The discovery in the Old School Building Archive Room was like a pebble tossed into muddy water. The ripples spread outward in widening circles over the next two days.
Kanzaki Toru sent scans of Tanaka's original interview transcript to Horikita Suzune and Shiina Hiyori. Horikita replied that evening: "In the Disciplinary Committee's official files, this section has been replaced with the standard format stating that 'the parties involved admitted fault and reached a settlement.' The fifth page was reprinted. Tanaka's signature is genuine, but all traces of alterations on the first four pages have been erased. This is evidence tampering, not some gray-area maneuver." Shiina's reply was even shorter: "The 'Sato' who was sidelined by fake evidence in the old files was Sato Kenichi, Class C's previous class representative. Ryuen took over after he was sidelined."
The baton had been passed. Through her social network among the girls, Karuizawa figured out everyone Ryuen had been in contact with recently in less than twenty-four hours. "Ryuen met with two second-year Disciplinary Committee members in the past few days. He also met with Kushida Kikyo by the café on the third floor of the Shopping Center. He was standing while she sat, and it lasted about five minutes." The emotional profile Karuizawa relayed through Perception Resonance was alert, with a trace of suspicion. "Kushida handed him a coffee, no sugar, and chatted with him casually the whole time. I was just passing through to buy a sports drink, but I saw them and doubled back to take another look. Kanzaki, those two were definitely exchanging something."
The clues pointed in two different directions. The second-year Disciplinary Committee members were an old card Ryuen had always held, but Kushida was new. Ryuen had always used other people's secrets to control them; he didn't sit down and trade with them. Anyone he was willing to talk to for five minutes in a public place like the Shopping Center either had information he urgently needed, or held leverage he couldn't fend off.
The next day, after school, most of the students had left the classroom. The setting sun bathed the room in orange-red light, and the air held the lingering smell of chalk dust and cleaning supplies. Sakura Airi sat in a corner, not packing up and leaving as she usually did. Her camera lay on the desk, its lens cap off; her schoolbag was only half-zipped, with the corner of a lunch box showing inside. Kanzaki Toru came in through the front door, sat at the desk in front of Sakura, and turned to face her.
"You have something to tell me."
It wasn't a question. Sakura looked up. Beneath the brim of her cap, her purple eyes held an emotion he rarely saw in her—not nervousness or fear, but a quietness that had settled in.
"At lunchtime today, I went to the rooftop to get my tripod and heard someone on the stairs making a phone call." She handed him her camera and pressed play to show him the recording. The video showed the narrow gap beneath the rooftop door, filmed through the camera lens. The audio wasn't very clear, but it was enough to recognize Kushida Kikyo's voice. Still gentle, she spoke a little faster than usual. "Someone's already handling that report for him. You just need to wait for the result. Someone needs to pick up the things in the Old School Building in person. Ishizaki made too much of a scene last time."
Kanzaki listened to the entire recording. Kushida was speaking to a student. The door muffled most of the other person's voice, but her wording didn't sound like she was talking directly to Ryuen. It sounded more like she was checking a list with someone higher up. During the call, Kushida confirmed that the report about the cross-class incident had been submitted through the Student Council, and suggested that the other person check the Old School Building's watch log. "I've organized Kanzaki's routine. Before he went into the Old School Building yesterday, he stopped by the Equipment Room." Then she suddenly switched to a gentle tone. "I just don't want to see classmates hurting each other."
He paused the recording and looked up. Sakura was watching him, her fingers unconsciously turning the zoom ring on her camera lens, but her voice didn't waver. "Karuizawa told me at lunch the other day that Kushida had met with Ryuen. I know I shouldn't have eavesdropped, but she mentioned your name on the call." She paused, as if trying to piece together a jumbled puzzle. "She isn't trying to protect her classmates at all. She just doesn't want anyone to disrupt the situation she has under control."
Coming from Sakura, those words carried more weight than Horikita's cool analysis or Karuizawa's indignation. The quietest person in the class was willing to break her silence for him. Kanzaki ended the recording, backed up the file to an encrypted drive, then safely ejected the memory card and returned it to Sakura. She took the camera and replayed a single frame he had pulled out. In one corner of the image stood a shoe rack beside the lockers. Kushida was bent over, putting a pair of dusty indoor shoes into a dustproof bag. The soles were stained with the brick-red dust unique to the Old School Building. He recognized it.
"She went there that day too," Kanzaki said.
"Who?"
He didn't answer directly. Instead, he silently opened the Illustrated Guide deep in his mind. Kushida Kikyo's page remained blurry, and her favorability still had no number. But the line in her status bar—"the boundary between her public and private selves remains unconfirmed"—shone brighter than ever. It wasn't warm or cold, but had the unstable gleam of an electric current, crackling across the page.
"This could get more complicated. Don't tell anyone about the recording for now—not even Karuizawa or Shiina. It's not that I don't trust them. The fewer people who know, the less pressure there'll be. You should still have a few chances to photograph the front entrance of the Old School Building from the rooftop. If you can, keep watching the area around the shoe lockers from six to six-thirty in the evening over the next two days, and see if she shows up again. But don't take any risks. If something feels wrong, give up," he said.
Sakura nodded, put away her camera, zipped up her schoolbag, and stood to leave. At the door, she stopped without turning around. "Whenever she smiles, her eyes are looking at someone different. When she smiles at girls, she looks them in the eye. When she smiles at boys, she looks at their forehead or shoulder line. But she looked straight at Ryuen for a long time. At the Shopping Center, she didn't smile at Ryuen at all."
Kanzaki looked at her. "You spotted the bull's-eye."
"She chose the wrong opponent," Sakura said, then gently closed the door behind her. Her footsteps gradually faded down the corridor, but a weight of silence remained in the classroom—not the emptiness she left behind, but the words she had spoken, still faintly vibrating in the air. Kushida Kikyo hadn't smiled at Ryuen. That judgment from the class's quietest observer was more damning than any recording.
Late that night, he sat alone at his desk, several rooftop photos printed by Sakura spread out before him alongside an annotated organizational chart of the Disciplinary Committee. Sakura's frame-by-frame recording was fixed on the left side of his monitor. In the center was the old Sato file Shiina had retrieved from the Library, and on the right was the original interview transcript he had just pulled from the encrypted drive. Most of the lights were off. A faint glow from the corridor slipped through a gap in the curtains, outlining his profile. His shadow cut a sharp gray line across the white wall.
The key to the next stage was obvious: the information channel between Kushida Kikyo and Ryuen Kakeru had to be cut off. But before severing it, he first needed hard evidence of the brick-red dust on the soles of those shoes.
He opened his terminal and sent Shiina Hiyori a brief message: "Can you get all the shoe-rack cleaning reports for the Old School Building from this week's evening hours? The area's a blind spot for the cameras."
Shiina's reply was brief, like the faintest sound of a book closing in the Library late at night. "The facilities team files cleaning reports, and they aren't connected to the Disciplinary Committee's network. I'll organize them for you tomorrow." He closed the terminal and lay on his bed, hands clasped behind his head. The light slipping through the curtains cast a pale path across the ceiling. In the shadows, all the puzzle pieces were silently falling into place—the rooftop, the shoe lockers, the Old School Building; evidence, accusations, and informants; and people. People hidden behind every door, each watching the others' backs.
He closed his eyes and replayed the sound of Sakura's recording in the darkroom of his mind. Kushida said, "I just don't want to see classmates hurting each other." She had said those words many times in many situations. Yet this time, her voice didn't rise or fall, and there was no lingering breath at the end. It sounded like a line she had rehearsed too many times. What changed the meaning of those words wasn't her tone, but the background noise—the intermittent tapping on the other end of the call, three short beats followed by one long one, much like the Enter confirmation sound in the Disciplinary Committee's internal file-search system. The person she was speaking to wasn't somewhere else; they were right in front of a terminal in the school administration office or the Disciplinary Committee.
This final conclusion wasn't a new clue, but it carried more weight than all the others: behind Ryuen and Kushida stood someone who could access the official system in real time. Kushida had compiled Kanzaki Toru's movements into a timetable, and she was the one who suggested the other person check the watch log. The anonymous trail that had once pointed only to "leaks" was now beginning to reveal, without disguise, where it truly led. Kushida Kikyo had chosen an opponent beyond Ryuen alone. Her chessboard was bigger than anyone had imagined. And she still didn't know that the quietest camera in the class had already taken its lens cap off.
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