One of the reasons for this was their central organizing figure, Kaname. She was the current student council vice president, and had been the vice chairman of the culture festival executive committee the year before. She’d ended up being called off on one minor culture festival-related task after another, and had barely had time to help out her own class.
Additionally, the executive committee members kept coming to her with questions. “Where do you start buying materials?” and “What do we do if we go over budget?” and “What kind of documentation should we have in the nurse’s office?” It wasn’t until after their second term started that she realized this was Tomita’s roundabout way of sabotaging her.
And that wasn’t her only problem. Kaname had wanted to use her free time towards the end of summer break to work on detailed planning for their class project, but as luck would have it, that time ended up being spent on a terrible misadventure in the south seas. Even after that was over, she was so exhausted by the experience that it took her a few days before she could think about the culture festival again.
But now they were well into their second term. She’d handed in her summer homework and was finally ready to focus on culture festival preparations, when suddenly, a ridiculous transfer student had arrived in Class 4, and thrown Kaname’s and Sousuke’s lives into chaos for about two weeks. By the time she could finally catch her breath, the culture festival was just ten days away.
I haven’t made any preparations at all—
Kaname, sweating from every pore and fidgeting, revealed this fact to her homeroom and earned a collective scream from her classmates.
“What?! How can that be?”
“We’ve only got ten days left?!”
“What have you been doing the past month and change?!”
Kaname could do nothing but silently receive her classmates’ rebukes—“I’m disappointed” and “Do you even care?” and “After all that bragging you did...” She did feel quite responsible and remained abashed for some time, but the jeers kept on coming. A more timid girl would probably have started crying and apologizing, but this was Kaname. After reaching the limits of what she could take...
“Shut up!” She turned it all back on them, shouting and kicking over the lectern in front of her.
“Eek!”
“Wah!”
The students in the front row dove out of the way of the falling lectern. Their teacher, Kagurazaka Eri, who’d been watching the proceedings from the corner, also started in shock.
“I’ve been busy, okay?!” she shouted aggressively. “I almost died time and again... and again and again! I didn’t have time to think about the damned culture festival! What the hell right do you have to complain after you put all the burden on me anyway?!”
“Ngh...”
“But the fact is that I haven’t prepared, so we’ve got to do something. At this rate, we’ll have a café that no one wants to visit. What’ll happen then?”
“What will happen then?” the group asked in response to her rhetorical question.
“We’ll end up in the red! And if we’re in the red, we won’t have money for our after party,” she reminded them. “We won’t be able to eat expensive seafood or drink so*rs, bee*, or s*ke!”
“No way!!!” the students responded in unison.
“That’s right!” Kaname continued ruthlessly. “Remember the bliss we sampled last year with the profits earned off our inexplicably popular RPG-like matchmaking maze karaoke haunted house with trading curry? Have you forgotten that glory already?!”
Her words had the entire group feeling nostalgic in an instant.
“Yeah, that was something else...”
“Shiori got black-out drunk and tried to take off her clothes...”
“But it was Ono-D who stripped instead and confessed his love to Chidori on the roof...”
“And Enta dented a parked Benz and then ran off. That was a close call.”
“Who was it who took a dive into the lake in Inokashira Park again?”
There were just two people in the classroom who had no idea what anyone was talking about: the transfer student Sousuke, and the teacher Kagurazaka Eri.
“I don’t fully understand, but an after party sounds a bit like some sort of dangerous cult ritual...” Sousuke muttered.
“Excuse me, everyone? I wish you’d told me... or rather, I wish you wouldn’t talk about any of it with me around...” Eri muttered.
But Kaname ignored them and shouted out loud, “This isn’t just about the after-party! The culture festival executive committee is already cracking down on our use of the home ec room and water fountains, and denying us priority use of materials and ingredients. Tomita of Class 7 is behind this! Doesn’t it make you crazy?!”
“Yeah!” the whole class responded immediately.
“Excellent. Will you work with me, then? We’ll call in seat fillers to help us fight!”
“Seat fillers?”
“If a shop looks empty, customers will assume it’s bad, so they won’t come in. That’s an ironclad rule,” Kaname told them. “So we’ll want to call in our friends from our middle school days and stuff to make it look like it’s well attended. A whole lot of them!”
“Hmm...”
“Each of you has a minimum quota of five people. Got it?!”
“Okay...”
It was a desperate plan, but no one was going to put themselves out there by objecting.
Several days later, at the Class 7 planning meeting...
“Looks like they’re scrambling to get it done last-minute,” a member of the Class 4 recon team told Tomita and the others. “The food is improvised, the decorations are half-assed, and they’re bringing in seat fillers to make it look like there’s demand.”
“And the classroom where they’re running their café will be on the third floor of the south building, away from the other projects.”
“Looks like Class 7 will be this year’s winner. Heh heh heh...” The Class-7 students smiled at each other, looking like executives for a secret evil organization.
“No... we need to do more. We need to steal away the seat fillers they’re calling in, too,” Tomita said.
“Steal them? How?”
“There’s an orientation booth beside the gate. I’ve placed a committee member there who I’ve got on the take. They’ll tell them that Class 4’s display is ‘effectively’ non-functional, and that they should come to Class 7’s café instead.” In other words, they were going to divert the friends and acquaintances that Kaname’s Class 4 were inviting to their own room.
“But won’t the jig be up the minute one of them calls a friend?”
“A guy from the radio club said he bought a jamming device in Akihabara recently. We’ll borrow that.”
“I see... But that’s a pretty dirty trick.”
“So what? If we’re gonna do this, we’ve gotta be thorough about it. You can never underestimate what Class 4 might pull at the last minute,” Tomita said, the eyes behind his round glasses flashing.
The next ten days passed in a flash. The school was bustling with preparations, and the sound of hammers and saws rang throughout the school after classes finished. With their preparations lagging further and further behind, Kaname and her friends ended up having to stay overnight at school the day before. The main movers of Class 4 had been working on café decorations without rest, but the work was slow. Overnight, things would suddenly need epoxy, or a power tool would break down... but when they went to the executive committee to borrow what they needed, they always seemed to be out of glue, or didn’t have any drills to rent, and turned them away. Apparently, Tomita cast a long shadow over the executive committee.
Kaname and the others, now growing furious, forged a plan to steal what they needed from the committee, but it seemed Tomita and his goons had anticipated that—they had people standing watch over the various work areas, making casual theft a no-go.
Left with no other choice, Kaname sent Kazama Shinji, one of their class’s boys, to bike out to a late-night discount store to buy what they needed. But on his way, Shinji found himself accosted by a tyrannical police officer in the Sengawa Precinct. “It was awful! She took one look at me and without any evidence said I looked like a perv, and that I was probably on my way to peep on the women’s bath or steal underwear!” he pleaded tearfully over the phone.
“Well, she’s not that far off the mark...” Kaname muttered in response.
“Not you too, Chidori-san! You can’t just—”
“Oh, sorry, sorry. Don’t worry about the shopping. Just be back by morning, okay?”
“Hey—”
Click. Kaname hung up and rubbed her eyes sleepily. “Right. In that case...” She called up the cell phone of Sousuke, whom she hadn’t seen since evening fell. The EC had some items and tools they absolutely needed, and she was hoping to ask the battlefield veteran to embark on a proper robbery, but...
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help the class,” Sousuke responded coldly. “I have student council preparations. My hands are full. There’s a job I’m staying up all night to do alone.”