Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 19: Credit by Examination
At four-fifty on Tuesday morning, Yuki was sitting up in bed with the laminated schedule on her knees and a dry-erase marker in her teeth.
“I’m amending,” she mumbled around the marker, when she saw Lena’s eyes open.
“Rei gave up Wednesday.”
“She what?”
“Last night.
After the report.
She came to the Committee and said, quote, *I will trade Wednesday to Ayaka in exchange for the formal right to time people.*” Yuki took the marker out of her mouth.
“I accepted.
It’s a good trade.
Ayaka gets a day.
Rei gets a stopwatch.
I get peace.” She wrote AYAKA under WEDNESDAY in neat green letters and capped the marker.
“Also, it’s Tuesday.
I’m Tuesday.”
“You are.”
Yuki set the schedule carefully on the nightstand, next to the first edition, and took off her glasses.
Without them her eyes were huge and soft.
“Do you know what I was thinking about all night?” she whispered.
“Mizuki and the stars.
Counting satellites on a roof with her mother.
I think that’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said in our kitchen.” She flushed.
“It made me want you.
Is that strange?”
“It’s not strange.”
“Then may I?”
Lena brushed her bangs off her forehead.
“Please.”
Yuki slid down beneath the duvet, and the duvet became a tent, and inside the tent it was warm and dim and Yuki’s breath was the only sound.
She took her time finding her.
Little kisses along Lena’s hipbone, the soft skin of her lower belly, the crease of her thigh.
Then her small hand, wrapping around her, stroking slowly, learning the weight.
Then her mouth, closing over the tip, warm and wet, her tongue tracing slow circles that made Lena’s toes curl against the sheets.
“Like satellites,” Yuki whispered, pulling back for a breath.
“Going around and around.”
Lena laughed and then stopped laughing, because Yuki had gone back down, deeper this time, and was moving in a slow, steady orbit that never quite repeated itself.
Deep, then shallow.
Lips, then tongue.
Her hand twisting gently at the base on every downstroke.
She had clearly been thinking about it, planning it, the way she planned everything, and the precision of it was so purely Yuki that Lena felt her heart swell even as her hips lifted helplessly off the mattress.
To her right, Hina stirred and opened one sleepy eye, saw the moving duvet, smiled, and pressed her face back into Lena’s shoulder.
“Yuki,” Lena whispered.
“Yuki, close.”
Yuki made a small, pleased sound and didn’t change a thing.
That was what undid her: that Yuki trusted her own orbit.
Lena came with a long, shaking moan, both hands on the duvet over Yuki’s head, and Yuki held her through it, swallowing, patient, her hands soft on Lena’s hips.
She emerged pink and rumpled and found her glasses and checked the clock.
“Five-nineteen,” she said.
“Rei, did you get that?”
“Twenty-seven minutes,” said Rei from the foot of the bed, without opening her eyes, holding her phone up with the stopwatch running.
“Elegant.
Slightly slow in the middle section.
Nine point four.”
“She’s scoring us now,” said Hina into Lena’s shoulder.
“I hate this.
I love this.”
*Ding.*
[Yuki Sato | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[New Feature: “The Committee” has officially recognized a judge.]
[System Note: The judge is biased toward precision.]
At breakfast, Rei and Mizuki wrote the answer to Genji’s question.
It took eleven drafts.
In the end it was two lines.
*— Subject has not mentioned the name Hoshizora.*
*— Will listen for it.*
“Both true,” said Rei, satisfied.
“Lena has never said it in front of you.
Never.
Not once.”
“I’ll never say it now,” said Lena.
“Good,” said Rei.
“Don’t.”
Mizuki read the lines three times, then sent them, then sat back with her hands in her lap.
“Why would he ask that?” she said quietly.
“He’s never said that word in five years.
Not in a meeting.
Not on a phone call.
I’d remember.”
Nobody answered.
Rei looked down at her coffee for a long time.
Then Mizuki stood, put on her black suit jacket, pinned up her hair in its severe bun, picked up her tablet, and became, in thirty seconds, Genji Kurosawa’s perfect secretary again.
“I’ll be back at eight,” she said at the door.
‘Embedded,’ he calls it.” She hesitated.
“Thank you.
For the cat pajamas.”
“Keep them,” said Yuki.
The moment the gate closed behind her, Yuki grabbed Lena’s sleeve and dragged her up four flights of stairs to the flat roof, where a woman in a hard hat was already waiting with a tablet and a tape measure.
“The dome goes here,” the architect said, pointing at the north corner.
“Retractable.
A twelve-inch telescope, computerized mount, a heated observation deck, light shields toward the city.
We can have the shell up by Thursday night if you don’t mind noise.”
“Thursday is her birthday,” Yuki whispered.
“She can’t know.
She has a perfect memory.
She’ll notice a single missing screw.”
“Then we hide it under a tarp,” said Lena, “and tell her it’s a leak.”
Yuki looked deeply troubled at the idea of lying, and then deeply happy about the reason, and settled on writing *ROOF LEAK (FAKE)* in her planner.
Accounting at ten-thirty brought bad news.
“Midterm,” the professor announced, writing on the board.
“November twenty-fourth.
Ninety minutes.
Everything through chapter nine.”
Two hundred students groaned in unison.
Beside Lena, Nanami dropped her pen, picked it up, wrote *NOV 24* on her hand in large letters, and then wrote *DON’T PANIC* under it.
“That’s in five weeks,” she whispered.
“I’ve never passed a midterm without crying first.”
“Then we’ll study before you cry.”
“Together?” Nanami’s ears went red.
“In the library?
On Sundays?
I’ll bring snacks.
I’m good at snacks.”
“Sundays,” Lena agreed.
Nanami wrote *SUNDAYS* on her other hand and looked at both hands for the rest of the lecture as if they were winning lottery tickets.
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 94% → 95%]
At lunch, Lena went to the Registrar’s Office.
It was on the ground floor of the main administration building, behind a long counter staffed by three women in cardigans.
The youngest, a clerk of about twenty-five with a ponytail and a name badge that read *Ono*, looked up and dropped her stamp.
“C-can I help you?”
“I’d like to apply for credit by examination,” Lena said.
“For Microeconomics I.”
Ono stared at her.
“Microeconomics?
You’re a first-year.
In your first semester.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody does that.
I mean, people do it.
Third-years.
Transfer students.
People who already studied it somewhere else.” Ono found a form, and then the wrong form, and then the right form.
“The exam is set by a committee of three.
It’s not the textbook.
It’s the graduate qualifying material, basically.
The pass rate is…” She checked a binder.
“Last year, zero.
The year before, one.”
“When is it?”
“November twenty-eighth.
Saturday.” Ono pushed the form across the counter and then didn’t let go of it.
“Can I ask why?
You’re in Fujiwara-sensei’s class.
Everybody says you got full marks on her quiz.”
Lena thought about how to answer.
“Because there’s someone I want to stop being a student for,” she said.
“In one class.
So we can be something else.”
Ono looked at her for a long, long moment.
Then she let go of the form and stamped it, very firmly.
“Good luck,” she said, and her voice was a little thick.
“I mean it.
I’ll be rooting for you.”
[Ono Haruna, 25 | Attraction: 70% → 78%]
At six o’clock, Fujiwara already knew.
Lena saw it the moment she walked into the office.
The professor was standing at the window again, arms folded, and on her desk lay a photocopy of the form with the registrar’s stamp on it.
“The committee chair is a friend of mine,” Fujiwara said, without turning around.
“She called me at three.
She asked if I knew a first-year named Lena who had just signed up for the November sitting.” A pause.
“She asked if I had put you up to it.”
“Did you?”
“I told you a rule existed.
In a corridor.
Her eyes behind her glasses were bright and very unsettled.
“I didn’t tell you to take it.
It’s a graduate exam.
It’s cruel.
I failed it the first time myself, at twenty-seven.”
“Then teach me how not to fail it.”
“I can’t.
That’s the point.
I can’t help you prepare, or it means nothing.” The professor sat down heavily in her chair.
“If you take it and pass, you leave my lecture.
Someone else’s grade goes on your record, not mine.
You stay in the research group, but only as research, and I’ll have to declare a conflict of interest to the department and let Professor Ishida co-supervise, so I’m never the only one judging your work.” She pressed her fingers to her temples.
“And if you take it and fail, everyone will know why you tried.”
“I don’t care if everyone knows.”
“I do,” Fujiwara said quietly.
“For you.
Not for me.”
The kettle clicked off on the windowsill.
Neither of them moved.
“Sensei,” Lena said.
“I’m going to study for it on my own.
In the library.
On my own time.
You don’t have to do anything.
Just keep teaching me about Hoshizora on Tuesdays and Thursdays like nothing’s changed.”
The professor looked at her for a long time.
Then, very slowly, a smile broke through, small and crooked and astonished.
“You’re impossible,” she said.
“I’ve been told.”
“Sit down,” said Fujiwara, and pulled the second chair a little closer to hers.
Two centimeters.
“We have the Hoshizora annual filings.
I got them this afternoon.”
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 97%]
[System Note: Holding.
But she moved the chair.]
They worked until nine.
The filings were thin, almost empty: Hoshizora Holdings owned its two small stakes and nothing else, earned a little in dividends, paid a little in tax, spent almost nothing.
Every year, the annual return was signed by its director, by hand, and mailed from the same post office in Kamakura.
“She signs in ink,” Fujiwara said, enlarging the scan.
“Nobody signs in ink anymore.
She uses a brush pen.”
The signature was elegant, slanted, the kanji for *Haruka* rendered in one quick, sure stroke like a blade cutting water.
Lena stared at it.
She had seen that stroke before.
She didn’t say anything until she got home.
Hina was waiting in the big bathroom with the tub filled and the lights low, because, she said, the internet said warm baths were good for the baby, and also because she had been alone all evening and wanted Lena all to herself.
She pulled Lena into the water fully clothed, laughing, and peeled her skirt off underwater, and climbed onto her lap in the steam.
It was slow and slippery and sweet.
Hina rode her with her arms around her neck and her forehead against hers, rocking, the water sloshing over the edge of the tub onto the tiles, the sunflower key swinging between her breasts.
She came murmuring *mine, mine* into Lena’s mouth, softer than she ever used to say it, and Lena came with her, holding her hips, careful of the small curve of her belly that wasn’t really a curve yet.
Afterward, drowsy, Hina said, “You’re thinking about something.”
“Yes.”
“Is it a bad something?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Hina kissed her shoulder.
“Then go look.
I’ll wait.”
Rei’s mother’s sword lived in its case at the foot of the big bed, where it always slept beside Rei.
Rei was asleep.
Lena knelt beside the case in the dark and opened it, very quietly.
The blade gleamed.
And near the hilt, on the flat of the blade, there was an engraving Lena had seen a hundred times without reading it: a single line of kanji, cut into the steel by hand.
*For Rei.
Cut what you must.
— H.*
She held her phone beside it, with the Hoshizora signature on the screen.
The same slant.
The same quick stroke.
The same hand.
Behind her, very softly, Rei said, “I know.”
Lena turned.
Rei was awake, propped on one elbow in the dark, watching her.
“I knew the moment you came home and wouldn’t look at the case,” Rei whispered.
“My mother wrote everything with a brush pen.
Grocery lists.
Birthday cards.” Her voice didn’t break.
Her eyes did.
“Close the case, Lena.
Please.
Not yet.”
[End of Chapter 19]