Rules

In the brief silence, Ken Sudō abruptly shoved his chair back.

Its metal legs scraped across the floor with a shrill screech, like a blade slicing through the frozen air.

Without looking back, he charged out of the classroom. The hem of his school uniform knocked over the pencil case on the next desk, scattering pens and pencils across the floor, but no one bothered to pick them up.

Light flickered along his tense jaw as he raced down the corridor. His footsteps echoed through the empty hallway, growing faster until they became a full-on sprint.

The basketball court. It was the only place big enough to contain the suffocating heat inside him.

He snatched up a basketball that had rolled to the sidelines. Its rough texture against his palm gave him a fleeting, illusory sense of control.

Thud! Thud! Thud! Each bounce grew heavier, as if he were trying to pound all the resentment surging in his chest into the rubber floor.

He suddenly accelerated and took three steps toward the basket. As he leaped, his muscles bulged and his body traced a fierce arc through the air. The rim shuddered violently as he dunked.

When he landed, sweat dripped from his hair onto the gleaming floor, spreading into dark circles.

"Dropping out... isn't that big a deal!" Sudō panted, roaring at the empty stands, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself. "I can transfer... I've still got two and a half years! I'll practice, get a part-time job and earn my tuition..." His fingers unconsciously traced the ball's ridges, where the feel of countless game-winning shots lingered in his memory.

His dream was like the sun suspended above the hoop: blinding, yet seemingly within reach. But the path beneath his feet had suddenly turned into a steep uphill climb.

"Sudō!" Hirata Yosuke called from the entrance, his voice full of worry.

He and Kushida Kikyo, with Horikita Suzune close behind, stopped in the shadows, breathing slightly hard.

Seeing Sudō mechanically repeat the motions of dribbling, jumping, and shooting, the tension visibly left their shoulders.

"Thank goodness... He's just playing basketball," Kushida whispered to Hirata, a hand over her heart. Her concern was genuine.

Horikita's gaze settled on Sudō's back, soaked with sweat.

Every shot had a ferocity to it, yet his aim was remarkably precise. "He's different now..." she murmured.

The Sudō who used to explode at the slightest provocation and solve everything with his fists now seemed like iron repeatedly hammered and tempered in a forge, his silence revealing a strange new toughness.

Though they had known each other only briefly and clashed constantly—Sudō had sneered at Hirata's gentleness and glared furiously at Horikita's aloofness—the days they had spent cramming late into the night at the library, arguing over a math problem until their faces turned red, had become one of the few glimmers of light in Class D's memories.

Hirata gently stopped Kushida from going over and shook his head. "Let him... have a little time alone." This final farewell was his own battle to face.

They quietly moved beneath the trees at the edge of the court and watched his lonely figure stretch long in the setting sun. Every thump of the ball against the ground sounded like a muffled drumbeat against their hearts.

The next morning, sunlight slanted into the Class D classroom.

Ken Sudō's seat was gone.

His desk and chair had been removed, leaving behind a jarringly neat, rectangular patch of empty floor.

The blank space was like an unhealed scar, drawing everyone's gaze and making it ache.

Kanji Ike stared at the empty patch, absently fiddling with his eraser. Yamauchi Haruki was unusually quiet, and even the most talkative girls kept their voices low.

A faint, unnameable sadness hung in the air. In the end, the red-haired boy with his quick temper had left in the bleakest way possible.

Who would be next...? Fear crept around some students' ankles like cold vines.

That heavy silence was effortlessly crushed when Chabashira Sae stepped into the classroom.

She slapped her lesson plan onto the lectern and glanced across the glaring empty space, the corners of her mouth lifting slightly.

"I'm announcing the class points." Her voice was flat. "Based on the results of this midterm exam, Class D would theoretically receive 73 points."

A few sharp intakes of breath followed, and several pairs of eyes lit up with a glimmer of hope.

But the next moment, Chabashira's words drenched them like ice water:

"Due to Ken Sudō's expulsion, 100 class points will be deducted." She tapped her fingertip on the desk, like a judge's gavel passing sentence. "Therefore, the class points for this month are zero. Next month, your personal points will still be issued as usual."

Silence.

Then an uproar erupted like a volcano.

"One hundred points?!" Kanji Ike shot to his feet, his chair legs screeching against the floor. "Why should all of us lose points because he dropped out?!"

"Exactly! He flunked and got kicked out, and now we all have to suffer for it!" a girl shrieked in agreement, angrily kicking the chair in front of her. "If I'd known this would happen, I never would've wasted my time helping him study!"

"Chabashira! That's way too many points to deduct! The rules say—" Hirata tried to restore order, but his voice was immediately drowned out.

"The rules?" Chabashira gave a cold laugh, her sharp gaze stabbing toward Hirata. "Those are the rules the school has established. There's nothing I can do.

"Sudō's expulsion proves that your class can't even keep one of its own members.

"One hundred points is the price you pay, and a warning." She ignored the flushed faces and clenched fists below, turned around, and wrote a huge "0" on the blackboard.

The empty spot that marked Sudō's departure had now become the target of everyone's anger.

Their earlier sadness vanished without a trace, replaced by naked resentment.

Sudō's name was repeated over and over, accompanied by accusations like "dead weight" and "troublemaker," lashing at his invisible corpse like whips.

Hirata sank into his seat. He looked at his furious classmates, then out the window at the empty basketball court. His tightly pressed lips hinted at his bitterness.

Horikita opened her book with an expressionless face, but her fingers gripped the page so tightly that they seemed almost ready to tear it.

The sunlight still shone brightly on the empty patch of floor. Now, all that remained there was abandoned anger and cold calculation.

The dream's basketball hoop swung alone on a distant shore.