20 Ancient Families

The current head of the Miyamoto family was called Miyamoto Yuuto. He was the first child of the previous head, Miyamoto Shin. Yuuto had six siblings, two male and four females. In total, Shin had had seven children. Yuuto was the first born, so while he was spoiled when he was young, he often had to undergoing strict training in both fighting and business.

When he reached high school, he had already been working at the main headquarters of Nissan, as an office clerk. This allowed him to gain exposure, as well as familiarizing himself with the staff and they way they worked. Three years later, when he graduated from high school, he did not attend university and instead worked as the vice-president of Nissan, exposing his identity as the son of Miyamoto Shin.

At this stage, four out of six of his siblings had been born already. His two younger brothers had more talent than him in the respective fields of fighting and business, but they did not have much talent in the counterpart. Therefore, in the end, Shin had still chosen Yuuto to succeed the family. His first younger brother, who was good at fighting, was in charge of a security company that was run by the family. Although it was called a security company, it was common knowledge that it was involved in a certain capacity with the yakuza. As for the second younger brother, he was Yuuto's faithful business advisor.

When Yuuto was 20, he married the niece of the head of the Hattori family. It wasn't until twenty years later that they finally had Basara, making them currently 62 years old. An old couple indeed. Miyamoto Shin was 85 this year, and was still as fit as a fiddle.

It had to be said that while Basara was the sole successor of the so-called main family, it was entirely possible for his cousins to succeed the family if he got into a mishap, was disowned, eloped, or was considered not worthy enough. Therefore, the pressure put onto these sole children was often very heavy. If he had other siblings, then at least Yuuto wouldn't have to worry about the head becoming one of his nephews or nieces.

But since he only had the one child, he had no leeway and had to force Basara to do his best in everything.

Over on the Hattori side, it was pretty much the same thing. The current head, Hattori Akihito, had won over the other children of his father, Hattori Hiro. However, since the Hattori's were more into trading and didn't come from a background that placed heavy importance on martial arts, they focused more on the business talent of their descendants. Therefore, Iwatani had also focused more on business. The only reason he was so good at fighting was because he had met Basara, who excelled in that field. In order to compete with him, he needed to get his martial skills up to scratch, while Basara needed to get his head thinking in the right way.

It was often said that rivalry brought out the best in people, and Basara and Iwatani were the prime examples of the saying.

Overall, the current and previous heads of both families were extremely satisfied with the way their successors were developing.

Even more so, when they heard that they had befriended Amakusa Naofumi. At first, they only thought that the name sounded familiar, but did not delve into it too much. Certain leaders of the family were even tempted to tell the young masters to distance themselves away from him.

It was only after a week that an elder finally remembered where he saw the name – in Amakusa Shirou's last prophecy!

After that, both families had hurriedly held meetings, and convinced both Basara and Iwatani to make their relationship with Amakusa Naofumi as good as possible.

That was also one of the reasons why they had been sent to Australia to study with Naofumi. The other reason had been that both families wanted to branch out into the technology field, and had the idea that their successors should study engineering. They would also study a computing minor on the side, and when they came back, both families would pour their resources into one, massive technology company.

When they heard back from Basara and Iwatani about Naofumi's desire to start his own technological company, they thought that it was a good idea to curry favour from him. Since all three of them had more or less the same expertise, they could lead the company together, while giving Naofumi some more benefits.

That way, they would be supporting him while getting on his good side at the same time.

They had come prepared to meet him, and had rehearsed their stick-and-carrot routine in case he was not satisfied. In their minds, Naofumi would be considerably nervous, and would concede if they applied a bit of force.

However, the current situation was beyond what they had imagined. Not only was Naofumi not nervous, he didn't even seem to think of the current and previous heads of both ancient families to be anyone important!

The way he looked at them resembled the way they would look at other ancient families; as equals!

They had not noticed that Plato had only changed his gaze after reading through their histories with "All-Seer".

Even if they did notice, they had no way of knowing what caused the change in Plato, let alone knowing the fact that now, he too, knew of Amakusa Shirou's prophecy.

Plato was currently considering what stance he should take when speaking with these elders. In their views, he should be respectful to these industry veterans who had years of experience; but in Plato's view, they were similar to newborns who knew nothing of the real world.

It created a gap, a rift, in both parties' expectations, and had ultimately led to this awkward impasse in the atmosphere.

Alas, it did not last long. When both parties considered what the other party wanted, they felt that conceding a step was still something doable.

When the tension in the air died down, Basara, Iwatani and the two butlers let out a visible breath of relief. If they had fought or disagreed on such a small matter, all the effort that they put into reaching this stage in their relationship would have all been for naught.

After all, what the two parties wanted was co-operation, not the subordination of the other.

After a minute of cooling down and alleviating the atmosphere, the four elders and Plato started chatting.

"Ah, you must be Amakusa Naofumi. Is it alright if I call you Nao-kun? First of all, I'd like to thank you for being friends with my son for all these years. He isn't exactly he most sociable, as you can see, and he hasn't had many close friends apart from you. Also, I'm sorry about my wife's absence. She's been busy as of late, managing her jewellery and fashion stores."

Basara: "…"

Plato chuckled inwardly. It was obviously Yuuto trying to get on his good side, and had used his son as an excuse for it. Plato himself was clear on what Basara was like. Although he wasn't the most popular, he could by no means be called unsociable. In fact, out of the three of them, Basara had the most friends, followed by Iwatani, and then Plato, who only had the other two.

Yuuto, seeing as how Plato hadn't replied, thought that he was silent because he was nervous. Therefore, he put on a kind smile – one of those that you would get from a grandparent – and proceeded to pile on sugary complements, one after another.

A couple of minutes later, he ran out of saliva and breath, but still saw that Plato hadn't replied yet. Therefore, after taking a gulp of water, he employed his last resort, his trump card, in an attempt to "calm" Plato down.

He had started telling him about Basara and Iwatani before they had met.

"You probably don't know this, but Little Basara, back in the day, was a real crybaby. Whenever we were training and I said he did something wrong, he would look at me with those eyes of his, as if saying, 'Look! You are making me cry!'. Hahahahaha! Those were the days. There was another time…"

Iwatani's father, Akihito, had, at some point, joined in on recounting the two's younger days. Both Basara and Iwatani had long gone red in the face. While it wasn't as embarrassing as having such facts divulged to the opposite sex, Plato was someone that they considered a close friend.

They had tried to act tough in front of him on several occasions, but in their eyes, Plato's view of them was obviously falling apart after hearing of their shameful childhood.

Plato could have stopped the two fathers talking at any time, but he found out that he quite enjoyed hearing about Basara's and Iwatani's escapades when they were young, in the sense of an elder appreciating the tomfoolery of a younger generation.

But when he saw that the situation was turning from 'trying to ease the nerves' to 'recounting old stories', he felt the need to intervene.

But before he could, the two previous heads had acted already. They gently nudged their sons, effectively telling them to shut up in front of a guest. After all, even though they were trying to curry his favour, Plato was not someone of their family. If they divulged too many secrets, who knew how it would leak out to their competitors. Luckily, they had kept their knowledge of Amakusa Naofumi's existence on lockdown.

They had no idea that every other family had already known about it…