I Accidentally Built a Harem of Girls Who All Hate Each Other

The ginger pork lay on the mahogany table like a casualty of war. Each piece of meat, each grain of rice, was a testament to the emotional carnage that had just unfolded. The sweet, savory scent of the sauce, which would have been a delight just minutes ago, now smelled like failure. My failure.

I couldn't tear my eyes away from it. That bento wasn't just food. It was sixteen years of shared jokes, scraped knees, summer festivals, and secret handshakes. It was Yui's default language of affection, and she had just used it to write the final, messy chapter of our friendship right on the Student Council President's ridiculously expensive table.

My stomach churned, and it had nothing to do with hunger. A wave of guilt so profound it was physically nauseating washed over me. I had done this. My clumsiness, my inability to manage the simplest social situations, my cursed kindness that drew people in only to have them collide—it all led to this. To Yui walking away with that dead, hollow look in her eyes.

"Are you just going to stare at it?"

Reina's voice cut through my self-flagellating haze. It was sharp, but it lacked its usual icy bite. It was more... pragmatic.

I finally looked up at her. She was still seated, her hands folded neatly on her lap, regarding the mess with a look of clinical detachment. But her eyes, those expressive crimson eyes, betrayed a flicker of something else. It was the look of someone watching a complex equation solve itself in a way she hadn't predicted.

"I... I have to go after her," I mumbled, my body finally moving, turning towards the door. "I have to explain."

"And say what?" Reina challenged, her voice stopping me cold. "That it was all a big, hilarious accident? That you just happened to fall into a compromising pile with your teacher and me? After seeing the evidence with her own two eyes, do you honestly believe words will fix this now?"

Her logic was a bucket of ice water to the face. She was right. From Yui's perspective, my excuses would sound pathetic and false. I had been caught, red-handed, in a situation that looked exactly like a betrayal. The fact that it wasn't was irrelevant. Perception had become reality.

My shoulders slumped in defeat. I felt hollowed out, a fragile shell of a boy whose one friendship had just been pulverized. "So what do I do?" I whispered, the question aimed at the room, at the universe, at anyone who might have an answer.

Reina let out a small, frustrated sigh. "For now," she said, her voice softening almost imperceptibly, "you are going to clean up that mess."

She stood and walked over to a discreetly hidden door in the wall I hadn't noticed before. She opened it to reveal a small supply closet—the irony was not lost on me—and emerged a moment later with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of wood cleaner. She placed them on the table, a safe distance from the culinary crime scene.

"This table is 19th-century French mahogany," she stated, as if discussing the weather. "The lacquer is delicate. If the sauce is left to sit, it will stain permanently. I would prefer not to have your domestic disputes immortalized in my furniture."

Her tone was blunt, but her actions were... strange. She could have ordered me to clean it. She could have berated me. Instead, she had simply provided the tools for the job, her expression unreadable.

Numbly, I walked over to the table. I tore off a sheet of paper towel and began the grim task of cleaning up what felt like the wreckage of my own heart. I carefully picked up the pieces of pork, the scattered vegetables, the clumps of rice. With every piece I dropped into the nearby wastebasket, I felt the pit in my stomach grow deeper.

Reina didn't return to her throne. She leaned against the edge of the table, a few feet away, watching me. The silence returned, but it was different now. It wasn't the tense silence of a standoff or the awkward silence of detention. It was a shared, contemplative quiet.

"She has strong feelings for you," Reina said, her voice low. It wasn't a question. It was an observation.

I paused my cleaning, my hand hovering over a smear of sauce. "She's my best friend," I said, the words feeling inadequate. "She's always been there."

"Friendship does not typically involve staking a claim on a person as if they are property," Reina countered coolly. "Nor does it usually result in tactical food-based assaults in the Student Council office."

A weak, humorless laugh escaped my lips. "Yeah, well... Yui's friendship is... unique."

"Clearly," she sniffed. But then she did something unexpected. "My parents' marriage was an arrangement. A merger of two corporations, Kujou and Shirogane. There was no room for... 'unique' friendships. Every relationship was a transaction. Every interaction had a purpose. Loyalty was a clause in a contract, not an emotion."

I stopped cleaning and stared at her. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking out the massive bay window, at the setting sun painting the sky in shades of orange and purple. The Ice Queen's mask had slipped, not in a moment of panic or humiliation, but in a moment of quiet reflection. She was giving me a glimpse, just a tiny sliver, of the world she came from. A world of cold, hard lines and calculated moves. A world where a messy, emotional outburst like Yui's was as alien as life on Mars.

"That... sounds lonely," I said softly.

Reina's head snapped back towards me, her eyes wide, as if surprised by my response. Or perhaps surprised that she had said any of it out loud. The mask slammed back into place.

"It is efficient," she corrected herself sharply. "Emotions are a liability. As you have just demonstrated." She gestured pointedly at the mess I was still cleaning.

I finished wiping up the last of the spill, then sprayed the cleaner and polished the spot until the mahogany gleamed, showing no trace of the disaster. The table was perfect again. Immaculate. As if nothing had ever happened.

If only fixing things with Yui were that easy.

I threw the used paper towels in the bin and turned back to Reina. "Okay. It's clean. Am I... dismissed?" I asked, my voice heavy with exhaustion. All I wanted to do was go home, crawl into bed, and cease to exist for about a decade.

"No," she said simply.

"What? Why?" I groaned. "I've been observed, I've been piled on, I've cleaned up a... a metaphor. What else do you want from me?"

She picked up her bag and walked towards the door. "My sentence was that you would be under my direct supervision. My work for today is finished, but my supervision is not. I am going home. You will walk with me."

My brain took a moment to process this new, insane development. "Walk with you? But... why?"

"Leverage," she said, her hand on the doorknob. "Hamasaki-san is angry with you. She believes you chose me over her. If she sees us leaving school together, it will reinforce her perception. It will make her... predictable. And I prefer my rivals to be predictable. Furthermore," she added, a faint, almost imperceptible smirk playing on her lips, "you still know my secret. I can't very well let you out of my sight, can I?"

She was using my crisis as a strategic tool. It was cold. It was calculating. It was brilliant.

And I was too tired to fight it.

"Fine," I sighed, grabbing my bag. "Fine. Whatever."

We walked out of the Student Council office together, the heavy doors closing behind us with a soft click. The hallways were mostly empty now, filled with long shadows and the quiet hum of a building settling down for the night.

As we descended the main staircase, my eyes were drawn to the shoe lockers.

Standing there, partially hidden by a pillar, was Shiori Akiyama. The quiet librarian. She was pretending to search for something in her bag, but I saw her peek up at us, her violet eyes wide behind her glasses. She saw me. And she saw me with Reina Kujou. Again. Her face fell, a subtle, heartbreaking expression of disappointment, before she quickly turned and hurried out the door, vanishing into the twilight.

I felt another pang in my gut. Another unintended casualty. Another misunderstanding I didn't have the energy to fix.

Reina noticed my gaze. She followed it to the disappearing figure of Shiori, then looked back at me. She didn't say a word, but her expression was complex.

My life was a dumpster fire. A raging, multi-alarm dumpster fire. And as Reina Kujou and I stepped out into the cool evening air together, I had the sinking feeling that someone, somewhere, had just added a full tanker of gasoline.