(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)
A/N: Taking everything not nailed down and the ramifications thereof~
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Amadeus ponders the contents of the safe for one moment more before making his decision.
“We’re taking everything.”
If they took just the contracts, then they would have to immediately go to K/DA and get them too, because otherwise Millenium would know exactly who to blame for the break-in when it was finally discovered. But this wasn’t a rescue operation, it was a heist. And convincing Ahri and her bandmates to all go with them when he hadn’t even truly interacted with the other three yet wasn’t something Amadeus was interested in dealing with at the moment.
Instead, it’s much simpler to just take everything in the safe, from the magical tomes and the paperwork to the small collection of gold bars and jewels that he finds sitting in the far back. He checks them all over for further security measures though of course… and finds them as well. Luckily, he’s learning a lot from this heist… and using Unlock to unravel the tracking spells and security magic on the items within the safe is as simple as using it to get to this point in the first place.
Once they’re done collecting everything, Amadeus closes the safe back up and spins the lock. But of course, he can’t exactly put back all of the magical protections he’s gone through to get here in the first place. They’re going to know something’s up as soon as any human magician of middling talent goes to check the safe.
The question there is, when will that be? Just who within Millenium is an actual magician and who is mundane? In the end, it won’t matter though because as soon as they next open the safe they’ll find it empty anyways.
Amadeus slips back out from there. Grayfia… does not. Whether Serafall is still distracting the Millennium Enterprises Executives or not, it matters little. Neither he nor Grayfia are detected by anyone, having completely slipped under the radar. Just like that, they’ve stolen the chains wrapped around K/DA right from under their masters’ noses. Now all that’s left is to decide what to do about it…
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“This was the work of that Leviathan bitch! It had to be!”
“I’m not so sure… that creature is not the subtle type. Not by a long shot. And besides, if it was her agents, why did they take everything like they did? No… this smacks of a crime of opportunity.”
“It matters little who is behind the theft, doesn’t it? What matters is what we do now. We have a serious breach on our hands, along with a great risk to our best investment.”
The theft is discovered within an hour of Serafall Leviathan’s departure. The Satan’s arrival had everyone at Millennium on edge, including the Executives who were forced to meet with her. The entire time they’d been speaking in seemingly civil tones, the temperature of the room had been growing progressively lower, until every single one of them were having to repress shivers and keep their teeth from chattering in spite of the protection spells they had on their clothes.
The Leviathan had certainly made her displeasure known… but Millennium had not budged an inch when it came to releasing Evelynn into the Satan’s custody. How could they? To lose Evelynn would be to lose an irreplaceable part of their greatest cash cow. K/DA wasn’t just big; they were super stars. They were increasingly looking like they could become the next big thing, in fact.
But not without Evelynn. So of course, the Millennium Executives had kept a stiff upper lip, standing strong in the face of Serafall Leviathan’s scare tactics. They all knew she didn’t have a leg to stand on… while the Underworld certainly had the firepower to wipe out Millennium Enterprises in a single night if they wanted to, they would be drawing attention from far more powerful entities in the process.
Such ham-fisted actions would almost certainly blow up in the devils’ faces. And one single Devil wasn’t worth all of that trouble. Evelynn simply didn’t have the same value to her people as she did to Millennium, full stop.
But now they had another crisis on their hands. While they’d managed to hold their own and kept the Leviathan from intimidating them into submission, some opportunistic thief had managed to get past all of their defenses, even destroying a few along the way, and broke into their safe without raising a single alarm.
“Surely we have their location by now, no? Every single thing in that safe had a tracker on it.”
“No… the trackers were disabled, same as many of the security measure. It’s all in the wind.”
“And none of our best hunters are able to catch even a whiff of a trail to follow back either? How is that even possible?!”
“We don’t know. Whoever did this was very skilled though. Perhaps that is a sign that the Satans and the Underworld were behind this. But if they were, then the question becomes… why have they failed to get word to Evelynn?”
That was indeed the big question. The thief had stolen all of the contents of the safe… which included the magical contracts binding K/DA to Millennium Enterprises. With those contracts, the women who made up K/DA were effectively chattel. They’d signed their rights away, reducing themselves to nothing more than property because they’d failed to read the fine print.
Their own fault really, but the point was, without those contracts, Evelynn and her fellow idols could make a break for it and Millennium would be hard pressed to stop them without the use of excessive force. And yet…
“There’s still no movement from any of the merchandise, right? No sign that any of them know what happened or had any part of it?”
A shake of the head is followed by a grunt.
“No, not as far as we can tell. They’re currently quite unhappy with the most recent costume designs, but beyond that there’s no signs of excess anxiety or nervousness. Nothing makes me think that any of them are looking to bolt at the first sign of an opening.”
“We’ve still doubled the security on them though, right? Losing any one of them would be disastrous. Letting any one of them escape and manage to get their story out to the press would be irrecoverable.”
“Yes, yes. The security knows not to let them go anywhere. We’ve got them on lockdown, something else they’re unhappy about. The thing is, we need to decide whether we want to continue fruitlessly hunting for the original contracts… or whether we want to try and get them to sign new contracts to solve this issue right away.”
There’s a scoff at that.
“They didn’t know what they were doing when they signed the original contracts. How in the world do you expect to get them to re-sign, given the circumstances?”
“It shouldn’t be too hard, I don’t think. If we dress it up properly, they’ll think they have no choice. We can make it seem like its for other things, and since they think they’re still bound to us by the original contracts, they’d better sign… or else.”
“Hm, and even if they do manage to figure out something is up, we can force the issue, can’t we? We should have enough firepower…”
“Now that I wouldn’t be so sure of. Akali and Kai’Sa aren’t exactly powerhouses, but Ahri and Evelynn… they must not be pushed to the point that they go on a rampage. Taking them alive would be difficult, having to put them down would be regrettable, and the damage they do in the meantime would be costly.”
“Tch, very well. We’ll give it a few days then. See if maybe our hounds can find something after all and we can retrieve the original contracts. If not, we’ll see if we can trick them into signing new ones. We can’t just lock them down forever, after all. They’ll figure out something is up if we stop having them perform for too long.”
“Yes, yes. But their dislike of the new costumes should buy us some extra time. They’ll be too relieved to not have to wear them on stage yet to wonder why we’re pushing back their next performance.
“Heh, too true…”
Grayfia stands in the back of the boardroom, listening to the slimy men filling the conference table talk about the members of K/DA in such despicable fashion. Leaving her behind to see what would happen had been a masterstroke on her Master’s part, Grayfia had to admit.
They needed to make sure that K/DA weren’t in immediate danger, after all. If this meeting had gone differently, if the Millennium Enterprises Executives had decided to do things a bit more immediately, then she probably would have had to act in some way.
… But it sounded like they had time. Mere days, maybe… but that was time aplenty. Grayfia continues to watch until the meeting comes to a close of course, just to make sure there’s anything else relevant… but in the end, there’s not much. Just some complaining about the other things stolen from the safe, such as the magical tomes apparently being from the ‘Founder’ of their magical organization himself and what not.
Otherwise… its just a bunch of vile men complaining that their vile actions are finally having something in the way of consequences, really. It makes Grayfia wrinkle her nose in disgust. Frankly, it makes her want to just wipe out every smug bastard in the boardroom all at once.
But no… that was not her purpose here. She was only to observe for the time being. There might be a time when Lord Amadeus ordered her to do a bit of ‘spring cleaning’ later on, but that was not this time. Not quite yet, anyways.
For now, as the meeting comes to an end and everyone files out of the boardroom, Grayfia watches them go still completely undetected. The oldest among them had been of middling magical power, definitely Upper High-Class at most. Which of course meant they truly couldn’t hold a candle to her.
However, Grayfia was also aware that these were specifically the executives of Millennium Enterprises’ Record Label Division. The greater company might have older powerhouses waiting in the wings, though she found it curious that nobody in the meeting had mentioned them even once.
Either they were too afraid to call upon their superiors or bring them up in any way, or they were simply given enough unilateral power as an organization that they could stand separate and apart and handle things on their own.
All in all though, it was not up to Grayfia to interpret everything she’d seen. Rather, it was only her place to observe and then report back to her Master. Which she of course does shortly thereafter, returning to their base of operations, which at this point is Huntrix Tower rather than the safehouse down in the Underworld.
Grayfia arrives to find everyone waiting for her. Though that doesn’t mean they’ve been idle. Zoey is flipping through one of the magical tomes they’d stolen, Mira is tapping a gold bar, and both Rumi and Amadeus are standing on the other side of the couch, looking over Celine’s shoulders as she reads through K/DA’s contracts, which have been separated from the rest of the documents by this point.
“Tell me I’m not going crazy, Celine. Tell me this is as abominable as it read to me!”
Celine lets out a sigh at Rumi’s stressed words, the purple-haired half-demon looking like she’s one step away from going over to Millennium Enterprises’ Headquarters and ripping the heads off of all their executives herself. It’s obvious that Rumi had read through the contracts first while Grayfia was gone, and then Celine had been called in to go through them as well.
Lord Amadeus just has a frown on his face and his arms crossed over his chest, his brow furrowed in concern.
“… It’s bad, yes. Though admittedly, it’s only draconian by modern standards. Standards that I’ve done everything in my power to push forward and champion through you girls.”
Rumi straightens up and puffs out her chest a little bit at that. Mira looks over and also looks a little proud, though her pride wars with residual anger she feels towards Celine. Finally, Zoey…
“Guys, there’s a spell in here that lets you turn someone into a rabbit!”
Everyone looks over at the youngest member of Huntrix for a moment, prompting Zoey to eventually look up, blink, and flush.
“Ah… sorry, just got excited. We can do magic now, right?”
Master Amadeus nods easily enough.
“You should be able to, yes. Devil Magic is all about creativity… I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to adapt anything humans came up with to your new energy once you’ve trained up your reserves enough.”
Zoey whoops, causing Amadeus to smile and Mira to smirk. But Rumi and Celine are still both frowning, too focused on the contracts.
“Okay but… we can free them now, can’t we? We have these magical contracts now. So we can just… go and get them at any point.”
Celine hums.
“Under normal circumstances I would say no. There would be multiple copies of the contracts in question. Having just one version, even the original, doesn’t suddenly let you break it. However… magic does change things doesn’t it? The magic binding those girls to their ‘Masters’ is tied up in these pieces of paper and the signatures on them.”
Celine looks to Amadeus then, a rather serious glint in her eye.
“Of course… the question becomes, what do you intend to do with these pieces of paper, now that you have them? Will K/DA be trading one set of Masters for another?”
Grayfia straightens up at Celine’s words. It’s not quite an accusation… or Grayfia would already be bristling in anger no matter the heart to heart they’d had. And yet, there’s still somewhat of a challenge inherent in Celine’s tone. And Grayfia doesn’t like that challenge, even if Celine fully expects Amadeus to make the ‘right move’.
Testing her Lord and Master like this… tch, that woman is already getting a bit too comfortable, isn’t she?
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A/N: Remember to Vote, leave a Like, and let me know what you think!
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Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qP2RyfQ5Am2xD4HmynOr6tHx-A7YXV0jfQczDEmjpPA/edit?tab=t.0