Chapter 6
Click.
The President's Office door closed.
“...Hah.”
Leaning back against the chair, I let out a long breath.
It was over. Truly over.
The interview that had dragged on for hours had finally come to an end.
“I feel like I can live again.”
From the moment the meeting ended, people had started coming in one after another without a break.
Every single one of them wanted their punishment reduced.
At first, I thought they were sincerely regretting what they’d done.
But when I looked closer, people like that were actually rare.
Please, just this once. I’ll make it up to you with my body.
I thought you, President, would understand.
If you could just let it go this one time, considering my sincerity...
Later on, people even started showing up and asking for leniency in ways that were completely beyond common sense.
Most of the women who came in made a point of taking off their shirts the moment they walked through the door.
What on earth kind of world was this, a world inside an eroge?
“Hmm…”
For a moment, I’d wondered if Assistant Manager Park Soyoung had been about to try the same thing.
Fortunately, she hadn’t.
Of course, she had made one bizarre misunderstanding in the middle.
Still, unlike the people who had come before her, she hadn’t tried to cross any obvious lines.
She had simply wanted to save her boyfriend.
Her method had been wrong, but the feeling behind it was understandable.
At least she was someone I could talk to.
The thought of her dazed face made a snort of laughter slip out of me.
At the very least, she had listened to me all the way through.
I hoped there would be more employees with that kind of common sense in the future.
I wasn’t completely without flexibility, either.
If it was a decent employee like Assistant Manager Park Soyoung, I wasn’t entirely unwilling to leave room for negotiation.
Feels like I’m the one person in a village of one-eyed people who still has both eyes.
Was I the weird one, or was the common sense of this world just like this by default?
People who had committed corruption would try to seduce me instead of showing remorse.
After repeating the same thing for hours, I’d started to feel like I was the one being treated as the strange person.
Even so, Park Soyoung had been different.
She had misunderstood me, yes, but she had listened to everything I said, and she had also accepted the terms of the deal sincerely.
This company is probably still standing because of people like that.
There had been embezzlers, yes. Bootlickers too.
But on the other hand, there were also employees who quietly did their part without complaint.
If I could protect only people like that, then the hardship I was going through now would be worth it.
“...No one else is coming, right?”
I couldn’t even remember how many people I’d dealt with today alone.
Thanks to that, I hadn’t been able to properly look at a single sheet of paper.
Only then did it finally seem like I might be able to breathe.
That was when it happened.
“...Hm?”
A translucent window drifted past my eyes.
Now that I thought about it, I’d felt like status alerts had been popping up for a while.
I’d been too busy to check them.
“Status window.”
NTR points have been acquired.
...
NTR Points +300
[Deputy General Manager Bae Yunhak's slush fund has been confiscated.]
NTR Points +500
[Director Yoon Seonghyeok's foreign car has been impounded.]
NTR Points +200
[Part of the embezzled assets has been recovered by the company.]
“...What?”
My foggy mind snapped awake.
I sprang out of my seat and checked the messages one by one.
“...Ha.”
A laugh escaped me.
“This is amazing.”
So this counted as NTR too?
After thinking about it for a moment, I managed to infer at least part of the status window’s judgment system.
Taking something away.
I had thought that, since this was an eroge, the system would only target taking women away from someone else, taking their lover, and that sort of thing.
But apparently, the system valued the act itself.
Property, position, power, honor, and so on.
It seemed to score the act of taking something away and convert that into NTR points.
“...Which means.”
I murmured as I rubbed the coarse stubble on my chin, which had already begun to grow back.
There was no need to bother with other people’s women like the original story had done.
Recover an embezzler’s slush fund.
Seize a corrupt executive’s imported car.
Strip away a position they had unjustly claimed.
Even that would earn points.
“...”
After a brief silence, the corners of my mouth lifted.
“Not bad.”
This was way more wholesome a way to farm points than I’d expected.
Maybe I’d found a proper way to make use of the system after all.
*
After returning from the negotiation with Kang Taeseong, Park Soyoung’s desk was waiting for her, piled high with documents like a mountain.
The stack of papers proved that what had just happened was real and not some dream.
He said to work like I was doing Junho oppa’s share too...
For a moment, Park Soyoung stood there blankly before picking up the approval form on top.
Organizing personnel evaluation materials.
That part she knew.
But underneath that were all sorts of tasks she had never seen before.
New organizational restructuring plan.
Temporary personnel reassignment review.
Reallocation of manpower for audit targets.
There was even work that required coordination with other departments.
“...All of this?”
It was not the kind of workload one person should be expected to handle.
Her head swam for a moment.
But she couldn’t run away.
I can do this.
Park Soyoung clenched her teeth.
First, she spread the organization chart out on one side of her desk.
She checked each newly changed department and team one by one, memorizing the unfamiliar names with her eyes.
When she didn’t know a task, she dug through the company regulations.
If she still didn’t understand, she would go to a senior employee and ask carefully.
“Senior, which department should this part be coordinated with?”
“That one needs to go through the Audit Office first.”
“Ah... thank you.”
She sent an email to the Audit Office and called other departments.
After reviewing the revised materials again, she rewrote the approval documents from scratch.
At first, her hands shook uncontrollably.
Being assigned unfamiliar work was far more stressful than she’d expected.
She made mistakes more than once.
There had been documents she had had to pull back because she set the approval line incorrectly, and others she had had to resubmit because she forgot an attachment.
Every time, her heart had dropped into her stomach.
But...
“...It’s okay.”
She took a deep breath and checked everything again from the beginning.
As time passed, the height of the paper pile began to shrink little by little.
The tasks she had thought she couldn’t even touch were, one by one, coming to an end.
...So I can do this too.
A small but strange sense of accomplishment slowly began to bloom in her chest.
“Soyoung.”
The employee beside her stood up from their seat.
“I’m heading out first.”
“Yes! Take care.”
“Don’t push yourself too hard. See you tomorrow.”
One person, then another, left the office, and the lights began going out one by one.
Park Soyoung looked around for a moment.
In the past, this would have been the time when people from several teams were still staying late.
But today was different.
Most people had gone home as soon as the clock hit quitting time.
No one was lingering just to read the room.
The atmosphere really has changed a lot...
Since the reorganization, the company had been changing little by little.
Only the people who truly needed to work overtime did so.
Unnecessary reports were being reduced, and a culture was taking hold where performance was acknowledged in proportion to results.
It was only much later, after she had been pounding away at the keyboard in a daze, that Park Soyoung looked at the clock.
“...Already?”
Darkness had fallen.
Outside the window, the world had already gone pitch-black.
Park Soyoung uploaded the last approval document to the system.
Approval request has been registered successfully.
“...Hoo.”
Park Soyoung leaned back in her chair.
She was exhausted.
But she also felt oddly proud.
The stack of documents that had been piled up had clearly shrunk.
“I should... head home too.”
Park Soyoung gathered her things and left the office.
*
Still, I’m glad things worked out.
As she left the company with her bag in hand, the events of the afternoon replayed in her head.
— There is one method, though.
At those words, her heart had plummeted.
And then—
— Assistant Manager Park, button your shirt.
— That is not the method I meant.
That expressionless face.
The way he had quickly turned his head away like someone who had seen something he shouldn’t have.
...Honestly.
Park Soyoung pouted her lips.
“What was he rejecting, anyway?”
It was certainly a good thing.
If President Kang Taeseong had accepted her proposal, she would have lost the purity she had treasured all this time.
It really had been for the best.
And yet, for some reason, her heart felt strangely ticklish in one corner.
It’s not like I’m lacking in anything when I go out.
No, what on earth was she even thinking?
Park Soyoung shook her head hard.
I must be crazy.
She had managed not to dirty her body.
And yet, the fact that she had been rejected was oddly bothering her.
It was a feeling she couldn’t even understand herself.
She was walking through a narrow alley with those complicated thoughts tangled in her mind when—
“Hold on.”
A strange voice stopped her in her tracks.
Park Soyoung froze.
Two men were blocking the alley entrance.
One had dyed his hair blond and was wearing a leather jacket, while the other was a hulking man with a thick gold necklace around his neck.
They looked unmistakably like thugs.
“Where you headed, miss?”
“Got a minute to talk?”
Park Soyoung instinctively took a step back.
“...Please move.”
“Don’t say that, okay?”
The two men slowly closed the distance.
The dim alley was deserted.
Because it was so long after quitting time, there wasn’t a single person passing by.
Her heart began to pound faster.
“Don’t come any closer.”
Park Soyoung said in a trembling voice.
“I-I’ll call the police.”
The man wearing the gold necklace let out a sneer.
“Heh heh. Call them? Go on and try.”
“Before that, the miss has to spend some time playing with us.”
One step. Then another.
Park Soyoung realized there was nowhere left to retreat.
Just as she squeezed her eyes shut with a desperate expression—
Thud.
A large hand seized the gold-necklace man’s wrist with brutal force.
“...What?”
The man turned around with a shocked look on his face.
A massive shadow stretched beneath the streetlight.
A low voice rumbled through the alley.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Park Soyoung’s eyes shook wide open.
“...President?”
It was Kang Taeseong.