“And you’re the envoy from Isekai?” Ioha looked at a woman in her forties, with long blonde hair and grey eyes that belied her Japanese origins. She wore as close to a business suit as was possible in this world.

  “I am,” she answered. Her voice was pleasant, if a little sharp.

  “This might sound rude, but do you have any credentials backing your claim up?” Ioha’s patience wore thin while they were forced to wait for over half an hour within speaking distance of her while she did pretty much nothing but flex her air of power.

  She gave him an appraising look. “You’re not really a teenager, are you?”

  “Never said I was. Going on twenty-eight.”

  “Education?”

  Ioha sighed. This wasn’t an interrogation. She was just assessing whether he could discern if what she chose to produce as evidence was true or not. Whatever happened next, he’d made absolutely certain she was not part of it. “Industrial processes. I have an MA in product development.” He met her eyes. “Let’s just say I picked the right parents as well.”

  “How so?”

  “Welander and associates.” The company was one on the rise. She wouldn’t recognise it.

  “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with local Swedish business.”

  He sighed again. She probably was the envoy, but she was awful at negotiation. Only a first class idiot started off with insulting the other party. “I just said I’m familiar with the business side of production as well.” He turned. “Meneki, you win. I’ll keep Isekai out of the trade.” The last he said in the federation language. His conversation before that had been in English.

  “Wait, I didn’t…”

  Ioha switched back to English. “I don’t give a damn about what you do or not. If you can’t keep civil, you’re no business partner of mine.”

  “Look I represent…”

  “I said we’re done. If you were any competent, you’d ask about the ‘associates’ part of my parents’ company. I don’t really need you, or anyone else in Isekai for trade.”

  Her face coloured with irritation and anger. “Do you understand what…”

  “I understand that if you piss the Isjase conglomerate off, you’re out of a job. Your call.” It was time to get some proper use out of the business associates he made in Sweden before he moved here permanently.

  She turned white in an instant.

  Isjase, or the Isekai Japan Sweden conglomerate, exploded into action after they set up headquarters in Isekai. The last time Ioha visited the town, they had grown from five to two hundred employees in a couple of months. The mass murderer Yoshida Akira was no longer the richest outworlder this side of the gate. Ioha’s business partners poured over ten billion euros into their Isekai business in a year. They had two thousand employees Earth side and another three hundred in transit to Isekai. In a town of at most sixty odd thousand inhabitants, that was a monster.

  “Meneki, shall we?” Ioha rose.

  They left behind an ashen woman at her table. From Meneki’s looks, Ioha read that the military man hadn’t understood the discussion, but still realised how the child warrior had thoroughly broken someone in power. Ioha now had less than an hour to establish a power-base. He was in too much of a hurry to let go of an opportunity to display raw power. The wagons with their loot already passed through the gates, and he owed Rede the best possible price. It was the reason he travelled to Remerrin rather than back to Isekai.

  “Did you have to do that?” Harvali asked when he joined them.

  “Yes. I just made it clear I’m not an Isekai puppet.”

  Harvali shrugged. Spending too much time apart from nobility must have rubbed off. These days he almost behaved like a normal human. Give him another half a year and he might actually become one. “What’s the benefit?”

  “Money,” Ioha answered. “Someone who doesn’t side with the southern side of the mountains can charge more.”

  “Saint Questingtank, I hope you are aware the Remerrin kingdom has excellent relations with Isekai,” Meneki said.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Ioha laughed. “Nice try. We’re just not raiding you every second year. That’s not good relations.” He zigzagged between tables until he reached the Calmen trading delegation. They might represent a poor kingdom, but they still controlled the largest locally known copper deposits. Ioha planned a real trade.

  “Gentlemen,” he said and sat down. Harvali and Meneki stood on both sides behind his back. Another display of power.

  The three men at the table shot him a glance until he had taken a seat at their table. Then they glared. “This is our table,” one of them said. His voice was laced with heavy accent. The federation tongue definitely wasn’t one he was used to.

  “I have a business proposal for you. Meneki, Lord of the river, has offered to translate for me.” Why slug the other party with your fist when you had a sledgehammer available?

  Meneki translated from his standing position. This was Ioha telling them he was your average merchant with a duke as his manservant.

  “Sir Terendala will answer any legal questions.” And the firstborn son of one of the federation literal powerhouses as bodyguard.

  Meneki translated once more.

  Ioha loved when the other party leaned over the table and searched for his eyes.

  “What’s your deal?” the heavyset man who first tried to shoo him away asked through Meneki.

  “I am Ioha Questingtank, Protector Saint of Heimdall,” Ioha began and waved a hand in the direction of Meneki behind him, “something I believe the Lord of the river will be happy to confirm.”

  The three men all bowed over the table. “I am honoured. Impressed even, but I can’t see a business here.”

  Oh, you will. Ioha smiled. “I have just returned from an extermination raid, a rather large one. We prevented a breakout.”

  “I see.” An expression of interest mixed with greed slowly grew on the man from the Calmen kingdom.

  “It was a considerable breakout. We have several wagons with material in storage here. I have heard you are interested in magic lanterns.”

  “How many?”

  Hook, line and sinker. “How many would you be interested to trade for?” The sentient monsters sometimes carried items of magic. Those items might not always come with earth-shattering capabilities, but they were always magic items that defied the laws of this world. In this specific case, they were magic lanterns that never went out, no matter how manhandled they were. They also never put anything on fire. In short, a godsend for people who relied on mining for a living.

  “As many as I have fingers and toes would be nice,” the man said and offered Ioha a condescending smile. Twenty lanterns meant hundreds of C-rank monsters killed, which in turn represented a sizeable breakout level event.

  With a deliberately lazy grin, Ioha met his counterpart’s eyes. “That is quite a lot of lanterns. I believe we could make a deal.” He smacked his lips in pretend disappointment. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could sell the rest of them?”

  If stunned silence could be measured in gold coins, Ioha would have been a wealthy man. He let his grin linger on his lips and waited for the other man to react.

  “That’s impossible! The capital would be in an uproar if that was true.”

  “Now, my dear friend. Let us think this through. Behind me, I have the Lord of the river and the firstborn son of the Terendala house as my support. If my claims were false, do you believe I would receive their help here?”

  It was pure joy, looking at the man’s eyes flicker between the figures behind Ioha’s back. “So what you are saying…” He let the sentence peter out.

  “What I am saying is that you might want to close this deal before the entire capital is ablaze with rumours.” From here on, they were talking about the price. Ioha felt it in his bones. He made his best not to show that he was in just as much of a hurry as the Calmen delegation had just become.

  “How much? We don’t carry that much gold with us, so we will need another way to pay.”

  “I don’t want any gold. I want one year when you sell this much copper at this much loss.” Ioha slipped a piece of paper across the table.

  The merchant looked at the paper and blanched. “That’s absurd!”

  “I think not. In fact, it’s a good price for thirty-seven lanterns.” It was. Per lantern at least, but three dozen of them would normally bomb the market unless you ran a national mining industry and were desperate for safe lighting.

  The conversation died for a moment. Across the table, three men frantically shared their thoughts and worries in a language Ioha didn’t understand, and Meneki had no time to translate any longer. Ioha waited for them to finish.

  They seemed to come to an understanding, and their spokesperson once again turned his attention to Ioha. “I believe we could export more copper than that.”

  Oh? They want to buy scales and hides and stuff as well? “That could be arranged. What did you have in mind?” More business was better than less, but Ioha had a limit he needed to respect as well. If the local merchants didn’t get to buy their fair share, he’d burn Isekai’s reputation more or less permanently, and he couldn’t afford that. Trade, one way or another, was the lifeblood of his associates. Their plans involved more half-and-half contracts than Isekai had ever seen before. According to his latest report, Isjase was hiring close to a thousand construction workers and craftsmen Earth side. They planned to build housing for an insane twenty thousand people in just about no time at all, and recruitment of similar abilities this side of the gate was already in full swing.

  Negotiations proceeded at a brisk pace, and when they were finished, Ioha had sold almost a quarter of his wares to the Calmen kingdom. A lot of people would get angry, but the sheer amount of material he brought into the capital should more than make up for that.

  He walked from table to table and managed to offload another quarter before shit hit the proverbial fan and the capital descended into chaos.