Futa Harem System: Infinite Money in Tokyo
Chapter 8: A Schedule With Times
The new schedule had times.
Lena found this out at four fifty-two in the morning, when a small, cold hand tapped her shoulder and a voice whispered, very seriously, “Lena.
It’s Friday.
Friday is mine.
It says so in red.”
She opened one eye.
Yuki was kneeling beside her on the mattress, glasses already on, hair sticking up on one side, holding a laminated sheet of paper against her bare chest like a court order.
“You laminated it,” Lena whispered.
“Hina can’t erase lamination.” Yuki pointed.
Under FRIDAY, in red marker, it said YUKI, and beneath that, in smaller, stern kanji: 04:45-05:25.
NO ALARMS BEFORE 04:30.
VIOLATIONS WILL BE REPORTED TO THE COMMITTEE.
“What committee?”
“Me.” Yuki pushed her glasses up her nose.
To Lena’s left, the space where Yuki usually slept was still warm.
To her right, Hina was snoring with her face mashed into Lena’s ribs and one hand spread over her own stomach.
At the foot of the bed, Rei lay curled against Lena’s hip, frowning in her sleep as if she were losing an argument in a dream.
Her alarm was set for five-thirty.
Hina’s had been confiscated.
Yuki had hidden it in the rice cooker.
“I woke you up to ask,” Yuki whispered, suddenly shy again, the committee voice gone.
“You can say no.
You can go back to sleep.
I’ll just…
lie here and read.”
Lena reached up and fixed the tuft of hair sticking out over her ear.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“Come here.”
Yuki was the one who had done this first, the morning after their first night, nervous and clumsy and so sweet it had made Lena laugh and cry at the same time.
She wasn’t clumsy anymore.
She had, Lena suspected, done research.
She slid down under the sheet slowly, her glasses fogging, and took them off and folded them with great care and placed them on the mattress, and then she looked at Lena, nearsighted and pink, and whispered, “Tell me if I’m doing it like the book.”
“What book?”
“I’m not telling you.”
And then her mouth was on Lena, warm and unhurried, and Lena forgot to ask.
Yuki kissed her first, little reverent kisses along the length of her, like reading poetry with her lips.
Then she took her in, inch by careful inch, her small hand wrapped around the base.
She was slow the way an autumn afternoon is slow.
Every time Lena’s hips lifted, Yuki pressed a palm flat to her stomach, gently, as if saying *wait, I’m not finished with this page.*
Lena gripped the pillow above her head.
Beside her, Hina sighed in her sleep and pressed closer.
At her hip, Rei’s breathing stayed slow and even.
“Yuki,” Lena breathed.
“Yuki, I’m…”
Yuki looked up at her through her lashes, and Lena saw it with the talent she had taken from her: not lust, or not only.
Pride.
The quiet, fierce pride of a girl who had once hidden behind a Kawabata novel and was now exactly where she wanted to be.
She didn’t stop.
She hummed, softly, and the vibration went straight up Lena’s spine, and Lena came biting her own wrist, shaking, the sheet sliding off both of them.
Yuki swallowed, sat up, found her glasses, put them on, and checked the clock on the nightstand.
“Five twenty-one,” she whispered, with deep satisfaction.
“Four minutes early.”
Lena laughed silently into her pillow until the bed shook.
Hina grunted.
Rei’s alarm went off.
*Ding.*
[Yuki Sato | Love: 100% — LOCKED]
[Achievement unlocked: “Punctual” — The Morning Schedule was respected for the first time in harem history.]
At five-thirty-two, Lena stood in the villa’s former billiards room in a white fencing jacket, a sword in her hand, while Rei walked slowly around her like a cat around a fish tank.
On Thursday night a truck had brought a regulation strip, mirrors, and a rack of épées.
Rei had not spoken for a full minute afterward, which for Rei was the equivalent of weeping.
“Your guard is lazy,” Rei said now.
“You beat me yesterday because I’m an idiot who blushes.
That will not happen in a tournament.
Again.”
“It might happen in a tournament.”
“Only if you are my opponent.
Again.”
They fenced until six-fifteen.
Lena had Rei’s talent, but Rei had ten years of habit, and the gap turned out to be enormous.
Rei touched her eleven times.
Lena touched Rei twice, and both times Rei said “acceptable,” which, Yuki later explained over breakfast, was Rei for “I am madly in love with you.”
Breakfast was miso soup, grilled salmon, and Hina discovering the rice cooker.
“You put my alarm in the RICE.”
“It’s not in the rice,” Yuki said.
“It’s in the little steam basket.
It’s warm.
It’s happy.”
Hina held the dripping clock aloft with an expression of profound betrayal that slowly became a grin.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay, Sato.
You’ve got guts.
I respect it.” She set the alarm down very gently on the counter and patted it.
“Next week, I sleep with it under my pillow.”
“Hina,” Lena said.
“Before you go to practice.
Wait a second.”
She came back from upstairs with a small velvet box. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Something I owe you,” Lena said, and opened the box.
Inside was a silver key on a ring, and from the ring hung a tiny silver sunflower, its petals delicately engraved.
“You moved in during a party, and then there was Rei’s father, and the baby, and I never gave you one.
Rei got hers before you.
That’s not fair.”
Hina didn’t touch it.
“A sunflower,” she said.
“Because you always turn toward the light,” Lena said.
“And because the first time I saw you, at the seminar, you were the brightest thing in the room.”
Hina took the key with two fingers, as if it might burn her, closed her fist around it, and bent forward until her forehead touched the table.
“Hina?”
“Give me a second,” came the muffled voice.
“I’m the captain.
Captains don’t cry at breakfast.”
Yuki came around the table and put her arms around her from behind.
Rei, after visible internal debate, put a cup of tea by Hina’s elbow, which was Rei for the same thing.
When Hina sat up, her eyes were red, and she was smiling so wide it looked painful.
“I was jealous,” she said.
“Of the snowflake.
I didn’t say anything.
I thought maybe…” She stopped.
“Doesn’t matter what I thought.
This is mine.”
“It’s yours.”
“Mine,” Hina repeated, softly, to the key.
Then she looked up, and for half a second her eyes were very dark.
“If anyone ever tries to take it, I’ll—”
“Hina.”
“—be very sad,” Hina finished sweetly, and threaded the key onto the chain around her neck.
Microeconomics was at nine, in Lecture Hall 2, and Professor Fujiwara did not look at Lena once for the first forty minutes.
This took effort.
Lena could see it from the fourth row: the professor drawing supply and demand curves in quick, furious strokes, blazer buttoned to the throat, glasses firmly on her nose.
Every time the professor’s eyes swept the hall, they skipped one seat in the fourth row with the precision of a stone skipping water.
“Elasticity,” Fujiwara said, tapping the board.
“If the price of a good rises by ten percent and demand falls by twenty, what do we call that good?”
Silence.
Three hundred first-years discovered an urgent interest in their notebooks.
“Elastic,” said someone.
Not Lena.
A boy in the front row.
“Correct.
Now.
Give me an example of a perfectly inelastic good.” The professor’s eyes swept the hall again.
Skipped the fourth row.
Swept back.
Stopped.
Lena felt it like a hand on her collarbone.
“Lena,” the professor said, and her voice cracked very slightly on the second syllable.
“An example.”
Lena thought about the café in Piraeus, and the old men who came at six every morning for a coffee they would have paid five euros for, because the coffee was not really what they were buying.
“Insulin,” she said.
“And loneliness.”
A few people laughed.
Fujiwara didn’t.
“Explain the second one.”
“People who are lonely will pay almost anything to not be,” Lena said.
“A café where the waitress knows your name.
A bar.
A phone call.
The price goes up, they still pay.
They cut something else instead.
Food, sometimes.”
The hall was quiet.
Somewhere to Lena’s left, a pen hit the floor and rolled.
Professor Fujiwara stood very still at the whiteboard, marker in hand.
Lena watched her the way Yuki would have watched a character on the page, and saw it: a twenty-four-year-old woman wiping down a ramen counter at midnight in Fukuoka, a textbook open beside the register, and no one waiting for her at home.
“That,” the professor said finally, “is not in the textbook.” She turned back to the board.
“It should be.
Next slide.”
[Sakura Fujiwara | Attraction: 93% → 94%]
When the class ended, Lena bent to pick up the pen that had rolled to her feet.
It was a cheap blue ballpoint, chewed at the end.
A hand appeared beside hers.
“Thank you,” said Nanami Okamoto, crimson.
“That’s my second one.
The third I left at home so I wouldn’t drop it.”
“You’re in this class too?”
“Retaking it.” Nanami winced.
“I failed in spring.
Too scared to ask questions.” She looked at Lena, then away.
“You just…
answer.
Like it’s easy.”
“It’s not easy,” Lena said.
“I’m terrified every time.”
Nanami blinked as if this had never occurred to her.
[Nanami Okamoto | Attraction: 81% → 83%]
At four, Lena sat in the bleachers of the university gymnasium with Yuki beside her and a bag of melon bread between them, watching Hina destroy people.
The women’s volleyball team was practicing for the autumn league.
Hina, in shorts and a sleeveless jersey, with her sunflower key tucked inside her collar, was in the middle of the court shouting in Osaka dialect so dense that even Yuki’s talent took a second to parse it.
She jumped, and the gym seemed to wait for her to come down.
She spiked, and the ball hit the floor like a gunshot.
“She’s pregnant.”
“She’s three days pregnant,” Yuki said, tearing a melon bread in half.
“The baby is the size of a sesame seed.”
“A sesame seed that’s going to be my daughter.”
Yuki looked at her and smiled very softly and gave her the bigger half.
At the water break, three teammates drifted over.
They were pretending very hard they had come to stretch near the railing.
“You’re the Greek girl,” said one, a middle blocker with a high ponytail.
“The fencing one.”
“Lena.”
“Lena,” the blocker repeated, as if tasting it.
Her two friends giggled.
The aura hummed, warm and lazy, like a cat in a sunbeam.
“Do you, um, come to all the practices?
Because we have a match tomorrow, against Keio, and if you came, maybe…”
“She’s coming,” said Hina.
None of them had heard her approach.
She was simply there, behind her teammates, towel around her neck, smiling the widest, friendliest, most Osaka smile in the world.
“She’s coming,” Hina repeated cheerfully, “to watch ME.
Right?
Because she’s MINE.
Ours.” She glanced at Yuki, included her with a tilt of the head, and turned the smile back on her teammates.
“Isn’t that nice?
Okay!
Water break’s over.
Fifty serves each.
Go.”
“Captain, we just did fifty—”
“A hundred,” Hina said, still smiling.
They went.
Hina leaned on the railing and looked up at Lena.
Her eyes were bright and warm, and underneath the warmth, very, very deep, was something that did not blink.
“I’m fine,” she said, before Lena could ask.
“I’m not doing anything.
I’m just making them strong.
For the match.”
“Hina.”
“I asked my coach.
I’m captain.
It’s my job.” She reached up and tucked a strand of Lena’s hair behind her ear.
“And I’m not jumping anymore after today.
I promise.
For the sesame seed.”
The shopping trip to Ginza was Rei’s fault.
“I own,” Rei announced at dinner, “eleven blazers, six identical white shirts, four pleated skirts in navy, a fencing uniform, and one dress for funerals.” She set down her chopsticks.
“I have nothing to wear that my father did not choose.”
So at seven, the Ninja purred to a stop on Namiki-dori, with Rei holding Lena’s waist, and Lena walked her into the boutique where, nine days earlier, she had bought her first skirt in Japan.
Ayaka Mori looked up from the counter.
The hanger she was holding slid off its rail and clattered to the floor.
“Welcome,” Ayaka said, a little too loudly, and then, softer, “…back.”
She was exactly as Lena remembered, tall, perfect bun, a black suit tailored like a blade.
But when she came around the counter, she stopped two steps too far away, as if she didn’t trust herself closer.
[Ayaka Mori, 29 | Attraction: 95% → 97%]
“This is Rei,” Lena said.
“She needs everything.
Things she chooses herself.”
Ayaka looked at Rei with the look of a woman who could read a body and a life in three seconds: the straight back, the inherited blazer, the hands that didn’t know what to do without a sword.
“Silk,” Ayaka said.
“Not wool.
Grey, not navy, to match her eyes.
And something red.
Just one thing.
So she remembers she’s allowed.” She turned toward the racks, and then turned back and looked at Lena, and her professional voice slipped.
“You said you’d call,” she said quietly.
Lena felt it land.
“I did,” she said.
“And I didn’t.
I’m sorry.
Everything happened very fast.”
“I know.
I saw the news.
The Ice Queen kissing a Greek girl in front of the whole fencing club.
It was on three campus blogs.” Ayaka smiled, a little crooked.
“I kept the phone in my pocket for a week.
Like a high school girl.”
She brought Rei silk, and grey, and one red sweater, and when Rei came out of the fitting room in it, staring at herself in the mirror with an expression Lena had never seen on her, Ayaka stood next to Lena and said, without looking at her, “We close at eight tomorrow.
Saturday.
I’m the one who locks up.”
Lena looked at her.
Ayaka’s ears had gone bright red.
But her voice was steady.
“I could stay late,” she said.
“For a private fitting.
If you wanted.”
*Ding.*
[Ayaka Mori | Attraction: 97% → 98%]
[New Quest: “After Hours” — Accept the invitation.]
[System Note: The candidate has been thinking about this for nine days.]
In the mirror, Rei met Lena’s eyes and raised one platinum eyebrow, very slowly.
[End of Chapter 8]