:"A system built by minds can still be broken by a single thought."
---
The digital announcement echoed through the halls of Touzen Academy like a warning bell masked in elegance.
"Attention, Class 1-A. Effective immediately, a special assessment will be conducted under the title: The Anomaly Hunt. Further instructions will be sent directly to your personal devices. You have one week."
The students stirred. Whispers crawled between desks. Suspicion bloomed faster than understanding. The system had never conducted an event like this.
At his desk, Kuroyami Rei blinked slowly, eyes fixed on his tablet screen as the rules unfolded.
---
System Message:
Objective: Discover and vote out the Anomaly — a student secretly flagged as a manipulative threat to the academy.
Rules:
Each student will receive a private dossier containing behavioral data of five classmates.
You may share, trade, or hide your data.
At the end of the week, a vote will be held.
If the correct Anomaly is expelled: All remaining students gain 1,000 points.
If the wrong person is expelled: Four students will be randomly purged from Class 2-B
Participation is mandatory.
---
Rei's face was unreadable.
His eyes scanned the fine print again, and then once more — not to understand the rules, but to see through them.
"It's not a test," he thought, "It's an execution. They're disguising it as justice, but this is a firing squad built by code."
He immediately knew. He was the target. The Anomaly. The data points, the pattern of digital surveillance, the subtle flags he'd left untouched — they were converging now.
But no one else saw it. And that was the game.
---
Scene: After Class, Common Room
Riku: "This is insane. We're supposed to just vote someone out? What if they're innocent?"
Yumi: "If we get it wrong, four of us are expelled. The stakes are higher than ever."
Sena: "It's psychological roulette. You don't need to be guilty to be feared."
Rei (smiling softly): "Maybe the system just wants us to prove we're good at spotting danger..."
---
Internal Monologue (Rei):
"If I speak too little, they'll call me passive. Too much, they'll call me deflective. Stay warm. Stay forgettable."
He offered gentle nods, listened attentively to theories, and even pretended to be mildly afraid. He was perfectly neutral — yet watching everything.
That night, Rei reviewed his own dossier. Blank. Empty. Not because he was clean, but because someone had wiped it deliberately — to bait suspicion through silence.
"A missing shadow stands out more than a tall one," he murmured to himself.
---
Rei's Counterplay Begins:
He plants an idea with Riku: "What if the anomaly is one of the overly helpful students?"
He privately trades a fake dossier with Sena that suggests Yumi has suspicious past behavior.
He inserts deliberate logic errors in conversations so that the students begin questioning the system itself, not just each other.
Every move makes the class hesitate. No clear target emerges.
By Day 4, the system is forced to send a second message:
"No consensus found. Anomaly vote deadline extended by 48 hours."
Rei watches the class split into five micro-factions, each suspecting someone different.
He smiles, not from joy — but from control.
"They built a machine to hunt me, but I infected the gears."
In the dim glow of the empty classroom, Rei sits alone, watching the screen flicker with live data streams.
He's inside the system's algorithm now — rewriting predictions.