My plan to avoid joining the Student Council was ultimately accepted by Horikita Manabu.
I tossed Manabe Shiho into the Student Council as a Disciplinary Committee Member, where she could take the C-Class delinquents under her wing and teach them how to stay within the rules while throwing their weight around.
Just like when a store owner tells an inspector that the bribe money is for their child, there are plenty of legitimate excuses within the system. You just have to learn them.
On May 1, personal points were deposited into every C-Class student's account right on schedule.
Before class began, everyone lined up in the classroom to hand over their points for the month.
C-Class had performed pretty well this month, earning 880 Class Points. After leaving each student 3,000 personal points for emergencies, I received a total of 3.315 million personal points. Including my own, I had 3.403 million.
Last month, I collected a total of 3.5 million personal points from the class. Some of that came from taking 80,000 points from each student at the start, and I collected quite a bit more afterward.
I got 2.9 million personal points from D-Class, and I could get another 900,000 this month.
Classes A and B paid 2.2 million points for information, and I got 5.5 million personal points from the suckers in the clubs who signed up for lessons.
The budget for my club came to 350,000 personal points for last month and this month combined, but I couldn't count that toward the points campaign. I needed that money to support the rest of the class.
After subtracting the 100,000 points I'd paid the chairman at the start of the school year, I now had 18.303 million points on my card.
Even with the new student benefits, this was all I'd managed to scrape together. Eight hundred million points really were hard to get.
Sakagami, the homeroom teacher, stood to the side holding a stack of papers while his students handed in their points. Once they'd finished, he had everyone return to their seats and began the class meeting.
"Let's begin. This month's personal points have all been deposited into your accounts. If anyone hasn't received theirs, come see me after the meeting.
"Next, as we do every year, I need to go over the results of the entrance assessments.
"Excluding sick leave, you were late eleven times in total, all during the first week of school. Since then, everyone has maintained a very good record, with no further incidents of tardiness or absence.
"There are still times when you can't help but strike up conversations with the students sitting beside you during class, but those are minor issues. Everyone is moving in the right direction, and I'm very pleased.
"There's a lot I don't really want to say, because you all already know this school puts strength above everything else. You can do a lot of things here, as long as you know where to draw the line.
"These are the entrance assessment scores for the four first-year classes. It's worth noting that even with help, this year's D-Class only scored slightly above the average for D-Class in previous years."
Sakagami spread out the papers in his hands.
Class A had 960 points, Class B had 920, Class C had 880, and Class D had 520. The first-years had 3,280 points left in total, which meant they'd receive 13.12 million personal points each month.
Just as Sakagami had said, D-Class really was hopeless. Even with the information they'd received, they'd still lost nearly half their points.
Of course, they might have lost that many before getting the information. The fact they'd managed to hold on to 520 points could have been the result of their hard work. That was how meaningful even the lowest baseline was!
"Next, you should all know what I'm about to announce. At this school, if you fail even one subject in either the midterm or final exams, you'll be expelled.
"According to the results of the last quiz, aside from those who deliberately handed in blank papers, any student who scored below thirty-eight points is at risk of expulsion. Please make sure you keep your scores under control on the upcoming midterms, and don't let anything go wrong unexpectedly."
In the second set of papers Sakagami announced, I ranked dead last with a score of zero. Ryuen was second to last with thirteen points. Aside from the two of us, the lowest score among the other students was still over fifty.
There was no doubt that after getting tutoring for a while, even the students whose entrance scores had been too awful to look at had made some progress. At least they could now answer most of the easy questions correctly.
"Now that Sakagami's finished, it's my turn. Over the past month, we've seized a huge share of the benefits offered to new students. We've taken quite a few points from the other classes in our grade. That may be a drop in the bucket compared to our ultimate goal, but it means we've set out on the right path.
"It'll be difficult to get points from the other classes in our grade over the next month, so we need to look further afield. I'm sure most of you have heard a little about the situation among the second-years.
"The struggle between the two vice presidents from Second-Year Class A and Class B has reached its decisive stage. It's no exaggeration to say that the outcome will determine who's likely to become the next Student Council president. It may even cause several second-year students to be expelled.
"Since the first-year classes have already grown wary of us, we'll set our sights on the second-years.
"All you need to do is gather information and bring it to me. I'll make the decisions and draw up plans to profit from it."
The first-years really weren't easy to squeeze for points anymore, and in the short term, only Class A still had a lot left to wring out.
D-Class's first-month points had been completely drained. In the second month, they'd have to repay their loan from Class B and what they owed us, so there wouldn't be much left.
Class B had also been drained by its regular expenses and the points it had lent to D-Class. What it had on hand now was probably a combination of the loan repayments and newly deposited points. It wasn't worth putting in a lot of effort to take those points. We were counting on making money from Class B through legitimate means.
Class A would be difficult to deal with in the short term. I'd leave the class that had split into two factions and was fighting itself to Ryuen. He could keep Katsuragi firmly in check, while I dealt with Sakayanagi.
The best chance to get a large number of points right now was to get involved in the second-years' battle.
I'd started out with a somewhat flawed perspective, assuming from the outset that Nagumo didn't have much money because of the resources he'd have later on.
In reality, that wasn't the case. From everything I'd heard over the past month, the second-years had a truly staggering number of points right now.
The reason Nagumo hadn't had many points in the original story was probably that he'd spent all the points he'd saved up during his first year in this decisive battle. After unifying the grade later, he'd have to share the spoils, so he wouldn't keep many points on hand. He'd only need enough to save someone once.
Taking some points from the second-years was the most important thing we had to do this month.
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