Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 25: The Wooden Sword
Rei slept with the wooden sword.
Lena found it at five in the morning, lying across the padded ridge at the foot of the new bed, Rei’s hand curled around its small worn hilt, her mother’s real sword in its case on the floor beside her, and the Paris épée on the rack across the room.
Three swords, Lena thought.
Three lives.
Rei was awake.
She was looking at the little sword, not at Lena.
“I remember it now,” she said quietly, when she felt Lena move.
“I didn’t, yesterday.
Last night I dreamed it.
She used to sit on the engawa and let me hit her with it.
Very softly.
On the arm.
And every time I hit her she’d say *ow* and fall over in the garden, and I’d laugh until I couldn’t stand up.” She turned the sword over.
“I was five.
I’d forgotten I ever laughed like that.”
“You laugh like that now.”
“I know.
That’s why I remembered.” Rei set the sword down carefully on the ridge.
Then she crawled up the bed, between Yuki and Hina, and lay on top of Lena, her chin on her chest, her grey eyes very close.
“It’s Monday.”
“It is.”
“I don’t want to be sad on my Monday.
I want to be yours.” She paused.
“May I?”
“Always.”
Rei didn’t use a feint this time.
She didn’t use anything.
She kissed her way down Lena’s body slowly, and when she reached her, she stopped and rested her cheek against Lena’s thigh for a moment, breathing, eyes closed, as if listening to something.
Then she took her into her mouth with a soft, low sound, and began.
It was simple.
That was what made it overwhelming.
No strategy, no precision, no stopwatch.
Just Rei, moving slowly and deeply, her hands holding Lena’s hips, her silver hair spilling across Lena’s skin.
She was making small sounds in her throat, unguarded sounds, and Lena realized after a moment that Rei was enjoying it, purely, the way she’d enjoyed hitting her mother with a wooden sword on the engawa.
Not winning.
Just playing.
Lena laughed, breathless, and Rei looked up, startled, and then smiled around her, which made Lena gasp.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Rei mumbled, pulling back for a second.
“You started it.”
“I always start it,” said Rei, and went back down, and this time she was fast, playful, teasing, pulling back to lick and then plunging deep again, until Lena was laughing and moaning at once and couldn’t tell which was which.
She came with Rei’s name and a laugh tangled together in her throat, both hands in Rei’s hair, and Rei held her there, swallowing, shoulders shaking with her own laughter.
When she sat up, her eyes were wet and bright.
“Ow,” she said softly, and fell over sideways onto the mattress, the way her mother used to fall in the garden.
Lena laughed until Yuki woke up and asked what was so funny, and neither of them could explain.
*Ding.*
[Rei Kurosawa | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “The Engawa” — Played instead of competing.]
[System Note: Rei Kurosawa did not time herself.
This is unprecedented.]
Rei wrote to her father at breakfast.
She did it with a brush pen.
Lena hadn’t known she owned one.
It was old, the bamboo handle cracked and taped, and Rei held it the way she held her mother’s sword.
She wrote two characters on a white card, slowly, and then put the pen down and looked at them for a long time.
*ありがとう.* Thank you.
“That’s all?” asked Hina.
“That’s everything,” said Rei, and handed the card to Mizuki.
“Will you put it on his desk?
Don’t tell him anything.
Just put it there.”
Mizuki took the card in both hands and slipped it into her tablet case as carefully as if it were a contract worth four trillion yen.
“He’ll read it a hundred times,” she said quietly.
“He won’t say anything.
But he’ll read it.”
“I know,” said Rei.
Microeconomics was at nine, and for the first time, Lena sat in the fourth row with the aura turned all the way down.
The difference in the hall was immediate.
Three hundred students, and for once, nobody turned around to look at her.
Nobody dropped anything.
Even Nanami, three rows back, wrote steadily without a single pen falling, and when Lena glanced back, Nanami was smiling at her notebook as if it had told her a secret. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
At the whiteboard, Professor Fujiwara was explaining price discrimination.
She turned to face the hall, opened her mouth, and found Lena in the fourth row.
And stopped.
Lena watched her with Yuki’s eye.
The professor was standing very still, marker raised, looking at her the way one looks at a familiar painting after someone has removed the frame.
Searching her face.
Searching for something that should have changed and hadn’t.
Ten full seconds passed.
Three hundred students shifted uneasily.
Then Fujiwara turned back to the board, and Lena saw her hand, holding the marker, tremble just slightly.
“First-degree price discrimination,” the professor said, a little hoarsely.
“When a seller knows exactly what each buyer is willing to pay.
Rare in practice.
Usually, we can’t see into each other’s hearts.”
She did not look at the fourth row again for the rest of the lecture.
After class, in the empty corridor, she stopped Lena with two fingers on her sleeve, the way she had the very first week.
“Something’s different,” Fujiwara said.
“With you.
Today.”
“Is it?”
“I can’t tell what.” The professor took off her glasses and pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“You seem…
quieter.
Less like a spotlight.
Like you’re just a student in the fourth row.” She put her glasses back on.
“And I still…” She stopped.
Pressed her lips together.
“Never mind.
Kakutani.
Have you looked it up?”
“Yesterday.
In the library.
I understand lines fourteen to nineteen now.”
“Explain them to me.”
Lena did.
Right there in the corridor, in four sentences, by the window with the ginkgo leaves.
Fujiwara listened with her arms folded.
When Lena finished, she didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then she said, very quietly, “You’ll pass.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’ve graded that exam,” said Fujiwara.
“I know exactly what it costs.
You’ll pass.” She turned to go.
Then she turned back.
“And whatever you did today, with your quietness.
Thank you.
It made it easier to know.”
“Know what?”
But the professor was already walking away, very fast, her heels clicking on the old floor.
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 97%]
[Aura: 0%]
[System Note: Holding.
Verified without the aura.]
The afternoon seminar on Japanese economic history was presentations.
Lena’s group of four had drawn the Mitsui zaibatsu, and Lena, with Mizuki’s talent, had organized the slides on Saturday night in eleven minutes while Hina watched in horror.
“How?” Hina had asked.
“I can see where everything goes,” Lena had said, which was true and also, apparently, very irritating.
The presentation went smoothly.
Her three groupmates, two boys and a girl named Sato (no relation to Yuki, she had clarified twice), each took a section.
Lena took the last one: the postwar dissolution of the zaibatsu by the Occupation, and how the families had quietly rebuilt their ties through cross-shareholdings, the *keiretsu*, friendly hands holding each other’s shares.
“So the families didn’t really disappear,” the lecturer in the bow tie said afterward, nodding.
“They just learned to hold hands in a less visible way.”
“Yes, sensei.
Sometimes for decades.
Sometimes through companies that never vote.”
The lecturer looked at her over his glasses with sudden, sharp interest.
“That’s very specific.”
“I’ve been reading,” said Lena.
On the walk back to the parking lot, under the ginkgo trees, her phone buzzed twice.
*”Ms.
Lena.
I put the card on his desk at 8:40, under his coffee cup, where he couldn’t miss it.
He found it at 8:52.
He has not moved it.
He has picked it up eleven times.
I am counting from the outer office through the glass.*
*He cancelled his three o’clock with the Takamura bank. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
He told me to tell them he was ‘reviewing a document.’*
*It is two characters long.
— M.H.”*
And a minute later:
*”I’m wearing the old black suit.
Ayaka says it’s the last time.
I believe her.
— M.”*
Lena stood under the yellow leaves and laughed and read both messages twice, and then she showed them to Rei, who was waiting by the Ninja after a council meeting.
Rei read them without expression, handed the phone back, and put on her helmet very quickly so Lena wouldn’t see her face.
That evening, Ayaka declared war on Mizuki’s wardrobe.
“Eleven black suits,” Ayaka said, standing in the fourth-floor atelier with her arms folded, while Mizuki stood on a little wooden platform in front of the three-way mirror in her underwear, red to the ears.
“Eleven.
Identical.
You dress like a bodyguard at a funeral.”
“They’re professional.”
“They’re a cage.” Ayaka walked around her slowly with the measuring tape draped around her neck.
“You’re still going to wear suits to his office.
Fine.
But they’re going to be navy.
Midnight blue.
The color of the sky an hour after sunset.
With a lining,” she held up a bolt of silk the color of deep night, scattered with tiny silver stitches like stars, “that nobody sees but you.”
Mizuki stared at the silk.
“Stars,” she whispered.
“Inside the jacket.”
“Every time you button it in front of him,” Ayaka said softly, “you’ll know they’re there.”
Lena, leaning in the doorway, had paid for the silk and nothing else.
The idea was entirely Ayaka’s.
She watched Mizuki’s face crumple and smooth itself out, then crumple again, and watched Ayaka hold her, and decided the gift was perfect precisely because it wasn’t hers.
The fitting, as fittings in that atelier tended to, did not stay a fitting.
It started with Ayaka measuring Mizuki’s waist with the tape, very slowly, and Mizuki’s breath catching.
Then Ayaka’s mouth on Mizuki’s neck.
Then Lena crossing the room, and Mizuki reaching for her, and the three of them ending up on the cutting table among the bolts of midnight silk, Mizuki on her back with her loose hair spread over the cypress wood, Lena moving inside her slowly while Ayaka knelt beside them and kissed her, swallowing every soft cry.
Then Ayaka on her knees on the platform in front of the three-way mirror, Lena behind her, a hundred reflections of them, Mizuki lying on the table watching with dark, fascinated eyes, until Ayaka cried out and her hands slid down the mirror glass, and Lena came with her.
Afterward the three of them lay on the floor of the atelier, wrapped in midnight silk.
“I’m making you a scarf, too,” Ayaka told Mizuki drowsily.
“With Cassiopeia on it.
In the exact positions of your moles.”
Mizuki made a strangled sound and hid her face in Lena’s shoulder.
[Gift: Mizuki — “Midnight” suit line with star-lined silk (by Ayaka).]
At ten-thirty, Hina came looking for her, with her phone held out at arm’s length as if it might explode.
“My mother,” Hina said.
Her face was a color Lena had never seen on it.
“She called.
She’s coming to Tokyo.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.
On the eight o’clock shinkansen from Shin-Osaka.
To watch my practice.
She does it once a year.
Surprise visit.
It’s a tradition.” Hina swallowed.
“She’s going to stay two nights.
She asked if she could stay with me.”
“That’s…
fine?
She can stay here.
We have eight bedrooms.”
“Lena.” Hina grabbed her by both shoulders.
“She doesn’t know I moved.
She thinks I live in the volleyball dorm.
She doesn’t know about you.
She doesn’t know about Yuki or Rei or Ayaka or Mizuki.” Her voice went up an octave.
“She doesn’t know about *the baby.*”
Lena looked at her.
“Hina,” she said carefully, in perfect Osaka dialect, “what exactly does your mother think you’ve been doing for the last three weeks?”
Hina stared at her, mouth open.
Then she put her face in her hands.
“Volleyball,” she moaned.
“She thinks I’ve been doing volleyball.”
[End of Chapter 25]