To Be a Power in the Shadows! (LN) - Volume 5 - Chapter 3.03

Part 3

School is canceled for the day, so I head back to my dorm and immediately get accosted by Skel and Po.

“Dang, that was messed up,” Skel says. “I can’t believe the head librarian got whacked like that.”

“Right?” agrees Po. “The you-know-which organization might actually have been behind it.”

“Feels like this just got real serious all of a sudden.”

“Yeah, everyone’s freaking out.”

The two of them are drinking top-shelf Mitsugoshi coffee and lounging about like they own the place.

They don’t, though. It’s my room.

“Shouldn’t you two be doing your extra assignments?” I say, putting more weight in my voice to make the subtext clear: GTFO, guys.

“I’ll just do it later,” Skel replies. “Now that we’ve got the day off, I’ve got loads of time.”

“Yeah, same,” Po adds. “If we get so hung up on homework that we let all the little joys of life pass us by, then what are we even living for?”

The two of them loudly slurp their coffee.

“Sure, but none of that explains what you’re doing in my room.”

“’Cause this is where the high-end Mitsugoshi coffee is, duh,” says Skel.

Without so much as asking permission, Po fishes through my drawer and tears into a package of chocolate. “And you’ve got high-end Mitsugoshi sweets, too.”

“Dude, those are mine.”

“It’s fine,” Po assures me. “We’re all friends here.”

“And if we’re being honest,” Skel adds, “there’s no way you get enough allowance to be able to afford this stuff.”

“We’ve thought it was weird for a while now.”

The two of them get dead serious out of nowhere, and they turn to look back at me.

“I—I, uh…”

They’ve got me dead to rights.

A single cup of high-end Mitsugoshi coffee will run you north of two thousand zeni. It doesn’t make sense for a broke-ass aristocrat like me to constantly have it stocked in my room.

That said, it’s not my fault Gamma keeps sending me cases of the stuff.

“Fess up, Cid,” says Skel. “You’ve been buying on credit, haven’t you?”

“Huh?”

“If you have, you gotta tell us, man,” Po urges.

“No, wait, back up a minute. What’s this about buying on credit?”

“Dude, we found flyers for it all over your room.” Skel shows me one. “‘Mitsugoshi Bank’s Hot New Service, Mitsugoshi Installment Payments.’ If you knew about this awesome new way to borrow money, why didn’t you tell us?”

“M-Mitsugoshi Installment Payments?”

With a sinking feeling in my gut, I read over the flyer and discover that it’s advertising a payment plan that would’ve looked right at home back in my old world. Now that I think about it, I guess I did explain to Gamma how payment plans worked, huh?

“D-don’t tell me you guys went and borrowed money, did you?”

“Of course we did,” Po replies. “They lent me two million zeni, no questions asked.”

“And I borrowed a cool mil,” Skel says. “Now all I gotta do is make the fixed monthly payments of twenty thousand zeni apiece. How sweet is that?!”

“Oh boy…”

They’re doomed.

“What’s up, Cid?” Po asks. “You’ve got that face like you just realized something.”

“What’s the interest rate on those plans?”

“Two percent a month, I think?” replies Skel.

“Yeah, twenty-four percent a year. That’s dirt cheap, compared to other lenders in the capital.”

I stare vacantly into space.

“Let me get this straight,” I tell them. “You borrowed a million zeni at a twenty-four percent annual rate with twenty thousand–zeni monthly payments, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Have you guys done the math on how long that’ll take you to pay off?”

If they’ve got a 24 percent rate on a million zeni, then their annual interest sums up to two hundred forty thousand zeni.

If their monthly payments are twenty thousand zeni, then their annual payments sum up to two hundred forty thousand zeni.

Two hundred forty thousand zeni in interest, two hundred forty thousand zeni in payments.

In other words, all they’re doing is covering the interest, and they’re never gonna stop having to make payments for the rest of their lives.

“I dunno, like, five years?” Po says.

“Why would I bother calculating that stuff? All I gotta do is make my monthly twenty-K payments,” adds Skel.

“The fact they don’t make you do all that math is how you know Mitsugoshi is running an honest shop.”

“…I think you guys might wanna consider bumping up the size of your payments.”

“What are you talking about, dude? If Mitsugoshi’s fine with us just paying twenty K, why would we go out of our way to give them more money?”

Po agrees with Skel. “Yeah, you’re talking nonsense. I’ve heard of students who borrowed as much as ten million zeni from them. They’ll lend money to anyone, from aristocrats on down to students. As long as your family’s got property, you’re golden.”

I stare up at the ceiling.

“Now,” Po announces, “let’s get this party started.”

“We just borrowed a bunch of money, and you know what that means,” Skel says.

The two of them produce a deck of cards.

“Really? More poker?”

“What, too chicken?” Skel teases.

“If you thought we’d let you quit while you were ahead, think again,” Po tells me. “Now we’ve got full war chests.”

“Nah…”

I let out a big sigh. Then I slam a pile of bills on the table.

“…Let’s go double or nothing.”