Don't Tell Anyone This Is a Secret
"This is a secret, so don’t go around telling people."
"Uuugh...! I wish I had as much money as Labellehar unni toooo...!"
Seah let out a short, wounded wail as she stretched from her chair.
She was just repeating, one more time for no reason at all, a wish every person in the world had probably made at least once, and then she rubbed her back against the chair as if that somehow helped.
"If I had money like unni, I could be number one in clan wars and number one in the Colosseum too..."
Among the countless things money could buy, Heretic was imagining something very fitting for Heretic.
"Ah... and I’d want to eat the silbi kimchi too... and mala-tang with tons of fish balls, right?"
She murmured to herself, sinking happily into her fantasy.
─ Buzzzzz!
"...Huh, who is it?"
Heretic stared at her smartphone, then reached out and picked it up.
"Hello. Is this Heretic the illustrator...?"
Heretic blinked, straightened up, and flicked her thumb.
"Another commission? Virtual avatars are the best though..."
Everyone wanted to make a lot of money!
Creating virtual avatars took a ton of time and was a real pain, but in the end it was the kind of commission that paid the most money.
Heretic simply wanted to make as much money as possible, so with genuine excitement she started reading the email, expecting it to be another avatar commission that would also give her a fair bit of personal satisfaction.
"The Korean branch... huh?"
After reading a few lines, Heretic gasped and clutched her smartphone with both hands.
She hadn’t particularly wanted to know, but she’d somehow ended up with a body that knew far too much about Honkai’s Korean branch.
"Wait, what is this... a collaboration product? Sticker production?"
Heretic moved her thumb as she read carefully, her eyes sparkling.
"M-my art... they want to use it as stickers? I’d have to draw twenty new ones, but..."
Gulp. Heretic swallowed and her hands began to shake.
"The payment’s huge, and they want my art turned into stickers... This is like those Pokémon bread things, right? The little collectible stickers?"
Her heart was pounding dangerously hard.
"This is insane. Insane! Totally insane!!! Of course I’ll do it!!"
She shouted in delight, then hurriedly took a sip of water from the tumbler beside her and had to clear her throat awkwardly.
"They said to call this number, so..."
It might be a scam.
Heretic had never once thought that in her life, so with the corners of her mouth twitching, she started the call.
* * *
"Congratulations, young lady. As you requested, I have finished the contract with the illustrator."
"She signed right away, just like we thought?"
"Yes. I got the impression she was an extraordinarily enthusiastic person."
Heretic, as expected, had not refused the sticker project.
She was good enough to make virtual avatars, but she was also an artist who excelled at SD-style illustrations.
So good, in fact, that she had a record of creating those little emoticons people could use in place of comments.
It hadn’t become wildly, cultishly popular, but people still used them from time to time because they were cute.
"Then please go ahead and take me to the place Uncle Jinsoo told you about."
It sounded a little strange to call it a bread research lab, so we were headed to the building where Hanseong Foods developed all sorts of products.
"I have organized the materials you sent, young lady, and turned them into a neat set of documents."
"Oh... you did that too? I thought I’d been way too incoherent yesterday."
"It is my job to turn each and every one of those remarks into material everyone can understand."
With a bright smile, Chief Secretary Lee Eunbyul looked exactly like a chief secretary should.
But how had she made it look this clean?
Yesterday I’d been talking about how I’d looked at collaborations other games had done in Japan and China, saying things like, This is good, that is good! Can’t we do bread like this too? and somehow she’d organized the whole mess into something polished and presentable.
It probably looked a little too much like we’d just copied things wholesale, but I’d been rambling on purpose anyway, trying to make it feel as “special” as possible...!
"Then please give us a hand, Driver Park."
"Yes, young lady. I’ll take you there."
Feeling the smooth vibration of the car as it moved, I flipped through the documents.
Wow... so she really organized everything I said in passing?
She’d even written down which parts of the bread had been praised and what its possible weak points might be, in quite some detail.
─ Buzzzzz!
While I was reading hard, a Discord message suddenly arrived from Heretic.
...Huh? There was no way she could know I’d commissioned her, was there?
What the hell? Why was she firing off messages like this, all excited?
...Was this girl insane?
Was she telling me about it right now?
There was definitely something in the contract saying she wasn’t supposed to go around telling people!
Augh...! This idiot!
Had she bragged about it to all her other friends too?!
Had she really not expected that at all?
No, wait. There was no way she was actually going to say she honestly didn’t know, right?
Unbelievable! I was the kind of person who could shake you with that NDA, you know?
Look at that. Look at that.
No friends is a point of pride for her.
Was she insane???
Why would she post them anonymously on the gallery and try to get advance feedback?
"...Chief Secretary Lee Eunbyul, did you not tell her about the contract when she signed?"
"No? I explained everything properly. She seemed quite used to commission contracts already, so there was no trouble in the conversation itself."
"Then you explained the NDA too, right?"
"Yes. I was told she understood that as well."
From the sound of it, she’d just thought it was the same as all the commissions she’d taken before and listened with one ear in and the other out.
"Well... I guess the thing I was worried about won’t happen."
I set my smartphone down and gave a wry smile.
"I don’t know whether I should think it’s adorable that she only has me as a friend and came to brag to me, or feel sorry for her."
* * *
"I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again this soon, after just a week."
A week ago, I’d had a long conversation in Hanseong Foods’ research and development office.
Without thinking at all about whether any of it was actually feasible, I’d shoved together a pile of papers full of “good ideas” and talked about making bread like this, wanting the shape to feel like that, and so on.
Fortunately, the R&D director... no, rather, the poor R&D director had no position to refuse the pampered whims of the Hanseong Group’s youngest daughter, Kwon Seah, who’d come down with the chairman’s backing on her back like a parachute.
At least, that was what I believed, and one week later, today had arrived.
"I’m very glad to see you too, Miss Seah. The materials you showed me last time were quite detailed, and they were a tremendous help."
"Really? I was worried I’d shown you something far too impossible."
"Not at all. You showed us products that had actually been sold, so they gave us a great deal to work with."
I couldn’t tell whether this R&D director uncle was flattering me or speaking from the heart.
Still, today they were supposed to show me the bread they’d developed over the past week, so there was reason to be excited.
"Then what’s the schedule for today?"
"Today, Miss Seah will be tasting ten different kinds of bread prepared by our research and development team."
Ten?
...Maybe I should’ve invited Heretic or Lilith to come with me.
"Chief Secretary, you haven’t eaten yet, right?"
When I joked about it, Chief Secretary Lee Eunbyul and the R&D director both burst out laughing at the same time.
"You don’t have to finish them. It’s perfectly fine if you only have one bite of each."
"Hmm, good. We should also take into account that these are freshly made breads."
"Ah, no. They’re breads we brought in after letting them sit, just like products that were actually distributed."
"Oh... that’s thoughtful of you. Bread is always best when it’s fresh out of the oven, after all."
The director smiled and turned away.
"Then I’ll show you the breads we prepared."
"Yes, please bring them in."
As I took a little breath and tried to keep my expectations in check, a few older ladies in pure white uniforms appeared and set the bread down in front of me.
"Oh... this is actually pretty nice, more than I expected."
Looking at the ten breads lined up before my eyes, the corners of my mouth twitched without me meaning to.
Other people only got to taste four breads here, right?
And I got to try ten?
Thinking of this as one more privilege and luxury that came with being Kwon Seah, the youngest daughter of a chaebol family, I found my thighs tensing with absurd satisfaction.