Chapter Text
The tea was excellent. That was the first thing Manabu Sakayanagi noticed about the office, and the second thing he noticed was that the creature pouring it had done so without spilling a single drop, despite having paws.
"You're staring," said Nezu pleasantly. "Everyone stares. It's quite alright. I've been told I resemble a mouse, a bear, and a dog, and I've never been inclined to settle the argument. It keeps people usefully off-balance."
"Forgive me." The Chairman of the Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School inclined his silver head. He was a thin man in a grey suit, with the bearing of a person who had spent forty years signing documents that ruined lives and had made peace with it. "Your reputation precedes you, Principal Nezu. I understand you hold the record for the shortest disciplinary intervention in the history of Japanese secondary education."
"Four seconds," Nezu said, delighted. "The boy simply needed to be told what he already knew. Most of them do. Now." He set down the pot. His small black eyes were bright and utterly unreadable. "You didn't take a bullet train and two ferries to compliment my record-keeping. You want one of my teachers."
"I want Shota Aizawa."
Nezu's ears twitched once. "Ah. Him specifically. Not Yagi. Not Kayama. Not Yamada, who would at least be loud about it."
"Loud is the opposite of what I require." The Chairman drew a folder from his briefcase and set it on the desk, squared to the edge, and did not open it. "My school operates on a principle. We take students that the rest of Japan has quietly filed under unsolvable — the brilliant, the broken, the criminal, the abandoned — and we place them in a controlled environment where the only currency is merit. Four classes. A through D. It has worked for eleven years."
"And now you want a fifth."
"Now I have a fifth." The Chairman's mouth moved in something that was not a smile. "Circumstances beyond my institution have delivered twenty-six individuals into government custody over the past fourteen months. Some are returnees. Some are survivors of incidents the public will never hear about. Some are, in the most literal legal sense, dead people who have declined to remain so. Every one of them is sixteen or seventeen years old on paper. Every one of them has an intelligence profile, a threat profile, or both, that no existing institution in this country will accept."
"So you're building a cage," Nezu said cheerfully, "and calling it a classroom."
"I'm building a school, Principal."
"They're always cages at the start. The trick is whether the door ever opens." Nezu hopped onto the desk, seized the folder in both paws, and opened it. He read at a speed that was not human, and his expression did not change once, which the Chairman found more alarming than if it had.
"Hm," said Nezu, on page nine.
"Hmmm," said Nezu, on page seventeen.
On page thirty-one he made a small sound like a kettle deciding whether to boil, and said, "You've put a mass murderer, a serial killer's chief investigator, and the serial killer himself in the same room."
"Yes."
"With a girl who commands an army."
"Commanded. Past tense. Her army is in another world."
"With a succubus."
"Her paperwork lists her as a foreign exchange student from an unaccredited academy."
"With—" Nezu turned the page and paused for the first time. "With a child who has died more times than my records can display in the allotted field."
The Chairman said nothing.
"Fascinating," Nezu murmured. "Truly. And there's a twenty-seventh here, in the annex. Akemi. Routed elsewhere?"
"Still in processing. She's proven difficult to keep in a single room." The Chairman folded his hands. "So. Aizawa."
"Why him?" Nezu turned another page. "Be honest with me, Chairman. Dishonesty in this office is a waste of your afternoon."
"Because he expelled an entire class on their first day for failing to demonstrate potential, and because when he found potential the following year, he did not expel a single one of them. Because he is the only educator in Japan on record as having deliberately lied to a room full of children in order to make them stronger, and then admitted it to their faces and explained precisely why." The Chairman's fingers tightened, minutely. "My school runs on a lie, Principal Nezu. A beautiful, elegant lie that has broken hundreds of teenagers into the shape of adults. And I have come to suspect that this particular class will detect it inside of ten minutes. I need a teacher who knows what to do when the lie stops working."
Nezu closed the folder. He was quiet for a long moment, paws folded on the cover, and when he spoke his voice had lost its brightness entirely.
"He'll say no."
"Will he?"
"He'll say no three times, complain about the paperwork, complain about the commute, complain about being awake, and then he'll read the file." Nezu's whiskers twitched. "And then he'll say yes, and he will not tell either of us why."
Aizawa read the file in the UA teachers' lounge at 2:40 in the morning, because that was when he read everything.
His third-years had graduated eleven days ago. Midoriya had cried. Bakugo had pretended not to. Todoroki had bowed for eleven full seconds. Aizawa had stood at the gate in his rumpled black and said "don't die" to each of them individually, which was the most sentimental thing he had ever done in public, and then he had gone home and slept for nineteen hours.
Now there was a folder.
He got as far as Subject 09: Enoshima, Junko before he stopped, put the folder down, and drank a juice pouch he found in the fridge that belonged to Present Mic.
Then he picked it back up.
Subject 14: Iwatani, Naofumi. Returnee. Prior host environment: designated "Melromarc." Duration: approx. 2 years subjective. Note: subject's left forearm is fused with a metallic object of unknown composition. Removal attempts unsuccessful (4). Subject requests that further attempts be discontinued as they are, quote, "a waste of everyone's time and my patience."
Subject 21: Ishigami, Senku. Returnee. Prior host environment: Earth, +3,700 years. Note: subject rebuilt a functional telephone during intake processing using materials from the intake room.
Subject 26: Jabami, Yumeko. No unusual environmental history. Note: subject has requested, on eleven separate occasions, that intake staff wager something on the outcome of her assessment. Two staff have been reassigned.
At 4:15 a.m. Aizawa dialed the number on the cover page.
"Yes," he said, and hung up, and went to sleep on the couch with the folder over his face.
The bus came up through the hills at nine in the morning and nobody on it was talking, which — considering who was on it — was a small miracle that lasted forty seconds.
"So," said Kazuma Satou, from the third row, arms crossed, tracksuit jacket zipped over a blazer he had not yet figured out how to wear, "does anyone else think it's weird that they wouldn't tell us the name of the school until we got on the bus?"
"Yes," said the black-haired boy two seats up, without turning around. He had bad posture and worse eyes — dark, ringed, the kind of eyes that had watched too many things without blinking. His own tracksuit was orange and white and clearly older than his blazer. "Yes, extremely. Also they took our phones and gave us new ones. Also nobody told us where the campus is. Also the windows on this bus don't open."
"Right?" Kazuma leaned forward. "Right! Thank you! Finally, one normal person."
"Natsuki Subaru."
"Kazuma Satou."
They shook hands over the seat back with the grim solidarity of two men who had each independently concluded they were being handled.
"Statistically speaking," said the boy across the aisle, who had spiked white-and-green hair and red eyes and was drawing something on the fogged window with one finger, "the odds this is a normal high school are about 0.0000001 percent." He grinned. It was an unsettling amount of teeth. "Which is exactly ten billion percent more interesting than a normal high school."
"Please stop saying numbers," said the boy behind him. He was black-haired, sharp-featured, sitting perfectly upright with his arms folded and his eyes half-lidded in a way that suggested he had already calculated the load-bearing capacity of the bus roof. "You are drawing attention. Attention is a resource we are spending before we have earned any."
"Seiya, buddy," said Kazuma, "we've been on a bus for two hours."
"Two hours and eleven minutes. I have counted three exits, four blind spots, and one driver whose reflection has not once looked at the road." Seiya Ryuuguuin did not unfold his arms. "I'm not ready."
"You're never ready."
"That is why I am alive."
Near the back, a boy in a green blazer sat with his shield-arm angled deliberately into the aisle so that nobody could sit beside him. Naofumi Iwatani had not spoken since the intake center. He had black hair and green eyes and a face that had been sanded down by something, and when the girl with the auburn hair had tried to make polite conversation about the entrance procedure he had said "don't" in a voice so flat that she had gone quiet and pulled out a paperback instead.
The auburn-haired girl was still reading it. Makise Kurisu, said the name tag she hadn't taken off. Two rows behind her, a man in a lab coat — a lab coat, over the uniform, which should not have been permitted and evidently was — pressed a hand to his ear and said, in a voice pitched to carry:
"El Psy Kongroo. Yes. Yes, I understand. Confirm the coordinates and stand by. The Organization has moved sooner than anticipated." He laughed. It went up an octave and stayed there for six seconds. "MUHAHAHA! Do they truly believe a cage of concrete can hold Hououin Kyouma—"
"Your phone is off," Kurisu said, without looking up from her book.
"Christina."
"Don't call me that."
"It is a decoy transmission, obviously—"
"It's off. The screen's dark. You're holding a dark rectangle to your face and shouting."
"—which is precisely what the Organization would expect me to say."
At the very front, curled sideways in his seat with his knees drawn to his chest and his shoes on the floor beneath him rather than on his feet, a young man with wild black hair and enormous shadowed eyes pressed his thumb against his lower lip and watched the reflection of the passengers in the windshield.
Three rows behind him, a boy with light brown hair and an immaculate uniform watched him back in the same reflection.
Neither of them had said a word since boarding. Neither of them had needed to.
Then the trees broke.
"Oh," said the small girl in the front-left seat, a hood pulled up over black hair that bled to red at the tips. Silver eyes went very wide. "Oh."
The bus came over the ridge and the school came up out of the valley like something that had been grown rather than built: white towers and glass, a running track, an athletic complex, greenhouses, a shopping arcade with a glass roof throwing back the morning, four dormitory buildings and a fifth that was visibly newer than the others, and around all of it — around the entire valley — a wall.
"That's not a school fence," said Jaune Arc quietly. He was tall and blond and had gone slightly grey. "That's a curtain wall. That's — that's, like, siege architecture, that's what you build when you're expecting people to try and get out—"
"Yoooo." Jesse Pinkman had his forehead against the glass. His beanie was jammed under the hood of a sweatshirt he had refused to remove, and beneath it his eyes were doing an unhappy calculation. "Yo, I've been in a place with a wall like that. Twice. Neither time was, like, education-based, you feel me?"
"It's beautiful," breathed a girl with long black hair and a red ribbon at her throat, and her brown eyes were already starting to shine. Yumeko Jabami leaned across the aisle, and her smile could have lit the valley. "Don't you think? A place with walls that high is a place with stakes. Nobody builds a wall like that around something worthless."
"That is the single most correct thing anyone has said all morning," said the redheaded boy in the seat behind her, hands in his pockets, mercury-gold eyes half-shut in lazy pleasure. Karma Akabane's grin was small and terrible. "Whatever's in there is worth something. Which means somebody's guarding it. Which means somebody can lose it."
"Nipah~," said a small blue-haired girl to nobody in particular, kicking her feet. "It's very pretty, isn't it?"
And when she turned her face back to the window, her eyes were about a thousand years old.
Room 1-E was on the ground floor at the end of the corridor, a little apart from the others, which everyone noticed and nobody mentioned.
Twenty-six desks. Twenty-six students. One empty chair at the front where a teacher should have been, and, on the floor beside it, a yellow sleeping bag containing a man.
"Uh," said Kazuma.
The sleeping bag did not move.
"Is he — is that a person?"
"He's breathing," reported Senku, crouched a meter away with his chin on his hand. "Twelve respirations a minute. Deep sleep or an extremely good actor. Ten billion percent a person."
"May I poke him?" asked Yumeko.
"No," said four separate people.
"It's a hostage-shaped object," said Seiya from the doorway, where he had not yet entered. "It could be a decoy. It could be filled with something. I'm not going in until someone else has been in for sixty seconds."
Ruby Rose had already gone in, sat down, and started organizing her pencil case by color.
The rest filed in around the sleeping bag like water around a stone, and while they did, Aizawa — who had been awake since 5 a.m. and had been lying there for nineteen minutes precisely so that he could watch how they entered a room — catalogued every one of them through the gap in the zipper.
The tall blue-haired woman came in first, and did not look at the sleeping bag once — she scanned the corners, the windows, the sight lines, and chose the seat with its back to the wall and a view of the door. Her hair fell past her waist. Her eyes were the pale blue of deep ice and her uniform had been altered, at some point between intake and now, so that the collar sat open. She smiled at the room the way a person smiles at a menu.
The girl with the long black hair and red eyes came in seventh, and took the seat that was farthest from the blue-haired woman while still having a clear line to her. Akame's hands stayed loose at her sides. Her expression did not change. But her eyes did not leave Esdeath for eleven full seconds, and Esdeath — without turning her head — smiled wider.
Two of them are going to try to kill each other, Aizawa thought, with a kind of weary professional calm. Noted.
The brown-haired boy came in loudly, tripped over nothing, and immediately received a face full of blue hair as a girl attached herself to his arm.
"Isseeeeei~! Sit with me!"
"K-Kurumu—!" Issei Hyoudou made a sound like a kettle. His face went scarlet from the jaw up. "Y-you're — that's — you're touching — that is a lot of contact—"
"Mmm, is it?" Kurumu Kurono had violet eyes and a smile with a point on it and absolutely no concept of personal space. She leaned in further. "You're so warm. Are you always this warm? I bet you're always this warm."
"HE'S SITTING WITH ME."
The temperature of the room did not change. The pressure did.
The crimson-haired girl in the doorway was tall and composed and radiated the sort of authority that comes from having been born to it. Rias Gremory's blue-green eyes were fixed on the hand around Issei's arm and her voice was extremely, dangerously pleasant.
"Issei is mine."
The room stopped.
"—'s," Rias continued, without a flicker, "servant. He's my — he works for me. He's my Pawn. It's a contractual arrangement. There is a contract."
"Uh-huh," said Hachiman Hikigaya, from the back row, in the tone of a man observing a car accident in slow motion. He had black hair, a slouch that had taken years of dedication, and eyes like a dead fish contemplating a worse fish. "Yeah. A contract. That's why the vein in your forehead's doing that."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing. Rotten eyes. Bad depth perception." He put his head down on his arms.
"You," said Kurumu, and pointed at Rias, "are not his type."
"I am literally his type. I have been empirically established as his type."
"HHHHNNNGH," said Issei, and steam came out of him.
Aizawa considered, briefly, staying in the sleeping bag until retirement.
The last four arrived in a clump: a hunched brown-haired boy who apologized to the doorframe; a small white-haired girl in an oversized hoodie who was being led by the hand and appeared to be asleep on her feet; the black-haired boy leading her, who took one look at the room, at the seating arrangement, at the twenty-five configurations of ego and threat, and grinned; and, drifting behind them, a pink-haired girl with red eyes and two small pale protrusions above her hairline that everyone was pretending very hard not to look at.
"Nyu," said Lucy, and sat down, and folded her hands, and went still.
"Board's set," murmured Sora, dropping into a chair with Shiro immediately climbing into the one beside it and putting her head on the desk. "Twenty-six pieces. No rules published yet." His red eyes swept the room and stopped, briefly, on the sleeping bag. "Except one. Because the guy who's pretending to be asleep is the guy who's already playing."
The sleeping bag unzipped.
Shota Aizawa stood up out of it in one motion, and he was tall, and rumpled, and unshaven, and his black hair hung in his face, and his eyes were the flattest, most exhausted, least impressed eyes that twenty-six extremely dangerous teenagers had ever collectively been subjected to. The grey scarf around his neck moved slightly, as though it were thinking.
"Eight minutes and forty seconds," he said, "to get twenty-six people into twenty-six chairs. Two arguments. One physical altercation that didn't quite happen. One person who didn't come in until someone else did." His eyes found Seiya, who was now seated, and who inclined his head very slightly, unashamed.
"Rational," Aizawa said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment. It was a data point." He walked to the podium. He did not raise his voice at any point in the next four minutes and did not need to. "I'm Shota Aizawa. I'm your homeroom teacher. I used to teach heroes. I don't anymore. Some of you know why. The rest of you don't need to."
"Are you strong?" asked Esdeath.
"Yes."
"How strong?"
"Strong enough that the answer's boring." He didn't look at her. "You'll be tempted to test that. It'll be a waste of both our time, and I've read your file, General, so let me get ahead of it: I can't stop your ice. My ability doesn't apply. Neither does it apply to demonic power, sacred gear, chakra, aura, semblance, magic, or whatever the shield does." His eyes went, briefly, to Naofumi's arm. "That's not a weakness. That's a rule I've already accounted for. If you can't work out why that should worry you more, you'll figure it out eventually."
The room went quiet. Light Yagami's eyes narrowed by perhaps a millimeter.
L, who had folded himself into his chair with his knees up and his heels on the seat, said, around his thumb: "You are not intimidated by us."
"No."
"You are, in fact, bored by us."
"I'm bored by most things. Don't take it personally." Aizawa picked up the roster. "But no. I'm not intimidated. And here's why, so you can all stop calculating it: I've spent my career in rooms full of people who could level the building. Every single one of them was seventeen and thought that made them special. It didn't. It made them loud." He set the roster down. "Being able to kill a person is the least interesting thing about any of you. It's the last item on the list. It's below your handwriting."
"Rude," said Karma, delighted.
"Roll call."
He read them out and they answered, and Aizawa watched every single answer.
"Akabane Karma."
"Here~" Feet on the desk. Hands behind the head. Down before Aizawa's eyes reached him. Fast. Very fast.
"Akame."
"Present." Nothing else. She did not blink for the entire exchange.
"Arc, Jaune."
"H-here, sir! Uh — Mister Aizawa, sir. Sensei. Aizawa-sensei." He half-stood, sat back down, went red. "Sorry."
"Enoshima Junko."
"HERE!"
She had strawberry-blonde hair in two long twintails, each with a small white bear clip that had one red eye and one black one, and freckles across her nose, and a figure that had, in another life, been on the cover of every magazine in Japan. She waved with both hands. She was radiant.
"Ohmygosh, sensei, hi, this is SO exciting, twenty-six of us, all crammed in together, all these personalities, all this history, oh, we're gonna be such good friends—"
Then her posture collapsed. Her voice dropped an octave and flattened into something dead.
"—or you'll all despair and fall apart within a year and I'll get to watch. Upupu. Whichever."
Then she brightened again, exactly as fast. "Anyway! Present!"
Twelve people had gone very still. Shinji Ikari had gone the color of paper.
"Esdeath."
"Here." She said it the way other people said finally.
"Furude Rika."
"Nipah~! Rika's here!" Then, quietly, in a register so much lower and older that the boy next to her flinched: "For however long that means anything." Then, brightly again: "Mii~"
"Gremory Rias."
"Present." Perfectly poised. Still radiating.
"Hikigaya Hachiman."
"...Here."
"Hyoudou Issei."
"HERE— I mean, here, present, yes sir, I'm here, I'm alive, everything's normal—"
"Ikari Shinji."
"...ere."
"Louder."
"H-here. Sorry. Sorry."
"Don't apologize for existing. You'll run out of breath." Aizawa didn't look up. "Ishigami Senku."
"Yo."
"Iwatani Naofumi."
"Here." Two syllables, sanded flat.
"Jabami Yumeko."
"Here~!" She leaned forward over her desk, chin on her laced fingers, and her brown eyes had a red shine at the bottom of them like something coming up from underwater. "Sensei, before you continue — is there gambling at this school?"
Aizawa stopped reading.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Yes," he said.
And then he kept reading, and Yumeko Jabami made a small sound and put both hands over her mouth and did not hear the next nine names.
"Kurono Kurumu."
"Heeeere~"
"Lawliet, L."
"...Yes."
"Makise Kurisu."
"Present."
"Natsuki Subaru."
"Here." A beat. "Uh. Sensei. Quick question. Is there — a way to check whether time in this building runs, like, normally?"
Aizawa's pen paused for exactly half a second. He made a note. "Ask me after class."
"...Okay. Yeah. Okay."
"Okabe Rintaro."
"I am HOUOUIN KYOUM—"
"Okabe Rintaro."
"...Present."
"Pinkman, Jesse."
"Yo. Uh. Here. Yeah."
"Rose, Ruby."
"HERE!" Her hand shot straight up. Every eye in the room went to her. She wilted about forty percent. "...here."
"Ryuuguuin Seiya."
"Present. Conditionally."
"That's not a thing."
"It is when I say it."
"Satou Kazuma."
"Here, and I'd like to formally register that I don't want to be involved in whatever this is."
"Noted and ignored. Shiro."
Silence. The white-haired girl was face-down on the desk. Sora reached over without looking and lifted her hand for her.
"She's here."
"Sora."
"Here. And she's here." He tilted his chair back. "We're a unit. You'll want to write that down now instead of learning it the hard way."
"Yagami Light."
"Here." Warm. Pleasant. Perfect. He even smiled. "Thank you for having us, sensei."
Across the room, L bit down on his thumb.
"...and Lucy."
"Nyu?"
"Lucy."
"Nyu."
"Fine." Aizawa set the roster down. "Twenty-six. Congratulations. You're Class E."
"What happened to Class A through D?" asked Kurisu.
"They exist. They're upstairs. They've been here since April." He leaned back against the podium. "You're a mid-year insertion into a system that wasn't designed with you in mind, which means the system is going to treat you exactly like it treats everyone: without mercy and without explanation." A shrug. "I'm going to give you the explanation anyway. Not because I'm nice. Because the school's method is to withhold it, and I've read what happens to classes that get the method." His eyes went briefly, unreadably, to the window. "I've seen kids broken by a good lie before. I've done it myself. This class doesn't need it. This class needs the truth early, because the truth is worse."
He picked up a marker.
"Take out your student ID cards."
Twenty-six cards came out of twenty-six pockets. Thin, white, matte, with a chip in the corner and a small display.
"Check your balance."
A pause.
Then:
"WHAT."
Kazuma was on his feet. "A HUNDRED THOUSAND?! A HUNDRED THOUSAND POINTS?!"
"One point equals one yen on this campus," Aizawa said. "So yes."
"THAT'S A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEN! THAT'S—" Kazuma's brain visibly overheated. "I've never had a hundred thousand yen! I've never had ten thousand yen! I once sold a toad corpse for six hundred—"
"Hell yes," said Jesse, staring at the card. "Hell YES, yo, that's — okay, okay, no, hold up." His face changed. The hand holding the card lowered. "Hold up, no."
"Yeah," said Subaru, quietly, whose grin had died about two seconds after it started.
"What's the catch?" said Naofumi.
It came out of him like a bullet, flat and immediate, and it collided in midair with four other voices saying the same thing.
"What's the catch," said Senku, who was already turning the card over to look at the chip.
"What is the catch," said L, who had not looked at his card at all.
"What's the catch?" said Seiya, who was on his feet with his chair between himself and the podium.
"What's the catch," said Hachiman, without lifting his head from his arms, in the tired voice of a man who had never once in his life been handed something for free.
"Ooh," said Junko, "multiple people said it at the same time. That's SO good. That's like — that's a whole character-establishing moment, right there, all at once, boom—"
"There's always a catch," said Naofumi, and now he was standing, and the shield on his arm had caught the light, and his green eyes were the coldest thing in the room. "Someone hands you a fortune and a warm bed and a school uniform and tells you you're special. Then they take it. Then they tell the world you took it from them." His jaw flexed. "So. What's the catch."
"Sit down," said Aizawa.
"What's the catch?"
"Sit down, Iwatani. I'm going to tell you. All of it. Right now, in this room, and I'm not going to make you find out in a month like everyone else did." Aizawa's voice didn't rise. "That's not a favor. Once you know, you can't unknow it. Sit."
Naofumi sat.
Aizawa wrote a number on the board. 100,000.
"That deposit is real. It's yours. Spend it on anything you like — the shopping arcade on campus stocks everything from instant noodles to designer bags to hardware. Nothing is subsidized. Nothing is free. Bread is a hundred and twenty points. A haircut is three thousand. A cup of coffee at the café is four hundred and eighty."
Under 100,000 he wrote: NEXT MONTH: ?
"It is not a monthly allowance."
Silence.
"On the first of every month, every student in this school receives private points based on the class points their class currently holds. The formula is not a secret and it is not complicated." He wrote it. Class Points × 100 = Private Points, per student, per month.
"Class A currently holds one thousand class points. That's a hundred thousand private points a month, each, forever, as long as they hold it. Class B holds seven hundred and twenty-three. Class C holds four hundred and ninety." He capped the marker. "Class D holds one hundred."
Kurisu had gone very pale. "So Class D receives ten thousand a month."
"Class D received zero last month," Aizawa said. "Because class points are deducted for lateness, for absences, for talking in class, for phone use, for every single small ordinary failure that a normal high school punishes with a scolding and a note home. They burned through a hundred points in three weeks without noticing, because nobody told them what the points were for."
"They spent the hundred thousand," said Light, softly.
"Almost all of it. In four weeks. Because they thought there'd be more."
"Oh," said Junko, and shivered from her shoulders down. "Oh, that's good. That's so elegant. You give them the whole thing at once, you don't tell them the rules, you let them build a life on it — and then—" She made a small, ecstatic gesture, opening her hand like something falling apart. "The month rolls over. They check the card. And it's zero. Everyone's face, all at once, in the same second." She sighed, blissful. "God. I would've paid for that."
"You are the worst person I have ever been in a room with," said Kurisu, "and I have been in a room with him," and she pointed at Okabe without looking.
"Christina!"
"Sensei." Senku's grin had gone knife-thin, and his red eyes were bright and terrible. "You said Class A through D. You listed their class points. You didn't list ours."
The room turned.
Aizawa wrote it on the board.
Class E: 0.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing that had happened all day.
"Zero," said Jaune.
"Zero."
"So next month we get—"
"Zero," said Aizawa.
"So the hundred thousand—"
"Is the only money any of you will ever receive from this school unless you take class points from someone who has them."
Shinji Ikari made a small sound.
"That's not a school," said Ruby. Her voice was very small and her silver eyes were huge. "That's — sensei, that's not — schools don't do that. Schools have, like, lunch, and lockers, and—"
"This school has an eighty-two percent employment rate into any career the student names," Aizawa said. "Any university. Any company. Any government post. Guaranteed. Not helped — guaranteed. It is the single most effective institution in this country and it achieves that by being exactly what you're looking at." He set the marker down. "You're not being educated. You're being sorted. And every point in your account is a vote the school is casting about what you're worth."
"How do we get class points?" said Akame. First words since roll call.
"Special exams. Roughly one a month. Sometimes academic, sometimes not. Points move between classes based on results — win, and you take from the class you beat. Lose, and they take from you."
"We're at zero," said Karma, chin on his hand, smiling. "You can't take from zero."
"No."
"So we've got nothing to lose and everything to gain." His golden eyes gleamed. "Sensei. You do understand that you've just told twenty-six people with no assets that the only rational strategy available to them is to attack upward, constantly, forever, with total disregard for consequence?"
"Yes."
"...huh." Karma laughed. "Okay. I like you."
"There's more." Aizawa's tone didn't change, and somehow that was the worst part. "Academic examinations occur monthly. There's a pass line. It moves. Below the line—" he paused, once, "—is expulsion. Immediate. Not suspension. Not remedial classes. You are removed from the school and you do not come back."
"And those of us," said Sora, very evenly, one arm resting protectively across the back of Shiro's chair, "who don't have anywhere to be removed to?"
Aizawa looked at him for a long moment.
"That," he said, "is the part I couldn't get an answer to. I asked. Three times."
"Sensei." L had not moved. His voice was mild and flat and there was nothing mild about it at all. "You said points can purchase anything on this campus."
"I did."
"Define anything."
"Textbooks. Food. Clothing. Air conditioning — the dorm climate control is metered, by the way, at fifty thousand points to switch it on for the season. Test scores, in some circumstances, through channels the school pretends not to know about." Aizawa's eyes came up. "And an expulsion can be reversed. The price is twenty million private points."
The number landed on the room like a dropped anvil.
"Twenty million," Jaune said faintly.
"Two hundred students' entire first-month deposit," said Kurisu instantly.
"Two hundred class A students' monthly income," corrected Senku, "which means the school has priced a human life at exactly one class, for exactly one month. That's not a number, that's a statement."
"It's a leash," said Hachiman. He hadn't moved either, head still on his arms, voice muffled and utterly certain. "It's not about the money. If they wanted us broke they'd just make us broke. They set the price at twenty million so that we spend three years knowing there's a price. So every friendship in this building has a number attached to it, and everyone knows the number, and nobody ever forgets it." He finally sat up. His dead eyes swept the room without landing anywhere. "That's the actual catch. Not the money. They want us to learn that everything can be bought. And the sick part is they're right, and by the time we graduate we'll be grateful, because that's how the world actually works and everyone else just gets to find out later and worse."
Nobody said anything.
"Wow," said Junko, into the silence, wiping an imaginary tear. "That was bleak. Do you do parties?"
"He's correct," said Light Yagami.
He said it pleasantly. He said it the way you agree about the weather. He had not raised his hand, and his posture was flawless, and his brown eyes were warm and open and the most sincere thing in the room.
"It's a system that assigns a number to a person and then makes the person live inside it," Light said. "Which is honest, at least. Most institutions do the same thing and lie about it." He turned slightly, and smiled at the room — at all of them, generously, as though he were welcoming them somewhere. "But sensei, I'd add one thing. A system like this isn't cruel. It's neutral. It rewards exactly what you put into it. Which means the only people who suffer in a place like this are the ones who deserve—"
"Yagami-kun is going to be a problem."
L had not looked up from his card.
The room's temperature dropped four degrees and none of it was Esdeath.
"...Excuse me?" said Light, pleasantly.
"I said Yagami-kun is going to be a problem." L set the card on the desk, edge-on, with one finger. "Approximately eighty-five percent. It was ninety-two before he opened his mouth. He's very good at lowering it. That, in itself, is worth about six percent."
"That's a strange thing to say to someone you've just met."
"We have not just met."
"...No," Light agreed, and his smile did not move a millimeter. "No, I suppose we haven't."
"Are they gonna fight?" whispered Issei.
"They already are," murmured Rias, who understood politics better than anyone else in the room and had gone quite serious. "That's what that was."
"NYU," announced Lucy.
"Right," said Aizawa. "Anything else."
"Yes." Yumeko Jabami stood up.
She was trembling. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were red, fully red now, luminous, and her hands were pressed flat on the desk to keep them still, and her voice came out low and unsteady and reverent.
"Sensei. Let me make sure I understand." Breath. "Everyone in this building is carrying a balance. Everyone knows what everyone else's balance means. Points move between people. Points move between classes. There are exams every month where the stakes are our entire futures, and the losing side pays the winning side, and a person's continued existence here has a published price." She swayed slightly. "This whole school. The whole school. It's a—"
"Casino," said Sora and Shiro at the same time.
Shiro had lifted her head. Her red-gold eyes were open, and they were not sleepy at all.
"...a game," she said. "With rules. And rules can be—"
"—broken?" said Karma.
"—used," said Sora, and grinned. "Blank never loses."
"AAAHHHH—" Yumeko sat down hard, both hands over her face. "This is the best day of my life—"
"You're all insane," said Kazuma, to the ceiling. "I'm in another death world. It's got vending machines this time."
"Sensei." Subaru's hand was up. His voice had gone strange. "Sorry. One more. You said the pass line moves and people get expelled. So — has anyone ever failed here? Actually failed. Actually gotten thrown out."
"Yes."
"How many?"
"That's not public."
"How many, sensei."
Aizawa looked at him — at the tracksuit, at the sanpaku eyes, at the file in his desk drawer that had a line in it he still didn't fully believe, the one about the boy who kept describing events that hadn't happened with a precision that made three separate psychologists resign.
"Enough," Aizawa said, "that I'd like all of you to stop treating this as theoretical."
Subaru nodded slowly and put his hand down and did not stop shaking for about ninety seconds, and beside him Rika Furude reached over and patted his wrist twice, without looking, with the absent-minded gentleness of someone who had done this for another person a very long time ago.
"Nipah," she said quietly. "It's okay. It's only the first loop."
Subaru's head snapped around so fast his neck cracked.
She was smiling at her desk. Feet swinging. Small and blue-haired and eleven kinds of harmless.
"...what did you just say?"
"Mii~?"
"Class dismissed," Aizawa said. "Orientation packets on your desks. Dormitory keys in the packets. Boys' floors are three and four, girls' are five and six, and if I catch anyone on a floor they don't belong on after ten p.m. it's a class point, which — reminder — you don't have, so instead it will be me."
Chairs scraped.
"Iwatani. Natsuki. Enoshima. Lawliet. Stay."
The other twenty-two filtered out into a corridor that immediately became a war of small, careful movements.
Esdeath fell into step beside Akame, hands behind her back, smiling down at her. "You're going to try eventually."
"Yes."
"Wonderful. Do give me some warning. I'd hate for it to be over quickly."
"I won't."
"Better."
Kurumu latched onto Issei's left arm; Rias, with regal serenity and terrifying precision, took the right.
"HHHNNG—"
"Isn't this nice," said Rias sweetly. "The three of us."
"So nice," agreed Kurumu, sweeter. "Say, senpai — since Issei's just your employee — you won't mind if I walk him to the dorms?"
"He has a contract."
"Then I'll make him a better offer."
"HE IS NOT ON THE MARKET—"
"I love it here," Issei sobbed happily. "I love it here so much."
"Boobs," said Shiro, walking past, apropos of nothing.
"SHIRO."
Jaune Arc found Ruby by the lockers with her packet open and her hands shaking.
"Hey. Hey, Rubes."
"There's no Weiss," she said. "There's no Yang. There's no Blake. There's no Uncle Qrow, and there's — there's a school that expels you for one bad test, and I'm — Jaune, I'm fifteen, they wrote sixteen on my file, I watched them write it—"
"Yeah." He crouched down so she wouldn't have to look up. He didn't have a speech. He'd never once had a speech at the right time. "Yeah, I know. Me too. Not the fifteen thing, I'm — anyway." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But hey. Look. Bottom of the class, nobody expects anything from us, everyone thinks we're a joke?" A crooked grin. "Ruby. Come on. That's just Beacon. That's literally just Beacon again. We were good at that."
Ruby stared at him.
Then she laughed, wetly, once. "That's the worst pep talk."
"I know, I'm so bad at these—"
"No, it — it worked. It kinda worked." She wiped her face with the back of her hand and the red cloak flared as she straightened. "Okay. Okay! Okay. So we need points. So we take points. From the people who have points."
"That is — technically the plan, yes."
"I'm gonna take all their points."
"Please don't say it that loud, there's a girl behind you with horns—"
"Nyu," said Lucy, and drifted past.
At the end of the corridor, Kazuma had accumulated Subaru's empty seat, Senku, Seiya, and a headache.
"Okay. Okay, isekai support group, emergency session." Kazuma counted on his fingers. "Rule one, we pool the points. Rule two, nobody spends anything on anything stupid—"
"I'm buying laboratory equipment," said Senku.
"THAT'S STUPID—"
"I'm buying a centrifuge, Kazuma, do you know what a centrifuge is—"
"I'm buying nothing," said Seiya. "I'm spending zero points until I've mapped every exit, catalogued every student, identified the three most dangerous people in this building and confirmed that this classroom is not a simulation."
"...I mean, that last one's fair," said Kazuma. "That's the one fair thing you've ever said."
"Also I've already decided who the three most dangerous people are."
"Who?"
"The blonde with the bear clips, the one with the red hair and the smile, and the small one who says 'nipah.'"
Kazuma blinked. "The little one?"
"Kazuma." Seiya's voice went very quiet. "She has an old person's eyes."
Ten meters away, standing alone by the window with his packet unopened, Hachiman Hikigaya watched all of it — the alliances forming, the flirting, the crying, the counting, the two boys with the eyes staring at each other across the crowd — and made a noise in his throat.
"Twenty-six people," he muttered, "one hundred thousand points, zero class points, and a price tag on staying alive. Yeah. Great. Fantastic. This'll go well."
"You are also going to be a problem," said Rika Furude, from beside his elbow. She had not been there a second ago.
"...I'm going to be furniture, is what I'm going to be."
"Nipah! That's what the smart ones always say." She skipped away down the corridor. "Bye-bye, Hikigaya-kun~"
He froze.
He had not told her his name.
In the emptied classroom, Aizawa took them one at a time.
"Enoshima."
"Yes~?"
"Twenty-five people in this class have a reason to be here. You have a sentence." He didn't sit. "You were caught. There's a simulation-based intervention on your record with more redactions than text. Somebody in this government decided you were worth a second attempt, and I want you to know that I read the argument they made and I didn't find it convincing."
Junko put a finger to her lip. "Aww. Sensei's mean."
"I'm going to be watching you specifically. All day. Every day. Your seat is at the front from tomorrow. You will not be alone with any student in this class in a room with a closed door for the next three years." His eyes did not move. "If that sounds like a challenge, be aware that I've spent a decade putting people like you in restraints professionally, and unlike everyone else in this building, I don't find you interesting."
Something in Junko's face flickered.
For half a second — barely — the model's smile emptied out and something very cold and very bored looked back at him.
"Boooooring," she drawled, in a dead flat voice, hair somehow limp, shoulders slumped. "Ugh. God. You're one of those. Fine. Whatever." Then bright again, ponytails bouncing: "Can I go? I want to get a good dorm room!"
"Go."
"Byeee~!"
"Natsuki."
Subaru stayed standing. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were up around his ears.
"Your file says you spent two years somewhere else," Aizawa said, "and that you came back after — the word they used was tower. It also says you've described in detail events that never occurred, on eleven occasions, with information you shouldn't have had." He watched him. "You asked me whether time runs normally in this building."
"...Yeah."
"Why?"
Subaru laughed. It was not a good laugh. "Sensei, if I answer that question honestly, one of two things happens. Either you don't believe me, or you do." His grin was awful. "And I've done the second one before. It went really, really badly for the person who believed me."
Aizawa considered him for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
"...okay?"
"You've got a thing you can't say. I've had those." He picked up his sleeping bag. "The offer stands for three years. It doesn't expire and I won't ask again. But Natsuki — one piece of advice, from someone who's watched a lot of kids carry a lot of things alone." His tired eyes came up. "Whatever it is, this class is going to make you use it. Because the alternative is losing. And when you use it, somebody's going to notice." A beat. "Make sure it's someone you chose."
Subaru stared at him.
"...yeah," he said hoarsely. "Yeah. Okay."
"Iwatani."
Naofumi had waited without speaking, arms folded, shield gleaming dully.
"You wanted to know the catch," Aizawa said. "You got it. So why are you still angry?"
"Because you told us."
"...Explain."
"If you'd hidden it, you'd be like every other adult I've met." Naofumi's voice was scraped raw and perfectly level. "But you told us. Which means you want something. Nobody gives away leverage." His green eyes were flat and old and sixteen. "So what is it, sensei? What do you want from us?"
Aizawa looked at him for a long moment.
"I want twenty-six of you at the graduation gate in three years," he said, "and if I have to be the villain in your story for that to happen, I've done it before and I'll do it again on Thursday. That's all. That's the whole thing."
"...People say that."
"They do."
"They lie."
"Usually." Aizawa slung the sleeping bag over his shoulder. "Test it. That's not sarcasm — I mean it. Test me. Set up something small and see if I hold. I'd rather you spend three years suspicious and here than trusting and gone."
Naofumi's jaw worked.
Then he turned and walked out without another word, and Aizawa noted, without comment, that the boy's shoulders had come down about a centimeter.
"Lawliet."
L was already crouched on the chair in front of the desk, thumb at his lip, a sugar cube he had produced from nowhere balanced on the tip of his other thumb.
"You want to ask me about Yagami-kun," he said.
"No. I want to tell you something about him." Aizawa dropped into his chair. "The school's placement algorithm put you and him in the same class."
"Yes."
"There are four other classes."
"Yes."
"So either it's an accident," Aizawa said, "or somebody upstairs looked at both files, understood exactly what they had, and put you in a room together on purpose to see what happens."
L was quiet. He turned the sugar cube over. Then he ate it.
"Ninety-four percent," he said. "It's the second one."
"That's what I thought."
"Which means, sensei, that the true examination for this class has already begun, and it is not academic." L's enormous dark eyes came up and there was nothing childish in them at all. "It is us. We are the exam. Twenty-six people who cannot be governed by conventional means, placed in a system of pure incentive, to determine whether the system is stronger than the people." He tilted his head. "And you have just handed all twenty-six of them the rulebook on day one, which was not in the school's design."
"No," Aizawa agreed. "It wasn't."
"You've broken their experiment."
"I've started it," Aizawa said, and for the first time all day, something that was almost a smile ghosted across his exhausted face. "They wanted to know if the system's stronger than the people. I've made it a fair fight. If they didn't want a fair fight, they shouldn't have hired a hero."
VIII. The Report
In the administration tower, four floors up, the Chairman of the Advanced Nurturing High School watched the last of the twenty-six leave the building on eleven separate camera feeds.
Beside him, Sae Chabashira exhaled smoke out the window she wasn't supposed to open. "He told them everything."
"Yes."
"In one class period. Chairman, we ran that method for eleven years—"
"And Class D discovered it themselves in three weeks with no help at all," the Chairman said, "which is why I stopped assuming the method was sacred, Chabashira-sensei." He watched Feed 7: the blonde boy crouched in front of the girl with the red cloak. Feed 4: two boys walking twenty meters apart down the same corridor, at exactly the same pace, neither looking at the other. Feed 9: a small blue-haired girl standing perfectly still in an empty stairwell, looking up at the camera, directly into the lens, smiling.
Feed 9 flickered.
The Chairman's fingers stilled.
"Rewind that."
"Which?"
"Nine."
She rewound it. The stairwell was empty. It had been empty for six minutes.
Chabashira frowned. "System glitch."
"Mm," said the Chairman, and did not agree, and did not disagree.
On the desk between them, the file for the first Class E special exam sat sealed, dated for the twelfth of the month, and beneath its title — ISLAND SURVIVAL, MODIFIED: FIVE-CLASS VARIANT — someone had added a handwritten line in red.
Note: E-class enters with zero. Confirm that a class holding zero points can, in fact, lose.
Four floors down and half a kilometer away, in the shopping arcade under the glass roof, twenty-six students discovered what a hundred thousand points felt like in a place that sold everything, and a girl with black hair and a red ribbon at her throat stood very still in the middle of the crowd with her card held in both hands and her eyes shining red, and said, to no one, in a voice thick with joy:
"Now. Who wants to bet?"