The Villainous Director Is Raising a Child!

"...Director."

Lee Jinwoo, wearing a defeated look, held up the mat and picnic basket in his hands.

"This kind of thing is usually called a picnic, not a heist."

The same flicker of let-down passed across Han Soeun and Kang Taemin's faces — the two of them, who'd been braced as if for a last stand.

Amused by their expressions, I chuckled and answered.

"Well, if I call it a heist, it's a heist."

Just then, small hands tugged at the hem of my coat from behind.

I turned to find Suho and the twins huddled behind my legs.

Hajun rose up on tiptoe and put his mouth to Hayun's ear.

Whisper, whisper. A short exchange passed between them.

Hayun looked up at me and asked:

"...Director, Hajunie's asking where this is. Hayunie's curious too."

Suho, cradling the rabbit doll I'd bought him a while back preciously to his chest, chimed in.

"And... why are those people here...?"

The children's eyes had landed on the pure-white lab coats Han Soeun and Kang Taemin were wearing.

I jerked my chin at the two of them — lose the coats. Now.

At that, they hurriedly shrugged them off.

I dropped to one knee and got at eye level with the kids.

"This is my garden. Room got stuffy, so we came out."

I pointed a finger at Han Soeun and Kang Taemin.

"And those two are my new minions, so don't be scared of them."

I grinned and added:

"You can actually order them around all you want. If they give you any trouble, come tell me right away."

The wariness on the kids' faces melted at that, like spring snow.

"Hehe... okay."

Satisfied at the sound of their giggles, I got back up.

"All right — today we're eating out here. Understood?"

The Nest Research Institute was a massive pentagon-shaped building.

Like a giant donut, the center of the building was hollow, and that whole hollow space was one enormous garden.

It normally served as the researchers' break area, and today I'd booked the whole thing out on Director's authority.

Today had two objectives.

Give the kids a brief taste of fresh air, and create a chance for the new researchers and the children to grow closer.

For the hesitant group behind me, I spread the mat under the shade of a big cherry tree in the middle of the garden and stretched out on it first.

The first to react to what I'd done were — astonishingly — Cha Yul and Sea-ah.

Very cautiously, as though afraid all of this might turn out to be a dream, the two of them reached out toward the sunlight and knelt down to touch the soil.

...Ah.

Two years, and one year.

The time those barely-ten-year-old kids had endured in this prison.

To them, real sky and real earth had to be a distant landscape whose memory had already blurred.

But for the three youngest, who hadn't been at the institute long, it was like a playground they'd only briefly been kept from.

"Whoa!"

The kids burst into peals of laughter and started tearing around the garden like it was their own backyard.

I hid behind my paperwork and quietly took in the dazzling sight.

But the louder their laughter got, the more it weighed on me that Sihyeok was still alone in the containment room.

Next time... I'm bringing him out for sure.

Making that silent promise to myself, I turned to the two minions standing beside me.

"Two, Three. You two go play too. Getting close to the dolls is part of your assignment. Part of the plan."

At my order, Kang Taemin just gave a curt nod, but Han Soeun asked back with a look of disbelief:

"Sir? Director, we... really just play with them? No blood draws or anything?"

"When did I ever say to draw blood?"

Only then did Han Soeun's face burst into brightness, like a firework going off.

Brimming with joy, she ran toward the kids practically screaming.

"Kids!!!"

Han Soeun's booming shout froze the children in place for a moment.

Lab coat off or not, in the kids' eyes she was still just another researcher — one of the people who'd tormented them.

They clustered behind my back on instinct.

Even when I nodded to signal it was okay, they only reluctantly hovered near me and kept a clear distance from the two of them.

Even by the time the picnic was winding down, that invisible wall hadn't come down.

It's going to take a while to bridge this.

That was what I was thinking as I watched the invisible wall between the kids and the two researchers.

But two cracks formed in that wall faster than I'd expected.

The first crack started with Han Soeun's persistence.

She kept hovering around Lee Sea-ah, trying to strike up conversation.

"Sea-ah, that cloud up there. Weight-wise it'd be heavier than a hundred elephants, but it's floating in the sky. Isn't that weird?"

Right up to when we were getting ready to head back, Sea-ah said nothing.

Just as Han Soeun was about to give up and close her mouth — a very small voice came.

"...Because it's water vapor."

Without lifting her eyes from her book, Sea-ah quietly added:

"The rising air currents are stronger than the falling speed of the individual droplets... so it stays up."

Han Soeun's face lit up at the answer.

Around the same time, the second crack was happening.

The twins had been trotting around the grass, saying they were going to find something shiny.

Then Hayun spotted something and rushed toward it — only to trip over her own feet and nearly go down.

In that instant, a huge shadow swept over her.

Kang Taemin, who'd been standing there like a mountain, caught her lightly in one enormous hand a breath before she hit the ground.

For a moment her eyes went wide, startled.

"...T-thank... you..."

That was all she got out; she wriggled out of his arms, scampered right back, and hid behind me again.

The sight caught me a little off guard.

Just two months ago, these had been kids who put up thorns at every adult in sight, myself included.

And now those same kids were... starting to let a new adult in that close.

Reading the surprise on my face, Lee Jinwoo, standing beside me, quietly stepped closer and whispered.

"Director. Actually... before you arrived, our intake was the one assigned to the children."

I looked at him, taken aback by the new information.

"Well — 'assigned' just meant moving unconscious kids around, drawing blood, running twenty-four-hour surveillance — horrific work like that, sir. But even so, those two tried to treat the kids as human beings, not test subjects."

Ah...

Only then did I finally understand why Han Soeun had been so overjoyed by my orders earlier.

I looked back at the two of them, now mingling with the kids again.

...Got lucky.

Lee Jinwoo, whom I'd picked more or less on a whim, and the colleagues he'd brought in.

It seemed I'd pulled far better people onto my side than I'd bargained for.

After the picnic that day, the kids slowly began to accept the two of them.

Of course, Yul was still off training alone, and Sihyeok showed no sign of coming out of his tent — but the other kids, little by little, were opening up to the new people.

Sea-ah occasionally talked with Han Soeun about one thing or another, and the three youngest, the moment Kang Taemin came in, would swarm him and dangle off him.

Watching them, I figured the kids had found at least a baseline of security in having new caretakers around.

Right. It's time.

To put my real plan in motion, I summoned Lee Jinwoo once again.

Creak, thunk.

The moment the Director left and the door shut, the air in the room shifted — subtly.

The twins, who had been dangling off Kang Taemin, slid down to the floor, and Lee Sea-ah, who had been chatting with Han Soeun, closed her mouth as if she'd never opened it.

As if on cue, the kids gathered close around Cha Yul and started playing among themselves.

That sudden shift in attitude.

But having been through it many times, Han Soeun and Kang Taemin were used to it by now.

Still, the sheer naturalness of the switch had Han Soeun pouting and grumbling as if her feelings were hurt.

"Wow. The Director walks out and your attitude does a total one-eighty? A little rude, honestly."

Lee Sea-ah shot back in a voice cold as ice.

"You're not interested in us anyway. Just in the Director."

Han Soeun grinned at that.

"Sure, the Director's the most interesting research subject there is. But you kids are pretty interesting to observe too."

At that, Hayun huffed hmph! — prim and sharp as a spitting kitten.

"It's only 'cause of Director that we play with you! Don't get the wrong idea! Director is ours!"

As Hayun yelled it, chest puffed out to bursting, Suho and Hajun clapped hard in agreement.

That was when Cha Yul — who had been silently watching from behind the others — spoke up coldly.

"Throw us some food a few times, patch up a few wounds... and you think we're going to forget everything you did?"

His voice was full of a contempt that didn't match his age.

"The Director is the same kind of trash. But at least he's upfront about it. You two are different. Who knows what you're really hiding behind those smiles. Which makes you even more disgusting."

Han Soeun didn't so much as blink at Cha Yul's cutting remarks.

"Oh my. Look at these kids."

She pushed her glasses up and looked the children over, intrigued.

"You put on that innocent act for the Director, and you're this different with us?"

"..."

"But you kids really have this wrong. We're on your side! We're here because we want to help you."

The kids didn't so much as pretend to listen.

"Well — one of these days they'll come around," Han Soeun said, feigning nonchalance with a shrug.

Then she and Kang Taemin walked out of the containment room without a backward glance.

Only once the door shut and the kids were out of sight did she finally flare up, grumbling to Kang Taemin.

"God — that's just brutal, isn't it? I want to get closer to them, but they won't give me an inch! Only friendly when the Director's around, only asking about the Director! They're basically glued to him — total little limpets!"

Even in the face of her fuming, Kang Taemin's expression didn't twitch.

"No need to push it."

"What — 'push it'? I'm being genuine—!"

"We just do our job."

Kang Taemin cut her off coldly.

"Hmph!"

Han Soeun grumbled and trailed after him.

"That aside — have you managed to figure anything out about the Director's plan? He only ever calls Lee Jinwoo in. Kind of stings."

Kang Taemin paused mid-step.

"...I don't know... anything about a plan."

He paused a beat.

"But look at this."

He turned on his data pad and projected two graphs as holograms.

One was the children's energy waveforms from when Deputy Director Park Wonjin had been managing them — unstable, jagged, spiking wildly.

And the other... was the past two months of data, since the Director had taken over.

A curve holding steady at high values — smooth and gentle, incomparable to before.

Han Soeun stared at the graph on the pad and caught her breath.

"This... is this real?"

"..."

"Data that wouldn't budge no matter how much energy we injected, no matter how far we pushed them to the extreme... just from feeding them well and playing with them, it's coming out this stable?"

In her head, every one of the Director's antics over the past two months flashed past in quick succession.

Turning the once-prisonlike containment room into top-shelf everything.

Dipping into his own money to import organic meals and designer clothes.

Reading each child's individual character and giving each one their own books, tents, toys — things to interest them.

Even reserving the whole institute garden just to throw them a picnic.

The more she thought about each one, the stranger it all felt.

There's no way the notorious Chae Junhyeok did all that inefficient stuff out of, what — kindness? Pity?

Without meaning to, she swallowed dryly.

Then only one answer's left. All of this — every action — was a perfectly calculated experiment.

The moment she reached that conclusion, gooseflesh crawled all over her body.

He's insane... this man is actually insane.

If this was true, then in just two months, a nepotism hire not even a year in had cracked what dozens of researchers had failed to figure out over years.

"How on earth did he...?"

Powering the hologram off, Kang Taemin said quietly:

"...Lee Jinwoo said it before. That the Director might be a real genius operating in an area we can't even understand."

He turned his back.

"Maybe the delinquent we've seen for the past six months really was an act..."

With that, he vanished down the far end of the corridor without a backward glance.

Left alone, Han Soeun watched his retreating back for a moment, then shouted "Wait up!" and hurried after him.

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