After leaving home, Yūto Shō drifted through the streets without any real destination. Every time a girl with decent looks crossed his field of view, he tracked her with his eyes — not to admire the curve of a hip or the swing of a ponytail, but to see whether the system would so much as twitch in his skull.
Sato Ruri. Egawa Mitsuki. Tachibana Hina. For those three, the system had cracked open like a gacha banner and dropped route options into his lap. Whether they cleared some hidden rarity threshold or the system simply treated every female in his orbit the same way — he didn't know.
So he wanted to stress-test it. The sidewalks were thick enough with women that any decent algorithm should've pinged at least once.
There was a second question gnawing at him, too: would picking a random stranger off the street and running scumbag protocol on her also bump his level? He stayed careful with that line of thought. Push too hard, end up in a holding cell, game over before the second act.
…
After about an hour of casual reconnaissance, he'd clocked plenty of women. None of them measured up to Sato Ruri, Egawa Mitsuki, or Tachibana Hina, but a few were undeniably pretty by ordinary standards. The system stayed flat. No ping. No menu. Dead air.
He started to suspect the system had a filter — six or seven out of ten didn't register on its radar; only when a target hit that eight-or-nine, certified-goddess tier did the interface light up like a slot machine.
That left him with a wrinkle. Whatever the system was, he'd always assumed he could pick his own targets according to taste, even if the girl was only a soft six.
But he had a working theory. Maybe scumbag points scaled with quality. Run the protocol on a plain-looking woman, sure, technically still scumbag behavior, technically still a payout — but a small one. Pocket change.
For Sato Ruri, Egawa Mitsuki, and Tachibana Hina, his current main route trio, he was banking at least one or two hundred points a day. A lower-tier girl might net him a couple dozen. A dozen. Single digits, even.
Of course, the base pool of average-looking women was massive. A dozen points per head, scaled across volume, could add up.
But volume cost time, and time was finite. One session of scumbag protocol ate half an hour minimum, and he couldn't grind twenty-four-seven. So the daily cap on conquests was hard-locked by biology.
Under those constraints, target quality became the real multiplier. Chasing girls below the goddess threshold simply wouldn't max his yield curve.
Yūto Shō registered the math and shelved the idea of preying on ordinary women. Goddess-tier only. Endgame content.
There was also a moral economy he found amusing: women at that tier almost always ended up funneled into the beds of rich and powerful men eventually. Better him than them. Why let some bald executive cash in?
Those guys could only offer money. He wasn't broke either — well, not for long — and his exchange shop offered things money couldn't touch. One lucky pull could yield a treasure that granted eternal youth. Tell him no woman would trade something for that.
He flagged a cab and gave the driver the name of the city's largest commercial complex. It was Saturday, peak foot traffic. Girls flocked to malls on weekends like NPCs to a respawn point — shopping, movies, bubble tea. A target-rich environment.
Ever since the X-Ray Vision skill had popped up on his shop interface, blinking that hundred-thousand-point price tag, his whole frame of mind had shifted. Same way a country girl gets one taste of the city and can't go back to the rice paddies. He'd seen the endgame loot. He wanted it.
…
Twenty minutes later he stepped out of the cab. Young women crisscrossed the plaza in clusters, sundresses fluttering, shopping bags swinging. Right address.
He melted into the crowd and pushed through the glass doors. The AC hit cold and clean, a noticeable upgrade from the muggy heat outside.
Yūto Shō prowled the corridors with the focused appetite of a hunter on patrol.
…
An hour later, the appetite had soured into sulk.
He'd wandered the mall like an idiot for sixty minutes and the system had given him exactly zero. Did all the beauties really hide themselves away in golden towers, Princess-Mononoke-style? Not one ping.
Defeated, he ducked into a men's restroom to splash water on his face. Then his nose twitched. A scent — familiar, faint, but unmistakable — threaded through the bleach-and-cologne stink of the bathroom.
"This is… Egawa Mitsuki's scent. She's nearby?"
His face lit up. Back in the principal's office that day, he'd buried his nose in several different parts of her body and locked her scent profile into memory like a hound imprinting on a fugitive. Inside a ten-meter radius, she couldn't slip past him.
But this was the men's restroom. No way she was actually here.
Still, the scent didn't lie. His skill never glitched — she was within ten meters of him, somewhere.
"This skill probably doesn't ignore walls. Which means she's either in the women's room next door, or one floor up, one floor down."
He pushed out of the restroom and jogged up to the next floor, sniffing the air. Same intensity. Same floor or directly adjacent.
He posted up in a blind-spot corner with a clean sightline on both the women's restroom door and the bank of escalators. If she didn't surface within a few minutes, he'd climb a level. Either way, she couldn't slip past without crossing his field of view.
…
About a minute later, Egawa Mitsuki stepped out of the women's room. She didn't notice him. Her face was set in that signature glacial expression as she walked toward the entrance of an attached supermarket, where another woman peeled off a wall to fall into step beside her.
The second woman's body language was deferential — half a step behind, head slightly bowed. Driver, probably. Or handler.
Yūto Shō slid into the foot traffic and tailed them into the supermarket.
Egawa Mitsuki didn't seem to be here to actually shop. She wandered the aisles with no apparent goal. The woman beside her kept glancing around with rising anxiety, clearly trying to coax her out of the crowd, but Egawa Mitsuki acted like she wasn't even there.
"Go grab me ten bags of rice. Ten kilos each."
Egawa Mitsuki's voice cut clean, irritated. The driver-handler didn't dare push back. She bowed and scurried off toward the rice section like a kicked dog.
Egawa Mitsuki kept drifting through the aisles.
…
Yūto Shō, trailing maybe four meters behind, locked in. The crowd thinned. She turned down a quieter aisle.
She stopped in front of a shelf and tilted her head, studying the merchandise with unusual focus. Yūto Shō closed the distance silently. She still didn't notice him.
He peered over her shoulder — and his brow knotted. Condoms. Rows and rows of them. Boxes in pink, black, gold foil. Why the hell was Egawa Mitsuki standing in front of the condom aisle? Who did she plan to use them on?
The question lit a low, ugly heat under his ribs. Annoyance, sharp and possessive, with no business being there. Just then she reached up and plucked a box off the shelf — a thin variant, judging by the design — and turned it in her fingers, reading the label.
Today she was wearing a knee-length white sundress. Below the hem, her calves showed pale and slender, the soft definition of dancer's muscle catching the fluorescent light. The fabric draped over her hips in a way that gave her silhouette an elegant, unbothered grace, like a character cel from a Makoto Shinkai film.
He'd come up behind her to admire the view properly. The condom thing had soured it. He scanned: no other shoppers in the aisle, the nearest security camera angled wrong, the driver still off chasing rice.
His hand moved before his brain finished arguing. Through the thin cotton of her sundress, his palm closed over the swell of her ass — that firm, plush curve right where the fabric pulled tightest. The flesh gave under his grip, soft and yielding over taut muscle.
"Mngh—!" The sound escaped her before she could swallow it, a tight, startled gasp. She spun, face cold, ready to gut whoever — and saw him.
Her expression cracked. Color drained, then flooded back. Her voice came out unsteady, hissed low. "What are you doing here?"
"Why can't I be here?"
Yūto Shō snorted softly. His palm didn't retreat — it spread wider, fingers splaying to claim more of her through the dress, gripping that soft give of her cheek possessively. His ring finger crooked, pressing the fabric inward, dragging a faint indented line through the cotton along the dip of her crease.
He thought: she walked into this aisle on purpose. Bullshit she didn't.
Egawa Mitsuki's face flooded a hot, furious red. She glared up at him, lips parted, shame and rage warring across her features — but her chest was rising and falling faster now, the thin straps of her sundress lifting and falling with the new, uneven rhythm of her breath.