Star Voice Notary (SVN)

<Shadow III>

Our company, Edge Shadow Inc., is an organization of assassins that began its history operating in the shadows of society. However, today it holds significant influence over all branches of government—executive, judiciary, and legislative—regardless of political affiliation. This was all made possible by a single invention.

Karma Points.

They were devised through artificial magic to assist with assassination. The more actions taken to earn points, the higher the probability of a successful assassination—a miraculous numerical system.

By combining future prediction magic with our proprietary measurement magic known as “D,” Karma Points are calculated, accumulated in magical database servers worldwide, and can be viewed through a magical phone app.

If measurements indicate that infiltrating during the night increases Karma Points, then assassins will act at night. If it shows success during broad daylight, then they will strike openly. For assassins, it has become the standard by which they gauge their work.

Through the power of Karma Points, we earned the trust of our clients, and our economic activities continued to expand.

It seemed wasteful to limit Karma Points to the underworld alone. A young technician suggested introducing them experimentally at a small, privately-owned bar. The result? It became packed with customers.

Hearing about its success, two organizations requested to incorporate Karma Points into their systems: Eagle Company, which later became Edge Guard Inc., and Poem's Forest, a welfare corporation that evolved into Edge Hope Inc.

Both are semi-public organizations representing conservative and liberal factions. Initially, the intention was mere business partnerships. But, in time, these relationships developed into deep-rooted entanglements.

And so, unintentionally, we established connections within the government, providing our organization—which should have been always on the brink of collapse—with stability.

The first generation created the assassin organization and invented Karma Points. The second generation expanded the organization by incorporating musical magic and established a solid holding company structure.

As for me, the third generation—I might as well say that I’m just lying around eating the fruits of their labor.

If this were a card game, the deck was already perfected by the efforts of the previous generations. My task is simply to choose the most enticing, wild cards from the deck as I please.

Even with my considerable authority, I cannot destroy the deck that has been maintained for so many years. Attempting to do so would mean even I, as the leader, would have to prepare myself to face death. At first, people created the system, but now the system shapes the people. We are intertwined—bound by fate.

Yes. In any world, if a dictatorship lasts for three generations, it will inevitably end up like this. No longer entertaining schemes of wrongdoing, simply setting daily or monthly quotas and executing them with professional detachment. Even I am nothing more than a cog in the machine. If this organization has a brain, it’s the ghosts of the previous generations.

And the more earnest the individual, the quicker they are seduced by the ghosts and transformed into the greatest villains of their era. History, across all ages and nations, proves this to be true. And today, fresh recruits continue to be dyed in the colors of our organization.

The masses are easily swayed by the noble-sounding notion of “professionalism.” Even if the rules of the organization they serve are mad. If someone acts irrationally, it’s reduced to a personal flaw, allowing the organization to evade criticism. That’s fine. That’s exactly how our organization maintains peace.

Even if some of our members are exposed as criminals, the media simply plays background music ripped from anime or games while reading off their graduation album, humiliating the individual for the public’s satisfaction. The masses draw no distinction between real-life individuals and fictional characters. It’s convenient. The media, too, has been trained to pursue numbers with the same professionalism.

Karma Points are like the experience points of a computer game; once outside, they become nothing but an illusion. But as long as people belong to an organization, they believe these numbers have value. The masses criticize the deceit of game systems, but they don’t question the numerical values of economic activities within organizations, even when those numbers are hardly different from the games they deride.

If Edge Shadow Inc. were ever to crack, what would be the cause? Perhaps if something happened to Star Voice Notary (SVN), the entity that manages the macro codes of Karma Points...

No, that should be impossible. Star Voice Notary is strictly managed by the Magical Private Network (MPN). As long as there isn’t a major human error, everything should be fine.