[Sasaki's Apartment — Tokyo | 12:01 PM]
Scene after scene slid behind his eyelids like frames on a projector reel—morning light cutting through the blinds of the principal's office while Mitsuki's composure crumbled beneath his hands; the cold promise threaded into his voice when he'd told Ruri to show up at his apartment tomorrow; the way Sayuri's breath had stuttered against his collarbone in the blue-dark of the living room. The final image held—a single red bloom on Sayuri's pale throat, the strawberry mark he'd sucked into her skin still vivid as a pressed flower, and then the slideshow collapsed into static.
The settlement interface replaced everything.
> 「Daily Scumbag Rating: Outstanding.」
>
> 「Scumbag Points Earned: +250」
>
> 「Current Scumbag Point Balance: 300」
>
> 「Evaluation: A Scumbag of Small But Promising Achievement.」
Sasaki lay on his back, one arm folded behind his head, staring at the translucent display hovering a foot above his face. The ceiling fan wobbled through its lazy rotation behind the text, and the apartment smelled like leftover instant curry and the lingering citrus of Sayuri's shampoo trapped in the fabric of the couch cushion he'd dragged to bed. Satisfying haul overall—but the evaluation had changed. "Small but promising achievement." He mouthed the words without sound, tapping his lower lip with his thumbnail.
What triggered the upgrade?
「Ding—」
The chime sliced clean through the silence.
> 「Congratulations. As a man walking the glorious path of the Great Scumbag, your efforts have begun to bear fruit. Three women have now fallen within your grasp. Keep up the excellent work.
>
> However—a truly Great Scumbag must possess an equally great symbol of masculine dominance in order to conquer the many goddesses fate places before him.
>
> Strengthen your pride as a man!」
> 「Ding—」
>
> 「New Feature Unlocked: Enhancement. Please review.」
Sasaki sat upright so fast the pillow tumbled off the bed. Enhancement? His pulse quickened. Did this mean physical augmentation—faster reflexes, denser muscle, something straight out of a Solo Leveling stat screen? He could picture it already: Strength, Agility, Endurance, all climbing in clean numerical increments while he stood in some ethereal void watching his body reconstruct itself like a Sasakinen power-up sequence.
He opened the Enhancement panel before the fantasy finished rendering.
Four items. That was it. Four items arranged in a neat vertical column, each bracketed in the System's signature neon blue:
> [Length]
> [Stamina]
> [Hardness]
> [Girth]
Sasaki stared.
Then he exhaled—slow, measured, the kind of breath someone takes when the universe hands them something absurd and they need a moment to metabolize it.
Not exactly the superhuman body-strengthening suite he'd imagined. No All Might physique transformation. No hunter awakening. Just... that. Four very specific metrics for one very specific organ.
He rubbed the back of his neck, felt the heat climbing there. His expression hovered somewhere between incredulity and genuine interest, because—well. Absurd or not, what guy alive would turn down the option to be bigger, thicker, harder, and longer-lasting? It was the kind of offer that bypassed rational thought entirely and went straight to the brainstem.
He tapped [Length] first.
> 「Cost: 100 Scumbag Points per 1mm of added length.」
Quick math. One centimeter required one thousand points. At a baseline income of roughly two hundred points per day—assuming he maintained at least an "Outstanding" rating—five days would buy him a single centimeter of growth. The conversion rate wasn't unreasonable. If anything, it felt almost generous given the permanence of the modification.
He swiped through the remaining three.
[Stamina] operated on a time scale: ten Scumbag Points bought one additional second of endurance. Sixty seconds—a full minute of extended performance—cost six hundred points. Sasaki pictured the practical applications and decided this one might actually be the most cost-effective investment long-term. Three days of grinding for a minute of stamina seemed like a bargain the porn industry would kill for.
[Girth] matched Length's pricing—one hundred points per millimeter of added diameter, one thousand per centimeter. Expensive, but girth didn't need to scale the way length could. Push it too far and the enhancement became a liability; there were practical limits to what a woman's body could accommodate before pleasure curdled into pain. A few millimeters here and there, strategically invested, would be more than sufficient.
[Hardness] was the outlier. No fixed units—the System calculated it as a percentage increase. One percent harder cost ten Scumbag Points. A thousand points doubled his rigidity entirely. Sasaki flexed his hand open and closed, thinking about it clinically, and decided this was the one stat he could afford to ignore for now. He was eighteen. Hardness was not currently a problem. Gravity hadn't started winning yet.
He closed the Enhancement panel and let his shoulders settle back against the wall, the plaster cool through his thin T-shirt. A faint smile pulled at one corner of his mouth.
The System understood incentive structures. That much was becoming obvious. Every new feature dangled just beyond comfortable reach, priced to keep him hungry, priced to keep him performing. The Enhancement suite wasn't a gift—it was a treadmill with a carrot bolted to the front. And the carrot was shaped like his own dick.
Three hundred points in the bank. Not enough to make a meaningful dent in any single category. Better to save, compound, invest when the returns justified the expenditure. Patience now meant power later.
He swiped the Enhancement panel away and opened the Exchange Shop instead.
> 「Today's Available Items:」
>
> ❶ Lust Marker — A special pen. Write your name anywhere on a woman's body, and the signed area becomes intensely sensitive to touch. The target will feel a persistent, maddening urge to rub and stroke the marked spot. Each pen holds five signatures. Effects last ten days and can only be removed with the Magic Eraser. Cost: 200 SP.
>
> ❷ Magic Eraser — Removes Lust Marker signatures. Additionally capable of erasing minor skin imperfections: moles, small scars, blemishes, discoloration. Five uses per eraser. Cost: 100 SP.
>
> ❸ Perfect Contraceptive (x10 pills) — A contraceptive with zero side effects and a 100% prevention rate. Cost: 500 SP.
Sasaki read each entry twice.
Then a third time.
His three hundred points were already dead. He could feel them evaporating.
The Lust Marker alone was worth the price of admission. Imagine signing his name across the inside of a girl's thigh, the soft pale skin just below where her skirt hem fell, and watching her squirm through an entire school day trying not to reach down and touch it. Imagine the flush creeping up her neck during class, the way she'd press her knees together under the desk, biting the inside of her cheek.
The Marker wasn't just a tool for control—it was a multiplier. Every use would generate reactions, and reactions fed directly into his daily Scumbag Rating, which meant more points, which meant more purchases. The ROI was extraordinary.
The Magic Eraser served double duty. Cleanup for the Marker's signatures, obviously, but the cosmetic applications opened an entirely separate revenue stream. Erase a scar, smooth a blemish, remove an unwanted mole—the kind of results that dermatologists charged hundreds of thousands of yen for, achieved instantly, without anesthesia or downtime. He could sell that service. Carefully, discreetly, but he could sell it. Though a product that literally erased skin imperfections on contact would raise questions that no amount of clever packaging could deflect, so caution was non-negotiable.
And the Perfect Contraceptive. Ten pills, zero side effects, absolute efficacy. Every commercial oral contraceptive on the market carried some cocktail of hormonal disruption—weight fluctuation, mood instability, blood clot risk—and none of them promised a clean hundred percent. These pills solved every problem simultaneously.
Sasaki was realistic enough to acknowledge that his virginity's expiration date was approaching fast, and he'd heard enough locker room horror stories about condoms dulling sensation to know he didn't want latex between himself and whoever came first. Raw was the obvious preference. But raw without protection was suicide-by-consequence.
Five hundred points, though. Bundled. No singles. His balance couldn't reach it.
He let out a breath through his nose and dismissed the contraceptive listing.
The Lust Marker and the Magic Eraser together cost exactly three hundred.
He bought both.
> 「Scumbag Point Balance: 0」
"Broke," Sasaki muttered into the dark apartment. He could hear the refrigerator humming its low mechanical drone from the kitchen, and outside, a distant siren wound through the streets three or four blocks away. "One day without hustling and I can't even afford groceries, let alone contraceptives."
He turned the thought over, examining it the way he'd examine a chess position. The System was elegant in its cruelty. The shop rotated daily, the Enhancement suite demanded constant feeding, and neither accepted payment in anything other than morally bankrupt behavior. Every feature existed to push him deeper, faster, harder into the role. The scumbag treadmill didn't have an off switch—only an incline dial that kept cranking upward.
He picked up the Magic Eraser—a small, white, featureless block that fit neatly in his palm, smooth as a bar of high-end soap, completely odorless—and considered it for a moment before tucking it into the drawer of his nightstand. Nothing on his own body needed erasing. Not yet.
The Lust Marker, though. He kept that out.
It looked mundane enough—matte black casing, no brand name, roughly the dimensions of a standard Sharpie. He uncapped it and sniffed: faintly sweet, like cherry lip balm mixed with fresh ink. The tip was fine, precise, the kind of nib that could produce clean kanji without bleeding. He capped it again and set it on the nightstand beside his phone.
A new toy.
His lips curved, and the expression didn't quite reach warmth.
---
[Sasaki's Apartment — Tokyo | Saturday | 8:14 AM]
Morning came in through the curtains as thin yellow bars across the floor. Sasaki sat on the edge of his bed in boxers and a wrinkled grey T-shirt, thumbing his phone screen with one hand while the other rested on the Lust Marker rolling slowly back and forth across his thigh.
He pulled up Ruri's contact—no longer banished to the blacklist after last night's call—and sent his GPS pin.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. She was awake, then. Reading. Deciding how angry to be about it.
Before she could reply, he typed a second message:
> 「Come early. Pick up groceries on the way. Fridge is empty.」
He sent it with the same casual authority as someone asking a roommate to grab milk, then set the phone face-down on the mattress and picked up the Marker again, rolling it between his fingers like a pen during a boring lecture. The cap caught the light—matte black turning briefly glossy where the sun striped it.
A rare new toy, and a girl on her way over to test it.
The corners of his mouth lifted—just barely, just enough—and he began uncapping and recapping the Marker in a slow, idle rhythm, staring at nothing in particular.
---
Across the city, in a bedroom still thick with the smell of laundry detergent and vanilla body spray, Ruri stared at her phone and felt her blood pressure spike.
Buy groceries? Buy YOUR groceries? I'm not your housewife, you absolute—
She dropped the phone onto her comforter and pressed both palms flat against her cheeks, feeling the heat there. The notification sat on her lock screen like a taunt. No "please." No "if you don't mind." Just a command dressed in casual punctuation, as if she were some errand-running side character in his personal anime.
I should just not go. Block him again. Delete the pin. Go shopping with Maho like I planned and pretend he doesn't exist.
She sat with that thought for approximately forty-five seconds.
Then she got up and opened her closet.
The sundress she'd picked out last night—cornflower blue, hem above the knee, the kind of thing a girl wore when she wanted to feel cute on a Saturday—hung on the closet door where she'd left it. She reached for it, fingers brushing the light cotton, and then stopped.
Going to his place in a skirt. The memory detonated behind her eyes without permission: his face, the heat of it, the way the fabric had ridden up, the sound she'd made that she would deny to her grave. The tips of her ears flushed scarlet and a maddening, ticklish warmth pulsed between her thighs—phantom and unwelcome and vivid.
"No," she said aloud, to no one, shaking her head hard enough that her loose hair whipped across her face.
She shoved the sundress aside.
White T-shirt. Plain, crew neck, one size too big so it skimmed rather than clung. She pulled it on and checked the mirror—the cotton fell past her hips, obscuring her waist entirely, and the sleeves grazed her elbows. Safe. Shapeless. A garment designed to communicate absolutely nothing.
For bottoms, she grabbed a pair of relaxed-fit jeans, light wash, the kind with enough room in the leg that nobody could accuse them of being flattering. She tugged them up, buttoned them, and studied her reflection with the critical eye of someone fortifying a perimeter. Arms exposed from the elbow down. Everything else buried under denim and cotton.
He's not getting anything to look at. Nothing. Not one centimeter of skin he hasn't already earned the hard way.
She caught herself in the mirror—flushed cheeks, defiant jaw, a girl dressed like she was heading to a hardware store instead of a boy's apartment on a Saturday morning—and felt, beneath the indignation, a low and traitorous flutter in her stomach that she refused to name.
Ruri grabbed her bag, stuffed her wallet inside, and headed for the door before she could change her mind about any of it.