Mitsuki's jaw tightened. Her fingers curled at her sides, knuckles whitening beneath the cuffs of her blazer. There was something almost pitiable about the way her pride fought against her predicament — the slight flicker behind her violet eyes, that split-second calculation of cost versus dignity.
Sasaki caught it. Savored it.
"What's wrong?" He tilted his head, voice dripping with mock concern. "Can't even sweep a floor? You're a grown woman, Mitsuki. Or did you only ever learn how to touch yourself?"
She's going to snap. Three… two…
The color that flooded Mitsuki's face was immediate and violent — crimson pouring from her cheeks down the pale column of her throat like spilled ink. Her lips parted, then pressed shut. A muscle jumped beneath her left eye.
"The teacher acted on her own," Mitsuki said, her voice tight as piano wire. "What she did to you had nothing to do with me."
"Hmm." Sasaki leaned back on the wall "You know whose fault it actually is? Yours. You're too damn provocative. That's why I filmed that video yesterday. So really — not my problem."
That look. She's remembering.
He could see it happen in real time. Mitsuki's gaze went glassy, unfocused, like someone staring through a window at something far behind the glass. Her lips pressed together — not in anger this time, but in something involuntary, something she couldn't control.
She was remembering.
The memory hit her like a slap. His fingers — a boy's fingers, rougher than anything that had ever touched her mouth — shoving past her lips without permission. The pad of his thumb dragging across her tongue, callused skin scraping the soft, wet flesh, pressing down until she could taste salt and skin and something faintly metallic. The way her tongue had been pinched and rubbed like it was nothing, like she was nothing, just warm tissue for him to toy with. Even now, standing outside, her tongue tingled with the phantom sensation — that gritty friction against the most sensitive part of her mouth.
I can still feel it. Why can I still feel it?
Shame curled through her stomach like smoke.
"I'll send someone to clean up," Mitsuki said coldly. The blush hadn't fully retreated from her cheeks — two faint spots of rose lingering on porcelain skin like bruises that refused to heal. "You don't need to lift a finger."
Sasaki watched her with open interest, chin propped on his fist. There was something genuinely entertaining about Egawa Mitsuki when she was cornered — the way her mouth stayed hard and defiant while the rest of her body betrayed every emotion she was trying to bury. Stubborn lips, trembling hands. That contradiction made his chest feel warm in a way that was distinctly predatory.
Cute. She's actually kind of cute when she's pretending she isn't scared.
The urge to bully her crept up his spine like a vine.
"Fine," he said, nodding once. "But I've got something else in mind. I want to see the principal's office again. Take me there."
Mitsuki's eyes went wide. Her posture, already rigid, turned brittle — like a sheet of ice just before the crack spreads.
"What do you want there?"
"What do you think?" Sasaki's gaze held hers, playful and sharp as a cat batting at something it had already caught.
He didn't push. Didn't raise his voice. Just sat there with that half-smile, watching her the way someone watches a candle gutter in the wind — curious whether it'll go out or right itself. The silence stretched between them like a held breath, and with every second that passed, the invisible weight on Mitsuki's shoulders grew heavier.
He's not going to look away. He's going to just sit there and smile until I break.
Her fist clenched so hard her nails bit crescents into her palm. She wanted to refuse. The word sat right behind her teeth, loaded and ready — no. A simple syllable. Two letters. She'd said it to teachers, to classmates, to anyone who'd ever underestimated her.
But the video.
That damned video existed somewhere on his phone, and as long as it did, the word no might as well have been in a language she'd forgotten how to speak.
And beyond even that — beyond the leverage, beyond the blackmail — there was something else. Something she hated to acknowledge. Yesterday, Sasaki Fuyumi had done things to her that no one had ever dared. Not her family's bodyguards, not the students who fawned over her, not the faculty who treated her surname like a prayer. No one had ever grabbed her face, forced her mouth open, and shoved their fingers inside like she was a toy they'd bought at a convenience store.
The sheer audacity of it had left a crater in her psyche. A shadow that followed her even into sleep.
He did that to me. He actually did that. And I couldn't stop him.
The silence had gone on too long. Sasaki was still watching.
Mitsuki's proud head lowered — just a fraction, just enough. Like a hawk folding its wings. Her voice came out flat, drained of its usual imperious edge.
"This is the last time." She lifted her chin just enough to meet his eyes, and even in surrender, there was a flicker of something dangerous in those violet irises. "If the principal finds out you've treated me this way, you'll regret it. I promise you that."
A chill ran through Sasaki's gut. He believed her — believed, at least, that whoever stood behind Egawa Mitsuki was not someone to take lightly. The girl had commandeered the principal's personal office like it was a spare classroom. That kind of pull didn't come from nowhere.
But that was exactly why the principal's office was safe. No one would think to look for them there. And Mitsuki herself would make sure no one came close.
She's threatening me, but she's still going to do it. That's all I need to know.
"Noted," he said, standing.
Mitsuki stared at him for another beat — searching for something, maybe mercy, maybe a bluff — and found neither. Her expression collapsed into something wooden. Resigned.
"Fine. Follow me."
She turned and walked toward the door, her pleated skirt swaying with each step, the hem brushing the backs of her thighs. Even in defeat, her posture was absurdly perfect — spine straight, shoulders squared, the kind of carriage drilled into someone from childhood. But there was a heaviness to her stride that hadn't been there before, a drag in each step like she was walking through shallow water.
Sasaki didn't follow immediately. He waited until the sound of her footsteps faded down the corridor, then counted to thirty before leaving the area. The hallway smelled of floor wax and the ghost of someone's microwaved bento — soy sauce and pickled ginger, faint but unmistakable. A pair of first-years stood by the water fountain, arguing about whether Jujutsu Kaisen's Gojo could beat One Punch Man's Saitama, their voices rising and falling like competitive birds.
Sasaki passed them without a glance and crossed the courtyard toward the administrative building.
---
[Seirin Academy – Principal's Office, Administrative Building ]
The corridor outside the principal's office was empty. Not quiet-empty, where you could still feel the recent passage of bodies — genuinely, eerily vacant, as if someone had drawn a perimeter around the entire floor and declared it off-limits. The overhead fluorescents buzzed their usual insectile whine. The carpet, a deep institutional burgundy worn thin at the center from decades of foot traffic, muffled his steps.
She cleared the floor. The entire floor. Just like that.
The thought nagged at him. The principal's surname was Egawa as well — he'd seen it on the nameplate by the entrance during his first week. The connection seemed too obvious to be coincidence. If Mitsuki was the principal's daughter — or niece, or granddaughter — then the weight behind her threats was very real.
Sasaki pushed the door open.
The office was exactly as he remembered it — wide desk of dark walnut, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with leather-bound administrative records, the faint smell of old paper and lemon furniture polish layered over something deeper, warmer. Cedarwood, maybe. The curtains were half-drawn, letting in a blade of midday light that cut across the carpet and climbed the far wall.
Mitsuki stood near the window, her back to him.
The moment the door clicked shut, her shoulders jerked — a full-body flinch, sudden and involuntary, like a startled animal. She didn't turn around. Her reflection in the window glass showed a face drained of color, lips pressed into a line so thin they nearly disappeared.
He's here. The door is closed. It's happening again.
Sasaki noticed her legs first. Beneath the hem of her skirt, the pale skin of her thighs was trembling — a fine, continuous shiver that traveled down to her knees and made her calves tense and release in tiny, rhythmic spasms. She was scared. Genuinely, deeply scared, in a way that didn't match her reputation or her bloodline at all.
Interesting.
He'd expected resistance. Coldness, maybe. That aristocratic disdain she wore like armor. Instead, he was looking at a girl who had clearly never been cornered by someone who didn't care about the rules she lived inside. Her family had protected her too well — wrapped her in so many layers of privilege and deference that the first time someone reached through all of it and grabbed her by the throat, metaphorically speaking, she had no idea what to do except freeze.
She talks about wrestling, about being trained to fight. And maybe she is. But none of that matters when you're this afraid.
His newly acquired skill — the evasion instinct he'd pulled from the Exchange — hummed at the edge of his awareness like a second heartbeat. If Mitsuki snapped and actually threw a strike, he was fairly confident now that he could slip the worst of it. Fairly. Not certain. And he had no interest in testing that theory against a girl who'd supposedly trained in grappling since childhood.
But he didn't need to fight her. That was the whole point.
Against women like this, you didn't use force.
You used shame.
---
The real reason Sasaki had insisted on coming here had nothing to do with dominance games or petty cruelty — or at least, not entirely. The [Keen Scent] skill required him to catalog a target's body odor across multiple zones: neck, underarms, torso, extremities. Each zone needed direct olfactory exposure at close range for the skill to register and lock. Doing that in a classroom or hallway was suicide. The principal's office, emptied and guarded by Mitsuki's own influence, was the safest room in Seirin Academy.
Mitsuki stood rigid as a mannequin, her breathing shallow and quick. The silence after the door closed was enormous — a living thing that filled the room and pressed against her eardrums. He hadn't said a word. Hadn't moved. She could hear him breathing behind her, slow and even, and the contrast between his calm and her panic made her feel like she was the one on trial.
Say something. Do something. Just — get it over with.
"What do you want from me?" The words tore out of her like something she'd been physically holding back, ragged and too loud for the quiet room. She'd spun to face him, violet eyes wide, her chest heaving beneath the crisp white blouse of her uniform. "Tell me. Just — tell me."
Sasaki looked at her. Really looked.
Her face, up close and stripped of composure, was almost painfully beautiful — high cheekbones flushed with distress, full lips bitten raw at the lower edge, dark lashes wet at the roots where tears hadn't quite formed. The fear in her eyes was genuine and total, the kind of fear that collapses every pretense you've ever built.
If I keep pushing the monster angle, she'll break too fast. I need her cooperative, not catatonic.
He softened his expression. Let his shoulders drop. When he spoke, his voice carried a warmth that hadn't been there in the classroom.
"Hey. Relax." He held up both hands, palms open, like someone approaching a spooked horse. "I'm not a monster, Mitsuki. Yesterday — that only happened because you came at me first. If you hadn't tried to pin me down, I never would've done any of that."
Mitsuki's eyes narrowed. Distrust radiated off her in waves — he could practically smell it under the faint trace of her perfume, something floral and cool, like white jasmine diluted in cold water.
"You don't believe me," Sasaki said, and shrugged. "Fine. Then let's make a deal. Whatever happens in this room — whatever I do — I won't touch you. Not once. Not a single finger on your body. And I won't ask you to take off any clothes, either. Those are my terms."
He's lying. He has to be lying. No one brings you to an empty room to NOT touch you.
"You're serious." It wasn't a question, but her voice pitched up at the end anyway, betraying hope she didn't want to feel.
"Think about it logically," Sasaki said, crossing his arms. His tone was patient, almost professorial. "If I wanted to do something to you by force, could you stop me? Honestly?"
The question landed like a stone in still water. Mitsuki opened her mouth, closed it. Her judo training, her family's name, her own ferocity — none of it had mattered yesterday. He'd overpowered her psychologically before she could even think about using her body.
"So there's no reason for me to lie," Sasaki continued, spreading his hands. "I'm giving you a guarantee. No physical contact. No undressing. In exchange — whatever else I do, you cooperate. No complaints, no resistance. Deal?"
Mitsuki's teeth sank into her lower lip hard enough to leave a dent. The afternoon light caught the faint sheen of sweat at her temples. She was calculating, weighing the offer against every terrible scenario her imagination could produce, and slowly — reluctantly — arriving at the conclusion that a Sasaki Fuyumi who didn't touch her was infinitely preferable to one who did.
"Fine," she breathed. "But you keep your word. Every letter of it."
If he doesn't touch me, it doesn't matter what he does. He can act as disgusting as he wants. I'll just close my eyes and think of nothing. He's a cockroach. Cockroaches are beneath contempt.
"Same goes for you," Sasaki said, holding her gaze. "Every letter."
Mitsuki's chin lifted — a ghost of her old defiance. She closed her eyes, exhaled slowly through her nose, and squared her stance like someone stepping into an arena.
"Then do whatever you're going to do. Quickly. My time is worth more than yours — I'm not like you."
There it is. That mouth.
A dark flicker passed through Sasaki's eyes. The moment her safety was even partially guaranteed, the venom came right back — that reflexive contempt, that patrician cruelty she wielded like a blade. Every word she spoke was designed to remind him of the distance between them, to reassert a hierarchy she desperately needed to believe still existed.
I want to ruin that expression. I want to see that perfect, arrogant face covered in something that'll make her cry.
The thought was vivid and immediate and sent a hot pulse straight through his abdomen. He filed it away for later.
Right now, he had a skill to activate.
---
Sasaki stepped forward. One step. Two. Close enough to count the individual lashes framing Mitsuki's closed eyes, close enough to see the tiny, almost invisible beauty mark beneath her left ear. Her perfume was stronger here — jasmine and something underneath it, something warm and human that the fragrance couldn't entirely mask. Skin. Clean sweat. The mineral trace of expensive soap.
He leaned in.
His face drifted toward the left side of her neck, close enough that his breath ghosted across her skin in a warm, damp wave. He inhaled — slow, deliberate, deep — through his nose, pulling the scent of her into his lungs like smoke.
Hhhhh—
The fragrance layered itself across his palate: top note of jasmine, middle note of something subtly green — bamboo, maybe, or crushed tea leaves — and beneath it all, the base note of her. Warm skin. A faintly sweet, almost honeyed musk that clung to the hollow below her ear where the pulse beat hardest. His mouth watered involuntarily.
Mitsuki's eyes snapped open.
She found his face inches from her neck, his nose nearly grazing the tendon that ran from her jaw to her collarbone. His breath was hot and rhythmic against her skin, each exhale raising goosebumps in its wake.
"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice carefully flat.
"Isn't it obvious?" Sasaki pulled back just enough to meet her eyes. He was smiling — not cruelly, not mockingly, but with a kind of genuine, boyish pleasure that was somehow worse than either. "I'm smelling you. You smell incredible, by the way."
He leaned in again, this time letting his inhale become audible — a long, shameless snnnhhfff that echoed in the quiet office. The sound was obscene in its intimacy, like something stolen from a moment that should have been private. Mitsuki felt the pull of his breath against the fine hairs on her neck, felt the warmth of his proximity radiating against her skin without any actual contact.
He's… smelling me. He's literally just standing there and smelling me like I'm food.
Her face remained impassive. Carved marble. She told herself it was nothing — a weirdo being weird, meaningless sensory data, irrelevant stimuli. It didn't work. Somewhere behind her ribcage, her heart was slamming against bone like a trapped bird.
Sasaki straightened. Licked his lips once — quick, unconscious — and then his expression shifted into something businesslike.
"Raise your arms."
Mitsuki blinked. "What?"
"Arms up. Over your head."
Her brow furrowed. The request was strange enough to momentarily override her fear, replacing it with confusion. But the deal was the deal — he hadn't asked her to undress, hadn't touched her. By the terms of their agreement, she had no grounds to refuse.
Slowly, her arms rose. Elbows straightened. Hands lifted past her shoulders, past her ears, fingers lacing loosely above her head. The posture pulled her blazer open and stretched her white blouse taut across her chest, the fabric lifting just enough to expose a sliver of midriff — flat, pale, the faintest shadow of her lowest ribs visible beneath the skin.
The position also did something she hadn't considered.
It opened her underarms completely.
Sasaki moved before the realization could hit her. He stepped in close — too close, closer than he'd been at her neck — and ducked his head beneath her raised left arm. His nose hovered less than a centimeter from the hollow of her armpit, separated from bare skin only by the thin cotton of her blouse.
And then he breathed in.
Snnnhhhhfff—
The scent here was different. Richer. Denser. Her perfume barely reached this far; what met his nostrils instead was something raw and unmediated — the concentrated essence of Egawa Mitsuki, undiluted by fragrance or fabric softener. A sharp, clean musk with an undertone of something almost citric, bright and acidic, layered over the deeper warmth of her body heat. The deodorant she'd applied that morning had mostly faded by noon, leaving behind only the faintest ghost of powder and the honest, slightly sour tang of a young woman's skin after several hours of stress-induced perspiration.
It was intimate in a way that was almost violent. More revealing than nudity. More invasive than a touch.
Mitsuki's composure cracked.
Her face ignited — not the controlled blush from earlier, but a full, devastating flush that swept from her collarbones to her hairline, turning her porcelain complexion the color of crushed peonies. Her arms stayed up — trembling now, visibly trembling — but her expression had shattered into something caught between fury and mortification.
He's smelling my — he's actually — oh god, can he smell my sweat? I've been sweating all morning from the stress and he's RIGHT THERE and he can definitely smell it, he can smell everything, this is—
Her teeth clenched hard enough for Sasaki to hear the faint click of enamel meeting enamel. Every instinct she had screamed at her to drop her arms and shove him away, to drive her knee into his stomach and run. But the video. The deal. The cold, mathematical certainty that breaking their agreement meant he was free to do worse.
She held her arms up and stared at the ceiling and endured it, jaw locked tight, tears of humiliation prickling at the corners of her eyes while Sasaki Fuyumi inhaled the scent of her armpit like a sommelier nosing a rare vintage.
Sasaki took one final, slow breath — cataloging the scent, letting the skill register each molecular layer — and then pulled back, straightening to his full height with an expression of calm, almost clinical satisfaction.
Mitsuki's arms stayed raised, quivering, awaiting the next instruction, and the single tear that had gathered at the outer corner of her right eye caught the afternoon light before it slid down her burning cheek and disappeared beneath the line of her jaw.
---