The Ryuju Group.
That blue-haired beauty from his club, the one who always sat two seats down with her sketchbook open and her pencil tapping against her lip — her family's zaibatsu had crossed blades with the Ryujin-kai long before he ever stumbled into this mess.
"Eeeh, seriously? Talk about a coincidence…"
Kazama Haru let out a dry laugh, scratching his cheek in that sheepish way that always crept up when the universe decided to be a little too neat. So that was why Ryuzu Momo had rattled off the Ryujin-kai roster like she was reading a class attendance sheet. The Ryuju Group's intel network was clearly no joke.
Of course, even if Momo-chan's heart was still as soft as everyone whispered it was, they were barely at the good-morning-in-the-hallway stage. There was no way — absolutely, positively no way — he could shamelessly bow his head and beg her family for help.
But that didn't mean he couldn't use the information cleverly. Twist it. Turn it sideways until it worked in his favor.
Following the plan quietly simmering behind his eyes, Kazama Haru flicked his wrist and burned 250 wish points in one clean motion — exchanging for the full dossiers on the remaining five Ryujin-kai executive members, Uda Koji excluded.
With the resources currently at his fingertips, the fastest, cleanest route was to slip a knife between the enemy's own ribs and let them bleed on each other.
He scrolled through each profile with the patience of a librarian shelving new arrivals — until his eyes suddenly went round as ten-yen coins.
The file belonged to a Direct Group Leader by the name of Hirayama Naoya.
This Direct Group Leader — respected within the syndicate to a degree that eclipsed even the Wakagashira and Kyōdai-gashira ranks above him — was exactly the pressure point Kazama Haru had been searching for.
The dossier was thorough to a genuinely absurd degree. It listed the man's blood type, his preferred brand of cigarettes, even the color of the boxer briefs he'd purchased last Tuesday from a department store in Ginza. And buried in the middle of all that, one paragraph made Kazama Haru's jaw quietly unhinge.
Hirayama Naoya — the boy Kumichō Uemura Ryu had adopted and raised with a father's devotion since the age of six — had, over the past two years, been tangled in an unspeakable affair with Uemura Ryu's wife. His nominal okaa-san.
Kazama Haru sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
The file even included surveillance photos. Grainy telephoto shots from a love hotel in Uguisudani. Him with his suit jacket already tossed over a chair, tie loose, one hand fisted in the woman's silk-black hair as he tilted her face up to his. Her yukata half-slipped off her shoulders, the pale line of her collarbone marked with the fresh red of his teeth.
Another frame: her kneeling on the tatami-print carpet, lipstick smudged, mouth stretched full around him, his length half-buried between her painted lips while his thumb stroked reverent circles against her cheek. "Kaa-san," he'd apparently gasped in the audio surveillance, voice cracking — "mnnh, kaa-san, I'm close… More…" Her muffled whimper around him: "nnfuh, mmh—"
The final photograph was the worst of them. Her on all fours on the low futon, yukata bunched around her waist, one of his broad palms splayed across the small of her back while the other yanked her hip flush against his. His cock — glistening from her — sinking to the root inside her while her mouth hung open in a silent "aa—!" Her own husband's adopted son, buried balls-deep in her from behind, jaw slack with the kind of animal focus that only came from ruining something you were supposed to love as family.
Kazama Haru let out a slow, wondering exhale.
No wonder the late-night dramas he used to binge in his previous life were so obsessed with these forbidden little labyrinths of family and desire. Art really did steal everything from life. Every last thing.
If this piece of scandal could be weaponized properly, it would send a shockwave rippling through the already fragile Ryujin-kai — the kind of internal quake no gang their size could survive intact.
An unmistakably wicked grin curled at the corner of his mouth as he opened the system's exchange menu, a screen he hadn't touched in what felt like ages.
He searched for the ability already forming in his mind. A skill called Negotiation Art surfaced into view.
Without hesitation, Kazama Haru tapped the exchange button, aiming straight for the maximum tier — LV4.
"Pi—!"
To his absolute bewilderment, a sour little alert chimed, and a red dialogue box bloomed on screen.
"Intelligence value insufficient. Skill cannot currently be exchanged."
"Haaah?!"
The completely unexpected pop-up flattened him. He rubbed his eyes twice, leaned in, and only then spotted the faint little "9" tucked into the bottom-right corner of the skill's icon.
Kazama Haru shot upright from the sunken cushion of the sofa like someone had jabbed him with a chopstick. This was the first time he'd ever bumped into a skill gated behind a base stat.
As if a switch flipped in his head, he yanked up his personal stat window.
"Host Name: Kazama Haru"
"Stamina: 7"
"Intelligence: 7"
"Luck: 9"
"Charm: 10"
"Skills: Bartending LV4 (Master), Guitar LV3 (Professional), Shooting Games LV3 (Professional), Basic Academics LV2 (Proficient), Kendō LV4 (Master)"
"Wish Points Balance: 24,600"
His gaze drifted over each skill's fine-print description. Sure enough, in the bottom-right corner of his already-earned "Kendō LV4," the same tiny "7" sat there, quiet and smug.
Kazama Haru pinched his chin and pieced the logic together fast.
For skills built on top of raw human attributes — intelligence, stamina, and so on — the system evidently only handed over the technique and proficiency. The knowing-how. But if the technique suddenly downloaded into someone's brain and muscle memory without the underlying attribute foundation to support it, the whole thing collapsed like a papier-mâché sword.
Kendō was the perfect example. If he'd still had that noodle-armed, wheezing-after-two-steps physique from before his stat allocation, then even inheriting the accumulated genius of a thousand kenshi wouldn't have mattered. Two swings and he'd be gasping on the dōjō floor, wrists sprained from a form his bones couldn't handle.
Last time, right before exchanging for Kendō, he'd already dumped 2 points into Stamina — and by pure luck, that had scraped him past the minimum requirement. Which was why the restriction had never shown its face until now.
His eyes flicked back to the top of the panel. Intelligence: 7.
Which meant, to unlock the threshold for Negotiation Art, he'd need to sink a colossal 20,000 wish points into stat upgrades first.
That kind of "high-spec expenditure" made his stomach twist like he'd swallowed a bad umeboshi. But for the sake of keeping his skin intact in the days ahead, Kazama Haru grit his molars and stabbed a finger down on the Intelligence allocation.
"Ping."
"Intelligence: 7 → 8"
"Wish Points Balance: 14,600"
"Ping."
"Intelligence: 8 → 9"
"Wish Points Balance: 4,600"
Fuck, money really did evaporate like steam off a ramen bowl.
Watching the balance dwindle in real time, Kazama Haru — face pale as a hospital curtain — tapped his ultimate objective: Negotiation Art.
"Ping."
"Skill 'Negotiation Art' upgraded to LV4 (Master)."
"Wish Points Balance: 1,600"
Even after all that, he didn't close the system menu.
To make sure the meeting with a yakuza whose dossier described his personality as "cautious" went cleanly, he backed out into the Items section and started scrolling for anything defensive.
"Damn, they actually sell stuff like this — but the price is completely bonkers. If it were cheaper I'd totally buy one just to play with."
Eyes lingering on an item labeled "Time-Stop Pocket Watch" — a cool 200,000 wish points — Kazama Haru chuckled under his breath.
Then, catching sight of the pitiful 1,600 in the corner, he simply re-sorted the catalog from cheapest to most expensive.
After weighing his balance against practicality, he settled on spending 1,000 wish points for a Kevlar vest — the kind of thing you couldn't just walk into a Don Quijote and pick off a shelf here in Japan.
For a secret this radioactive, one that put his own life and name on the chopping block, as long as Hirayama Naoya wasn't a complete baka, the man would absolutely show up alone to minimize exposure. All Kazama Haru had to do was keep half an eye on the possibility that Hirayama might flip the table, pull a piece, and try to bury the whole conversation with a bullet.
As for hand-to-hand at close range — with 7 Stamina and Kendō-drilled evasion baked into his muscle memory, he genuinely didn't believe he'd lose.
For the location, he'd pick somewhere loud and packed — Shibuya crossing at rush hour, or a rowdy izakaya in Shinjuku's Kabukichō — anywhere the mere thought of drawing a firearm would be suicide. Extra insurance.
The plan clicked into place, each piece slotting neatly against the next, and a slow, dangerous smile pulled at his lips. He picked up his phone, keyed in the private number listed in Hirayama Naoya's file, and thumbed out a message:
"Hirayama-san. You wouldn't want your little affair with your stepmother getting out into the world, would you? If you'd like to hear what I have to say next…"