Managing Director Endo stood quietly to the side. Only when the sound of Keigo's footsteps had faded completely into the corridor did he finally let out a quiet breath of relief.
He turned and looked at Satsuki in the primary seat.
She was leaning against the back of her chair. The mental strain of the last deduction had clearly taken a heavy toll on her feverish body.
Her complexion was even paler than before, and cold sweat on her forehead had caused a few strands of hair to stick to her cheeks. Her eyes were closed, and the rise and fall of her chest was noticeably faster.
"Eldest Miss," Endo said, his tone full of concern. He walked quickly to the side table and picked up the glass of warm water he had poured. "Your temperature still hasn't come down. Let me handle the rest for now. You need to go back to your room and lie down."
"Leave it there."
Satsuki didn't open her eyes. She uttered the words softly. Though her voice was hoarse, it carried an unquestionable coldness.
Endo's hand froze in mid-air. Knowing her temperament, he understood that she only acted like a willful young lady at times like this. Helpless, he set the glass back onto the rosewood table.
"Building the political springboard is only the first step of this game," Satsuki said.
She opened her eyes slowly. Bloodshot veins threaded through the black and white, but her gaze was still sharp.
She reached out with her trembling right hand, picked up the warm water, tilted her head back, and drained the glass in one motion.
The world had already changed significantly because of her arrival. The timing of the war's outbreak was very likely to differ from her memories of her previous life.
In other words, war could break out at any moment. Now, not a single second could be wasted.
Satsuki set down the glass and looked directly at Endo. "Contact Frank."
Endo didn't argue further. He turned to the console, picked up the red encrypted phone, and quickly dialed the transoceanic line.
The dial tone echoed through the strategy room as they waited for the connection.
Satsuki leaned back into the leather swivel chair.
The Middle Eastern powder keg had entered its countdown. Next, Frank needed to use every dollar of liquidity in the offshore capital pool, apply high leverage, and go to the open markets of the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to sweep up three-month forward call options for WTI crude oil with a full position.
To evade the look-through scrutiny of US regulators on cross-border funds, no public market buy orders would appear under S.A. Investment. The US dollar principal would be injected entirely into Salomon Brothers' internal dark pool via an Offshore SPV Matrix. The crude oil long positions would be legally disguised as broker-dealer proprietary trading by domestic US oligarchs.
Meanwhile, at the execution level, to avoid the risk thresholds of quantitative giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Frank's quantitative team would use the order-splitting model previously verified during the Nikkei options campaign.
Electronic buy orders would be shredded by the servers into micro-lots of two or three contracts. Those fragmented orders would be scattered through hundreds of proxy brokers worldwide, blending into the daily trading noise of retail investors.
Oligarch cover bought through kickbacks, combined with Wall Street's top quantitative order-splitting models.
This was a seamless transnational harvest… was it?
No, I have to hurry…
She parted her dry lips, ready to issue instructions the moment the call connected.
At that instant, a violent wave of dizziness swept through her brain without warning.
Large black blotches surged at the edges of her retina. Beyond the blast-proof glass, the server matrix that occupied an entire wall began to twist and stretch in her vision, its flashing green fluorescence smearing into chaotic streaks of light.
The muscles in her torso lost tension all at once.
Unable to support herself, she fell back hard into the leather swivel chair, her eyes snapping shut involuntarily.
"Eldest Miss?" Endo sensed something was wrong behind him and whipped his head around, still holding the receiver.
Satsuki raised her left hand and made a small downward pressing gesture.
Endo froze, swallowing the exclamation on his lips. His hand tightened around the receiver, which was still ringing with a dial tone.
In the darkness, without the flicker of market data on her retinas or the harsh screen glare, only the low hum of the exhaust fans remained, along with the monotonous dial tone from the encrypted phone in Endo's hand.
"Beep— Beep—"
The rhythmic electronic sound gradually synced with her heartbeat, which was erratic from the fever, in the quiet room.
Attack, attack, and attack again.
That was the principle she had followed since being reborn into this world.
But now, the extreme physiological discomfort had forcibly cut off her thoughts, which had been spinning along an offensive inertia. In these few seconds without external input, her one-way deduction, strained to its limit, came to a temporary standstill.
When her brain was no longer processing leverage ratios and position-building channels at full speed, a strange sense of misalignment surfaced in the dark quiet of her mind.
Something's wrong… what did I miscalculate…
Satsuki steadied herself against the dizziness and darkness.
The flow of funds, the offshore pool in the Cayman Islands, the New York Clearing House… that part was basically fine.
Then, the funds would be fully injected into Salomon Brothers' internal dark pool. Using their proprietary trading as cover, they'd bypass the SEC's underlying look-through.
On the execution side, Frank's team was already skilled, the order-splitting model was verified, and concealment was pushed to the physical limits.
Was the original plan okay?
No, there's a problem… but I didn't see it.
But… where exactly is it?
Her consciousness retraced those interwoven data nodes.
I can't just consider what's theoretically feasible. I have to combine it with reality…
…
Right.
Salomon Brothers.
John Gutfreund.
This 'strongest' compliance umbrella that cost seven billion dollars to buy.
They… will die.
And if this continues, they'll take the Saionji Family down with them.
Damn it, how could I forget? I've had SIS monitoring them all along.
Satsuki clutched her hair, using the sting to stay conscious.
They're submitting false bids in Treasury auctions.
They're illegally cornering the market on two-year US Treasuries.
They're trying to squeeze the US Treasury Department in the secondary market.
An indescribable chill climbed through her in the darkness as the logic connected.
That's it. That fatal sense of misalignment came from here.
If, at this life-or-death juncture, all the Saionji Family's crude oil call option positions were placed inside Salomon Brothers' proprietary accounts, then once Washington's regulators moved—once the Federal Reserve and the Department of Justice intervened in this Treasury manipulation scandal—Salomon Brothers would face liquidation by the state machine.
When that happened, the DOJ would block all their external channels. They would freeze every trading account under their name for asset investigation.
The tens of billions in notional crude oil options that the Saionji Family injected through the dark pool legally belonged to Salomon Brothers' proprietary accounts. That batch of assets, which concerned the group's future, would inevitably become collateral damage in the purge.
They would be locked tight in a federal courtroom. They might even be confiscated as illegal profits from Salomon's market manipulation.
This time bomb under the Fed's nose could explode at any moment.
Following that crack, the entire foundation of the crude oil plan began to crumble. Another fatal blind spot was immediately exposed.
The New York Mercantile Exchange.
In Wall Street's open trading pits, any commodity futures or options contract had strict position limits.
Once the first shot of August echoed in the Middle Eastern desert and one-fifth of global oil supply was cut off, oil prices would skyrocket, triggering global energy panic.
That touched the bottom line of US national security.
At that point, the White House and the Pentagon would be at an extreme strategic disadvantage. Regulators from the CFTC would tear through trading data to find any mastermind trying to reap windfall profits from the national energy crisis.
Even with model cover, even if funds were shredded into tiny pieces, final delivery and settlement would still aggregate into a massive unilateral long position. A single-interest position that large could not escape the CFTC's data look-through under extreme conditions.
Once the Saionji Family was implicated because of Salomon Brothers, Washington politicians wouldn't hesitate to tear off the mask of the free market.
Crude oil.
That was the lifeblood of the United States.
Invoking emergency powers to force liquidation would be the basics. They might launch transnational sanctions directly against the Saionji Family for 'manipulating national energy security.'
Taking tens of billions to the open market to grab supply and handing their lifeblood to an oligarch about to die…
The original plan was full of holes.
No matter how confident Satsuki was, she didn't believe she could take on the entire United States.
This was the United States of the nineties.
Dizziness rolled through her mind like tides.
Damn it, the original plan has to be scrapped.
The entire acquisition foundation had to be rebuilt before the first buy order hit.
But in the darkness behind her closed eyes, the heavy fatigue from the fever and mental exhaustion pulled at her neural centers, trying to drag her consciousness into the abyss. Her thinking speed grew sluggish, as if every logical node now took several times more energy than usual.
If she gave in to the exhaustion and let her brain shut down, all the pressure would vanish.
But in the deepest part of her mind, the rationality of a capitalist was like cold stone, pinned in place, resisting the physiological urge to quit amid the storm.
Time was passing. Wall Street was about to open.
She forced those scattering thoughts together and, with limited mental capacity, began a secondary reconstruction on the ruins.
Since NYMEX position limits were an impassable wall, if the exchange route wouldn't work, then move to the off-exchange market.
A financial term surfaced in the quiet of her mind: OTC derivatives.
Abandon electronic trading and leverage the institutional status of offshore SPVs to sign ISDA Master Agreements directly with major Wall Street investment banks. Use customized Total Return Swaps. This black-box structure, without centralized clearing, could bypass CFTC look-through regulations entirely.
With underlying concealment solved, the next issue was delivery channel risk.
Salomon Brothers was a leaking ship that could sink at any moment. Funneling billions in fees to a single firm wouldn't diversify risk—it would paint a target.
If you're buying a protective umbrella, why not buy out all of Wall Street?
Slice the betting commissions and distribute them evenly among the top-tier oligarchs—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers. Pull all those giants onto the same profit-driven bandwagon. The moment Washington tried to investigate, the top lobbying teams of these banks would form a defensive net on Capitol Hill to protect their own profits.
For them, it would be risk-free, high-return business.
Their proprietary trading desks would never allow hundreds of billions to be used for a unilateral bet on a 'potential' war. That gave the Saionji Family room to maneuver, instead of the banks cutting them out to do it themselves.
While the safety net for channels formed, geopolitical hostility still loomed.
Channels and cover were solved, but political animosity remained. Once war broke out in the Middle East, if Japanese capital led the profit-taking, it would draw the White House's hostility.
In their eyes, Japan was just a dog they kept. How dare it take initiative in front of its master, the forefather of war profiteering?
Therefore, they could not be the nail that stuck out. They had to find someone to stand in front.
So who loved profiting from macro-level national disasters most?
The answer was their 'own people'—domestic American macro hedge funds.
Share the intelligence intercepted by SIS for free, as a gesture of allegiance, with Soros's Quantum Fund and Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investment. Let those bloodthirsty domestic giants be the 'villains' who led market trends. The Saionji Family's funds only needed to follow within their assault formation, hidden in the massive trading noise, to siphon profits safely.
With windfall profits secured, the final challenge was the dead end of money laundering and repatriation.
When the crude oil profits were liquidated after the war, bringing that much US dollar cash directly back to Japan would be intercepted by CFIUS on national security grounds.
Therefore, the money must never leave the United States. It had to be converted on the spot into American 'political investment.'
Directly acquiring domestic defense companies would touch a superpower's raw nerve. But capital always had secretive parasitic channels.
Use the Offshore SPV Matrix in the Cayman Islands to obscure the Zaibatsu identity. In the guise of dozens of multinational anonymous funds, inject heavy capital into defense private equity firms like the Carlyle Group, which had deep Pentagon backgrounds.
In legal structure, they would also proactively sign harsh subscription terms. The Saionji Family would relinquish all voting rights and access to classified technology, willingly becoming pure Limited Partners who only provided capital and shared profits.
For those private equity giants controlled by former White House staffers and retired Pentagon generals, when 'blind' capital worth billions—voluntarily cutting off all control and posing zero security threat—arrived at their door, capital's greed would crush everything. To earn lucrative management fees and performance splits, these politicians would proactively use their privileges to clear every compliance review in Washington.
Use the Gulf War to turn hot money from the oil crisis into principal for the American military-industrial complex, and into the expenditures that kept the US government running.
The highest level of capital defense was built on deep parasitic interests. Once the Saionji Family's dollars were integrated into the Pentagon's procurement chain and the US Treasury's deficit cycle, any attempt by Washington politicians to seize those assets would be equivalent to cutting off the financial lifeblood of American defense giants and smashing the purses they used for war operations and elections.
There would be no need for any court defense. To protect their immediate war dividends and budgets, congressmen on Capitol Hill and generals in the Pentagon would form a front, using political privilege to strangle any regulatory bills targeting Saionji funds in their infancy.
Underlying concealment, channel sharing, proxy vanguard, and political laundering.
In the dark silence, a new strategic map was reconstructed.
The black patches at the edge of her vision faded. The nauseating vertigo receded like a tide.
Satsuki opened her eyes slowly.
It took a full ten minutes for her to regain some energy.
Focus returned to her eyes, and clarity came back.
"Connect it," Satsuki said, staring ahead.
Relieved, Endo immediately pressed the speakerphone button.
The static of transoceanic radio waves echoed in the room.
"Boss. This is Frank." The sound of late-night rain in New York crackled in the background.
"Frank. Stop all public order book trading plans on the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Abandon the algorithmic order-splitting sweep."
The other end went dead silent for two full seconds.
Frank didn't ask why she had suddenly abandoned the agreed plan. If Satsuki chose this, she had her reasons.
"Understood. Please provide the new execution path."
"Shift to the OTC derivatives market," Satsuki said.
Her voice was weak, but clear.
"Use the institutional status of our Offshore SPV Matrix to sign ISDA Master Agreements directly with major Wall Street investment banks. Conduct bets on crude oil call options via Total Return Swap contracts. We must completely avoid the CFTC's position limit look-through."
"Also, this crude oil play must not go through Salomon Brothers' channels anymore. As for the 300 billion yen in Nikkei put options we already have… leave them for now. Keep them in their dark pools."
"Slice the total notional principal and betting commissions originally intended for crude oil accumulation. Distribute them evenly among the top ten oligarchs, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers."
"Finally," Satsuki said, leaning back in her chair, "SIS just intercepted satellite intelligence of the Iraqi Republican Guard massing at the Kuwaiti border. Share this intelligence for free with Soros and Paul Tudor Jones."
"Have people monitor their usual prime broker channels. Once these domestic giants start sweeping the market based on the intelligence, activate our OTC betting agreements in sync."
"Slice the principal. Buy in a way that matches their accumulation frequency and trading volume peaks. Do not lead the quotes, and do not create any independent data anomalies of our own."
"We move only when they move. Fill all our buy orders into the trading noise they create."
Satsuki struggled to sit up and gave her instructions deliberately.
"Frank. The window for this accumulation is extremely short. Once the Pentagon imposes a news blackout and crude oil prices start to skyrocket, we must immediately close our option positions. Inject the funds on the spot into defense private equity funds like the Carlyle Group and subscribe to US Treasury bills on a large scale."
"Absolutely no funds are allowed to flow directly back across borders."
"Do you understand?"
Frank could be heard flipping through notes on the other end, the rustle of paper clear over the line.
"Whew… Boss, did you just come up with this on the spot? This is truly…" Frank's voice sounded surprised. "I know what to do."
"Good, execute it."
Satsuki slumped back into her chair. Beside her, Endo promptly pressed the disconnect button on the console.
Click.
The transoceanic static cut out.
Satsuki leaned weakly against the chair, her head tilted slightly as she looked at Endo.
"Endo. The domestic matters… must also be expedited."
Her voice was extremely faint, as if every ounce of strength had been drained by the transoceanic call. Her chest rose and fell in short, shallow breaths, with an imperceptible tremor.
"The evidence the legal department obtained… of those bank executives using offshore accounts to balance their books. Go intercept them."
Satsuki's eyes were half-closed, her vision starting to blur. On her paper-white cheeks, an unnatural flush rose uncontrollably.
"Force them… to spin off the non-performing loans of the underlying semiconductor companies to our offshore trusts at a low price."
"As long as we seize the throat of the technical debt… we can complete the… final loop of the puzzle."
Intermittent syllables echoed in the empty strategy room. She no longer had the mental energy to detail interception points or pressure tactics. She was only squeezing out the core goals from deep in her throat, based on the last shred of obsession left in her mind.
Endo stood by the console.
He looked at Satsuki's bloodless lips and the dense cold sweat on her forehead and temples.
His thick eyebrows knitted into a tight knot, and he forced himself to control his voice, which had quickened with worry.
"I understand. I will personally oversee the domestic matters," Endo said with a heavy nod. "Young Miss, you really need to rest. Please stop thinking immediately."
Satsuki did not respond. She tried to reach out with her trembling right hand to grab the half-empty glass on the rosewood side table.
Endo felt more and more that something was wrong. He quickly turned and grabbed the internal emergency communicator on the console.
"Medical team. Bring emergency equipment to the entrance of the Strategy Room on the fourth basement floor immediately. Now!"
He growled into the communicator, veins bulging on the back of his hand, before slamming the walkie-talkie back onto its base.
The moment Endo turned back—
Clatter.
The water glass tipped over. The remaining warm water splashed across the rosewood tabletop, dripping from the edge onto the anti-static carpet.
Then came a dull thud.
The girl's body slid from the edge of the large leather chair and fell heavily onto the carpet.
"Young Miss!!!"