The transfer of funds was massive enough to make even the wealthiest members of the Shimazu clan hold their breath.
Koji didn’t just give Aleksander a small loan; he emptied out several of the clan’s deepest shadow accounts to build Apex Industries’ first factories and labs.
As the clan leader, Koji had the authority to do it, but that didn’t stop the quiet, bitter whispers behind closed doors.
To the traditional elders of the clan, this was madness.
It was bad enough that Koji treated this orphaned Russian boy like his own son.
It was even worse that Koji had made his long-term plans clear: one day, Aleksander and Akira would stand side-by-side as co-leaders of the Shimazu family.
The elders hated the idea.
Aleksander wasn’t family by blood, and he wasn’t Japanese.
He was an outsider, a gaijin.
To them, investing a massive fortune into a seven-year-old’s “science project” was proof that Koji’s grief over Aleksander’s parents had finally clouded his judgment.
They expected the company to burn through the cash and fail within a year.
Some even quietly hoped for it, planning to use the massive financial loss as an excuse to challenge Koji’s place as leader.
Six months later, Koji called a formal meeting in the highest boardroom of the Osaka Continental.
The elders sat on floor cushions around a long, polished oak table.
Their faces were grim, expecting Koji to finally admit his mistake and explain where the money had gone.
Instead, Koji slid a simple black leather folder down the table.
The oldest of the group, a scarred man named Hiroshi, opened the folder.
He looked at the numbers on the first page, frowned, and pulled out his reading glasses.
He looked again.
His hands slowly stopped moving.
“This is…” Hiroshi started, his voice dry.
He looked up at Koji.
“These are the returns for a single quarter?”
“That is the return for the first month,” Koji corrected, his voice calm and hard.
“Since the Apex Medical Scanner and the Bio-Foam hit the global market, our initial investment has returned tenfold.
And we own fifty percent of the company’s equity.”
The room went dead silent.
The elders passed the papers around, their eyes wide.
They were assassins and underworld businessmen; they understood money perfectly.
The numbers printed on those pages were staggering.
Apex Industries hadn’t just succeeded; it had practically printed money.
The patents alone were worth more than the Shimazu clan had earned in the last decade.
Koji pressed a button on the table, and the doors opened.
Two guards walked in, carrying a large metal crate.
They opened it to reveal dozens of silver canisters of Bio-Foam and a portable version of the Medical Scanner.
“The money is the least of it,” Koji told the room.
“These tools will be supplied to all our field operatives.
Our people will not bleed out in alleys anymore.
We will survive wounds that would kill any other syndicate’s men.”
Hiroshi picked up one of the silver canisters, turning it over in his rough hands.
He thought about the boy who had built it.
They had judged Aleksander for being a child and an outsider, assuming he was a charity case.
Now, looking at the impossible technology in his hands and the endless zeroes on the financial report, Hiroshi realized how blind they had been.
No one challenged Koji’s leadership that day.
And no one in the Shimazu clan ever questioned Aleksander’s place in their family again.
Aleksander walked over to the antique weapon rack at the back of the dojo.
He bypassed the wooden training swords and reached for a real kyoketsu-shoge.
It was an old, brutal weapon—a heavy iron ring connected to a long, thick chain, ending in a sharp, curved blade.
He wrapped the chain around his small hand, feeling the cold weight of the metal.
His mind instantly calculated the weight of the blade, the friction of the iron links, and the exact amount of force needed to manipulate it.
He looked at a wooden training dummy standing fifteen feet away.
It was positioned completely behind a thick wooden support pillar.
A straight throw was impossible; the pillar blocked the target.
Aleksander threw the blade.
Just as the heavy metal left his hand, he didn’t just let it fly.
He sharply snapped his wrist downward, twisted his elbow, and pulled back on the iron ring by a fraction of a millimeter.
He sent a very specific, high-speed vibration traveling down the metal links.
The chain didn’t just fly straight.
It moved like a living snake.
It whipped past the wooden pillar, hit empty air, and then sharply snapped sideways at a perfect ninety-degree angle.
The blade whipped around the blind corner and slammed deep into the training dummy’s neck with a brutal thunk.
The sliding door of the dojo clicked open.
Koji froze in the doorway.
He had come to bring the boy some water, but he stopped dead in his tracks.
Koji stared at the chain.
It was wrapped tightly around the pillar, the blade buried in a target that was entirely out of the line of sight.
Koji was a master assassin.
He had trained his whole life with weapons.
He knew the laws of physics.
Chains followed momentum and gravity.
They could swing in arcs, but they did not violently snap sideways in mid-air all on their own.
It was a trick from a comic book or a movie—an impossible stunt that broke every rule of combat.
Yet, the metal was stuck in the wood right in front of his eyes.
Aleksander gave the chain a short, sharp tug.
The blade cleanly yanked itself out of the dummy, the chain smoothly unwrapping from the pillar and flying right back into Aleksander’s waiting hand.
Koji slowly stepped into the room, gently closing the door behind him.
He looked at the young boy, then at the heavy iron weapon resting easily in his small hands.
“That,” Koji said, his voice unusually hoarse, “was physically impossible.”
“It’s just tension and vibration,” Aleksander replied simply, untangling the chain.
“If you calculate the air resistance and send the exact right ripple of force down the links, the chain acts as its own pivot point in mid-air.
It just looks impossible.”
Koji sat down slowly on a nearby bench.
He had spent his life watching men push their bodies to the absolute limit.
He believed he knew what human beings were capable of.
But sitting in the dark, watching this boy turn movie fiction into deadly reality through sheer brainpower, Koji realized there were no limits anymore.