If you had to pick one description for a certain kind of person in Lin's world, it would be the man who only wanted to grow stronger. There are many flavors of ambition — loud ones, quiet ones, and the kind that looks almost monastic. This chapter is a small study of that last type. Lin met him in a way that always makes people uncomfortable: directly, with zero stage and no filters. The man spoke in a way that made growth sound like a religion, not a hobby.
Hikigaya, who had been dragged into the club by social gravity and teacher authority, did not protest much before the club's weird disciplinary system did its thing. Even before the conversation turned to exercises of empathy, the club leader clamped down on his nonsense with physical comedic force: an elbow to the ribs that communicated two ideas at once — obey and introspect. It was absurd, but it worked. Sometimes people needed a concrete reason to pause. Sometimes they needed to be physically reminded they were still here.
The man who wanted to be strong had his own metrics. He measured results in gains, in the ability to endure, in the absence of excuses. When he spoke of changing a stubborn personality or correcting a strange temperament, he framed it as an engineering problem: identify the failure, apply force, check for response. For some that sounded ruthless. For others it sounded efficient. Lin liked efficiency as long as it did not become cruelty. That tension would be a repeating test for the club: how to change people without breaking them.
At the end of the day, Hachiman's stubbornness began to turn into small progress. The elbow remained a memory, and the club had a new case to manage. Lin logged the outcome like a report. The system rewarded small victories, and the world kept turning. The man who only wanted to grow stronger was still there, steely and sincere. He would be hard to change, but that's the whole point. The best work often starts with the hardest subjects.
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