Her expression flickered through a dozen channels in the span of a breath — fury, calculation, humiliation, back to fury — before Sato Ruri ground her molars together and stalked out of the classroom.
She'd made up her mind. She had to meet Yūto Shō face-to-face. No exceptions, no proxies, no trusting a screenshot. She needed to watch him delete that video with her own eyes — confirmed kill, file gone, no hidden copy lurking in some cloud folder waiting to detonate her life later.
On the other end, Yūto Shō tucked his phone away the second their meetup was locked in. He pushed out of the restroom stall, drifted out the school gates with the casual gait of a guy who definitely wasn't about to commit light extortion, and flagged down a taxi to the rendezvous spot.
He climbed out a few blocks from campus — far enough that nobody would catch them on the school security cams — and posted up at the agreed corner.
If he was being honest with himself, this was uncharted territory. First-time villain, no tutorial. His knee bounced. What if she actually called the cops? What if she dialed her parents? Either way, that was social death speedrun, any% — same destination, different route from the one he was already trying to dodge.
This so-called Life Achievement System — was it maybe just a manifestation of some buried gremlin in his subconscious finally taking the wheel, trying to mold him into a full-blown antagonist? Was this kind of straight-up illegal behavior really sanctioned by the rules? Wasn't the system worried about the long arm of the law dropping on him like a Stand attack?
But the dice had already been thrown. Yūto Shō couldn't rewind the tape now. All he could do was play the hand turn by turn and pray he didn't fumble.
Just as his anxiety was peaking, a silhouette resolved at the far end of the sidewalk — graceful, hurried, unmistakable.
She'd clearly been running. Her breath came in quick, uneven pulls, shoulders rising and falling, and the front of her uniform shifted with each inhale — full, soft, impossible to ignore even from twenty meters out. Her chest moved with her breathing in a way that turned every glance into a magnetic pull he had to fight.
Sato Ruri locked onto him from down the block. Her eyes narrowed, embarrassment and resentment burning behind her lashes like two opposing weather fronts about to collide. She marched toward him.
Yūto Shō felt his throat go dry. He was still rehearsing his opening line when his system buzzed a notification.
" Mind your dialogue and your conduct. The closer your behavior aligns with peak scumbag protocol, the higher your evaluation."
His pulse kicked. Right — the scumbag points. The dating-sim villain stat sheet. The system had been pretty clear: being a scumbag was a high-risk career path, and racking up scumbag points was basically how you bought armor for it.
He didn't know the exact conversion rate yet, but the system had no reason to gaslight him about its own ruleset.
He watched her approach, mentally flipping through every smug-bastard antagonist he'd ever seen — every Light Yagami smirk, every Diavolo sneer, every JJK villain monologue — and let a crooked grin slide onto his face. "Sato Ruri. You finally showed."
Sato Ruri, who'd jogged the last hundred meters with her fists balled tight and a whole speech loaded in the chamber, stalled out mid-step. By the time her brain rebooted, the speech had evaporated. She wavered, eyes flicking over him, then snapped through gritted teeth, "What exactly do you want before you'll delete the video?"
"What do you think ?" Yūto Shō let his gaze drag down her, lingering deliberately on her chest, holding the look one beat past polite, then two.
Her glare could've melted a vault door. "I'll pay you. You delete the video. We never speak of this again."
The audacity. She had nothing on him — he was the one holding the camera roll — and she was still trying to negotiate from high ground. No way the system was handing out S-rank for that exchange. He committed. In for a penny, in for the whole villain arc.
He snorted. "Shut up, you little perv."
Sato Ruri's face went blank for a half-second, processor lagging. Then it crashed back online in pure rage. "Who are you calling a pervert?!"
Yūto Shō gave her the most condescending up-and-down he could muster and pulled his phone out, right where she could see the screen. "You're really still running your mouth? Watch this — I'll drop the video in the class group chat right now. Let everyone enjoy the premiere."
He thumbed into the class group, queued up the file, finger hovering over send.
"No!"
Her eyes flew wide. She lunged, both hands clamping onto his wrist, refusing to let go. The thought of that video hitting the group chat — of thirty-some classmates seeing her, of the screenshots that would spawn, of the meme afterlife — short-circuited every shred of composure she had.
"Let go." His voice came out flat. Final-boss flat.
Her face drained to bone-white. The regret hit her in a tidal wave — she shouldn't have come in hot, shouldn't have tried to bargain, shouldn't have done any of this — but her grip only tightened, terrified that the second she released him, the send button would get pressed.
Sato Ruri's dark eyes turned up at him, glossy, pleading. Her stunning face — sharp cheekbones, peach-bitten mouth, the kind of features that won her unsolicited DMs from college boys — twisted into something close to a beg.
She'd folded.
Yūto Shō gave a small, satisfied nod. Sato Ruri was the type to live with her chin perpetually tilted up — class president energy, ice-queen GPA, the whole package. If he didn't establish dominance in this opening move, the rest of the questline would be a nightmare to clear.
A flicker of guilt tried to surface — bullying a girl, in broad daylight, like some entry-level light novel antagonist — but it didn't get to stay long. Because at that exact moment, with her hands clamped on his wrist and her whole body leaned in close, he realized she'd lost track of the distance between them. Her chest was pressed flush against his arm. Full, warm, soft in a way that bypassed every higher brain function he had.
That give-and-spring sensation lit something up behind his sternum he didn't have a name for.
A girl this proud, looking up at him with that expression. Yūto Shō raised his free hand and laid it gently over the back of hers, thumb sliding once across her knuckles. He chuckled low. "Didn't realize your hands were this smooth."
Sato Ruri's slender frame gave a small involuntary shudder. Her expression cycled — disgust, calculation, despair — before locking. She gritted her teeth and pressed in closer, hugging his arm fully against her, forcing a smile that looked physically painful. Her voice came out in a syrupy-sweet register that clearly cost her actual years of her lifespan. "Yūto Shō… can you please delete the video?"
She pressed her chest harder against his arm as she said it, and he could feel the soft curve of her give and reshape against him.
Yūto Shō's jaw tensed. He hadn't expected her to escalate this hard, this fast — to weaponize her own body just to get a file deleted. P ulling out the seduction route. Bold play.
She had reputation around school for a reason — the face, the grades, the figure that survived even a baggy uniform. He'd noticed her before, in the way every guy in their year had noticed her. Idle daydreams during boring lectures. Nothing concrete. But standing here now, with her practically draping herself across him to get her way, he felt the illusion crack right down the middle.
So the goddess wasn't a goddess. Just another girl, with the same calculations and compromises as anyone else — maybe even more of them, hidden behind a face pretty enough to make people forgive the rough edges.
Sato Ruri didn't just rifle through other people's bags without permission. When cornered by a guy she couldn't out-leverage, she'd cave too, exactly like the rest. Even pivot straight to seduction tactics without flinching.
The thoughts flickered through him in a half-second. He looked down at her — at the forced flutter of her lashes, the over-rehearsed pout — and let a satisfied smile spread. "Sato Ruri. I didn't peg you for the flirty type. Your chest is really soft."
A flash of rage detonated behind her eyes and got swallowed almost instantly. She hugged his arm tighter instead, forcing herself through the embarrassment, voice pitched up another half-octave. "Shō-chan… if you delete the video, I can…"
"You can what?" Yūto Shō prompted.
Sato Ruri bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper and produced what she clearly hoped was a coquettish smile. "I can… let you… touch…"
Her face went furnace-red the moment the word left her mouth, like she might actually pop a blood vessel. The mortification was so dense she looked one second from clipping through the pavement and disappearing.
Yūto Shō watched her — the trembling lip, the wet sheen on her lashes, the entire performance — and felt his throat bob involuntarily. He smiled. "Alright. Deleting it now."
He thumbed into his gallery and deleted the video right in front of her, scroll, tap, confirm. Gone.
Sato Ruri froze, then her whole face broke open with relief. She hadn't expected him to fold this easily. And in that exact same instant, her opinion of him plummeted through the basement — a guy who'd lose his entire spine for the suggestion of a feel-up. Absolute NPC behavior. Pathetic.
Yūto Shō smiled at her, gentle as a wolf in a Studio Ghibli sweater. "Ruri-chan. I deleted the video. So can I…"
His eyes dropped to her chest, hot and unblinking.
Sato Ruri rolled her eyes, peeled her hands off him, and skipped two steps back. Her face rearranged itself into wide-eyed innocence at speed. "What are you talking about? I don't understand. I'm starving, I need to get home for dinner."
She pivoted on her heel, already plotting her exit, when Yūto Shō's voice landed soft behind her: "Ruri-chan. Looks like you forgot — I sent you the video too."
Her body locked mid-stride. The blood drained out of her face in real-time. Yes — he'd deleted the file from his gallery. But the chat thread between them hadn't been cleared. The video was still sitting in their DMs, fully playable, one tap away.
The realization settled into her stomach like cold lead, and her face went the gray-white of old newspaper as she slowly, slowly turned back around to face him.