Part 6

Friday passed by, and Saturday, the first day of the weekend, had arrived.

There had been many opportunities to get involved with the first-year students these past five days, partially thanks to the influence of the special exam. There was our encounter with Amasawa, a student from Class 1-A, that had led to me cooking a homemade meal in order to secure Sudō a partner. And then, not long after, there was a discussion with Nanase to work out an agreement between our class and Class 1-D.

In other news, Kushida had managed to make connections with Yagami, a student from Class 1-B. And thanks to Yagami’s help, several students, such as Kei, had managed to find partners for themselves as well. This special exam would be evaluated differently depending on the person looking at it, but it may be particularly meaningful in terms of interaction between the school years.

Many students have already learned the names and faces of the upper and underclassmen, and some even know their ratings.

Furthermore, we’ve found out about the different inclinations of each of the classes.

Class 1-A doesn’t have a clear leader at the moment, giving off the impression that each student was free to take action on their own. One reason as to why this was allowed was the high academic capability of the class as a whole. True to its name, Class 1-A had the highest number of students with Academic Ability ratings of B- or higher. Many of the more academically capable students had taken the initiative to negotiate contracts with Class 2-A and Class 2-C for points. While the class naturally had several students with D-level Academic Ability ratings, these students still excelled in other ways, so Class 2-A had gone out of its way to pick them up as well. Of the 40 students in the class, 34 had already decided on their partner.

Class 1-B was similar to Class 1-A in the sense that no clear leader had emerged yet. Additionally, the academically capable students were also selling themselves off as partners one after the next. The main difference being that many of them had partnered up with students in Class 2-C instead of Class 2-A. This was probably due to the fact that Ryūen had offered more points than Sakayanagi, but the details of the situation were still unclear for the time being. Currently, 33 of the 40 students had decided on their partners.

Class 1-D was currently led by Hōsen, who had taken control of the class with an iron fist. It was essentially no different than what Ryūen had done with his own class last year. The most noteworthy thing about them was that they had decided upon the fewest number of partners out of all the classes. We would probably find out more once we met with them this coming Sunday.

And finally, there was Class 1-C, the one class that I hadn’t gotten involved with at all over this past week. I had already memorized the names of each of the students, but I hadn’t heard anything about the class, even from Horikita. The primary reason for this is that most of the Class 1-C students had signed partnership contracts with Class 2-B after attending the meet-and-greet Ichinose set up at the start of the week. Of their 40 students, 10 had yet to decide on their partners, but none of those 10 had Academic Ability ratings below a D-. In other words, as a class, they had succeeded in securing a safe position for almost everybody. Given that, Class 1-C might have some sort of class mediator who had utilized the meet-and-greet to successfully save their classmates.

Later in the afternoon, I launched the OAA app to take a look at all the partners that had been finalized as of today.

“105 pairs. Roughly 70%, huh?”

Considering the number of students who were in the library yesterday, it seems that the majority of students wanted to get this over with by the weekend. There also seemed to be more movement in Class 1-D, as now a total of 8 partners had been decided. I didn’t know if the weekend had made Hōsen feel impatient, or…

Anyway, the number of students who had yet to decide on a partner was 55 for the first-years and 52 for the second-years.

If the White Room enforcer was among those 55 students, the odds of partnering up with them was getting pretty high.

In all honesty, there was no way to 100% guarantee that I’d be able to avoid choosing the White Room student.

Of course, the only reason for that is because they don’t give off any scent at all. I’ve been prolonging the process, holding out hope for some sort of evidence that would allow me to decide that somebody was safe, but that strategy was about to reach its limit. I probably had to make my decision before my options narrowed down even further.

Even though negotiations with Class 1-D would happen soon, I felt as though I should be prepared for other options.

I decided to head to the Keyaki Mall later this afternoon to try and open up my possibilities.