A smartphone reveals that Atem never once used the search function — meaning he's spent weeks unknowingly day-trading real commodities futures for fun. Newly minted as an accidental multimillionaire, he's handed Seto's own black card with instructions not to worry about the balance. Domino City responds to that card exactly as Domino City responds to Seto Kaiba: total, panicked, five-star capitulation. Atem does not understand why until his friends read the name engraved on it.
This is a translation of an originalArtificial Intelligence work.
Original Title: 03 資産王
Original Author: Gemini with 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
Steeping in the afterglow of pizza on the bed, Atem arrived at a conclusion entirely commonplace for a modern person: if I am to play with everyone whenever I like from now on, I do need a means of contacting them.
Atem shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweats, went up the great staircase, and knocked on the door of Seto's study.
"Kaiba, are you in?"
"It's open."
Inside, Seto was glaring at a holographic display at his desk. Atem walked as far as the middle of the room and stated his business without preamble.
"Kaiba. I want to keep in contact with my partner and Joey and the rest from now on. For that… ah, I want one of those terminals everyone has. The 'smart phone.'"
Seto lifted his eyes from the display and looked at Atem with genuine astonishment.
"You have been buying on the KC Net to that extent and you never once ordered so much as a single smartphone?"
"…Ah."
Atem clapped his hands together.
"Now that you mention it, do those only appear if one searches for the thing one wants? I have only ever looked at the screens recommending pizza and board games to me."
"…Your net literacy is beyond hope, Atem."
Seto sighed in exasperation, then took from his desk drawer a spare KaibaCorp-manufactured smartphone, latest model, still in its box.
"No matter. There was never any chance of you completing the initial setup yourself in any case. Sit there."
Seto began striking the keyboard at his hand at a frightening speed. For him, rewriting the My Number records and communications data of Domino City's residents was easier than breathing. The concept of privacy was, before this man, as good as nonexistent.
He transferred the data from computer to terminal instantaneously, force-syncing the contact details and messaging app accounts of everyone who had come to the Kaiba mansion that day — Yugi, Joey, Téa, Tristan — all of them at once.
"Done."
The smartphone Seto handed over had its setup already complete, with the familiar icons of his friends lined up on it.
"Ohh…! So this is my sumaho."
Atem lit up the screen and murmured, faintly moved.
"You have my thanks, Kaiba."
"Hmph. If your business is concluded, get back to your own room. I'm busy."
Atem gripped the terminal happily and returned to the bed in his room.
Then, relying on the hazy memory of what Yugi had taught him, he began tapping at the screen. Bed hair everywhere, face set slightly too seriously, he typed out a message with awkward fingers.
It is Atem. Thank you for earlier. Come and eat pizza again whenever you like.
Within seconds of that message going to the group chat, a reply came back from Yugi — Sure! We'll come round again soon! — with a cute sticker, followed by vigorous characters from Joey: You bet! Next time I'm gonna wipe the floor with you at games!
"Heh…"
Lit by the light of the screen, Atem flopped onto his back on the bed and smiled happily.
The living world's newest technology was evolving Atem's shut-in life into something still more comfortable, and still warmer.
Having arranged with his friends by phone — next day off, let's all go to the Domino City leisure park! — Atem decided that he could not, in fairness, go out in baggy-kneed grey sweats forever, screwed his resolve to the sticking place, and opened the KC Net.
Relying on his memories of his time in the living world as the other Yugi, he ordered a black leather jacket and a pair of tight trousers with a single finger.
The next day, changed into the clothes that had arrived, fringe arranged in front of the mirror, he was ready. And at precisely that stage, Atem noticed an important fact.
Atem reached down and picked up the cheap wallet from his part-timer days, lying where it had rolled on the floor, and checked the contents.
Inside the synthetic leather wallet, flipped open, were one crumpled thousand-yen note and a few ten-yen coins. Total Life Points: 1,130 yen.
"…Ah. I have no Life Points."
The convenience store wages had been stripped away by taxes, and after the trouble over vacating the apartment there were genuinely only a few hundred yen left in his hands. At this rate he could not so much as buy snacks with his friends.
He was not ready at all.
The next morning, sitting opposite Seto as he drank an espresso with elegance in the vast dining hall, Atem asked between bites of toast:
"Kaiba. Let me activate a Reverse Card. I have decided after all that I shall work in KaibaCorp's virtual training room for the few days before I go to visit Yugi's shop!"
Seto set the espresso down on its saucer and glared at Atem with a face of extreme displeasure.
"You spent all that time saying you never wanted to work again and now you come out with this?! Our virtual training room is not so lukewarm a field that shifts can be shuffled around at will to fund your pocket money!"
"What else am I to do! My wallet is currently completely empty — zero cards in hand! I have only just remembered that even going out to enjoy oneself requires a minimum war chest in the living world!"
Watching Atem make his case in desperation, Seto was briefly dumbstruck — and then, in the next instant, detonated an enormous peal of laughter.
"—Kuku, fuhahahaha!!"
"What is so funny, Kaiba! I am speaking in complete seriousness!"
"Fuhahaha! Atem, you — you man…! Look at your screen! That game score you have been toying with buried in your Yogibo every day — take every position and close it, this instant!"
Doing as Seto told him, Atem tapped the GAME CLEAR button on the tablet screen.
At that moment, an astronomical figure in Japanese yen, earned by Atem in the spirit of play, landed in the premium account at Kaiba Securities with a cheerful thump. Even after the several hundred million of seed capital had been automatically repaid to Seto, the screen displayed a number of a magnitude he had never laid eyes on.
"…Kaiba. This symbol beside the score, this '¥' — surely it doesn't…"
"It does! The crude oil and coffee futures you have been crushing in the belief that they were mere boss fights are every one of them real markets in the living world! Without knowing it, you have become a multimillionaire — one who would appear on Japan's rich list in an instant!"
"Wh… what did you say…?!"
Atem sustained the greatest shock of his life and nearly dropped the tablet.
A man who had worked nights at a twenty-four-hour convenience store and swung a broom for fifteen hundred and twenty yen an hour had, purely by eating snacks on a Yogibo, come into assets on the scale of a national budget.
Seto had, of course, foreseen all of it.
He had arranged the field perfectly from the very beginning — a field on which Atem could stand on his own feet, take instruction from no one, and reign in the living world as the freest and most exalted strongest NEET alive.
"In addition, our KC Pay function is installed in over ninety percent of the shops in Domino City. Payment is possible from the terminal alone."
"Ohh, that is convenient!"
"But tracing every last electronic payment record is a nuisance. Take this."
What slid across the table with a snap was a single plastic card gleaming jet black — KaibaCorp's own highest-grade credit card.
"With that, any payment in the living world completes instantly. There is no need to concern yourself with a balance. Use it as you please."
"I see. So this is the fabled 'crebit card.' I shall make grateful use of it."
That it was a black card in Seto's own name, one of only a handful in existence, and that merely presenting it made every commercial establishment on earth quake — that, Atem had no way of knowing.
Several days later.
Having met up with Yugi and the others in front of Domino City station, Atem set off at once with his friends for the newest theme park.
"Yo, Atem! Your non-sweats clothes are as spiky as ever — suits you, though!"
"Heh. I intend to incorporate the trends of the living world from here on."
Trading light insults along those lines, they went first to the window to buy entrance tickets, and Atem presented that black card to the woman at the counter.
"I'll pay with this."
"Certainly, sir— …wait. What?!"
The receptionist's face went white as paper the instant she took the card. Her hands began to rattle, and she started shouting into her headset with tremendous urgency.
"Manager! Manager, we have a situation! Black Code Seto — the card is at a general counter, right now!"
"Er? Wh-what's happening?"
Before Atem and the others, still tilting their heads in confusion, a man in a bow tie who appeared to be the park director came sprinting out from the back with a face of terrible intensity, at a speed suggesting he might slide into a prostrate bow.
"M-Mister Kai— …sir! Our sincerest apologies! To have made you queue in an ordinary line is the bitterest regret of this company! Please, this way, to the Royal VIP passage!"
"Eeeeeeeh?!"
Joey and the rest cried out. Understanding nothing whatsoever, Atem was escorted to a VIP room floored with deep plush carpet and served a welcome drink of the highest quality. A melon soda at two thousand yen a glass.
"H-hey, Atem… what exactly is your position in Kaiba's house?!"
"No… I am supposed to be a mere freeloader…"
The abnormalities continued after that.
When he produced the card to buy chips at a burger place inside the park, the manager came out in person — "Our finest A5-grade wagyu burger, sir!" — and brought out mountains of off-menu items nobody had asked for, free of charge.
When he held the card up to play a single game at the arcade, the cabinet lit up with WELCOME, VIP USER and every machine in the building entered infinite free-play mode.
By evening, in the VIP private room of a café that had likewise been reserved entirely on the strength of one card, Yugi finally raised the subject with Atem, having decided this was too strange to ignore.
"Atem. Everywhere we've gone, we've been getting VIP treatment I can hardly believe. …Could you let me have a look at that card?"
"Mm. Kaiba lent it to me saying not to worry about the balance, but… is it a different grade of some kind?"
Atem took the jet-black card from his pocket and handed it to Yugi.
Joey and Téa leaned in too, thoroughly curious.
"Let's see, let's see. What kind of extras does it come with? 'Gold,' 'Platinum,' something like— hey, there's writing on it."
Yugi peered at the stylish engraving on the card's face.
It was the part Atem himself had paid no attention to at all, on the assumption that it was some sort of living-world card company crest.
There, in beautiful silver lettering, was written, quite unmistakably:
[ Holder Name : Seto Kaiba ]
"…"
The blood drained smoothly out of Yugi's face.
"O-oi, Yugi, what's it say?"
Joey looked in, and the instant he read the letters out he sprayed the cola he was drinking clean across the table.
"S-Seto… KAIBAAAAA?!"
"Eh?! It's in Kaiba's name?!"
Téa nearly went over backwards off her chair.
"Wh… what did you say?!"
Atem alone was astonished while still chewing his burrito.
"This was Kaiba's name? I had assumed it was the highest rank granted by a living-world card company — the 'Seto Kaiba Grade.'"
"There's no way a rank like that exists!"
Yugi delivered the retort with violence.
"This is the real black card Kaiba uses personally! If you hand this over in a shop in Domino City, of course they'll think Kaiba himself has come to inspect the place, or that someone equally important has — the whole city's going to turn itself upside down!"
"I see… no wonder every shopkeeper has been offering me prime cuts of meat with the face of a dying man."
Having finally understood, Atem gave a fearless heh and raised his cola.
"That is Kaiba for you. To load a single card with the destructive power of a Burst Stream of Destruction. Aibou, Joey — there is no need to hold back on anything. Tonight's dinner, we shall direct-attack the Life Points of this 'Seto Kaiba'!"
"Don't direct-attack with someone else's card!"
To the background music of Yugi's retort, Atem unleashed the living world's luxury combo once again.
Back at the Kaiba mansion office, meanwhile, Seto was watching the notifications arriving one after another on his tablet — Domino City theme park: several thousand yen. Burger shop: several hundred yen — payments of a petty, thoroughly ordinary sort, quite unbefitting a black card. "Hmph. Nothing but worthless purchases," he snorted, sounding somehow satisfied.
