Change

Across the classroom, Horikita Suzune took it all in.

Her slender fingers unconsciously tightened around the mechanical pencil in her hand, her knuckles turning slightly white.

Failing the exam meant expulsion—and for Class D, whose Class Points were already hanging by a thread, that would only make matters worse.

She couldn't predict how much someone leaving the class would affect their chances of moving up to Class A, and she didn't dare take the risk.

I can't just let this go... The thought circled in her mind.

She wanted to do something, like tutor Sudo and the others alone in the library.

But the moment the idea arose, the cold reality doused it. How could she bring it up? What excuse could she use? She couldn't even strike up a natural conversation with them.

Horikita ruefully realized that her social network in class was practically nonexistent. She was isolated, like a transparent person.

The only way she could think of was to ask Hirata for help.

But Hirata's invitation had just been rebuffed. Ike and Yamauchi hadn't responded out of consideration for Sudo, while Sudo himself had shown Hirata blatant hostility.

Hirata's influence clearly wouldn't work on those three.

Another name surfaced in Horikita's mind: Kushida Kikyo.

That girl who was always sweetly smiling and got along with everyone. If Kushida invited them, the trio of idiots might actually go along with it.

But the thought only made Horikita's brow furrow more deeply.

An indescribable instinct—or perhaps a subtle sense of wrongness built up through repeated observation—left her deeply distrustful of whatever lay beneath Kushida's perfect façade.

Ask Kushida for help? The idea repelled her instinctively.

Is this all I'm capable of? Horikita silently questioned herself, a trace of frustration winding around her heart like a thin vine.

She understood that she had seen the problem, but couldn't find a way to solve it.

Change required an opportunity, a driving force. But right now, she was like someone trapped beneath an invisible glass dome: she could see the predicament outside, but couldn't find a hammer to break through—or summon the courage to reach out and touch it.

The sense of helplessness weighed heavily on her heart.

She clearly understood that, at this moment, she simply wasn't capable of doing it.

That evening, near the student dormitories.

The moonlight was sliced into narrow bands by the high walls on either side of the alley. Horikita Suzune's footsteps came to an abrupt halt on the stone path.

The figure in the shadows slowly turned around. His lenses gleamed with an inorganic chill in the cold light.

"Suzune, you really did follow me here." Horikita Manabu's voice pierced the silence like an icicle.

"I'm no longer the failure you remember, Big Brother." She gripped the hem of her uniform, her fingertips digging into her palm. "I came here to catch up to you."

"Catch up?" Horikita Manabu took half a step forward. The sound of his dress shoes grinding over the gravel rang especially clear in the alley. "You were placed in Class D, yet you're still spouting the same nonsense as three years ago—you're so focused on watching my back that you can't even see your own shortcomings." He suddenly raised a hand, his fingertip nearly jabbing her between the brows. "Choosing this school was the biggest failure of your life!"

"I'll move up to Class A! Soon—"

"Impossible." The single word cut off her protest. Horikita Manabu seized her wrist and twisted her arm behind her back, slamming her hard against the concrete wall!

The dull thud of her spine hitting the wall mingled with Suzune's stifled groan of pain. Pebbles and dust pattered to the ground.

"Class D is disgraced because of you, and you disgrace me even more!" He clamped a hand around her throat and lifted her up. The tips of her shoes swung helplessly above the ground. "Drop out now. Don't make me say it twice."

Lack of oxygen made Suzune's vision darken, but she forced a shout through clenched teeth. "I... will never drop out!"

"Stubborn fool!" A vicious glint flared in Horikita Manabu's eyes as he raised his other hand—

His fist came rushing toward her with a whoosh, but at the last inch, it suddenly veered aside and smashed into the wall beside her ear.

The muffled impact echoed through the narrow space, making her ears ring.

A few flecks of plaster pattered down and stuck to her pale cheek.

"Look at how weak you are, Suzune." Horikita Manabu lowered his voice, its edge as sharp as an ice blade. He leaned in close, his breath almost brushing her skin, stiff with fear and humiliation. "Your so-called 'catching up' is just a way to use my goal to hide your cowardice. You won't even face the quagmire of Class D beneath your feet, yet you talk about Class A?"

Horikita Suzune slid down the cold wall and sat on the ground. The place on the back of her neck where he had grabbed her still burned, but a sharper pain came from her chest—something had been torn apart by her brother's words, something she had relied on to keep going.

The pallid moonlight seeped in through a high window and washed over her unfocused eyes.

Her brother's words struck again and again inside her hollow skull like an ice-cast bell clapper—

He had never denied her abilities. He had only ripped open her deepest means of escape.

For all these years, she had tied her entire life to the mast of "catching up to Horikita Manabu," yet she had never asked where "Horikita Suzune" wanted to sail.

That obsession was her hardest shield, warding off every attempt to examine herself.

Only now did she slowly understand that the "shame" her brother had spoken of, the shame of being in Class D, had been a twisted form of protection.

In this place of strict hierarchy and survival of the fittest, the Class D brand meant walking along the edge of a cliff.

Her brother had forced her to drop out because he wanted to pull her out of the whirlpool himself before the storm tore her apart.

The dull ache where her shoulder blade had hit the wall still spread, but the lingering choke in her throat had turned into a bone-chilling sobering agent.

The pressure on her body had finally crushed the prison of her mind:

Her proud armor was nothing more than a gilded coffin of loneliness.

Her arrogance in refusing to connect with others would lead not to the summit, but to a cliff where she would destroy herself.

As Horikita Suzune touched the tender mark on her neck, she suddenly gave a quiet laugh.

The dry sound cracked through the night like the first fine fracture in a sheet of ice.

"You're right, Big Brother..." She lifted her head, moonlight flowing along the taut line of her jaw. "All this time, I've been using my obsession with catching up to you... to avoid seeing myself clearly."

She took a deep breath, braced herself against the wall with all her strength, and staggered to her feet. The night wind gusting through the alley billowed her dust-stained skirt.

"From today on—" She looked straight into her brother's unfathomable eyes, speaking each word as clearly as if carving it in stone. "I won't chase you anymore. The one I want to surpass is the limit of 'Horikita Suzune' as she is now."

Back in her cold, single-occupancy dorm room, Horikita Suzune leaned against the door and slowly slid to the floor.

She took out her phone. Its light made her squint, and the name "Kushida Kikyo" lay coldly in her contacts.

The almost instinctive aversion she'd felt toward Kushida that day still lingered in her chest like a mass of sticky thorns.

Yet her brother's icy words—"zero," "defective," "cowardly"—and the glaring, indisputable reality of Class D's zero points had now become heavy chains, binding every escape route.

The humiliation that had nearly seared through her pride, like a red-hot brand, finally smashed her last fragile reserve.