The classroom door stood tightly shut before her eyes.
From the other side of the door panel came the soft rustling of conversation, and every now and then a shadow flickered past the gap at the bottom, brightening and dimming.
“It’s already been two months, yet I still can’t get used to this.”
Yukina stood in front of the door and took a deep breath.
No matter from which angle one looked, the door in front of her was perfectly ordinary.
Yet every time she stood in this exact spot, Yukina felt like a lost village girl who, holding nothing but a tree branch, had somehow wandered right up to the gates of an Lv.999 Demon King’s castle.
The moment those doors opened, some tragic orchestral symphony of unknown meaning would start playing, followed by terrifyingly long HP bars, and a forced boss fight would begin.
“Little Yukina, why are you just standing at the door without going in?”
Ningning popped up from the side and blinked curiously.
“…It’s nothing.”
“Then open the door.”
“…You do it.”
“What kind of noble young lady are you? You’re blocking the way and still making me open the door!”
Ningning pouted and pushed Yukina forward from behind, her tone full of complaint.
“Alright, alright.”
Yukina knew that continuing to stand there like an idiot wouldn’t solve anything. After taking another deep breath, she reached out and gripped the door handle.
Whoosh.
The instant the door was pulled open, time itself seemed to hit the pause button.
The entire classroom fell deathly silent. Dozens of pairs of eyes turned toward the doorway in perfect unison, locking onto Yukina like infrared laser beams.
Click click.
Yukina walked into the classroom like a wind-up doll, her movements stiff. The entire way she kept her head lowered, hiding her face beneath her bangs to avoid any eye contact.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
After someone muttered something along the lines of “What, it’s just Yukina,” the gazes receded like a tide, and the dense murmur of conversation rose again as if nothing had happened.
“…Hah.”
Yukina reached her own seat and nearly collapsed into it, letting out a long breath of relief.
Thank goodness. I made it back to my seat safely.
The seat she occupied was rather secluded, located in the corner of the first row by the window.
Not many people usually passed by, which made her feel a bit more at ease.
In theory, the seats in this classroom were arranged according to height.
Yukina’s height was relatively outstanding in the class, so she had naturally been placed in the first row.
Ningning, who also belonged to the ranks of the sleeping dragons and young phoenixes, sat right beside her.
“Heiya~ I’m so tired. Finally back in my own nest~”
Ningning sat down in the neighboring seat, pulled a leftover piece of chocolate from yesterday out of her desk drawer, and started crunching on it.
“Be careful not to upset your stomach.”
Yukina reminded her, then took the chance while no one was looking to turn her head and start observing the situation inside the classroom.
How should she put it… No matter how many times she looked, it still felt incredibly bizarre. This classroom was basically a condensed version of a slave society.
The largest group of students by number was “the silent majority.”
Just like the background extras in ordinary revenge stories, these people were all blank-faced.
No matter how big a thing happened, they showed no obvious reaction and simply watched in silence.
Yukina had tried chatting with them before, but most of the replies were just “…”, making them feel like human-shaped background props.
The second-largest group was “the oppressed.”
These students were the easiest targets for bullying in the class.
Introverted and poor with words, they always hid themselves behind books and headphones.
The topics they discussed never left the realm of anime, mobile games, light novels, and the like.
Fragile, sensitive, and bad at fighting back. In ordinary school-bullying stories, people like them were the bullies’ preferred prey.
Isn’t that exactly what I was in my previous life?
Yukina felt that if she weren’t one of Yumiko’s followers, she would very likely have been classified into this group as well.
Third were those at the top of the pyramid, the ones who existed like nobles—the “bullies.”
The area at the very back of the classroom near the door was their exclusive territory.
Several desks had been casually pushed together, piled high with snack bags, makeup pouches, nail polish, and all sorts of colorful junk.
The air was filled with the scent of perfume, hair spray, and the cloying sweetness left by someone who had been eating a strawberry lollipop halfway through.
These people’s art style was completely different from everyone else’s.
Their school uniforms had been heavily modified—skirts short enough to barely cover the tops of their thighs, loose socks slouching around their calves, collar buttons undone to expose the skin of their collarbones.
They were like the brightly colored birds of a tropical rainforest, their voices also chattering noisily. The entire classroom was filled with their unrestrained laughter.
Even without deliberately straining her ears, Yukina could hear what they were talking about.
“Did you hear?”
A girl with long flaxen hair sat on top of a desk, swinging her legs while constantly pressing the buttons of a foldable phone encrusted with pink rhinestones, her tone lazy.
“Apparently the neighboring high school got a transfer student who came back from Egypt. He wears a black uniform and a military cap all day, and keeps saying he once beat up a bloodsucker. His attitude is ridiculously arrogant.”
“Tch, trying to act cool.”
Another female student had already rolled up her legs, taken off her loose socks, and started applying nail polish, her tone full of disdain.
“Bloodsuckers? We’ve bullied plenty of them ourselves. What’s there to brag about?”
“I heard he has a face that looks scared of school violence. I really want to go meet him.”
“Then let’s go. Let him know what real school violence is.”
“Let’s go.”
Do you people even have the will to dominate?!
Yukina really wanted to roast them on the spot, but for now she could only hug her schoolbag tightly and hold it in.
These guys weren’t here to study at all. Every day the only things they did were either bullying someone or being on the way to bully someone.
Apart from these three major groups, there wasn’t much else worth talking about. Everything else was basically just variants of these three types.
Only two people in this class existed as completely special cases.
One was the female protagonist of this work, Reizuki Mashiro.
She was the rebel among the bullied, the only one who dared to fight against “evil.”
Yukina slightly turned her head to observe the seat in the second-to-last row by the window. That was Mashiro’s place.
But at this very moment, that seat was empty. No one was there.
Mashiro… didn’t come to class?
Remembering the sad expression Mashiro had shown when they met at the school gate earlier, Yukina felt a heavy tightness in her chest.
If she never comes to school again… will I still have a chance to properly talk with her one more time?
The uneasy feeling kept spreading through her chest until it felt like she could barely breathe.
Bang!
Suddenly the classroom door was kicked open. The door panel slammed against the wall with a violent crash.
The entire classroom instantly fell silent.
A tall golden-haired figure stood in the center of the doorway, followed by two underlings on her left and right like a pair of silent door gods.
Yukina slightly shrank her body deeper into her seat, fingers clutching the hem of her skirt tightly.
The other existence that completely stood outside the bottom framework—the tip of the pyramid, the bully among bullies—had finally appeared.