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ArabicClassroom of the Elite: Standing Firm in Class A — Chapter 51
Chapter 51: Morishita Ai’s Observation
Following his rather tedious exchange with Horikita Suzune, Kaedehara Tetsu resumed his aimless stroll across the campus. The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy of zelkova trees lining the paved walkway, casting fragmented shadows across his path. As he rounded the thick, gnarled trunk of an ancient camphor tree, a highly unusual scene presented itself.
Lying flat on the shaded lawn, arranged in a posture that bordered on the indecent, was a familiar figure.
Morishita Ai.
She was practically plastered to the earth. Her legs were splayed slightly apart, naturally forcing her hips to arch upward into a prominent curve. The stretch of her prone position had caused the hem of her school uniform blouse to ride up, exposing a delicate sliver of pale, smooth skin at her waistline.
Both arms were extended forward, elbows planted firmly in the grass. One hand maintained a steady grip on a magnifying glass, while the other delicately pinched a minuscule breadcrumb. Her face was buried so close to the dirt that her short blue hair brushed the grass blades, the strands swaying gently with her minute adjustments.
“Morishita Ai,” Tetsu called out, stopping a short distance behind her.
“Hmm… it’s Kaedehara Tetsu…”
Her muffled reply drifted up from the turf. She didn’t bother to shift her weight or turn her head. Her gaze remained entirely imprisoned by the magnified world beneath her lens, treating the miniature landscape as infinitely more valuable than the living, breathing boy standing at her back.
Tetsu closed the distance, crouching down beside her to inspect the subject of her intense scrutiny.
It was nothing spectacular. A simple column of black ants marching in disciplined order, hauling breadcrumbs back to a nearby anthill. For the average high school student, the novelty of the sight would expire in ten seconds flat. Some of the more destructive ones might even stomp on the trail or introduce a lighter to the mix.
Yet, Morishita watched them with an almost religious fascination.
Tetsu studied her profile. Her lips were pushed into a slight pout of absolute concentration. A faint sense of idle amusement surfaced within him. Rather than interrupt her again, he simply sat down on the grass beside her.
From this new vantage point, the peculiar angles of her posture became impossible to ignore.
Initially, his eyes tracked the busy ants. But soon enough, as if dragged by a magnetic pull, his focus began to drift. His gaze traced the line of her supporting arms, sweeping up past the fair skin of her nape, and settled on the taut arch of her back. The uniform fabric clung tightly to her frame, perfectly outlining the girl’s slender, delicate structure.
From there, his eyes wandered lower, following the dip of her waist to the soft, rounded swell of her hips, accentuated heavily by the way she lay. Her uniform skirt had bunched up, revealing a generous stretch of thigh encased in sheer black stockings.
Tetsu’s breathing slowed by a fraction. He had to concede a simple truth: Morishita Ai possessed a physical allure that completely contradicted her eccentric, scatterbrained personality.
Time seemed to stretch into a lazy crawl under the shade of the camphor tree.
“Kaedehara Tetsu.”
Her voice broke the quiet without a hint of warning. She remained flat on her stomach, eyes still glued to the dirt.
“Say, if I pour this bottle of cola onto their doorstep, would they treat it as sweet rain from the heavens and happily carry it inside, or would they view it as a prehistoric flood and collectively flee?”
As she spoke, she blindly fished out a half-empty plastic bottle of cola, giving it a light shake.
Tetsu finally tore his gaze away from the curve of her waist, letting it rest on the carbonated weapon in her hand. This woman’s train of thought always derailed onto the most unpredictable tracks.
“You could try,” Tetsu replied, his tone perfectly neutral, offering neither encouragement nor reprimand. “But my guess is they would simply route around it. A puddle of sticky liquid is likely more of a logistical nightmare for them than a biblical flood.”
“Is that so? They would just go around…” A distinct note of disappointment bled into her flat voice. She lowered the cola bottle back to the grass, officially aborting her grand scientific experiment. “Such unadventurous creatures,” she muttered, returning her full attention to the magnifying glass.
A few more minutes drifted by.
The ants finally secured the last breadcrumb, vanishing into the dark depths of their nest. The lengthy observation session had reached its natural conclusion. Tetsu expected her to sit up, but she didn’t move a muscle. She maintained her prone position, merely lowering the magnifying glass and staring blankly into a random patch of grass, entirely lost in a daydream.
Taking advantage of the silence, Tetsu resumed his unfinished visual appreciation.
“Have you had your fill of staring? Pervert.”
Her voice chimed out again, entirely unprompted. She still refused to look back at him. Her tone was muffled against the ground and as aggressively mundane as someone asking for the time. There was zero anger, zero embarrassment. It was as if the word ‘pervert’ was simply the most accurate, objective noun available in the dictionary to classify his current behavior.
“I am merely appreciating a rare piece of art,” Tetsu countered smoothly, his composure completely unruffled. “A piece boasting perfect lines and a rather peculiar inner—”
“Still a pervert.” Morishita ruthlessly severed his elegant defense with three deadpan words.
Deciding it was finally time to move, she planted her elbows into the dirt, attempting to peel her torso off the lawn. She shifted her weight, trying to draw her knees up to transition from a prone sprawl into a kneeling position.
That was when her biology betrayed her.
Having locked herself in that awkward pose for far too long, the blood flow to her lower extremities had stagnated. The exact second she put weight on her knees to push upward, a violent, electrifying numbness spiked from her ankles, shooting straight up her calves and directly into her brain.
“Hmm…”
A pained, muffled groan escaped her lips as her balance shattered.
The right leg she relied on for support instantly turned to jelly, completely devoid of strength. Her body went into freefall. A short, sharp gasp slipped past her teeth as she toppled backward—straight toward Tetsu.
Tetsu reacted the millisecond he heard her gasp. He leaned his torso back, bracing his arms behind him to avoid being completely flattened by the incoming projectile.
A split second later, a warm, soft weight crashed solidly into his chest.
Thump.
Morishita Ai landed on top of him in a spectacularly compromising tangle of limbs. Her smooth blue hair cascaded down like a silken waterfall, the fragrant strands spilling over his shoulders and brushing against his neck, leaving a faint, teasing tickle in their wake. To stop her face from smashing directly into his collarbone, her hands had instinctively shot out, planting themselves into the grass on either side of his waist.
The result was her entire body pressing flush against his.
Through the thin fabric of their summer uniforms, Tetsu could distinctly feel the soft, heavy fullness of her chest flattening against his torso from the sheer force of gravity.
For a fleeting second, the entire world seemed to hit the mute button.
The only sounds left in the quiet shade were the rustling of the camphor leaves overhead, and the rapid, intertwined rhythm of their breathing and heartbeats, echoing far too closely in the stillness.
Morishita Ai simply lay there, draped over him, absolutely motionless.