Classroom of the Elite (LN)

Epilogue: An Intensifying MysteryIntro

The following Monday, Nanase and Horikita got together and successfully ironed out the details of the agreement between our two classes. By Tuesday, all 157 pairs had been formed, and everyone had shifted their focus over to the upcoming written exams. Although Kōenji remained uncooperative until the very end, he instantly agreed to partner up with Nanase at her request, surprising both myself and Horikita.

While my left hand had sustained quite the injury, I could confidently say that the results were well worth it. Many students were surprised to see my hand wrapped up in bandages, but thanks to Chabashira and Mashima-sensei, the matter was kept confidential. This allowed the special exam to move forward without anyone else finding out about what happened.

Even though there had been many opportunities to interact with the first-year students over these past two weeks, I still wasn’t able to discern the identity of the White Room student. Given the lack of action throughout the special exam, it made me question whether or not they even existed in the first place. It was safe to assume that I needed to stay wary of all the first-years I had come into close contact with.

Normally, one might think that they could rule out Hōsen due to the fact that several students knew about him from back in middle school. However, neither Ryūen nor Akito had actually met him in person before. In other words, there was a chance he was an imposter who had contacted the real Hōsen and taken on his identity.

As for Nanase, even though she didn’t appear to bear any ill will toward me at first glance, upon delving deeper there were several factors that couldn’t be overlooked, such as the method she had used to get close to me, her attitude after we left the karaoke parlor, and the reason she had chosen to contact me in the first place.

And then there was Amasawa, who had joined hands with Hōsen to try and get me expelled. But even then, it was more than possible that she might’ve just been after the 20 million point bounty on my head.

In any case, I still didn’t have a single shred of evidence to connect any of them to the White Room.

If I showed even the slightest hint of weakness, I could be swallowed whole, and it seemed like this would continue to be the case for a while.

And just like that… May 1st had finally arrived. The day that the results of the special exam were to be announced.

During the 6th and final period of the day, some time was set aside to present our scores.

“I will now present the results of the special exam. While everything will be displayed up here on the blackboard, it will be displayed on your tablets as well so you can check what you want in detail.”

Thanks to our tablets, we could zoom in on the scores we wanted to check without even looking at the board.

I could feel Horikita’s eyes fixated on me. There was no doubt that this special exam had been the most difficult one yet. It was highly unlikely that the two of us would end up getting the same score.

On the day of the exam, Horikita had chosen math as the subject for the two of us to compete over.

Before long, the screen on the blackboard swapped over and the test results were displayed on our tablets.

Most students didn’t care about the scores of others, prioritizing their own scores instead.

I, on the other hand, prioritized checking the performance of our class as a whole.

In terms of expulsions… it seemed like we had successfully managed to avoid losing anyone.

Upon sorting the overall scores in ascending order, the lowest combined score was 579. From the look of it, everyone had gotten through the exam without a hitch. While everyone had undoubtedly tried their best, it wasn’t like the school would have hit us with such an unreasonably difficult special exam right at the start of the year. In fact, Ike, Satō, and many others had all easily managed to score more than 250 points. This meant that, back when Chabashira showed us that table of estimated scores at the start of the exam she had probably intentionally lowered the values.

As everyone began to see their scores, sighs of relief and joy-filled shouts could be heard throughout the classroom.

With that out of the way, it was time to check Horikita’s score as well. I filtered the results to only show math and had the results displayed in descending order.

As the subject selected for our competition, Horikita had scored an impressive total of 87 points. Given that the next score after hers was Keisei’s with an 84, I couldn’t even imagine the effort she must’ve put into studying. The students after Keisei all had high Academic Ability ratings at or around an A. That said, the 80 point threshold seemed like a huge barrier for most students, no matter the subject. After all, roughly 10% of the exam was based on concepts that went completely beyond the scope of the first-year curriculum, not to mention the difficulty of the exam itself.

As the class was brimming with delight over successfully getting through another exam, a commotion gradually began to arise amongst some of the students.

Of course, I was already well aware of what had happened. Chabashira was staring at me from up at the podium, along with several other students who had realized what happened. This reaction was understandable though, given that my name was placed just above Horikita in the results for the math test.

“A p-perfect score…!? This… Seriously?”

Nobody in the class had managed to score above a 90 on any given test, no matter the subject.

That is, except for me and my score in math.

Incidentally, I scored around a 70 in each of the other subjects.

Most students probably couldn’t understand why I had scored so phenomenally well on only one of the tests.

These written exams had been several times more difficult than I had anticipated. While there was a relatively high risk of getting a perfect score, I had very deliberately refused to cut any corners with my performance. It would inevitably attract the attention of my classmates and the entire school as a whole, but after considering what Tsukishiro was likely to do in the future, I figured that it wouldn’t be a problem to show a glimpse of this side of myself beforehand.

In fact, from a future perspective, making the first move would probably end up saving me a lot of trouble later on.

Under normal circumstances, Sudō would probably be raising a fuss together with Ike. And while he was surprised, he simply remained seated and quietly stared at me.

Given that he already knew about the actions I had taken so far and the incident that had taken place with Hōsen several days ago, it made sense that he would be somewhat less surprised than the other students.

In any case, this past April, things had started to change quite a lot. At this point, the students who were staring at me with strange gazes would probably begin asking questions, and I needed to be prepared to answer them.