Ayanokouji is numb

The matter was handled, but it didn't go ideally—everything was a mess.

Suzune Horikita, that black-haired, long-locked beauty, came with a naturally sharp tongue. When interacting with others, there was always a prickly edge. The sharp tongue itself wasn't the issue; what made it unbearable was the attitude behind it.

To complete his task, Kiyotaka Kiyotaka naturally sought out Class D's angel, Kikyo Kushida.

But who would have guessed that in the Terminal, the messages Suzune Horikita sent out were rather harsh to hear.

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka sat on his bed for the first time, striking a pose identical to Gosling's.

He'd already been screwed over, and now he had to go call those three academic slackers to study. If they actually wanted to learn, would they even be in Class D?

The task was done, but Suzune Horikita had some aversion to Kikyo Kushida as a person, so she was in a foul mood, resisting in every word she said.

Kikyo Kushida had originally called the three over, but one "waste" after another from her nearly sent them spiraling into fury, and they left on the spot.

The study session had just started when it disbanded on the spot, not even surviving an hour.

Frustrated, Kiyotaka Kiyotaka was genuinely baffled. He really didn't understand how this dog-eat-dog society operated, or if people in society were all this abstract.

All he could say was that encountering Suzune Horikita had raised his threshold for everything. Now, when he ran into other bizarre characters, he could keep a blank face and dismiss them as child's play.

Thump thump thump! Three knocks at the door.

Click. The door opened. Beihai poked half his head in, heavy dark circles and dead fish eyes glaring at the expressionless face outside.

In the end, Beihai was defeated by that blank face. The guy had been keeping a perfect poker face, then suddenly cracked a smile—it was creepy, you know?

Even Beihai flinched for a moment, because that move, in his past life, had a name: Chinese horror.

He instinctively stepped aside half a pace, let the other in, then closed the door.

"Something wrong? I remember I said yesterday that I don't really have time."

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka didn't answer directly. Instead, he scanned the room—the Game Console was black, not even warm to the touch. The only things on the desk were stacks of exercise books piled high.

"I recall we agreed last time to study together. I'd like to learn more."

He didn't bring up gaming at all. Instead, he pulled out that unfulfilled promise from before, and the effect was undeniably good.

Beihai's left hand let go of the door handle. Instead, he stepped closer, walked to the desk, and opened a math problem.

"They say a person can do anything when angry.

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

Beihai was genuinely curious. Being impressive at other things didn't mean being good at studying.

For example, Beihai himself dabbled in crooked paths, obsessed over games, and broke records in them, but his academics were a complete mess, which only drove him harder into other directions.

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka picked up a pen and began solving the problem as he wrote. The thought process he laid out was textbook formulaic.

At first, Beihai didn't see anything wrong, but it felt vaguely familiar. Eventually, he realized—this was just reciting the textbook.

This made Beihai's gaze grow strange. He felt like the guy beside him wasn't just robotic; he was very much like an AI. He knew what the textbook had, but didn't know what it didn't. There was no flexibility—one was one, two was two, as if he'd been specifically trained to be that way.

"Did you come out of some special agent training base, the ultimate killing machine?

No wonder you walk around with that deadpan face every day, under that brutal Shrek Academy Teacher Zhou system."

Beihai couldn't help blurting it out. It was too fitting. Having consumed countless works, this trope wasn't new anymore—it was almost cliché.

Something about assassins trained to scale walls at eleven, manipulate the stock market at twelve.

Plus, when gaming, if it involved strategic gameplay like Stellaris or Hearts of Iron, or StarCraft, he always went for maximum profit.

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka's writing hand paused for a moment, then quickly resumed as if nothing had happened, but inside, he was far from calm.

He'd been seen through. The disguise was torn to shreds.

The first time was gaming. The second time was just an academic exchange, and it ripped the mask off.

If it came to close friends, he'd still have to hide things from Beihai. But now there was no need to hide anymore. It had been exposed in such a brutal, almost cruel way, and Beihai was completely calm.

Seeing the reaction, Beihai caught every detail and couldn't help teasing.

"Looks like I hit the mark. Didn't expect you to have such a badass background. Now, you're in this school to lay low from pursuit, right?

No need to be nervous. I'm not interested in you. I've seen geniuses before."

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka couldn't be bothered to keep up the act anymore. He didn't even pretend. Gone was that frozen, deadpan state.

"Am I one?"

"No. You're no genius. A real genius can calculate an undiscovered planet from a single sheet of paper.

A real genius can create new mathematical laws with their own name, like Gauss and others.

And modern geniuses can produce significant results in scientific research.

You? You've been ruined. At best, you're a killing machine. I don't know where you could shine.

Go into politics? You don't have the mind for it. You don't even understand basic social norms—just pure profit maximization.

Go into research? Rote memorization doesn't seem promising. You're just a pure bookworm. No, wait—ah, you've got my left and right brains fighting each other.

Either way, I hate organizations like that. They stifle human creativity and thinking, thinking they've raised a genius, when in reality, they're committing murder."

Kiyotaka Kiyotaka instinctively looked down at his own hands after hearing Beihai's words. If what he said was true, then without any social common sense, having been trapped inside the White Room, learning like a machine—

At three years old, he had to learn to write, and it had to be beautiful. At four, if he was hit, he had to stand back up within a minute, or else he'd be kicked like an adult would.

In middle school, he was already tackling high school material.

And what came of it? In academics, he couldn't match the geniuses who threw themselves into social fields, couldn't create value for society. At best, he was standing on the shoulders of giants, walking the same path they had already tread.

In combat—what era was this? No matter how good a person was at fighting, what use was it?

They talked about refining inferior genes into excellence, but it was no different from this school—cull the inferior, and what's left is all excellent, isn't it?

In other words, his father saw him as some kind of sacrifice in an experiment. Thinking, If I can harden my heart and throw even my own son into this facility, then no one else needs to worry. But he never expected his son to be this tough, to have completely endured it.

Testing, experiencing emotions—in the end, it all failed completely with Beihai.

But precisely because of that, both sides knew that when the time came, they could cut ties cleanly. And right now, Beihai clearly didn't want to deal with him at all. That was dangerous.

"Beihai, you're right. I have no choice. So... are we still studying Advanced Math?"

"Study? Of course we're studying. How could we not? You came knocking on my door yourself!"