Rule

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

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

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

The light in the hallway flickered across his clenched jaw. His footsteps echoed through the empty corridor, growing faster until he was sprinting.

The basketball court. It was the only place that could 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.

"Thump! Thump! Thump!" His dribbling grew heavier, as if he could pound all the resentment surging in his chest into the rubber floor.

He suddenly picked up speed and went for a layup. As he leaped, his bulging muscles traced a fierce arc through the air, and the rim shook violently when he dunked.

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

"Dropping out... isn't the end of the world!" Sudō panted, shouting at the empty stands, as if trying to convince himself. "I can transfer... There are still two and a half years! I can practice, get a part-time job, save up for tuition..." His fingertips unconsciously traced the basketball's grooves, where countless game-winning shots had left their memory.

His dream was like the sun suspended above the hoop, dazzling yet seemingly within reach. Only the path beneath his feet had suddenly turned into a steep slope.

"Sudō!" Hirata Yosuke's anxious voice came from the entrance.

He, along with Kushida Kikyo and Horikita Suzune, who had hurried after him, stopped in the shadows, breathing lightly.

Seeing Sudō mechanically repeat the same motions—dribbling, jumping, shooting—the three of them visibly relaxed their tense shoulders.

"Thank goodness... He's just playing basketball." Kushida clutched her chest and whispered to Hirata, genuine concern in her eyes.

Horikita's gaze fell on Sudō's sweat-soaked back.

Every shot he took was fierce, yet astonishingly precise. "He's changed..." she murmured.

The Sudō who used to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation and solve everything with his fists now seemed like a piece of iron, repeatedly tempered and hammered. A strange hardness showed through his silence.

Though they had known each other only briefly and clashed constantly—Sudō had sneered at Hirata's gentleness and glared angrily at Horikita's aloofness—their final days, spent cramming late into the night in the library and arguing heatedly over a math problem, had become one of the few faintly shining fragments of Class D.

Hirata gently stopped Kushida from approaching and shook his head. "Let him... be alone for a while." This final farewell was his own battle to face.

They quietly retreated to the shade of the trees beside the court, watching his lonely figure stretch long beneath the sunset. Each thud 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 a stark, perfectly rectangular empty space in their place.

That blank space was like an unhealed wound, stinging everyone's eyes.

Kanji Ike stared at the empty spot, absently fiddling with his eraser. Yamauchi Haruki was unusually quiet, and even the girls who were usually the loudest kept their voices down.

A faint, indescribable sadness hung in the air. That short-tempered, red-haired figure had ultimately left in the bleakest way possible.

Who would be next...? Fear crept around some of their ankles like cold vines.

This oppressive silence was easily crushed when Chabashira Sae stepped into the classroom.

She slapped her lesson plan down on the lectern. Her gaze swept over the glaring empty space, and the corner of her mouth curled slightly.

"Class Points announcement." Her voice was utterly flat. "For this midterm exam, Class D's theoretical score is 73 points."

A few quiet gasps sounded, and a glimmer of hope appeared in several pairs of eyes.

But in the next second, Chabashira's words doused them like ice water.

"Due to Ken Sudō's expulsion, 100 Class Points have been deducted." She tapped her fingertip on the desk, like a judge's gavel pronouncing a death sentence. "As a result, this month's Class Points are reduced to zero. Next month, you'll still receive your personal points as usual."

Dead silence.

Then came an eruption of commotion like a volcano.

"One hundred points?!" Kanji Ike shot to his feet, his chair legs scraping the floor with a piercing screech. "Why should all of us lose points just because he dropped out?!"

"Exactly! He failed his own exam 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 wouldn't have wasted my time helping him study!"

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

"The rules?" Chabashira sneered, her sharp gaze piercing Hirata. "That's how the school's rules work. There's nothing I can do.

"Sudō's expulsion proves that your class can't even keep one of its 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 large "0" on the blackboard.

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

The little sadness they had felt moments ago vanished without a trace, replaced by naked resentment.

Sudō's name was repeated again and again, mixed with accusations like "dead weight" and "menace." The words lashed at his invisible corpse like whips.

Hirata slumped into his seat. He looked at his classmates, seething with anger, then gazed out the window at the empty basketball court. His tightly pressed lips betrayed a trace of bitterness.

Horikita opened her book expressionlessly, but her fingers gripped the page so tightly they almost tore it.

Sunlight still shone brightly over the empty space, but now all that remained there was the anger of the abandoned and cold calculation.

The dream hoop swayed alone on the distant shore.