Kiyotaka Was Done for

He'd handled it, but things hadn't gone as well as he'd hoped. Everything had gone wrong,

Suzune Horikita was a beautiful girl with long, straight black hair, and she had a bit of a sharp tongue. There was always something prickly about interacting with her, though the sharp tongue wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that she was hard to put up with,

To complete his task, Kiyotaka Kiyotaka had naturally gone to Class D's angel, Kikyo Kushida,

But who could have guessed that the message Suzune Horikita sent through the Terminal would be so harsh,

For the first time, Kiyotaka Kiyotaka sat on his bed and struck the same pose as Gosling,

He'd already been set up, and now he still had to go ask those three poor students to do some studying. If they really wanted to study, would they be in Class D?

He'd helped her out, but Suzune Horikita had taken a dislike to Kikyo Kushida, so she was in a foul mood and made no secret of her resistance,

Kikyo Kushida had called the three of them over, but after she called each one a good-for-nothing, they were nearly furious enough to blast off into space. They almost left right then and there,

The study session had barely started before it was called off. It hadn't even survived an hour,

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka was utterly dispirited. He really didn't understand how this goddamn society worked. Or were people out in society all this bizarre?

He could only say that meeting Suzune Horikita had raised his threshold so high that when he encountered other strange characters, he could stay expressionless and treat them like child's play,

Knock, knock, knock! Three knocks at the door,

Click. The door opened. Beihai poked half his head out, his dark circles heavy and his eyes dead, and stared at the blank face outside,

In the end, Beihai was defeated by that poker-faced guy. He'd been doing a great job of keeping a straight face, then suddenly pulled out a smile. It was downright creepy, you know?

Beihai went quiet for a moment. In his previous life, there had been a word for what the other guy had just done: Chinese horror,

He instinctively moved aside to make room for the other man to enter, then closed the door,

"Is something up? I'm pretty sure I told you yesterday that I didn't really have any time."

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka didn't answer directly. Instead, he looked around. The Game Console was turned off, and it wasn't even warm. The only thing on the desk was a pile of workbooks,

"I remember we agreed last time that we'd study together. I'd like to learn a bit more."

He didn't say anything about playing games. Instead, he brought up the promise they hadn't kept last time. He had to admit, it worked very well,

Beihai's left hand moved away from the doorknob. He stepped closer to the desk and opened a math workbook,

"They say people can do anything when they're angry,

Except math problems. So where's your limit? I'm curious."

Beihai really was curious. Being good at other things didn't mean someone was good at studying,

Take Beihai himself, for example. He'd tinkered with all sorts of shady tricks and devoted himself to gaming, breaking records in one game after another. But when it came to school, he was hopeless, so he'd thrown himself even harder into other pursuits,

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka picked up a pen and started solving the problem as he worked through it. The reasoning he explained was extremely formulaic,

At first, Beihai didn't hear anything wrong with it. But something about it felt vaguely familiar. Then he realized: it sounded like he was reading straight from the textbook,

Beihai's gaze gradually turned strange. The guy beside him seemed not only robotic but a lot like an AI. He knew what was in the textbook, but if it wasn't in there, he didn't know it,

He had no flexibility at all. One meant one, and two meant two, like someone who'd been deliberately trained,

"Did they make you at some kind of special-agent training base? A perfect killing machine?

No wonder you wear that dead-mother face every day. And then there's that brutal system at Shrek Academy, run by Teacher Zhou."

Beihai couldn't help saying it aloud. The resemblance was uncanny. He'd seen plenty of stories, so this kind of setup wasn't new. It was practically a cliché,

The kind where some trainee assassin could already scale walls at eleven and manipulate the stock market at twelve,

And then there was how, when gaming, he always went for maximum benefit in strategy games like Stellaris, Steel Division, or StarCraft,

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka's hand paused as he wrote out the solution, then quickly resumed as though nothing had happened. But inside, he was already shaken,

He'd been seen through. His disguise had been torn to shreds,

The first time had been while gaming. The second time, all they'd been doing was studying together, and Beihai had seen right through his disguise,

If they were talking about a close friend, he still had things he needed to keep from Beihai. But now there was no point hiding anything. It had all been laid bare in a blunt, almost cruel way, and Beihai was perfectly calm about it,

Seeing his reaction, Beihai picked up on the details and couldn't help teasing him,

"Looks like I was right. Who knew you had such an incredible background? You're at this school to evade pursuit, aren't you?

Relax. I'm not interested in you. I've met geniuses before."

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka couldn't be bothered to pretend anymore. He wasn't even trying to act. He was no longer in that frozen, unresponsive state,

"Me?"

"No. What kind of genius are you? A real genius can figure out which planet it is from a single sheet of paper without giving the game away,

A real genius can create new mathematical laws and name them after themselves, like Gauss and the others,

And modern geniuses can make significant contributions to research.

You, on the other hand, were raised wrong. At best, you're a killing machine. I don't know what field you could shine in,

Go into politics? You don't have the brains for it. You don't even understand basic social norms, and all you care about is profit,

Go into research? With all that rote memorization, I don't think you have much hope there, either. You're a textbook nerd, though—no, wait. Oh, you've got my brain arguing with itself now,

Anyway, whatever the case, I really can't stand organizations like that. They stifle human creativity and independent thought, then congratulate themselves for producing a genius. They're not cultivating anyone; they're killing people."

After hearing Beihai's words, Kiyotaka Kiyotaka looked down at his hands. If what he said was true, then he had no common sense about how society worked,

He'd spent his whole life in the White Room, learning like a machine,

He'd learned to write at three, and his handwriting had to be beautiful. At four, if he was beaten, he had to get back up within a minute, or he'd be kicked brutally by an adult,

By middle school, he'd already been studying high-school material,

Academically, he couldn't compare to those geniuses who entered society and put their talents to use. He couldn't create value for society,

At best, he was standing on the shoulders of giants and following the paths they'd already taken,

As for fighting, what good was being good at it when times had changed so much?

They talked about taking inferior genes and turning them into excellent ones, but wasn't that basically the same as this school? Eliminate the inferior ones, and everyone left would be excellent, wouldn't they?

In other words, his father had thought of him as one of the sacrifices required for the experiment. His father had figured that if he could harden his heart and put his own son into that facility, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone else. But he hadn't expected his son to be so capable that he'd make it through,

The tests, the attempts to experience emotions—in the end, none of it had worked on Beihai,

But that was precisely why both of them knew that, when necessary, they could cut ties completely. And Beihai had no desire to deal with him at all. That was dangerous,

"Beihai, you're right. There's nothing I can do. So, are we still studying advanced math?"

"Of course we are. How could we not? You came right to my door!"