“I suppose I should start by getting to know him.”
Saori Muto had made up her mind to try to get closer to Keita Kawakami. To do that, she’d decided she would need an ally who could help her bridge that gap, and had settled on Shoko Isotani, ranked fourth in their year.
Saori had several reasons for picking her.
First, Shoko’s family belonged to the Sixth Division.
The Sixth Division oversaw the Kinki region, and while their relationship with Saori’s own faction—the Third Division, which backed both the Kanto and Kinki regions during times of emergency—wasn’t precisely friendly, it wasn’t hostile, either. At the very least, Saori judged that there was little risk of their families clashing behind the scenes.
Second was Shoko’s personality. She knew she was talented, but she wasn’t smug about it. On the contrary, she was the kind of person who pushed herself to improve even further.
Of course, it probably helped that there were three students who’d outperformed her on the entrance exams, so she couldn’t afford to let herself get carried away. Then again, the world was full of people who could barely scrape into ninth place, even with all kinds of advantages propping them up, and still managed to delude themselves into thinking they were the best.
Compared with that, wanting to befriend someone who saw her as a rival and kept striving to improve didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Even someone like Saori, whose proper upbringing had included the art of socialization, would prefer to choose who she dealt with if she had the option. Especially if the alternative was someone who was mentally exhausting just to be around.
The last reason was Shoko’s attitude toward Keita.
While everyone else, Saori included, was unsure how to deal with this anomaly named Keita Kawakami, Shoko had approached him head-on. Some might have said she’d picked a fight with him, but Keita himself seemed to have taken it in stride, which suggested they got along reasonably well.
“Just going up and saying ‘Let’s be friends’ would only make him suspicious.”
It wasn’t like Saori had possessed no interest in him before. Still, Keita would likely just see her as someone who only wanted to get closer to him now that he’d been promoted.
Which is fair…but it’s also not the whole story.
Saori had her pride—both as a proper young lady and as a member of a military family. She could endure a little discomfort. However, she wasn’t nearly mature enough to tolerate being seen as shallow by a boy her own age.
Of course, Shoko wasn’t stupid. She would definitely be suspicious if someone she had never really interacted with suddenly approached her, and she would figure out pretty quickly that Saori was looking for a connection to Keita.
“Which is the whole point, really. She needs to notice.”
If Shoko realized Saori’s true intentions, how would she respond?
Try to gain favor from the Muto family, a major force in the Third Division? Or keep it to herself?
Most people would pick the former. After all, Saori and Keita were classmates anyway.
Things might be a bit awkward at first, but they would be spending three years in the same class, so the idea of them eventually becoming friends didn’t seem like such a long shot.
In that case, whether Shoko helped or not, the end result would be the same. So why not get in early, offer a helping hand, and earn herself a favor from the Mutos? That would be the smart move.
No matter how laid-back she might have seemed, Shoko was still here as a representative of the younger generation of her faction. There was no way she would forget about her family’s interests.
“Maybe the head of the Isotani family will tell Shoko to keep Keita to herself for a while. If that happens, I’ll deal with it then. For now, I should try to approach her. I have the perfect excuse, after all.”
To outsiders, Saori, with her refined looks and pedigree, might have seemed like a pure, sheltered noble girl with no idea of the dirty workings of the world. Even within her own faction, people like Tatsumi Kasahara and Kenjiro Obata treated her that way.
However, the truth couldn’t have been more different. Trained by her father, who used to be chief of staff, Saori was a cunning strategist who was fully aware of her own charms—and not above using herself as a pawn if it served her ends.
“Heh-heh. Not knowing how the game is going to unfold makes it all the more fun.”
Smiling sweetly, the gears began to turn in her sharp mind as she figured out how to deepen her friendship with Shoko Isotani—and, once that was done, how best to approach Keita.
✦ ✦ ✦
While everyone else was agonizing over how to deal with Keita, Shoko Isotani was in a fantastic mood.
“Heh-heh. Mm-hmm. Hmm-hmm…”
She was in such a good mood, in fact, that she’d started humming to herself without even realizing it.
“You seem happy, Shoko.”
“You can tell? How?”
“How could I not?”
Shoko’s childhood friend and assistant, Emi Sakazaki, had just missed out on getting into Class A and was stuck in Class B. While she was glad Shoko wasn’t sulking, she had to admit this was a little annoying.
But who could blame her? After all, Keita had gone out on a real mission, racked up some considerable achievements, and gotten promoted faster than anyone else, even their upperclassmen. And Shoko had been the only one to keep an eye on him (at least in her mind anyway).
Sure, Shoko was jealous it hadn’t been her. But she was the kind of girl who could be genuinely happy for a friend’s success.
And that wasn’t all.
Because most of their classmates had kept their distance from Keita, they barely knew anything about him.
Shoko, however, was different.
She was the only one in Class A who’d actually gotten close to him. Meaning she was also the only one who’d managed to gather intel on Keita Kawakami, the Second Division’s secret weapon and user of a prototype mech built by Mogami Heavy Industries.
Even her normally stern parents had praised her for it. That was how impressive a feat it was.
Now that Keita had proven himself, the other students would definitely start trying to get closer and dig up more info on him. But Keita, while a little careless at times, wasn’t stupid.
He would be wary of anyone who suddenly tried to cozy up to him after his promotion. Sure, maybe he would eventually let his guard down and treat them like friends—after all, they were classmates—but only if they didn’t give him a reason to doubt them.
How long will that take, though? A month? Three? Six? A year, even?
Keita was cautious like that. And Shoko had made sure to tell him—casually, of course—that all their classmates belonged to some faction or another. That included herself, a member of the Sixth Division.
By now, Keita would be operating under the assumption that everyone trying to get close to him was doing so on behalf of their faction.
In other words, anyone else who wanted to become his friend would have to clear a significant hurdle.
But Shoko? All she had to do was keep acting the same as before, and Keita would naturally compare her to the others, who’d only started acting friendly after his promotion.
And when he made that comparison…well, it wasn’t even a contest.
The more attention he gets, the more people will want information on him. But the more people approach him, the more guarded he’ll become. It’s an infinite loop. And when the time comes, I’ll reach out with a lifeline. Whether that lifeline goes to Keita or to someone from another faction…I suppose that depends on Dad’s orders and how the others act.
Since it involved dealings with other factions, her father, the head of the Isotani family, would decide on the general strategy they would take. He couldn’t micromanage everything happening at the academy, though, which meant Shoko had been granted a little decision-making power of her own.
And given that her decisions had led to this prize—having a monopoly on information about Keita—it was unlikely that the Isotani family would second-guess her unless she did something incredibly stupid.
“In other words, I’m the one with all the power right now…! Not that top-ranked Saori Muto! Not second-place Kazunari Fujita! And not Keita in third. But me—Shoko Isotani!”
Wow. Now that’s a look, thought Emi. Please don’t make that face at school, okay? You’ll freak Kawakami out for real.
Shoko was honest and straightforward, as Keita himself would have agreed. Yet she was also a teenage girl with her fair share of ambition and a desire to be recognized. Shoko basked in her sense of triumph, imagining how her classmates would scramble to befriend her, while her aide Emi cringed at her self-satisfied expression.
…Meanwhile, unaware to Shoko, the head of the Isotani family was quietly struggling with the fact that his daughter—who’d never shown so much as the slightest interest in boys before—had been chatting animatedly about a male classmate ever since having entered the military academy.