The first thing Saha did was to make sure to include an arbitrary point at the beginning of the story.

The entire point of "William was trying to sabotage Noah in the external olympiad..."

was not only a complete lie but also a trap. Firstly it baited the opposition into arguing against this point, which she had a perfect rebuttal planned and could not disprove.

The external olympiad had actually been postponed, Noah was just in the classroom preparing. I had a suspicion that Maia knew of this information. Based on previous interactions, William was probably coming to bribe more information out of Noah, which is why he likely stayed silent even after being falsely accused of a motive.

The second and most important aspect of that line was that the justification for the fight was unnecessary and meaningless.

It did not matter at all whether William was trying to sabotage Noah or not, that wouldn't've changed any aspect of what occurred.

The important point in the argument to point out was whether or not Saha tripped William on purpose.

Her story purposely took the emphasis away from this point, because she did trip William on purpose, which would've made her the aggravator. There was no way that someone like Saha could've possibly tripped William accidentally. Just the sheer difference in size would've made Saha fall over with William, but the fact that she was still standing up while William was on the ground meant that she must have tripped him purposefully.

This fact made Saha guilty.

I had my doubts on whether Saha could've created something as intricate as this on her own. This trial was enough to highlight the flaws in the student council trial system in general.

Firstly, there wasn't really an official judge who reviewed the evidence. Whilst there was a teacher in the room, she was more there for supervision purposes, it was mostly Maia and Caleb who were the adjudicators.

It was practically blatantly obvious that Maia was biased, if not having set the entire thing up. She provided incorrect information that only supported her side.

Maia's endgame began to make sense to me.

She was going to claw the student council to her side with everything she has, then I assume, she will launch an attack of some sort in the form of a new rule.

Oh well, I guess her endgame doesn't really affect me.

Everyone was still thinking about whether or not to review the security footage.

"If no one has anything else to add, I will conclude this case now with one warning for both William and Mackenzie." explained the teacher.

There was a brief moment of silence.

Suddenly, after coming to some sort of revelation, Caleb stood up scrunching the pages in his hand. He swiftly turned and faced the teacher.

"Hold on a second, what exactly are William and Mackenzie being charged for?"

"Violence on school grounds."

"If the charge is for violence, then shouldn't Saha also be charged because she also technically participated?"

"She has the justification of self-defence."

"At which point exactly was she doing self-defence?"

William and Mackenzie looked towards Caleb with sparkling eyes, as if he were an angel.

The teacher looked through her pages again.

The details of this case were obviously very crude, without Caleb, William and Mackenzie were bound for a very unjust outcome.

Caleb was doing all he could without making it seem biased, William and Mackenzie were his assistants after all. He couldn't just have them be punished but also he couldn't show a bias otherwise his words would be invalidated.

The teacher looked towards our representative.

The representative then looked through his own sheet of paper. It was like some game of passing the parcel with the responsibility being passed from person to person.

Our representative had two choices.

1. Claim the self-defence was when William attempted to kick her from the floor. This was the most obvious response, the problem was, William never actually made contact with Saha and bringing this up would lead to a bigger issue.

Despite claiming so before, Saha did not actually have grounds for self-defence at this point. The point was slipped by after it was hidden by, "What's more Mackenzie tackled her to the ground and even headbutted her..." which did not actually defend Saha's initial self-defence. It would've been tricky to defend her for a second time.

2. Claim the self-defence was after she was tackled to the ground by Mackenzie. This was less expected but a much more poignant response.

This is because the representative could claim 50/50 with what occurred between William and Saha and claim that it was a series of misunderstandings and escalations. This would move the responsibility onto the clash between Saha and Mackenzie, which would subtly slide the initial conflict under the rug. It was much more difficult to justify Mackenzie's use of violence on Saha.

Neither of these responses were perfect because they relied upon hiding information from the adjudicator.

I watched as the representative scrambled to come up with a response.

It was funny, watching this little trial unfold. The little tricks people used to hide the truth, the amount of value they place on the answer.

It was funny.

It was funny how I didn't have any stakes in this quarrel.

I wonder if I had stakes in something like this. I wondered if it would've made my heartbeat faster, made me sweat from my brow, made me tense in anticipation for the result. I wonder if then I would find it interesting.

I'll just watch how this unfolds from the sidelines for now.

*

"The self-defence was when she was attacked by Mackenzie."

I guess he chose option two.

Caleb began speaking again.

"Mackenzie was only fighting to protect William from Saha's attack. Therefore, Mackenzie's attack was justified, meaning it couldn't be self-defence."

The conversation was now moved onto whether Mackenzie's actions were justified.

Our representative now needed to find a way to respond to this.

He needed to find a way to show that Mackenzie's attack was not justified but that is near impossible considering the circumstances. Saha was attacking Will which did give grounds for Mackenzie to help her.

By the very nature of this argument, there was no way to prove anything.

He decided to make one more last-ditch gamble.

"I believe it is not fair to judge until we receive the video evidence."

This was enough to convince me that Maia had set this up. He is betting on the fact that Maia will find a way out of this situation for them.

The video evidence was obviously going to incriminate them further as they had built their entire story on lies and misleading statements.

I looked towards Saha who was sitting to the right of me.

I hadn't noticed it before but,

she was nearly crying.

We were dismissed for the day.