Who Held a Knife to Your Throat...
Starlight Food and Starlight Cosmetics were in an uproar, but the research institute itself had hardly changed at all.
"Hana, today's lunch is hamburg steak."
"Yay!"
Whether my hair grew back or not, I had already made more than enough money. It was a shame the income would dry up for a while, but given time, wouldn't it start growing again?
From Bora and Haru's point of view, they hadn't made any mistake of their own, so they said it didn't matter to them either way. And being salaried employees, the money that came in stayed exactly the same whether I sold my hair or not.
They did check me over with great care, just in case something was wrong with my health. The results showed nothing amiss. Is it simply a problem in my own head? There was a mountain of things in Icarus I still needed to get sick of, and yet I caught myself hoping my hair would hurry up and grow.
"Hana, you know you're doing your homework today, right?"
Bora had started drilling me in my studies more often, perhaps because there wasn't much time left before I started school. The problems were easy ones, though—maybe because I possessed such a brilliant mind.
Thinking about it, it made no sense for someone who had even finished military service to flounder over third-grade elementary problems. I was a person who had completed every stage of formal education the Republic of Korea had to offer, and I had gone to university on top of that. I was confident there wasn't a third-grader in the country smarter than me.
"Hnnng..."
My pride, however, was smashed to pieces while I worked through Korean. I was certain I knew the spelling, and yet the moment a question sat in front of me, nothing came to mind. It was so unfair I nearly cried.
"Hana, this one's wrong."
Beside me, Haru held the Korean workbook and taught with the pinpoint precision of a star tutor.
Even if the Starlight Guild had written the company off, it was still, in name at least, part of a major conglomerate. Maybe that was why even the ordinary employees walking around me had all come out of prestigious universities. I'd heard it took a tremendous amount of effort just to get in the door.
Haru said she had tutored for money back in her college days. With experience teaching students, she was, as expected, very good at it. From her perspective, even coaching high schoolers through the college entrance exam had been easy work, so elementary problems like mine must have been a piece of cake.
"Isn't it 'y not'? That's how they write it online..."
"Where on earth do you pick these things up..."
I had seen most people in the chat of the streams I used to run spell it that way, so I wrote it down convinced it was the correct answer. It wasn't. Haru wrote the proper words in beside me.
And the trials kept coming.
"Geumil does not mean Friday. It means today."
"Saheul is three days. Not four."
Impossible. The more Korean I studied with Haru, the closer I seemed to drift toward some abyss. It felt as if every bit of common sense I had trusted until now was being turned inside out. Was this what it felt like to tell a person convinced the earth was flat that it was round?
"Haru... the problems are too hard..."
I said it while sneakily flipping the workbook over. I wanted to see the title—surely this wasn't elementary level—but what I found was pure despair.
It was a workbook for my own age. I could have sworn the questions were the sort a sixth-grader ought to be sweating over... At this rate, the whole world would know I wasn't up to snuff.
"You're doing well, Hana, so you'll manage. You've improved so much since last time."
"Really...?"
"Mm-hm."
Haru's words let me find my confidence again. So I really am a genius? According to her, of all the children she had ever taught, my rate of improvement was the fastest. There was no reason for Haru to lie about something like that.
"Let's do math and English now."
Once the Korean was more or less behind us, the subjects I was actually confident in arrived. Math was so easy the difficulty itself made me yawn. If anyone wanted to bring me down, they would have to produce middle-school problems at the very least. I can even solve quadratic equations!
English, meanwhile, was nothing but the most basic vocabulary. That an apple was called an apple was common knowledge even the neighbor's dog could have told you.
Before I knew it I was studying with a smug little grin, a completely different person from the one who had been doing Korean. Sure enough, take Korean out of the picture and there was no one alive who could stop me.
It was a company owned by the Starlight Guild. Starlight Cosmetics, though, was only a byproduct of the Guild branching out into new businesses. The president would have been offended to hear it described that way, but it was the truth.
Anything to do with hunters, the Starlight Guild held in a fist—monster byproducts from inside the gates, hunters' weapons, all of it. It didn't even have a neck-and-neck rival the way a certain CPU maker, Company I, did with Company A.
It was as good as a monopoly. Any hunter in Korea bought weapons stamped with the Starlight Guild's mark as a matter of course, and products from other companies were not worth a moment's consideration. The quality was garbage.
The money skimmed from hunters, most of them high earners, was staggering—enough to account for nearly the whole of the Starlight Guild's revenue.
Flush with cash, the Guild had pushed into banking, insurance, and every other trade useful for making still more money. According to one article, the life insurance sold to hunters turned an especially fat little profit...
At any rate, plenty of Starlight affiliates were pulling in annual revenue in the trillions of won. Starlight Cosmetics, regrettably, had not managed even a hundred billion—let alone a trillion.
Then the lotion made with Hana's hair launched, and the company went roaring up the charts.
And then the supply of Hana's hair, which had kept coming in without pause, vanished all at once.
No... no!!!
Graaah! The strength is draining out of my body!
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...
At the news that Hana's hair was gone, Starlight Cosmetics was swallowed by terror and shock. The fear that began at the top rolled downhill until it buried even the lowest employees.
The factory that had run day and night without a moment's rest was shut down. The people who worked there were, in a single instant, sent home without pay.
They hadn't been fired, at least. Even so, for workers who lived on a month's wages at a time, unpaid leave was a brutal blow. It wasn't entirely unpaid—the company still paid out a certain sum while they were off—but it fell hopelessly short of what a person needed to live.
The workers on the line could see the cosmetic ingredients sitting there, perfectly intact. They simply had no idea that the most important ingredient of all was Hana's hair, so the misunderstanding couldn't be helped.
A gloomy air hung over the conference room at Starlight Cosmetics.
"President, with the stock we've built up, we won't last even a week."
"We got so carried away celebrating the company's all-time sales record that we barely set any reserves aside."
Nothing but bad news left the executives' mouths, one after another. It couldn't be helped. They had drawn up their sales strategy on the assumption that Hana's hair would keep arriving, so with the supply cut off like this, the situation could only be the worst possible one.
Worse, Hana's hair could not be replaced. It was not something you could buy even if you offered a fortune.
Kim Seyoung, her nerves shot, pictured running clippers over what hair Hana had left. If she buzzed off that entire bob, couldn't they hold out one more week...?
But a Hana whose scalp gleamed bald would nurse a tremendous grudge, and a sulking Hana would not give them a single strand. In the end, Starlight Lotion would disappear for good...
"President!"
"Y-yes!"
The executive calling for her yanked Kim Seyoung back to her senses.
"For now, cut the volume of lotion we're shipping to the absolute minimum. I'll go see Sehee. Word is Starlight Food has stockpiled some of Hana's hair, so I'll borrow it even if I have to get down on my knees."
One way or another, Kim Seyoung had to lean on family feeling and bring that hair back from Kim Sehee. The factory had stopped, and with every day that passed, the losses grew ruinous.