When I got home, Erza was waiting at the door.
“Welcome back, Ryota,” she greeted me.
“Thanks. Why the long face?”
“Well, my boss was here just now.”
“Your boss? Oh, the owner of the Swallow’s Returned Favor?” I asked, and she nodded back. “You said ‘was.’ Does that mean he left?”
“Yes. The situation was changing so rapidly that he couldn’t sit idly by.”
I went inside to the salon to settle down for a bit. Erza came with me, so I asked her, “What situation?”
“First, my boss came to ask if you were really going to Tetramine. If the answer was yes, he was going to try to convince you otherwise.”
“Why convince... Oh, because I’m a major customer?”
“Yes. If your whole Family left, we would be running at a deficit.”
“What?! We make that much of a difference?”
“He said our profits would be outright gone.”
“Wow... Okay, no wonder he came.”
We went into the salon and sat down.
This was all so big that it didn’t feel like it was about me.
“But he went home?” I confirmed. “Without trying to convince me?”
“Yes. Apparently, other drop buyers are already making plans to open shops in Tetramine. He worried that he’d be outmaneuvered.”
“Outmaneuvered... I mean, even if I moved, I’m not about to stop doing business with the Swallow’s Returned Favor.” Not as long as I had Erza, anyway.
She was on a temporary assignment here from her employer, the Swallow’s Returned Favor. But when you live with someone and share meals with them, you tend to start caring about them. She nominally worked for someone else, but to me, we were like coworkers.
“Thank you very much,” Erza replied, looking down and blushing a little. Based on how she acted, I thought she felt the same way. As long as she was here, I was going to limit my business to her employer. “But that’s not the problem,” she added.
“Oh?”
“My boss said, ‘Damn them! Sato’s sure to revitalize Tetramine, so we need to stake our place right now!’”
“You mean...”
“Yes. They believe that you will succeed if you try. I happen to think they’re right.”
“Huh? Why’s that?”
“People consider you a master of breathing new life into things. Indole, Methylene, Fylline... You have quite the success streak.”
“Do people really talk about me like that? How many nicknames do I have by now?” It seemed like they were really piling up lately.
“That’s why my boss rushed to Tetramine.”
“That makes sense.”
“I don’t think that’ll work, either,” a different voice suddenly piped up.
“Whoa!” I jumped from surprise. When I turned to them, Ina was there─Emily had brought her in.
She was Erza’s best friend and coworker. Once upon a time, she had made a request for me to procure specialty watermelons for her family’s greengrocer.
Ina smiled happily at my reaction.
“What does that mean, Ina?” Erza asked her.
“He already left, but we just got new intel. A certain someone has already started buying up all of the land in Tetramine; that means all of the drop buyers are too late.”
“Wh-Who could do something like that?”
“I bet Ryota has an idea,” Ina said, turning to me.
“Me?” I racked my brain.
To carry out a land grab like that, you’d need to be well-connected, quick to work, and have a certain level of conviction─
“Oh!” I gasped. “You mean Neptune?”
“The very same.”
He moves way too fast. Good grief.
“I’m impressed. Ryota just says that he’ll go somewhere, and it spurs so many people into action,” Erza complimented me.
“Yep. Who knows how many hundreds of millions of piros have been spent on that alone?” Ina agreed.
I get it, but I don’t really like it.