Now that Chiaki had left and her wins made invalid, Riku slowly realized that he was fucked. 

Thus, after a few moments of pondering, he flew back into the house, slamming the door open and hurrying up the stairs without even taking off his shoes. He was flying, so his sneakers never even touched the floor in the first place.

He desperately pleaded, “Chiaki! I’ll be your personal chef! I’ll tell Akana about how amazingly amazing you are! I’ll even admit that you’re cuter than Haruka-chan! Just come back! You weren’t cheating at all! You won perfectly fair and square!”

She had just slipped into her pajamas and was tucking herself in when she heard his yelling. She sighed. 

“Sure, sure, whatever. Tell Grandma that my wins count again. Just let me sleep, okay?”

Riku took out his phone and opened the camera app.

“Can you say that again? I’ll record it.”

In actuality, his grandmother could hear anything that was said in the mansion, but this was also the same grandmother who likely made an urgent order to every single open print shop in the region for the sole purpose of beating her grandson in a competition started in jest. Who knew what she would say if Riku didn’t record it?
Chiaki begrudgingly repeated her earlier statement, “Whatever. My wins count again. Happy?”

“Yep yep, very happy, very happy.”

His wish granted, Riku joyfully bounced out a window and into the front yard. To powerful cultivators, the fourth floor window was just as good as any elevator and in most cases, even better. 

Still basking in the euphoria of his totally deserved win, he cheerfully said, “Grandma, Grandma, Chiaki wants to count her wins again! It’s four to three in my favor!”

“So what?” she replied.

“I’ve won! That means that you have to step down and let me put down posters in peace!”

Kikue’s expression showed no sign of defeat. Rather, she looked as if she was the victor. “Says who?” she asked.

“Says you!”

She beamed, “When did I say that?”

Riku was slightly confused. “Just before we dueled… Wait…“

And slowly a look of realization flashed over Riku’s face. Indeed, the two had never even agreed to anything before fighting the grand battle. He just challenged her to a no-stress, zero stakes rock-paper-scissors match, completely forgetting to put any meaning into the duel. 

Riku’s brain indeed was small; he fell into a pit he dug himself. Fortunately, his brain, as small as it might be, was quick to accept his own folly, moving on to contemplate the next step needed to claim victory over his grandmother. 

Thus, a thought somewhat slowly passed through Riku’s small brain, which took an embarrassingly long time to process it. He bolted to his room, only to find the posters gone, destroyed by the powers of his grandmother. 

“Fuck!” Riku cried out. His total of two brain cells were once again showing their collective might; he had totally forgotten to protect the posters he had already drawn.

His grandmother leisurely floated behind him, laughing.

Tsking, he quickly leapt out of the open window and into the skies, flying out and away. A second later, he reached Rakuyo’s barrier, the strongest fortification in the world. The Tsar Bomba could explode on top of the city, and the barrier would still be mostly intact. Even an immortal would be stumped upon facing the barrier.

However, Riku just flew out of the city as if there wasn’t a barrier in the first place. And his grandmother closely followed suit.

His destination was the nearest department store; luckily, it was open.

The Shinosaki family was quite law-abiding for a cultivator clan, and even though most powerful clans would outright ignore the rules of insignificant mortals, Riku would not. Neither would Kikue make a commotion while Riku cleaned the store of its entire stock of poster paper.

The paper problem was solved, but how was he to draw all 317 posters within the hour? Simple. Riku had been making very detailed and high quality black-and-white posters beforehand, but it wasn’t as if he actually needed to go that far. Poor-quality fanart might be a desecration towards his goddesses, but it was a very minor and forgivable one. He had no choice but to grit his teeth and mass-produce crap quality posters. 

How was he to draw all 317 posters while fighting off his grandmother was the real question. However, the answer soon popped into his head.

Riku simply sat down inside the department store and drew his erotic pictures. Any fight between cultivators could possibly injure any passerby, and Kikue would not engage with that as a possibility.

However, his plan was short-lived. 

“I’m sorry, but your posters are a little bit inappropriate for this store. We ask you to please continue your drawing somewhere else.” A staff member approached him and told him off not too long later.

Riku then realized that panty shots weren’t exactly “safe for work,” and left the department store in full blush.

Kikue, having seen the events unfold firsthand, flashed a gloating smile and laughed. “I almost gave up there. Haha, if you were a bit less 2D-perverted, you could’ve easily won this competition.”

“You know, I—” Cutting himself off, he rolled his eyes and groaned. “Well, you aren’t wrong.”

Not one to wallow in yesterday’s misfortunes, he quickly thought of something and jumped into a glide, heading vaguely north. He tried to restart his poster creating mid-flight, but every time he so much as looked at the marker in his hand, Kikue would shoot a few bolts of formless qi or a flying sword or two at him. Riku had to take his concentration off his waifus to protect them with his own body, though it wasn’t like he was hurt in the least bit.

It was a stalemate; Riku couldn’t draw the posters, but Kikue couldn’t destroy the posters either. However, Riku only had a bit more than an hour left to finish drawing and putting up the posters. Any stalemate was only to his opponent’s advantage.

Soon leaving the city proper, they entered the mountainous parts of Sakyo Ward, and an unassuming suburban home appeared right in front of their path. The only thing out of place with the house was the nameplate that read, “Anti-Arrogant Young Master Association.” Riku smiled.

He flew over the house’s walls and activated a powerful barrier formation, blocking out his grandmother. He knew that it would only last so long against a forty-five fart cultivator, but he wasn’t counting on it anyways. It was just a temporary measure to give him enough time to activate the transportation array to teleport back into Rakuyo.

He materialized two keys from the dirt and pebbles in the yard, unlocking the front door with the first. Once inside, he slammed the second into the wall of the house’s entranceway, the method to activate the teleportation array.

However, it just made a dark smudge on the otherwise beige wall. It looked a bit ugly, and he would have to clean it up later.

“What the fuck?”

Riku only basked in bewilderment for a second before understanding what went wrong. His most beautiful and elegant grandmother must’ve disabled the formation from the other side, making his plan totally useless.

Hearing loud smashes into the barrier outside and feeling the ground vibrating, Riku panicked slightly, not knowing what to do. 

Luckily, this house was essentially his secret hideout. There was a possibility that he left something useful lying around that could save him from this predicament.

Well knowing the Shinosaki tradition of leaving random spirit stone arrays in strange places (he had this habit himself), he used his divine sense to comb through the entire two-storey building. Unfortunately, he only found one thing that could be of help—a spatial ring that connected to his personal vault back in Aomori. It contained most of his personal belongings, which consisted of a huge amount of spirit stones and pills, but not much else. 

Spirit stones weren’t entirely useless, though. He could use a number of them to power the barrier to last a few more minutes. It would give him some extra time to draw. As for the pills, well, he was slightly allergic to most of them… 

He used his divine sense to telekinetically bring the ring to him. He put it on and started to bring out spirit stones.

“Huh?” After a few seconds, Riku gasped in surprise.

For some reason, there was a large amount of anime goods stored in the ring’s space, including posters.

He soon realized why: just this morning—well, midnight had passed, so yesterday morning—he had bought out the entire stock of an anime hobbyist store in a bid to disgust his fiancee. It worked, but he put off disposing of all of the anime-themed goods; it would be slightly suspicious for the trash pile to be several times larger than normal. Kato, his father’s butler, would probably find out and report it to his father. Riku planned to slowly throw away all the goods over the course of the week and hoped that Kato wouldn’t conduct a random inspection of his vault for illegal (i.e. anime) merchandise. 

Ruffling through the posters, he realized that every single one of the thousands of posters was of his waifus, without a single one of his 317 waifus missing.

“What the fuck? You can’t tell me that I had all these posters in my possession all along? Then why the fuck did I go through all this trouble drawing all this crap?” 

Riku wanted to cry.

He didn’t even consider anime hobbyist shops in the beginning; he had 317 waifus, and not all of them were from popular anime. There was no way in hell that there were posters of 46 of his most unpopular waifus, and it would be a miracle if another 183 of his waifus had any sort of merch being sold in the physical world. 

He absolutely did not consider that he already had all the 317 posters he needed already in his possession. And yet, there they were. All the posters were of each of his waifus, none being of any other character.

Needless to say, he felt really stupid but also a bit curious why he had just experienced main character-level plot armor.

He looked back on what could be the cause of this, and pinpointed it to that one time a couple years back when he realized that some of his waifus didn’t have merch being sold. He asked Sena, his adopted sister and a fellow anime fan, to start a store to spread the gospel of his very own goddesses. Of course, it was just a passing thought, and he forgot about it ever since. He never would’ve realized one of the thoughtless impulses of his would hand him a victory now.

As he was reminiscing, he found a pair of panties lying around. They were scented panties he bought at the hobbyist store, which ended up being quite useful at making women puke. He realized something and looked closer at the packaging.

“Haruka-chan’s smell,” it read.

His thoughts confirmed, he frowned. “This is disgusting!” he said while unpacking the panties out of their plastic wrapper. A faint aroma of liliac diffused into the surroundings.

Bringing the panties closer to him, he continued, “How perverted would one have to be to even think of making such a degenerate product?”
His face was almost touching the underwear. “I really should fire whoever decided to dare sell these at my own store!”

After he finished speaking, he looked around both ways. Seeing that there was nobody else around, he took a nice, long sniff, deeply inhaling the lilac perfume Haruka-chan usually wore. 

A second later, the house shook, and Riku heard cracking noises come from the barrier. He instantly threw the panties and posters back into his storage ring and replaced his lecherous face with a confident one.

He sped out of the house and took flight, soaring towards his ancestral home with great celerity. Kikue rapidly followed with a speed no slower than his.

They soon arrived back at Rakuyo, once again defeating the strongest barrier in the world twice in succession. The ease at which the Shinosaki family bypassed the barrier would make any passerby doubt the authenticity of the title, “strongest barrier in the world,” but the truth was that any barrier existing anywhere close to the person named Shinosaki Kikue would naturally have some problems over the years. The fact that it still remained standing after over a hundred years of Kikue was probably more than enough proof of its strength. The barrier formation of Fort Knox, once touted as the most secure place on Earth by the American government, was accidentally destroyed in a mere two months of investigation by a certain mysterious lady still wanted by the FBI. 

Riku easily spotted the Shinosaki residence from a distance; it was one of the largest buildings there. He brought out his posters from the storage ring, and Kikue’s eyes widened, saying, “You might be able to get the posters, but don’t think that I’ll let you put them up!”

Indeed, as soon as Riku tried to plaster multiple posters on the roof, Kikue would immediately move to destroy all the posters. However, Riku could only defend a certain amount; thus, Riku's posters would be destroyed and he would lose.

He only humphed in reply, plopping the 317 posters on the residence’s roof and quietly taking a seat on top of them. He brought out his phone and started his three-hundredth or so rewatch of Haruka’s Normal Adventure.

 

*

 

“Have you given up?” Kikue posed a question to Riku.

He had sat still for an entire hour, making no effort to put up the posters, even as dawn was soon to come, only a few minutes away.

And those few minutes passed eventlessly. 

With a frown, Kikue spoke, “It’s your loss. The sun has risen and you haven’t posted the posters yet.”

It was a bit puzzling as to why Riku simply sat on his pile of posters without putting a single iota of effort into victory, or really doing anything at all besides watching anime. 

Riku simply laughed triumphantly in response. “Who said that I had to post the posters?”

His grandmother furrowed her eyebrows. “Of course, you said so… Wait…”

He raised his chin, looking down on her. “Exactly! If you can play word games, then so can I!” He did a short chortle. “I recall saying that ‘you’ll wake up in the morning to see 317 large posters of my waifus on top of the house.’ Aren’t 317 posters on top of the house right now?”

A conflicted expression flashed over Kikue’s face for a few seconds. “Ah, what the hell. You got me," she finally said.

She joined Riku in his laughter.

 

When Riku’s joyous laughter subsided, he asked, “Oh, what did you make all the print shops in Keihanshin print, anyways?”

Kikue shook her head. “Not only Keihanshin. I sent the order to all print shops in the entire country.”

“Oh.” His mouth formed the shape of an “O.” He didn’t realize she was so thorough. “But what did you make them print?”
“This,” Kikue said, taking a few huge stacks of posters out of her storage ring. 

Upon taking a closer look, Riku saw that they were all erotic anime posters of some kind. 

Slightly confused, he asked, “Huh, what are these going to be used for?”
She chuckled. “Remember the technique I taught you that removes your presence?”

Around two years ago, Riku asked for a technique that could breach defence formations unnoticed. In response, she taught him that unnamed technique that would literally bend space around him, completely hiding his existence from the world. It allowed him to sneak into almost every defence formation and hide from anyone unfamiliar with spatial techniques. 

“Yep.” He nodded. They used that exact technique to breach the Rakuyo barrier earlier in the day, so how could he forget?

She smirked. “Well, it’s time to make use of it.” 

Riku was confused for a moment, but he quickly connected the thousands of erotic anime posters, his initial bet, and the secret technique that would allow them to sneakily enter and exit everyone’s houses without the owner knowing. 

His eyes gleamed, and he gave a high-five to his grandmother, eagerly awaiting what was coming next. 

The two’s laughter rose with the sun.