Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 17: A Very Old Sword
Hina had been awake since three.
Lena knew because at four-fifty, when she opened her eyes, Hina was sitting cross-legged on the right side of the bed in the grey dark, fully alert, Lena’s phone in her hands, staring at the photograph from the pond.
“I zoomed in,” Hina said quietly.
“Long lens.
From the boathouse on the east side.
Probably a Canon.
He was standing on the second step, because the railing is in the corner of the frame.” She set the phone down on the nightstand, face down.
“I could find him by lunchtime.”
“Hina.”
“I’m not going to.
I’m just saying I could.” She looked at Lena, and her eyes were very dark and very steady.
“Did Mizuki answer?”
Lena checked.
She had written to Mizuki at midnight, from the pool.
The reply had come at two-ten.
*”I saw it too.
Not from him.
He hasn’t shown me anything.
He hasn’t said a word.
He asked me to book his golf for Sunday as usual, and to have a good weekend.
That’s what frightens me.
— M.H.”*
Hina read it over her shoulder and was silent for a long moment.
“Okay,” she said at last.
“Then we wait.
I’m good at waiting.” She put her hand on her stomach.
“I’m getting very good at it.”
Then she looked down at Lena, and some of the darkness eased out of her face, and something softer and hungrier came in.
“It’s Sunday,” she said.
“It’s mine.
I want to stop thinking about men with cameras.” She leaned down until her lips brushed Lena’s ear.
“Can I?”
Lena turned her head and kissed her.
“Make me forget them too.”
Hina went slow this time, which was new.
She knelt between Lena’s legs and wrapped her long fingers around her and just held her, for a moment, her thumb moving in small circles, looking at her in the grey light with an expression Lena couldn’t name.
Then she bent and kissed the tip, very gently, and then again, and took her into her mouth with a long, low sigh, like someone sinking into hot water after a hard game.
She didn’t rush.
For the first time, Hina didn’t rush at all.
She moved in long, deep, rolling strokes, and every time she reached the bottom she stayed there a heartbeat longer than Lena could bear, her throat working, her eyes closed.
Her free hand slid up Lena’s stomach, found her breast, and stayed there, warm and possessive, her palm over Lena’s heart as if she were checking it was still beating for her.
Lena’s hands found Hina’s short hair and tangled there.
Her hips began to rise, slowly, matching her, and Hina let her, humming low in her throat, *mine, mine,* the old word, but softer now, almost a lullaby.
“Hina,” Lena breathed.
“Hina, I’m…”
Hina opened her eyes and looked up at her.
She didn’t speed up.
She didn’t slow down.
She just held Lena’s gaze and kept going, steady as a heartbeat, until Lena came with a long, broken cry, shaking all over, her fingers clenched in Hina’s hair, and Hina took everything and stayed with her through the last shiver, eyes never leaving hers.
Afterward she crawled up and lay on Lena’s chest, on her side, her ear over Lena’s heart.
“I counted,” she murmured.
“It went up to a hundred and sixty.”
“Is that good?”
“For you?” Hina smiled against her skin.
“That’s a final.”
At the foot of the bed, Rei, who had been awake for some time, said, “Four fifty-eight to five twenty-nine.
Thirty-one minutes.
I have no notes.”
Hina lifted her head.
“No notes?”
“No notes,” said Rei.
“That was beautiful.
Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late,” said Hina, and put her head back down, glowing.
*Ding.*
[Hina Takeda | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Pregnancy: Day 12 — Healthy.
“Maternity Blessing” active.]
[System Note: Fetal heartbeat will be detectable in approximately four weeks.
The Host’s own heartbeat reached 160 bpm.]
At breakfast there was a new document on the fridge, beneath the laminated schedule.
It was titled, in Yuki’s careful kanji, AMENDMENTS (V.4).
1.
No alarms inside furniture, pillowcases, sword cases, or rice cookers.
2.
Five-player rock-paper-scissors is now legal on Saturdays.
Ayaka may not watch wrists.
3.
Rei is not allowed to time people.
(Rei has appealed.
Appeal is pending.)
4.
In case of a sixth member, the Committee will convene.
“Sixth?” said Ayaka, reading it with her coffee.
“I’m a planner,” said Yuki, very pink, and buried her face in her rice. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The University of Tokyo’s autumn festival was still five weeks away, but Sunday was the Student Council’s first all-hands preparation day, and Rei had decreed that every club with a booth must send at least two people to Hongo by nine to measure their assigned space.
Most of them sent one.
Rei was not pleased.
“The Astronomy Club,” she said, standing in the middle of the main avenue with a clipboard and a laser measure, “has sent zero people and a note.” She held up the note.
It said, *Sorry, it was a clear night, we’re all asleep.*
“That’s a good reason,” said Lena.
“It’s an outrageous reason.” Rei wrote something savage on the clipboard.
“I’ll give them the spot next to the Economics Society.
Beside the fog machine they don’t have.”
The whole harem had come.
Ayaka was helping the Fashion Club pin a banner and had already been offered a guest-judge position at their show.
Yuki was with the Prose Circle, measuring a table for selling a hand-bound anthology, which she was editing.
Hina sat on a bench under a ginkgo tree, banned from lifting anything by four separate people, shouting encouragement at the volleyball team, who were building a ball-toss game and doing it wrong.
And under a canopy at the end of the avenue, the Economics Society was holding a trial run of the takoyaki stand.
With an approved budget of one hundred thousand yen.
With octopus priced at this year’s rates.
With no fog machine.
Nanami was running it.
She was standing behind the griddle in a borrowed apron, a long metal pick in each hand, turning the little balls in their iron moulds with surprising speed.
She had a notebook open beside her on the counter, covered with figures.
The treasurer with the sweater vest was standing behind her, taking orders.
From her.
“Lena!” Nanami saw her and nearly dropped a pick.
Didn’t.
“Lena, look.
Look!
I redid the whole budget.
Break-even is at a hundred and forty portions.
We’ve already sold sixty to the other clubs, and it’s only ten-thirty, and it’s a *practice day*.”
“Nanami.
You did this?”
“The treasurer said I could try.” Nanami flushed.
“Because of the whiteboard.
On Thursday.
He said I explained it better than you.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Sorry.
That came out wrong.”
“It came out exactly right,” Lena said.
“You did.”
Nanami stared at her across the griddle for a moment, steam rising between them.
Then she put eight takoyaki in a paper boat, drizzled them with sauce and mayonnaise and a careful heap of bonito flakes, and held them out.
“On the house,” she said.
“For the consultant.”
“That’s bad for your margins.”
“I budgeted for it,” Nanami said, and smiled, a smile with no fear in it at all.
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 91% → 93%]
Lena ate them on the bench next to Hina, who stole four.
“She’s cute,” Hina said, chewing, watching Nanami at the griddle.
“Ninety-three?”
Lena looked at her.
“How did you—”
“Ayaka’s not the only one who reads faces,” said Hina comfortably.
“I’ve been reading yours for two weeks.
You get this little line, here, when someone is close.” She touched Lena’s forehead.
“It’s a nice line.
I’m not mad about it.” A pause.
“She has to be braver first.
She’ll get there.
You’re making her brave.”
At eleven, Lena went to the Economics building to drop off her problem set, and found the light on at the end of the fourth-floor corridor.
Professor Fujiwara was at her desk on a Sunday, in a grey sweater, with a red pen and a stack of quizzes three hundred high.
She looked up when Lena knocked on the open door and dropped the pen, which rolled under the second chair.
“You’re here on a Sunday,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I’m always here on Sundays.” Fujiwara bent to retrieve the pen, and hit her head on the desk, and came up rubbing it, looking at Lena through her fogging glasses.
“I graded yours.
I wasn’t going to tell you until Monday.”
“And?”
“Full marks.” The professor’s voice was very dry.
“I graded it three times.
Then I had my teaching assistant grade it blind, to make sure I wasn’t being unfair.
In your favor.” She looked down at the stack.
“Full marks all three times.”
“Thank you for being careful.”
“I will always be careful with you,” Fujiwara said, and then seemed to hear herself and pressed her lips together.
“Go.
It’s Sunday.
Go be twenty.”
Lena went.
But at the door, she turned.
“Sensei.
There’s a takoyaki stand on the main avenue run by a second-year who used to be scared of your class.
She’s doing a break-even analysis on a griddle.
Fujiwara looked at her for a long moment.
Then, slowly, she capped her pen.
Ten minutes later, from across the avenue, Lena saw the professor standing at the Economics Society canopy, a paper boat of takoyaki in one hand, asking Nanami a question about fixed costs.
Nanami was answering.
Nanami was shaking a little, but answering.
And the professor was smiling.
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 97%]
[System Note: Holding.
But she ate the takoyaki standing next to your harem.
She noticed.
She stayed.]
That evening, Lena gave Rei the sword.
She had saved it for the fencing room, for after dinner, when the house was quiet.
Rei came down in her red sweater, expecting a lesson, and found Lena standing in the middle of the strip holding a long narrow case of old, dark leather.
“Open it,” Lena said.
Rei opened it.
Inside, on faded crimson velvet, lay an épée.
Not a modern one.
Old, slender, the blade dark with age but perfectly straight, the bell guard engraved with laurel leaves and a tiny maker’s mark.
The grip was wrapped in silver wire, worn smooth by a long-dead hand.
“Paris,” Rei whispered.
“Eighteen-nineties.”
“Eighteen ninety-four.
It was used in a real duel, they say.
Over a woman.
Both of them lived.” Lena smiled.
“The dealer said the woman married neither of them and opened a bookshop.”
Rei lifted the sword out of the case.
She held it the way she held her mother’s sword, with total reverence, and turned it in the light, and then she took a stance and made one movement, a single, perfect lunge, and the old blade sang in the air.
“It’s balanced,” she breathed.
“It’s perfectly balanced.
After a hundred and thirty years.”
“And this,” Lena said, and unrolled a drawing on the floor.
It was the east wing ballroom on the ground floor, the one with the tall windows facing the garden pines, unused since they’d moved in.
Except in the drawing, it was a fencing hall.
Four regulation strips.
Electric scoring.
A mirrored wall.
A rack of thirty swords.
And on the far wall, in a glass case, a place for two swords to hang side by side: the old Parisian épée and the sword Rei’s mother had given her.
“Your own salle,” Lena said.
“So you never have to borrow a room again.
Not in this house.
Not in anyone’s.”
Rei put the épée down very carefully in its case.
Then she stood and looked at the drawing for a long time, the Ice Queen in a red sweater, barefoot on the strip.
“My father,” she said, “gave me a fencing coach when I was eleven.
Because a Kurosawa should win things.” She looked up at Lena.
“You gave me a sword that ended up in a bookshop.”
And she crossed the strip and kissed her, hard and fierce, and pulled her down onto the mat.
They made love on the fencing strip under the mirrors, Rei’s red sweater tossed over the old leather case, the reflected Ice Queen on her back with her knees drawn up and her platinum hair spilled across the piste, and Lena moving inside her slowly and deeply, until Rei turned her head and watched them in the mirror and said, astonished, “I look happy.
Lena, look, I look *happy*,” and came, laughing, with tears running into her hair.
At nine-thirty, the gate intercom buzzed.
Ayaka got there first.
She looked at the little screen and went quiet.
Then she called up the stairs, in a careful voice, “Lena.
You should come.”
Mizuki Hayashi was standing at the villa’s gate under the pines, in the black suit again, hair pulled back into the severe bun.
She had no suitcase.
She had only her tablet, held against her chest in both hands like a shield, and her face, under the gate lamp, was very pale.
Lena opened the gate herself.
“I’m sorry,” Mizuki said at once.
“I know I said I wouldn’t come.
Not while I work for him.
I know.” She swallowed.
“He called me into his study an hour ago.
He had the photograph from the pond on his desk.
My face isn’t in it.
Only my hair, and my cardigan.
He didn’t recognize me.”
“Then why—”
“Because he gave me a new assignment.” Mizuki’s voice was perfectly level, and her hands on the tablet were shaking.
“He said the detective is useless.
He said he needs someone intelligent, discreet, who can get close to you without suspicion.
Find out where the money comes from.
Find out who the woman at the pond is.
Find out what you want.”
She laughed, very softly, a sound with no humor in it.
“He told me to get close to you, Ms.
Lena,” Mizuki said.
“And I said yes, sir.”
Behind Lena, in the doorway of the villa, four women stood in silence: Yuki with the first edition still in her hand, Ayaka with her arms folded, Rei in her red sweater, and Hina, very still, one hand on her stomach.
Hina was looking at Mizuki’s face.
[End of Chapter 17]