Sato Ruri's expression cycled through a dozen shades of fury and dread before she bit down on nothing—teeth pressed hard into the inside of her cheek—and shoved her chair back from the desk.
She was going.
Whatever Sasaki Fuyumi wanted, whatever pathetic little power trip he was on, she would look him in the eye and watch his fingers tap delete. That video could not stay on his phone. Not for one more hour. Not for one more minute.
I'll make him erase it. Then I'll forget any of this ever happened.
The late-afternoon hallway smelled like floor wax and the faint chemical sweetness of whiteboard markers. Sato Ruri's indoor shoes squeaked against linoleum as she moved quickly past the shoe lockers, swapped into her outdoor pair, and stepped into the golden slant of a dying afternoon. Cherry blossom petals drifted lazy and pink across the courtyard, catching in the chain-link fence like tiny wounds.
She didn't notice any of it.
---
Sasaki Fuyumi had left ten minutes ahead of her.
He'd pocketed his phone in the second-floor bathroom, splashed water on his face, and walked out the school's rear gate with his bag slung low over one shoulder. The taxi ride took twelve minutes. He got out three blocks from Sakuragi's—a family restaurant wedged between a laundromat and a closed-down bookstore—and stood on the sidewalk outside the entrance, arms crossed, trying very hard not to look like someone committing a crime.
The air here tasted different from the school's sterile corridors. Fryer oil from the restaurant's kitchen vent mixed with exhaust fumes and the faint green tang of freshly watered sidewalk planters. A vending machine hummed nearby, its fluorescent glow painting a pale rectangle on the concrete.
Sasaki Fuyumi uncrossed his arms. Crossed them again. Checked his phone. Put it away.
This is insane.
He'd never done anything like this. The closest comparison he could dredge up was that arc in Death Note where Light walks into every conversation three moves ahead, radiating sociopathic calm—except Light never had sweat collecting in his palms or a heartbeat hammering so hard it felt like a second pulse in his throat.
Sasaki Fuyumi wasn't three moves ahead. He was barely one move in, and already half-convinced Sato Ruri would skip the meeting entirely and call the police, and then he'd achieve a different kind of social death: the kind that involved a police report and his mother's face crumpling in the fluorescent lights of a precinct waiting room.
This so-called Life Achievement System… is it actually trying to turn me into a villain? Did it latch onto some stray dark thought I had once and decide, yeah, let's build a whole personality around that?
He exhaled through his nose.
What's done is done. One step at a time.
A text notification buzzed. He ignored it. The vending machine hummed louder, then clunked as it cycled its compressor. Somewhere behind the restaurant, a delivery driver killed an engine.
Then—movement.
A figure appeared at the far end of the block, silhouetted against the warm amber of the low sun. Slender. Moving fast. Running, actually—arms pumping, school bag bouncing against her hip, skirt flaring with each stride.
Sato Ruri had sprinted here.
Sasaki Fuyumi's throat went dry.
She slowed to a walk twenty meters out, chest heaving from the effort. Every gasping breath lifted her breasts visibly beneath her uniform blouse—the white fabric pulling taut across their fullness with each inhale, the top button straining where the cotton gathered over the rounded swell. They were bigger than her uniform was designed to accommodate; the fabric dipped between them with each exhale, outlining their shape with the kind of clarity that made it impossible to look anywhere else. A thin sheen of sweat had dampened the material along her collarbone, and the faintest shadow of a bra—pale lavender—showed through where the cotton clung to damp skin.
She caught him looking.
Her dark eyes snapped onto his face like a trap closing, and something venomous flashed through them—shame tangled up with raw anger. She closed the remaining distance with stiff, deliberate strides, her jaw set so tight the muscles in her neck stood out.
She's furious.
Sasaki Fuyumi's mind scrambled for an opening line, something casual, something that might defuse the nuclear-grade hostility radiating off her—and then the translucent text flickered into existence at the edge of his vision:
「 Mind your words and behavior. The more closely your conduct aligns with "scumbag" standards, the higher the evaluation. 」
Right. The Scumbag Points.
He'd chosen this route. The system had explained it plainly: Scumbag Points could be converted into self-preservation abilities. High-risk lifestyle, high-risk rewards. He didn't fully understand the mechanics yet, but the system hadn't lied so far, and right now—standing across from a girl who looked ready to claw his eyes out—self-preservation sounded extremely appealing.
Sasaki Fuyumi pulled from every smug antagonist he'd ever watched. Gilgamesh's casual cruelty in Fate/Zero. The way Makishima Shougo smiled at people he was about to ruin. He let his mouth curl into something that wasn't quite a smile, more a slow baring of teeth, and tilted his chin up.
"Sato Ruri-san. You finally made it."
The honorific dripped with false courtesy.
Sato Ruri stopped two paces away. Her fists were balled at her sides, knuckles bone-white. She'd been building herself up the entire run here—fury as fuel, righteous indignation as armor—and he could see the exact moment it faltered. Her eyes searched his face, found nothing familiar, nothing safe, and the fire in her expression guttered like a candle in a draft.
He's… different.
She hesitated. The courage she'd carried here evaporated in the space between one heartbeat and the next, replaced by something colder: the awareness that he held the power, and she didn't.
"What do you want?" Her voice came out harder than she felt. "What do I have to do to make you delete that video?"
"What do you think?"
Sasaki Fuyumi let his gaze travel down from her face—deliberately, theatrically slow. Over her neck. The damp collar of her blouse. The prominent curve of her chest, where each residual pant still made the fabric shift and stretch. He lingered there for a count of three, four, five—long enough that there was no ambiguity about what he was staring at—before dragging his eyes back up to hers.
Sato Ruri's expression could have curdled milk.
"I'll pay you," she said, each syllable bitten off clean. "Money. I'll give you however much you want. You delete the video, and we pretend none of this happened."
She's still talking like she has leverage. Sasaki Fuyumi felt something shift inside him—a cold pragmatic reflex overriding the guilt. The system wanted scumbag energy. She still had her chin raised, still looking at him like he was the disgusting one, and something about that defiance told him his evaluation score would tank if he backed down now. He'd already crossed the line. Half-measures were worse than commitment.
So he committed.
"Shut your mouth," he said flatly. "You goddamn pervert."
Sato Ruri's face went blank. Completely, utterly blank—like a screen that had been unplugged. Then color flooded back in, red and furious, starting at her ears and racing across her cheeks.
"Who are you calling a—"
Sasaki Fuyumi pulled his phone out and held it up where she could see the screen. He opened the class LINE group chat with one thumb, the video file already queued in the message field.
"Still talking back?" His voice was bored, almost lazy. "Want me to drop this in the group chat? Let everyone enjoy the show?"
His thumb hovered over Send.
"DON'T—!"
The word tore out of her like something physical. Sato Ruri lunged forward and grabbed his wrist with both hands, fingers locking around bone and tendon with desperate, white-knuckled force. Her nails dug crescents into his skin. She wasn't letting go—couldn't let go—because letting go meant the video would land in a group chat with forty-three classmates and it would be over, everything would be over, her reputation, her life as she knew it—
"Let go," Sasaki Fuyumi said. His face was stone.
He means it. Oh god, he means it.
Sato Ruri's complexion drained to the color of rice paper. Regret crashed through her—regret for her tone, for the defiance, for every sharp word she'd thrown at him in the last thirty seconds. But her hands wouldn't unclench. Her body refused to release his wrist. The terror was too primal, too absolute.
She looked up at him.
And Sasaki Fuyumi nearly lost his composure.
Sato Ruri's dark eyes—wide, liquid, framed by lashes still damp from the wind—stared up at him with an expression he'd never seen on her face before. Not in two years of sharing a classroom. The haughty class beauty, the untouchable honor student whose gaze could freeze a boy mid-sentence at thirty paces, was looking at him with raw, trembling supplication. Her lips parted slightly, the lower one bitten pink, and her perfect features arranged themselves into something so vulnerably, achingly pleading that it hit him somewhere behind the sternum like a fist.
She'd surrendered.
Good. Sasaki Fuyumi filed the observation away clinically. Sato Ruri was proud by nature—pride was her default operating system, her armor, her identity. If he hadn't struck hard and fast, established dominance in the first thirty seconds, she would've steamrolled the entire negotiation. He'd watched enough anime to know the archetype: the ojou-sama who only respects strength. You couldn't reason with that. You had to break through it.
Though… bullying a girl like this…
A thread of guilt tried to surface. He smothered it—because right then, Sato Ruri was still gripping his wrist, and in her panic she hadn't noticed how close she'd pulled herself. Her body was pressed flush against his arm. And her chest—those full, generous breasts that the school uniform perpetually struggled to contain—was squeezed directly against his bicep.
Soft.
That was the first thought. Impossibly, obscenely soft. The kind of softness that had weight and give to it, flesh yielding against the hard line of his arm, reshaping itself around the muscle. Through two layers of fabric—her blouse, his sleeve—he could feel the heat of her skin, the faint dampness of sweat, and the unmistakable firmness of her nipple pressing into the outer edge of his forearm as her breast compressed against him. The contact was accidental on her part, born entirely from desperation, and that made it worse—or better—because there was nothing calculated about the way her body molded against his.
A jolt of arousal lanced through him, sharp and electric.
Sasaki Fuyumi moved before he could second-guess it. He lifted his free hand—the one she wasn't death-gripping—and laid it over the back of her fingers. Slowly. Palm sliding across her knuckles, his thumb tracing a deliberate line along the ridge of bone and tendon.
Her skin was startlingly smooth. Cool from the evening air but warming fast where he touched.
"Heh." The laugh came out low, almost a murmur. "Your hands are softer than I expected, Sato Ruri-san."
She flinched. A full-body tremor ran through her, shoulders to fingertips, and he felt her breasts shift against his arm with the motion—a slow, heavy drag of flesh that sent another pulse of heat straight to his groin. Her expression cycled through revulsion, calculation, and something desperate enough to override both.
Then Sato Ruri bit down on the inside of her cheek, stepped closer, and wrapped both arms around his bicep.
She hugged it against her chest.
Deliberately.
The pressure was immediate and overwhelming. Her breasts enveloped his arm—warm, pillowy, absurdly full—and she squeezed with enough force that he could feel them deform around the muscle, the pliant flesh bulging above and below where his arm bisected them. The rounded outer curves swelled visibly against the straining blouse, the fabric pulling so tight across the compressed swell that individual stitches stood out along the seam. Through the thin cotton and the lace of her bra beneath, the texture of her skin was fever-warm and faintly damp, and the ridge of her nipple—stiffened now, whether from the contact or the cool air—dug into the sensitive inside of his forearm like a small, hard point of accusation.
Sato Ruri forced her face into something approximating a smile. It didn't reach her eyes. It barely reached her mouth—a brittle, mechanical curve that looked like it physically hurt to produce.
"Sasaki Fuyumi-kun~" Her voice came out saccharine and strangled, a bad imitation of the cutesy tone girls used in dating sims. "Won't you please delete the video? Pretty please~?"
I want to die. I want to die. I want to crawl into the earth and never resurface.
She pressed her breasts harder against his arm to emphasize the plea, and the soft mass flattened further, the upper swell rising above the neckline of her blouse—pale, flushed skin visible in the V of her collar, the shadowed line of cleavage deepening as she squeezed.
Sasaki Fuyumi's feelings were… complicated.
He hadn't expected this. The school's celebrated beauty—the girl half the boys in their year fantasized about, whose face alone could stop hallway traffic—was clinging to his arm, pushing her chest against him, and cooing at him in a voice dripping with forced sweetness. All to make him delete a video. She was using her body as currency, and she was doing it willingly, if not happily.
Something romantic inside him—some small, naive part that had occasionally daydreamed about Sato Ruri the way every boy in class did—withered and died on the spot.
So this is what a "goddess" looks like up close. Not so different from anyone else. Maybe worse. An ordinary girl would've just cried. She went straight to seduction.
She'll go through someone's private belongings without a second thought. She'll invade your privacy like it's nothing. And when she's cornered by a man she can't outmaneuver—she'll press her tits against his arm and call him "kun."
What a disappointment.
The thoughts burned through him in rapid sequence, leaving something cold and clear in their wake. He leaned into the role. Let the smug, satisfied grin spread across his face like oil on water—the grin of a man who was enjoying this, because the system wanted him to, and because, god help him, some feral part of his brain was.
"Sato Ruri-san," he said, voice low and thick with theatrical relish. "I had no idea you could be this slutty. Your tits are seriously soft, you know that?"
The word hit her like a slap. Her jaw clenched so hard he heard her teeth click. A vein pulsed at her temple. But she didn't let go—if anything, she tightened her grip, mashing her breasts even more firmly against him, the plush weight shifting and spreading with the motion.
"Sasaki Fuyumi… onii-chan." The honorific sounded like it was being dragged out of her throat with pliers. Her smile was a rictus, her dark eyes glittering with barely contained murder. "If you promise to delete the video… I'll let you… t-touch…"
Her voice cracked on the last word. A blush so violent it looked painful erupted across her face, flooding from her cheeks to her ears to the exposed skin of her neck, turning her the color of ripe persimmon. She looked like she wanted the sidewalk to open up and swallow her into the earth's core.
"…touch them," she finished, barely above a whisper.
Sasaki Fuyumi's throat bobbed. An involuntary swallow.
She's offering to let me grope her to get the video deleted.
"Deal." The word came out faster than he intended. He cleared his throat, recovered the smirk. "I'll delete it right now."
He made a show of it—unlocking his phone, navigating to the gallery, pulling up the video file. He turned the screen toward her so she could watch. His thumb hovered over the red trash-can icon, then tapped it. A confirmation prompt appeared. He tapped again.
Video deleted.
Sato Ruri's eyes went wide. Then wider. Then a smile—a real smile, involuntary and radiant with pure, crashing relief—broke across her face like sunrise after a week of rain. Her grip on his arm loosened. Her shoulders dropped three inches.
It's gone. He actually deleted it. That idiot—I just said a few sweet things and he folded like wet cardboard. What a pathetic, brainless—
"So, Sato Ruri-san." Sasaki Fuyumi's grin hadn't moved. "I held up my end. Now about that promise…"
His eyes dropped to her chest. Hungry. Unsubtle.
Sato Ruri released his arm and stepped back two full paces. She folded her arms across her breasts—instinctively, protectively—and tilted her head with a look of wide-eyed, theatrical confusion so perfectly crafted it belonged on a stage.
"Hmm? What are you talking about?" She blinked twice, guileless as a kitten. "I don't understand. Ah—my stomach is growling! I really need to get home for dinner~"
She was already turning on her heel, hair swinging in a dark curtain across her shoulders, one foot pivoting toward the direction she'd come from—
"Sato Ruri-san."
Sasaki Fuyumi's voice was calm. Almost gentle.
"You seem to have forgotten something."
She stopped. The pivot died mid-motion. She didn't turn around, but her shoulders went rigid beneath her blouse.
"I deleted the video from my gallery, sure. But I sent it to you on LINE first." He paused, letting the silence do the work. "Chat history's still right there. Tap the file, and it plays just fine."
Sato Ruri turned around slowly.
The color that had returned to her face during those few giddy seconds of triumph drained out of it all at once, like water from a cracked glass. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. Her arms fell to her sides. Her dark eyes—those beautiful, expressive eyes that had blazed with fury and glittered with contempt and softened with false sweetness all within the span of fifteen minutes—went flat and hollow, the look of someone who'd just watched the last lifeboat pull away from the dock.
No. No, no, no—the chat log. The message. He sent it to me, and the video's still embedded in the conversation, and he can re-download it any time he—
The evening air smelled like fryer grease and cherry blossoms and something metallic she couldn't name. The vending machine hummed its mindless electric hymn. A bicycle bell rang once, somewhere far away.
Sasaki Fuyumi slid his phone back into his pocket and watched the last of Sato Ruri's defiance gutter out behind her eyes like a candle flame pinched between wet fingers.