On Advanced Nurturing High's athletic field, all the students who had finished with the cultural festival had gathered together in a dense crowd, waiting for the results to be announced.
It was now six in the evening. The festival was officially over, and all the visiting guests had already left the school.
The once lively, bustling campus had finally returned to its usual quiet.
To be honest, even Yukio himself had not expected that a perfectly ordinary cultural festival would end up solving two major headaches in a single day: Takumi Yagami and Atsuomi.
On top of that, Tsukishiro and Amasawa had unexpectedly reunited as father and daughter. Fate really did have a strange sense of humor.
At the start, all Yukio had wanted out of this cultural festival was to draw Atsuomi into the open.
As for the results announcements, in every previous special exam, the school had simply sent the results directly to each student's school-issued phone. The only exception had been the very first deserted island exam, when the homeroom teachers had announced the results in person.
This cultural festival, however, had been Tsukishiro's pet project, so naturally there was a proper in-person announcement ceremony.
At first, Tsukishiro had planned to go up there himself.
Then, after learning Atsuomi had come, he had mentally prepared himself to hand the role over to Atsuomi instead.
But in the end, Yukio had become chairman.
Without anyone noticing, he had used the S-System to replace the school chairman on the spot, blindsiding Atsuomi completely and burying him inside the school itself.
Yukio had no intention of declining this kind of stage.
Having a public ceremony was good. Showing off was only part of it. More importantly, it would make one thing perfectly clear to every student in the school: from now on, if they still wanted to compete with him, they had better think long and hard about it first.
You could say this was his way of directly taking control of the entire student body across all three years.
At that moment, Tsukishiro had already returned to Yukio's side. He seemed entirely at ease with the shift in status, neither stiff nor disrespectful.
He had switched from former acting chairman to old secretary so smoothly it was almost natural.
"Yukio," Tsukishiro said, "the bodyguards outside the school gate have already been sent away."
"Good."
Yukio then went up onto the stage with Tsukishiro.
The stage had originally been set up by the school as a temporary performance platform, for cultural clubs to put on shows. The light music club, the chorus club, and so on had all used it to entertain the guests and show off the students' talents. Now it was being used for the cultural festival results announcement.
The moment Yukio stepped up there, plenty of sharp-eyed students immediately noticed something was off.
"Huh?! Yukio... why is Yukio going up there with the chairman?!"
"What's so weird about that? He's the student council president for this year. The chairman and the student council president appearing together after the cultural festival doesn't seem that strange, does it?"
"Idiot! Look more carefully! Chairman Tsukishiro is clearly walking half a step behind Yukio! Do you realize what that means?"
"What does it mean? I think you're overthinking it. Maybe the chairman just isn't making a big deal out of social niceties because Yukio's still a student."
Some students thought it was normal. Others thought it absolutely was not. Even teachers across all three grades began to sense that something was wrong.
Some thought Yukio was being socially clueless, walking ahead of a man of higher status like that. Others, like Hoshinomiya and Chabashira, were watching him with pounding hearts. They had clearly guessed something.
But soon, whether it was students or teachers, all of them fell silent.
No one argued anymore.
Because by then, the result was already obvious.
It was Yukio who stepped up to the microphone at the podium.
And Chairman Tsukishiro stood off to one side like an assistant.
That positioning alone made everything perfectly clear.
Something big had changed. Something huge.
A number of students felt like the inside of their heads had exploded.
That kind of positioning could not be explained away as coincidence.
Even if the chairman wanted to let the student council president speak first, he could have simply waited farther back. Why stand at Yukio's side like that? Why lower his own position and make himself a stepping stool for Yukio?
The massive athletic field, packed with students from all three grades, had become eerily quiet.
Every eye was wide.
Everyone was unconsciously holding their breath.
It felt like the oppressive stillness before a storm.
Yukio calmly switched on the microphone.
"Hello, everyone. This isn't exactly our first time meeting, but I think there's something I need to make clear."
"Starting today, I will be serving as the chairman of Advanced Nurturing High."
"And now, I will be announcing the results of this cultural festival."
Silence.
Silence was the sound of Advanced Nurturing High tonight.
Then the entire field erupted with a tidal wave of voices.
"Quick, quick! Yamamoto, punch me in the face! I think I'm dreaming! There's no way this is real—ow! What the hell, you actually hit me?!"
"No, seriously, what? I already knew Yukio was a monster, but this is way too much! Chairman? He became chairman?!"
"This has to be fake, right? Chairman? A student becoming chairman? Did Tsukishiro... did Tsukishiro end up with some kind of blackmail material in Yukio's hands or something?"
To be fair, that last student was actually closer to the truth than he realized. Tsukishiro's most important weak point, Amasawa, more or less had ended up in Yukio's hands.
Of course, no one here could possibly know that.
Yukio had expected this reaction from the start, so he waited patiently for a bit before pressing a switch and projecting the results onto the large stage screen.
[Cultural Festival Results]
1st Place: Second-Year Class A, Yukio Class
2nd Place: Second-Year Class D
3rd Place: Third-Year Class A
...
[Second-Year Class Rankings]
Class A: Yukio Class — 3540 points
Class B: Sakayanagi Class — 1830 points
Class C: Ichinose Class — 1340 points
Class D: Matsushita Class — 220 points
Under normal circumstances, looking at results like these, students would be burning with ambition, eager to catch up, to surpass one another, to work harder in the next special exam and overturn the rankings.
But now?
The third-years and first-years were mostly just relieved.
Only the second-years looked like frostbitten eggplants.
Heads hung low. Faces sagged.
What the hell were they supposed to compete over now?
They were still students. Yukio, meanwhile, had already shot straight into the sky and become chairman.
One person holding two roles at once—chairman, with the power to freely design special exams, and student council president, with the power to approve any exam.
What were they supposed to do against that?
Compete?
Compete with what?
Just lie down and wait to die?
The students in Sakayanagi's class had always been fiercely ambitious. They had always wanted to overtake Yukio's class and reclaim Class A.
But in the face of a situation like this, all they could feel was a dark, crushing helplessness.
Ichinose's class was doing a little better by comparison.
After all, they had already settled on their solo-transfer strategy during the Unanimous Vote exam. If anything, this only strengthened their resolve to transfer into Yukio's class later.
As for Class D, there was even less to say.
Aside from girls like Karuizawa and Kushida, who were simply happy for Yukio, everyone else was looking at Sakura—who had already transferred into Yukio's class—with naked envy, jealousy, and bitterness.
Only Yukio's class truly looked like it was celebrating New Year's.
Plenty of students were jumping up and hugging each other, cheering without end. There was no need to even look closely—whichever section of the field was the loudest, liveliest, and most festive had to be Yukio's class.
Their boss had become the chairman of the whole school.
One person ascended to heaven, and the whole class rose with him.