"The next thing I'm going to have you do with me is also nothing more than meaningless self-satisfaction."
"So you don't need to dwell on it. Ten thousand yen might look like a lot, but as part-time pay, it's actually dirt cheap."
After studying Ichinose Honami for a moment, Asakusa Tōru stopped hesitating and turned on his heel, walking away.
As he walked, he raised a hand.
"Keep up."
Watching his back as he moved forward without the slightest hint of hesitation, feeling the weight of the bill in her hand, Ichinose Honami bit her lip and stepped after him.
"Can you… tell me your name?" she asked as she caught up.
Without turning his head, he answered:
"Asakusa Tōru."
...
Looking back on it now, what he did back then really did look a lot like abduction.
Deliberately squatting beside a girl outside a hospital—a place where people were guaranteed to have problems—saying vague, half-ambiguous things to earn her trust, and once that trust was gained, leading her away from the scene to do this and that…
Ahem. Anyway, it was fortunate that he was a good person. Aside from taking Ichinose Honami around tearing down missing-person posters and then directly going to the person's home to get yelled at, he didn't do anything else.
Well, it wasn't random vandalism. All the missing-person posters he tore down were looking for the same person.
A guy wearing sportswear, black hair, 172 cm tall, 66 kg, named Natsuki Subaru.
The reason they got yelled at was because not only did he tear down all the posters, he also went straight to the family's home and told them that the guy had actually been dragged off to another world to be a simp and probably wasn't coming back.
Even though Asakusa Tōru felt he was only stating facts, his Speech skill clearly wasn't leveled high enough. Not only did he fail to convince the family, he ended up getting viciously scolded instead.
Still, even now, he felt that the ten thousand yen had been well spent.
After all, Ichinose Honami had stood in front of him and taken the brunt of the yelling for him back then.
With a beautiful girl blocking for him, the incoming firepower he received was reduced by far more than just a little.
So just as he'd said earlier, Ichinose Honami really had no reason to feel burdened by it, nor any need to keep that incident in mind.
That wasn't because his sexual orientation was questionable, nor because he was awkwardly refusing repayment.
It was simply unnecessary.
What kind of repayment could Ichinose Honami give him? Transfer ten thousand equivalent personal points to him now?
Leaving aside whether he even needed that amount of money, Ichinose herself would never accept such a form of repayment.
Go straight for the nuclear option and offer her body?
Are you insane? Spending ten thousand yen and expecting a beautiful girl to throw herself at you—who do you think you are?
Even the purest loser wouldn't harbor that kind of delusion, right?
"..."
Soon, the third class of the morning ended, and what followed was the students' lunchtime break.
Ichinose Honami wanted to keep talking with Asakusa Tōru a little longer, but after thinking it over, she raised her hand.
"Um, everyone, could you please stay for a moment? I have something I want to say," she announced loudly.
"It's about the school."
...
First-Year Class C.
"Listen up, all of you! Do whatever you want during breaks, but once class starts, keep your behavior completely in line!"
"Yes, yes!!!"
After learning the truth about the school from Asakusa Tōru—especially about the first month's ongoing exam—Ryūen Shō had no intention of keeping it to himself.
What, he paid two million points for that intel and wasn't going to use it? He wasn't an idiot.
But how to use it was a new problem altogether.
The first step was using violence to force the uneven-quality students of the class to watch their conduct and behave like proper students during the first month.
Since he now knew it was a point-deduction game, the priority was to make sure they didn't lose any more points than necessary. Only after that could he think about further moves.
Of course, the quality of Class C students was what it was. Being assigned to Class C meant there was a reason for it.
Even though Ryūen Shō had no respect whatsoever for the school's so-called evaluations, he had to admit that making them maintain model-student behavior for an extended period was difficult.
Fortunately, the conduct-based exam only lasted for the first month. Ruling through violence was just barely enough to keep things under control.
Still, he couldn't rely on this meager amount of class points forever.
The transfer privilege that required twenty million points…
If that was the case, then personal points would become extremely important.
To get the entire class into Class A, they would need… eight hundred million personal points.
Heh. An astronomical number.
"..." Shaking his head, Ryūen Shō temporarily set aside thoughts of transferring classes and instead recalled the final "freebie" Asakusa Tōru had left him with.
In this exam, the lower limit for deductions is zero.
In other words, future exams might allow negative scores?
That said, no class would be stupid enough to burn through all one thousand points in a single month… right?
Ryūen Shō had actually considered simply having Class C give up on the first month entirely—dragging everyone down so that all classes' points would drop to zero.
The problem was that if they did that, their personal point income for the next month would also be zero.
If he hadn't handed over those two million points, it wouldn't have mattered. Ten thousand a month, used sparingly, would've been enough.
But having already paid two million, he couldn't afford that approach.
His control over the class wasn't strong enough yet to make everyone obediently accept empty pockets for several consecutive months.
So Ryūen Shō abandoned that tempting idea of dragging everyone down together and began thinking in other directions instead.
Before long, a rough outline of a plan started to take shape in his mind.
"..."
Under the pressure of Ryūen Shō's gaze, Class C made it through the first morning properly and without incident.
Of course, that was only the morning.
When noon arrived, fighting broke out in one of the rare corners of Advanced Nurturing High School not covered by cameras.
"Thud—"
No—calling it a fight would be inaccurate. It was a blatantly one-sided, vicious ambush.
"Ryūen—"
Dragged into an alley and slammed against the wall without warning, Ishizaki Daichi wore a ferocious expression.
"You've gone too far!"
"—There's more where that came from!" Seizing his opening, Ryūen drove his knee upward, the heavy impact transmitting through Ishizaki's abdomen and flooding his entire body.
Almost instantly, his strength gave out, and he collapsed to the ground.
"I told you," Ryūen said coldly, looking down at Ishizaki Daichi as he clutched his stomach in agony, "no matter where you go, I'll make you submit."
Enjoyed these chapters? Access advanced chapters and exclusive content by visiting my Patreon. https://patreon.com/WillOFD129?