Classroom of the Elite: Standing Firm in Class A — Chapter 52

Chapter 52: Returning to the Dorm Together

Kaedehara Tetsu’s chest rose and fell in a slow, measured rhythm, causing Morishita Ai—who was currently sprawled directly on top of him—to bob gently with every breath he took. The faint, sweet scent of her shampoo drifted up from her hair, mingling with the crisp evening air. He didn’t move to push her away. He simply lay there against the grass, letting that soft, warm weight press against his frame.

“Is this the new ‘throwing yourself at me’ tactic you’ve applied right after accusing me of being a pervert?” Tetsu asked, his voice laced with dry amusement. “The execution is certainly direct.”

Morishita Ai maintained her position. Her face remained buried in the fabric of his shoulder, rendering her voice slightly muffled when she finally spoke.

“My foot is asleep. It is completely unable to receive instructions from my brain’s motor cortex. Help me up.”

Her explanation was entirely righteous, completely devoid of the shyness or panic a normal high school girl might exhibit in this compromising position. To her, using a boy as a human mattress seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.

Tetsu reached out. He placed one hand firmly against the curve of her back for support, while his other arm wrapped securely around her waist. Engaging his core, he sat up smoothly from the ground, bringing her limp, unresponsive body up with him in one fluid motion. She felt incredibly light. She leaned softly against his chest, her legs dangling uselessly over the grass. He adjusted her posture, letting her sit steadily against him.

Ai patted her right leg, which was apparently still staging a strike.

Tetsu’s gaze drifted downward, landing on her knee. She hadn’t taken the brunt of the fall earlier—he had absorbed the vast majority of the impact himself—but her knee had still inevitably scraped against the rough, uneven ground. A small, jagged tear had opened up on her right knee, the black synthetic fibers of her stockings split apart. In the center of the tear, a patch of crimson blood was slowly seeping out, staining the surrounding black fabric an even darker shade.

“It seems your knee has decided to go on strike along with your right leg,” Tetsu noted, gesturing toward the wound.

Ai followed his finger, blinking as she looked down. Only then did she seem to register the injury. Instead of wincing, she extended a slender finger and curiously poked at the oozing scrape.

Tetsu watched her bizarre reaction and let out a silent sigh. He stood up, casually brushing the stray grass clippings from his uniform.

“Stay here. Don’t move around.”

He dropped the instruction and turned to leave. Ai didn’t bother asking where he was going or what he planned to do. She simply sat obediently on the grass, continuing her intense, clinical examination of her own bleeding knee.

A few minutes later, Tetsu returned from a nearby convenience store, a small plastic bag rustling in his grip. He crouched down beside her and began extracting his purchases: a bottle of sterile saline, a pack of medical cotton swabs, a small bottle of disinfectant spray, and a few adhesive bandages. He paused, noticing that in his brief absence, Ai had somehow managed to peel off her ruined stockings entirely, leaving her smooth, pale legs completely bare to the evening breeze.

“Straighten your leg.”

She obediently extended her injured leg forward. Tetsu reached out and wrapped his fingers around her slender ankle. He lifted her leg smoothly, resting her calf against his own slightly bent knee to create a stable, convenient angle for treating the wound. He unscrewed the cap of the saline bottle, thoroughly dampened a cotton swab, and began carefully cleaning the dirt and grass clippings away from the broken skin. The sudden, cold touch of the wet cotton made her body tremble slightly, a tiny shiver running up her leg.

Once the wound was clean, he picked up the disinfectant spray.

“This might sting a little. Bear with it.”

“Hiss…”

The moment the cold chemical mist made contact with her raw skin, the sharp, biting pain forced a sudden gasp from her lips. Instinct took over, and she tried to yank her leg back. But Tetsu’s grip was absolute. His hand clamped around her ankle like an iron vice, keeping her entirely immobile until he was finished. Satisfied, he peeled the backing off an appropriately sized adhesive bandage and pressed it firmly over the scrape.

“All done.”

He released his iron grip and gently guided her leg back down to the grass. Then, he gathered the discarded packaging and empty bottles, restoring the quiet campus lawn to its former tranquility.

Ai tested her right leg, moving it back and forth now that the numbness had faded. She stared intently at the fresh bandage on her knee, seemingly lost in deep thought.

“Kaedehara Tetsu.”

Just as he finished tying off the trash bag and prepared to stand up, her voice drifted over to him again.

“My knee won’t move.”

Tetsu froze. He turned his head slowly, looking at her face. Her expression was the absolute picture of deadpan seriousness.

“Although the superficial outer wound has been treated,” she said, pointing a dramatic finger at the bandage, “this impact seems to have caused irreversible damage to some vital internal structure. It is now refusing to work for me.”

To prove her point, she attempted to bend her right leg, stopping exactly halfway and contorting her face into a mask of someone enduring immense, agonizing pain.

“See? It’s actively protesting,” she stated with utter conviction.

Tetsu watched her theatrical performance with a completely expressionless face. A knee that had been moving perfectly fine just ten seconds ago had suddenly suffered catastrophic mechanical failure the moment a bandage was applied.

“So?” he asked, his tone flat, waiting to see what kind of angle she was playing at.

Ai looked right back at him. Her eyes, which usually sparkled with a strange, eccentric curiosity, now held a look of absolute, matter-of-fact logic.

“So, Kaedehara Tetsu, according to the basic principle of ‘whoever causes the problem is responsible for solving it,’as well as the fundamental social axiom that’the strong have a moral obligation to help the weak’…” She paused for dramatic effect before delivering her final verdict. “You have to carry me back to the dorms.”

Tetsu didn’t bother arguing. He simply stood up, turned his back to her, and bent his knees, lowering himself into a slight crouch.

A triumphant, thoroughly satisfied smile bloomed across Ai’s face. Abandoning her crippling injury instantly, she scrambled up from the grass using both hands and feet. Her movements were so fluid and agile that she didn’t resemble a wounded patient in the slightest. She skillfully hopped onto his back, her arms wrapping naturally and securely around his neck.

Tetsu reached his hands back, hooking them firmly under her soft thighs to support her weight, and stood up with steady, effortless grace.

“Let’s go.”

The evening shadows were lengthening across the winding campus paths, the usual flow of pedestrian traffic gradually thinning out as the day came to a close. The dying light of the setting sun stretched their silhouettes across the pavement, merging the two of them into a strange, singular entity gliding over the concrete. Tetsu’s pace was methodical and steady, each step taken at a calm, unhurried tempo that ate up the distance to the dormitories.

Resting on his back, Ai didn’t spout her usual barrage of incessant, weird remarks. She simply rested her chin lightly against his shoulder, quietly absorbing the rhythmic, swaying motion of his walk.

“Kaedehara Tetsu.”

After about five minutes of comfortable silence, her voice murmured right next to his ear.

“Why did you come to this school?”

The question was a sharp departure from her usual whimsical, off-the-wall topics. It was ordinary, direct, and almost excessively mundane.

Tetsu’s footsteps didn’t falter for a fraction of a second.

“A one hundred percent university acceptance and employment rate. A facility that can absolutely guarantee a person’s future. That sort of promise is attractive to anyone, isn’t it?”

“Is that so?” Ai’s tone carried a drawn-out, highly skeptical inflection. “But your eyes don’t look like someone who is satisfied with a simple guaranteed future at all. You look much more like… a wolf that has snuck into a flock of sheep, quietly calculating which one to take a bite out of first.”

Tetsu let out a low, dry chuckle.

“Your metaphors are always so vivid. Perhaps I’m just calculating whether to have pork cutlet rice or ramen for dinner tonight.”

“Ramen, then,” Ai replied without missing a beat. “Pork cutlet rice is far too greasy.”