Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 18: The Assignment
Hina had looked at Mizuki’s face for one full minute.
Nobody had spoken.
They had stood in the villa’s front hall at nine-forty on Sunday night, the rain dripping from the pines outside, five women and a secretary in a black suit, and Hina had walked up to Mizuki and stood in front of her and simply looked.
Mizuki, to her enormous credit, had not looked away.
She had held her tablet against her chest and stood very straight and let herself be read.
At the end of the minute, Hina had said: “Guest room.
Second floor.
Yuki will bring you pajamas.
We’ll talk in the morning.”
Then she’d turned and gone upstairs, and that had been that.
So on Monday morning, when Lena woke at five-oh-two, the first thing she thought about was not the woman in the guest room down the hall.
It was the cool fingertips resting on her ankle and the grey eyes looking at her from the foot of the bed.
“It’s Monday,” Rei whispered.
“I’m reclaiming it.
Ayaka has had her gift.”
“I know.”
“I’m telling you because I enjoy telling you.” Rei crawled up the bed, careful not to wake Ayaka, who was sprawled across Lena’s stomach with one arm flung over Yuki, or Hina, who had slept curled tight around Lena’s right side all night as if guarding her.
“There is a stranger in the house.
A kind one.
I’ve decided not to think about it until breakfast.” She paused, and her voice dropped.
“May I?”
“Yes, Rei.”
“Good,” said Rei.
“I’ve been thinking about it since Thursday.”
She lifted Ayaka’s arm aside like a drawbridge and slipped beneath it, and then she was between Lena’s thighs, her silver hair loose, her face very serious in the grey dawn.
Rei had a new idea.
Lena could see it in her eyes, the same narrow focus she wore on the fencing strip before a feint.
She started at Lena’s knee.
Slow, light kisses, climbing the inside of her thigh, one centimeter at a time.
Then the other knee.
Then back.
She never quite arrived.
She came so close that Lena felt her breath, warm and teasing, and then retreated to the other thigh, and Lena’s hips lifted off the mattress all on their own.
“Rei,” she whispered.
“That’s cruel.”
“That’s a feint,” said Rei, very softly.
“Watch the next one.”
The next one wasn’t a feint.
Rei took her into her mouth in a single, slow, perfect motion, all the way down, and held her there, and Lena’s whole body went rigid and her hands flew to the sheets.
Then Rei moved, and it was devastating.
Long strokes, unhurried, her lips tight, her tongue pressed flat along the underside.
Every few strokes she stopped at the very tip and swirled, once, before going down again, a rhythm as precise as footwork, so that Lena could feel each return coming and still couldn’t brace herself for it.
Rei’s cheeks hollowed.
Her eyes closed.
A low sound hummed in her throat, and Lena felt it all the way to her spine.
Ayaka murmured in her sleep and shifted.
Rei didn’t stop.
“Rei,” Lena gasped, “Rei, I can’t…”
Rei opened her eyes, looked straight up at her, and took her deep one last time.
Lena came with her fist pressed to her lips and her back arching so hard that Ayaka’s arm slid off her stomach.
Rei held her through every pulse, steady and sure, swallowing, until Lena fell back limp against the pillows.
Rei sat up, touched the corner of her mouth with her fingertip, and looked at the clock on the nightstand.
“Five twenty-four.
I’m not allowed to time people,” she said.
“So I didn’t.”
“You just did.”
“I observed,” said Rei serenely.
“The Committee has no rule against observing.”
*Ding.*
[Rei Kurosawa | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “The Feint” — Struck true after two false attacks.]
At seven, in the kitchen, the Committee convened.
Yuki sat at the head of the table with the laminated schedule in front of her and a pen.
Hina sat on her right with a bowl of rice and an unreadable expression.
Rei sat on her left in her red sweater, legs crossed, arms folded, with a legal pad.
Ayaka leaned against the counter with coffee.
Lena sat at the far end, feeling like a defendant.
Mizuki Hayashi sat alone in the middle chair, in Yuki’s spare pajamas, which had little cats on them and ended at her shins.
“I’m sorry,” Mizuki said.
“For last night.
For coming.
I know what I said at the pond.
Not while I work for him.”
“You still work for him,” Yuki said.
“He told you to come here.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re here because he sent you.”
“No.” Mizuki’s hands tightened on her teacup.
“I’m here because when he told me to get close to Lena, I realized I could stay close without lying to her.
And without lying to you.” She looked at each of them.
“If I say no to him, he gives the assignment to someone else.
Someone who will lie.
Anything.
You decide.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“You want to be a double agent,” Rei said slowly.
“In my father’s house.
For us.”
“I’ve been one for two weeks,” said Mizuki.
“I’m just asking permission to be one in yours.”
Yuki pushed her glasses up her nose and looked at Mizuki for a long time with her soft, serious, literary gaze.
Then she asked a question nobody expected.
“What do you love?”
Mizuki blinked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Not Lena.
Everyone loves Lena.
That’s the System.” Yuki said it matter-of-factly.
“What do you love that’s yours?
Ayaka loves fabric.
Rei loves swords.
Hina loves volleyball and yelling.
I love books.
What do you love?”
Mizuki was silent for so long that Lena thought she wouldn’t answer.
“Stars,” she said finally, very quietly.
“In Niigata, where I grew up, there were no streetlights on our road.
My mother and I used to sit on the roof of the dry-cleaning shop on summer nights and count satellites.
I haven’t seen a real night sky in eleven years.
Tokyo doesn’t have one.” She looked down at her cup.
“I keep a planetarium membership.
I go alone, on Sundays, when he’s at golf.
It’s the only thing I do that he doesn’t schedule.”
Yuki nodded slowly, as if a character had just revealed her motive on page three hundred.
“Then you can stay,” Yuki said.
“I’m first.
I say yes.”
Every head turned to Hina.
Hina put down her chopsticks.
She looked at Mizuki’s face again, the way she had the night before, and Mizuki looked back.
“I looked last night,” Hina said.
“For a whole minute.
I was looking for the lie.” She paused.
“There wasn’t one.
You were scared.
You weren’t lying.” She picked up her chopsticks again.
“So, yes.
You stay.
Guest room.
Until you choose.”
“Until I choose?”
“Not him.
Not his assignment.
Not because you’re scared or grateful.” Hina’s eyes were very steady.
“When you come to Lena’s bed, it’s because you chose it.
Not before.
I’ll know the difference.
I always know.”
Mizuki bowed her head until her forehead almost touched the table.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Both of you.”
“And there’s the matter of the report,” said Rei, uncapping her pen.
“My father expects one tonight, I assume.”
“Every evening at nine,” Mizuki said.
“Bullet points.
He doesn’t read paragraphs.”
“Excellent.” Rei’s eyes gleamed with something Lena had only ever seen before a championship bout.
“Then we’ll write him one.
Together.”
Microeconomics at nine was game theory.
Professor Fujiwara drew a two-by-two box on the whiteboard and wrote PRISONER’S DILEMMA above it, and Lena almost laughed out loud.
“Two suspects,” Fujiwara said, tapping the box.
“Separated.
Each can confess or stay silent.
If both stay silent, both get one year.
If one confesses and the other doesn’t, the one who confesses goes free and the silent one gets ten.
If both confess, five years each.
What do they do?”
“Confess,” said the boy in the front row.
“It’s the dominant strategy.”
“Correct.
The rational choice is to betray.
And yet both end up worse off than if they’d trusted each other.” Fujiwara turned to the hall.
“So.
How do you escape the dilemma?”
Silence.
Then Nanami, three rows behind Lena, raised her hand, which she had never done before.
Her pen fell.
She ignored it.
“If they have to play again and again, every day, forever.
Then betrayal costs something tomorrow.
Then trust becomes rational.”
Fujiwara looked at her.
Lena watched the professor’s face soften.
“Name?”
“Okamoto.
Nanami.”
“Okamoto-san,” said the professor.
“That’s exactly right.
Trust is what happens when people expect to see each other again.” She glanced, very briefly, at the fourth row.
“Next slide.”
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 93% → 94%]
After class, Lena caught Fujiwara in the corridor, by the window where the ginkgo leaves were piling against the glass.
“Sensei.
A question about the rules.
Not economics.”
The professor stopped, her stack of papers held against her chest like armor.
“Go on.”
“Is there a way to finish a course early?
An exam you can take, so that someone else grades it?”
Fujiwara went very still.
She understood the question.
Lena watched her understand it, watched the color climb from her collar to her ears.
“There’s credit by examination,” she said at last, carefully, to the window.
“For students with prior knowledge.
It’s set and graded by an outside committee of three professors.
Not the course instructor.” She paused.
“It’s very hard.
Almost nobody passes.
The next sitting is in late November.”
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t tell you anything,” said Fujiwara, and walked away so fast her heels skidded on the old wooden floor.
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 97%]
[Hidden Condition “The Professor’s Line”: a path has been found.]
The first report went to Genji Kurosawa at eight fifty-nine that evening.
They wrote it at the kitchen table, all six of them.
Rei drafted.
Mizuki formatted.
Ayaka argued for adjectives.
Hina wanted to add threats and was overruled.
Yuki edited for tone.
Lena sat at the end and occasionally said “that’s not true” and was told it didn’t need to be.
*Report: Subject L.*
*— Subject resides in Denenchofu with several university roommates.
Atmosphere: domestic.
Curry is frequent.*
*— Source of funds: appears to be a family trust in Greece.
Investigating further.*
*— Subject attends all classes.
Excellent student.
No visible business activity.*
*— Subject rides motorcycles.
Two.
Possibly a third soon.*
*— Rei-sama is in good health.
She is eating well.*
“The last line,” Mizuki said, hesitating over it.
“He didn’t ask about her.”
“Leave it,” said Rei quietly.
“Let him read it anyway.”
Mizuki pressed send.
They all watched the screen.
After, while Mizuki went upstairs to the guest room with a borrowed book on astronomy from the library, Lena found herself in the big bed with Yuki and Ayaka, the others still downstairs arguing about the next report.
It started as a kiss.
Yuki’s kiss, small and sweet, and then Ayaka’s, slow and deep, and then the two of them kissing each other across Lena’s chest, Yuki’s glasses fogging, Ayaka laughing softly against her lips.
Yuki climbed on top first, sinking down onto Lena with a shaky sigh, and Ayaka knelt behind her and wrapped her long arms around her waist and kissed her neck while she moved, whispering things in her ear that made Yuki gasp and go red to the collarbones and move faster.
“What are you telling her?” Lena managed.
“Fashion advice,” said Ayaka, and Yuki laughed so hard she came, startled, collapsing forward onto Lena’s chest.
Then it was Ayaka’s turn, on her back, her hair spread across the pillow like spilled ink, her long legs wrapped around Lena’s waist, Yuki lying beside them holding her hand and watching with wide, fascinated eyes, until Ayaka arched and cried out and pulled Lena down with her into the dark.
At nine-forty, Mizuki knocked on the bedroom door.
She was still in the cat pajamas.
Her face was white.
“He answered,” she said.
“He never answers the reports.
He just reads them.”
She held out the tablet.
*”Good.
Continue.*
*Find out if she has ever heard the name Hoshizora.*
*— G.K.”*
[End of Chapter 18]