"As a scumbag, you still lack some skills. Please keep grinding."
Yūto Shō watched the system's notification subtitle dissolve like end-credits text, then fixed his hair in the mirror with two distracted fingers and left for school.
By the time he arrived at the classroom, Sato Ruri was already at her desk, staring into the middle distance like an NPC whose dialogue tree had crashed. The second she registered his presence, her shoulders stiffened, her eyes dropped to the open textbook, and a flush crawled up the back of her neck.
He caught her stealing glances at him from the corner of her vision anyway. He didn't mind. Being hated was the standard tax for a job like his — and given that she was, factually, a peeping pervert with a habit of rifling through other people's bags, his guilt meter wasn't exactly redlining.
Still, he exhaled when he saw her sitting there. Some part of him had spent last night half-worried that the humiliation would break her and she'd take the day off. Apparently he'd underestimated her stat sheet.
At that moment, the homeroom teacher slipped in through the back door, spotted him standing by his desk, and waved him over. "Yūto Shō, run this up to the principal's office for me."
A thick stack of documents landed in his arms. The teacher kept walking toward the podium without waiting for an answer.
Tch. Side quest.
Yūto Shō sighed, hefted the materials, and walked out. The principal's office wasn't even in the main teaching building, which meant by the time he got back, half of the first period would be smoke. Fine. He'd call it a fashionably late entrance by royal decree.
He climbed the stairs of the administrative wing, knocked twice on the principal's door — no answer.
Not in?
He hesitated. Walking back with the documents still in his arms wasn't an option; the whole point was delivery. He could just set them on the desk and leave.
The door wasn't fully shut, only resting against the frame. He nudged it open with his elbow. The office looked empty. The curtains had been drawn most of the way across the window, leaving the room in a dim amber half-light, dust drifting slow through the one stripe of sun that made it past the fabric.
He stepped inside.
…
"You finally came."
A voice — cold, level — landed against the back of his neck the moment his foot crossed the threshold. The high-backed office chair facing the window pivoted slowly, and Egawa Mitsuki was sitting in it, one leg crossed over the other. Her eyes were dark and deep-set, the kind of gaze that didn't quite ripple — it simply lay there, flat and chilled, like the surface of a frozen pond.
Yūto Shō paused. He looked down at the documents in his hands, then back up at her. The pieces clicked together with an audible snap.
"You had the teacher send me here," he said, frowning. His tone tilted toward genuine confusion. Egawa Mitsuki was a student — what kind of pull did she have to make a teacher pass notes for her?
Egawa Mitsuki's lip curled. "Some people are born NPCs, and some people are born final bosses. The gap between us is wider than you can comprehend. And yet trash like you still doesn't know its place — offending people you couldn't afford to offend in ten lifetimes."
Yūto Shō's brow knit deeper. "So what — you're saying you were born a final boss? Cool flex. What does that have to do with me?"
Class warfare monologues in a high school office. Genuine chuunibyou energy. He thought she sounded like a light novel antagonist who'd memorized her own villain speech in the mirror — normal people didn't put that kind of thing into actual sentences, and frankly, the social contract didn't allow it either.
Egawa Mitsuki's gaze sharpened to a point. "I'm a very paranoid person. Especially about anything I can't afford to expose. I mark every secret I bury. And yesterday, only you and Sato Ruri were late to PE. Sato Ruri isn't a pervert or a dyke — she has no reason to crack open my bag. That leaves you."
Buzzer sound effect. Wrong answer. Sato Ruri is, in fact, a pervert.
He'd seen the shape of this conversation the second he walked in and registered who was sitting behind the desk. The look in her eyes had pre-written the ending — this wasn't going to dissolve into polite negotiation. Her family money was clearly thick enough that she thought she could fold him in half. If he didn't break her down here, in this office, he'd be flinching at every shadow in the hallway for the rest of the semester.
"What do you want?" Yūto Shō said.
He didn't bother explaining that she had the wrong suspect. Girls like Egawa Mitsuki, once they'd locked onto a theory, didn't get talked out of it — you had to break the theory along with everything attached.
"Close the door," she said.
He closed it.
The compliance only sharpened the disdain in her eyes. She was looking at him the way you look at a cockroach skittering across a marble floor, the way you look at a wet pile of takeout in the gutter. "It's revolting that someone like you knows my secret. I genuinely want to smash your skull open against this desk."
"Bit excessive. That tends to be fatal." Yūto Shō sighed, no actual concern crossing his face. "Let's talk this out, Mitsuki-chan."
"Don't say my name with that filthy mouth, you disgusting pervert. Sewer maggot." Her voice climbed, contempt dripping off every consonant.
Tch. His jaw tightened. They really think I don't have a temper?
He pulled in a slow breath through his nose, smoothed the spike of anger back down, and let a strange, lazy smile drift onto his mouth as he looked her over. "When it comes to perversion, Egawa-san, I'm still in the bronze tier compared to you. Where'd you buy your toys, by the way? Reviews any good?"
Her eyes iced over instantly, gaze knife-sharp, face gone the pale of fresh snow.
"You're staring down the barrel and still running your mouth?" Her voice dropped to that flat, frozen register again. "The principal listens to me. All I have to do is have him 'discover' some little stunt you pulled. One announcement at the morning assembly about a perverted classmate, and your reputation is shredded — expelled by lunch."
Huh. Wasn't this exactly the kind of move the certified main-character-syndrome girls liked to pull in dramas?
Yūto Shō had genuinely walked into one. For a half-second the threat actually landed somewhere uncomfortable in his stomach — until he remembered the video sitting in his phone's camera roll, and the tension drained out of his shoulders.
"You'd really do that?" he said, voice deliberately rough. "Not afraid I'll out you?"
The villain-scumbag role was supposed to belong to him in this scene, but somehow against her he was looking like an amateur in the wrong league.
Egawa Mitsuki smiled, easy and slow. "Got any proof?"
Yūto Shō said nothing.
A long beat passed. He exhaled. "What exactly do you want me to do?"
She didn't answer right away. She rose from the chair with unhurried grace, folded her arms across her chest, walked out from behind the desk, and stopped a single pace in front of him. Then, conversationally, she said, "Kneel down and lick my shoes."
Yūto Shō went still. His gaze raked over her, weirdly evaluative. Egawa Mitsuki didn't flinch — she stared back with the lazy amusement of a cat batting a half-dead mouse around the kitchen tile.
This shrimp's about to make me skip lunch with this attitude. Whatever — let him squirm a little before I crush him.
At the same moment, a new prompt unfurled across Yūto Shō's vision.
"Option 1: 'There's actually such a good deal on the table?' Overjoyed, you drop to your knees and worship her shoes with obsessive devotion, deliberately drooling onto the leather, intent on soaking through the silk of her socks to the smooth feet underneath."
"Option 2: As the hunter, you watch your prey perform. Right now, the prey thinks she holds the leash and is loudly issuing humiliating demands meant to grind your dignity into the carpet. Decide enough is enough — bare your fangs, and show her what a real scumbag looks like up close."
The corner of Yūto Shō's mouth tugged up. There we go.
He picked Option Two without a flicker of hesitation, slipped his phone out of his pocket, and tapped open yesterday's video. He dragged the progress bar until the inside of her backpack filled the screen — clear, unmistakable — paused, screenshotted, and then scribbled a quick digital smudge over the corner where Sato Ruri's hand was reaching in, blotting her out of the frame entirely.
Egawa Mitsuki's brow creased when she saw him fiddling with his phone. She was just about to snap at him when he looked up and gave her a strange, slow smile. "I'm about to send you something. Accept the friend request."
The smile sat wrong on her stomach. A thin thread of unease pulled tight through her chest. Then her own phone buzzed against the desk — she picked it up, woke the screen, and there it was. Friend request from Yūto Shō.
She frowned. Thought for a moment. Tapped accept.
However hard he wriggles, I can still grind him under my heel.
A picture dropped into the chat a second later.
She opened it.
The familiar pattern of her own backpack filled the screen — and inside, a hand pulling out something thick, ridged, unmistakable.
Her expression cracked. Her eyes flicked up and locked onto Yūto Shō's face, pupils tight, the color draining clean out of her cheeks as her fingers closed white-knuckled around the phone.