Chapter 33

Ayanokōji's POV

"What a ridiculous strategy!"

Lelouch placed his hand against the wall to steady himself – he looked like he was in danger of collapsing from laughing too much. Right now, I was standing outside Class E with Sora, Shiro, Lelouch and Light. We had gone around to check how the other classes fared in the midterm exam, which was what lead to this situation.

"Do you not find this funny, Ayanokōji?" Sora asked me.

"I do."

"You don't look very amused."

"I'm just bad at expressing myself." I responded truthfully.

After a minute or so, the laughter echoing through the halls subsided.

"But honestly, who would've thought Class E would be so bold?" Light said with a grin.

"That's gotta be the riskiest thing I've ever seen a group of people do." Sora said, his sly grin even more prominent than usual.

"Mhm. All it would take is one traitor and their entire class would've been expelled." Lelouch said, returning his gaze to the Class E scoresheet.

"It's a good strategy if you're unified though. They probably felt kinship after being mocked so much by the other classes. A common enemy or goal will bring a group together no matter how distant they initially are." I replied.

If someone were to repeatedly mock a group of people, those people would target their hostility towards that person, overriding any grudges that may be held within the group. Such was basic human nature.

"So, someone in Class E found a loophole in the rules, huh?" Sora scanned his eyes through the window at the Class E students.

"Yeah. They found a loophole that even we didn't think of." Lelouch said.

"Well, we didn't really try to find one. Our class is very good at academics, after all." Light replied.

If all of our class was bad at academics, we would've probably spotted this loophole as well. For a Class E student to find it, though...

"The thing that sets the exams in this school apart from exams at normal schools is the way that they decide whether you pass or fail." I analysed stoically.

"Yeah. You don't fail at this school by scoring below a set threshold. You fail by scoring noticeably low relative to your classmates." Sora continued for me.

"Which means that no one will fail if the entire class gets the same score, no matter what that score is." Light added.

"And the easiest score to get is zero. If your whole class scores zero out of one hundred then that makes the class average, and therefore the passing grade, also zero, doesn't it?" Lelouch finished with a laugh.

"But what would've happened if someone like Kōenji didn't play along? Even if he just scored ninety like on the pop-quiz, that would singlehandedly bump the average up to 2.25 and the passing grade up to 1. Every single one of them except for Kōenji would've failed and been expelled." I said.

Your entire class scoring zero, thus causing the passing grade to also become zero. It was a sure-fire way to make everyone pass, but if just one person decided to take the test normally then it would've been disastrous.

"That's why it's risky. How exciting! Class E could provide us with some entertainment after all!" Sora exclaimed, completely overrun with glee.

"Say, who do you think it was that came up with the idea?" Light posed an important question.

"Kōenji probably could've but I don't think he'd be the type of person to help his class out like this." Lelouch responded.

"But Kōenji did play along with the strategy, even though it would risk him facing expulsion." Sora pointed out.

"Apart from Kōenji, though, who in there could've possibly come up with such a wild plan?"

"Horikita?" I guessed.

"Horikita? She's way too serious to ever think of something like this, isn't she?" Lelouch rejected the idea.

"I don't know. On the second day here, I beat her by proposing a game to her wherein the apparent main focus of the game was not actually what should've been focused on – it was the rules, which never stated that the deck was shuffled." Sora disagreed with Lelouch.

"Yeah, so what?"

"Well, if she took anything away from that and also took what I told her two weeks ago seriously, she could've applied the same line of thinking to this exam and realized that the only reason anyone fails the midterms is because the class has a great discrepancy in the range of scores."

Everyone went quiet and began mulling it over. The passing grade was always half of the class average. This meant that, as long as the lowest scoring student scored at least half of the highest scoring student, everybody would be guaranteed to pass.

For people that've been sitting exams at regular schools their whole lives, then, the logical step would be to study in order to raise the grades of the lowest scorers to meet half of the class' average. However, lowering the scores of your top scorers to be level with the lowest scorers achieves the same outcome, but is much easier to pull off.

Having their entire class score zero on every paper might look a bit extreme, but they probably weren't confident that their entire class could successfully manipulate their scores to something like thirty. To do that, you had to be confident that every single answer you write is correct.

"Well, there's one easy way to find out for sure." Lelouch said as he walked over to the door.

He kicked the door open and waltzed into the Class E room, immediately silencing all of the students in there. Everybody turned to stare at him, but he simply shrugged of the gazes and asked one question.

"This is definitely a very interesting strategy. In fact, it wouldn't have worked if even one person had decided not to go along with it. Who was it that came up with such an idea?"

Everyone was silent for a few seconds, but then a gyaru girl near the front of the room spoke up, challenging Lelouch. Karuizawa Kei, I think her name was.

"And why the hell do you think we'd tell you?"

"You're quite the feisty one, aren't you? You'll make a lot of enemies acting like that, you know. I just asked a genuine question, there's no need for such hostility."

Karuizawa's expression faltered slightly, but quickly reformed into the confident, headstrong look from before. Lelouch was certainly right, though. Someone who constantly belittles others and acts aggressively off the bat is bound to become hated by quite a lot of people, especially other girls in Karuizawa's case.

"Are you trying to lecture me?" Karuizawa shot back, her tone laced with venom. "And besides, if I do make any enemies my boyfriend will protect me. Right, Hirata-kun?"

Hirata and Karuizawa were the main attraction as far as couples go at the moment. Normally, us in Class D would be isolated from such information since we aren't heavily involved in any social circles – the only real connection I had outside of my own class was my friendship with Sudō. However, now that I had Kushida under my control, I had free access to a vast well of information about the first-year students.

Lelouch looked away from Karuizawa, apparently disinterested. "So, you're not going to tell me, then?"

"I hope you can understand. We don't want to freely reveal information to other classes at this stage." The reliable Class E representative, Hirata Yōsuke, spoke up on behalf of his classmates.

"Acceptable, for now. Well, class is starting soon so I'd better take my leave, then."

Lelouch re-joined us in the corridor and we began walked back towards our classroom.

"That Karuizawa is quite interesting, isn't she?" Light mused.

"She's dating Hirata, but they don't seem particularly close to me." Sora responded thoughtfully.

"Popular people like Hirata and Karuizawa are like that though. They attract to each other just for status." Lelouch said apathetically, as if anything to do with romance didn't interest him at all.

"Oh yeah, you know a lot about that don't you?" Light teased him. Lelouch didn't give a reaction, though.

As we silently ascended the stairs, a thought popped into my head.

"Say, we're meant to be gaining up to a hundred class points from this exam, right? Nobody from any of the classes failed, so does that mean every class is gaining one hundred class points?" I asked, curious as to what my classmates think.

"The class points given out right now are most likely just to reward all the students with a bonus 10,000 private points to their allowance for passing the midterms, as opposed to a method to close the gap to the next class." Our representative gave us his interpretation.

Sora nodded in response. "Yeah. In this 'contest,' we were all competing against the school. In the future, though, I bet there'll be some kind of contest where we will compete directly against other classes. It'll probably be the main way that classes get promoted."

Competing against the other classes, huh? I wondered what kind of trials that could entail. At the very least, it would be something interesting