My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 766: Sword and Beautiful Trouble

Hayashi watched his daughter walk away, and the corridor itself seemed to rearrange its priorities to accommodate her passage and groaned.

She moved the way she always moved — loose, unhurried, rolling her hips with each step like the hallway was a runway she had personally commissioned and everyone else had simply arrived early, grateful for the privilege of witnessing the show.

’Gods below, that girl. She’s going to cause trouble. Too bad she has never once felt the need to pretend otherwise.’

He shook his head.

Yuzuki’s behind swayed with slow, deliberate rhythm beneath that criminally short skirt — round, full, the black pleats barely remembering what they were supposed to cover.

The hem rode up with every stride and fell back just in time to maintain the thinnest possible margin of decency, flirtingwith the boundary between fashion and felony, landing each time on the side of technically legal by a margin thin enough to read a newspaper through.

The pleats whispered against her skin like a secret they were no longer interested in keeping.

Her thighs were bare and smooth beneath the hem, catching the warm corridor light each time the fabric flared — long, sculpted, the muscle definition shifting beneath golden skin as she walked.

The inner thighs pressed softly together at the top of each stride before parting again, the light tracing new contours with every step, turning the simple act of walking into something that felt like a private performance staged solely for the unfortunate souls caught in her wake.

The katana bumped gently against the outside of her right thigh with a soft tap-tap-tap that should have looked absurd — a girl her age, in a hotel this expensive, carrying a full-length sword through a five-star hallway in a skirt that belonged in a music video.

It should have looked like cosplay.

Like a girl who had watched too many anime and committed too hard to the bit: but it instead looked like cosplay right up until you blinked and she was already in front of you.

Then it stopped looking funny altogether.

Her long black hair swung behind her in a heavy dark curtain — thick, lustrous, so black it devoured the corridor’s recessed lighting and returned only a deep blue sheen along its length.

It brushed the small of her back with each stride, the ends whipping softly against her bare shoulders whenever she turned her head.

The weight of it moved independently of her, half a beat behind, so that the corridor received two images of her in sequence: the girl, then the hair, then the girl again as the dark curtain settled.

Her bangs bounced against her forehead with each step — the thick straight fringe lifting fractionally and falling back, lifting and falling, the soft dark line of them playing across her brow in a rhythm that was, against every rational objection Hayashi could summon, genuinely endearing.

’The bangs are cheating and make her look younger than she is. Softer than she is. The single most effective piece of camouflage she has ever deployed, because they sit on her face like a promise of gentleness the face beneath them has never once kept. I can’t help wonder what she’s going to do next and to whom to give me a heart attack.’

He wouldn’t know... Hayashi had really lost all authority over his girl and more so now that she wasn’t under him anymore.

Also, she was devastatingly causing chaos in the place, giving her father more headache to nurse.

Because; staff and residents in the hallway turned to watch her as she passes.

Men whose eyes dropped to those thighs and that swaying skirt before their brains could intervene, higher cognitive functions arriving several seconds late to discover the eyes had already committed to a destination and were not accepting redirections at this time.

How much he wished he could strangle them to give his daughter such perverted looks!

But it was just the men either...

Women looked at her face first, then her fit stomach, then the sword, and arrived at three different conclusions in three different seconds — pretty, dangerous, confusing— none of which prepared them for the fourth conclusion: that the girl carrying a katana through a seven-star corridor in a crop top and pleated skirt was, by every observable metric, the most comfortable person in the entire building.

Soon room service attendant pushing a cart walked directly into his own cart because he had been watching her walk and had forgotten he was pushing something. The cart hit the wall. The attendant hit the cart.

A silver cloche lid rolled across the marble floor with a bright ringing sound that sailed down the corridor after Yuzuki like a small, round tribute.

She noticed all of them: she simply did not care.

She smiled inwardly, knowing how much her father wanted to slap the poor staff.

She strolled past, shoulders loose, chin level, her soft bangs bouncing against her forehead, the bare strip of toned stomach between her cropped white shirt and her low-slung skirt catching every warm bar of light the corridor had to offer.

The amber recessed glow slid across the defined lines of her abdomen with each stride, the warm dip of her navel appearing and disappearing as the hem of the crop top shifted with her movement, the faint shadowed lines along her obliques flexing as her hips rolled.

’When will she learn that the world does not belong to her. Not truly. No matter what power she carries, she can only influence a few things, and her existence itself sits in the hands of the Empress and the family we all serve.’

But the world let her believe it anyway, because correcting Yuzuki Hayashi is something most people only want to try once.

Hayashi sighed, the sound low and long and deeply paternal.

’The young generation does not understand the weight of what they are serving. They carry the Ryujin Tiamat name on their backs as their superior and think it sits lightly because no one has yet handed them the invoice for the privilege of serving a bloodline that predated the first turning of the wheel itself —’

His son, luckily, understood.

Hayashi had raised him inside the weight and had learned to breathe under it, the way deep-sea creatures learn to breathe under pressure that would crush anything designed for the surface.

’That is enough.’

Hayashi had his successor, and the succession was sound, and the family they served would have continuity for the services he provided when his knees finally gave out for the last time.

’So, I can let that little brat be as carefree as she wanted.’

Luckily, there would be no consequences to her behavior — at least not consequences that reached him.

Because unlike Hayashi and his son, who served the Empress directly, Yuzuki’s service fell under a different loyalty of the royal family.

She worked under the oldest princess — Melissa’s and Seiryū’s sister, the one whose name the household spoke carefully and whose instructions arrived through channels that Hayashi himself did not always have clearance to see.

’And that,’ he thought with a flicker of dark amusement, ’is the only reason I am still allowed to sleep at night without worrying about the little brat.’

He sighed for the umpteenth time.

’That girl,’ he thought, not without a complicated mix of pride and resignation, ’is soon going to be someone else’s beautiful, terrifying problem long before she ever becomes mine again.’