Black Badger

The problem was, I had no idea how I was supposed to do it.

I had to go to some building in Core 3 by 8:30 p.m. When I checked, it was pretty far from the factory site. Meaning they weren’t going to give me a factory tour right away.

So that meant I had to go there and use the honey trap(?) to get a factory access pass.

And of course, I’d never used a honey trap in my life.

Faced with a crisis I’d never even imagined, I spent the entire morning clutching my head.

“What am I supposed to wear?”

I had absolutely zero talent for dressing myself up.

“What... how do I even prepare for this?”

Igor, who’d been chugging a sports drink, lifted an eyebrow.

I looked at the man with short black hair and dark black eyes.

Silence settled as we faced each other.

I turned my head away.

“Yeah. My bad for asking the guy who washes his hair with soap.”

“What?”

Igor set the sports drink down, his voice incredulous.

“What the hell does soap have to do with anything?”

“Leonard.”

The senior sitting beside Igor, leisurely sipping coffee, lifted his head.

He smiled gently, wearing a grin that made him look like the nicest guy in the world.

“With a face like yours, I think all you need is to dress appropriately for the time and place.”

“Then I’ll buy a suit nearby after lunch and go.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“And then what?”

Honestly, I’d rather tie them up, dump water over them, and get what I wanted that way.

Or I’d rather sit a politician down and negotiate both sides’ positions. I could more or less tell what that person wanted from me, and I could bargain accordingly.

But a honey trap?

Human charm?

“Just go and smile, Hilde. Don’t make it so hard. Listen to them and smile.”

Leonard bared teeth so neat he ought to be in a dental commercial.

“Compliment them. And if you’re confident, toss in a small joke.”

If Ricardo were here, at least I could’ve gone dressed properly....

“Ask questions. Look at them like they’re telling you the most interesting story in the world.”

Ju is the expert in this field, but I didn’t particularly want to ask him....

“And if they want a kiss, kiss them.”

“Excuse me?”

Kiss what?

“I have to kiss them, too?”

When I blurted it out in a blank voice, Leonard’s eyes went round.

He looked like he genuinely couldn’t understand why I was so shocked.

Igor plucked a single pale-green grape off the shine muscat cluster sitting on the round table where we were seated.

“What’s with you over a kiss?”

“Do you have some kind of germophobia?”

Igor popped the shine muscat into his mouth as he spoke, and Leonard asked in a tone like, Ah, so you hadn’t even considered that.

I glared at the men across from me.

“No. I just believe anything beyond a kiss should be with someone I have feelings for.”

Leonard’s eyes went even wider.

His face screamed, What kind of idiot says that? It was obvious he was thinking it. The rationality he’d acquired to function in society seemed to be stopping him from turning that thought into sound.

“Why?”

the senior asked.

Before I could answer, he shaped his mouth into a small “ah” and added,

“I didn’t tell you this. The young chairman’s wife is quite a beauty too. The two of them are famous as a perfect handsome man and beautiful woman pair. They say every time the couple shows up at social gatherings, people turn their heads to stare.”

“It’s not about their looks. Given the situation, I can smile and compliment them, at least, but....”

“You’re not desperate enough.”

Igor lifted the shine muscat cluster and curled his lip into a crooked grin.

“You’re still the same—getting all blocked up in the weirdest places. You’re better than most people when it comes to skinship like hugging, so what’s the big deal?”

“That’s a sign of closeness and affection. The kind of ‘kiss’ we’re talking about here won’t be that.”

“Do you think they’re expecting true love from you? They’re both pros. It’s just, ‘We like it, so let’s have fun.’ What’s the problem between grown adults?”

“Then you go.”

It wasn’t something I spat out because I was sulking—I genuinely thought he’d do better than me.

“Or how about we go together, and you use the honey trap?”

The two men stared at me.

Eyes wide, they didn’t look away.

I had enough sense to realize the thing I’d just said sounded extremely bizarre to them.

The one who broke the silence was Leonard.

“Do your people have different standards for beauty than we do?”

“Senior.”

There was no malice in his voice, which somehow made it crueler.

I hurriedly adjusted my posture and said,

“Igor is handsome too.”

“He’s just overly generous about other people’s faces.”

Igor looked at Leonard with a face that wasn’t hurt at all.

“He’s the kind of guy who always says everyone has their own charm. So when he told you to use a honey trap, he probably meant it. I’m not dissatisfied with my face, but I also know it’s not the level where I can pull a honey trap. Hildebert doesn’t know that.”

“How strange. Even if I don’t know society’s common sense, I can still tell who’s handsome and who’s pretty.”

Leonard’s reply had been oddly off the mark for a while now.

It was so bizarrely off that it was hard to even point out what was wrong.

But it definitely seemed more off than Yun. The only reason Yun had gained anything resembling normalcy was probably Yehyeon and Ami’s tearful efforts at correction. When Yun was in front of Yehyeon or Ami, sometimes he even looked like a normal person.

“Hilde. Who do you think is the most handsome and the prettiest among the Badgers?”

While I was having this weird experience of realizing Yun’s “normalcy,” Leonard looked at me and asked.

I pressed my lips into a straight line.

“I don’t want to answer a rude question.”

“Is that a rude question?”

So he really didn’t know.

“Yes.”

“Why? The only Badgers here are you and me. And I’m not so lacking in self-awareness that I’d be offended if I didn’t rank.”

“Arbitrarily ranking other people is generally not the right thing to do, senior. Especially in a field that has no objective indicators.”

“Really? Then I’ll remove the word ‘most.’”

I let out a small laugh.

No matter how much I explained, he wouldn’t understand.

So I decided I might as well just answer.

“Aide-de-Camp Ska and Senior Lia.”

“Hm. If you answered like that, your eyes seem normal.”

“Commander. If you can’t kiss, then at least smile your ass off.”

Igor tossed the shine muscat stem—every grape gone—onto the plate with a thunk.

“And do the thing where you pull the woman in and push the man away. Then the job’ll be basically solved.”

Wasn’t he making it sound a little too easy because it wasn’t his problem?

“And tie your hair back into one ponytail when you go, and then let it down at the right moment.”

“When is the right moment?”

I didn’t get an answer that was clear enough to satisfy me.

All I got were lines like, What have you even been doing for two hundred years? and, Yeah, someone born with it can’t help but get lazy, none of which helped me cultivate a honey trap in the slightest.

But the appointment was already set, and I couldn’t just throw this plan into the trash.

I wished evening would never come.

But evening came.

Heavy with dread, I set off for the meeting place.

***

“Walk me in.”

At the main gate, I turned back to Igor.

My subordinate—who’d been playing at being my escort knight—took in my desperate face and snorted.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you that scared, Commander. Didn’t you attend social gatherings just fine?”

“I still attend social gatherings just fine! I’m scared I’m going to turn everything into a total disaster.”

“Trust your face.”

Igor turned his head away indifferently and rolled up the passenger-side window.

“Good luck.”

He was a cold bastard. After telling me to contact him when it was over, he left me behind and disappeared. The vehicle he’d borrowed from Sylvia quickly shrank into the distance.

With my options gone, I dragged my heavy feet into the building.

It looked like a place where Byung Yeong-baek or a baron might’ve lived. I’d been to Choi Hyunjun’s house, so I thought I’d gotten used to these palace-like homes, but the one I’d been invited to was far bigger than Choi Hyunjun’s mansion. No matter where I looked, I could feel the couple’s staggering wealth.

But I didn’t have the energy to admire the chandelier filling the reception room ceiling or the Persian rug covering the marble floor.

When I stood there blankly, someone approached and guided me into the reception room.

“Please wait just a moment.”

Inside were two pairs of men and women.

A faint smell of marijuana hung in the air. Wine and cocktail scents mixed with the perfume the people in the room had sprayed on their bodies.

“Wow!”

The owners of that perfume greeted me far too enthusiastically.

“Aren’t you the amusement park Badger?”

This part wasn’t that hard.

I sat where they offered me and gave appropriately measured answers to the barrage of questions.

Guiding the topic gently in the direction I wanted was easy. They were drugged, and they bore me no ill will. And I was curious about the chairman and his wife.

I matched their tone, tossed out a topic, and they bit the bait immediately.

The guests snickered as they spilled crude gossip.

“The wife’s the pitiful one. Looks like she married him because she was dazzled by his looks.”

“She tied her own noose.”

“Didn’t she know the rumors?”

“No way she was that stupid!”

“Well, it’s been an open secret for ages that Heath prefers men. She probably just didn’t want to admit it. Or maybe no one ever told her.”

“Poor thing.”

Across from the men laughing derisively, a blonde woman put on a fake, tearful face.

“Unrequited love! And she’s an adopted daughter, too!”

“Hey, she was adopted into a rich family. She probably grew up happier than we did. That kind of rich doesn’t need our pity.”

“But she looked like she grew up being mistreated. Didn’t you see it? That timid expression.”

A chic woman with a sharp bob put a cigarette to her lips and tilted her head.

“Always looking scared of everything. It’s not an easy face for a rich family’s daughter to have.”

“They say the husband is ice-cold to her. Apparently he treats his own wife like that.”

“That’s too much. He signed the marriage contract after calculating his own benefits, too. If you married for business reasons, is there really a need to be that cruel?”

“I heard the wife broke the contract and went to see her husband’s lover. That’s when Heath completely lost it.”

“Wow, scary. So the legally married one went to find them?”

Vulgar.

I thought that, but I didn’t let it show on my face.

I wasn’t particularly surprised. I’d seen this countless times—at the Empire’s social gatherings, at Earth’s social gatherings. People like this existed in every world, in every era. It wasn’t new or interesting.

What was surprising was the information I’d just gained.

The chairman’s wife genuinely loved him?

Then was the rumor about her aggressively pulling in handsome men just false gossip?

“But lately there’s been talk that Lacy’s been drawing men in left and right. Decent-looking ones, too.”

“For that, she didn’t look very happy.”

“I think that’s part of a jealousy strategy.”

The man idly spun his cocktail glass as he spoke.

“She’s trying to make Heath look back at her.”

“She still hasn’t given up? She’s persistent. Heath is handsome, sure, but Lacy’s not hard on the eyes either.”

“Well. For the men she calls over, there’s nothing bad about it.”

The man who’d been examining a wine label said that, then suddenly snapped his head toward me.

I calmly met the gaze of the person curling the corner of his mouth at me.

Dilated pupils, loose with drugs.

The man grinned and asked,

“So which side is the amusement park hero aiming for? Heath? Or Lacy?”

At that moment, a young housemaid entered the reception room.

“Mr. Taleb. The chairman is calling for you.”

I stood without hesitation and left the reception room.

***

There was some distance to the second reception room where the chairman and his wife were waiting.

I knew things like this all too well. Malicious rumors. Political marriages. Vast mansions. The servants who worked there.

The way people unjustly smeared clung to their masters.

I wasn’t surprised when the young housemaid walking ahead of me spoke quietly.

If anything, I was surprised by how long she’d held it in.

She’d looked like she wanted to speak from the moment she pulled me out.

“I know it’s presumptuous of me to speak.”

That’s how it usually starts.

“Lacy is not that kind of person.”

I heard a very different account.

The gist was this: it was true that Lacy loved Heath, but she had never once gone to his lover to commit any wrongdoing. In fact, Heath’s lover had been abusing the servants when Heath wasn’t around. Unable to stand it, Lacy had sought him out privately to warn him—only for the lover to run straight to Heath and frame Lacy.

Lacy was kinder to the servants than anyone, and the men who visited her were all business partners. Many had fallen for her, but Lacy had always rejected their advances....

That was the story I heard.

I couldn’t yet be certain what was true.

But judging from the rumors as a whole, it did seem true that Lacy liked Heath.

“Chairman.”

A honey trap wouldn’t work on the wife at all.

I thought that as I heard the knock on the oak door.

This was bad. That meant I’d have no choice but to deploy the honey trap on Heath.

I wasn’t confident.

“Mr. Taleb is here.”

“Let him in.”

A voice as cold as Yun’s—if not colder—flowed out.

Creeeak....

I forced myself not to sigh as I stepped through the opening door.

Blindingly bright lights.

I came face to face with the pharmaceutical company chairman sitting in a modern reception room.

A perfectly fitted three-piece suit. Pomaded hair slicked neatly back. A high nose bridge and sharply defined brow. The watch on his wrist reflected the light—it was from the same company Erich Erhart favored—and the fountain pen in his hand bore the logo of the brand Colton preferred.

He was unmistakably handsome. I could see why Leonard had called him a handsome man. He had an impression as cold as Yun’s. But while Yun was cleanly handsome, this man was intensely handsome.

And his eyes—unlike Yun’s—were normal.

A blessing in disguise.

“Sit.”

The man didn’t rise from his seat.

He flicked his chin toward the sofa opposite him and spoke dully, eyes still on his documents.

“This is my wife.”

I turned my gaze to Lacy.

Focused on confirming the primary target, I’d momentarily forgotten her presence. They weren’t seated side by side, so she hadn’t entered my field of view right away.

Still, they were the ones who’d emailed me and called me here. What an incredible way to treat a guest.

No matter how little he liked his wife.

This really was excessive, just like the rumors said....

.......

...?

“Nice to meet you.”

The woman smiled faintly.

I couldn’t respond.

Rose.

Why are you there.

“I’m Lacy Clair.”

“I don’t recall telling you to introduce yourself before me.”

Without lifting his gaze from the documents, Heath snapped at her.

Lacy—Rose pretending to be Lacy—flinched, then hurriedly lowered her eyes at an angle.

Heath let out an impatient sigh.

Behind us, the servant quietly sucked in a breath.

Just before closing the door, the housemaid muttered under ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) her breath,

“Our poor Lady Lacy....”

No.

Fuck.

You’re all being completely fooled.