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[Shibuya Commercial District, Tokyo ]
The afternoon sun beat down on the sidewalk outside Fuyumi's apartment, warm enough to pull sweat from the back of his neck within minutes. He walked without direction, hands in his pockets, eyes drifting across every face that passed—not with the idle hunger of a guy checking out pretty girls, but with the clinical attention of someone running an experiment.
Ruri. Mitsuki. Sayuri. Three women. Three routes the System had offered without him asking. He still didn't understand the selection criteria. Did the System trigger for every woman, or only certain ones?
The streets of Shibuya on a Saturday afternoon were practically an open casting call—hundreds of young women in cropped tops and pleated skirts, iced coffees sweating in their hands, perfume mixing with car exhaust and the grease rolling off a nearby takoyaki cart. If the System was going to ping, this was the place.
He walked for an hour. Passed girls who were objectively attractive by any reasonable standard—smooth skin, nice figures, the kind of faces that pulled double-takes from salarymen on their lunch breaks. Six-out-of-tens. Sevens, even.
Nothing. The System sat dead and silent in the back of his skull, like a browser tab that refused to load.
Fuyumi stopped at a crosswalk, tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek. He was starting to form a theory, and he didn't love it.
The System has a threshold.
Six or seven wasn't enough. It wanted eights. Nines. The kind of women ordinary people put on pedestals and called goddesses—the ones you saw once on a train platform and remembered for a week. Ruri, Mitsuki, Sayuri—all three cleared that bar by a comfortable margin. The System didn't care about volume. It cared about quality.
Which raised another question: could he farm Scum Points off women below that threshold on his own initiative, without the System's prompting?
Probably.
A scumbag was a scumbag regardless of target. But the return would be garbage—maybe a handful of points per encounter, ten at best, compared to the hundred-plus he pulled daily from his three active routes. And each encounter cost time: half an hour minimum of conversation, flirtation, emotional manipulation. He wasn't a machine. There were only so many hours in a day.
The math was simple. Efficiency dictated he focus exclusively on high-value targets.
Fuyumi exhaled through his nose, watching the crosswalk light turn green.
Fine. No more wasting time on npcs.
Besides—women at that level almost always ended up as trophies for rich men anyway. Some forty-year-old executive with a Porsche and a receding hairline would wine and dine them into a kept arrangement. At least Fuyumi could offer something those men couldn't. The Exchange Shop didn't just sell money. It sold the impossible. Eternal youth serums. Physical enhancements. Things that broke the rules of reality itself.
One day I'll pull something from that shop so absurd that a goddess-tier woman would beg me to ruin her life.
The thought was darker than he expected. He didn't flinch from it.
He flagged down a taxi on Meiji-dori. The vinyl seat was warm and cracked, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and the lemon-scented air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. "Shibuya Hikarie," he told the driver.
The commercial megaplex was the obvious play. Weekend foot traffic would be enormous—young women flooding the shops, the cinema floors, the food courts. If a System-worthy target existed anywhere within a five-kilometer radius, she'd be there.
Ever since I saw that hundred-thousand-point Clairvoyance skill in the Exchange Shop, something shifted inside me.
It was the same thing that happened to small-town girls in manga—the ones from March Comes in Like a Lion or Scum's Wish—who moved to Tokyo and saw the skyline for the first time. Once you glimpsed what was possible, you couldn't go back. Poverty of ambition became unbearable.
The taxi pulled up to the Hikarie entrance in under twenty minutes. Fuyumi stepped out, and the crowd hit him immediately—a river of bodies flowing in and out of the glass doors, ninety percent of them female and under thirty. Shopping bags from 109, Parco, Loft. The smell of perfume layered so thick it became a single sweet fog, undercut by the warm yeasty scent of a nearby crepe stand and the faintly metallic tang of the building's air conditioning system cycling against the outdoor heat.
This is the right place.
He merged into the flow, shouldered through the revolving doors, and the air conditioning hit his damp skin like a slap. Inside was louder, busier—heels clicking on polished tile, escalators humming, a J-pop track bleeding from a cosmetics storefront at a volume just below obnoxious. Fuyumi adopted the posture of a man browsing casually, hands still in his pockets, but his eyes moved with purpose.
One hour passed.
The initial excitement curdled into something sour. He'd circled three floors, ridden the escalator up and down like some kind of retail stalker, passed literally hundreds of women—and the System hadn't made a single sound. Not a ping, not a flicker, not even a tooltip.
Are all the beautiful women in this city locked up in penthouses? Is there seriously not a single one walking around a goddamn shopping mall on a Saturday?
His mood had gone from hunter's anticipation to flat irritation. Fuyumi pushed into the men's restroom on the fourth floor, cranked the faucet, and splashed cold water across his face. The fluorescent tube above the mirror buzzed with that particular frequency he hated—the one that made everything look slightly morgue-tinted. Water dripped off his jaw. He stared at his reflection, annoyed with himself, annoyed with the System, annoyed with—
His nose twitched.
The restroom smelled like industrial soap and urinal cakes and the faintly sour residue of a hundred strangers' hands. But underneath all of it, threading through the chemical fog like a single gold filament in a pile of copper wire, was something else.
Jasmine and cold cream. A trace of high-end shampoo—the kind sold in salon-exclusive bottles. And beneath that, warmer, fainter: the specific scent of clean skin that belonged to exactly one person in his life.
Mitsuki.
Fuyumi's hands froze on the edge of the sink. Water continued to run over his knuckles, forgotten.
That day in the principal's office, he'd used the Keen Smell skill to catalogue her scent from multiple points on her body—her hair, her neck, the inside of her wrists, the warm crease behind her ear, e.t.c.. The skill encoded it permanently. Anyone whose scent he'd memorized couldn't come within a ten-meter radius without triggering recognition.
But this was the men's restroom.
He killed the faucet. Thought for half a second.
The skill doesn't specify line of sight. It ignores walls. She could be in the women's restroom next door, or one floor above me, or one floor below.
He was moving before the thought finished forming. Out of the restroom, down the escalator—shoes hitting each metal step with a rapid tak-tak-tak—to the fourth floor's restroom cluster. The scent was still there, maybe fractionally stronger. She was either on this floor or the one he'd just left.
Fuyumi found an inconspicuous corner near a potted ficus, positioning himself where he had a clear sightline to both the women's restroom exit and the elevator bank. If Mitsuki came down from above, he'd see the elevator doors open. If she was on this floor, she'd walk right past him.
He waited. His pulse had settled into something steady and focused—the calm of a predator who'd finally caught a trail after hours of nothing.
Sixty-three seconds.
The women's restroom door swung open, and Mitsuki Egawa stepped out.
She moved the way she always did—like the crowd was an inconvenience she'd already decided to ignore. Her expression was perfectly flat, porcelain-pale features betraying nothing, dark eyes fixed on the middle distance. Her hair fell past her shoulders in a straight black curtain, the kind of black that looked almost blue under the mall's recessed lighting, each strand so fine it shifted like water when she turned her head.
She wore a white dress that ended just above her knees—simple cut, expensive fabric, the hem brushing against thighs that were slim and pale as birch wood. Below the hem, her calves tapered down to narrow ankles and low white flats. No jewelry. No makeup that he could detect. She didn't need either.
She looks like she walked out of a Makoto Shinkai film and decided reality was beneath her.
Mitsuki didn't notice him. She turned left toward the supermarket entrance at the far end of the corridor, and as she did, another woman fell into step beside her—mid-thirties, plain navy suit, sensible heels, hair pulled into a tight bun. The woman's posture screamed professional subordination: shoulders slightly hunched, half a step behind, head tilted at a deferential angle.
A driver or personal assistant. She leaned toward Mitsuki and said something low and urgent, her eyes scanning the crowd with the twitchy vigilance of someone responsible for another person's safety in a public space.
Mitsuki ignored her completely.
She's annoyed, Fuyumi noted. Or bored. Or both.
They entered the supermarket—a bright, sprawling FamilyMart Deluxe that smelled of fresh bread and the citric sting of sliced fruit on display. Mitsuki wandered the aisles without purpose, trailing her fingers along shelf edges, picking up items and putting them back. She wasn't here to shop. She was here to not be somewhere else.
The assistant followed, growing more agitated by the second. Her mouth kept opening—half-formed suggestions, gentle pleas to leave—and each one bounced off Mitsuki's silence like a ball against a wall.
Finally, Mitsuki stopped walking. She didn't turn around.
"Go to that aisle," she said, her voice low and clipped, the tone of someone accustomed to obedience. "Buy me ten five-kilogram bags of rice."
The assistant blinked. "Ten... bags of—"
"Did I stutter?"
"No, Mitsuki-sama. Right away."
The woman scurried off, heels clicking double-time against the linoleum. Fuyumi watched her disappear around the corner of the grain aisle, and something electric prickled across his skin.
She's alone.
He closed the distance.
Mitsuki had stopped in front of a shelf near the back of the store—a quieter section, poorly lit compared to the main aisles, no other customers within earshot. Her slender fingers plucked a small box from the shelf, and she held it close to her face, reading the label with an expression of detached curiosity, the way someone might examine a species of insect they'd never encountered before.
Fuyumi stepped up behind her, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her bare shoulders, and looked over her head at what she was holding.
His jaw tightened.
Condoms. A twelve-pack. Okamoto Zero One, ultra-thin. She was turning the box over in her hands, reading the fine print on the back with that same blank, analytical expression.
Who the hell is she planning to use those with?
The question hit him like a fist to the sternum, and the reaction that followed wasn't rational—it was territorial and immediate and ugly. His mood, already sour from an hour of fruitless hunting, curdled into something darker.
He looked at her—the delicate line of her neck, the way her white dress clung to the subtle flare of her hips before falling loose around her thighs, the bare calves that caught the overhead light like polished stone—and instead of admiration, he felt a hot spike of possessiveness that tasted like copper on his tongue.
No cameras in this section. He'd already checked—a habit now, automatic as breathing. The nearest customer was three aisles over. The assistant was buried under fifty kilograms of rice.
His hand moved.
It slid forward, fingers spread wide, and pressed against the back of her white dress, directly over the swell of her backside. The fabric was thin—some blend of cotton and something silkier—and through it, his palm sank into flesh that was obscenely soft. Full and round enough to overfill his grip, the kind of plush density that gave under pressure and then pushed back, resilient and warm. His fingers dug in, squeezing hard enough to feel the individual muscles beneath the fat tense and then surrender, the meat of her left cheek deforming around his knuckles like risen dough.
"—Hnn!"
Mitsuki's gasp was small and sharp—a bitten-off sound that barely escaped her lips before she clamped them shut. Her spine went rigid. The box of condoms trembled in her fingers.
She turned her head, and her eyes were already narrowed to kill—dark irises glittering with a fury that could've flash-frozen the entire aisle. But the face she found hovering inches from hers wasn't a stranger's.
The killing intent evaporated. What replaced it was worse: recognition, followed immediately by something that looked a lot like panic.
"You—" Her voice cracked. She swallowed. "What are you doing here?"
"Why wouldn't I be here?" Fuyumi said, his tone flat, almost bored.
His hand didn't move. If anything, his grip tightened—fingers splaying wider across the curve of her ass, palm grinding the thin dress fabric into the cleft between her cheeks. His ring finger, positioned at the lowest point of his spread grip, pressed inward through the layers of cloth and found the seam where her thighs met her body—a narrow, warm crevice that flinched at the contact. The tip of his finger pushed against something yielding and hot, even through the dress and whatever she wore beneath it, and he felt her entire body jolt like she'd touched a live wire.
"Mmnh—"
The sound she made was involuntary—a throaty, choked thing that vibrated in her chest before dying behind her teeth. Crimson flooded her face in a single violent wave, rising from her collarbones to her hairline, turning that porcelain skin the color of crushed peonies. Her nostrils flared. Her breathing, previously silent and controlled, roughened into audible pulls through parted lips—each exhale carrying a faint tremor, each inhale sharper than the last.
Her dark eyes locked onto his, and in them he saw a war—fury and shame and something hungrier fighting for dominance behind a rapidly crumbling mask of composure.
I'm going to kill him, the look said.
But her legs didn't move. Her hips didn't pull away. And the box of condoms stayed clutched in her whitening fingers, pressed against her chest like a paper shield.
Fuyumi held her gaze, his hand kneading slow, deliberate circles into the pliant heat of her flesh, and waited for her to decide what came next.
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