[Seirin Academy — Principal's Office]
Sasaki turned his phone screen toward the girl.
The display showed her the photograph—selected, highlighted in blue—and his thumb hovered directly over the SEND button at the bottom of the class LINE group chat. He smiled, easy and warm, the kind of smile that belonged on a guy offering to carry someone's books.
"What do you think happens if I drop this into the group chat?" His voice carried no malice. Conversational. Almost friendly. "You carry that bag to school every single day. Everyone in our year recognizes it."
Egawa Mitsuki stood four feet away from him, and even now—cornered, threatened—she looked like something drawn rather than born. Tall for a girl, five-foot-seven at least, with a narrow waist that flared into athletic hips built by years of grappling and mat work. Her hair was the color of poured ink, pin-straight and heavy, cut in a sharp hime style that framed a face of almost cruel symmetry: high cheekbones, a small nose, lips naturally flushed the pink of cherry-blossom mochi.
Her skin was porcelain-pale, the kind that bruised like a peach and showed every flush. Beneath the standard-issue school blazer, her white dress shirt pulled taut across a chest that was generous without being ostentatious—a C-cup straining the third button—and her plaid skirt stopped mid-thigh, hemmed shorter than regulation allowed, revealing legs that were long, toned, and deceptively powerful. A faded bruise, yellow-green at its edges, marked the outside of her left knee—an old training souvenir. She smelled faintly of unscented soap and something cooler underneath, like freshly laundered cotton dried in winter air.
I'll kill him. I'll put him through the floor and I'll kill him.
Her body coiled. In a single, fluid snap, she whipped her right leg up in a sweeping kick aimed directly at his wrist—fast, vicious, a striker's instinct overriding every rational thought.
Sasaki didn't flinch. The instant her leg moved, his thumb dropped toward the screen.
Her foot froze centimeters from his forearm.
The room went silent except for the fluorescent tube above the filing cabinet, buzzing its thin, insectile drone.
Mitsuki's face drained of color. Her eyes—dark brown, nearly black—locked onto his phone screen, tracking the millimeter gap between his thumb pad and the glass. Her leg hung in the air, extended, trembling with the effort of holding it perfectly still.
Sasaki tilted his head. "Remember your first day? Freshman year, opening ceremony—you stood up in front of the whole class and introduced yourself." He spoke as if reminiscing about a fond memory. "You said you'd been training in judo since elementary school. That several grown men couldn't take you in a match. And then you told every boy in the room not to bother confessing, because romance didn't interest you."
He remembers that. Of course he remembers that. Everyone remembers that.
Mitsuki's expression flattened to nothing. Blank. Controlled. But her forehead betrayed her—a fine sheen of sweat beading across skin so pale it looked translucent under the overhead light, tiny droplets catching the sun like scattered glass.
"Cute speech," Sasaki said. His grin widened.
Then he reached out and grabbed her ankle.
His fingers wrapped around the joint—warm, firm, unyielding—and he began pushing her leg upward. Slowly. Deliberately.
Mitsuki's eyes blew wide. She tried to pull her foot back down, muscles in her thigh flexing hard beneath the skin, but Sasaki's grip was iron, his knuckles white with effort.
"Don't. Move." His voice dropped an octave. No smile now.
If I break free and he hits send—
She bit down on her lower lip hard enough to leave a crescent indent in the flesh. Her body shuddered once, a full-spine tremor, and then she went still. Compliant. Her breath came in short, tight pulls through her nose, and her hands hung rigid at her sides, fingers curled into fists so tight her knuckles had gone the color of bone.
Sasaki pushed her leg higher.
Past hip level. Past her shoulder. Past both their heads.
Mitsuki's flexibility was inhuman—a product of years of competitive stretching routines and mat drills—and her body folded into a perfect standing split without resistance, her right leg pointing straight at the ceiling, toes curled inside her loafer. Her skirt obeyed gravity and slid down the length of her raised thigh like water off a slope, pooling at the crease of her hip and exposing everything below.
Her thighs were extraordinary up close. Pale as milk, smooth, the skin pulled taut over lean quadriceps that twitched with involuntary micro-contractions. A faint web of blue veins traced beneath the surface near her inner thigh, delicate as brushstrokes on rice paper. And between her legs, stretched tight across the swell of her mound and the cleft beneath, a pair of black spandex safety shorts clung to every contour—the fabric thin enough to show the subtle dip of her slit pressing against the material, the outline unmistakable.
Sasaki swallowed. Hard. The sound was audible.
Fuck.
"Hold it there," he said, his voice steady despite the heat climbing up his neck. "Don't you dare lower that leg."
He released her ankle and stepped back half a pace, phone still raised, screen still facing her, thumb still hovering. Mitsuki's leg stayed exactly where it was—straight up, trembling, a single bead of sweat rolling down the inside of her standing thigh and disappearing beneath her knee-high sock.
She balanced on one foot with the practiced stillness of someone who'd held horse stances for hours at a time, but her whole frame vibrated like a tuning fork. Her jaw was clenched so hard the muscles along her mandible stood out in sharp relief.
I am going to destroy you for this. I am going to tear you apart with my bare hands.
"You have some nerve," she said, her voice a blade wrapped in frost. "Do you have any idea what I'll do to you once this is over?"
"Oh, I'm terrified." Sasaki's tone was light. "But here's the thing—you were going to come after me regardless. Whether I behave or not, you'll make my life hell. That's just who you are." He shrugged, a loose roll of his shoulders. "So if I'm getting punished either way... why not enjoy myself?"
He reached out and pinched the meat of her exposed thigh.
Not gently. His thumb and forefinger sank into the plush flesh just above mid-thigh, where the muscle gave way to softness, and he squeezed—testing, appraising, like a buyer at a market.
"Nngh—!" The sound escaped Mitsuki before she could kill it. A breathy, high yelp that cracked at its peak into something unmistakably feminine. Her face ignited—red from the hollow of her throat all the way to the tips of her ears—and she glared at him with an intensity that could have peeled paint.
"Huh." Sasaki looked at his hand, then back at her thigh. "Springy. Like mochi."
This is—he's actually—
He pinched again. Harder this time, rolling the flesh between his fingers, feeling the dense muscle underneath yield to pressure before bouncing back. Her skin was impossibly smooth, warm from exertion, and the faintest dusting of invisible peach fuzz caught the light when he tilted his hand.
"Mmnh—hnn..." Mitsuki's second sound was lower. Throatier. A stifled groan that vibrated through her clenched teeth, and her eyes—those furious, murderous eyes—glazed over for just a fraction of a second. A softness crept in at the edges. Involuntary. Biological.
"Don't move," Sasaki reminded her, his voice dropping to a murmur. "You know what happens if you do."
His palm flattened against her thigh and slid upward. Slowly. His fingertips traced the landscape of her leg—the subtle ridge of her sartorius muscle, the silk-smooth inner plane where her skin grew warmer and softer with every inch, the almost imperceptible dampness of fresh sweat collecting in the crease where thigh met hip. When his fingers reached the hem of her black safety shorts, he paused. The elastic bit into his fingertip. He could feel the heat radiating off her body beneath the fabric—furnace-warm, faintly humid.
He pushed one finger underneath the edge.
"Don't—!" Mitsuki's composure shattered. The word tore out of her in a panicked cry, sharp and raw, and her raised leg came down in an instinctive clamp, thighs pressing together, her whole body folding inward like a flower closing at dusk.
The spell broke.
Sasaki's expression went cold. "Who told you to put your leg down?"
Mitsuki stared at him, chest heaving, lips parted. A strand of ink-black hair had come loose from her hime cut and clung to the sweat on her cheek.
"Kneel."
The word landed like a slap.
He's out of his mind. He's completely out of his—
Her eyes burned. Literally seemed to glow with barely contained violence, every muscle in her body tensing toward a lunge, toward wrapping her hands around his throat and—
"Now." Sasaki's thumb pressed against the phone screen. Not quite touching the button. Close enough that a breath could send it. "Kneel. Down."
The color left Mitsuki's face all at once, as if someone had pulled a plug. She thought about the photograph. She thought about the group chat—two hundred and sixteen students in the year-wide LINE group. She thought about the whispers, the screenshots, the way information spread through a school like fire through dry grass. A frost settled over her skin, prickling every hair on her arms beneath her blazer sleeves.
Her teeth ground together so hard Sasaki could hear the enamel creak.
Her knees buckled.
She sank to the floor in a slow, agonizing descent—first one knee touching the cold tile, then the other—her skirt fanning out around her like a dark plaid puddle. Her hands stayed balled at her sides. Her chin stayed up. Her eyes, wet now but refusing to spill, stayed locked on his face with an expression that was equal parts humiliation and homicidal promise.
I set up the cameras. The cameras are recording. He doesn't know. He doesn't—
She knelt before him, and the office smelled like dust, floor polish, and the faint sweetness of her shampoo—something floral, jasmine maybe—rising off the crown of her bowed head.
Sasaki looked down at her.
This girl—Egawa Mitsuki, the untouchable queen of the first-year class, the judo prodigy who'd once thrown a third-year boy over her hip for grabbing her wrist in the hallway, the girl whose introduction speech had become school legend—was kneeling at his feet with tears threatening to fall and her whole body shaking like a leaf in a storm.
Something dark and electric surged through his chest. A satisfaction that tasted like copper on his tongue. And beneath it, deeper, a thought so vile it surprised even him.
He raised his free hand.
Slowly, deliberately, he brought two fingers to Mitsuki's lips. Her mouth was closed, a thin hard line, her jaw set like concrete. He pressed his fingertips against the seam of her lips—they were soft, impossibly soft, still slightly swollen where she'd been biting them—and then he pushed.
"Open," he said. "Lick them clean. Or the whole school finds out what you keep in that bag."
No. No no no no no—
The fingers forced their way past her lips. Mitsuki gagged—a wet, involuntary retch that convulsed her throat and made her eyes water—as the taste of his skin flooded her mouth: salt, faint traces of mechanical pencil graphite, the metallic tang of the phone he'd been gripping. Foreign. Invasive. Her tongue pressed flat against the floor of her mouth in reflexive revulsion.
"I said lick."
His voice above her was calm. Patient. The patience of someone who knew they held every card.
A sound escaped her throat—not a word, not a moan. Something between a whimper and a snarl, broken and furious. Her eyes, when she looked up at him past his extended hand, held the glazed, faraway expression of someone dissociating from their own body.
Then her tongue moved.
Clumsy at first. Uncertain. The flat of it dragging across the underside of his index finger, then curling tentatively around the pad of his middle finger, her saliva warm and slick and building with each reluctant stroke. She lapped at his knuckles with the mechanical obedience of someone performing a task they found physically revolting—but her body told a different story. Her cheeks had flushed deep crimson. Her breathing had gone ragged, each exhale a hot puff against his wet fingers. And her thighs, pressed together beneath her skirt where she knelt, squeezed tight in a rhythm that might have been unconscious.
"Nnh... hahh..." Soft, broken sounds leaked from the corners of her occupied mouth, muffled by his fingers, half-swallowed by her own spit.
Within thirty seconds his fingers were glistening—coated knuckle to tip in a sheen of her saliva that caught the light from the window like lacquer. She'd gotten thorough despite herself, her tongue working into the creases between his fingers, along the edges of his nails, her lips sealed around him in a tight, wet ring that made a soft schlck sound every time she pulled back.
Sasaki swallowed. His throat clicked. He held his phone in his opposite hand—but the screen was turned toward himself now, the camera app open, recording. The red dot pulsed silently in the corner of the display.
Every second of this. Every single second.
"Rrrriiiiiinnng—"
The bell shattered the stillness like a rock through glass.
The sharp, mechanical trill of the period chime echoed through the office walls, vibrating in the filing cabinets, and Sasaki exhaled through his nose. He withdrew his fingers from Mitsuki's mouth in a slow, deliberate pull, and a single translucent thread of saliva stretched between her lower lip and his fingertip—thin as spider silk, catching the light—before it snapped and fell against her chin.
"Hahh... hahh... hahh..."
Mitsuki gasped. Open-mouthed, desperate gulps of air, her chest heaving beneath her blazer, her face a ruined canvas of red and white—flushed cheeks, pale forehead, lips swollen and glossy with spit. Her eyes had gone blank. Doll-like. Staring at nothing.
His fingers. His disgusting, filthy fingers were in my mouth. He made me— I actually—
Horror. Fury. Something else she refused to name.
Sasaki looked at his wet hand, then at her face. He pressed his slick fingers against her cheek and wiped them clean—a slow drag across her cheekbone, leaving a glistening trail of her own saliva across that flawless porcelain skin.
Mitsuki flinched. A full-body jerk, like she'd been shocked.
"You got my fingers dirty," Sasaki said, his tone perfectly reasonable, as if explaining basic etiquette. "Wiping them on your face seems fair."
Fair? FAIR?
Her whole body trembled—arms, shoulders, the muscles along her neck standing out like cables—but when she tried to raise her hand to strike him, her limbs wouldn't cooperate. The adrenaline crash had hollowed her out, left her joints loose and her muscles filled with wet sand.
Sasaki wiped the last of the moisture across her other cheek, taking his time, his phone still recording her face in close-up: the humiliation burning in her half-lidded eyes, the saliva streaked across both cheeks like war paint, the way her lower lip quivered between clenched teeth. The footage was devastating. Several minutes of unbroken, high-definition devastation.
He tapped the stop button.
Then he took a full step backward—outside her reach, outside lunging distance—and studied her with the wary respect of someone who'd just hand-fed a tiger and knew the cage was still open.
Mitsuki sat crumpled on the tile floor, legs folded beneath her, skirt in disarray, hair clinging to her damp face. A girl who'd entered this room ready to make him grovel was now the one on her knees, marked with her own spit, hollowed out and trembling.
She set this up. She had the advantage. And I flipped the entire table.
Sasaki felt no guilt. She'd come at him first—physically, with genuine intent to harm. If he hadn't stumbled onto her secret, if he hadn't had that photograph ready on his phone, he'd be the one kneeling right now. Or worse. The judo prodigy hadn't invited him here for a polite conversation.
He shook his head and turned toward the door—then stopped.
A small black dome in the upper corner of the room. A security camera, its red indicator light glowing faintly, the lens angled to cover the entire office.
His gaze dropped to the principal's desk. A laptop sat open, its screen displaying a grid of four camera feeds. One of them showed this very room, from this very angle.
Everything that had just happened was on that hard drive.
Sasaki walked to the desk without a word. He leaned over the keyboard—the chair smelled like old leather and someone's forgotten bento, soy sauce and pickled ginger—and navigated through the security software. Basic stuff. No password protection on the playback files. Whoever had set this system up hadn't expected anyone to access it from the inside.
He selected all footage. Deleted it. Emptied the recycling bin. Cleared the temporary cache for good measure.
Then he straightened his blazer, pocketed his phone, and walked out of the principal's office without looking back. The door clicked shut behind him with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.
On the floor, Mitsuki watched the door close.
The cameras.
Her expression, already devastated, collapsed into something worse. Ash-gray. Hollow.
I had them installed this morning. Specifically for today. The plan was simple—provoke him, force him to his knees, make him lick the sole of my shoe, and record it all. Use the footage as leverage so he'd never dare expose my secret.
The plan hadn't just failed. It had inverted completely. She hadn't humiliated him—he'd humiliated her. And the surveillance footage that was supposed to be her insurance, her mutually-assured-destruction failsafe, the one thing that could have given her equal footing even after this disaster—
He'd erased it.
Every frame. Every second. Gone.
She had nothing left.
Her fingers pressed flat against the cold tile floor, and a sound crawled up from her chest—not a scream, not a sob. Something lower. The sound of a blade being sharpened.
---
Sasaki slid the classroom door open and stepped inside mid-lecture. Twenty-six heads turned. The smell of chalk dust and someone's melon bread hit him immediately, along with the low hum of the air conditioning unit rattling in its ceiling mount.
"Pardon the interruption. I was called to the faculty office," he said, offering a shallow bow.
Ōkubo-sensei—a stocky man in his fifties with reading glasses perpetually perched on the tip of his nose and a combover that fooled absolutely no one—glanced up from his textbook with all the emotional investment of a man watching paint dry.
Oh, it's you. The one I sent to get chewed out. You look fine. Good.
"Mm. Take your seat."
That was it. No follow-up. No concern. The man had essentially fed Sasaki to the wolves this morning—redirected him to the principal's office knowing full well what was waiting—and now stood at the lectern conjugating English verbs as though the betrayal had never occurred.
Unbelievable. The audacity of this man's poker face is almost admirable.
Sasaki dropped into his chair, the plastic seat cool against his back through his shirt. He uncapped his pen and fixed his eyes on the whiteboard, letting the drone of Ōkubo-sensei's lecture wash over him like white noise.
His phone sat heavy in his pocket, warm against his thigh, loaded with footage that could ruin a girl's life—or save his own.
He clicked his pen twice and began copying notes, his handwriting steady and unhurried across the page.
---