The Secret Party
Warm sunlight was there to greet me. For the first time in a long while, I woke already steeped in sentiment.
It seemed they had given up on shaking me awake in the mornings. From Bora's side of things, it could hardly have been anything but a nuisance. Even so, I felt a little wistful about it.
The days had begun to turn cold. Step outside and your breath left you in pale little puffs, and for no good reason at all, watching the trees shed their leaves made the strength seem to drain out of me as well.
When winter comes, I'm not going to start losing my hair the way a tree loses its leaves, am I? Unbidden, the bald head that practically lived in the office rose in my mind.
I had teased him so mercilessly for being bald. The thought of becoming the very thing I had mocked was more than I could stand. I would sooner have died.
Just as I'd thought, Korea's seasons were not spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They were summer, summer, winter, winter. Autumn had vanished in the blink of an eye, and the streets were already overflowing with people bundled in thick coats.
I rarely left the building, so I wasn't especially sensitive to shifts in temperature. Even now the heater was roaring away at full strength. Standing in front of the machine and spacing out while hot air drifted over me had become something of a hobby.
I watched the morning sun climb, round and bright, and then wandered off to the office. It wasn't that no one had come looking for me, even though the start of the workday was long past.
I was going to make sure they had actually shown up. From the position of the superior who kept them fed, checking whether the team had clocked in properly was nothing less than my rightful duty.
I set my shortened legs in motion and headed for the office, only to find a single person there. Haru. She was hammering at her keyboard just as she had last time, which suggested she still had a great deal of work left.
I broke into a run and poked her in the side.
"Haru, hi!"
"Ah—!"
Haru startled as if she had just seen something she was never meant to see. What? Do I really look that frightening? But the moment she realized it was me, she smoothed the shock from her face and answered in a gentle voice.
"Hana, hello~"
"Yeah. But where did everyone else go?"
Bora and the bald guy were nowhere in sight. Haru was the only one in the office.
"Well... they went out to buy something nice, so they're not here. Hana's a good girl, so you can wait, can't you?"
Wait for what? I didn't understand a word of it, but I nodded earnestly all the same. Even when I kept asking where they had gone, her answers stayed maddeningly vague.
I couldn't have said how many hours I lingered at Haru's side before she glanced at her phone and saw that a message had come in. Then she took my hand and led me off somewhere.
We passed through a modern room and into one overflowing with frilly pink lace. I hate rooms like this... Haru, though, couldn't hide her smile, and she went along beaming from ear to ear.
Haru's a girl. Maybe that's why she actually likes a room like this. I failed to notice that the door was already cracked open, and let myself be drawn along until I stood right in front of it.
Why are we stopping here? It never crossed my mind that something might be waiting inside. The moment I stepped into the darkened room, the lights flared on and party poppers cracked through the air.
"Hyaaah!"
The sudden bang sent me diving behind Haru, tucking my small body against her back. Whether she was simply that big or I was simply that small, I slipped behind her and still had room to spare.
The bald guy and Bora had been waiting in my room. Bora came toward me with an enormous cake in her arms.
The bald guy was clapping with painful awkwardness. It would honestly have been better if he hadn't clapped at all.
I stared at Bora, utterly bewildered. I had never had parents to begin with, and a birthday, to me, had never been more than the day a phone carrier sent along a congratulatory text. Apparently it was something else entirely.
"I wanted to do it on the day we first met you, but that would've been much too late~"
Even as she said it, Bora set a cake crowned with a single candle down in front of me.
"Today is your birthday, Hana! I hope you'll make sure to remember today."
I blew out the candle on the cake she had brought me, a soft rush of breath, and said,
"Today is my birthday!"
I was in a different body now, so a birthday could change well enough along with it. If I counted today as the day I had been born again, wasn't that more than enough? My old birthday had never been anything at all, but this was different. I smiled brightly and savored the modest little party.
"So? The test results are in?"
Gusungtaek, CEO of Seodong Food, arrived at work to word that the research institute had finished its analysis. With the market as brutal as it had been lately, the news was welcome.
The face of the lab director delivering those results, however, was anything but. The moment Gusungtaek saw that expression, something in his gut went tight.
He had sat through so many briefings that he could read a face at a glance and guess, more or less, whether he was about to hear success or failure. Judging by the director's expression now, the outcome did not look good.
"The... the analysis didn't turn up any special components. It's simply the same green tea composition as the product released before. The only finding is that the quantity has dropped by nearly half."
"I drank Starlight Green Tea myself, so I know exactly what it does. You're telling me there's nothing in it? How does that make any sense?"
Gusungtaek had tasted the Starlight Green Tea an employee brought him, and he knew its effects firsthand. Perhaps that was why the face of the researcher who had carried in the results was written all over with this can't be right.
They had to know something was off. They knew perfectly well that drinking the tea produced a real effect, and yet the test results insisted it was no different from the green tea they used to sell.
"We... we ran the tests several times, but nothing special showed up in the tea. It's just a tea bag with green tea in it. Nothing more."
Nothing special? How could that possibly be? It was nonsense. The composition was no different from the Starlight Green Tea that had failed before, and yet it produced an effect like this? A dog passing in the street would have laughed.
"Research must be pretty easy for you these days."
"Sir? Absolutely not."
"Don't give me not. You walk in with results like these and expect them to sound like sense? The effects of Starlight Green Tea are plain as day, and you're telling me the composition is identical? Even a grade-schooler could tell the difference. You bring me this and call it an analysis? Clearly the research life has gotten far too comfortable."
Gusungtaek tore into the lab director who had dared to bring him such a report. He was already in a foul mood, with their own green tea bags refusing to sell thanks to Starlight Green Tea, and seeing this passed off as an analysis made his blood boil.
"If the company is paying you, shouldn't you at least be worth what you're paid?"
"I—I'm sorry!"
He kept at the director until the man was slick with cold sweat. Once the director got back, he would obviously turn around and tear into the staff beneath him. Put a charitable spin on it, and Gusungtaek's words would reach every employee in the institute, so he could hardly have held his tongue.
He couldn't have said how many dozens of minutes he spent ripping into the man before he checked the time and finally sent the still-apologizing director away. Berating someone wasn't going to conjure an answer out of thin air.
With the director gone, he still had to sit through the sales report—the kind of briefing that turned his stomach just to hear.
"Sales of our bagged green tea have fallen by half."
That was only the opening. Report after report followed, each one enough to drag a scream out of anyone listening. No matter how long he sat there, nothing good came up.
The green tea market was a zero-sum game. If another brand sold, that was exactly how much of theirs went unsold. People who meant to drink green tea did not suddenly grow thirsty and pour themselves another cup.
Seen that way, the bagged green tea Seodong Food sold had taken a fatal blow from Starlight Green Tea.
Back when Starlight Guild had been selling the byproducts of monsters from inside the gates and dominating every industry tied to them, it had been none of his concern.
Why? Because it had nothing whatsoever to do with green tea. Outside of raid-related business, Starlight Guild had been running nearly everything else into the ground, so he hadn't spared them a thought.
Now it was his concern. From the moment Starlight Green Tea hit the market, it had exploded in popularity. Before he could so much as mount a response, it had already seized the public's attention.
Even if he wanted to run a smear campaign, the opponent sat in a far higher weight class than Seodong Food. Throw a careless jab, and he might eat a counterpunch hard enough to drop him.
Had some small company put out a product like that, there would have been any number of ways to deal with it. With Starlight Guild at their back, though, no opening ever appeared.
The one mercy was that they were not producing the tea in any explosive volume—whether their factory lines were still inadequate, or some unknown ingredient was in short supply.