Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 23: Four Pipes and a Kickstart
Six-player rock-paper-scissors took nine rounds, and Mizuki won it without watching a single wrist.
“I didn’t watch,” she said, when Hina accused her at eleven o’clock on Friday night.
“Ayaka watches wrists.
That’s banned.
I just remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
“Every throw from last Saturday.
Yuki told me the results in order.
Hina threw scissors eleven times.
Rei threw rock after every loss and paper after every win.
Ayaka adapts, but she always opens with paper because it’s ‘more elegant.’ Yuki closes her eyes and throws whatever Kawabata would.” Mizuki folded her hands.
“It’s not cheating.
It’s records.”
“That’s worse,” said Hina, delighted.
“That’s so much worse.”
So at five-oh-five on Saturday morning, Lena woke to a gentle, rhythmic tapping on her shoulder, three taps, a pause, three taps, like someone knocking on an office door.
“Ms.
Lena,” Mizuki whispered.
“Good morning.
I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“You can’t call me Ms.
Lena in bed.”
“I’ve called you Ms.
Lena for three weeks.
It’s a hard habit.” Mizuki was kneeling beside her in the half-dark, her hair loose, the crescent moon key on a chain around her neck.
“Lena,” she corrected herself, trying it out, and blushed.
“I won the morning.
I’ve studied.
Yuki showed me yesterday and I remember everything.” She paused.
“May I?
If you say no, I’ll make coffee and be perfectly happy.”
Lena reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear.
“Yes.
I want your first morning.”
Mizuki did not improvise.
Mizuki executed.
She settled between Lena’s thighs, folded her hands for a moment as if reviewing an agenda, and then began, and it was Yuki’s opening: the slow lick from root to tip, three times.
Then Rei’s feint, the kisses that climbed the inside of each thigh and never quite arrived.
Then Ayaka’s stillness, a palm pressed flat on Lena’s stomach.
Then, when Lena was already gasping, Hina’s depth, taking her all the way down and holding there.
Lena’s eyes flew open.
“Mizuki—you—”
“I took notes,” murmured Mizuki, and went back down.
She had learned all of them.
And then, somewhere in the middle, she stopped quoting and started composing.
Her own rhythm emerged, quiet and precise and devastatingly attentive.
She noticed things.
A muscle twitching in Lena’s thigh.
The exact moment Lena’s breath hitched.
She filed each one away instantly and used it ten seconds later, exactly right, as if she’d been doing this for years instead of minutes.
Her hand moved at the base in a steady, patient beat.
Her eyes, when she lifted them, were dark and soft and full of wonder that she was allowed to be there.
Lena came with a long moan she didn’t try to muffle, her fingers buried in Mizuki’s hair, her hips lifting off the mattress, and Mizuki held her through it with perfect calm, swallowing, until the very last tremor.
She sat up, slightly breathless, and smoothed her hair.
“Was that acceptable?” she asked.
Five women were awake and staring at her.
“Twenty-three minutes,” said Rei, finally, with something like reverence.
“Ten.
I’ve never given a ten.
She did all of us.
In order.
And then she did herself.”
“She did *me*,” said Hina, outraged and impressed.
“She did my thing!
In the middle!”
“Your thing is very good,” said Mizuki shyly.
“I wanted to include it.”
*Ding.*
[Mizuki Hayashi | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “Executive Summary” — Synthesized the techniques of four predecessors on the first attempt.]
The answer to Haruka’s message took Rei twelve minutes, in the garden, after training.
Lena had shown her at five-forty, before anything else, because she had promised daylight and no lies.
Rei had read it standing on the flat stone by the koi pond in her fencing whites, the old Paris épée in one hand, the phone in the other.
Her face hadn’t moved.
“*Do not let her come until she is ready,*” Rei read aloud.
“*I will wait.*” She handed the phone back.
“She’s been waiting eleven years.
“She’s telling me to protect you.”
“I know what she’s telling you.” Rei looked at the koi for a long time.
“Write back.
One line.
From you, not me.”
“What line?”
Rei was silent.
Then she said, very quietly: “*She smiled.*”
Lena typed it.
*She smiled.
— L.* She showed Rei the screen.
Rei nodded once.
Lena sent it.
They stood together by the pond.
A minute later, the phone buzzed.
There was no text.
Just a single photograph: a small wooden house with a tiled roof, half hidden by a persimmon tree heavy with orange fruit, and a woman’s hand in the corner of the frame, holding a brush pen, resting on a sheet of paper on which a single character was written, still wet.
*笑* — *smile.*
Rei looked at it for a very long time.
Then she gave the phone back and walked into the salle and fenced alone for an hour.
At eleven, Lena stood in the Yanaka back street in front of Kaneko Motors while Mrs.
Kaneko sat on an upturned crate with her cigarette behind her ear and her arms folded.
The CB750 stood in the street, candy-apple red and chrome, its four exhaust pipes gleaming like organ pipes.
Behind Lena, on the sidewalk, sat her audience: Yuki with a thermos of tea, Ayaka with sunglasses, Mizuki with a notebook, and Hina, who had been strictly forbidden by everyone from touching the motorcycle and was sitting on her own hands.
Rei had stayed home.
She’d said it was to fence.
Everyone knew it was to look at a photograph.
“Electric start’s been dead since 1989,” said Mrs.
Kaneko.
“Kickstart only.
Choke’s stiff.
She floods if you look at her wrong.
If you stall her on the block, you walk home.”
“Understood.”
Lena had spent two nights reading the 1972 service manual.
With Mizuki’s talent, every page was now sitting in her head like a photograph.
She knew the choke position.
She knew the idle screw.
She knew that you had to prime the kick, slow, until you felt compression, then let it come back, and then give it one clean full stroke.
Knowing, she was learning, was not the same as doing.
The first kick, nothing.
The second, a cough.
Mrs.
Kaneko snorted.
Lena closed her eyes, felt for compression the way Rei had taught her to feel for an opponent’s blade, eased the choke back a hair, and kicked.
The CB750 woke with a roar.
Four cylinders, four pipes, a deep, mellow, rumbling howl that rolled down the narrow Yanaka street and set every cat on every wall bolt upright.
It was nothing like the Ninja’s growl or the Ducati’s scream.
It was older, warmer, a sound with fifty years of Tokyo in it.
Mrs.
Kaneko took the cigarette from behind her ear and put it back without lighting it.
Lena swung onto the seat, pulled on her helmet, eased the clutch, and rolled out.
Around the block.
The temple corner, slow.
The sharp left past the rice-cracker shop, where an old man in an apron stepped out to watch.
The steep little hill by the cemetery, where the bike lugged and Lena gave it a little more throttle at exactly the right moment, and felt it answer, and laughed inside her helmet.
Back down the street, past her audience, Yuki jumping, Hina standing up on the curb and then sitting back down as Mizuki and Ayaka each grabbed one arm.
And to a stop in front of the garage, idle steady, no stall.
She killed the engine.
The silence rang.
Mrs.
Kaneko got up off her crate.
She walked slowly around the bike, once, and stopped in front of Lena.
“He’d have liked you,” she said gruffly.
“He liked girls who rode like they meant it.” She wiped her hands on her overalls.
“Three hundred and eighty-five thousand yen.
What he paid for her in seventy-two.
Not a yen more.”
“That’s nothing.
She’s worth twenty times that.”
“I didn’t ask what she’s worth.
I said what he paid.” Mrs.
Kaneko jabbed a finger at her.
“And you bring her back every six months for service.
Here.
Not some dealership with a coffee machine.”
“Every six months,” Lena promised.
Mrs.
Kaneko looked at her a moment longer.
She turned away abruptly.
“And turn down whatever that is you’re doing,” she muttered.
“I’m seventy-one.”
Lena laughed, and turned the dial down, all the way, and Mrs.
Kaneko’s shoulders relaxed and she lit her cigarette at last.
The garage in Denenchofu now held three motorcycles.
The black Ninja.
The red Ducati.
And at the end, in space three, the candy-apple CB750, chrome glowing under the fluorescent light like something in a museum that had decided to escape.
Two empty spaces left.
Yuki stood in the doorway with her thermos.
She looked at the three bikes, then at the two empty spaces, then at Lena’s face.
“You’re going to need a bigger garage,” she said, resigned.
“Do you think?”
“I’m a literature student,” said Yuki.
“I can recognize foreshadowing.”
At one, the volleyball team played Waseda in the autumn league, and Hina coached from the bench in her gold-embroidered captain’s jacket, and Lena sat in the stands with the dial turned down so low that for the first time, the players on the court looked at the ball instead of the bleachers.
They won in three straight sets.
Afterward, the middle blocker with the high ponytail came over to the railing, red-faced, and said, “That was the first match all season I could concentrate.
Sorry.
I don’t know why I said that.”
Hina, behind her, put an arm around her shoulders and grinned up at Lena.
“Keep it down,” Hina mouthed.
And then, aloud, cheerfully, to her blocker: “You were great.
Two hundred serves tomorrow.”
At three, Yuki’s Prose Circle met to finalize the anthology for the festival.
Mizuki came, because Yuki asked her to.
She sat in the corner with a laptop and, in forty minutes, formatted all eleven submissions into a single typeset document with consistent margins, a table of contents, and page numbers, while the circle watched in awed silence.
The old professor leaned over to Lena.
“Where did you find that one?”
“She found us.”
“Keep her too,” he said.
The new bed arrived at six.
It took four men to carry the frame up the stairs and two hours to assemble, and it was, as Rei had insisted, custom: three meters wide, with a slightly raised padded ridge across the foot.
“For my head,” Rei explained, lying down on it to test, as the workmen left in bewilderment.
“Ergonomic.”
They christened it that night.
It wasn’t planned.
It never was.
It began with Ayaka on her knees at the foot of the bed, kissing Rei, and Rei pulling her down onto the new mattress, and Hina laughing and climbing in after them.
Yuki crawled in from the left, Mizuki from the right, shy and then not shy at all.
And then there were five women and Lena and a great deal of new sheet, and hands everywhere, and mouths, and someone’s hair across Lena’s face that smelled of Ginza, and someone’s knee that turned out to be Rei’s.
Lena took them one by one, and sometimes two at once, and lost count.
Hina on top of her, laughing, then moaning, Yuki kissing Hina’s neck.
Ayaka on her back with her long legs over Lena’s shoulders, crying out, and Mizuki holding her hand, then kissing her.
Rei last, on her knees on the ridge she’d designed, Lena behind her, Rei’s face pressed into the mattress and her hand reaching back for Lena’s, gasping that the ridge was “functioning exactly as intended.”
When it was over, they lay in a tangle across three meters of mattress, and there was room for everyone.
Yuki on the left.
Hina on the right.
Ayaka across Lena’s stomach.
Rei at her hip, on the ridge.
Mizuki curled into Lena’s side, between Yuki and Lena, holding a fistful of her hair.
“It’s perfect,” Yuki sighed.
“It’s big enough for eight,” said Mizuki, who had measured it.
“Approximately.”
Nobody said anything.
Then Hina, very quietly, said, “Yuki.
Do we need a new column on the schedule?”
“Not yet,” said Yuki.
“But I bought more lamination.”
At midnight, Lena’s phone buzzed.
It was Nanami.
*”Lena.
Tomorrow at the library, at ten.
I’ll bring the rice crackers.*
*I have something to tell you.
Before I lose my nerve.
And I want to ask you something, and I know it’s strange.*
*When you’re near me, it’s like there’s music playing too loud and I can’t hear myself think.
I know that sounds crazy.
But today, at the volleyball match (I was in the top row, I go sometimes, please don’t tell Hina), it went quiet.
And I still felt the same.*
*Tomorrow, can you make it quiet again?
I want to know it’s really me.*
*— Nanami”*
[End of Chapter 23]