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Early the next morning, Nogami arrived at school just as the halls were at their busiest, following Harutaki’s plan to the letter. She walked straight to her shoe locker and opened it.

A mountain of nails, stacked neatly behind the door, came cascading out at once. They were all nails Harutaki had bought from a home improvement store, large, conspicuous ones that would make a scene, yet be easy to clean up later.

Clatter, clatter, clatter,

Even amid the hum of morning chatter, the sharp, rhythmic collision of metal echoed like temple bells, each note striking the hearts of the onlooking students.

The usual lively energy of the morning dissolved in an instant. The very air seemed to solidify, nailed down by the fallen iron, the silence that followed pressing down on everyone’s lungs with a quiet, suffocating weight.

But unlike the students who froze in uneasy silence, Nogami herself showed no visible reaction. Without a word, she took out her shoes, walked over to a corner of the entryway, and fetched a broom and dustpan used for cleaning. Calmly, she began sweeping up the scattered nails.

As she passed, the crowd instinctively parted to make way, as though some invisible barrier surrounded her, the formation unnervingly neat.

“Isn’t this going a bit too far?”

“That’s not a prank anymore. This is just cruel.”

“Ugh, gross. Whoever did this is a total psycho...”

Some whispered in sympathy, indignant on her behalf.

Of course, not all comments were kind.

“Serves her right.”

“Huh, just nails? Could’ve been worse.”

“Man, using the shoe locker trick? How outdated.”

Nichiya High might be one of Tokyo’s top schools academically, but grades alone could never measure a person’s decency or sense of morality.

Still, the few who dared to mock quickly fell silent when their friends shot them warning looks or quietly tugged at their sleeves.

After all, reading the room was practically a birthright here in the East, and perhaps the most vital social skill of all.

At a time when most people were siding with the “victim,” to speak against the tide was no different from declaring war on the crowd itself.

Because the truth was, for all that people vented their cruelty online behind anonymity, once stripped of that mask and made to stand in reality, almost everyone reverted to being an upstanding, rule-abiding citizen.

At least on the surface.

That, precisely, was the atmosphere Harutaki had calculated for.

The sympathy of the majority.

The outrage of the majority.

And, most importantly, the consensus that Nogami Izumi was the “victim.”

That should be enough...

He stopped recording on his phone and turned away, heading off to fetch Asama-sensei to clear the scene.

How laughable, he thought.

Just days ago, on the anonymous forum, Nogami had been everyone’s favorite target, a shameless, vile “slut” in their words. Yet now, faced with the reality of the bullying they had once encouraged, the same people were tripping over themselves to pity her.

As if the ones who’d harassed her online and the ones condemning the bullies now were two entirely different groups.

How much of that so-called “compassion” was genuine, he couldn’t say.

But opposing bullying, sympathizing with victims and the weak, those had always been the safest, most righteous stances to take, both in this country and society at large.

By lunchtime, the incident had, as expected, exploded across the school’s anonymous forum. After Harutaki’s earlier post, the one where Asama-sensei “confirmed” his high test ranking, this became the next hot topic.

While the online replies leaned more mocking than the words heard in person, Harutaki welcomed it.

Such schadenfreude wouldn’t actually worsen Nogami’s real situation; if anything, it would sway neutral students, even those who’d disliked her, toward sympathy.

After all, this was still a school. The people posting there were kids who hadn’t even reached college, let alone the real world.

And anyone attending an elite school in Minato Ward was, without exception, comfortably well-off, textbook products of the ivory tower.

They hadn’t yet formed firm values or learned to think independently. They simply moved with the crowd, letting the current of popular opinion decide where they stood.

By the time Harutaki was done guiding the conversation with a few of his alternate accounts, the forum had turned into something resembling a repentance circle.

[Bullying isn’t something Nichiya High students should ever do.]

[The bullies are the real scum, spreading lies, smearing her name, and even going so far as to dump nails in a shoe locker. How despicable!]

Whether anyone truly believed what they were saying didn’t matter. What mattered was that the pride and elitism of being a Nichiya High student could, at times, serve as a leash, stopping them from acting beneath their supposed status.

The uproar had grown large enough that even the administration decided to hold a special morning assembly in the gymnasium the next day to “address the issue.”

Harutaki learned this from Asama-sensei later that day, when the teacher complained about the extra workload.

……

Only eighth place...?

After school, in the girls’ restroom on the second floor, Chouko sat on the closed lid of a toilet, staring at the list of the top ten results from the second-year entrance exam that someone had posted on the forum.

She could accept scoring lower than students like Sakuramiya or Asano, after all, she’d always hovered between fifth and seventh without ever putting in much effort. She never crammed, never attended prep school; she relied on wit alone to maintain her rank.

But this time... this time, there was a name above hers she hadn’t expected to see.

Hoshikawa Harutaki.

Just picturing that faint, knowing smile of his, those refined, mysterious violet eyes, made her chest tighten with anger she couldn’t quite put into words.

Not only had she nearly dropped out of the top ten, but she’d been beaten by him by four whole ranks.

And worse, she’d even fallen below that Nogami girl.

This wasn’t just about the old Kyoto-Tokyo rivalry anymore; this was a strike straight to her pride.

How could I possibly lose to that girl?

That rude, overbearing, insufferably arrogant Nogami Izumi, she’d not only outperformed her but also stolen Hoshikawa-kun’s attention in the process.

He’d once looked at her with admiration, with interest, yet these past few days, he’d been circling Nogami like a loyal satellite.

Unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable.

Still, it didn’t take Chouko long to pinpoint the true cause of her poor performance.

The culprit, of course, was that terrible Hoshikawa himself!

Yes, “terrible.” For a young lady raised in a traditional household, that was about as harsh as her vocabulary allowed. Words like terrible, idiot, awful, they sounded more like a sulky pout than actual curses, shaped by years of etiquette drilled into her bones.

But really, wasn’t it his fault she’d done poorly?

Her thoughts flashed to the selfies she’d been reusing over the past few weeks...

Using the same picture too many times dulled the effect, the thrill and imagination fading with each reuse.

And all because of that afternoon tea “date” at Starbucks. The conversation had drifted, one thing led to another, and before she knew it, she’d sent him the most revealing photo she’d ever taken in her life, privately, through Twitter DMs.

In hindsight, she’d been on edge for days afterward, terrified that Harutaki would somehow connect the dots between her secret online identity, Tsunako, and her real self, Chouko.

What if he used it to blackmail her...?

“Chouko-san, you wouldn’t want your friends, or your parents, to find out that you run a private account and exchange risqué selfies with a classmate, would you?”

“Guhh...”

Horrible. Utterly horrible... Just imagining that possibility was enough to make her pulse quicken again.

Every time she’d thought about asking Harutaro for new photos, the memory of that day outside the girls’ restroom resurfaced, when he’d pointed out that her blouse buttons were undone.

If he’d noticed that much, then he must’ve seen more.

The fear of exposure had kept her from contacting him again, while his own preoccupation with Nogami’s incident left her stranded in this agonizing limbo of hesitation and restlessness.

She’d even lost focus preparing for the entrance tests because of it!

Still, leaving that aside for now, there was something even more pressing on her mind,

Golden Week was only a few days away.

…