Kaihin Sogo High School Student Council Meeting Room.
On either side of the long conference table, the divide was unmistakably clear. On one side sat Tamanawa and his two attendants; they wore neatly pressed suits, sat upright, with laptops and aesthetically formatted PPT printouts laid out before them.
On the other side was the "Delegation" from Sobu High.
Darius sat in the main chair without expression. Iroha sat beside him, trying desperately to look like a legitimate President, though her restless eyes betrayed the mental collapse happening within. Yukino had her headphones on while reading a thick book with a plain black cover. Meanwhile, Yui was quietly tying a ribbon around a slice of black cake under the table, apparently intending to give it as a gift.
The atmosphere was oppressive and strange.
"Okay, let's start." Tamanawa cleared his throat, attempting to reclaim control. He stood and launched into his performance.
"Regarding this Christmas party, our core concept is 'Connection' and 'Innovation.'" He spoke while drawing circles in the air with his finger. "We need to break down barriers, build a new exchange platform, so that every stakeholder can feel its value."
Each time he uttered a word in English, his hand gestures grew increasingly exaggerated.
Darius watched him in silence, without saying a single word. Waiting until Tamanawa had finished speaking, Darius slowly rose to his feet.
He looked neither at the PPT nor at anyone in the room. He simply extended both hands outward. Then, his ten fingers began to move at a speed that dazzled the eyes, crossing and shifting with rapid, precise changes.
These were not mere gestures. These were Hand Seals.
Rin, Pyō, Tō, Sha, Kai, Jin, Retsu, Zai, Zen!
After one fluid sequence of Kuji-kiri seals, the air throughout the entire meeting room seemed to freeze solid. Tamanawa and his two followers behind him gaped at the sight, their brains immediately hanging.
"What you just said." Darius completed his seal, pressed both palms together, and began speaking in a flat tone, "is riddled with logical paradoxes."
"What?" Tamanawa instinctively shot back.
"You pursue 'Synergy,' which in essence is an attempt to create order within a closed system. However, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the total entropy of an isolated system can only increase — it will never decrease."
Darius walked to the blackboard, picked up a marker, and rapidly wrote a formula:
ΔS ≥ 0.
"Your 'Win-Win' model ignores the inevitable energy loss during the conversion process. Within a zero-sum game framework, a Win on one side will necessarily produce a Lose on the other. What you call 'winning all around' is merely transferring the loss to an uncounted third party — the background radiation of this world."
Sweat began to bead on Tamanawa's forehead. He understood none of it. Yet he felt that every word his opponent spoke was laden with cold, irrefutable scientific truth.
"And your 'Consensus' is a dangerous fantasy." Darius turned around, his gaze sharp as a blade. "According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the very act of observation causes the collapse of the wave function. When everyone reaches a 'consensus,' the various possibilities of reality collapse into the single most boring reality possible. This is a murder of the world's potentialities."
"W-we just wanted to throw a party..." One of Tamanawa's followers defended themselves in a small, desperate voice.
"A party is a small-scale heat death phenomenon within the universe's entropy-increasing process." Darius immediately countered. "Our plan, the 'Winter Solstice Ritual,' is an effort to reverse that process."
He pointed to his own draft proposal, covered in scrawled strange symbols.
"The Rune characters we employ are each macroscopic solutions to the Schrödinger Equation. The 'World Tree' is a wormhole model connecting different spacetime continuums. And the 'Survivor Matching Experiment' is a sociological simulation of the Fermi Paradox — within the Dark Forest, any individual who exposes their existence will be annihilated."
Tamanawa's face cycled from red to pale, then to blue. He felt his brain being ground to pulp over and over again beneath an avalanche of incomprehensible concepts.
Synergy... Entropy Increase... Quantum Mechanics... Schrödinger... Wormhole... Dark Forest...
He recognized the words individually, but combined, they formed a lethal poison that attacked his sanity directly.
"Your theoretical model neglects the most crucial chaos variable." Darius walked back to his seat, sat down, and delivered the closing statement of this one-sided slaughter.
"That variable is me."
*THUD!*
Tamanawa's knees gave out. He collapsed back into his chair, gasping for breath, his gaze vacant, his mouth unconsciously repeating on loop: "Synergy... Entropy... Synergy... Entropy..."
His entire worldview, in the span of just ten minutes, had been completely demolished, then reassembled into a pile of meaningless fragments.
"I... I agree..." With the very last of his strength, he forced the words out through gritted teeth. "Follow... just follow your plan..."
Having said that, his eyes rolled back and he genuinely lost consciousness.
"Chairman!"
"Call an ambulance, quickly!"
The people from Kaihin immediately descended into chaos. Darius paid them no mind. He closed his notebook and issued instructions to Iroha.
"Make the announcement. The plan is approved. All departments, begin execution."
Iroha looked at the chaotic meeting room, then at Tamanawa foaming at the mouth, and finally fixed her gaze on Darius, his face perfectly calm.
She took a deep breath, then picked up the phone.
"This is Sobu High Student Council. Regarding the joint activity plan, both parties have reached a consensus."
Her voice was cold and professional, entirely devoid of emotion.
"The 'Winter Solstice Ritual' — is officially underway."