Ayase was family, but she was also a girl, and we were the same age. I
felt bad enough that she had to worry about how to act around me at home.
Trying to maintain the right distance in public would just make it harder
on both of us.
I wanted to cherish my time alone, and so did she. Keeping that up
would be key to maintaining a good relationship in the future.
"Which do you like better, cryptocurrency or becoming a YouTuber?"
"Forget both for now."
Maru and I were lazily waiting for morning homeroom to begin. As
soon as he arrived, I'd hit him with a choice, and he'd ruthlessly rejected
both options in less than a second.
"I'm impressed by how quickly you make decisions," I said. "I guess
that's why you're the regular catcher."
"Anyone would say the same thing. What's gotten into you all of a
sudden?"
"I'm looking for a way to make money quickly and efficiently."
I chose my words carefully. I couldn't break my promise with Ayase
and tell him about our conversation, so this was as much as I could say.
Naturally, he wasn't satisfied and eyed me suspiciously.
"Asamura…don't tell me some scam artist is trying to rip you off or
something."
I wanted to joke that Ayase was filling me up (with delicious
breakfast), not ripping me off, but I held it in. I was a man of my word.
"I haven't turned to crime or anything," I said, "but it's hard to find
stability these days, even if you start working for a big company. And a
career as a public servant sounds pretty hard. It can't hurt to start building
a savings account, right?"
"That sounds like a decent life plan."
"For starters, I'd like to take paid dating off my list."
"I'm surprised it was there in the first place, but… Hmm." I could see a
glint of suspicion from behind Maru's glasses. "You asked me about Saki
Ayase yesterday, and now you're looking for a shady part-time job. Don't
tell me you're—"
"N-no, I'm not."
I was quick to deny what he was about to say. I knew he'd only be
more suspicious, since I hadn't even let him finish, but I couldn't help it.
He swallowed and stared into my eyes as I waited for him to say something. He carefully searched my expression, then dived straight to the
point.
"Forget it, Asamura. You can try to sell your body, but you won't find
any customers. Just take a look in the mirror."
"…Haah."
I sighed in relief. The energy drained from me so quickly that I
couldn't even bring myself to object to Maru's insult.
Thanks, Maru, for being weirdly dense.
"You just thought something rude about me, didn't you?" he said.
"No, I didn't," I lied casually.
It wasn't really a lie anyway. I wasn't being rude—only silently
thanking him.
As it turned out, stereotypes were a force to be reckoned with. Behind
his glasses, my best friend was the regular catcher for our school's
baseball team and a terrific student with excellent insight and powers of
observation. Yet even he couldn't bring himself to associate Ayase with
the words younger sister.
The image people had of her was that of a bad girl suspected of dating
for money, not a sister; this was simply more proof of how hard it was for
people to combine those conflicting ideas.
"Anyway," Maru said, sticking out his index finger like a wife telling
her husband what was what, "for starters, you're underestimating the
world if you think you can make quick, easy money as a YouTuber or with
cryptocurrency."
"Y-you think?"
"Yeah, you are. Successful people are serious about what they do and
spend more time at it than you can imagine. It's like baseball. You aren't
going to hit a home run merely by swinging the bat and hoping you'll get
lucky."
"Oh, I see. When you put it that way, it makes sense."
Maru had sunk a lot of time into baseball, and that made his argument
especially convincing. But while I could see his point, I sensed a shadow
of contradiction in his words.
"Though, you know," I said, "some people only start making decent
money after a decade of work, while others make a huge fortune in a year.
I wonder what the difference is. I can't believe it's only a matter of how
much time they put into it."
"I don't know. It isn't like I'm making money myself. Maybe there's a trick to doing things right."
"A trick, huh…?"
"Maybe it's about attitude. My folks are into history, and they raised
me talking about stuff like the Warring States period and Romance of the
Three Kingdoms, so I have all this knowledge about battle tactics…"
"Yeah. You do remind me of Zhuge Liang sometimes."
You start to get a sense of how a person talks when you've been
chatting with him for more than a year, and Tomokazu Maru was quite the
strategist.
At the previous year's Sports Day, he'd collected information on the
other classes from who knows where and passed it on to the people
competing in our class. As a result, we did great in most of the events.
Maybe it was those qualities that had helped score Maru his position on
the baseball team.
"I don't know if I'd go that far…," he said, "but I guess the basic
concepts of war got imprinted in my brain."
"What concepts are those?"
"Information and knowledge are the greatest weapons you can have."
"Like 'know your enemy, know yourself, and you shall not fear a
hundred battles'?"
"Exactly. The number of enemy soldiers, the locations of their bases,
the number of weapons they have, what their plans are—information like
that is crucial. And there's no way a guy with a stone ax could ever defeat
an enemy with the technology to shoot at long range from unmanned
aircraft."
"Okay, so if we apply those concepts to making money…what are we
lacking? Knowledge?"
"I think so. I bet you'd have a lot more success if you understood the
mechanisms of society and how people do business—not that I do or
anything."
Maru sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but he adopted
a devil-may-care attitude in the end. I supposed it was a show of his
sincerity to avoid sounding sure when he wasn't, even when he was just
giving advice to a friend.
But I felt what he was saying was right. I knew my best friend was a
guy I could depend on. I mentally noted down the approaches he'd
suggested.