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Lunch ended quickly, and the big screen began the fourth round of project selection. Luck was on Yukio's class again.
[Free Fight. Total number required: six; time limit: twenty minutes.]
[Rules: follow official free-fighting regulations; KOF format.]
[Win condition: each side fields three students; if all three are eliminated, you lose; otherwise, when time expires, the side with more surviving fighters wins.]
[Commander intervention: you may designate any one eliminated teammate to revive—once only.]
Seeing this, even Sakayanagi felt it was troublesome. If academic events were her advantage, then physical events were undeniably Yukio's. Across the whole first year, maybe only Ichinose's class could arm-wrestle with Yukio's on the physical side. But that was only for general physical events; for a combat-type event like Free Fight, Yukio's class was unquestionably number one, able to steamroll Ichinose and everyone else.
This was also a gap Sakayanagi's class couldn't close in the short term: no amount of little tricks would work under a KOF format with a commander's one-time revive.
KOF meant one person was allowed to cut through an entire team. There were no best-of-three sets—if your first fighter kept winning, they stayed in and kept fighting until the match was over. No luxury of "matching horses" like in the tale of Tian Ji.
Yukio picked casually. For this event, his class had at least eight viable participants; he just selected from that pool—and deliberately sent Ishizaki out first.
As for the result, there's not much to say. This was probably the fastest win for Yukio's class since Ryuen's rock-paper-scissors event: in five minutes, Ishizaki had already gone one-versus-three. The other two teammates on his side never even got a chance to take the stage.
That drew some grousing from them at Ishizaki. "At least leave us one, will you? We trained all this time and didn't get to do anything."
"Hahaha, sorry, sorry—tonight's on me. I'm buying." Ishizaki could only scratch his head and apologize, telling them not to mind too much.
Sakayanagi didn't blame anyone on her side. It was only natural: in a combat event, this bunch of honor-student bookworms had no chance against Yukio's delinquents. After this swift bout, the big screen showed the overall score at 3–1, then moved to draw the fifth project. Luck finally favored Sakayanagi: an English event they had strong odds in. The rules were identical to the math project, just with an English test paper.
At that point, Sakayanagi wondered how Yukio would pick his people. His academic aces—Shiina and Kaneda—had already been used up in the math project; so how would he win the second academic bout? Yet Yukio was even more nonchalant than he'd been for Free Fight—he basically called names at random. He didn't care whether their usual grades were good or not; he pointed at anyone who hadn't been on stage yet.
Watching him field a bunch of oddballs, Sakayanagi's frown deepened. Something was off—way off. She had secretly sent Hashimoto and Kamuro to investigate who in Yukio's class was good at English, and the ones he was choosing didn't match at all. Had he just given up on English?
Right then, Yukio and Ryuen's tactic finally came to light. Inside the gym, after the desks and chairs were brought back in, the judge looked toward Sakayanagi's side. "Where are your other test-takers?"
A student answered awkwardly, "Judge, they went to the restroom. They'll be right back."
The judge simply nodded, waited two minutes, then returned. "Substitute. If you don't make a substitution now, this event will be ruled a loss for you."
"Eh?" The Sakayanagi student was completely at a loss, not knowing what to do.
The overall score edged to 3–2. But that was as far as it went. The next two projects hardly needed commentary. One was Yukio's class's karate event; even if Sakayanagi's class hadn't been dosed with laxatives, they'd still have been swept 1-v-3 once they set foot on stage.
The final project stung the mentality even more: it was dodgeball—custom-made by Sakayanagi's class—yet they didn't have enough people. Many were still locked in the bathrooms and simply couldn't make it back. With no way to field a full team, they forfeited. The overall score settled at a steady 5–2: a big win for Yukio's class.
You could say that in less than an hour after lunch, this special exam that had been scheduled to run the whole day had already seen half its curtain fall. There was no helping it—after being hit by the laxatives, Sakayanagi's class was powerless. Only the English project managed to drag things out forty minutes; karate and dodgeball were both swift, one a sweep, the other a forfeit.
Mashima and Sakagami hadn't expected it to end this fast. They'd thought Yukio and Sakayanagi would have a climactic showdown, but it turned out anticlimactic—though on second thought, maybe not. After all, Yukio's class had been laying the groundwork during the ten days before the exam even began. With the "laxative" move unnoticed by Sakayanagi, this outcome had been essentially locked in.
When it ended, Sakagami left grinning and Mashima with a gloomy face; they went straight off, apparently to report to the school.
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