Special Project (fin.)

I couldn’t wrap my head around one thing regarding the Popularity Contest.

For a school that took the concept of meritocracy and ran with it to its logical conclusion, this exercise was incredibly contradictory—if anything, it felt like it was trying to favour the upper half.

Let me explain.

The impacts of this Special Project were trivial once you had enough points. For someone like Mari who was flirting with one million, winning or losing 200,000 points would be largely inconsequential.

In contrast, if you were a Class F student, placing first or last in the poll was a matter of doubling your allowance or getting expelled. A matter of leapfrogging to the front in terms of financial flexibility or having your scholarship cut short.

A matter of life and death, to exaggerate a little.

Moreover, it wasn’t even the most hated student who had to worry about expulsion: If you were someone like Mino Ruri who broke the bank on furniture, losing even 20,000 points could be devastating. And this didn’t even take into account the possibility of threats or blackmail if sleuths could figure out you had a low point balance, or the existence of a certain class rep who would surely crush the popular vote on the female side.

But this explanation is all surface level. The real reason it’s biased is because of the special prizes. If you think about them as a reward for cooperation rather than an individual award for popularity, it becomes much more apparent.

For Class A, it would be straightforward for them to rake in 2 million points as a collective. Two students, one boy and a girl, could simply tell the rest of the class to vote for them and that they would split the bounty once point transfers were unlocked again. There’d be little incentive for them to pull an exit scam since the rest of the cohort would work against them for the rest of their three years otherwise, and given the fact that it’s an invitation for free points, rational actors would happily vote for the money. The two leaders could even offer to subsidise the losses incurred by the bottom ranking students to achieve full cooperation.

In Class F, this doesn’t work for the simple fact that you cannot subsidise an expulsion. The student at the bottom of the poll would have almost zero incentive to support the two leaders, given the fact that they would be leaving the school—more likely than not, they’d choose to sabotage the operation out of spite. In addition to that, handing over a cool million to a person and trusting them is a tall order when you’ve only ever known 200,000.

The financially stable classes would have 2 million points added to their economy, while the financially unstable would have to play politics with each other to struggle for their lives. The epitome of classism.

Also, Sakura Emi had planted a target on my back.

“......”

“Hey, Kohei-san. You’ve been reading silently, but do you actually understand what this all entails?” Mari asked from opposite me.

She was putting on a cold front, but I could detect concern in her voice.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Are you sure? You don’t seem very stressed to me… Do you have a plan or something like that? ”

“Not really.”

“Then?!”

She flung herself across the table towards me, in the processing knocking over some half-empty glasses.

But neither of us paid attention to the sound of clinking glass or the water that’d been spilt over her tablet.

Points could replace those things.

Points cannot replace an expulsion.

“I don’t want to lose you, Kohei… not again. Not after I’ve come so close…”

“I know.”

“After all this time of putting up fronts around you… After all this time of feeling doubt every time I looked at your face, of feeling like an idiot when I realised I was the one who threw away our friendship… why? What was all of it for? Just for you to leave me after we’ve finally gotten back to normal? I can’t accept that.”

It was tragic, but neither Mari nor Sakura Emi were at fault.

To protect her ‘real friends’ from getting expelled, Sakura Emi was probably using me as a scapegoat—the antisocial person who rejected social gatherings and napped through every class. It was a noble cause, though slightly warped in execution. I only played along because I thought it’d be cute.

And though Tsujimoto Mari had only vaguely warned me about Sakura Emi, it wasn’t as if I didn’t pick up on it. I just chose to ignore the red flags because I assumed they’d be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. As long as I had no intentions of climbing up from Class 1-F, then it wouldn’t be an issue.

The fact of the matter was that if I hadn’t been so careless... if I hadn’t assumed the school was a benign entity that ran itself like a normal academic institution—then we wouldn’t have gotten into this situation.

If only I’d picked up on Yukimura’s hints earlier.

Lived alone—roommate expelled.

The school will expel me if I tell you.

“I don’t know what to do to save you, Kohei...”

Mari’s voice was weak.

She was practically whimpering.

Stifling tears, clawing into my flesh like her life depended on it, Mari’s calm facade broke down into a mess of anxiety.

I could not say the same for myself.

“You can’t save me,” I told her bluntly.

“...No. Don’t say that, Kohei. Don’t… please. We’ll think of a way.”

“Only I can save myself.”

“......”

Mari looked like she was trying not to laugh.

“B-before I do that, I want you to ask you something... Come here.”

She nodded.

Taking a seat next to me, she rested her head onto my shoulder.

I could feel the sleeve of my shirt getting damp from her hair.

“Remember when you said you loved me?” I asked. “I still don’t get it at all. I’m dishonest. I’m unreliable. I never put in effort for anything. I only ever give half-truths, and even when I’m giving someone the right answer, I act as if I’m unsure about it.”

Mari stayed quiet.

“And even though you know this about me, you still continue to harbour those feelings. Why?”

“Don’t try to quantify this like everything else,” Mari replied. “I just… I just care for you. That’s all.”

“That’s not a good enough explanation.”

“...I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat there in silence, tranquility deeply embedded into that scene of our shared existence.

I could have bathed in that void forever.

No, I wanted to bathe in that void forever.

But the time for that had passed.

When I said that I wanted an exciting high school life many chapters ago, I meant that I wanted to fall in love and experience drama born from trivial matters like love triangles or funny misunderstandings. I wanted to make friends and live a trivial, plot-free, slice-of-life experience, in the end confessing to the girl of my dreams and living happily ever after. Too bad the boring river of time had finally decided to pick up its pace, hurling me head-first into a blazing inferno of conflict. Too bad fate has decided now would be a good time to end my worry-free existence.

“After this,” I said to Mari, “nothing will ever be the same.”

“...Okay.”

"So, that's why... at the end of all of this, I want a proper explanation."

If there ever was such a thing as a mystery better left unsolved, it would be Kitazawa High School.

They probably didn’t allow us to search for the second-year rankings, because it’d show Class 2-F being nonexistent.

Perhaps for the 3rd years, only 100 students would remain

Was this why only lower half students got 2nd-year mentors?

This was all an exaggeration, of course, but if this was the first Special Project they were giving us, one where an expulsion was guaranteed—I could only expect worse from future ones.

Not to mention regular exams and athletic check-ups probably had their own caveats too.

What was the point of an educational institution if they threw students out so easily? What was Kitazawa's objective? I would eventually have to get to the bottom of that, but for now, I had to focus on survival.

Pushing Mari’s body away from mine, I stood up from my seat and headed for the door.

“Where… are you going?”

“Nowhere important,” I said.

I was just heading back to Class 1-F to gather information.

With that last phrase, I closed the door on my everyday high school life, and opened a new one that led to an ill-defined future.

Fact Six: Special Project (END).