The classroom was a sealed pressure vessel of irrationality. Forty students, completely stripped of the artificial safety net they believed existed, were undergoing a spontaneous psychological collapse. The revelation of receiving zero points had shattered their baseline reality.
The noise in the room was a physical weight. Desks were shoved, legs scraping violently against the floor. Saliva flew from the mouths of students pointing trembling fingers at one another.
Two boys near the back were locked in a screaming match, the veins in their necks distended, hurling accusations regarding one absent attendance and tardiness.
The classroom completely broke down. It was total chaos, with everyone desperately shouting and blaming each other to avoid facing the reality of getting zero points.
Tears, snot, and the high-pitched frequencies of genuine panic saturated the air.
At the front of the room, the teacher simply watched them, her expression entirely blank.
Right below their cohort label on the LCD screens, the white background fractured.
It shifted to a harsh, synthetic blue, flickered into a sickly green, flashed a warning yellow, and finally locked into a saturated, unblinking crimson.
Then came the sound.
*Ping.*
It was a sharp, loud digital ring that cut straight through the shouting. It was impossible to ignore.
*Ping. Ping. Ping.*
The argument in the back row faltered. The hyperventilating girl froze, a gasp caught in her throat.
The human brain is hardwired to interrupt continuous processing when introduced to sudden, sharp, unfamiliar stimuli. The amygdala prioritizes the new threat.
*Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.*
The silence rolled over the room in a wave, not out of respect, but out of but out of sheer shock. The chaos was forcefully paused. The students stood paralyzed in various states of distress—mouths half-open, hands raised in mid-accusation, tear-streaked faces turned toward the front.
*Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.*
Exactly twenty-one times.
The main LCD screens simply locked onto a solid red background, accompanied by the repeated pinging. No text explained the situation. The class was left staring at the blank, red screen in confusion.
The homeroom teacher stood at the podium. She had not flinched during the shouting. She had not attempted to discipline them. She merely stood there, watching the digital slaughter with the detached observation of a researcher monitoring a rat enclosure.
Reine watched the teacher silently.
The timing is intentional. The class is already panicking over the zero points. Their minds are a mess. And right in the middle of this trauma, before they can even recover, she's dropping complex financial rules on them. It's calculated cruelty. It's like a cop reading the penal code to someone who just got into a car crash. They aren't going to understand a single word.
As if acting on Reine's cue, the teacher tapped the podium. The sharp sound drew forty pair of eyes.
"Since you have finally quieted down," the teacher said, her voice a flat, uncompromising monotone, "I will explain the Seat Credit, or SC, system. Listen carefully, though I suspect most of you lack the capacity to process this."
She placed her hand flat against the thick physical folder resting on the podium.
"But to ensure there is no lingering confusion, I will first clarify your current bankruptcy. Your zero-point balance is not a system error. Over the past month, the school has meticulously recorded your conduct. Documented tardiness. Sleeping during lectures. The continuous use of smartphones. Incessant talking while instructors were present. There are even verified reports of students from this class window shopping at the local mall."
A girl near the window spoke up, her voice defensively high. She was clearly one of the culprits but tried to mask it as a theoretical question.
"Wait. Window shopping? How is looking around a mall a conduct violation? We aren't doing anything wrong."
"Because it is a parasitic behavior," the teacher replied. Her voice didn't rise, but the absolute certainty in her tone pinned the girl to her seat. "A commercial establishment provides climate control, lighting, sanitation, and physical floor space with the mathematical expectation of revenue. When you occupy that space for hours without initiating a transaction, you are actively consuming their electricity and resources for free. You might think one person browsing for a few hours doesn't matter. But multiply that behavior. If millions of students across the country treat commercial spaces like public lounges, occupying them without spending a single yen, the economic drag on local businesses would be massive. A role model student is expected to be a functional, contributing asset to society, not an economic drain."
A boy in the front swallowed hard, raising a shaky hand. "Then... how are we supposed to go there without getting penalized?"
"By fulfilling your end of the economic contract," she stated simply. "To avoid the loitering penalty, you must purchase an item at least once every two hours."
The boy's eyes went wide. "Every two hours? We don't have the money to keep buying clothes or meals like that!"
"I did not specify a price floor," the teacher countered, her eyes narrowing slightly at his lack of deduction. "The system tracks your legal status, not your total expenditure. Buy a pencil. Buy a single paperclip. A 100-yen transaction generates a timestamped receipt. The moment you hold that receipt, you are legally reclassified from a loitering liability to an active customer. The amount is completely irrelevant; the simple shift from a freeloader to a recognized patron instantly clears your conduct record by reclassifying your status as a paying client. It requires literal pennies to avoid a penalty, yet none of you possessed the foresight to figure that out."
She tapped the cover of the folder. The sharp sound of paper aligning against wood echoed in the dead silent room.
"If any of you have doubts regarding this calculation, you can check this folder after class. It contains the exact descriptions, timestamps, and names for every single infraction you committed."
The students simply stared. They were still trapped in the previous timeline where they had zero points. The transition to a new information was too fast. They are overloaded.
"The hierarchy of this institution is absolute," the teacher continued.
"Whichever class maintains the highest net worth is designated as Class A.
The lowest is Class D. If Class D manages to accumulate a higher net worth than Class C, you will be promoted. The current Class C will be instantly demoted to Class D. Rank is fluid, but it is dictated entirely by net worth."
She tapped the screen of her tablet.
"Your SC points are not merely for purchasing food or luxuries. They are capital. And capital can be used to acquire assets. One of assets, the seats you are currently sitting in. As of a few seconds ago, other classes have utilized their points to purchase twenty-one of your seats."
A boy in the middle row blinked rapidly, his mouth opening and closing silently. *Purchase seats?* The concept bounced off his traumatized brain.
"The pricing model is fixed," the teacher stated, pulling up a mathematical formula on the board. "The base cost to buy the first seat from any given class is exactly 100,000 SC points. However, the system employs an exponential growth model for subsequent purchases within the same cohort. The cost increases by ten percent, compounded."
She wrote the equation on the board: C_n = P (1 + r)^{n-1}
"Where C_n is the cost of the n-th seat, P is the base principal of 100,000, and r is the rate of 0.10. Therefore, the first seat cost the buyers 100,000. The second cost 110,000. The third, 121,000. However, because Classes A, B, and C bought your seats independently rather than as one single entity, the 100,000 base cost applied separately to each purchasing class. By doing this, they avoided the steeper exponent curves. Across all three upper classes, a total of twenty-one of your seats have been purchased."
Reine started analyzing.
I ran the numbers in my head while she stood there. The 10% compound interest rule wasn't just a price tag; it was a mathematical chokehold. If a class tries to buy all their seats from just one target, the exponent curve goes vertical and bleeds their budget dry. To bypass the penalty and maximize their purchasing power, the only optimal strategy is diversification—spreading their purchases evenly across the other three classes to keep the baseline cost as low as possible.
Assuming the upper classes acted rationally, I could reverse-engineer their exact targets using their starting budgets.
Class A had 3.76 million points. If they split their capital three ways, they could afford exactly twenty-five chairs overall before hitting a financial wall. Divided across the lower classes, that meant they took nine from us, costing them roughly 1,357,947 points.
Class B had a budget of 2.6 million. Distributed evenly, their absolute limit is nineteen chairs, meaning they snagged seven of ours for 948,717 points.
Class C had 1.96 million. Their optimal spread buys them fifteen chairs, so they took five from us for 610,510 points.
Nine from Class A. Seven from Class B. Five from Class C.
Exactly twenty-one chairs. The exact number of pings. The upper classes didn't just randomly buy our seats; they calculated the absolute mathematical ceiling of their capital to launch a synchronized, maximum-efficiency hostile takeover.