Hikari wasn't exactly a social butterfly. He had spent so much time analyzing and writing code on the internet that he had left that phase behind years ago. He also forced himself to spend time outdoors to prove to himself that he could live without depending on technology.
After the incident with Kaito's group, Ryota refused to show his face with any excuse other than the flimsy: "I got hurt playing." Although the whole school knew the truth, no one had the nerve to mock him for it. Even so, Hikari managed to introduce himself to the academy with native-level Japanese that impressed more than a few people.
The students expected a clumsy hello, hello or, at best, an awkward silence. Instead, encountering someone who mastered the language took a weight off their shoulders, especially for the school administration, which was watching closely. Still, the reputation of the "clumsy guy" who had taken down one of the strongest students wouldn't go unnoticed.
"A clown. That's just what we needed: a foreign clown..." Kaito said, feet propped up on his desk, wearing an expression of clear annoyance.
The teacher, wearing a serious expression and holding clear disdain for Hikari, stood up and rapped the chalkboard with his ruler.
"Class, pay attention."
Then, he directed his gaze toward Kaito.
"And now, for a little challenge: a bonus problem."
He wrote a complex differential equation—a monstrosity of integrals and variables that had no place in a high school curriculum. It was an act of pandering, an opportunity for one of the elite students to prove their worth.
Kenjiro looked at the equation, and his brain processed it instantly. He saw the solution, but the idea of raising his hand, of making himself visible, triggered a wave of icy panic. He sank deeper into his chair.
Suzuki waited. Seeing that no one moved, his gaze swept the room and landed on the newcomer. A condescending smile formed on his face.
"How about our new friend? Mr. Akihiko, perhaps you'd like to give it a try?"
Hikari looked up, surprised. "Me? Oh, no, I don't... my math is terrible."
"Come on, come on, give it a try," the teacher insisted.
Realizing he couldn't simply refuse, Hikari got up from his seat and walked to the front. He picked up the chalk, holding it awkwardly. For a moment, he almost dropped it, prompting a few snickers from the back. For an instant, he stared at the equation as if it were written in an alien language.
"I don't think I'm capable of such a thing..." he said in a small whisper only the teacher could hear. The man smiled at him and pointed to the board.
Resigned, he simply began.
And it was a disaster. He started on the wrong side, and confused a positive sign for a negative one. Halfway through a step, he seemed to forget a fundamental rule and took an illogical shortcut that should have invalidated the entire process. With every new line, everything looked like a mistake.
But then something strange happened. His first error, the wrong sign, was canceled out by his second error, an incorrect transposition of terms. His illogical shortcut somehow allowed him to skip a redundant intermediate section and land exactly where he needed to be. It was a cascade of failures, a chain reaction of incompetence that, against all laws of logic and probability, was marching inexorably toward the answer.
Finally, he wrote the final result in the corner of the board. And it was correct.
He turned around, covered in chalk dust, wearing an expression of total bewilderment.
"I think... I think that's it. Did I get lucky?"
The class erupted in laughter. It was too absurd. The idiot had stumbled and fallen face-first onto the right answer. "The idiot genius," several thought.
But two people weren't laughing.
Haruna had put down her book. Her eyes were fixed on Hikari. Her intuition, that part of her that read people beyond their masks, screamed at her that what she had just seen was a lie. No one was that lucky. It was such perfect order, so elegantly hidden beneath the appearance of chaos, that it was insulting. She filed it away in her mind under a new label: "Anomaly to watch."
Kenjiro had forgotten to breathe. His brain didn't see luck; it saw the underlying mathematics. The probability of making that exact sequence of seven critical errors that mutually canceled each other out to produce the correct result wasn't just low. It was astronomically infinitesimal. It was the equivalent of a monkey typing at random and writing Don Quixote on its first try. A shiver ran through his body. It wasn't luck. It was an impossibility.
The clumsy boy who had solved the problem as if it were a simple video game system walked back to his seat, paying no attention to the jeers, but a small smile, one that only he could see, tugged at his lips.
Once class was over, Hikari was the last to leave. Waiting for him at the entrance was the same girl he had saved a few hours earlier, holding a plant in her hands.
"This... is for you," she said softly, without lifting her gaze from the floor. "For... for earlier. Thank you."
Hikari blinked twice, mouth agape, and a clumsy but genuine smile spread across his face.
"Oh! No, you don't have to thank me. It was a terrible accident! I almost hurt you too!"
He tried to take the flower, but his fingers got tangled with hers, almost making her drop it. He recovered it at the last second with a jerky movement. The scene was so clumsily believable that Yui couldn't help but smile slightly.
"Even so..." she insisted. "Thank you."
She gave a quick bow and scurried away before he could say anything else.
Hikari stood looking at the flower and, just for an instant, that facade of the "clumsy genius" vanished. A fleeting memory pierced him: the afternoons spent in his mother's garden in the Sierras of Córdoba. It was barely a flash of melancholy, so fast it would have gone unnoticed by anyone watching. He simply pushed it aside and continued on his way.