I suspected. They were trying to get close to my female self through me.
When I glanced into the hallway, it was packed with people. Every single one of them was staring at Primrose, throwing around words like “beautiful,” “cute,” and “mysterious.” So the news about the game has already spread, huh. Thanks to my female body, the internet had gone wild with talk of a beautiful otherworldly girl who played human games. I was feeling the full power of that “pretty girl” effect today.
That was when Yohiko pretended to receive a phone call. She held her smartphone to her ear and quickly left the classroom. Since I was technically her bodyguard, I followed quietly in case anything happened.
She headed straight for the old school building where we had met before. The phone call had clearly been an excuse; she shoved the device into her pocket and immediately spat out a string of curses.
“Goddamn it, what the hell is wrong with them!! Are all their eyes broken? The world’s top idol shows up and this is how they react? Aaaah!! This is so fucking annoying!”
She kicked a nearby tree in frustration and immediately let out a scream, collapsing to the ground.
“Uuuugh… damn it…!”
Watching her clutch her foot after kicking the tree in anger gave me a small pang of guilt. Is she like this because of me—because of Primrose? I did feel a little sorry for her. I was about to turn around and leave when I accidentally stepped on an abandoned soda can. The crunch made Yohiko’s head snap toward me.
“You’re… Haru.”
“Ah, you went off by yourself, so I followed in case something happened.”
“…Did you see that?”
“See what?”
She glared at me, the look clearly saying don’t lie. I figured I’d been caught.
“If I said I didn’t see anything, that would be a lie. Sorry…”
“…”
I was still trying to figure out how to smooth things over when I noticed her white knee-high sock turning red with blood. I stepped closer.
“Why are you suddenly coming at me?! Kyaa! Where do you think you’re touching?!”
“Shut up and stay still!”
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?! Even if you’re my bodyguard, do you really think I’ll just let you touch my feet like this?!”
“Yohiko, you’re bleeding.”
“…”
I used a gentle wind spell to brush the dirt off the wound, then sat her down and carefully removed her sock. The skin on her toes had been scraped raw.
“I told you not to take your anger out on rocks. You’re the one who gets hurt.”
“You don’t have to tell me that!”
Leaving the still-fuming Yohiko for a moment, I pulled out disinfectant and bandages from the pouch I always carried and treated her foot.
“Why do you even carry around stuff like that?”
“Because I need it.”
Yu Daye sometimes came out to meet me using crutches. She was so weak that she fell and hurt herself often, so I always kept first-aid supplies and her special painkillers on hand.
Yohiko stared at me for a while before speaking again.
“If you act this nice, you probably think girls will squeal ‘Kyaa~! So cool!’ and fall for you. Just so you know, I’m not giving you any special fan service or anything.”
“Yeah, I figured. There’s no way a cute girl like you would do something like that for an ordinary-looking guy like me.”
“At least you understand a little.”
She muttered something about how it wasn’t as bad as that monstrous little sister of mine. Her complexes must run pretty deep.
After I finished treating the wound, I asked, “So why did you really come here? It’s not to study, right? Does stuff like what happened before happen often?”
“All the time.”
“Huh?”
“Three times in the past month alone…”
“Did some magician join your fan club or something?”
“It’s possible…”
“For real?”
“I am the top idol Red Butterfly! My official fan club has over five million members worldwide! Of course it’s possible.”
She puffed out her chest with pride as she said it. She really was incredibly proud of her popularity.
“Being that famous must be exhausting.”
“It’s the fate of an outstanding idol like me. By the way, Haru, are you really human?”
“Why are you suddenly asking if I’m human? Do I look like a monster to you?”
“You use magic that humans can’t, your little sister is from a race I’ve never even heard of—Synapse—and she’s beautiful on top of it.”
She just kept calling her beautiful.
“I’m human.”
“You’re not some weird monster the Serena Union created in a lab, right?”
“I said I’m human.”
She stared at me with clear suspicion for a moment before finally speaking.
“I don’t know what you are, but I paid you, so protect me properly.”
“Yeah, yeah. Got it.”
“Also… I don’t like it when you speak to me so casually.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
“…You’ve already been doing it, so just keep doing it.”
Was she telling me to stop or to continue? This idol seemed to have mood swings as her default setting.
“You don’t speak casually to me?”
“I’m an idol. What do you think would happen if my fans saw me talking familiarly with a guy?”
“I see. Must be tough being such an important person.”
“…”
She made a complicated face, and I thought to myself that being an idol really wasn’t easy.
“There’s an outdoor event an hour away from school after classes end. You’ll come with me, right?”
“Why would I?”
“You took my money, didn’t you?”
“Oh right, I did get paid. Fine. But if I go… two other people can come along.”
“Two people?”
“Daisy and Sorcia.”
“Why would those two be coming with us!?”
“We’re connected in a lot of ways.”
“I thought you were a free person.”
“I am pretty free. Tell you what, if two people are too many, my little sister can go instead.”
“That’s not happening.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Obviously she didn’t want someone prettier than her stealing the spotlight. When I thought about it, the hallway was still packed with people praising Primrose’s looks.
“Alright, alright. I’ll go, but… since the situation is this dangerous, why don’t you take this chance to rest for a bit?”
“If I rest, the company’s stock price will drop and our group’s popularity will suffer. The higher-ups wouldn’t like that. Plus I need to earn money to pay my bodyguard.”
“From what I know, you’ve been debuted for over three years. Haven’t you saved up plenty by now?”
“I’m not going to talk about that! And it’s not three years! It’s been four years since I debuted as an idol!”
“Ah… sorry. Four years… that means you started at eleven? Wow, that’s really young. Did you want to become an idol that badly?”
“It wasn’t my own will. There were personal circumstances.”
“So your parents forced you to earn money for them.”
“How did you know when I never told you?”
“Just a feeling.”
“That’s not the kind of thing you guess from a feeling. Seriously, what are you? How do you know everything about me? Did you stalk me? How long have you been stalking me?!”
“I haven’t.”
“You did! Do you have any idea how many stalkers I’ve dealt with? Every morning someone digs through my trash bags. No matter how well I hide when I go out at night, they follow me!”
“You really didn’t have to go into that much detail. Anyway, I’m not that kind of person, so relax.”
She still looked at me with distrust. I wondered how much she must have suffered to become like this. Well, I can’t exactly blame her for not trusting people. It reminded me of my own cousins who had tried to steal my parents’ inheritance by promising to grow the fortune. They had even reached for the last house we had left after squandering everything. If not for Hunya seeing through their lies, I might not have made it.
“If I really were a stalker, you would’ve seen me at least once, right?”
“…Now that you mention it, that’s true. I’m sorry. Too many things have been happening lately and my nerves are shot. I got too worked up.”
“It’s fine. But if you’re stressed enough to be this sensitive, wouldn’t it be better to ignore the company and rest for a month or two?”
“Idols earn less and less the older they get. That’s why I have to make money now while I still can.”
“Ah…”
It was such a realistic, adult way of thinking. She was the same age as me, yet she had already been forced to grow up.
Just then, Yohiko’s smartphone began to ring.
“Mom?”
From the other end of the line came a sharp voice asking why she had arbitrarily spent two million won recently. Two million won… that was probably the money she had transferred to me. She had earned that money herself, yet her parents spoke to her like that? I didn’t know the full story, so I couldn’t say anything for sure, but it sounded like her parents were living luxuriously off their child’s earnings—just like my own relatives who had leeched off our family fortune.
At that moment I felt someone watching us. The feeling was distinctly unpleasant. When I looked toward the source, I spotted a mirror imbued with magical power hidden among the bushes. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but ordinary mirrors don’t contain magic power. That meant someone had cast a spell on it.
Are they spying on us with that thing?