Cote | Alternative Universe.

『Chapter 2 - A Bothersome Start』

I was headed towards my class.

After I few minutes of walking, I arrived at the school building. I pushed open the door of Class 1-D, and stepped into the unfamiliar atmosphere of the classroom—except, it was empty. It appeared that I arrived earlier than I intended to.

Despite my efforts, I couldn't help but notice the cameras hidden in the corners. Were such monitoring methods really necessary? My doubts increased exponentially.

"Hmm... What now?" I said out loud as I looked for my seat, which was in the far corner of the room. The last chair, the perfect seat for the protagonist of any story, and the perfect seat for someone like me. I could observe all my classmates without any difficulties. How fortunate.

I wouldn't have said that if I knew who my neighbors were, though.

Noting that I still had time left, I decided to take a look at the nameplates around. After all, those will be my future classmates. It was probably a good idea to have everyone's names in mind before they remove the stickers. Though, as I was checking, a certain question rose up: Do names have an effect on human beings? Do they affect their figure development? Or mental state? Maybe both?

Just like trying to imagine what would the sound of someone be like, I found myself generating an image, a voice, and a personality for every name. How much accurate would I be? Will any guesses turn out to be even remotely close? Curiosity soon filled me, and I was overwhelmed by anticipation.

However, that can wait. Curiosity wasn't the main reason for my action.

In my search, I came across potentially the rarest thing I will ever see—with a 1 to 55,000,000 ratio—the existence of my neighbors.

But that will be a story for another time.

At any rate, everything after that went as typical as one might expect. There were no more surprises until I arrived at a disk labeled "Kouenji Rokusuke," a name that I recognized. He was the sole male heir to the Kouenji conglomerate group. If this school provided everyone a guaranteed successful career after college, I wondered what benefits would he get by enrolling here.

If it did, that is. I was 100% positive that the 100% rate was a trap.

Anyway, finishing with the nameplates there, I decided that it was a good idea to memorize the names of the students from the other classes as well; just in case, it will never hurt.

Thus, I took a look on all the 3 other classes from my year. Although I didn't find what I was looking for, I still came up with a handful of things.

Class 1-C had a foreign name, Yamada Albert, just like us. The only difference is that ours appeared to be more Chinese.

Class 1-B didn't have anything noteworthy, they sounded like a bunch of good, kindhearted people, though. Class 1-A on the other hand, had a very pleasant surprise—the daughter of the Chairman was enrolled there, too. I made a mental note to stay away from her for the time being.

In summary, all the classes had 40 students; 20 boys and 20 girls. Making it 160 students in total. It was easy for me to memorize the information, but whether it was useful or not remains to be seen, however.

Because it didn't seem like anything was going to happen soon, I went towards the upper classes, starting with the 2nd year.

There, I finally found what I was looking for.