The class meeting bell rang promptly at three in the afternoon.
When Chabashira Sae pushed open the door and entered the Class 1-D classroom, she was carrying a stack of handouts far thicker than usual. She didn't take attendance first, as she normally did. Instead, she set the handouts on the lectern, braced both hands against its edge, and surveyed the room. Her gaze was exactly the same as it had been on the first day of school: businesslike and impassive, neither warm nor harsh, as if she were assessing a batch of white mice just delivered to an experimental cage. But if you looked closely enough, you would notice that her eyes lingered a fraction of a second longer on certain people: Ken Sudō's straightened back; Karuizawa Kei's hands, folded over her knees and no longer twirling a pen; Sakura Airi's hat brim, held steady just above her eyebrows; and the pen that never stopped moving in Kanzaki Toru's hand.
"Today's class meeting has only one item on the agenda." Chabashira adjusted her glasses and opened the first page of the handouts. "A preliminary briefing for the June Special Exam."
The classroom didn't erupt as it had at the start of the school year. Nobody slapped a desk, complained, or shouted, "Not again." There was only a dense, restrained silence—a silence that said more than any commotion could. Through all the upheavals since the beginning of the year, Class D had learned to hold back, but it had paid a price for that, too.
"The theme of this Special Exam is 'Comprehensive Assessment of Cross-Class Cooperation and Competition.'" Chabashira pressed the remote. A title appeared on the projection screen, with a string of numbers beneath it: LD-B1-0401. Kanzaki Toru's gaze paused on the numbers. They were identical to the tiny note Chabashira had left in the upper-right corner of the semester schedule last time: "Early June, Special Exam preliminary briefing, LD-B1-0401." The final four digits, "0401," matched the suffix on the cross-class report number he had just signed that morning. This wasn't a coincidence. There were no coincidences at this school.
Chabashira continued, bringing up the exam's basic framework. It would last two weeks and consist of three stages. The first would be the cross-class cooperation stage, in which students from different classes would be mixed into several cooperative groups to complete assignments set by the school. Scores would combine peer evaluations within each group with teacher assessments. The second would be the class competition stage, in which each class competed as a unit in designated events. The events would be announced after the first stage. Classes would face off directly, with the winners receiving Class Points and the losers losing them. The third stage would be a comprehensive assessment involving the Student Council, the Disciplinary Committee, the Academic Affairs Office, and the homeroom teachers from each class. They would evaluate students' performance throughout the exam. Of particular note, this exam would introduce some frozen clauses from the Old System framework, including bonus weighting for cross-class group cooperation and a deduction exemption mechanism for the competition stage. The specific clauses would be announced before each stage began.
"Frozen clauses under the Old System framework." The words fell into the classroom like a pebble into still water. No one erupted, but the ripples could be heard spreading—someone drew a sharp breath, someone set down a pen, and someone gently nudged the classmate beside them.
Kanzaki Toru lowered his head and wrote a line in his notebook: "Old System Collaboration Model Trial Summary (Seventh Edition)—under the cooperation model, Class Points are no longer calculated separately for each class, but allocated through a shared pool within each group. This clause was abolished in the school's fourth year. The reason listed was 'irreconcilable internal divisions.'" He closed his notebook and looked up. Chabashira's gaze had moved on from him and was sweeping across the class as she continued, "The cross-class cooperation group assignments for the first stage will be posted on the bulletin board on the first floor of the Academic Building tomorrow morning. Groups will be assigned randomly in principle, but students' cooperation records from cross-class group tasks this semester will also be taken into account."
She closed the handouts and adjusted her glasses. The classroom's silence felt like a layer of hardened gel, with everyone struggling to think inside it. The Old System clauses had been activated; cross-class cooperation records would factor into group assignments; and the Special Exam number matched the suffix on Kanzaki's cross-class report. Taken together, all this meant that Ryuen Kakeru's fabricated evidence operation last semester, Ishizaki Daichi's retracted testimony, Manabe Shiho's bullying record, and the punch Ken Sudō had held back—all the conflicts and choices that seemed unrelated to the exam—would be entered into the school's database. Over the next two weeks, each would be converted into cold, merciless points.
"During the exam, all individual point rewards and changes in Class Points will be announced in real time. You can check your class's ranking at any time on your terminals." Chabashira added one last thing. "Any questions?"
Horikita Suzune raised her hand and stood. "Teacher, what are the conditions for activating the frozen clauses of the Old System?" Her tone was as level as ever, like a blade without a single unnecessary curve.
Chabashira looked at her—or perhaps she was looking through her, weighing how much of an answer the students could bear. "The results of cross-class cooperation must be formally cited and archived, and the archive citation must pass the Academic Affairs Office's signature-trace audit. Once both conditions are met, the system will automatically activate the relevant clauses." She swept her gaze across the class, finally stopping on Horikita. "The specific clauses activated will be announced before each stage begins. You only need to know that the rules of this exam are more complex than those of any previous exam—and fairer."
When the meeting ended, the students filed out of the classroom. As Sudō stood, he shoved his chair back with a loud clatter, but caught it himself before it hit the desk behind him. Karuizawa walked over to Sakura and said something quietly. Sakura nodded and put her camera away in her backpack. Shiina Hiyori sent a message from the Library saying she was putting together a simplified comparison chart of the Old System clauses and asking everyone to check for it that evening. Horikita Suzune sat in her seat alone, reviewing the digital copy of the exam briefing. She didn't say a word, only made detailed annotations on her tablet, line by line.
Kanzaki Toru leaned against a windowsill in the corridor, watching the deepening dusk outside. The searchlights atop the high walls had begun to turn slowly, sweeping their pale beams over the lawn between the athletic field and the Academic Building. Tonight was the last day of May. Tomorrow morning, the group assignments on the bulletin board would decide who each person stood beside in this two-week Special Exam. And inside the still-unopened folder of Old System clauses lay the shared-pool rules abolished in the school's fourth year, the gray areas altered in the seventh edition of the cross-class cooperation summary, and the final line of annotations signed by Sakagami-sensei before retirement from teaching social studies to the third years.
After returning to his dorm, he opened the file he had brought back from the Old School Building. In the blank margin of one page, he found a line of pencil writing that was easy to miss: "Sample first-stage cooperation task: survival on an Uninhabited Island. Trial classes: Class 3-A and Class 3-D. Trial result: cooperation terminated after Class D suffered systematic suppression in the Shared Pool Allocation. Archivist: Sakagami."
He closed the file and turned off the desk lamp, his eyes open in the dark. Tomorrow morning, the group assignments would appear on the bulletin board, and behind those lists might stand the names of several wanderers long frozen in history.
The dusk of May's final day slowly faded from the cold-lit screen of the vending machine at the corner of the Academic Building. Before returning to the dorm, Karuizawa Kei took a slight detour and placed a can of a new red bean soup drink on the machine's bottom shelf. It wasn't the brand she usually drank, but the one Sakura had mentioned wanting to try at the dessert shop the other day, before admitting she couldn't bring herself to buy it. Karuizawa set it down, took a photo of the vending machine's number, and sent it to Sakura: "Machine 2, fourth row. Don't forget to bring a straw tomorrow morning." Then she straightened and saw Chabashira-sensei at the other end of the corridor, holding a proof of the group assignments she had just collected from the printer. The two of them looked at each other for a second across the vending machine's cold white glow. Chabashira didn't explain why she was still at the office so late, and Karuizawa didn't ask. She only nodded to the teacher, then turned and headed toward the dorms.
In the dark corner at the end of the corridor, she looked again at the encrypted image she had received the day before. It had no context, but in the background was a student ID number whose final digits matched Manabe Shiho's exactly. The sender's signature was just one symbol: "&". She locked the image deep in her encrypted album and didn't forward it to anyone.
The motion-activated light at the end of the corridor never came on.
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