Chapter 26: Secret Talk in the Dormitory (Patreon)

Chapter 26: A Secret Conversation in the Dorm

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After the afternoon club orientation ended, most of Class A's students had a rough idea of what they wanted.

Class B, Class C, and Class D's reactions mostly didn't exceed Class A's expectations — they still treated Advanced Nurturing High School as an ordinary school.

That was understandable, though. The other classes didn't yet know that points could be used to purchase specialized courses.

So they didn't take the points seriously. Their homeroom teachers were also restricted — while told to have students save their Private Points, they weren't allowed to reveal exactly what the points could buy.

Not to mention Class A already enjoyed plenty of privileges.

Setting aside Class A, who'd essentially gotten a spoiler, even if Class B, Class C, and Class D understood something about jujutsu sorcerers by now, their impression of the school was probably still just that of some special vocational school training something like firefighters.

To put it bluntly, they thought of it as a technical secondary school, a junior college, a vocational school — that sort of thing.

In fact, even the second- and third-years were in the same boat, since they'd only awakened one or two weeks before the first-years — their mindset hadn't caught up either.

Some upperclassmen were even behind where Class 1-A stood now.

After dinner, a good number of students showed up at Satoru Anjouin's dorm room.

Giving one person special tutoring was the same amount of work as giving two, so of course Anjouin wasn't going to turn anyone away.

These classmates might well become his companions, his comrades-in-arms, down the road.

Still, every student who stepped into his room couldn't help but notice the plastic bag full of protective padding sitting on his nightstand.

Asuka Shiraishi: "..."

Ryoko Nishikawa: "..."

Arisu Sakayanagi: "..."

Masumi Kamuro: "..."

Kohei Katsuragi: "..."

Masayoshi Hashimoto: "..."

Ai Morishita: "..."

It was only a high-schooler's apartment, after all — there was no way half the class could cram in. Even so, the handful who did show up packed the room full.

Watching everyone fall silent, Anjouin flicked a finger against Ai Morishita's forehead.

"What are you going quiet for? You're the one who bought this and left it behind."

"Guh." Morishita clutched her forehead, trying to look cute.

"Everyone, sit down. Sorry, no tea to offer you though."

He hadn't bought much furniture, so there weren't many places to sit. The girls simply settled onto the bed, while the boys sat cross-legged on the floor.

Looking at the girls perched on his bed — beautiful, cute, delicate, pretty, sweetly dopey, each different from the next — Anjouin felt a bit conflicted.

He grabbed a set of disposable paper cups and pulled a large bottle of orange juice from the fridge.

Then he started teaching the group.

Along the way, he laid out some of his plans to everyone present.

"So you're saying you're plotting to get a position on the Student Council, Anjouin?"

"Yeah. The Disciplinary Committee. And I want to expand its authority too — get the power to intervene in conflicts between students."

After all, the entire Advanced Nurturing High School had fewer than 480 students across all three grades combined, so the Student Council had never been fully staffed — and even at full strength, it'd have fewer members than one might expect.

"Besides, the Student Council here is unusual. It counts as a sort of third-party power within the school, with the authority to intervene in special exams."

Hearing this, Kohei Katsuragi — who'd once thought his own experience as Student Council President counted for something — fell silent.

This school was different. Completely different.

ε=(´ο｀*))) Sigh...

Ai Morishita let out the sigh on Kohei Katsuragi's behalf, leaving the boy — who'd actually been about to sigh himself — utterly bewildered.

"What are you sighing about?"

Anjouin shot her an irritated look.

Had she managed to gather cursed energy? Or awakened a cursed technique?

Could she output cursed energy steadily? Or figured out how to use it to reinforce her body?

Or had she learned how to alter a technique's mechanics by setting a Binding? Or expanded her technique's range of effect, or the strength of her own cursed energy?

That look of Anjouin's carried a world of meaning, enough to make Morishita clutch her head, looking every bit like she was reliving memories of being forced to study by her parents.

But Morishita's grades weren't bad, and her perceptiveness was sharp — she didn't actually seem like someone who'd been forced to study. She just happened to know exactly how to play the straight man's foil.

Everyone in the room let out an involuntary laugh.

"Already scheming for a Student Council seat this early?" Arisu Sakayanagi asked.

"Well, this year's different — all three grades are starting from the same line."

Sakayanagi tried to gather cursed energy while weighing his odds of pulling off the Disciplinary Committee plan.

"Also, there's the thing where Katsuragi and I went to the Student Council earlier, asking whether we could use volunteer work to earn bonus points."

"Oh?" Sakayanagi glanced instinctively at Katsuragi.

The buzz-cut boy nodded earnestly. "I mentioned this in the class group chat before too — Anjouin wants Class A and Class B to cooperate and split the 'bonus points' from the first month's special exam."

"On that front, I just talked things over again with Ichinose from Class B. If the bonus is 300 points, Class A gets 200 and Class B gets 100. If it's only 200, Class A gets 130 and Class B gets 70."

Sakayanagi, who didn't particularly care about the details, turned to look at Anjouin.

"I doubt you're doing all this just for those points."

Two hundred Class Points wasn't a small sum — converted to Private Points that came to twenty thousand per month, or eight hundred thousand for the whole class. But from what Sakayanagi had observed of Anjouin these past two days,

she'd noticed his schemes were never aimed at just one goal — he cast a wide net instead, content to see how many fish he'd land.

"Right. Mainly it's about the volunteer work. If I'm on the Student Council, I can lock this in — even if the school only offers a small amount of Private Points, or doesn't give any Class Points at all."

Hearing that Anjouin had further motives, everyone in the room turned to look at him.

"At the end of the day, being a jujutsu sorcerer isn't an ordinary job. It's a dangerous one, bound up with combat and death, so it takes a certain amount of courage."

"If you think of sorcerers as soldiers, then training soldiers means cultivating a spirit that fears neither hardship nor death."

In short — cultivating raw grit.

By the standards of the country Anjouin had lived in during his previous life, that required a whole system: forging conviction through ideology, tempering through real combat, cultural immersion, institutional incentives, and leadership by example.

But Class A's students were all just ordinary kids. Training them like soldiers straight off would only backfire.

"Still, we can't start out with anything too intense. But drawing a little blood — that's necessary."

"Blood?" Masayoshi Hashimoto sucked in a breath.

The look he gave Anjouin was full of dread.

The girls in the room all put on frightened expressions too.

Anjouin swept his gaze over them — one was acting it out convincingly, one was genuinely a little scared, one had it down almost too well, one had actually been startled, and one had reacted half a beat too slow...

Girls really are natural-born actresses.

"Anjouin, isn't this a bit too extreme?"

"No, no — I just mean sending students to the cafeteria or the restaurants in the commercial center, to have them slaughter chickens, ducks, fish."

"Plenty of the students probably have cooking experience, but not much experience killing something alive. That's a gap I want to fill in."

"That's what it means to become a jujutsu sorcerer — you need to make peace with taking life."

Even if it starts with butchering chickens.

"K-killing chickens?" Masumi Kamuro blinked. She admitted to herself that she really had been startled a moment ago.

But now that Anjouin had spelled it out, the whole "jujutsu sorcerer" mystique felt a little less cool.

"Isn't a sorcerer's job to exorcise curses?" Katsuragi asked.

"If that were all there was to it, there wouldn't be such a thing as curse users. A curse user is really just a sorcerer who's turned evil — one who won't take orders and instead follows their own desires."

"And exorcising those curse users is also a sorcerer's duty."

Anjouin had no intention of throwing Class A's students into the deep end right away.

Just handling some chickens, ducks, and fish, building up a little nerve — that was plenty for a bunch of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.

"So there was a whole scheme behind the volunteer work idea."

Katsuragi found himself nodding, admitting his own thinking hadn't gone far enough.

If being a sorcerer was inevitably bound up with combat and death, then the courage to face both really did need to be cultivated early.

"As expected of Anjouin." Hashimoto's praise came out a bit awkward.

"I see. No wonder you two look down on Class B."

Katsuragi thought it over for a moment and suddenly realized that Anjouin and Sakayanagi were remarkably in sync when it came to their attitude toward Class B.

As for why he himself looked down on Class B, it was partly because their homeroom teacher had said early on that Class A was the best class, and partly because he'd always felt something odd about Class B's atmosphere.

Thinking about it now, he realized he'd sensed it himself — most of Class B's students probably didn't even have it in them to hurt someone else.

And a class like that would have a hard time surviving at a school like Advanced Nurturing, where strength was everything.

"I know how to win Class B over now."

"No, let's leave this one to Sakayanagi." Anjouin knew Katsuragi was steady and reliable in his work.

But on this particular matter, he trusted Arisu Sakayanagi's tyrannosaurus-level aggression more.

"Oh my, thanks for the vote of confidence."

Anjouin had won a huge amount of popularity in Class A by giving private lessons on gathering cursed energy, which annoyed her — but she wasn't the type to sabotage things out of pure spite.

As a side note, Class A now had three group chats. One was the big group with all forty students in it.

Of the two smaller groups, one was run by Katsuragi — originally twelve members, now down to ten. The other was run by Sakayanagi — originally seventeen members, now down to fifteen.

In other words, anyone who hadn't joined either smaller group counted as belonging to Anjouin's third faction.

The group talked a while longer before Katsuragi, Hashimoto, Shiraishi, Nishikawa, Sakayanagi, and Kamuro left, making way for other Class A students to come to his room.

Still, every student who came in stopped to stare at the plastic bag on the nightstand for a moment.

Anjouin had meant to have Ai Morishita take it with her when she left.

But the moment he looked away, Morishita — whom he'd been forcing to practice gathering cursed energy — slipped out on the sly, leaving the bag right where it was.

Then, around ten o'clock that night, a boom echoed down from upstairs, followed by several loud, ringing barks.

"Hm?"

The commotion was loud enough that even with the dorm's good soundproofing, plenty of students noticed.

It was accompanied by a boy's anguished, bloodcurdling scream.

Many students stepped out of their rooms and hurried toward the noise.

Being close by, Anjouin skipped the elevator entirely and just ran up two flights of stairs.

By then, quite a few students had already gathered on the fourth floor, most of them looking utterly at a loss.

The ferocious barking kept them from daring to get close.

Anjouin pushed through the crowd and saw a boy pinned down, being savaged by two fierce dogs — one black, one white.

The sight left him momentarily stunned.