Just as the two of them stood frozen at the door, with the atmosphere growing utterly bizarre, the heavy teak doors slid open without a sound.
Warm air rushed out from inside. It carried a faint scent of sandalwood, dispelling the slight chill of the mountaintop night.
In the living room, beneath soft lighting, Seiji sat cross-legged on the tatami.
He wore a deep blue silk yukata, barefoot, savoring a steaming cup of premium Gyokuro with relaxed elegance.
In front of him stood a simple, antique low table.
There was nothing else.
No conference table, no projector, no equipment of any kind related to "work."
Hearing the movement at the door, he slowly raised his head and let his gaze drift calmly over the two stiffly-postured women at the entrance.
He glanced first at the impeccably tailored business suit Fuyumi wore, then at the simple, elegant kimono on Eru.
The corner of Seiji's mouth curved into an almost imperceptible, amused arc.
"You're here?"
He spoke calmly, as if they were merely two guests arriving late.
Then, in a tone so flat it was nearly a matter of course, he said the words that shattered every fantasy they had been holding onto.
"You're my left and right hands. One gathers wealth for me, the other guards the foundation. Tonight's celebration banquet, of course, requires both of you to come and provide me with 'reward service.'"
The phrase "reward service" struck both women like a blow.
What business meeting.
What technical instruction.
What being indispensable.
What being uniquely different.
All of it had been their own self-flattering fantasy.
From the very beginning, their position had been exactly the same.
Both of them were tools meant to provide "reward service" to their master.
Fuyumi's expression turned ugly in an instant. She felt that the business plan she had so carefully prepared had, in this moment, become a joke.
Eru's body began to tremble faintly, beyond her control.
Both of them stood silent, frozen in place, unmoving.
Seiji didn't urge them on.
Unhurriedly, he finished the last sip of tea in his cup.
Then he turned his gaze to the area beside the living room. The open-air hot spring bath, separated from the room by a glass wall, was sending up curls of white steam.
Inside, the enormous hot spring pool had been carved from a single block of obsidian.
Under the soft lighting, it gleamed with an inviting luster.
That unquestionable look held more force than any harsh order.
A muffled, soft sound.
Fuyumi was the first to let go.
The briefcase fell onto the soft wool carpet with a barely audible thud.
Slowly, she closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, those eyes that had once gleamed with intelligence and ambition were now hollow, dead silent.
Fuyumi had accepted her fate.
She took a step forward and walked stiffly into the living room.
Eru watched the senpai's back, moving like a corpse, and the last sliver of luck she had been clinging to dissolved completely.
Silently, she followed.
...
Steam rose in the hot spring bath.
The vast obsidian pool had been designed in an infinity style, blending seamlessly with the distant Hakone night view.
Seiji leaned comfortably against the edge, enjoying the pleasure of the spring.
Beside him, two girls of incomparable beauty knelt naked on either side of him like statues drained of their souls.
In silence, they massaged his shoulders.
Throughout the whole process, both girls kept their heads lowered, doing everything they could to avoid meeting each other's eyes in any way.
As if, by not looking at each other, they could deny the absurd and humiliating fact of the three of them bathing together.
Seiji savored the silence, savored this soundless torment.
After a long while, when he seemed to have grown bored, he finally spoke again.
He extended a hand toward Fuyumi, whose body was tense with strain, and said to Eru beside him:
"Eru, wash your senpai's body."
Eru's body jerked. She raised her head in disbelief.
Seiji ignored her shock and pointed to the other side, at the body that had also gone rigid.
"Fuyumi, you do the same."
"Use your bodies, and feel whether there's any difference between you."
His voice remained calm.
But the words he spoke were as venomous as a devil's curse.
Eru's and Fuyumi's movements became impossibly slow, impossibly mechanical.
But under Seiji's brooking-no-refusal gaze, they slowly shifted toward each other.
As they were forced to put their hands on each other, both did everything they could to avoid the other's eyes.
Eru's hands were slightly cold. She cupped water and carried it over Fuyumi's shoulders the way she was told, and then she had to soap her palms and set them to the older girl's body, and she felt the smooth skin under her fingers go rigid and then slowly, helplessly, give up resisting. She washed Fuyumi's collarbones. She washed lower, because he told her lower, the weight of the senpai's breasts in her cold hands, a stiff nipple dragging over her palm, and Eru heard the older girl's breath change and still did not look up, could not, because looking up would make it real.
Fuyumi's hands were faintly callused, a strategist's hands, and they moved over Eru's back with the same terrible competence she brought to everything, because competence was the last thing she still owned and she would not let him watch it fail. She washed the spine, the silk-fine skin trembling the whole length of it. She did what he said. She slid a soaped hand around and low between Eru's thighs because he said that too, in the same flat pleasant tone, and felt the girl flinch and then take it, and felt under her fingers that this younger body had already been taught the thing her own body had already been taught. The knowing went through them both at the same instant.
A familiar humiliation passed between them through the contact, with perfect clarity.
They each understood, with absolute certainty, that the other was exactly the same as themselves.
The same beauty.
The same helplessness.
The same fall into the role of this man's possession.
This irrefutable recognition was a heavy hammer that completely shattered the last sliver of fantasy in their hearts.
They stopped struggling pointlessly inside.
The once-clear eyes and the once-sharp eyes, in this moment, took on the same shade.
It was the dimness of total surrender.
...
...
In the hot spring suite, on the enormous bed.
Seiji leaned against the headboard, watching the scene before him like a connoisseur appreciating a work of art.
A scene he had personally directed, full of immorality and humiliation, vivid and lurid.
He had them on it the way he wanted them, and what he wanted was the two of them facing each other, close, a hand's width apart on the sheets, while he took them by turns. He used Fuyumi first, from behind, one hand fisted in her hair to hold her head up and aimed at the girl in front of her, his cock working into her in long even strokes while he watched Eru watch it happen. The senpai who had spent her whole life letting her face show only what she had decided to show could not keep it off her face now, not this close, not with Eru's wide pale eyes a handspan away taking in every flicker of it the way they took in everything. Then he left Fuyumi open and shaking and moved over to Eru and pushed into her the same way, unhurried, and made Fuyumi watch that, watch the younger girl's cunt take him while her own was still wet and clenching on nothing. He kept them both inside arm's reach. When he wanted them together he put them together, a hand working each, holding them to the same rhythm so that one body's helpless jolt carried across the small gap into the other, until neither could go on pretending the sound the other made was not the same sound she made.
He wanted them to be forced to look into each other's eyes while they were toyed with.
It was a cruel form of psychological torture, and it was worse than anything he had done to either of them alone, because alone a woman could still go somewhere far away inside herself. He had just made that impossible. There was a face in front of each of them now, doing the going-away, and it was her own face, and she could not stop seeing it.
At first, both did everything they could to escape.
Fuyumi buried her face in the pillow, biting down hard on the pillowcase, refusing to let the other see her expression, refusing most of all to be watched losing the one surface she had left. Eru kept her eyes tightly shut. On her long lashes hung crystalline tears. As though if she couldn't see, none of this would exist.
But Seiji had patience and means in abundance.
He used no cruelty. He used the gentlest of motions, and orders that brooked no defiance, slowing until the only way left to make it end was to obey, and he made obeying mean lifting their heads, made it mean opening their eyes, until the cost of keeping them shut climbed higher than the cost of looking.
In the end, their gazes met in the air between them, unavoidably.
Time, in that moment, seemed to stand still.
In each other's eyes, they saw a reflection that was unbearably familiar.
Fuyumi saw herself in Eru's eyes. She saw the same despair, the same surrender, that had been on her face in the Council Hall when she had untied the sash of her kimono.
Eru, in Fuyumi's eyes, also saw herself. She saw the same numbness, the same drained-soul emptiness, that had been on her face in the moonlit rice paddy when she had offered up everything.
They saw each other's humiliation.
They saw each other's grief.
They saw each other's pride, ground to dust.
And the despair that, by completely different paths, had brought them to the same place.
In that moment, every barrier between them, every fantasy, every self-consoling thought, vanished.
They were no longer a lofty senpai and a naive, simple kouhai.
They were no longer friends who envied or pitied each other.
No longer a business elite and a Daughter of the Land.
They had become a mirror. A mirror that reflected the other's tragic fate.
Two streams of silent tears slid down from the corners of their eyes at the same moment.
Seiji observed it all.
He watched as, under each other's gaze, they finally lost control and shed the tears that marked their complete collapse.
There was no triumphant smile on his face, and not the slightest pity.
He merely confirmed, calmly, that the final piece of his plan had slotted perfectly into place.
A new, stable structure of power had taken shape.
One in which Fuyumi and Eru held each other in check and confirmed each other's identity.
They would exist as a pair of possessions. Inseparable, appearing in tandem, belonging to him, Seiji Fujiwara.
They would be jealous of each other. They would pity each other.
But more than anything, they would, in each other, continually confirm their own unchangeable status as "possessions."
That was the result Seiji wanted.
...
...
Tokyo.
A bright, neat living room.
Kei Shirogane, an outer-campus student of Shuchiin Academy.
She was flipping through the latest fashion magazine on the sofa, looking for outfit inspiration that might make her appear more mature at her part-time job.
Suddenly, her hand stopped.
A two-page spread had caught her attention.
[Legend of a King for the New Era: A Deconstruction of the Charisma of Seiji Fujiwara, the Newly Risen Conglomerate Leader]
The article, in a tone that was nearly fawning and lavish in its praise, cast that Seiji Fujiwara as a perfect "diamond bachelor."
He combined wealth, power, intelligence, and good looks in one person, irresistible to every woman.
The article even included several high-resolution photos.
One was Seiji's handsome, cold profile at the press conference. As if indifferent to everything.
Beside it were photos of two other women. The text, full of envy, read:
"...And assisting this new king are two equally talented and incomparably beautiful confidantes. One is the former empress of business, now chief secretary of the Fujiwara conglomerate, Miss Fuyumi Irisu; the other, born of a distinguished family and known as the 'Pearl of Kamiyama,' Miss Eru Chitanda."
"Their existence is, without a doubt, the ultimate proof of Lord Fujiwara's personal charisma..."
Seiji's "harem," through the deliberate packaging and beautification of the mass media, had, with cunning skill, been transformed from a potentially controversial "scandal" into a legend the public eagerly gossiped about.
Kei looked at the contents of the magazine, and a wave of indescribable disgust surged into her chest.
With a sharp slap, she snapped the magazine shut, as though something filthy had stuck to its pages.
"What 'legend of a king'... what 'beautiful confidantes'..."
She curled her lip and spat under her breath:
"Isn't he just some bastard who relies on family background to toy with women's feelings... I hate that kind of man the most!"
Kei tossed the magazine aside, refusing to look at such boring trash.
...
...
Tokyo, Chiyoda Ward.
The top floor of a skyscraper whose name was not disclosed to the public had been converted into a vast, open conference hall.
It was one of the nerve centers of Seiji's commercial empire.
At this moment, every seat was filled.
Every person seated here was the highest-ranking executive of one of the major industries under Seiji's command.
They were figures of significant weight on the Japanese economic map, kings in their own fields, accustomed to giving orders, accustomed to universal reverence.
But today, they were merely subordinates.
Before the meeting began, every person had passed through a security check on par with a state-guest level inspection.
At the entrance stood two rows of men in black suits with cold expressions.
They came from the protagonist's private security firm, every one of them an elite retired from the world's top special forces units.
The metal detector gates were only the first checkpoint.
After that came full-body scans. Any electronic device, including phones, watches, even voice recorders, had to be handed over and sealed in specially made signal-blocking bags.