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[Classroom 2-C, Seiran Academy ]
The afternoon sun cut through the tall windows of Classroom 2-C in fat, lazy slabs of gold, warming the rows of wooden desks until the varnish gave off that faintly sweet, chemical smell that only old school furniture carried. Outside, cherry blossoms drifted past the glass like pink static. Inside, Instructor Sawamura droned about differential equations, his marker squeaking against the whiteboard in a rhythm that had already lulled half the class into a glassy-eyed stupor.
Sasaki Fuyumi wasn't even pretending to listen.
He had his phone propped against his pencil case at the perfect angle—screen tilted just enough to catch the light without reflecting it toward the teacher's podium. His thumb scrolled lazily through a group chat, one of those chaotic Discord servers where people dumped memes, rage-bait, and the occasional pirated manga chapter. The air around him carried the faint scent of whiteboard marker fumes and someone's strawberry milk from the vending machine two halls over.
Then someone dropped a screenshot.
He tapped it open without thinking—a reflex, the kind of careless muscle memory that always got people in trouble. The image expanded to fill his screen: a social media post from one of those anonymous confession boards, the type that thrived on drama the way mold thrived on wet bread. A girl—username crowned with sparkle emojis—was cheerfully detailing how she'd been sneaking around behind her boyfriend's back to meet other guys for "casual hangouts." The tone was practically victorious. Beneath the post, the comments section overflowed with praise. Queen behavior. He probably deserved it. Living your best life.
Sasaki Fuyumi stared at the screen for roughly ten seconds.
His blood pressure climbed like a rocket on a launchpad.
He closed the image, backed out of the server, and locked his phone with a sharp click against the desk. His jaw was tight. The irritation sat in his chest like a hot coal, refusing to cool down. He exhaled through his nose, leaning back in his chair until it creaked.
So that's how it is, he thought sourly, arms folding across his chest. Girls out here collecting guys like gacha pulls, and honest dudes just get to sit there and take it. Being a decent guy in this era is basically playing life on Lunatic difficulty with no continues.
It was just frustration talking. The bitter, irrational kind that evaporated within an hour and left you wondering why you'd been so worked up in the first place. He knew that.
What he didn't know was that something had been listening.
「Ding.」
「Loading complete.」
「Welcome to the Life Achievement System. Your desire has been registered. This system will guide you in becoming an outstanding scumbag.」
The words materialized directly in his field of vision—clean, sans-serif text hovering in mid-air like subtitles in a visual novel, pale blue against the warm classroom light. No phone notification. No screen. Just... there.
Sasaki Fuyumi's entire body locked up.
His eyes darted left—Tanaka was hunched over his notebook, copying equations. Right—Mori was asleep with her head on her arms, a thin line of drool catching the sunlight. Behind him, someone's mechanical pencil clicked in steady intervals. Not a single person had noticed floating text appearing out of thin air.
His heart slammed against his ribs once, hard, like a fist hitting a drum.
A system.
Like in those isekai light novels.
...Except I haven't been hit by a truck.
He swallowed. His palms were suddenly damp against the surface of his desk, and the smell of old wood and lemon floor cleaner seemed sharper than it had a moment ago, as though his senses had cranked themselves up to compensate for the fact that his brain was currently short-circuiting.
Life Achievement System. Guides me to become... a scumbag?
His expression twisted into something complicated—halfway between disbelief and a grimace. He realized, with dawning embarrassment, that the system had apparently latched onto his angry little internal monologue from thirty seconds ago. That throwaway thought about not being too honest. That petty, heat-of-the-moment resentment.
I didn't mean it literally. I was just venting.
But the system didn't seem interested in clarification. It offered no dialogue box, no input field, no cheerful mascot character to explain the tutorial. The text simply refreshed.
「Each scumbag action will earn you a set amount of Scumbag Points. Being a scumbag is a high-risk profession. Points can be used to enhance your survival capabilities.」
High-risk profession.
Survival capabilities.
It's telling me this could get me killed.
Sasaki Fuyumi's face cycled through expressions like a slot machine—shock, confusion, reluctant intrigue, and right back to shock. The only silver lining, thin as it was, came from that last line. If the points could protect him, then at least the system wasn't sending him on a suicide mission without insurance.
The text faded like breath on a cold window.
And then—nothing.
Silence. No follow-up. No menu screen. No stats page.
He tried calling out to it mentally. System? Hello? Status screen? Open menu?
Nothing. Dead air. The subtitles were gone, the classroom was unchanged, and Instructor Sawamura was still squeaking away at the whiteboard as if reality hadn't just developed a crack down the middle.
Sasaki Fuyumi pressed his lips together, forced himself to sit still, and pretended to pay attention to class. His fingers drummed a restless rhythm against his thigh under the desk.
---
The bell rang with its usual two-tone chime—bing-bong—and the room exhaled. Chairs scraped. Chatter erupted. Students filed toward the door in loose clusters, voices bright with the particular relief that only preceded PE class. Someone was already arguing about volleyball rotations. The corridor filled with the shuffle of indoor shoes and the distant thud of someone taking the stairs two at a time.
Sasaki Fuyumi stayed seated.
The itch was unbearable. He hunched over his desk, eyes half-closed, and tried again.
System.
Nothing.
System, open.
Nothing.
Menu. Status. Inventory. Help. Anything.
Absolute silence. Not even static. He might as well have been talking to his desk.
He exhaled and opened his eyes. The classroom was empty. Every chair vacated, every desk abandoned—pencil cases left open, notebooks splayed at odd angles, a single eraser sitting on the floor near the window row. Dust motes floated through the columns of sunlight. The room smelled like chalk dust and the faintly metallic tang of the old radiator along the far wall.
He was alone.
"Guess I imagined the whole thing," he muttered, and the disappointment in his own voice annoyed him. He ran a hand through his dark hair, mussing it further, then pushed himself to his feet. His chair scraped against the linoleum with a sound like tearing paper. PE. Right. He grabbed his phone, pocketed it, and headed for the door.
He made it exactly three steps.
The rear door of the classroom swung inward just as he reached it, and suddenly there was a person occupying the space where empty air had been a half-second before. Sasaki Fuyumi's momentum carried him forward—he caught himself just in time, stopping so abruptly that he rocked on his heels, his chest barely six inches from the other person's face.
"Sorry—wasn't looking."
He straightened up and actually looked at who he'd almost bulldozed.
The girl standing in the doorway was small—at least a head shorter than him—with features so finely sculpted they bordered on artificial, like a figure that had stepped out of its display case. Her skin was pale to the point of porcelain, smooth and luminous even under the flat fluorescent backup lights that had clicked on when the sun shifted behind a cloud.
A faint flush was already spreading across her cheeks from the near-collision, turning that porcelain pink at the high points of her cheekbones, dusting the bridge of her small, straight nose. Her lips—thin, precise, the color of rose petals pressed between book pages—pressed together in a tight line. Dark hair fell past her shoulders in a straight, glossy curtain, black enough to carry blue highlights where the light touched it, cut in a precise hime-style fringe across her forehead.
She wore the standard Seiran Academy uniform—navy blazer over a white blouse, pleated skirt hitting just above the knee—but wore it like armor, every button fastened, collar crisp, the red ribbon tie knotted with almost militant precision.
Her eyes were what held him. Large, dark, and sharply defined—the whites almost startlingly bright against irises so deep brown they appeared black—and right now they were glaring at him with undisguised irritation.
This girl looks at me the way a cat looks at a closed door, Sasaki Fuyumi thought.
She didn't say a word. The glare lasted exactly one and a half seconds—long enough to communicate a full paragraph of displeasure—and then she stepped past him and walked into the empty classroom without so much as a syllable of acknowledgment. Her indoor shoes made soft, precise sounds against the floor.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The faint scent of jasmine shampoo trailed behind her, sharp and clean against the stale classroom air.
Sasaki Fuyumi stood in the doorway, mildly stung.
Hot face, cold ass, he thought, borrowing the old expression. But I guess I was the one who almost ran her over, so...
He knew who she was. Everyone in Class 2-C knew who she was.
Sato Ruri. Class representative. Academic committee chair. Perpetually ranked in the top five of their entire grade. A face pretty enough to anchor an anime character design sheet, paired with a personality that treated male classmates the way a surgeon treated bacteria—with clinical, detached hostility. She had never, in the two years since Sasaki Fuyumi had been in the same class as her, voluntarily initiated a conversation with any boy. Ever.
Getting the cold shoulder from Sato Ruri wasn't an insult. It was simply weather.
He steadied himself, then—against his better judgment—glanced back over his shoulder.
She was already several rows deep into the classroom, walking with that measured, deliberate stride of hers. His gaze lingered for a moment on the way the pleated skirt swayed with each step, the slender curve of her waist visible even through the blazer, the pale strip of skin at the back of her neck where her hair parted. Her calves were toned—probably from the morning runs she was rumored to take—and her thighs, what he could see of them between the skirt's hem and her dark knee-high socks, were smooth and fair.
He caught himself, blinked, and turned away with a carefully neutral expression.
None of my business.
He walked out.
Behind him, inside the empty classroom, Sato Ruri paused mid-step. She turned her head slowly and stared at the vacant doorway, something cold and suspicious flickering through her dark eyes. After a beat, she seemed satisfied that she was truly alone. Her gaze swept across the classroom—row by row, desk by desk—and the tight, controlled expression on her face shifted into something else entirely.
Interest.
---
Sasaki Fuyumi reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
One hand on the railing, foot on the first step, and—
「Being a scumbag means doing scumbag things. You suddenly realize that Sato Ruri had no reason to return to the classroom at this hour. You decide to go back and investigate. Use your phone to record Sato Ruri's unspeakable secret.」
The text blazed into existence directly in front of him, floating above the descending staircase like a quest prompt in an RPG.
Sasaki Fuyumi froze.
Sato Ruri's... unspeakable secret?
What the hell is she doing in there?
His foot hovered over the step. His pulse picked up—not from fear, but from that dangerous, magnetic pull of curiosity, the same feeling that made people slow down to look at car accidents. The system wouldn't prompt him without reason. Whatever was happening back in that classroom, it was something worth seeing.
But the rational part of his brain pushed back immediately. Getting involved in something like this is nothing but trouble. This is how people end up as side characters in a scandal arc—
The text refreshed.
「You still have reservations about becoming a scumbag. Therefore, you have decided to become a pervert instead. You will strip naked and sprint back to the classroom, shocking the female student inside.」
Sasaki Fuyumi's face went the color of an unripe lime.
WHAT.
WHAT KIND OF ALTERNATIVE IS THAT.
He chose scumbag.
He chose scumbag immediately, without hesitation, with the speed and decisiveness of a man selecting "continue" over "delete save file." Because between being a scumbag and being the naked lunatic who streaked through the halls of Seiran Academy during PE period, the calculus was not difficult. One of those options let him keep his dignity. The other got him expelled, arrested, and immortalized as a meme in every student group chat until the heat death of the universe.
The text dissolved, and Sasaki Fuyumi exhaled so hard his bangs fluttered.
He stood there for three seconds, staring down the empty staircase. The corridor behind him was deserted—everyone was already at the sports field. The faint sound of a whistle carried in from an open window somewhere below, thin and distant. The air in the stairwell was cool and smelled like concrete and the metallic bite of the railing under his palm.
He turned around.
His footsteps were quiet against the hallway floor—deliberately so, each step placed with a care he hadn't used since sneaking downstairs for midnight snacks during middle school. The rear door of Classroom 2-C was still slightly ajar, a two-inch gap between the door and the frame, just enough to see through without being seen.
He stopped beside it. Pulled out his phone. Switched to camera mode, then toggled to video with a swipe. The small red dot appeared in the corner of the screen.
Recording.
He leaned forward, just barely, and angled his head past the edge of the door frame.
The classroom stretched out before him in its abandoned state—thirty-odd desks arranged in neat rows, afternoon light falling in golden parallelograms across the floor, the whiteboard still covered in Sawamura's equations. The smell of chalk dust and that sweet furniture varnish hung undisturbed.
Sato Ruri stood near the middle of the room, in front of a desk that was definitely not hers.
Sasaki Fuyumi recognized it instantly. Third row from the window, fourth seat back. That was Egawa Mitsuki's desk.
Why is she at Egawa Mitsuki's desk?
He watched through his phone screen as Sato Ruri hesitated, her small hands hovering over the desk's storage compartment. Even from this angle and distance, he could see the way her jaw tightened—a brief, visible negotiation between impulse and restraint. Then she reached in and pulled out a backpack.
Egawa Mitsuki's backpack. A sleek, dark thing with a single keychain dangling from the zipper—some limited-edition mascot character, a little stuffed cat with an eyepatch.
The name conjured an image in Sasaki Fuyumi's mind: a face of almost austere beauty, cheekbones high and sharp, framed by long hair the color of dark honey. And those eyes—cool, distant, the shade of deep water on an overcast day, carrying an expression that suggested she found the entire world mildly tedious. Egawa Mitsuki was, like Sato Ruri, one of the recognized beauties of Class 2-C, though her appeal ran in a completely different direction. Where Sato Ruri was a porcelain doll—precise, delicate, untouchable—Egawa Mitsuki was something colder and more remote, like a character from a psychological thriller who hadn't yet revealed whether she was the protagonist or the villain.
What does Ruri want with her bag?
He steadied the phone and kept recording.
Sato Ruri's pale face had changed. A blush was creeping up from her collar, staining her neck, her cheeks, the tips of her ears—a deep, vivid red that had nothing to do with embarrassment from a near-collision and everything to do with something far more private. She bit her lower lip, leaving a brief white crescent in the pink, and unzipped the backpack.
Sasaki Fuyumi's angle prevented him from seeing inside, but Sato Ruri's face was an open book. Her expression shifted in real-time—tension melting into wide-eyed surprise, surprise curdling into something that might have been disdain, and then disdain being swallowed whole by a flush of unmistakable, almost feverish excitement. Her breathing quickened. He could see it in the rise and fall of her chest beneath the blazer, the way her collarbones shifted under the white blouse. Her hands dove into the bag.
She's not stealing money, Sasaki Fuyumi thought, brow furrowing. That's not a "found cash" face. That's—
Sato Ruri withdrew her hand.
Pinched between her slender fingers, held up to the light like a jeweler examining a gemstone, was a small, smooth, ovoid object. Pink. Unmistakably, aggressively, impossibly pink—the color of bubblegum, of cherry blossoms, of the blush currently consuming Sato Ruri's entire face. It fit neatly in her palm, connected to a short silicone tail that ended in a tiny loop, and even from across the room, Sasaki Fuyumi could tell exactly what it was.
A vibrating egg.
The kind sold in discreet packaging on late-night web stores. The kind that came up in recommendations if you lingered too long on certain product pages. The kind that absolutely, categorically, unequivocally did not belong in a high school backpack.
Sasaki Fuyumi's eyes went so wide they ached.
Egawa Mitsuki brought THAT to school?
He thought of that cold, impassive face. Those bored, half-lidded eyes. That aura of aristocratic detachment. And then he thought of this small pink egg sitting in her backpack between her textbooks and pencil case, and his brain produced a sound like a record scratching.
But Sato Ruri wasn't done.
「Ah—there's more?」
Her free hand plunged back into the bag, rummaging with an urgency that had entirely abandoned any pretense of casual browsing. She pulled out a second object, and this time Sasaki Fuyumi nearly bit his tongue.
It was longer. Thicker. Curved slightly, with a flared base and a surface texture that caught the light in a way smooth plastic never did—ridged, veined, sculpted with a realism that left zero room for plausible deniability. The silicone was a deep, translucent purple, and it was big—easily eight inches, thick enough that Sato Ruri's fingers didn't quite meet around the shaft when she gripped it. The sculpted head was pronounced, bulging, and the surface detail was almost obscenely meticulous: every ridge, every vein rendered with the kind of craftsmanship usually reserved for artisan figures.
A dildo. Full-sized, realistic, and currently being held aloft in the pristine classroom of Seiran Academy by the class representative, who was staring at it with an expression caught somewhere between scientific fascination and the face of someone who had just opened a treasure chest in a dungeon and found legendary-tier loot.
「What... what kind of girl brings an entire arsenal to school?」 Sasaki Fuyumi's internal voice had gone slightly hoarse.
Sato Ruri turned the toy slowly in her hands, examining it from multiple angles. Her lips were parted now, the tight, controlled line from earlier completely gone, replaced by something softer, something almost hungry. The blush had spread down her neck and disappeared beneath her collar. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow cycles, straining the buttons of her blouse at the peak of each inhale. Her thighs pressed together beneath her skirt—a subtle, almost unconscious motion—and her tongue darted out to wet her lower lip, leaving it glistening.
「She's... into this. She's really into this.」
Sasaki Fuyumi's heart was hammering. Not from fear—from something rawer, something that pulsed low in his gut and made the air feel thicker. He kept the phone steady through sheer willpower, the screen framing the scene with the clinical indifference of a lens that couldn't understand what it was capturing.
Sato Ruri—the untouchable class representative, the girl who looked at boys like they were incorrect answers on a test—stood alone in the empty classroom, afternoon light gilding her hair, jasmine-scented and flushed from her cheeks to her chest, cradling a thick purple dildo in both hands with an expression of naked, trembling excitement. Her dark eyes were wide and bright, pupils blown, and her breathing had become audible—soft, quick little exhales that fogged faintly in the patch of cool shadow where she stood.
「I need to keep filming. I need to keep filming and I need to NOT get caught.」
His thumb checked the recording indicator. Still running. Good.
Sato Ruri seemed to realize she'd been holding the toy for too long. She glanced down at it, then at the egg in her other hand, and a complicated expression crossed her features—guilt and thrill wrestling visibly behind her eyes. She turned the dildo once more, her thumb tracing absent-mindedly along one of the raised veins, and a tiny, breathless sound escaped her lips. Not quite a gasp. Not quite a sigh. Something in between—a small, involuntary "nn..." that barely carried across the empty room but hit Sasaki Fuyumi's ears like a thunderclap.
「She doesn't even know she made that sound.」
He memorized this moment with a vividness that felt almost surgical. The golden light. The dust motes. The pretty girl with the obscene toy, biting her lip so hard the skin went white.
Then—
「Route One: You recognize that Sato Ruri possesses a powerful curiosity about other people's private secrets—the more composed and proper someone appears on the surface, the more desperately she wants to unearth what they're hiding underneath. But she has failed to realize that her actions right now constitute a secret every bit as damning as the ones she hunts for. You decide to use the recorded video to coerce the girl into going on a date with you.」
「Route Two: Despite discovering the girl's unspeakable secret, you have no intention of threatening her. Instead, you feel a surge of kinship—the excitement of finding a fellow deviant. You decide to reveal yourself, kneel before the girl, and request permission to kiss her toes.」
Sasaki Fuyumi stared at the two floating prompts, his back pressed against the corridor wall, phone still recording through the crack in the door, Sato Ruri's soft, uneven breathing carrying faintly from inside the sunlit classroom.
His left eye twitched.