Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School welcomed its new students with spotless halls, polite staff, and an unspoken promise: only the capable would rise. Beneath that promise lay a system designed to expose weakness and reward cruelty masked as efficiency.
Ryo Kanzaki stepped through the gates without hesitation.
He wore the standard uniform neatly, black hair tied loosely at the nape of his neck, his expression calm and unreadable. To anyone watching, he looked like an ordinary student—quiet, composed, forgettable. That was intentional.
On his father's side, the Kanzaki name was anything but ordinary.
Ryo's father came from a lineage deeply embedded in organized crime—brokers of illegal trade, fixers who made problems disappear, men who understood power not as authority, but as leverage. Ryo had spent his early childhood in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and quiet threats, learning lessons that were never spoken aloud.
Trust no one completely.
Never show your true hand.
Information is worth more than loyalty.
Those lessons stayed with him long after his mother took him away.
His mother's family was clean, warm, and painfully normal by comparison. They lived honest lives, believed in effort and kindness. And among them was her niece—Honami Ichinose.
Ryo was her cousin, though few would ever guess it. Where Honami radiated warmth and sincerity, Ryo carried a distant calm that made people unsure how to approach him. Still, she had always treated him the same, smiling at him as if the shadows around him didn't exist.
"You don't have to carry everything alone," she once said to him.
He never answered. He didn't know how.
Inside the school building, Ryo scanned the placement board.
Class D.
As expected.
Advanced Nurturing High School claimed to judge students fairly, but Ryo knew systems like this always relied on surface-level data. Scores, behavior records, fabricated neutrality. Anyone who understood manipulation could slip through unnoticed.
Class D was perfect.
The classroom buzzed with chatter as he entered. Loud students, nervous ones, confident ones who mistook volume for strength. Ryo chose a seat near the back and leaned slightly into it, posture relaxed, eyes sharp.
He began observing.
Who spoke too much.
Who watched others instead of talking.
Who pretended to be average.
One student stood out—not through presence, but absence. A boy with messy brown hair sat by the window, eyes dull, as if nothing in the room mattered. There was a deliberate emptiness about him that Ryo recognized immediately.
Ayanokōji Kiyotaka.
Dangerous in a quiet way.
Introductions followed soon after the teacher arrived. One by one, students spoke of ambitions and expectations. When Ryo's turn came, he stood calmly.
"Ryo Kanzaki," he said. "No special goals."
It wasn't a lie. Survival had never required goals—only adaptability.
The teacher eyed him suspiciously but moved on. Ryo sat back down, satisfied. He had planted himself firmly in the category of unremarkable.
As the class continued, Ryo felt it—the subtle pressure of the school's system beginning to close in. Points, rankings, hierarchy. This place wasn't meant to nurture students.
It was meant to break them.
Somewhere else in the school, Honami Ichinose was likely smiling, already earning trust, already becoming someone people believed in.
Ryo exhaled quietly.
Two sides of the same family.
Two completely different paths.
And within this school, both paths were about to collide.