The morning of January 21st.

I was gently awoken by the beeping of my trusty alarm clock once again.

This time, Haruto had gotten used to it.

'The results of the exam are being released at 6:00am.' I said.

'I'm interested to see what's about to happen.' He replied as he slowly got up.

The time was 5:15am.

I pulled my blanket down. The room was heated so there wasn't much of a difference in temperature. Haruto was scrolling through his phone and I made my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth—it was our usual morning routine now.

**

At 6:00am on the dot, both Haruto's and my phone vibrated.

-

National High School

All students who have been given an expulsion notice should report to administration to finalise required paperwork.

Your Result: Passed

-

'I passed,' said Haruto.

'Same here.'

'Well, that was to be expected wasn't it?'

I opened my bank account and checked the amount.

-

Your Account

Current Points: 1

Owed: 317,800

Owing: 120,000

-

Maybe I shouldn't have cut it so close—oh well, it was fine so it doesn't matter now.

'So what are you going to do now?' Asked Haruto.

'What do you mean?'

'I have a feeling your class will be feeling a lot more empty today.'

'It doesn't bother me.'

'Ah, well since we have nothing else to do, do you want to go to gym?'

'Yeah.'

'Alright, let's go!'

On our way out of the dorm, we noticed a large number of faculty staff going door to door like salesmen. However, it was pretty obvious that they weren't trying to sell anything. A small stream of students began coming out of the dorms. Some of their faces looked distraught—it was obvious that they had just been expelled. However, I noticed that there was a larger portion of students who seemed to not be saddened by the fact that they were being expelled.

I assumed that this had something to do with the situation in class 1-F.

We made our way towards the gym. The gym was located inside of the a very large, state-of-the-art sports centre. The centre was filled with many different facilities, from a swimming centre to several indoor volleyball and basketball courts to a bowling alley. It was truly a grand establishment.

All of the facilities were free so students didn't have to pay any points to use them. Haruto and I went into the gym and began doing some workouts. I had used most of this gym equipment before back when I was part of Ideal Human Project, it appeared that Haruto was also quite acquainted with the equipment.

We continued until 7:30am when we decided that we'd return back to our dorms and prepare for classes for the day.

*

The class certainly felt a lot more empty than usual.

There were exactly eight other people in front of the board.

There was a brown-haired girl who was crying on her knees as she looked up at the board. Her faint sobbing was distinctly audible in the nearly-silent room. Under her breath, I could hear her crying the name of someone.

'Emi... Emi... why did you do that for me...'

I moved closer and glanced at the board.

-

Class 1-A

1. Amaya Ami - 40,000 points

2. Inoue Akiko - 40,000 points

3. Oliver Moran - 38,989 points

(0 students expelled)

Class 1-B

1. Naegi Saka - 1,190,177 points

2. Aya Linda - 237,213 points

3. Ester Hamasaki - 206,111 points

(5 students expelled)

Class 1-C

1. Lucy Fujiwara - 29,222 points

2. Kaoru Hiroto - 28,901 points

3. Touma Suzuki - 27,565 points

(0 students expelled)

Class 1-D

1. Kohei Tachibana - 38,172 points

2. Andria Katsuki - 5,090 points

3. Aya Akasaka - 4,377 points

(3 students expelled)

Class 1-E (My class)

1. Honoka Airi - 26,796 points

2. Aiko Hamasaki - 18,800 points

3. Yamada Gait - 11,672 points

(21 students expelled)

Class 1-F

1. Yogi Fukuda - 2,060 points

2. N/A

3. N/A

(29 students expelled)

-

It looked like my strategy had unintentionally gotten 16 extra student expelled from our class.

Kai, Akane, Yamada, Nendo, Aiko, Honoka, Yuuto, the blonde girl who bullied me on the first day and I were the only students were managed to evade expulsion.

This school was pretty ruthless with its expulsions.

Kohei Tachibana appeared to have the most points in class 1-D by a significant margin. Especially when he had to compete with class 1-B to get points, it was quite impressive.

Now that the class was so small, I wondered what the school was going to do—luckily, I didn't need to ponder that question for too long because I conveniently received a notification on my phone.

-

National High School

Students in a class with less than ten students are required to choose another class within two ranks of theirs to move to. The class they join must have more than ten students.

Class transfer slips must be handed to your homeroom teacher before 6:00am on the 22nd of January.

Note: Midterm exam difficulty will be scaled to the rank of your class. Higher-ranked classes will have more difficult exams. There will be conditions for getting a low score on the exams.

-

It looks like I'll be moving classes.

The homeroom teacher of Class 1-E walked in with a defeated look on her face.

'Everyone here, I just want to say something. This exam was designed to cull out the lower classes. Every year I've taught here, either class 1-E or class 1-F have been wiped close to empty. This is part of the school's mission. I can't say anything more, but I will tell you this—I have enjoyed teaching you guys for the short period of time we were together.'

After that she took a seat at her desk and handed out class transfer slips.

When we returned to our seats, I was able to see that the girl who was crying was Honoka. It wasn't too hard to figure out what likely happened. Her friend probably gave her all their points to help her survive.

How tragic.

I looked down at the class transfer slip. There were a few random pieces of information I need to fill out however the most important part was which class I was going to transfer to. The exam difficulty scaling meant it was not always the best idea to just pick the highest ranked class, however, that didn't really matter to me.

It was pretty easy to guess the atmosphere of the classes based on the point scores which were shown every morning.

After the second morning, I noticed that the top 3 students had lost exactly 7,000 points. This was very interesting as if the class was working together in order to get an invalid vote, each student would need to pay 7,000 points if they spread out the punishment.

This is because each student automatically loses 5000 points for an invalid vote and a minimum of 12 people must not vote for a vote to be invalid. The 12 people would them lose an extra 5,000 points each. If they decided to spread the extra point loss between all of the students then the 30 students would each pay 2,000 extra points. (12 x 5,000 = 60,000, then 60,000/30 = 2,000)

This leads me to believe that the class is very united, otherwise such careful cooperation and collaboration would not be possible.

Needless to say, I decided that Class 1-C was the best choice for me.

I filled out the remainder of the class transfer slip and handed it back to the teacher, however just as I was about to do so, she quickly added another option.

'I just received a message from the school informing us that there will be 30 more students admitted to make up for the unexpectedly large loss of students in the last exam. They will form the new class 1-E and you have the option to stay in 1-E if you would like.'

A surprising third option, however, I won't be staying in class 1-E.

I wanted to join class 1-C because of their unity and altruism. I would be able to sit back and relax without having to worry about special exams and having to expend too much effort for the time being. If I stayed in 1-E or went to 1-D instead, there would be likely a rough road ahead of me.

'I'll stick with my choice.'

'Alright, I'll put that through the system, thanks Rin.'

A few minutes passed before everyone decided on the class they were going to join.

'Are you going to 1-C?' Asked Yuuto.

'Yeah.'

'Same, Kai, Akane and Aiko are also going there.'

We were dismissed for the day at that point. The teacher informed us that classes were cancelled for the day due to lots of changes needing to be processed.

It was just barely 8:30am, I had practically the entire day free. I also didn't have very many points to use for shopping and the like. So I decided to just return to my dorm and lie on my bed.

**

I was all alone in the room, Haruto was likely doing something out so I was the only one in the dorm. I decided that it was good time to do my laundry. I only had two sets of clothes, my school uniform and the casual clothes I brought when I first arrived.

I had bought detergent a few days earlier so I decided to just wash my clothes in the sink in the bathroom. There was a communal laundry room with washing machines and dryers on every floor, but since I didn't have very many clothes, I would wash them by hand in my room and then take them to the dryers to dry.

I wasn't completely sure why but the washing machines had a 200 point charge whilst the dryers were free. I suppose it was because there was no where to hang your clothes out to dry if you wanted otherwise.

As I was about to leave my room, I received a notification on my phone.