Chapter 797

Chapter 797: Chapter 797

Someone once said that after two people crossed certain boundaries together, a girl would naturally become more affectionate and start wanting to stay close.

Kaoru had begun to suspect that whoever said that had no idea what they were talking about, because after everything that had happened the night before, neither Ichika nor Tsubasa treated him much differently.

Tsubasa still wore that perpetually serious expression around him, and whenever the conversation drifted into anything suggestive, she would immediately glare at Kaoru in embarrassment before lecturing him that, as Student Council president, he was absolutely forbidden from doing this or that to girls. If anything, she had become even more willing to scold him now that she no longer had to maintain the distance required by Tsukishiro’s mission.

Ichika was the complete opposite. She remained as bright and mischievous as ever, frequently sneaking up on Kaoru whenever his attention wandered. Sometimes she demanded that he take her around the cruise ship, sometimes she insisted they exchange personal belongings as souvenirs, and other times she dragged him into taking pictures together as though they had been close for years.

Worse, Ichika appeared to have developed a genuine fascination with teasing him about his supposed foot fetish. After hearing everyone call Kaoru a hopeless pervert obsessed with girls’ feet, she had actually planted her foot against him a few times and smugly announced that she was merely satisfying Senpai’s depraved preferences.

Kaoru naturally refused to let such an arrogant underclassman get away with that. He caught her ankle immediately and retaliated until Ichika finally wriggled free.

Instead of getting angry afterward, she merely wore the triumphant grin of a fox whose trap had worked perfectly, calling him "Zako-senpai" over and over with such delight that Kaoru seriously wondered who had taught her that expression.

Even so, neither Ichika nor Tsubasa allowed things to progress much further. Whatever had happened between them the previous evening seemed to have become an unspoken secret, accompanied by just enough lingering embarrassment that all three of them behaved as though nothing unusual had ever occurred.

Of course, another reason was probably that Kei and the others were around.

Kaoru formally introduced Ichika and Tsubasa to them, which had somehow become an established ritual by now. Whenever another girl entered his already complicated circle, Kaoru inevitably ended up gathering everyone together and explaining the situation.

Kei stayed angry with him for quite a while.

At first, Kaoru assumed he had finally pushed things too far and triggered another bout of jealousy. After spending ages trying to soothe her, however, he eventually discovered that what Kei was truly angry about was the uninhabited island exam.

Kaoru had traveled around with Ichika and Tsubasa, yet he had never invited Kei and the others to accompany him. As far as Kei was concerned, that meant he had obviously planned the whole thing from the start.

The more she imagined Kaoru happily spending his days with other girls while leaving his actual girlfriend elsewhere on the island, the more aggrieved she became.

In a sense, it was still jealousy. From Kei’s perspective, Kaoru’s behavior looked suspiciously like abandoning his girlfriend to go flirt with cute underclassmen.

Kaoru apologized first, then spent the following days properly making it up to her. He took Kei around the cruise ship, went on several small dates with her, and devoted enough uninterrupted attention to her that she finally stopped sulking.

Kikyō and Airi, on the other hand, showed almost no signs of jealousy. Kikyō in particular kept looking between Tsubasa and Ichika with an increasingly thoughtful expression, as though some dangerous new idea were forming in her head.

Sure enough, it did not take long before Kaoru discovered Kikyō and Ichika huddled together, whispering furiously about something.

Whatever they were discussing, both girls’ eyes were practically shining.

One looked as though she had finally discovered her long-lost soulmate and wanted to swear sisterhood on the spot, while the other was somehow even more excited and had already grabbed both of her hands.

Kaoru stared at them without understanding anything.

Before he could investigate, Airi quietly tugged on his sleeve and reminded him not to forget about Miki.

Yes.

Airi wanted his romantic circle to keep expanding for the simple reason that she desperately wanted her best friend to become part of it too, so the three of them could remain together forever.

Kaoru found the idea both ridiculous and strangely endearing. Still, when he thought about Miki, he could not deny that something stirred inside him.

After the embarrassing incident between them that night, however, he had no idea whether Miki would even be willing to face him properly again.

Sometimes Kaoru himself felt shameless when he considered how often his thoughts revolved around his own desires.

Yet if he honestly asked himself whether he could casually walk away from a girl who might genuinely become someone precious to him, the answer was no.

Either he should have given up on everyone from the beginning, or he had to stop pretending he could simply abandon someone once his feelings became involved.

While Kaoru was spending time with the girls, Tsukishiro also approached him for another conversation. As expected, the subject amounted to the usual mixture of incentives, cooperation, and carefully disguised demands. A considerable number of aging power brokers were apparently waiting impatiently for the "miracles" Kaoru could offer them.

Had Kaoru never demonstrated Explosion Magic in front of them, their attitude would probably have been considerably less polite. Instead of inviting him to negotiate, some desperate old bastard might already have tried sending people to abduct him.

Truth Magic made negotiating with Tsukishiro remarkably straightforward. At first, the Acting Director had looked deeply confused by how easily information slipped out of him, but by the end of their discussions, the way he looked at Kaoru bordered on religious awe.

Kaoru agreed to several conditions, though privately he remained unimpressed.

Once he properly returned to the outside world, he intended to broaden those people’s horizons a little more.

One Explosion had frightened them enough to become cautious, but caution was not the same thing as understanding.

...

Because of the storm on the seventh day, the exam had been suspended, and it was not until the eighth day that the weather improved enough for the school to resume it.

By noon, the vicious summer sun had returned to a perfectly clear sky, and the oppressive heat lasted all the way until the exam ended.

Kaoru did not know every detail of what happened on the island after his withdrawal, but with both him and Miyabi gone, the overall shape of the competition became much easier to understand.

The only groups still realistically competing for first place were Kōenji Rokusuke’s and Sakayanagi Arisu’s. Ikuto and his allies had spent too much time helping Kaoru and suppressing Miyabi earlier in the exam, which left them struggling to catch up despite their best efforts.

Miyabi’s expulsion also caused enormous turmoil throughout the third year, especially inside Class 3-A. Ikuto initially wanted to capitalize on that confusion and continue pressing his advantage, but at the most important moment, the rest of his alliance began falling apart.

There was nothing particularly surprising about it.

Their coalition had always been fragile, united almost entirely by their shared desire to overthrow Miyabi. Once Miyabi disappeared, the alliance lost the one objective holding it together, and Ikuto himself lacked the authority to permanently unite every participating class.

The moment that common enemy vanished, everyone went back to fighting for themselves.

No matter how impatient Ikuto became, third place was the best he could secure. From then until the exam ended, he could only watch first and second from a frustrating distance.

Kaoru learned the final results at the last possible moment.

Second place went to Kōenji Rokusuke.

First place went to Sakayanagi Arisu.

That was somewhat unexpected.

Kaoru had always assumed the championship would belong to one of those two, but Rokusuke had eventually lost enough points for Arisu to overtake him.

The reason was simple.

Rokusuke had formed a group with Ryūen Kakeru.

That was what surprised Kaoru.

Doing so was effectively surrendering first place. Class 2-C had once possessed a realistic chance of taking all 300 class points for itself, yet now three classes would have to split the 200-point reward for second place.

Viewed narrowly, that was a huge loss.

On second thought, however, it could also be seen as the price of maintaining their alliance.

If Class 2-C had monopolized all 300 points while the other two classes received nothing, the coalition between them might eventually have collapsed exactly like Ikuto’s temporary alliance had.

That explanation was convincing enough, but Kaoru doubted it told the entire story.

He strongly suspected this had been Ryūen’s goal from the beginning.

Ryūen possessed the Trial card, which meant Classes 2-B and 2-C would each receive only around sixty-seven class points from the reward, while his own Class 2-D would receive one and a half times the normal amount.

In other words, Ryūen’s class benefited more than either of its supposed partners.

If Kaoru had been arranging things himself, he also would have instructed every student holding a Free Ride card to bind it to either Rokusuke’s or Ryūen’s group beforehand, creating an additional stream of private points.

Second place awarded 500,000 private points per group, divided among the members. Ryūen’s group had four people, meaning each person received 125,000.

A Free Ride card earned half of the selected group member’s reward, or 62,500 private points.

If Ryūen’s class had ten such cards and all of them were attached to his group, that alone would generate roughly 625,000 private points.

Kaoru suspected the real figure was even higher and could easily have approached one million.

Taken together, Ryūen had effectively secured around 100 class points and close to a million private points from the exam, making him arguably its second-biggest winner.

That bastard really did know how to scheme.

Unfortunately, he tended to use that intelligence in the most irritating ways possible.

Honami and the others could hardly complain, though. Ryūen had been the one lucky enough to draw the Trial card in the first place.

And when it came to Free Ride cards, Honami’s class would obviously have used its own on Honami’s group as well.

Kaoru checked Honami’s final ranking and found that she had finished seventh.

That was a very respectable result, especially considering how much time she had spent investigating the ghost incident rather than focusing exclusively on points.

Katsuragi Kōhei’s group had only finished fifth. Given another few days, Honami might genuinely have closed the gap.

Almost every group inside the top ten belonged to the second or third year. The only first-year group to break into it was Ishigami Kyō’s, which finished ninth.

More than any of those results, however, Kaoru found himself thinking about Miyabi’s final words.

Whatever method he had prepared, it had actually worked.

Three of the bottom five groups belonged to Class 3-A, occupying dead last, second-to-last, and third-to-last respectively.

That outcome meant Class 3-A would not merely lose several students; the entire third year would also have to pay the class-point penalties attached to those rankings.

Under the exam rules, the class points awarded to first place were taken from the year containing the last-place group, divided evenly among its classes. That meant each third-year class would lose seventy-five points from the first-place penalty alone, with the second-place and third-place penalties adding further losses.

By the time everything was calculated, the third year as a whole would lose 150 class points, while Class 3-B, because of how the specific penalties fell, would effectively lose only 125.

Viewed optimistically, the entire year had moved backward while Class 3-B had advanced twenty-five points relative to its rivals.

That technically counted as a victory.

It was not, however, the outcome Miyabi had originally wanted.

Had he remained in control, only the specific Class 3-A students he regarded as traitors would have been expelled, while his own class would have avoided paying any class points at all. The penalties would instead have devastated the other classes.

In that scenario, the overall competitive level of the third year would have collapsed while Class 3-A remained untouched and perhaps even gained class points.

After all, first place alone was worth 300. Even after paying 150 in penalties, Miyabi could still have walked away 150 points ahead.

Once Miyabi was removed, that entire plan collapsed.

Class 3-A suffered severe damage instead, and Kaoru doubted it would be able to prevent Ikuto from challenging for the A-class position much longer.

Miyabi had at least gotten one thing he wanted.

He had delivered what he considered hell’s judgment upon the "filthy vipers" who betrayed him.

What he probably never realized was that the anonymous note exposing his plans had come from Asahina Nazuna.

No one understood a childhood friend quite like another childhood friend.

Without Nazuna’s warning, as many as five Class 3-A groups might have been wiped out entirely.

Kaoru also noticed that Ichika and Tsubasa’s group had finished considerably higher than he expected, most likely because he had arranged for Kaho to help them.

Once the two small groups merged into a larger one, Kaho’s leadership was enough to keep them competitive even after both Ichika and Tsubasa withdrew from the exam.

After that came the punishment.

Honami welcomed Ichika and Tsubasa warmly enough, but that did not prevent her from giving Kaoru a thorough lecture.

Arisu followed soon afterward, equally displeased because he had broken their agreement. She even recruited Masumi to help restrain him while she spent an absurd amount of time scolding him for behaving however he pleased.

Suzune, surprisingly, had little interest in Kaoru’s romantic problems. She was far more concerned with whether Ryūen and Rokusuke had secretly coordinated their strategy, which prompted Kikyō to mock her for having nothing but points and competition inside her head.

Naturally, the two started arguing again.

Considering they were sharing the same room, their constant bickering eventually became so exhausting that Kei told Kaoru to do something—anything—to make them shut up.

Then there were Fūka and Mio.

Mio had absolutely no interest in joining Kaoru’s increasingly ridiculous romantic circle. Instead, she jabbed a finger at his face and loudly declared that one day she was going to beat him until he cried.

The moment she finished saying it, she immediately ran away before Kaoru could catch her and retaliate.

Fūka was entirely different.

By the time Kaoru realized what was happening, she had somehow blended naturally into the group and even dragged Nazuna into the conversation, eagerly demanding that everyone start sharing their romantic experiences.

Kei and several of the others became red-faced almost immediately.

Then there were Miki and Ai.

Kaoru genuinely wanted to find an opportunity to speak with Miki alone, but the girls surrounding him made that almost impossible.

His mornings belonged to Honami, his late mornings to Kei, lunchtime somehow became Fūka and Nazuna’s territory, Kaho took over much of the afternoon, and by evening he usually found himself trapped between Kikyō and Ichika.

In between all of that, he would inevitably run into Ryūen, Haruka, Hiyori, Mako, or Tsubasa.

Kaoru simply did not have enough hours in the day.

Whenever he was distracted elsewhere, Airi instead spent most of her time with Miki. The two girls frequently disappeared into their room and whispered together for long stretches.

Haruka occasionally overheard fragments of those conversations by accident. Whenever that happened, she would freeze, turn bright red, and immediately send Kaoru an aggressively angry reaction image.

Kaoru never understood why.

Finally, there was Ai.

The uninhabited island exam seemed to have awakened an entirely new interest in her.

When Kaoru ran into her again, she was browsing information about various insects online because she had apparently decided she wanted a small pet.

The moment she noticed him approaching, however, Ai became suspicious and accused Kaoru of coming over because he wanted to do something weird involving her legs again.

Kaoru immediately gave her a light chop on the head.

He had no idea what went on inside that girl’s mind all day. Even if any of her accusations were somehow true, she absolutely did not need to announce them to everyone within hearing range.

Ai remained unconvinced.

She had already heard that even Kaoru’s underclassmen had been pulled into his orbit, so she believed it was only a matter of time before he revealed his true nature around her as well.

And naturally, according to Ai’s impeccable logic, the true nature of a hopeless foot fetishist could only lead to one conclusion.

She was therefore determined not to make things easy for him.

Kaoru responded by producing the photograph he had taken during the island exam—the one capturing Ai immediately after a crab pinched her toe.

He had originally intended to use the humiliating picture as leverage.

Unfortunately, Ai simply denied there was anything embarrassing about it and then demanded that Kaoru send her a copy.

That left Kaoru completely at a loss.

How was he supposed to blackmail someone who actively wanted the evidence?

In the end, he could only give up.

...

With the uninhabited island exam finally over, the cruise ship prepared to return.

Once Kaoru arrived back at Advanced Nurturing High School, his thoughts immediately turned toward the problem he had been postponing for months.

The idols.

How exactly was he supposed to face them again?

Still thinking about that, Kaoru returned to his room and opened the door.

Several pairs of unfamiliar shoes were lined up neatly in the entryway.

He stopped.

Then a familiar voice drifted toward him.

"We finally meet again, my dear Producer-san~"

Kaoru raised his head.

Suzuki Hana stood there smiling brightly at him.

Beside her were Asakura Tōru and Mayuzumi Fuyuko.

Kaoru froze for only a moment before a smile slowly appeared on his face.

Then, in a quiet voice carrying far more emotion than the simple words suggested, he said,

"Long time no see."