[Residential District –]
Sasaki's lips found hers.
Soft—impossibly, unreasonably soft—like pressing into warmed mochi that yielded beneath every angle of contact. The faint sweetness of strawberry milk lingered on Ruri's mouth, mixing with the salt-and-copper taste of his own bitten lip, and the combination short-circuited something behind his sternum. A door he hadn't known existed swung open inside his skull, and whatever lay behind it flooded in all at once: heat, static, a low electric hum that crawled down his spine and pooled somewhere south of his navel.
A girl's lips are this soft. This is—this is actually insane.
The evening air carried exhaust fumes and the damp-earth smell of a recent rain, but all Sasaki could register was the scent rolling off Ruri's collar—clean cotton and something floral, maybe jasmine shampoo, faint and maddening. He inhaled it through his nose while his mouth moved against hers, slow at first, testing, the way a reader traces a sentence they want to memorize. Then less slow. Then not slow at all.
His self-control snapped like a cheap mechanical pencil.
"Mm—!"
Both arms locked around her waist and hauled her flush against him. One hand splayed across her lower back, fingertips pressing through the thin fabric of her blouse hard enough to feel the ridge of her spine, while the other cradled the nape of her neck, tilting her head to give him a better angle. He kissed her like he was trying to pull something out of her—tongue sliding across the seam of her lips, coaxing, demanding, a wet and graceless exchange that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with hunger.
Ruri's brain flatlined.
Her thoughts dissolved into white noise—no words, no logic, just the overwhelming sensation of warm pressure and the taste of someone else's breath inside her mouth. Two full seconds of absolute cognitive shutdown. Then awareness crashed back in like cold water, and with it came a shame so violent it burned from her ears down to her collarbones.
He's—this disgusting pervert is KISSING me—
She thrashed. Her shoulders twisted, arms pushing against his chest, hips writhing to wrench herself free. But Sasaki's grip only tightened, because every frantic movement pressed her body harder into his. The full, soft weight of her breasts crushed against his sternum through layers of fabric, shifting with each struggle—left, right, left—and the friction sent a jolt straight through him that made his jaw clench.
Oh god. Oh god, that's—she's making this so much worse and she doesn't even know it.
His palms moved on instinct. Down from her lower back, tracing the curve of her spine through her blouse, vertebra by vertebra, until they reached the swell of her hips and kept going. Both hands settled onto the round, firm crest of her backside—each cheek fitting his palms like they'd been designed for exactly this purpose—and squeezed.
Not gently.
"Nnnh…!" A high, breathy whimper escaped Ruri's throat before she could strangle it. The sound was so obscene that her face turned a shade of red usually reserved for traffic lights. She felt his fingers knead into the flesh through her skirt, the pressure firm enough to dimple skin but somehow not painful—just a deep, tingling warmth that radiated outward from every point of contact, turning her muscles into something boneless and traitorous.
Her knees buckled. Her rigid posture collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and she sagged against Sasaki's chest, her forehead resting against his collarbone, breathing in short, shaky gasps that fogged against the fabric of his shirt.
The scent between them thickened—his deodorant, something cedar-adjacent, layered with sweat and the faintly sweet musk of arousal neither of them wanted to acknowledge.
BRAAAAMP.
A dump truck blasted its horn as it thundered past, close enough to send a gust of diesel-stinking air across both of them. The sound was ugly and enormous, a foghorn at point-blank range, and it shattered the moment like a brick through a window.
Sasaki's head snapped toward the road. The truck was already receding, taillights shrinking into the evening haze, and he glared at it with genuine resentment—the look of a man whose meal had been knocked off the table mid-bite.
Ruri jolted back to reality at the same instant. Her eyes flew open, wide and glassy and absolutely furious, and she bit down on nothing before slamming both palms into his chest with enough force to send him stumbling half a step.
She staggered backward, nearly tripping over her own feet, and dragged the back of her wrist across her swollen, kiss-reddened mouth in frantic, messy strokes—like she was trying to scrub the sensation away, erase the evidence, pretend the last sixty seconds had been a hallucination.
Her eyes locked onto his. Rage. Humiliation. Something else that flickered underneath both, something she buried before it could surface.
My first kiss. He took my first kiss. On a sidewalk, next to a dumpster, with a TRUCK watching.
Sasaki registered her expression and immediately understood the magnitude of the situation.
Guilt—actual, unrehearsed guilt—settled into his gut like a stone dropped into still water. The system demanded scumbag behavior, yes. He'd kissed her instead of doing something worse, yes. Technically, by the logic of self-preservation and point accumulation, this had been the merciful option. But none of those rationalizations changed the fundamental reality staring him in the face: he had just forcibly kissed a girl who despised him.
In every anime he'd ever watched, the guy who did this was always the villain. The one the audience rooted against. The one who got what he deserved in the final arc.
I've literally become that guy. Episode one villain energy. Except there's no redemption arc written for me.
More pressingly, he was worried about her mental state. The system had warned him from day one that being a professional scumbag was a high-risk occupation—the kind that ended with kitchen knives and rooftop confrontations. If Ruri spiraled into genuine despair, or worse, developed some sort of yandere-adjacent trauma response, he'd be measuring his remaining lifespan in days rather than weeks.
Damage control. Now.
"I'm sorry," he blurted, raising both hands in the universal gesture of surrender. "Ruri, I—you're just—you're so beautiful that I lost my mind for a second. That's the only reason. I swear. Please don't be angry."
Ruri's body trembled. Not from sadness—from fury. Her fingers curled into fists at her sides, knuckles whitening, and Sasaki could practically see the steam venting from her ears like a kettle in a Ghibli film.
He kissed me by force, and now he's blaming it on MY FACE?!
This wasn't an apology. This was a redirect. Every word out of his mouth placed the fault squarely on her for having the audacity to be attractive, as though beauty were a crime and his lips were merely the court-appointed sentence.
Sasaki watched her tremble intensify and realized, with mounting horror, that his apology was making things worse. Much worse. The fury meter was climbing, not dropping. He needed a different approach entirely—something so absurd, so disarming, that it would short-circuit her anger the way the kiss had short-circuited her thoughts.
His mouth moved before his brain could review the script.
"I admit it—I'm scum," he said, his voice dropping into something low and uncomfortably earnest. "Every time I see you, Ruri, I can't help it. I want something to happen between us. Sometimes I think about asking you to be my girlfriend, because then I'd finally have a legitimate excuse to mess with you. That's the kind of person I am."
Silence.
The words hung in the evening air between them, slowly rotating, like a grenade with the pin pulled.
What the FUCK did I just say.
Sasaki heard his own declaration replay inside his skull and felt his soul attempt to vacate his body. He'd been going for shock value—the idea was to lean so hard into the scumbag persona that Ruri's anger would convert into disgust, and disgust was safer than heartbreak. Angry women yelled. Heartbroken women plotted. He wanted yelling, not plotting.
But the words that had actually left his mouth sounded less like a villain's taunt and more like... a confession.
An honest-to-god, anime-protagonist-under-cherry-blossoms, I've liked you since middle school type of confession.
Delivered by the worst possible person, in the worst possible context, after the worst possible lead-up.
Ruri stared at him.
The rage drained from her expression in stages, replaced by confusion, then bewilderment, then a slow, dawning realization that reorganized every interaction they'd ever had into a completely different narrative.
He bullied me... because he likes me?
The teasing. The harassment. The way he kept singling me out. It was all—
That's... that's so messed up.
Her emotions tangled into a knot she couldn't begin to unpick. Anger was still there, yes—she could feel it smoldering like embers beneath wet leaves. But layered over it was something stranger. Something warm and unwelcome that she absolutely refused to examine, the same way you refuse to look directly at the sun even when it's the only thing illuminating the road.
Her first kiss had been stolen. That fact remained. But the thief was now standing in front of her claiming he'd stolen it because he was in love with her, and somehow—somehow—that made the theft feel less like a violation and more like a scene from one of those problematic romance manga she kept hidden in the bottom drawer of her desk.
She hated that. She hated him for making her hate it less.
Sasaki braced for the explosion. Screaming, maybe. A slap, definitely. Possibly a thrown shoe. He catalogued the nearby objects she could weaponize—a discarded aluminum can, a loose brick at the edge of the sidewalk planter—and calculated escape routes.
Instead, Ruri's expression cycled through shock, comprehension, and something complicated enough to require its own glossary. When she finally spoke, her voice was cold and clipped, but notably lacking the murderous tremor from moments ago.
"Give up," she said. "I'd never agree to be the girlfriend of someone like you. Hmph."
She spun on her heel and ran—actually ran—toward the apartment complex gate, her school bag bouncing against her hip, hair streaming behind her like a dark banner. She didn't look back. The automatic gate buzzed, swung open, and swallowed her into the complex's courtyard lighting.
Sasaki stood on the sidewalk, alone, listening to the distant rhythm of her shoes fade into silence.
He blinked.
Wait.
He replayed the exchange frame by frame. His unhinged non-apology. Her shifting expression. The way the fury had bled out of her eyes and been replaced with that strange, complicated look. And then her final line—delivered not with the venom of someone who'd been assaulted, but with the haughty finality of someone turning down a suitor.
She thinks I confessed to her.
She literally interpreted my scumbag monologue as a love confession, processed it through whatever romance-manga filter lives inside her brain, and then formally rejected me.
And she stopped being angry. Because apparently being liked is enough to cancel out being kissed against your will.
He should have felt annoyed. A rejection was a rejection, even a fake one. But all he felt was a kind of bewildered amusement, like discovering that the final boss of a dungeon was a golden retriever in armor.
She's... kind of an idiot.
A sweet, naive, dangerously trusting idiot.
The thought should have ended there. But Sasaki's mind had been marinating in scumbag logic for two full days now, and the gears turned whether he wanted them to or not.
If she thinks I like her, I can use that. Pursue her. Make her fall for me. Let her believe she's living inside some enemies-to-lovers subplot, and then—
He stopped the thought, examined it, and found it genuinely repulsive.
Alternatively: skip the pursuit entirely. Use my "feelings" as leverage to force the relationship. Claim her as my girlfriend without her consent, and use the title as a license to torment her openly.
Even worse. Cartoonishly worse. The kind of plot that got a manga canceled after two volumes and its author ratio'd into the shadow realm.
Sasaki shook his head, stuffing both hands into his pockets as the streetlights buzzed to life overhead, casting long orange streaks across the damp asphalt. The evening sky had deepened from bruised purple to full dark while he'd been standing here arguing with his own moral compass.
He turned and walked home.
---
[Sasaki's Apartment – Bedroom]
The ceiling was an unremarkable shade of off-white. Sasaki had been staring at it for forty minutes.
His room smelled like instant ramen broth and the faintly chemical scent of cheap laundry detergent—he'd thrown a load in earlier and forgotten to add fabric softener. The window was cracked open two inches, letting in the low ambient hum of the city at night: distant trains, a barking dog somewhere three blocks over, the tinny bass of someone's car stereo passing below.
At 11:59, the air in front of his eyes began to shimmer.
Right on schedule.
The familiar slideshow materialized—translucent panels hovering in his field of vision like an augmented reality overlay, each one displaying a highlight reel from his day in crisp, almost cinematic clarity.
Panel one: The principal's office. Egawa Mitsuki pinned against the desk, her composed mask fracturing as Sasaki dismantled her dignity piece by piece, every calculated word landing like a surgical cut.
Panel two: The school gate. Ruri walking stiffly beside him, coerced into a date she hadn't agreed to, her jaw set and her eyes burning holes in the sidewalk.
Panel three: The café. Ruri's lips parting reluctantly as Sasaki guided a forkful of fishballs toward her mouth, the tips of her ears scarlet, students at adjacent tables pretending not to stare.
Panel four: The alley. Ruri's face contorted in humiliation as she surrendered her underwear with shaking hands, fabric crumpled in Sasaki's palm, the warm cotton still holding her body heat.
Panel five: The sidewalk. The final image froze and held—Sasaki's arms wrapped around Ruri on the roadside, her body pressed against his, their mouths sealed together under the amber glow of a streetlamp while traffic blurred past like smeared watercolor.
The panels dissolved. Text replaced them, floating in clean white font against the darkness of his ceiling.
「Daily Scumbag Rating: OUTSTANDING.」
「Scumbag Points Awarded: 250.」
「Commentary: A fledgling piece of trash finds his wings.」
Sasaki let out a slow breath through his nose. Outstanding. Two tiers above yesterday's rating—and earned through a wider spread of operations. Humiliating Mitsuki in the principal's office had clearly stacked with the Ruri content to push him over the threshold. The system rewarded variety, apparently. Diversified scumbaggery.
Two hundred and fifty points. Added to his existing balance, that was enough to start browsing seriously.
A grin crept across his face—small and private and slightly unhinged in the way that grins tend to be at midnight when nobody is watching.
He flicked his gaze to the upper-right corner of his vision and thought the command.
The Exchange Interface opened with its familiar soft chime, rows of items and abilities cascading downward like an infinite storefront display, each entry pulsing faintly with a pale gold border. New listings populated the top rows—daily refresh stock he hadn't seen before—and Sasaki's eyes moved hungrily across the descriptions, fingers laced behind his head on the pillow, scanning for anything that could make tomorrow's performance even more spectacular.
---