Prologue: The Solitude at the Top
Kaito Sato lived in a world of quiet accolades. His desk was at the front of Class 1-B, his test scores were always posted as the standard, and teachers' praise was a constant, gentle hum in the background of his life. "Look to Sato-kun for the correct answer." "Sato-kun's essay sets the bar." He was popular in that distant, untouchable way—girls sighed over his looks and grades, boys respected him with a layer of unspoken jealousy. Yet, he walked the bustling hallways of Sakuragaoka High School like a ghost, conversations flowing around him but never through him. His world was a perfectly ordered, silent library.
Across the same school, in the same grade, lived Hikari Tanaka. If Kaito's existence was a series of perfect, quiet checkmarks, Hikari's was a bold, messy splash of paint where the rules said there should be none. She slept through lessons she found dull, challenged teachers with inconvenient questions, and her test papers were often decorated with doodles alongside wrong answers. Labeled a "rebellious loner" and a "hopeless case," she was an island nobody tried to visit. While the boys vied for the attention of the popular girls, and the popular girls glanced at Kaito, Hikari was a background fixture, invisible to all.