Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 4: The Challenge
On the second day, Lena parked the Ninja in the right spot.
It was the last student space, in the corner of the lot, under a ginkgo tree that dropped yellow leaves onto the seat.
She took off her helmet, glanced around, and smiled when she saw who was standing on the steps of the Student Council building directly across from her.
Rei Kurosawa, a folder in her hands and her gaze pointed elsewhere.
Very carefully elsewhere.
“She was waiting for you,” Yuki whispered, climbing off the bike.
“I know.”
“Are you going to talk to her?”
“Not this morning,” Lena said, and walked right past her without stopping.
She only gave her a nod, a small, polite nod, as if she were just another classmate.
Behind her, she heard Rei’s folder hit the steps.
[Rei Kurosawa | Attraction: 75% → 76%]
Yuki covered her mouth to keep from laughing.
Lena had enrolled in the Faculty of Economics.
She’d chosen it before the System, back when she dreamed of making enough money to never serve coffee again.
Now money wasn’t a problem, but the degree had taken on a new meaning.
Someday she would have her own company.
And she wanted to know how to run it.
Yuki headed to the Literature building with a kiss on the cheek and a promise to have lunch together.
The first class was Microeconomics, in a lecture hall with two hundred seats.
Lena sat in the middle.
Within five minutes, the seats around her had filled with girls, while the rest of the hall stayed half-empty.
The professor walked in at exactly nine.
She was around thirty-five, with short black hair, thin-framed glasses, and a severe gray suit.
Lena recognized her immediately: she was the professor who’d looked at her a second too long at the Akamon Gate.
“I’m Professor Sakura Fujiwara,” she said, writing her name on the board in quick, sharp strokes.
“And in this course, half of you will fail.”
She turned toward the hall.
Her gaze swept across the rows, reached the middle, and froze.
The chalk snapped in her fingers.
[Sakura Fujiwara, 35 | Attraction: 70% → 84%]
The professor looked at the chalk, then at Lena, then at the chalk again.
She cleared her throat.
“As I was saying,” she continued, in a voice slightly higher than before.
“Half of you will fail.”
Lena took notes through the entire lecture.
With Yuki’s skill, she read the kanji on the board as easily as Greek.
Every time she looked up, she caught Professor Fujiwara watching her, and every time, the professor whipped back around to the board.
At the end of the lecture, the professor asked a question.
A hard one, about demand curves and elasticity.
No one raised a hand.
Lena did.
Her answer was correct.
Not because of the System.
She remembered it from the books she used to read at night back in Greece, after her shifts at the coffee shop, when everyone else was asleep.
Professor Fujiwara looked at her for a long moment.
“Correct,” she said at last, more gently than she’d spoken all morning.
“What’s your name?”
“Lena.”
“Lena.” The professor repeated it as if tasting it.
“Come by my office on Thursday.
I’d like to discuss my graduate research group with you.”
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 84% → 88%]
At noon, Lena found Yuki in the café beneath the library, with two bentos and a book open in front of her.
She wasn’t alone.
Across from her sat a girl with short brown hair, tanned skin, and a tracksuit bearing the university volleyball team’s logo.
She was tall, broad-shouldered, with a wide, open smile, and she talked with her hands so animatedly that Yuki was holding onto her tea to keep it from spilling.
“Lena!” Yuki stood up in relief.
“This is Hina.
We’re in the same poetry seminar.
She’s—”
“Hina Takeda!” The girl sprang to her feet and stuck out her hand.
“Second-year Sports Science, volleyball team captain, and I took the poetry seminar because I lost a bet.
Nice to meet you!”
Lena shook her hand.
It was warm, strong, with calluses on the palm.
And Hina didn’t let go.
[Hina Takeda, 20 | Attraction: 70% → 85% → 93%]
Hina stared at Lena with her mouth half-open, still holding her hand.
Her tan couldn’t hide the flush creeping up her neck.
“Uh…” Hina said.
“You’re Lena.
Lena with the motorcycle.”
“That’s me.”
“The whole team’s been talking about you since yesterday.” Hina suddenly realized she was still holding her hand and dropped it, laughing nervously.
“Sorry.
I’m not usually like this.
I’m usually…
normal.”
“Sit down,” Lena said with a smile.
“Eat with us.”
Lunch lasted an hour.
Hina was funny, loud, and completely honest.
She talked about volleyball, about her family in Osaka, about how she hated poetry but loved the way Yuki read it.
Yuki, who was reserved at first, started laughing along with her.
Lena watched.
And with Yuki’s skill, she read Hina like a book: a girl everyone loved, who was always strong for everyone else, and whom no one had ever asked if she was tired.
“Hina,” Lena said at one point, “when was the last time you slept eight hours?”
Hina stopped mid-sentence.
Her smile flickered.
“Uh…
I don’t remember,” she said quietly.
“I have practice at six in the morning.
And I work nights at a konbini to pay rent.
And then I study.” She laughed, but it wasn’t the same laugh.
“How did you know?”
“It shows in your eyes.”
Hina looked at her for a long time.
Then she looked at Yuki, who gave her a soft smile.
[Hina Takeda | Attraction: 93% → 100%]
*Ding.*
[Hina Takeda has reached 100%.]
[Talent to acquire: “Heart of the Athlete” — National-team-level stamina, reflexes, and strength.]
Hina pulled her phone out of her tracksuit pocket.
Her fingers were trembling a little.
“Can I…” She swallowed.
“Can I have your number?
And…
I know this sounds crazy, we just met, but…” She looked down.
“Yuki told me you two live together.
In a big house.
Could I…
could I come over sometime?
Just to see what it’s like?”
Lena looked at Yuki.
Yuki, without a word, nodded yes.
“Come tonight,” Lena said, and took Hina’s phone to type in her number.
“And don’t go to the konbini.
I’ll pick you up from practice.”
Hina held the phone to her chest as if it were a medal.
In the afternoon, Lena had no classes.
She had other plans.
The fencing hall was in a low wooden building at the edge of campus, with tall windows and a floor that gleamed.
Lena stood in the doorway and looked inside.
Twelve fencers in white uniforms were training in pairs.
The sound of blades striking each other filled the hall like metallic rain.
And in the middle, without a mask, her platinum ponytail moving like a whip, Rei Kurosawa disarmed her opponent with a move so fast Lena didn’t even see it.
The opponent’s blade hit the floor with a crystalline ring.
“Again,” Rei said coldly.
“You’re too slow.”
Then she turned her head and saw Lena in the doorway.
The whole hall stopped.
The fencers, one by one, lowered their blades and stared.
The women among them took off their masks.
“What do you want here?” Rei asked.
“I came to see the queen in her kingdom,” Lena said, and walked in.
Rei looked her up and down.
The black skirt, the white shirt, the knee-high socks.
Her gaze caught for a moment on her legs before rising back to her face with anger, as if she were angry at herself.
“This is a gym, not a runway.”
“Then give me a sword.”
Silence spread through the hall.
Someone whispered something.
Someone else laughed nervously.
Rei raised an eyebrow.
“You know how to fence?”
“No,” Lena said honestly.
“But I want to see what it’s like to lose to you.
They say no one’s ever beaten you at anything.
I want to understand why.”
Rei looked at her as if she couldn’t decide whether she was angry or fascinated.
Finally she took a sword from the wall and tossed it to her.
Lena caught it.
Barely.
“One point,” Rei said.
“If you touch me once, I’ll give you whatever you want.
If not, you never set foot in here again.”
“Deal.”
They didn’t put on masks.
Rei took her stance with a grace that made her body look like a line of ink.
Lena tried to copy her and immediately felt ridiculous.
“Ready?” someone called.
Rei moved.
Lena didn’t see her.
She only felt the tip of the blade press gently against her chest, right over her heart, before she could even raise her own.
“Point,” Rei said.
“You lose.”
Lena looked down at the tip of the sword on her chest.
Then she looked at Rei.
She was so close now that Lena could see the tiny gray flecks inside her icy eyes.
“That was beautiful,” Lena said quietly.
Rei blinked.
“What?”
“The way you moved.
It was like a dance.
I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.” Lena smiled.
“It was worth losing to see it.”
Rei’s blade trembled.
Barely.
But Lena, with its tip still against her chest, felt it.
Rei lowered it abruptly and turned her back.
“Leave,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t as cold as she wanted it to be.
“You lost.
That was the deal.”
“Okay.” Lena set the sword on the bench and headed for the door.
At the threshold, she stopped.
“Rei?”
Rei didn’t turn around.
But she didn’t say anything either.
“The deal was that I’d never set foot in here again,” Lena said.
“We didn’t say anything about the Student Council.
See you tomorrow.”
And she left.
[Rei Kurosawa | Attraction: 76% → 82%]
[Quest Progress, “The Campus Queen”: 20%]
Inside the hall, no one dared to speak.
Rei Kurosawa stood motionless in the middle of the strip, staring at the tip of her sword, where it had touched Lena’s chest.
Then, for the first time in three years, she abandoned practice halfway through and walked out without a word.
At eight that evening, Lena waited with the Ninja outside the volleyball gym.
Hina came out with her hair wet from the shower and her sports bag on her shoulder.
When she saw Lena, she stopped in the middle of the path and smiled like a kid on Christmas morning.
“You really came,” she said.
“I told you I would.” Lena handed her the second helmet.
“Get on.
Yuki’s cooking.”
“Yuki cooks?”
“Yuki makes curry that’ll make you cry.”
Hina climbed on behind her, and unlike Yuki, she didn’t shriek.
She laughed the entire ride, arms spread wide in the wind on the straightaways, shouting at the city lights.
When they arrived at the villa, Yuki was waiting at the door in an apron with a spoon in her hand.
Hina stood in the garden, looked at the house, the lights, the pool glowing blue behind the glass, and her eyes welled up.
“I live in a six-square-meter room,” she whispered.
“With a window that won’t close.”
Yuki came down the steps, took her hand, and led her inside.
“Not anymore,” she said softly.
And she looked at Lena over Hina’s shoulder, with a small, conspiratorial smile.
Lena knew what that smile meant.
Dinner was loud and warm.
Hina ate three plates of curry, just as Lena had predicted, and on the third she cried a little, just as Lena had also predicted.
Yuki blushed with pride every time Hina said “this is the best food of my life.” They sat on the living room floor, because the furniture wouldn’t arrive until the following week, and Hina leaned her back against the sofa that was still wrapped in plastic.
“You know what?” she said at one point, her eyes half-closed.
“This is the first time in two years I’ve sat somewhere without thinking about what I have to do next.”
Lena and Yuki exchanged a look.
*Ding.*
[Harem Status]
[Members: 1/∞ — Candidates: Hina Takeda (100%), Rei Kurosawa (82%), Sakura Fujiwara (88%), Ayaka Mori (95%)]
[New Quest: “A Home for Hina.” Reward: “Heart of the Athlete.”]
Lena closed the screen and leaned back, listening to the girls laugh in the warm room that smelled of curry.
The night was only just beginning.
[End of Chapter 4]