Soon, once the explanation and discussion inside the assembly room had concluded, the core figures of each class gradually left the room, each carrying their own complicated thoughts.
Out in the corridor, Katsuragi Kouhei deliberately slowed his pace and went out of his way to approach Shikime Natsu, who was walking ahead of him.
"Shiki."
A trace of contemplation showed on Katsuragi Kouhei's composed face as he asked his question.
"About this special exam that Mashima-sensei just announced—do you have any leads on it yet?"
Shikime Natsu stopped walking, turned his head to look at Katsuragi Kouhei, and a faint smile played at the corner of his mouth.
"I do have a few leads, actually. According to this school's rules, at the very start, every class basically stands at the same starting line. In other words, the preferential persons of the twelve groups are split evenly—three to a class."
"Mashima-sensei emphasized that the core of this exam is 'thinking'—that is, the ability to reason. So perhaps we can start directly from those three preferential persons in our own class and look for some kind of common pattern among them."
Hearing this clearly reasoned deduction from Shikime Natsu, Katsuragi Kouhei nodded in deep agreement.
"That deduction really is perfectly reasonable—working backward from the cards we already hold to deduce the rules of the entire exam."
A few measures of admiration crept into the gaze Katsuragi Kouhei fixed on Shikime Natsu. Shikime Natsu truly was a person capable of producing unexpected results. Mashima Tomoya had only just finished explaining the rules of the exam, and yet Shikime Natsu had instantly come up with an approach.
Shikime Natsu gave a slight nod and continued to speak.
"However, as for exactly how this exam is to be carried out—the prerequisite for everything is to wait until eight o'clock tomorrow morning, and first confirm who exactly our Class A's preferential persons are."
Of course, since Shikime Natsu possessed information from the System, he had long ago already known the true identities of all twelve preferential persons.
But the surface procedures and the logical reasoning that ought to be carried out still couldn't be skipped.
Katsuragi Kouhei expressed his agreement with this.
"No problem. Once the list of preferential persons is confirmed by email tomorrow morning, I'll make arrangements at once and first compile the list of our Class A's three preferential persons."
Shikime Natsu nodded, and then the two of them each returned to their rooms.
The next day, eight o'clock in the morning.
The school's email was sent right on time into the phone mailbox of every first-year student.
Soon, the originally quiet inner core group chat of Class A grew lively.
The three Class A preferential persons chosen by the school, after confirming the email, concealed nothing at all and directly posted their own preferential-person identity information into the group.
At the same time, they had also been required to send out which zodiac group each of them respectively belonged to.
Seeing these three people's information, Shikime Natsu, phone in hand, directly posted a new message in the group.
[Shikime Natsu: You three, post the list of members in your groups who belong to other classes as well.]
For everyone in Class A, the information the school had handed out was naturally quite important, and basically every single person had memorized it—including the list of members within their group, which the teacher had specifically instructed them not to take out of the room.
After all, no matter how you thought about it, there was no way the teacher's action could be superfluous, right? There ought to be some kind of hint in it.
Of course, hint or not, everyone in Class A had memorized the member list of their respective groups, and soon afterward the three preferential persons posted the complete lists of their groups into the chat.
Shikime Natsu briefly committed all three group lists to memory, then ran through a round of gojūon ordering, and ultimately confirmed that it really was the same as the result his information System had given: the school was using the gojūon ordering method.
After waiting a few minutes, Shikime Natsu finally posted in the group chat again.
[Shikime Natsu: The rule's already been cracked. The school selects each group's preferential person based on the gojūon order of each group member's name, combined with the ordering of the zodiac signs.]
Upon receiving this message from Shikime Natsu, everyone in Class A couldn't help being momentarily stunned, and then immediately, following this "gojūon plus zodiac" pattern Shikime Natsu had laid out, they cross-checked it against the three group lists whose preferential persons had already been announced.
As it turned out, every single one was correct.
At first everyone had thought that since some groups had thirteen people and some had fourteen, sorting it out would be rather troublesome.
But once Shikime Natsu finished speaking, everyone couldn't help being dumbfounded.
It was cleared just like that?
Based solely on the sample of these mere three people from their own class, they could directly work out the core pattern of the entire exam?
No need to exchange any information with the other classes? No need to go through repeated probing and confirmation?
Or was it that Shikime Natsu had privately confirmed the information of the other classes with those several girlfriends of his?
But from eight o'clock that morning when the preferential-person list was announced, up until now when Shikime Natsu threw out his conclusion—the whole thing, start to finish, added up to only a few short minutes!
Shikime Natsu had actually directly seen through this gojūon ordering method—it was practically like a cheat with an omniscient viewpoint!
And at this moment, Sakayanagi Arisu, who was staying in one of the guest rooms, looked at the message Shikime Natsu had sent on her phone screen, and her lovely brows couldn't help knitting together. After all, even she had no way of directly producing the answer within such a short span of time.
Especially without the corroboration of the other classes' preferential-person lists, she had no way to directly confirm it—was it those girlfriends of Shikime Natsu's?
That was the only way Sakayanagi Arisu could think of it... but even with the assistance of girlfriends, working out such a pattern within a few minutes was simply impossible, wasn't it?
After all, even with sorting, there were many methods of sorting—unless on his very first attempt Shikime Natsu had tried gojūon and just happened to hit the mark like a blind cat stumbling onto a dead mouse.
Of course, it was also possible that this exam's questions had been carelessly leaked, but Sakayanagi Arisu quickly rejected that conjecture—after all, Class B's Hoshinomiya Chie had already been sternly warned beforehand.
And besides... no matter how much hatred there was between Hoshinomiya Chie and Class D, it wouldn't go so far as to drag Class B down into the water along with her. What's more, if Hoshinomiya Chie were caught a second time this round, then she would inevitably be dismissed. For a nasty piece of work like Hoshinomiya Chie, who wanted to watch Chabashira Sae struggle, that would absolutely not be worth it.
And her own class's Mashima Tomoya had always been a rigid, rule-abiding person. As for the homeroom teachers of the other two classes, for Shikime Natsu to reach a private cooperation with them would be no small feat—there was almost no room to maneuver.
After going through several rounds of elimination, Sakayanagi Arisu still couldn't help letting out a sigh. This fellow Shikime Natsu really was different from ordinary people; she couldn't best him—or rather, whenever she competed against this fellow Shikime Natsu, she had never once won.
Shikime Natsu was, without a doubt, a genius. This time Sakayanagi Arisu had actually thought to pit herself against Shikime Natsu in a contest, but she hadn't imagined that in such a short span of time, she would already have lost.
It was just as well that she hadn't placed any kind of wager with that fellow Shikime Natsu, otherwise she really would have lost everything again.
But... although Shikime Natsu had produced this gojūon method, its veracity was still open to question. After all, it only applied to her—er, his—own class's preferential persons; what if, scaled up larger, things turned out differently?
Of course, Sakayanagi Arisu also knew that the probability of that was quite small. If the sample were a bit larger, the probability of such an error appearing would be a bit greater, but this was nothing more than a hundred and sixty people.
And after the people of Class A had verified it, Shikime Natsu's conjecture won their agreement as well; no one raised any further doubts.
[Katsuragi Kouhei: Now that the pattern's been found, the rest of you, post the complete member lists of your respective groups too.]
Soon, apart from the groups containing Class A's three preferential persons, the other people in the chat also quickly posted the member lists of their respective groups.
Before long, the complete lists of all twelve groups had all been produced in the chat.
Then, according to the rules, Shikime Natsu, as a matter of course, in less than a minute circled the names of every single preferential person across all twelve groups on the lists, and posted them back into the group.
Looking at the preferential-person list that had appeared on their phone screens, everyone felt it was quite incredible. After all, when this exam began, everyone had already prepared themselves to play a game of Werewolf—and yet, how much time had even passed? From learning of this exam yesterday until now, not even twenty-four hours had gone by, and the preferential-person list had only just been produced.
Some people probably hadn't even fully grasped the game's rules yet, and the game was already over. This really was too absurd.
Everyone's gaze fell upon Shikime Natsu. Was there anything at all that could stump Shikime Natsu?
Probably not, right?
Ever since the start of the school term, Shikime Natsu had basically maintained an invincible posture. At this moment the people of Class A couldn't help feeling fortunate that Shikime Natsu was in the same class as them—because otherwise, if they came up against Shikime Natsu, they would have absolutely no power to fight back.
[Katsuragi Kouhei: Shiki, now that we've already got hold of all the lists, what's Class A's strategy going forward?]
Katsuragi Kouhei began asking for instructions on the next move in the group chat.
[Katsuragi Kouhei: Do we just fill in all the preferential persons of the other nine classes into the mailbox and submit our answers this very evening?]
[Katsuragi Kouhei: And then we figure out a way to hide Class A's three preferential persons as tightly as possible. That way, not only can we obtain a huge reward, but we can also keep our preferential persons going until the very end. Class A's interests should then be maximized.]
Katsuragi's line of thinking was very steady.
[Katsuragi Kouhei: Of course, if during the process of hiding them we can release false information and lead the other classes to guess wrong about which group our Class A's preferential persons are in, then naturally that's even more profitable. After all, every time they guess wrong, not only do they lose points, but our Class A can conversely receive a compensation reward of 50 class points each time.]
Of course, misleading others was no small challenge—after all, not everyone is the kind whose IQ is running on empty, especially someone like Ryuuen Kakeru, who genuinely overthinks things and won't necessarily truly believe it.
If Class A directly showed the other party the text messages, then perhaps it might work.
And as for all of this, Katsuragi Kouhei still intended to see what Shikime Natsu's thoughts were—after all, Shikime Natsu was Class A's leader, while he himself was merely playing support. He too wanted to know what decision Shikime Natsu would make.
[Shikime Natsu: Hiding is too passive, and the payoff from misleading is unstable. The plan is simple.]
[Shikime Natsu: Katsuragi, you'll step forward and privately contact the other three classes, and sell them the information on our Class A's three preferential persons.]
Proactively exposing your own class's preferential persons? That was an act that would cause the class to be deducted points!
Why do it this way?
[Shikime Natsu: The bargaining chip in the deal is that they must sign a long-term contract, paying a fixed sum of personal points each month, to purchase our class's preferential-person information.]
[Shikime Natsu: After selling off these three slots, the remaining nine preferential-person slots from the other classes will all be answered and claimed by our Class A.]
If you kept the preferential persons until the very last day and held your hand without acting, achieving Outcome Two, the preferential persons could directly obtain a reward of 500,000 personal points—wouldn't that also be pretty good? There was absolutely no need to waste unnecessary class points. You have to realize that, done this way, the 270 class points that could originally have been gained would simply turn into a gain of one hundred and twenty points.
[Shikime Natsu: The school definitely won't let any single class's class points get too high. Just take a slight look at yesterday's rules and you'll know—the school's reward-and-punishment mechanism has already changed; the punishments far outweigh the rewards. The higher our class's points, the more that even when we take first place down the line, it'll be nothing more than a mosquito's-leg reward.]
[Shikime Natsu: Look further at the third-years and second-years. Across both of these grades, even Class A—led by Horikita Manabu, the one hailed as the most outstanding Student Council president—doesn't have a class-point total all that far over a thousand. And among the second- and third-years, the entire grade's combined class-point total doesn't even reach three thousand points.]
[Shikime Natsu: The school can control the increase and decrease of class points, but in contrast, personal points haven't been subjected to much restriction. A long-term, stable personal-point cash flow is far better than class points, which are going to be restricted.]
Regarding this explanation of Shikime Natsu's, the people of Class A also expressed their understanding. It had been mentioned before that the school would restrict class points, but the moment they saw they could increase their class points, what everyone thought was, sure enough, that continuously increasing them would be better.
If they proceeded according to Shikime Natsu's method, then Class A would gain 120 class points, while the other classes would be deducted 120 points, and the gap between the classes would still widen.
After the other three classes purchased Class A's preferential persons, they would only suffer a loss of thirty class points.
Not many people in Class A were resistant to it, and they then expressed their approval.
[Shikime Natsu: Since everyone agrees, then the matter of contacting the other classes and negotiating the sale is left entirely in your hands, Katsuragi.]
[Katsuragi Kouhei: Understood. I'll fight to secure the greatest possible benefit for everyone.]
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