Gray horses usually weren't easy to handle. Even so, with that thought in mind, he raised his hand and joined the bidding.
"Fifty thousand, now sixty thousand from the floor, followed by seventy thousand over the phone. Eighty thousand, bid on behalf of Jody in the back."
This was starting to become a little troublesome.
At this rate, the bid for the gray colt onstage would soon break through the team's agreed maximum of one hundred thousand dollars.
However—
He still couldn't decide whether the colt before him qualified as a "special case."
"Gray horses really are hard to figure out."
With a sigh, he looked up again at the screen displaying the live bidding price.
It had clearly exceeded the team's one-hundred-thousand-dollar limit, and the number on the screen was still climbing.
He raised his hand again and continued bidding.
When Yahagi asked, "Could this be the special case Kitano mentioned?" he considered it, then shook his head and replied, "I'm not really sure."
"Since he's a colt I'm not entirely sure about, how about I keep him for myself instead of putting him with the club?"
At those words, Yahagi looked slightly surprised.
"Even Kitano can't quite read this horse?"
"I get the feeling he's exceptional mentally... but as for how he'll run, that's still hard to say."
Though, admittedly, that suspicion came from the status panel he had only just examined.
He continued bidding, and after a prolonged back-and-forth, the upward momentum of the price gradually slowed.
"One hundred seventy thousand from the floor. Any other bids? How about one hundred eighty thousand? One hundred eighty thousand?"
Both the phone and online buyers seemed to have withdrawn from the competition, leaving only the auctioneer's voice in the room.
Just as he was about to breathe a sigh