Leave It to Me
Grea's stats were outstanding. Single-digit strength was only natural—she wasn't a combat character. Her intelligence cleared two hundred, and her luck sat comfortably above one hundred and fifty. Raised properly, she could even serve as a mage.
Of course, her real stage wasn't the battlefield. Grea's title, CEO, was focused entirely on management and administration. That was what she was built for.
I slung Grea over my shoulder—she was still drowning in a sea of pleasure, in no condition to walk—and turned to the Master, who had collapsed on the shop floor in a puddle of his own spend.
"What happened here today goes with you to the grave."
I flicked a gold coin at him. The glittering piece landed in front of his face, and he nodded with a vacant, stupid look in his eyes.
"We're leaving."
"Yes, sir."
Luna and I returned to the mansion. Dawn was already breaking. We'd burned the whole night on gambling—though, to be fair, the sex had done most of the burning.
Once we were home, I handed Grea off to Luna. She and the other maids would wash her, put her makeup on, and bring her to me.
I sat down at the desk in my obscenely lavish study. The room was packed with hardwood furniture that cost several gold pieces apiece, and the faint scent of timber they gave off was so pleasant it settled both body and mind.
"You're back?"
Sera padded into the study, ears twitching. Very few of my maids were allowed to enter this room without knocking. She was one of them.
"I'll take care of you."
She slipped under the desk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The space beneath was wider than a normal desk's—I'd had a craftsman build it to my specifications, and my intentions for that extra room had not been innocent. For the record, that was also Elper's workstation.
Settled between my knees, Sera tugged my trousers down with nothing but her mouth and drew my cock free. The whole motion was practiced, effortless. She murmured a quiet Thanks for the meal! and closed her lips around me.
Time went by very agreeably after that. I was on my second round when the door opened.
"I have brought her."
Grea stood in the doorway, prettily made up, with Luna behind her. I tipped my head, and they came in. Luna pulled a chair from the corner of the study and sat Grea down in it.
"Ugh… feels like I'm sitting on a bed of nails."
Grea's eyes traveled around the room as she spoke. A white camisole and a pair of panties that left her ass almost completely exposed—she wasn't even trying to hide how uncomfortable she was. Last night's gambling had apparently taught her that a poker face was wasted on me.
"Grea. You swore you'd become my slave."
"Nngh—swore? I wasn't in my right mind. I was in a state of diminished capacity."
Diminished capacity. She could throw whatever excuse she wanted at me; I was perfectly confident I could break her all over again. Grea studied my face, then let out a short, dry laugh and went on.
"Not that saying so is going to make you let me go. Honestly, as a man, you're the worst. That flabby body. That pig-beastkin face. And that laugh—god, that laugh. I got goosebumps every single time I heard it."
"Buhihit! This voice, you mean?"
"Yes. That laugh with the weird nasal thing mixed in. I've never heard anyone laugh that creepily in my life. That's not even a human sound. Look, I don't care about the rest, but you should really drop that insane laugh."
She laid into me without mercy. I listened in silence. I wasn't particularly angry. Grea was my meat slave either way.
"Easier said than done. Can a person actually control how they feel? And besides, the laugh isn't the problem. This face is."
Her expression sobered.
"Ah… yeah. That's fair. Being born like that isn't a crime. Neither is the voice. I'm just saying, if you can fix it, fix it. No reason to get treated like a villain over a laugh alone."
"Noted. I'll try."
"Don't take it too hard. The pleasure you gave me was the real thing. And you seem pretty sharp, too. I can put up with an ugly man. I can't put up with a stupid one. A swindler who gets caught in the act ought to go quietly. I'm your slave. Starve me or devour me—your call."
Grea spread both hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender. I'd expected her to keep working the angles a little longer, but she folded cleanly. Fewer headaches for me. Fine by me.
"Good. From this moment on, you're my slave. You understand what that means."
"Yeah. I had a rough idea back at the tavern, but coming to this mansion made it obvious. This is your little castle. A castle stuffed full of filthy appetites. And what's with the woman under the desk?"
"Hi there! I'm Sera, Master's cute little maid!"
Sera popped up from beneath the desk, ears perked in greeting. My cock hair and cum were smeared messily around her mouth.
"Heh. This place really is something."
Grea didn't look particularly shocked. If anything, she looked like she'd seen it coming.
"Do I have to call you Master too?"
"That's up to you. I won't force it."
"Alright. Then… how about I just call you Guildmaster?"
"Whatever you like."
"Great. Guildmaster. Looking forward to working with you."
She stripped the honorific off the word in the span of a single breath. I didn't particularly care. I hadn't gone to all this trouble just to hear her simper at me with pretty titles.
"Then I'll tell you what you're going to do. You'll take my capital and you'll run a business. Specifically, you'll take the slave-trading company I already own and make it a great deal bigger."
At the word business, Grea's eyes lit up.
She'd been planning to found a merchant guild of her own. If she'd won last night, she would have run as far from this city as she could and built something enormous. That plan was wreckage now—because of me—but she'd just been handed another chance. A much bigger one than she'd started with.
"Oho. Interesting. Is that why you came after me?"
"Yes. That's why."
I didn't deny it. There was no point dressing this up as romance. Grea was a businesswoman, through and through.
"I want to hear more about the business."
She dragged her chair closer to mine. I pulled a sheaf of documents on my current operations from the drawer. Not thin A4 paper—thick parchment, heavy in the hand.
"The Walker Merchant Guild currently holds three hundred platinum. Our trade good is slaves. We deal in every kind, but humans are the mainstay by volume. As for the recent situation…"
I recited the contents of the guild evaluation report Arme had compiled in meticulous detail. I spoke quickly. Grea never once asked me to slow down; she filed every word away as it came. With a memory like hers, it wouldn't have been difficult. She was a genius with an intelligence score over two hundred.
"…That's the shape of it."
"Got it. You started with deep pockets, and the last territorial war was a windfall, but lately the business has been stagnating."
"That's the short version, yes. In any case, I'm going to move into fields beyond the slave trade."
"Which fields?"
"Luxury goods, for a start. I'm thinking sugar."
"Sugar? Do you have buyers?"
Sugar was an expensive luxury in the Myles Kingdom. Not just there—across the entire continent. In the southern nations where it was produced, even commoners could enjoy it now and then, but this was Solari World, where logistics were a nightmare. Stray even a little from the production regions and the price shot into the stratosphere. In the Myles Kingdom, any dish made with sugar was treated as high cuisine.
The sweetness in a commoner's food came from honey. Sugar was for nobles, royalty, and wealthy merchants. For an ordinary person, a sweet dish was a festival-day impossibility.
"I have a supplier who can guarantee a stable volume. Don't worry about that."
My sugar supplier was Earth. Back home, a single hard day's work would buy me the stuff by the ton.
"Sugar trading can make you filthy rich overnight if you do it right—but there's plenty to watch out for. And because it's a luxury, choosing your clients matters. You already know this, Guildmaster: sugar isn't something you stack in a trading post and sell off the pile."
Valuables like sugar were usually sold through brokers, who found buyers and arranged the deals in person. I could flood the market and open a sugar shop, of course—but that would tank the value.
I wasn't interested in thin margins on high volume. I wanted the maximum added value for the minimum labor.
"I jumped in thinking it would be easy, and it's turned out to be more of a hassle than I expected. I'm leaving everything related to the guild in your hands. Make the sugar trade a success. That's your first job."
Grea smiled, slow and sure. There wasn't a trace of failure in her face.
Grea really was a genius of management and administration. In a matter of days she had mapped the guild's structure, scale, and systems down to the last cog. Then she declared a campaign of efficiency and started restructuring. The salary-collecting deadweight I'd never even noticed vanished under her hand, and once the books were clean, she launched the sugar trade in earnest.
She worked the noble houses of Coulon one by one, building a client list. I assigned Luna to her as an escort. Grea's tongue was a weapon; in less than a week she had more than ten customers. If she'd been selling insurance back on Earth, she would have been the Insurance Queen.
I brought over a measured quantity of sugar from Earth. Honestly, Earth sugar was practically free. Buy it by the sack and a kilo cost less than a dollar. In Coulon, a hundred grams of sugar went for about one silver—call it a hundred dollars. On paper, that was a thousandfold return. And the sugar I'd brought was far more popular than the local product.
"Oh! What is this sugar, white and fine as snow? It looks like eternal frost, yet the taste is unmistakably sugar! And none of that sour, musty smell ordinary sugar carries! Could this be what the southern royalty eats?"
Most of the sugar sold on Earth was refined—the white sugar everyone knew. Solari World's sugar was unrefined. The molasses hadn't even been removed; it had a dark tint, and rather than a powder it was hardened syrup.
Sugar here was made from the fruit of sugar trees, incidentally—actual trees, like apple trees, not sugarcane. Back on Earth, unrefined sugar was the expensive one. But the value of a thing is decided by scarcity.
"It is indeed. In the southern nations they call it Snow Sugar, a delicacy even most nobles rarely have the chance to taste. The flavor is aristocratically clean—truly exquisite. Nearly all of it is consumed domestically, so almost none reaches foreign markets, but I was able to import a special shipment through a southern merchant of my acquaintance."
I stood at Grea's side and laid it on thick. The noble watched the sugar pour like powder through his fingers, looking thoroughly seduced. The stout lady beside him gave him a nudge.
"Madame Cheren already has a contract. How are we supposed to keep our dignity if we fall behind a trend this luxurious? Sign it this instant."
"Of course! It's from the famous Walker Merchant Guild—there won't be any problems. I'll take the contract at once."
"A wise decision. The volume I can bring in is extremely limited, so once this opportunity passes, there's no telling when the next one will come. We will supply five kilograms of Snow Sugar each month for one gold."
My Snow Sugar was priced far above ordinary sugar. With a rarity like this, expensive sold better. To protect the brand, we called only on the most prestigious houses in Coulon.
I was already the most famous merchant in the Coulon Territory. My performance in the territorial war had made me a star overnight, and stardom, as it turned out, was an excellent thing to have when you were selling something. Even on Earth, a popular CEO could lift a company's value by existing.
In a single day, we had locked in a fixed income of twenty gold a month.
"Guildmaster. Where are you actually getting this? I've never heard of sugar like this. I've never even seen it."
"I'll tell you. Eventually."