"Once a seat is purchased," the teacher continued, unfazed by the sea of uncomprehending faces, "the physical owner of that seat—the student assigned to it—becomes a tenant. The tenant is legally obliged by the school's charter to pay a monthly rent of 10,000 SC points to the one who bought the seat."
Someone in the back whimpered. The word "rent" managed to pierce the fog, associating with the "zero points" revelation from minutes prior.
"To cancel this tenancy," the teacher elaborated, her tone devoid of any empathy, "the class or the individual must buy the seat back. However, you cannot simply buy back the cheapest seat first. The system operates on a mandatory Highest-Cost-First retrieval protocol. If you wish to reclaim a seat, you must buy back the most expensive seat purchased by that specific buyer first. For example, since Class A bought nine of our seats, you must buy back their ninth seat—which costs 214,358 points—before you can attempt to buy back their eighth seat.
The logic of the system was brutal and mathematicallysound, Reine thought. By forcing a top-down buy-back order, the school engineered a financial wall. It made it exponentially more expensive for a class to save its own members than to simply attack another class. If Class D ever acquired 100,000 points, basic game theory dictated they shouldn't waste it trying to climb a 214,358-point buy-back wall just to save one of our own. Instead, the class should spend that 100,000 to buy the first seat of Class C, enslaving a student from another class to offset our own losses. It is an incentivized cycle of mutually assured financial destruction.
The teacher did not explain this game theory. She merely presented the cold mechanics.
"You may be wondering who bought you," she said. "The buyers can be an individual person, a two-person joint venture, or a massive syndication acting as a single entity. It appears that Classes A through C have decided to unite, pooling their capital to buy your chairs as a unified class effort. I will not reveal exactly who holds the deed to which seat. If you wish to identify your new landlords, look at the LCD screens embedded in your personal desks. The system has already updated your individual terminals."
She gathered her physical folders from the podium. The sharp sound of paper aligning against wood echoed in the dead silent room.
The class was completely overwhelmed by the barrage of information. They were standing in the wreckage of their own expectations. The sheer volume of abstract variables—SC points, 10% compound interest, mandatory rent, buy-back exponents—sounded like complete nonsense to them. They lacked the foundation to understand the math, and they lacked the emotional stability to process the threat. They were bleeding out, and the teacher was reading them the tax code.
"I have one final piece of information," the teacher said, pausing at the threshold of the door without looking back at them. "Rent is due on the first of every month. The first payment will be on June 1st. If a student cannot pay the 10,000 SC rent because they have a zero balance, the penalty is not a negative balance. The penalty is immediate expulsion from this school."
The word hung in the air, heavy and lethal.
"And remember," she added softly, the door sliding open. "The expulsion of a single student incurs a massive and permanent consequence to the whole Class. Do try to survive until next month."
The teacher stepped into the hallway, followed by a staff member pushing a cart. The door slid shut.
For three seconds, the room remained suspended in frozen silence.
The red glare from the main LCD screen bathed the forty students in the color of a warning light. No one breathed. No one blinked. The brain was desperately trying to stitch the two realities together: *We have zero points. We owe 10,000 points or we are expelled.*
Then, the shock wore off, and the harsh reality of the situation finally sank in.
A boy in the third row, whose terminal screen had just flashed his new status as a tenant, simply vomited onto his desk. The wet, acidic sound broke the seal.
The hyperventilating girl from earlier dropped to her knees, her hands clawing at her uniform collar as if she were being suffocated. She could not form words. She only produced high-pitched, reedy gasps as her lungs demanded oxygen her panicked heart could not distribute.
Others frantically slammed their fingers against their desk terminals, desperately swiping at the screens as if the physical action could delete the 'RENT DUE: 10,000' text burning into their retinas.
"No, no, no, no," a student muttered rapidly, rocking back and forth in his chair, his eyes wide and unseeing. "This is a joke. It's a mistake. The math is wrong. We don't have it. We don't have the points. June 1st. That's next month. I can't be expelled. My parents—I can't be expelled!"
A girl in the front row was crying, her chest heaving in rapid, shallow spasms as she clutched her hair. She stared at the LCD screen of her seat, tears spilling over her cheeks.
"What am I going to tell my family?" a girl choked out between gasps. "My mom... she bragged to everyone back home that I got accepted here. If I get expelled... I can't go back. I can't face them."
A few seats down, another student had his head buried in his hands, rocking back and forth. "My dad is going to kill me. He's actually going to kill me. I'm dead. Ruined!"
There was no coordinated anger this time. The anger had been replaced by the raw, animal terror of inevitability.
They were not fighting each other anymore. The students of class D were drowning in mathematical certainty. The numbers were absolute, and the numbers dictated that over half the class was scheduled for termination.
Reine maintained her clinical silence, observing the destruction of thirty-nine human psychologies with the cool detachment of a forensic analyst.
It might look like a massive overreaction, Reine thought, watching the boy in the back, pointing fingers. It's just a point deduction. It's just a bad month. But they aren't crying over a number on a screen. A normal human being would act the same way. They are reacting to the sudden derailment of their entire lives.
In this society, the academic track is incredibly rigid. The path is narrow and unforgiving. You get into a prestigious high school so you can secure a guaranteed recommendation for a top-tier university. You graduate from that university to secure a lifelong position in a reputable corporation. The margin for error is practically nonexistent. An expulsion on a high school record is a permanent stain. It instantly shuts the door to every elite college in the country. It marks you as a failure before your adult life even begins.
Reine looked at the girl pulling her hair out in the front row.
That girl isn't just having a tantrum over a failed test. She is grieving the death of her future. The immense, crushing weight of her parents' expectations and financial sacrifices just collapsed on top of her. And the boys pointing fingers of who to blame? That is just pure, unfiltered terror. They are aggressively hunting for a scapegoat because admitting that their own laziness destroyed their futures is a truth too heavy to bear.
If they can blame someone else's tardiness or phone usage, they can protect their own egos for just a few more minutes. The panic would no longer be an overreaction anymore. They are staring at social and academic execution.
Then she looked at the seats in the classroom.
This Seat Economy is a literal game of Monopoly, stripped of the dice and plastic tokens. The core mechanic is exactly the same: the true win condition isn't just hoarding cash, but monopolizing the physical board itself. You buy up the space so your opponents are forced to bleed out just for the privilege of existing in it. Once you own the ground they stand on, their bankruptcy isn't a possibility—it's a mathematical certainty.
I wonder how this whole game will play out.
---
After class.
The school grounds were entirely silent, a jarring contrast to the financial slaughter that had just dismantled Class D. A few students from the other classes walked by in the distance, chatting casually in groups.
Reine sat alone on a bench beside a row of vending machines. The late afternoon sun cast orange and yellow colors in the sky. Watching those distant, laughing groups only cemented the reality of her situation: it had been a full month since the class started, and she had completely failed to make a single friend.
She stared at the illuminated display of the drinks in the vending machine. She bought a standard bottle of water.
Then, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel interrupted the quiet. A shadow stretched across the pavement, intersecting with hers and stopping about two paces away.