The time had approached what could practically be called after school.

Three people are the cause of that heavy atmosphere.

And the source of that oppressive atmosphere is those three.

The three girls, standing there under the cold, unforgiving stares of the entire class.

Kashiwagi and the other two looked pale and seemed on the verge of tears.

The three girls, Kashiwagi and her group, turned toward the homeroom teacher all at once and cried out as they closed in on him.

“Sensei!! Help us! Please help!!”

“Hey… hey!! Help us, okay? Please!!”

“You promised you’d help us!!”

…Promised to help them?

What… does that mean?

“H-hey! Don’t come any closer!! What do you mean, ‘help us’!? Y-you three are the ones behind all this! R-reflect on what you’ve done, and stop—”

“Don’t screw with us!! You promised you’d help us!!”

“You’re gonna break your promise, sensei? Fine… then we’ll spill everything.”

“S-stop! Calm down, all of you… just calm down!!”

“There’s no need to hide it anymore, sensei.”

“W-what…?”

The homeroom teacher lowered his voice, whispering so only the three girls could hear him.

But even from the fragments leaking out, it wasn’t hard to realize he was in on it with them.

…No way, a teacher is involved…? That’s just pathetic.

No wonder everything so far has conveniently gone their way.

Cornered by the three girls, the teacher desperately tried to come up with excuses… but Kato said there was no need for any of that.

“I have evidence of the relationship between Kashiwagi and sensei, so it’s useless to hide it, sensei.”

“H-huh?”

“……”

The teacher lets out a bewildered voice, and Kato silently observes the teacher’s reaction.

“D-don’t spout such nonsense! Trying to smear a teacher… do you even understand what you’re doing!?”

“If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. I’ll just go to the principal’s office after this.”

“Y-you!!”

The teacher angrily shouts at Kato.

Even Kashiwagi and her group were frightened by this.

The teacher demands that he hand over his smartphone.

I must not let him take it…!

I step forward to protect Kato.

Other male students also come forward to help.

Kato glanced at Sado, and Sado immediately understood what he meant and left the classroom.

After that, things unfolded rapidly.

Several male students somehow managed to restrain the rampaging teacher and buy time.

While that was happening, Sado brought another male teacher who subdued and restrained the rampaging homeroom teacher.

Soon after, he was taken to the staff room.

Kato, Sado, Natsume, Kashiwagi, and two others, a total of six people, were also taken there, and the situation ended.

No one knows what will happen next until tomorrow.

While talking about what just happened, other students begin to prepare to go home.

I ended up going home with Fuyunagi-san as well.

There was something I absolutely needed to ask her.

“Hey… Fuyunagi-san…”

“What is it?”

“…This might just be me overthinking, but… are you hiding something from me?”

“I’m not sure if you’d call it hiding, but there is something I haven’t told you yet.”

“What is that…?”

“Why don’t you try guessing?”

This woman… haa….

“……Are you the one who put Kato up to this?”

“Fufu, why do you think so?”

“Kato is too well-prepared for this, and it didn’t seem like him… I thought someone was pulling the strings behind the scenes…”

“Fufu, as expected of you, Taku-chan. You really do understand.”

“I knew it…”

“I knew from the beginning that Miyo was the one bullying Nagisa. Once Sado-kun’s girlfriend changed from me to Nagisa, it was obvious that Miyo and her group would switch their target from me to her.”

“…So without me noticing, were you also being bullied by Kashiwagi and the others?”

“Me? I’d never show trash like them an opening, you know? That’s what the whole ‘pure and gentle girl’ act was for. And if they ever had tried to bully me, I would’ve hunted them down and crushed them until they couldn’t recover.”

“…That’s… pretty intense, huh.”

“But I didn’t want to be dragged around by girls’ envy and jealousy anymore. I wanted things to stay as peaceful as possible… But thanks to a certain someone, all of that is gone now, and honestly? It feels refreshing. This freedom I have now isn’t so bad.”

“……….”

Fuyunagi-san’s ‘pure’ façade was completely shattered when she revealed her relationship with me.

Once it became widely known that she had ‘betrayed’ the popular Sado, Fuyunagi-san’s reputation plummeted at an overwhelming pace, made even worse because she had been so popular to begin with.

If it weren’t for Sado’s unexpected support, she might have become the target of bullying again.

“You know… I was fully aware that Miyo and the others held a grudge against me. That’s why I made sure to collect some dirt on them, just in case. Those girls are stupid and completely careless, so gathering their weaknesses wasn’t hard at all.
They’d call me their best friend on the surface, but behind my back they’d mock me. I mean, that’s unforgivable, right?”

“…Well… I understand how you feel.”

“So, I gathered their weaknesses in secret… I easily recorded Miyo and the others badmouthing Nagisa. Women are surprisingly talkative when they think the other person is ‘one of them,’ you know? It’s honestly amusing.”

“It’s not amusing at all…”

“And then… I found the best material!”

“The best material?”

“Yep. The best material… the strongest piece of dirt imaginable.”

“You mean…”

“Exactly. Miyo and the others were having a physical relationship with our homeroom teacher.”

“…I knew it…”

The way our homeroom teacher had panicked… and more than anything, how blatantly he’d been trying to defend Kashiwagi Miyo and her two friends.

He shut down Natsume Kano’s words from the start and behaved as if he were favoring those three girls. There was nothing fair about it.

For a teacher, his behavior was clearly abnormal.

In short, Kashiwagi and the others were basically saying, “If you don’t want us exposing our relationship, then protect us properly.”

“I have pictures and videos as evidence, but they are too disgusting to look at… It’s like watching pigs mate, it’s laughable.”

“Still… that’s impressive. How do you even manage to get damning footage like that so easily…?”

“It’s easy. Don’t you also have old phones lying around after switching? I change phones all the time, so my room is full of spare smartphones!”

“Yeah…”

“I hid them in various places in the classroom after school, set them to record, and left them there. The next day, all sorts of things were recorded.”

“…You absolutely cannot ever tell that to anyone but me!!”

“Huh? Of course I’m not gonna tell anyone!”

…She really has zero regard for privacy.

What she’s doing is honestly way too despicable.

“So why did you involve Kato?”

“Didn’t Taku-chan seem eager to solve this problem? I didn’t want to get involved in trouble, and I didn’t want you to be involved either. So I was looking for someone to do it instead.”

“That was Kato?”

“Yes! He’s a friend of Taku-chan and gets along with me better than you, so I thought he would be perfect and used him!”

“…Seriously…”

Kato… I’m sorry…

I’ll treat you to something next time to make up for it.

“Besides, if he’s your friend, then it’s only natural he should be able to do at least this much for us, right?”

“It must have been a sudden and unreasonable request for Kato. I don’t want you to involve him in strange things anymore.”

“Mm, don’t worry. This time I was also testing whether he was worthy of being your friend. Fufu… he turned out to be quite an interesting boy.”

“…? Fuyunagi-san?”

“Don’t worry, my heart belongs only to Taku-chan.”

Fuyunagi-san smiled sweetly and eerily.

Her smile was lovely and graceful… yet somehow unsettling, enough to send a chill down my spine.