At two in the afternoon.
Inside the Managing Director's Office, Nakayama Takuya was scratching his head over a new game prototype being tested on his computer screen.
Suddenly, the internal phone on his desk began ringing frantically, like it was demanding his life.
Nakayama Takuya pressed the speakerphone button, and Hoshino's unusually urgent voice, slightly out of tune, immediately came through. "Managing Director!
"There's an emergency! I'm coming over right away!"
In less than two minutes, hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Hoshino shoved the door open with a bang.
He had not even had time to put on his suit jacket. Wearing only a thin dress shirt, his forehead was already beaded with fine sweat.
He crossed the room in two strides, then slapped a telegram freshly torn from the Bloomberg Terminal—still carrying the warm scent of ink—heavily onto Nakayama Takuya's desk.
"Bangkok—there's been a major move!" Hoshino panted.
Nakayama Takuya raised an eyebrow, picked up the telegram, and gave it a quick glance.
It was packed with dense English abbreviations and flashing figures, enough to make anyone dizzy.
"The Bank of Thailand has gone mad. They've struck back!" Hoshino pulled out a chair and sat down, speaking as fast as a machine gun. "Just now, they intervened massively in the foreign exchange market without regard for the consequences. They deployed an enormous amount of foreign exchange reserves and forcibly bought up Thai baht to prop up the market. And even more viciously—they flipped the table and blew up the overnight interbank lending rate!"
"Oh? How high did they push it?" Nakayama Takuya sat up straighter, mildly interested.
"Over twenty percent!" Hoshino hammered the tabletop, his voice trembling. "Some unlucky institutions desperate to close their positions and urgently needing cash were even quoted an outrageous twenty-five percent! The entire