Chris pulled his gaze away from the retreating figures of Kushida Kikyo and Ichinose Honami, the two of them walking off side by side into the distance.
His eyes drifted to the not-so-distant shade of a tree, where Horikita Suzune was running through her pre-practice stretches.
She was in a deep crimson tracksuit, the cut close enough to trace the lean, disciplined lines that years of daily training had carved into her frame. As she pressed into a forward stretch, those already-remarkable legs demonstrated a flexibility that had no business being that extreme.
If he'd wanted to, the Omniscient Eye would have handled it. Or the X-ray function he'd quietly developed through long hours with the Psychic Power Training Box. Either one would have made that layer of fabric completely irrelevant.
But Chris didn't.
And the Magic Butt that had just refreshed into his inventory that very afternoon — the one that let him link his senses to anyone's posterior at will, opening the door to all manner of creative applications — that, too, he had absolutely zero intention of field-testing right now.
The reason was simple.
He'd long since moved past that phase of his life. There was no point getting obsessed with cheap tricks when the real thing was an option. Why peep when you could just reach out and touch?
"Although..."
Chris rubbed his chin, turning it over in his head:
Yesterday the Magic Glove dropped, and today it's the Magic Butt. Is this thing running some kind of themed delivery service?
If it's going to do themed drops, why hasn't it given me the Dog Talisman yet...
He couldn't help it.
For any Chinese person worth their salt, immortality was a temptation that hit harder than the Imperial Jade Seal itself. It was written into the DNA. No one was immune.
And on top of immortality, the Dog Talisman came with the bonus of an undying constitution — the host's body locked permanently at peak condition, forever.
Perhaps it was because the direction of his gaze while deep in thought had been a little too unguarded. Or perhaps it was the specific coordinates his eyes had landed on.
Either way — Horikita Suzune, mid-stretch, suddenly went still.
Something about that stare felt like it could cut straight through anything. It raised the hair on the back of her neck.
She straightened up, pulled her legs back in, and walked over to him with a completely blank expression.
"What exactly do you think you're doing?" she said, her voice like winter.
"...Come again?"
Chris blinked back to the present. He looked at the raven-haired girl standing in front of him, face carved from ice, and put it together a beat later.
He shrugged.
"Don't read into it. I wasn't looking at you. I was thinking."
"Good."
Horikita Suzune let out a cold breath through her nose, crossed her arms, and pulled on the expression of someone who had personally invented the concept of keeping people at arm's length.
"Even if you did have feelings for me, you'd be better off giving up now."
"I'm not interested in relationships. I'm not going to waste my time on something that trivial."
Chris was quiet for a moment. He looked at her — completely, utterly serious about this — and couldn't help himself.
"Horikita."
"Has anyone ever told you... you might be a little too in love with yourself?"
Horikita Suzune's eyebrow arched. Those sharp, upturned eyes narrowed, already loading up a rebuttal —
And then, for some reason, her thoughts slipped sideways on their own.
Back to last night. After the Black Sphere exam had wrapped up — her, alone, pulling up her own evaluation from the Black Sphere interface.
She'd known full well that thing had a vicious tongue. She'd braced herself going in.
But she'd needed answers. She'd needed to chase down whatever trace evidence might explain the gap in her memory — to understand exactly how she had won, when she couldn't remember winning. So she'd looked it up anyway.
And it had gotten through her defenses completely.
The Black Sphere had told her:
[You must be feeling very proud of yourself right now. You did all that hard work. You're the reason Class D is standing at the top. That's what you think, isn't it?]
[But what if I told you... you were carried?]
[Face it, Horikita. You got lucky. You just happened to meet the right person at the right time. That's all.]
If someone had said that to her face in front of a crowd — attacked her, belittled her, tried to tear her down publicly — Horikita Suzune could have weathered it. She could have met it with cold indifference and walked away untouched.
But this kind of doubt — the kind that went straight for her competence, that planted itself at the center of her self-worth and refused to be pulled out — that was her one real weak point.
She could have told herself that Chris had just been using the suit as a cheat code. That the equipment had done all the heavy lifting.
But her pride wouldn't let her.
It was a classic case of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, entirely of her own making.
Horikita Suzune bit her lip and gave Chris one long, searching look.
There was resentment in it. And something else — a defiance that had just been lit.
Next time...
Next time, I won't let anyone outshine me. Not anyone.
The two of them stood there in charged silence, both doing a very convincing impression of people who were above this sort of thing. The atmosphere was beginning to curdle.
On the other side of the courtyard, Ichinose Honami and Kushida Kikyo had finished changing and were making their way over.
Taking that as their cue, Hirata Yousuke and Amikura Mako each turned to call their respective classmates together, announcing that there was something important that needed to be said.
The contrast between the two classes was immediate.
Class B — clearly given some degree of advance notice by Ichinose — carried themselves with a certain readiness. Class D, on the other hand, wore a collective expression of profound confusion.
"What's going on? We're in free period. Whatever it is, can't it wait until after class?"
"Seriously, Hirata, why are you being so mysterious about this?"
The grumbling was widespread, but Hirata Yousuke had enough goodwill stockpiled in this class to keep the complaints from going anywhere. People drifted together more or less willingly.
Hirata Yousuke and Ayanokoji Kiyotaka moved through the group, distributing printed reports.
The documents were thorough — an explanation of the Black Sphere rules, and accompanying them, the photographs Ayanokoji had taken inside the exam last night. Graphic ones. The kind that made the stomach drop.
As people finished reading, the silence gave way to sharp, involuntary intakes of breath.
"Wait, seriously? There are monsters in the school building?"
"Zombies?! You're joking."
"Is this why our points changed?"
Judging the moment right, Ichinose Honami cleared her throat and stepped forward.
She was in her tracksuit — but sharp eyes in the crowd had already caught the glimpse of black material peeking out at her collar and cuffs. A few people were already squinting.
"I think most of you have had time to go through it," Ichinose said, looking across the assembled students.
"I want to be clear: this is not misinformation. It is not a prank designed to mess with you."
"The reason we're gathering everyone today is to make sure you all understand what's changed about this school — and so that we can work together to figure out how to deal with it."
"Ha? Are you serious right now?!"
Sudou — Class D's resident hothead — slapped the printed report down onto the ground and practically shouted:
"Monsters? Black Spheres? What kind of fairy tale is this? You really expect anyone to fall for that?"
"Exactly. Pretty words are easy. Why should anyone believe you?"
Faced with the pushback, Ichinose didn't flinch.
She didn't rush to argue, either. She simply said:
"Of course. Words alone don't prove anything."
"Which is exactly why I'm here — to show you."
As she said it, she glanced over at Amikura Mako.
Amikura Mako gave a small nod and rolled a prop cart forward — loaded with sports equipment: basketballs, dumbbells, the usual fare.
Ichinose Honami extended one arm and rolled up her sleeve, revealing the black compression material clinging to her palm and wrist.
In the sunlight, it caught the light in a strange way — a deep, matte sheen that looked like neither metal nor fabric. More like the skin of something alive.
"What I'm wearing underneath this tracksuit right now is the combat suit I exchanged from the Black Sphere."
"As for what it does..."
She didn't bother finishing the sentence.
Instead, she leaned down, reached into the cart, and picked out a brand-new basketball at random.
Then — no leverage, no two-handed grip, no bracing against anything. Just her hand, closed around the ball.
Five fingers pressed inward.
Crrk——
The sound was deeply, viscerally wrong. The kind that makes your teeth ache.
And then —
BANG!!
The basketball exploded.
She had crushed it. One-handed. With nothing but her grip.
Fragments scattered in every direction. The shockwave was strong enough to blow the bangs off the foreheads of the girls standing in the front row.
"What the —?!"
Unlike Class B — who had received enough advance notice to at least maintain the appearance of composure — Sudou and the rest of Class D let out a collective cry of shock. Every head whipped toward Hirata Yousuke simultaneously, as if looking for confirmation that this was real.
"How is that even possible?"
"She crushed a basketball with one hand? That has to be a trick. The ball must've been tampered with!"
Facing the doubts, Hirata Yousuke shook his head. His tone was level, and completely serious:
"It's real. I checked the equipment myself."
"And... I was personally dragged into the Black Sphere exam yesterday. The photos in that report — Ayanokoji and I took those ourselves. At genuine risk to our lives."
"That's why we decided not to keep this secret. You all deserved to know."
Hirata Yousuke's credibility had been quietly accumulated over a long time. No one in the group challenged him directly.
Besides — the sheer visual impact of what they'd just witnessed was doing most of the work. It was hard to feel calm after watching someone pop a basketball like a soap bubble.
Ichinose Honami nodded.
"If you're still not convinced, you're welcome to inspect the other basketballs in the cart yourself."
At that moment, Horikita Suzune — who had been watching the whole scene from the edges with cool, unreadable eyes — stepped forward.
She didn't reach for a new basketball. Instead, she bent down and picked up one of the torn fragments from the ground, turning it over in her fingers and examining the cross-section carefully.
After a moment, she looked up. Her voice was cool and certain.
"That won't be necessary."
"To burst a regulation-standard basketball by grip strength alone, you'd need to generate approximately five hundred to over a thousand kilograms of compression force in an instant."
"And that's just for the air pressure. The harder problem is the internal nylon winding layer — a material engineered specifically to resist deformation. Extremely tough."
She dropped the fragment and turned her gaze toward the black material visible at Ichinose's wrist. Her expression was complicated.
"The average adult male grip strength sits around forty to fifty kilograms. Even the world's strongest grip athletes — absolute peak specimens — can only generate roughly one-fourth to one-sixth of what would be required to burst a basketball."
"What we just saw," she said, "is not something a human being can do."
"...Yeah," Sudou agreed, his voice quieter now.
As a student-athlete, he understood exactly what kind of strength it would take. This was in a completely different class — at minimum, the level of a man who punched through brick walls for sport.
His throat moved as he swallowed. The look he fixed on Ichinose had shifted — quietly, entirely.
It was the look of someone confronting something unknown. And underneath it, something else: a raw, hungry longing for that kind of power.
If you wore that suit to play basketball, you'd be guaranteed a national team slot.
Assuming they let you wear it in actual matches, of course.
Seeing that the demonstration had landed exactly where she wanted it, Ichinose went ahead and laid out the final piece:
"The special exam is dangerous. But it's also an opportunity."
"This combat suit is one of the cheapest items available for exchange — and you've just seen what even that level can do. Those of you with the ability and the mental fortitude might consider participating."
"And even if you choose not to — you should at least understand what you're dealing with. The alternative is getting pulled into an exam without any warning, without any idea what's happening..."
"And potentially losing your life over it."
——End of Chapter——
Note ①: Magic Glove — A glove-type item that, when worn, allows the user to make contact with objects several meters away. Functionally similar to the Invisible Hand ability of the Sloth Archbishop.
Note ②: Magic Butt — When the user strikes the corresponding model's backside, the target person experiences the sensation of a real impact at that location, without any physical injury occurring at the actual site. The angle of the model can be adjusted to control the force and position of impact.
(Promo: 「Honkai: Star Rail — My Absurd Ability Refreshes Every Week」 — a friend's book, nearing its finale, worth checking out.)
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