Chapter 505: Side Story, Return (5)
Chapter 505: Side Story, Return (5)
Ha Hee-Jeong reassured me that she would head over first to make the necessary preparations, so I remained seated, turning the situation over in my head.Ten minutes felt woefully insufficient to the heads of state of various nations. With the added difficulty of varied time zones, we were contacting them in the middle of the night. Also, in that short window, they would also need to summon their aides and attendants. Of course, they would be more than a little flustered—I hadn’t told them that I would be visiting them directly.
I told them, “Everyone will need to prepare,” though.
Anyone competent enough to become a national leader should have grasped the implication behind those words, at least in broad strokes. By now, they were probably agonizing over who exactly was included in that “everyone,” turning the question over again and again.
In any case, because the meeting itself was so abrupt, coordination between allied nations would also be exceedingly limited. Everything about it would be rushed, forcing them to fumble around to see what they could do.
I wasn’t concerned about that.
From the beginning, I hadn’t intended for this to be an extravagant event with assembled entourages. If that caused complaints, it didn’t matter. Moreover, even if they knew which countries were participating, it wouldn’t meaningfully impact our talk.
They have surely prepared to some extent already.
During my rest, they wouldn’t have been idle, so at the very least, they had a rough idea of what to expect. The balance of power between nations hadn’t shifted dramatically while we were inside the Tower of Ordeal. Well, I had heard that Korea enjoyed a relatively easy time diplomatically because of me. Regardless, that wasn’t an important point. Just because it was my homeland didn’t mean I planned to give it any special consideration. It wasn’t a matter of fairness, exactly. Rather, what I was about to say wasn’t something that could be selectively applied in the first place.
It is closer to a rule that simply has to be upheld.
Truth be told, the climbers had arranged a meeting after conquering the tower. I had beseeched everyone to speak freely, and as expected, a wide variety of opinions had surfaced. Some had naturally suggested that the climbers who had suffered for Earth’s sake should be granted certain conveniences or privileges. That had been immediately followed up with a common-sense counterargument—yes, the climbers had endured a lot, but for the most part, I had conquered the tower. Though they had used my achievements as the core of that argument, their reasoning aligned closely with my own thinking, lending it weight.
The climbers did suffer, but...