Her eyes found his.
The look on her face wasn't anger. Anger would have been easier. This was something rawer—humiliation boiled down to its purest concentrate, painted across flushed cheeks and a trembling lower lip. Her small chest heaved beneath her uniform blouse, each breath unsteady.
Sasaki opened his mouth. He wasn't sure what he was going to say—some flimsy excuse, maybe an apology dressed up as a joke, anything to sand down the edges of what he'd just done. But before a single syllable left his throat, Ruri's eyes rimmed red, and the look she gave him curdled from shame into something harder.
"Pervert."
He's the worst. The absolute worst. I hate him. I hate him so much I could scream.
The word hung in the spring air like a slap. Then Ruri turned and ran—school bag bouncing against her thigh, pleated skirt swaying with each frantic stride. Sasaki caught the glint of teardrops scattering from her face as she disappeared past the park's stone gate, tiny prisms catching the last of the golden light before they hit the pavement.
He sat on the bench for a long time after she was gone.
The cherry blossoms kept falling. The vending machine kept humming. A pair of elderly women strolled past with a Shiba Inu, paying him no attention at all.
Sasaki dragged both hands down his face and exhaled through his teeth. A bitter, crooked smile tugged at the corner of his mouth—the kind that tasted like self-contempt. He'd been so fixated on the task, on the system's demands, on not wasting the risk he'd already taken, that he hadn't stopped to weigh the most obvious thing:
Maybe, compared to getting slapped in public or cursed out by some guy, this was the thing that truly wounded a person.
He sat with that thought until the park lights flickered on, pale and buzzing, turning the cherry blossoms from pink to grey. Then he stood, brushed off his pants, and walked home.
---
[Sato Residence, Residential Block 7]
Ruri closed the front door behind her with exaggerated care, as if the soft click of the latch might somehow betray what had happened. The apartment smelled like miso broth and grilled mackerel—her mother was in the kitchen, the faint sizzle of oil punctuating the evening news droning from the living room television.
"Ruri? Dinner's ready."
Her mother's voice drifted out from behind the kitchen partition, warm and routine.
"I'm not hungry. I'll eat later."
She delivered the line with mechanical precision, each word controlled, then slipped into her bedroom and pressed the door shut. The room was small and cluttered with the specific debris of a seventeen-year-old girl: a desk stacked with open textbooks and highlighters in five colors, a bookshelf lined with manga volumes—Fruits Basket, Nana, a weathered copy of Honey and Clover—and a bulletin board pinned with photo-booth strips and a Jujutsu Kaisen postcard. A stuffed Pochacco sat on her pillow, watching the room with its stitched black eyes. The air smelled like fabric softener and the vanilla body mist she'd spritzed that morning, now stale.
Mom can't know. She absolutely cannot know.
Ruri's knees buckled. She slid down the door until she was crouching, arms wrapped tight around her shins, forehead pressed into her kneecaps. The urge to cry pushed against the backs of her eyes like water behind a dam—hot, insistent—but she swallowed it down in thick, painful gulps. If her mother heard sobbing through these thin apartment walls, there would be questions. Gentle ones. Patient ones. The kind impossible to deflect. And Ruri could not explain this. Not any part of it.
She crouched there until her calves went numb, breathing the vanilla-tinged air of her own room, replaying the sensation of his face against her—
She stood up abruptly.
Her fingers moved before her brain caught up. She reached behind her waist, found the clasp of her skirt, unhooked it, and let the pleated fabric pool around her ankles. Then, with a hesitation that bordered on dread, she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties—plain white cotton with a small embroidered bow at the front—and slid them down her thighs, the elastic dragging faintly across skin still prickling with goosebumps.
She held them up at arm's length.
The wet spot was unmistakable. A darkened patch of fabric right at the center gusset, roughly the size of a fifty-yen coin, the cotton there turned slightly translucent where the moisture had soaked clean through. Thin threads of it had wicked outward from the edges, mapping the shape of her arousal like a confession written in water. The evidence was damning and absolute.
Ruri stared at it.
Her face ignited—cheeks, ears, the bridge of her nose, all of it flaring scarlet in the space of a single heartbeat. The room seemed to tilt beneath her bare feet. She could feel the residual slickness between her thighs even now, a faint warm stickiness that the cool evening air was already drawing across her bare skin in a way that made her legs press together instinctively. The scent rising from the damp fabric was unmistakably hers—that same sweet, musky warmth she'd only ever encountered in her most private, most shameful late-night moments beneath the covers, fingers guilty under her waistband, face buried in the pillow to keep quiet. Except those moments were chosen. Wanted. Secret.
This was none of those things.
No. No, no, no.
He was forcing himself on me. He held me down. That was—my body shouldn't—this doesn't make any sense—
Why am I like this?
She couldn't finish the thought. Her hands crushed the panties into a tight ball, fingers white-knuckled around the fabric, and she shoved the crumpled cotton behind the stack of old Sasakijo manga on her bottom shelf—a place her mother never touched. Then she pulled a fresh pair from her dresser drawer, stepped into them with shaking hands, and felt the clean cotton settle against flesh that was still faintly, traitorously warm.
Ruri collapsed face-first onto her bed.
The Pochacco plush tumbled off the pillow from the impact. She didn't pick it up. She lay there with her face buried in the comforter, knees drawn up, arms limp at her sides, breathing the detergent-and-vanilla scent of her own sheets until the trembling in her body finally, slowly, stopped.
She didn't move for a long time.
---
[Sakuragi Heights Apartment Complex, 4th Floor ]
Sasaki fished his keys from his pocket as he approached Unit 402, the familiar hallway carrying its usual cocktail of concrete dust and the faded antiseptic the building manager mopped with every other Tuesday. His key was halfway into the deadbolt when the door across the hall swung open behind him.
He turned.
A young couple stepped out of Unit 401. The man came first—tall, around five-eleven, with the kind of jaw that belonged on a cologne advertisement. His hair was ink-black and swept back from a clean forehead, not a strand out of place, and he wore a charcoal suit with the tie loosened one knot past professional, the top button of his white dress shirt undone to expose a triangle of collarbone. Late twenties. His build was lean but carried in that particular way that suggested a gym membership used at least three mornings a week—broad through the shoulders, tapered at the waist, the suit jacket tailored close enough to confirm it. His shoes were oxfords, freshly polished, clicking against the concrete floor with authority.
The woman a half-step behind him was something else entirely.
She stood about five-four in low heels, with a figure that the plum-purple wrap dress she wore made no effort whatsoever to conceal. The fabric cinched at her waist—twenty-three, twenty-four inches at most—before draping over hips that flared with a gentle, decisive curve, the kind of ratio that made the wrap dress look less like clothing and more like an editorial decision. Her legs were bare below the knee-length hem, smooth and pale, the faint shadow of muscle definition in her calves visible when she shifted her weight. Her collarbone caught the hallway's fluorescent light above a modest neckline that still managed to hint at the soft swell beneath. Her hair was a deep chestnut brown, falling in loose waves past her shoulders with the kind of effortless texture that probably required thirty minutes and a ceramic curling iron to achieve. Her face was oval, features delicate: a small nose, lips that rested in a natural half-smile even in repose, and eyebrows that arched in soft crescents above eyes the color of dark honey—clear, bright, startlingly warm. A thin silver chain rested against her throat, and the only other jewelry was a wedding band on her left hand, catching the light when she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
She smelled like white tea and jasmine. It reached Sasaki from four feet away.
She's beautiful, he thought, before he could redirect the observation into something less blunt.
"Hey there." Sasaki straightened up, key still half-embedded in his lock. "I live across the hall. Sasaki Fuyumi" He dipped his head in a slight bow—not deep enough to be formal, just enough to signal basic neighborly decency. Living next door to strangers didn't require friendship, but it was best to avoid making enemies of people who could hear you through the walls.
The couple assessed him with the quick, synchronized glance of two people who communicated in shorthand. The man's gaze swept over Sasaki's school uniform and bag; the woman's lingered half a beat on his face.
High school. He's young. Maybe second year? Tanaka catalogued the details with the efficiency of someone accustomed to sizing people up in boardrooms.
The man smiled first. Practiced, confident—the kind of expression designed to put strangers at ease without revealing much of anything beneath it.
"Good to meet you. I'm Ichinose Tanaka, and this is my wife, Reika." He tilted his head toward the woman beside him. "We just moved in a few days ago. Apologies in advance for any noise while we're still getting settled."
Reika offered Sasaki a smile of her own—softer than her husband's, the corners of her eyes crinkling just slightly, her gaze holding his a beat longer than standard politeness demanded. The kind of smile that made you feel like you'd said something clever, even if you hadn't opened your mouth yet.
He has a nice face. Gentle eyes for a boy his age.
"It's lovely to meet you, Sasaki-kun," she said. Her voice was low and unhurried, pitched like late-night FM radio—the kind you left playing in the background because turning it off felt like losing something.
They cycled through the standard repertoire of neighborly small talk—how long they'd been in the building (three days), what brought them to Sakuragi (Tanaka's company transfer), whether the garbage sorting schedule was as absurdly confusing as the welcome packet made it seem (worse, actually). Tanaka did most of the talking, punctuating his sentences with easy hand gestures while Reika stood slightly behind him, her half-smile constant, her honey-brown eyes drifting between Sasaki's face and his apartment door.
Then Tanaka tilted his head. "So, Sasaki-kun, you're still in school, right? Are your parents home? We should introduce ourselves properly."
Alone. If this kid lives alone, then—
Sasaki rubbed the back of his neck. "Ah... I mostly live by myself, actually."
Something shifted behind Tanaka's eyes. Not surprise—more like a flicker of calculation, a door opening somewhere in the back of his expression that he hadn't expected to find unlocked so soon. His mouth parted, the beginning of another question already forming on his tongue, when Reika's heel came down on the toe of his oxford with a pressure that was gentle enough to look accidental and firm enough to mean stop.
Not now, you absolute idiot. You're going to scare him off before we've even unpacked the kitchen.
Tanaka caught himself mid-breath. The calculated look dissolved back behind his practiced smile, and he let out an apologetic laugh, scratching his jaw.
"Well, that's impressive. Living independently at your age." He straightened his tie—a nervous habit, or a reset. "If you ever need anything at all—a cup of sugar, help with a leaky faucet, whatever—don't hesitate to knock."
"I appreciate that. Seriously." Sasaki patted his stomach with exaggerated sheepishness. "I should head in, though. Dinner's calling."
"Of course, of course. Have a good night, Sasaki-kun."
"Night."
Sasaki stepped inside Unit 402 and closed the door. Then, acting on an instinct he couldn't quite name, he pressed his eye to the peephole.
Through the fisheye lens, their figures warped at the edges but their faces stayed clear enough. The Ichinoses hadn't moved. Tanaka leaned toward Reika, his mouth forming words the door swallowed into silence. Whatever he said made Reika's perpetual half-smile collapse into a flat, unimpressed line. She spoke back—short, clipped, her jaw tight—and Tanaka's expression cycled through defensiveness into that particular brand of sheepish contrition husbands mastered within the first year of marriage. He held up both palms in surrender. She turned and walked back into 401 without waiting for him. Tanaka followed, shoulders slumped, pulling the door shut behind them.
Sasaki peeled his face off the door and dropped onto the couch.
The apartment was dark except for the blue standby light on the television—empty, quiet, carrying the stale ghost of this morning's instant coffee and the cedar air freshener dangling from the bathroom doorknob. The curry he'd made two nights ago sat in a covered pot on the stove, and the faint sourness of day-old rice lingered near the kitchen counter.
His phone buzzed. Auntie's name lit the screen.
"Sasaki-kun, did you eat?"
"Yeah, already ate." He hadn't. He pulled the leftover curry toward the microwave as he spoke, cradling the phone between shoulder and ear.
"Good. I'm swamped this week, but I'll try to come by Sunday. Take care of yourself, okay? Don't live off konbini bentos."
"I won't. Night, Oba-san."
"Night, sweetheart."
She hung up. The line went dead, and the apartment swallowed the silence whole.
Sasaki ate the reheated curry standing at the kitchen counter, scraping the spoon against the bowl without tasting much. He rinsed the dish, turned off the lights, and spent twenty minutes lying on the couch turning the Ichinoses' behavior over in his mind like a two-sided coin—the man's too-eager eyes, the woman's corrective heel on his shoe, the silent argument in the hallway. Then his thoughts scattered under the weight of fatigue, and he dragged himself to bed.
---
[Sasaki's Apartment, Unit 402 — 12:01 AM]
The bedroom was dark. Sasaki lay flat on his back with the covers pulled to his chest, eyes closed, balanced on the edge of sleep—when the familiar ripple passed across his vision.
Even through closed eyelids, the effect was unmistakable: a liquid distortion, as if someone had dropped a pebble into the still surface of his sight. Then the slideshow began.
Images materialized in rapid succession, crisp and vivid as photographs pinned to the inside of his skull:
Sasaki crouched behind the classroom's rear entrance, phone angled upward, Ruri captured on the screen—unknowing, exposed.
Sasaki standing before Ruri, close enough to watch the panic bloom across her features, his voice delivering threats he could still taste on his tongue.
Sasaki's cheek pressed into the warm polyester of her skirt, arms locked around her hips, her body rigid and trembling against his face.
Each frame lingered for two, three seconds before dissolving into the next. The final image held longest of all:
A bedroom drenched in the soft pinks and creams of a girl's private world. Ruri stood at its center, face scarlet to the tips of her ears, holding a crumpled pair of white cotton pantsu at arm's length. Her thighs pressed together. Her expression was fractured—disbelief and shame and something she clearly did not have a name for, all fighting for dominion over the same face.
The image dissolved to black.
Glowing text materialized in the darkness behind Sasaki's eyes, each character burning with clean amber light:
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>☆ DAILY ASSESSMENT — COMPLETE ☆
>
>Today's Scumbag Rating: ORDINARY
>
>Scumbag Points Earned: +100 SP
>
>Evaluator's Remark: "A greenhorn scumbag. Still wet behind the ears."
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Sasaki's left eye twitched in the dark.
...Was that supposed to be encouragement, or an insult?
Before he could dwell on it, a chime sounded—a single clean tone, bright and synthetic, identical to the shop-menu bell from every RPG he'd ever sunk three hundred hours into.
>「 DING 」
>
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>EXCHANGE SHOP — NOW AVAILABLE
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
A translucent panel bloomed across his field of vision, edges glowing faintly gold, the header reading EXCHANGE INTERFACE in bold serif font. His fingers twitched against the bedsheets—there was nothing physical to touch, but the interface responded to intent alone, scrolling as he willed it.
This is it. Whatever that system put me through today—this is where it starts paying dividends.
He dove into the catalog with the fervor of a gacha addict on the last day of a limited banner. The excitement lasted approximately nine seconds.
The Exchange Shop permitted three purchases per daily cycle, refreshing at midnight. The available inventory was... not what he'd envisioned. No telekinesis. No time dilation. No Sharingan. Not even a basic stat enhancement. Instead, the offerings read like a survival kit designed for someone the universe was actively trying to punish:
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>[ Bare-Handed Blade Catch ]
>Cost: 200 SP
>
>Upon acquisition, success rate for intercepting a bladed weapon with bare hands: 60%. Proficiency scaling to 100% with repeated successful use. (Note: Failed attempts may result in loss of fingers.)
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Sasaki's mouth twitched. He scrolled down.
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>[ Iron Face ]
>Cost: 50 SP
>
>Facial dermis achieves supernatural resilience. Slaps will no longer register pain. (Note: Does not prevent redness, swelling, or emotional damage.)
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
>[ Keen Scent ]
>Cost: 50 SP
>
>Olfactory sensitivity sharpens to predatory levels. You will permanently memorize the unique scent signature of every girl you have wronged. Detection radius: 10 meters. Provides immediate alert upon their approach.
>(Highly recommended for avoiding surprise stabbings.)
>━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Sasaki stared at the interface in the dark for a long, silent moment.
Every single skill in this catalog existed for precisely one purpose: to help him survive the consequences of being a terrible human being. Bare-Handed Blade Catch assumed that, at some future date, a woman would come at him with a knife. Iron Face assumed he'd be slapped so regularly that pain mitigation became a practical necessity. Keen Scent assumed his list of victims would grow extensive enough to justify a biological early-warning system calibrated to the smell of girls he'd ruined.
The system wasn't offering him power.
It was offering him damage control.
...Exactly what kind of future does this thing think I'm walking into?
Still—ominous implications notwithstanding—Bare-Handed Blade Catch and Keen Scent both carried genuine tactical value. The arithmetic, though, was unforgiving. He had 100 SP. Blade Catch demanded 200. Keen Scent was affordable at 50, but investing on Day One in a skill whose entire premise was you will wrong enough women to need a radar felt premature. Presumptuous, even.
Sasaki chewed the inside of his cheek, weighed the options one more time, then exhaled through his nose and dismissed the interface with a thought.
I'll bank the points. See what accumulates.
He checked his phone. 12:03 AM. The system's daily cycle appeared to close at midnight, tallying his performance from the preceding twenty-four hours. Daytime was freeform—act at his own discretion—with the system occasionally presenting forced route selections. The clock had already rolled over. A new day. A fresh ledger.
Sasaki's thumb hovered over his phone screen. Then, with the decisive energy of a man who'd already sold his conscience and intended to collect on the investment, he opened LINE and navigated to Ruri's contact.
He typed a single message:
> 「Don't tell anyone about yesterday. You know what happens if you do.」
He tapped send, placed the phone face-up on the nightstand, and pulled the covers to his chin. The ceiling fan turned its slow, indifferent circles above him. Cedar air freshener drifted in from the bathroom, and the distant rattle of a late train rolled through the walls like a held breath finally released.
Sleep found him within minutes—deep, dreamless, undeserved.
---
[Sato Residence, Ruri's Bedroom — 12:04 AM]
The notification chime cut through the silence of the dark room like a needle through silk. Ruri, curled on her side beneath the comforter with the stuffed Pochacco wedged against her chest, reached for her phone on instinct. The screen's blue-white glow washed across her face, and she read the message once. Twice. A third time, slower, each word landing like a knuckle against glass.
Her expression didn't crumble.
It hardened—jaw setting, brows drawing tight, lips pressing into a bloodless line that aged her face by ten years in the span of a single breath. She placed the phone face-down on the mattress, pulled the comforter tighter around her shoulders, and fixed her gaze on the far wall where pale moonlight from the window drew a crooked rectangle across the Jujutsu Kaisen postcard pinned to her bulletin board. Gojō's blindfolded face stared back at her, serene and untouchable—everything she was not.
Her fists tightened around handfuls of bedsheet, knuckles bone-white in the dark, and she breathed through clenched teeth until the trembling in her hands finally went still.