The next day, after Yui gave Hikari another flower because she felt the previous one hadn't been enough, he didn't refuse, despite his initial protests.
"Okay... okay, I accept it. You don't have to go to such trouble," he said, and then watched her hurry away.
"How touching. The clumsy knight and the damsel in distress."
Haruna Sato had slid over to his spot. She sat down across from him without being invited.
"First, you dislocate the shoulder of one of the school's biggest bullies by 'tripping.' Then, you solve an impossible equation by 'luck.' You must be the luckiest man... or the unluckiest man in all of Tokyo. Which is it?"
Hikari just drank from his milk carton and looked at her awkwardly, a bit of liquid lingering on his lip.
"Maybe..." He wiped it off with his sleeve.
That threw her off. She expected to see surrender or some clearer reaction from the new guy, but she received only indifference. Haruna wasn't exactly unattractive; in fact, she was the best-looking girl in the institution, and yet she couldn't believe how the foreigner, supposedly clumsy, seemed unaffected by her charms—something that had always worked very well for her.
Still, she wasn't going to give up that easily.
"Oh, really?" Haruna said, leaning slightly forward. "Clumsiness is random, Akihiko-san. Chaos. What you do... has a purpose. It looks efficient. There is a difference."
He held her gaze for a second, and in that instant, Haruna felt something strange. It was like looking at the surface of a churning ocean while simultaneously glimpsing the immovable stillness of its depths.
"I guess sometimes things just... click," Hikari replied, looking away. "Physics is weird, isn't it?"
Haruna just raised an eyebrow. The answer was both an evasion and a statement. He hadn't given her anything, but her intuition kept screaming.
"Be careful, Akihiko-san," she said quietly. "Luck, like some people's patience, tends to run out."
She walked away, leaving him alone with his lunch, his flower, and her warning.
Later, when classes ended and night finally fell, in a room illuminated solely by three monitors, Kenjiro no longer felt fear. He felt an obsessive need to understand. The phantom of the academy had become the god of the machine.
His fingers flew across the keyboard. He wasn't writing code; he was conversing with it. The security barriers of the Ketsueki network weren't walls to him; they were merely suggestions, systems with rules that could be bent to his will. He passed through firewalls and encryption protocols as if they were whispers. His only target was: Hikari Akihiko.
He found him in less than a minute. And instantly, he knew something was wrong.
There was nothing suspicious. That was the problem.
The file was perfect...
"Huh?"
It was immaculate; every form was filled out without a single typo. The transcripts from his previous school in Argentina were flawlessly translated. His profile picture was perfectly centered. There were no staff notes, no attached emails, no messy metadata. It was a sterile digital file.
Human files were messy. They had errors, corrections, the fingerprints of the bureaucrats who had handled them. Not this one. This one looked generated, not compiled. Kenjiro dug deeper, analyzing the binary structure of the file itself: the creation timestamp, the administrator's digital signature. Everything was there. Everything was correct.
Too correct. Like a room so clean you realize no one has ever lived in it.
This isn't a file, he thought as his gaze scanned the underlying lines of code. It's camouflage.
The algorithm didn't just know how to manipulate physics. It also knew how to write its own history. And Kenjiro had just discovered the first page.
And in another place, not far from there, young Hikari was smiling. He knew what having a perfect profile implied: because the gears had to start turning.