Chapter 98: Hiring The Dealer

Ogata looked at the young man and repressed a smile.

’Finally… somebody understands.’ He thought, however it seemed that this Koya wasn’t aware of the way that they did things around here.

There was a code to it and without following the code, he couldn’t divulge anything… after all, the Academy had cameras in the Library to prevent the theft of property, and a man in Ogata’s position had survived years by respecting that fact at all times.

“Or should I say… De-al-er?” Koya mouthed out slowly, making sure each syllable was clear.

Ogata nearly stuttered.

The kid had perfectly angled his face away from the nearest camera so that his lips wouldn’t be read, a detail that most adults didn’t think to account for on the first visit… He was the real deal.

“I understand sir, what would you like?” Ogata asked with a small bow. “Even if you are from Class 5, I am still below you.”

“I’d like a book on drone building.” Koya said and Ogata nodded, scanning the nearby shelf quickly until he found one with a thick spine that would take a while to browse through.

“Please let me lead you to a personally recommended place to read.” Ogata directed him to a table at the far end of the Library and Koya sat down. “Would you mind if I joined you?”

“Please feel free to.” Koya said.

Ogata sat across from him. The seat he had chosen was a deliberate one which was a bit distant from the shelves and sparse enough that the overhead camera coverage didn’t reach it, it was positioned directly opposite the receptionist’s desk which made a second camera redundant in the administration’s eyes.

The receptionist herself was already watching them from behind her terminal. She was his trainee and had been for two years which made the library a perfect place to conduct business, for exactly that reason.

He tapped once under the table and the noise-suppressing stone embedded in the underside activated without a sound. Their conversation was now between them.

“Since you know about my line of work and even my secret name.” Ogata said lightly, just loud enough for Koya to hear. “I take it that you know who exactly I am?”

Koya cracked open the drone book and set it between them like they were consulting a reference text.

He was calm… not the performed calm of someone trying to look unafraid but he was calm like someone who had done this before.

Alongside his natural composure, Calm Mind was running quietly in the background.

’I can’t be underestimated here.’ He had learned that much from his meeting with the gold merchant… Composure was currency in rooms like this.

“Who doesn’t know you?” Koya said with an easy smile. “You’re the Dealer. Your name precedes you, honestly.”

A little flattery never hurt and Ogata was clearly a man who had gone too long without being properly appreciated.

“A senior that graduated from the Academy told me about you and said you hacked into the Academy database to change up the marks, pushing students above the cut-off. Considering ALI has one of the most secure databases amongst all the Supercities and that Tech Tube himself is usually plugged directly into it, doing it without being found out even once is honestly impressive. One could say you outsmarted him every single time.”

Tech Tube was a Blue-liner on the teaching staff for the upper classes, an Awakened who could interface directly with any piece of technology and assume full control of it.

The Academy kept him plugged into the database as a living security measure and for Ogata to have slipped past him on multiple occasions without triggering a single flag was the kind of thing that should have made him a legend.

’Honestly one of the most wasted characters in the whole manga.’ Koya thought.

A man who could outsmart a Blue-liner plugged into the most secure database in any Supercity, operating over years without being caught, and the Author had him walk off campus after a while and never appear again.

Disappointing didn’t cover it.

“You have not only done that but much more… including the one where you accessed ALI’s internal monster threat assessments and sold them to trade guilds and merchant consortiums before the Academy made anything public. Half a dozen supply routes got rerouted based on your information and not a single buyer ever traced it back here.” Koya said. “You’re well aware that the Academy is still looking for whoever did that.”

Ogata laughed. He genuinely liked this kid… he knew how to read a room and he knew how to make a man feel like his work had been properly seen.

“Not like they will ever find me. I’m called the Dealer for a reason.” He leaned back slightly. “Now, tell me about your job. And please… I don’t want it to be something low-tier. Breaking into the System to bump mid-term scores up a few points is too easy these days, It bores me.”

Koya chuckled.

“Fortunately for me, I had a better idea in mind.” Koya said.

He was opening up because Ogata had a policy that everyone who knew about him also knew… he would never give up a client’s identity as long as he lived.

You could know the job but you could never know who had commissioned it. “I received a leak of the mid-term questions and I—”

“Ah.” Ogata clapped once like a man whose brain had just been jolted by something pleasant. “So let me guess. You want an incognito site where you can post the questions in tiers for desperate students to buy. You don’t want it traced back to your account so you’ll need an encrypted address… the IP passes through several dummy accounts before it reaches yours, and the site itself needs to be invisible enough that even if the administration finds it they can’t pull a thread back to you.”

Koya blinked.

“…Uh.”

“No, I wasn’t downplaying your plan.” Ogata said, reading the expression correctly. “I think it’s an excellent idea. I’ve honestly been waiting for a student to try it.”

He folded his hands on the table. “The only question is how sure are you that your ’leaked’ questions are real?”

“Sure enough.” Koya said which was not the same as certain, and Ogata heard the difference immediately.

“Are you sure?” Ogata grinned. “Because I can hack into the database right now and pull the actual papers fresh for you. If you release the correct questions from the start your buyers trust the brand completely… which means when you want to scam them later, they’ll be far more willing to pay.”

Koya went still for half a second.

’He figured it out that quickly.’ The plan didn’t end at mid-terms.

It had never ended at mid-terms… Once the first papers matched and the trust was established, he would release false questions for the actual exams at inflated prices and clean up a second time on the panic buying alone.

Ogata had read the whole shape of it from a single sentence.

’If anyone gets expelled from the fallout they didn’t deserve to be in ALI to begin with.’ Koya thought without particular guilt.

“What a smart kid.” Ogata said, and placed both hands flat on the table with a wider grin. “Retrieving the real mid-term questions, building the site, running the anonymity layer so nothing traces back, the display, the file uploads, the series of dummy IP accounts as a buffer… it’s a significant piece of work. Costly to put together properly.” He paused. “But since you’re a first-time customer, I’ll give you a 10% discount.”

It wasn’t generosity. It was an investment… Ogata could already see that the exam phase was coming and when it did, Koya would need the site tweaked and expanded.

Securing a customer who could clearly pay was worth more than squeezing a first job.

“So will you be paying in cash or Individual Points?” Ogata asked.

“Wait… you actually take cash?” Koya’s eyes moved with genuine surprise.

“Of course. Jobs from outside the Academy come in Crowns. Jobs from students usually come in IP because most of them don’t have real currency to speak of.” Ogata said. “I’ll also tell you something the Academy hasn’t gotten around to informing your year group yet… IP converts to Crowns. So it doesn’t make much difference to me either way. What are you paying in?”

“Cash then.” Koya let out a quiet breath.

He had spent an hour the previous night letting the System try to walk him through the technical side of building the infrastructure himself… the animation had lasted ten minutes and somewhere around the part with the designing… his eyes had glazed over completely.

Hiring the right person was always going to be the smarter call. “How much?”

“Three million Crowns upfront.” Ogata said, settling back. “You’ll pay it up flat, there are no installments or monthly arrangements, nothing like that. If you have the three million right now, we have a deal. If you don’t, come back when you do.”

“I have it right now.” Koya said.

Ogata’s expression didn’t move however on the inside, he shook.

A first year… Class 5 student for that matter, sitting across from him with three million Crowns available on the spot and saying it the way someone said they had exact change for a vending machine? Did he know what 3 mil was?

’Who are these Class 5 kids? Are they all millionaires?’ He thought.

“Send it here.” Ogata pulled up a link on a separate interface… not the standard banking app and slid his phone across the table slightly so Koya could scan the account.

Koya loaded his regular phone, connected through the hotspot on his ALI device to bypass the campus network restrictions.

The banking app opened faster than it did back at Star Mansion and he scanned the account and transferred three million Crowns in a single motion.

Ogata’s phone pinged… He checked it, double checked it, and gave a short nod to Koya.

’It’s still unreal every time I see that number.’ Koya thought.

Having more than a million Crowns in an account was something he still hadn’t fully adjusted to and watching three million leave it in a single transaction was a different sensation entirely.

“I’ve received it.” Ogata said. “Very good, Amagi-dono… Let us exchange contacts. I’ll send you the first look at the project tonight.”

Koya nodded and stood, closing the drone book and leaving it on the table.

He deactivated Calm Mind as he walked out of the Library and through the main corridor.

That was a tense matter however he was happy that he had gotten the best of the best to deal with it and given that in the manga, the rate at which Individual Points could be turned into crowns was 1 IP = 5 Crowns.

This was why it wasn’t revealed yet… their allowances were about 300k in regular currency which was a lot honestly and students in Class 5 and even Class 4 would spend their allowances much more once learning their worth.

“So Koya-kun, can you tell me what you were doing in the Library as well…?”

He glanced up and a bat was hanging upside down from the corridor ceiling above him with a heart-shaped tail dangling while it watched him with its little head tilted to one side.

“Did you come to research? If so why were you talking with that guy?”

He sighed.

Mirei dropped from the ceiling and landed on his shoulder in a single smooth motion, folding her wings back. He wasn’t sure Victoria would approve of this arrangement at all.

’I wonder how she’s doing.’ The Vampire had not taken the news of being left behind at Star Mansion well.

When Hakai had told her she wasn’t permitted to come to ALI, Victoria had very nearly brought the whole mansion down around them then Hakai had leaned in and whispered something into her ear that Koya hadn’t caught.

Victoria had gone still immediately and she had agreed, reluctantly…

’She’s a Yandere but I genuinely can never tell what’s going on in Tori’s mind half the time.’

“Are you… thinking about another woman?” Mirei’s eyes narrowed on his shoulder. “You have a succubus that is very interested in you and you’re here thinking about other women.”

“Shoo shoo.” He waved her off his shoulder and she took to the air with an indignant flap, but she didn’t leave… she just moved behind him and followed at a short distance as he walked.

“Anyway.” She said, from somewhere just above his left ear. “I have researched what the meaning of dating is and why would you even suggest such a horrendous thing?”

She landed back on his shoulder without asking. “Being in love? That’s such a childish thing to say. In a world that is governed by power, aren’t you the dumb one for believing that love exists?”

“I actually think it depends on the situation.” He said.

Victoria loved him in a way that was unconditional in its own specific and slightly terrifying shape… though a cynical reading of her behavior also produced a coherent picture of strategic attachment.

The seal she had placed on his heart that would detonate if she died could be her ensuring his blood couldn’t be given to anyone else.

The arrangement where her own death would follow his immediately could be because she had decided she couldn’t survive without his blood.

Unconditional love and calculated self-interest looked identical from the outside in her case and he had long since stopped trying to determine which one it actually was though he was very sure it was affection.

With the others though… it was his fault, he had asked for a realistic world, after all.

Nobody in their right mind walked away from a political position that favored them to come down to his level… The heroines had their own obligations to the Great Clans they belonged to, their own expectations and their own futures that had been planned long before he arrived.

Everyone including Ichinose was using him in some shape or the other.

He had run a background check. She didn’t have a sister. It was almost funny… the exact same lie he had once told Saeko before he killed her had been turned around and used on him. He still wasn’t certain she had taken the Hereto Dagger but the probability was not low.

The “love” that existed in the pages of light novels was a comfortable fiction… People did what they did for gain, that was the realistic world he had asked for and he had no particular complaint about it.

“Whatever.” Mirei said, apparently finished waiting for him to arrive at a more reasonable conclusion. “I have decided that I want you to become my pet.”

She said it with confidence.

“What’s so bad about it? Forget the rest of these women… a Succubus is the best woman to have sex with. My womb and insides are all yours to control, you just have to surrender your mind and body to pleasuring me, and maybe if you do a good enough job I won’t replace you.”

Koya stifled a laugh.

“Is that your idea of Paradise…?” He had reached the front doors of the ALI main building.

He pushed through them into the evening air and paused to look at her. “Maybe if I was the kind of person willing to degrade myself, I would have accepted your offer. But you can keep it.”

He walked off and the Succubus didn’t follow this time. She stayed at the threshold and watched his back until it disappeared toward the student complex with her wings folded and her facial expression genuinely puzzled for once in her existence.

’What did I do wrong?’ She thought. ’Is there something else he wants?’

She had offered him everything a Succubus could offer… Total physical devotion, exclusive access and the highest standard of pleasure available to any living creature.

That was supposed to be the part where the target crumbled.

For the first time in her Succubus life, Mirei was not being tactical or performing confusion as a tool… She was actually, genuinely confused.

…

“I’m home.” Koya knocked on the apartment door at the top of the Class 5 student complex and pushed it open, hanging his uniform coat on the rack by the entrance.

Neither Hakai nor Disguise Master appeared in the hallway to greet him and from the kitchen came the sound of something being cooked as well as the scent of something good.

“Koya-kun!” Hakai called. “You can put your dirty laundry into the basket in the bathroom, I’ll handle it. Wash up after that and wait a little bit… I’ll have dinner done in a minute.”

Koya nodded to nobody in particular and headed to the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him.

Every surface in the small room was so clean that the surface was practically sparkling.

He pulled off his uniform shirt, peeled off the singlet underneath and stuffed his trousers into the empty laundry basket before stepping out of the rest of his clothes before lowering himself into the tub.

The water was already hot.

“Haah~ This is so relaxing~” He let out a long breath and let his entire body go slack, skills switching off one by one as the heat worked into his joints.

The bath was the one place in ALI where he genuinely let his guard down… which was, as it turned out, a mistake.

A face surfaced slowly between his legs from beneath the water.

“Is it just me,” Mirei said, in her bat form, blinking up at him from the surface with an expression of mild interest. “or are Class 5’s facilities clearly lacking?”

Koya’s expression went from perfectly relaxed to horrified in an instant.

The next sound that Disguise Master and Misora heard from down the hall was a horrified shout.

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