[Riku's Apartment Complex, Tokyo ]
The late afternoon sun slanted through gaps between high-rises, casting long amber rectangles across the sidewalk. Riku loosened the collar of his shirt as he walked, the warmth of the day still clinging to the asphalt beneath his shoes—each step releasing that faint petroleum-and-dust smell that Tokyo sidewalks gave off when spring finally committed to being warm.
Everything from today was wrapped up. All that remained was the matter of Yamashita Tachibana's contract—the one he'd promised almost casually, as if a hundred million yen were pocket lint.
Speaking of which...
He fished his phone from his pocket and thumbed through the notification backlog. A weather alert. And then—timestamped from much earlier in the day—a message from Yukigami Nahiro.
> "Riku-kun, I've completed the acquisition of a company. It's called Fantasia Entertainment. The paperwork went through this morning."
Riku stopped walking. He leaned against a vending machine that hummed against his hip, the vibration traveling through his slacks as he pulled up a browser search.
Fantasia Entertainment Co., Ltd.
The company profile loaded in seconds. A skeleton crew operation—fourteen employees at peak, currently down to maybe ten. Their portfolio was a smattering of indie short films, a handful of niche music videos with production values that punched above their budget, and two documentary features that had earned modest critical praise at regional festivals. One of them—a forty-minute piece on Hokkaido fishing villages—had even been nominated for a minor broadcasting award.
But the industry had shifted beneath their feet. The short-form content space had been swallowed whole by influencer agencies and adult-adjacent production houses. Fantasia's earnest, artful approach couldn't compete with algorithmically optimized garbage. Revenue had cratered. Debts had mounted.
Acquisition price: twenty million yen.
Riku exhaled through his nose. Twenty million. He'd committed a hundred million just for Yamashita Tachibana's signing fee alone. Twenty million was the cost of a moderately ambitious dinner party.
His thumbs moved across the screen.
> "Good start. Acquire several more companies across different entertainment verticals—music production, talent management, post-production studios. F Music Production is one to look at. Don't economize. If you run short on funds, I'll wire more."
He pocketed the phone and resumed walking, the vending machine rattling behind him as a can of Boss Coffee tumbled into someone else's waiting hand.
---
[Riku's Apartment ]
Inside the apartment, the living room had been converted into a war room of sorts.
Tachibana Emi sat cross-legged on the floor, her honey-blonde hair pulled into a hasty ponytail that exposed the fine chain of her necklace against the back of her neck. She was hunched over the laptop, scrolling through corporate registries with the focused intensity of someone who had never done this before but refused to admit it. Her oversized t-shirt—borrowed from Riku's laundry pile, though she'd never confess that—slipped off one shoulder as she leaned forward, revealing the strap of a pale blue bra.
This is way harder than picking stocks in a mobile game, she thought, gnawing on the cap of a pen. But if Riku-kun trusts us with this, I'm not going to be the one who drops the ball.
Beside her, Tachibana Haru knelt with her legs tucked beneath her, a notebook open on her thighs. The younger sister's hair—straight and glossy where her sister's was wavy—fell like curtains on either side of her face as she scribbled acquisition candidates in neat, compact handwriting. She was slighter than Emi through the shoulders and waist, her frame almost birdlike beneath a cream-colored cardigan buttoned unevenly. A smudge of ink marked her left cheekbone where she'd absently scratched an itch with the wrong end of her pen.
Big sis keeps picking flashy companies, Haru thought, underlining a name twice. We need ones with infrastructure. Talent. Equipment. Not just a cool logo.
Yukigami Nahiro occupied the kitchen table, surrounded by a fortress of printed documents, sticky notes, and two empty mugs that still smelled of barley tea gone cold. Her silver-white hair was loose today—unusual for her—cascading past her collarbones and catching the overhead light like spun aluminum. Dark circles shadowed the skin beneath her violet eyes, faint but visible, the kind that came from staring at legal language for six consecutive hours. She wore a simple black blouse tucked into grey slacks, professional enough to feel like armor against the imposter syndrome gnawing at her ribcage.
Her phone chimed.
She read Riku's message. Then read it again.
"...Ah."
Emi glanced over. "What'd he say?"
Nahiro turned the phone screen toward them.
Emi's eyes widened, then curved into a triumphant grin. She slapped her own thigh hard enough to leave a pink mark. "Ha! I told you Fantasia was too small-scale on its own! Riku-kun wants to build something bigger—acquire companies with real infrastructure, then consolidate them."
Nahiro bit her lower lip. "But... won't this drain him? The numbers are getting—"
"It won't." Haru spoke without looking up from her notebook, her pen still moving. "Riku-kun isn't being reckless. He's building a vertically integrated entertainment company. Content production, talent management, music, post-production—all under one roof. That's not spending money. That's architecture."
Emi nodded vigorously. "Right, right! And he told us specifically not to hold back. He doesn't want us penny-pinching—he wants us scouting. Our job is to find companies that have real talent and real equipment but are drowning financially. Fantasia has creative energy but no management backbone. So we find companies that have the opposite problem—experienced leadership, established pipelines, just no revenue stream. Then we merge them."
They're so much sharper than me at this, Nahiro thought, her chest tightening with a mixture of admiration and inadequacy. I was just trying to save him money. That's not strategy—that's cowardice.
"Emi, Haru..." Nahiro straightened in her chair, pushing a strand of silver hair behind her ear. "I'll leave the acquisition scouting to you two. I still need to finalize the contract for Yamashita-san—she's technically the company's first signed talent."
"Go, go!" Emi waved her off. "We've got the shopping list covered."
Nahiro turned back to her documents with renewed focus—but the work was brutal. The company didn't even have a registered office address yet. Roughly twenty percent of the required supporting materials were still missing. She was drafting a legally binding talent contract for an entertainment company that, on paper, barely existed.
The afternoon bled away. Sunlight migrated across the apartment floor in slow golden parallelograms, climbing the far wall as the hours passed. The scratch of Haru's pen. The click of Emi's trackpad. The shuffle of Nahiro's papers.
By 5:00 PM, Nahiro set down her pen with a long, shuddering exhale. The contract was done—imperfect, probably, but structurally sound. Across the room, Emi spun the laptop toward Haru, and together they reviewed a spreadsheet of acquisition targets, color-coded by industry vertical and financial viability.
That was when the front door opened.
Riku stepped in carrying two large plastic bags, one in each hand, the handles digging red lines into his fingers. The smell hit the room immediately—tonkotsu broth, rich and porky, layered with the sharper scent of freshly fried gyoza and the warm, wheaty fragrance of steamed rice. He'd ordered from three different restaurants on the walk home, correctly anticipating that three women buried in first-time corporate work would not have remembered to cook.
"Riku-kun..."
"Riku-kun..."
"Riku-kun..."
Three voices, slightly staggered, overlapping like wind chimes struck in sequence.
He set the bags on the kitchen counter and stretched his fingers, the joints popping quietly. "Eat first. Then we talk."
But talking happened during eating—inevitably, helplessly—chopsticks gesturing at laptop screens, gyoza dipped mid-sentence, rice grains falling onto spreadsheet printouts.
Riku reviewed Nahiro's contract draft, nodding as he chewed. He approved the acquisition strategy the sisters had outlined. Then, setting his bowl down with a ceramic tock against the table, he said:
"I want you to draft four contracts. One hundred million yen each. Ten-year terms."
Silence.
Emi's chopsticks froze halfway to her mouth, a strip of pork belly dangling precariously.
"A hundred million—" Haru started.
"Each," Riku repeated. "One for Yamashita-san. One for each of you."
"A hundred million yen?!" Emi's voice cracked upward, and she clamped a hand over her own mouth. Haru's notebook slid off her lap onto the floor.
"Plus revenue shares calculated separately after signing," Riku added, as if discussing the weather.
Emi recovered first, though her cheeks were flushed a deep rose. "Riku-kun, that's—we can't accept that. My sister and I, we're just staying here temporarily. We haven't earned—"
Riku raised a hand, palm out, and both sisters fell quiet.
"This apartment is too small anyway. I'm planning to relocate us within the week." He turned to Nahiro. "Four contracts. Same terms. One of them is yours."
Nahiro's violet eyes went wide. "M-mine?"
"Yours."
She shook her head rapidly, silver hair swaying. "Riku-kun, absolutely not! I still haven't repaid the hundred million I already owe you from before—"
He cut her off with a look that brooked no argument. The arithmetic running behind his eyes was invisible to them, but perfectly clear to him: every hundred million yen routed through Yukigami Nahiro triggered the system's tenfold return. Three contracts signed through her at a hundred million each meant three hundred million out—and three billion back.
He didn't give them room to protest further.
The contracts were signed in the living room, one after another, pens scratching across paper that smelled of fresh toner. Nahiro's hand trembled as she added her signature to her own copy—the absurdity of signing a contract she herself had drafted not lost on her.
"Now transfer the funds," Riku said.
Nahiro's fingers moved across her phone. Three chimes, in quick succession.
Ding. Tachibana Emi—¥100,000,000 deposited.
Ding. Tachibana Haru—¥100,000,000 deposited.
Ding. Yukigami Nahiro—¥100,000,000 deposited.
And then the system responded.
[RETURN: ¥3,000,000,000 credited.]
Three billion yen. Just like that.
The urge to grab Nahiro by the waist and kiss her square on the mouth seized him with an almost physical force. He suppressed it—barely—by picking up his empty rice bowl and carrying it to the sink.
"Eat," he told the three stunned women. "Finish everything. I need to go next door—Yamashita-san's contract still needs signing."
He collected the fourth contract from the table, slipped it into a folder, and headed for the door.
---
[Yamashita Tachibana's Apartment, Adjacent Unit — 5:38 PM]
Knock-knock-knock.
His knuckles rapped against the door—hollow wood, cheaper than it looked—and the sound echoed briefly down the empty corridor. The hallway smelled of floor cleaner and the faintly metallic tang of the fire extinguisher cabinet mounted on the wall.
A pause. The subtle click of a peephole cover being lifted.
Then the lock turned, and the door swung inward.
"Riku-kun... you came."
Yamashita Tachibana stood in the doorway, and Riku's train of thought derailed, flipped, and caught fire.
She had changed. Completely.
Gone was the modest, slightly worn clothing of the widowed mother scraping by on odd jobs. In its place—
A black-and-white mini dress, fitted through the bodice with alternating panels that hugged the architecture of her body like drafting lines on a blueprint. The skirt portion was criminally short, hemmed high enough on her thighs that the bare suggestion of movement threatened to reveal the transition from smooth, pale skin to whatever lay beneath. White stiletto heels added three inches to her height, reshaping the musculature of her calves into taut, elegant lines. Elbow-length black gloves encased both hands and forearms, the satin material catching the hallway light with a liquid sheen.
Her hair—that deep chestnut brown, normally left to fall in its natural waves—had been styled into twin curled sections framing her face, the rest swept up and pinned, exposing the graceful column of her neck and the delicate prominence of her collarbones. A beauty mark sat just below the corner of her left eye, dark against skin so fair it seemed translucent at the temples.
She looked like Gwen. The Gwen—the Hallowed Seamstress from League of Legends—rendered in flesh and warmth and the faint tremor of a woman who was acutely aware of how much skin she was showing.
He's staring, Tachibana thought, her pulse hammering against the inside of her wrists. Of course he's staring—this skirt barely qualifies as clothing. Why did I put this on? I bought this costume three years ago on a whim, before everything fell apart, and I couldn't bring myself to sell it even when I was pawning wedding rings. And now I'm wearing it for a man five years younger than me who's about to hand me a hundred million yen. What does that make me?
She clasped her hands behind her back—and used the motion to surreptitiously tug the hem of her skirt downward. Twice. The fabric resisted, snapping back to its original devastating height. The dress simply wasn't designed for modesty.
"...Come in, Riku-kun." Her voice was softer than she'd intended, almost breathless, and a blush spread from her cheeks down to the exposed skin above her neckline—a warm, living pink, like dawn creeping across snow.
"Mm."
He managed one syllable. That was the best he could do.
Riku stepped past her into the apartment, and the air shifted immediately. Her living space smelled of strawberries—not the artificial sweetness of cheap air freshener, but something richer, rounder, like actual fruit warmed by sunlight, underlaid with a whisper of vanilla and the clean cotton scent of recently laundered sheets.
The apartment was immaculate. Despite being a single woman living alone, every surface was organized with deliberate care—books aligned on shelves by height, cushions positioned symmetrically on the couch, a single vase of white flowers centered on the kitchen counter. No dust. No clutter. The home of someone who maintained control over her environment because so much else in her life had spiraled beyond it.
Riku set the contract folder on her coffee table and straightened.
When he turned, Yamashita Tachibana was standing three feet away, her weight shifted onto one heel, the posture canting her hips at an angle that made the already-short skirt ride another centimeter northward along her outer thigh. The black satin of her gloves gleamed under the warm overhead light.
"Riku-kun..." She tilted her chin down, looking up at him through her lashes. "Is there anything you need me to do?"
The question floated between them—light as silk, heavy as lead. The words were innocent. The tone was not. It carried an undercurrent, a frequency just below the surface, like hearing someone hum a melody you recognize but can't name.
And then she raised her right hand to her lips.
Slowly.
Her teeth found the tip of the glove's middle finger. She bit down—gently, precisely—and began to pull. The satin resisted for a moment, clinging to the contour of each knuckle, before sliding free with a whispered fwip that seemed unreasonably loud in the quiet apartment. Inch by inch, the glove peeled away, revealing skin beneath—porcelain-pale, the fingers long and slender, nails trimmed short and unpolished, a single faint blue vein visible at her wrist where the pulse beat visibly.
She held the glove between her teeth, the black satin dangling from her lips, her now-bare hand suspended in the air between them. Her eyes—dark brown, almost umber in this light—held his gaze without blinking, though the blush on her cheeks had intensified to a shade that nearly matched the strawberry scent filling the room.
I can't believe I just did that, she thought, her exposed fingers curling slightly with involuntary nervousness. This is mortifying. This is absolutely mortifying. But he's looking at me like—like I'm not just a broke widow with a daughter and a mountain of debt. He's looking at me like—
Riku's throat worked. The swallow was audible—a dry, clicking sound that betrayed everything his expression was trying to conceal.
Every rational impulse in his body screamed the same four words:
Madam, please compose yourself!
But his mouth wouldn't form them. His vocal cords had apparently seceded from his nervous system. He stood there, contract folder forgotten on the table, watching Yamashita Tachibana hold a black satin glove between her teeth like she'd stepped out of a fever dream someone had commissioned specifically to ruin him.
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