The True Elites

Chapter 2-1: Vigilante

"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.