Seven unread messages from Ran sat on the glowing screen of his smartphone.
It wasn’t that Tōhō Getsukai didn’t want to reply; it was simply a matter of tactical pacing.
Whatever he typed just didn’t feel quite right.
Sending a casual ‘See you this weekend’came off a bit too cold, while’I’ll come over tomorrow’ leaned a little too heavily into doting territory.
If you feed them too much, the sweetness loses its flavor.
Keep them hanging just a fraction of an inch, and that lingering anticipation transforms into a genuine thrill the next time you meet.
Tōhō Getsukai smiled inwardly.
The absolute basics of taming beautiful girls—mastered to perfection.
Slipping the phone into his pocket, he quickened his pace.
The morning train arrived at the platform with a mechanical hiss, perfectly on schedule.
As the doors slid open, a crisp blast of air-conditioned wind rushed out to greet him.
He stepped into the carriage, the sudden draft catching his long silver hair and sending it fluttering beautifully through the air.
Down the aisle, several exhausted office workers looked up from their briefcases simultaneously.
Then, just as simultaneously, they all looked down.
It wasn’t out of fear.
It was simply that they didn’t dare to look directly at him.
Encountering a creature of such devastating, striking beauty this early in the morning was dangerous; it easily left a man dazed, completely ruining his work efficiency for the rest of the day.
Tōhō found an empty window seat and gracefully sat down, crossing his legs.
The hem of his pleated school skirt slid back just above his knees, revealing a flawless stretch of lower leg wrapped tightly in premium black stockings.
From ankle to knee, the silhouette was excessively, perfectly smooth.
Diagonally opposite him, a female college student pretended to check her makeup while secretly snapping three rapid-fire photos.
Through it all, Tōhō remained completely expressionless, his chin resting lightly on his hand as he stared out the window.
His mind, however, was busy chewing on a completely different problem.
The timeline of this world was utterly toxic.
Over in Beika Town, his memories were rock solid.
He remembered knowing Ran since they were five years old.
He had suffered through Kogoro Mouri’s foul temper round after round, watched Shinichi Kudo grow from a snot-nosed brat into an insufferable deduction geek, and knew for a fact that it had been exactly ten years since Eri Kisaki moved out of the Mouri household.
Yet, a single year in Beika Town could somehow cram in eight hundred distinct murder cases.
And when it came to Sobu High School?
Everyone’s perception was entirely different.
To them, Tōhō Getsukai was a transfer student who arrived in the first year of high school, was currently in his second year, and had been here for a little over a year.
It was a Schrödinger’s timeline.
It simply didn’t collapse unless actively observed.
When he first crossed over, he had desperately tried to untangle the mess using basic logic.
After three grueling days of mapping out dates, he nearly deduced himself into a PhD in abstract philosophy.
Eventually, he just gave up and accepted the truth.
In a world fused with Detective Conan, the timeline was merely a decorative suggestion.
He needed to stop thinking about it.
Thinking too much caused stress, and stress caused hair loss.
He absolutely refused to lose his hair; this shimmering curtain of silver was at least half the foundation of his flawless maiden aesthetic.
…
The front gates of Sobu High School were already a chaotic mess of morning energy.
Students trickled in by the dozens.
Some were chatting loudly about video games, others were yawning into their hands, and a desperate few were squatted right by the gatepost, frantically copying homework.
Tōhō blended into the crowd and walked inside.
Or rather, he tried to blend in.
He couldn’t.
Wherever his black loafers stepped, a distinct, five-meter circle of absolute silence followed.
Two boys walking ahead of him casually glanced over their shoulders.
The one on the right instantly lost all higher brain function and walked face-first into a brick gatepost.
The one on the left panicked, reached out to catch his friend, and ended up tripping over his own shoelaces.
The two of them desperately clung to the brick pillar to keep from eating dirt, their faces flushed red as they shouted in unison, “G-Good morning, Tōhō-san!”
“Morning,” Tōhō replied.
His tone was cool, airy, and entirely indifferent.
He didn’t even break his stride.
He couldn’t afford to.
If he stopped for even a second, it would be over.
There were already twelve other boys lined up along the pathway, practically vibrating with the need to greet him.
This wasn’t an arrogant exaggeration; it was a survival tactic forged in blood and tears over the past year.
If he engaged the first person in conversation for more than thirty seconds, it triggered a catastrophic chain reaction.
Within five minutes, he would be surrounded by an impenetrable wall of hormones.
That exact scenario was why he had been marked tardy last week.
Sobu High School, Class 2-F.
Tōhō pushed open the sliding classroom door just as the preparatory bell for morning reading echoed down the hall.
A second ago, the room had been a riot of noise.
Guys were standing in the aisles arguing about last night’s late-night anime broadcast, girls were chasing each other near the blackboard, and a few exhausted souls were dead asleep on their desks.
Then the door opened.
A sweep of silver hair drifted in, carrying the faint, crisp chill of the morning breeze.
The delicate ribbon of his sailor uniform swayed gently against his collarbone.
His slender, pale fingers rested lightly against the doorframe, while the hem of his pleated skirt settled into place with a soft rustle.
The decibel level of the entire classroom flatlined to zero in exactly 0.3 seconds.
Tōhō walked calmly down the aisle, set his schoolbag on his desk, and took his seat.
The entire sequence was so dead silent that the ticking of the wall clock sounded like a metronome.
It was like this every single day.
He let out a soft, elegant sigh and swept his gaze across the room.
Every single face staring back at him was practically stamped with the words: I’m dying from cuteness.
“Stop staring, everyone,” Tōhō said, his voice smooth and perfectly deadpan.
“I’m a boy.”
Total silence reigned for about two seconds.
Then, the girls’ side of the classroom completely exploded.
“Ahhhh!
Tōhō-kun is emphasizing that he’s a boy again today!”
“This kind of gap moe is just too unfair!
He’s so cute I could cry!”
“Are those socks new?
The material looks so soft, I really want to touch them!”
And the boys’ side?
Selective deafness.
A collective, localized hearing loss.
It wasn’t that they didn’t care about his gender; it was that caring was entirely useless.
After more than a year of intense psychological conditioning, the boys of Class 2-F had successfully completed the three stages of grief: moving from bitter jealousy, to numb acceptance, and finally, to religious faith.
The fact that ‘Tōhō is a boy’was treated exactly like the fact that’the Earth is round.’ They knew it was scientifically true, but it had absolutely zero impact on their daily urge to admire the view.
Tōhō’s expression remained perfectly unchanged as he propped his chin on his hand, his gaze drifting over his classmates.
Despite being at Sobu High for over a year, his actual social circle was incredibly small.
To be precise, he had deliberately engineered it to be small.
Sitting a few rows ahead was his classmate, Eriri.
With her signature blonde twin-tails and bright smile, she was the undisputed idol of the class.
On the surface, she played the role of a cheerful, energetic half-British rich girl perfectly.
Behind the scenes, however, she was the infamous, legendary doujin artist known as Kashiwagi Eri.
The girl constantly dragged him off to the art room, using the flimsy excuse of needing him to ‘model for human anatomy references.’
Then there were the other two.
The third-year upperclassman and undisputed literary genius of the school, Kasumigaoka Utaha, and the legendary, untouchable ice beauty of the Service Club, Yukinoshita Yukino.
He had always maintained a strictly polite, yet heavily barricaded distance from both of them.
The reason was simple: they were notoriously, dangerously difficult to deal with.
Utaha could effortlessly tongue-lash a man into a three-day depressive spiral with a single breath, while Yukino’s mere presence could make you suspect the classroom’s central air conditioning had broken whenever she narrowed her eyes.
If you can’t afford to offend them, the wisest move is to avoid them entirely.
But now…
Tōhō rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Now that he had the System bound to his soul, interacting with these top-tier heroines wasn’t just a risk—it was a goldmine.
He could extract free skills and stat boosts just by building bonds with them.
No matter how he calculated the risk-to-reward ratio, it was an absolute bargain.
The objective of approaching Yukinoshita Yukino and Kasumigaoka Utaha could officially be moved to the active agenda.
Still, he couldn’t rush it.
Fishing required patience.
You had to scatter a little sweet bait in the water first, let the ripples settle, and wait for the fish to bite the hook on their own.
As his mind spun through tactical approaches, a sudden flurry of movement in the front row caught his peripheral vision.
The blonde twin-tails were violently thrashing around.
Eriri was frantically tearing through her schoolbag.
Her movements were erratic and laced with pure panic.
She yanked out textbooks one by one, slammed them onto her desk, and began furiously flipping through the pages.
Her metal pencil case rolled off the edge, nearly crashing to the floor before she snatched it mid-air and resumed her frantic search.
She was looking for her homework.
Tōhō wasn’t surprised in the slightest.
Eriri was the exact type of degenerate who could happily grind out doujin art until 4:00 AM without breaking a sweat, but the moment she had to deal with standard school assignments, it was as if her very soul had been sucked out through her nose.
“Found it!”
Eriri yanked a crumpled worksheet out from the middle of her English textbook, letting out a heavy, dramatic sigh of relief.
She then stood the thick textbook upright and slammed the spine against her desk, trying to align the messy pages inside.
She slammed it just a little too hard.
A loose piece of paper slipped from between the glossy pages.
It was most definitely not homework.
The paper shot out, caught the draft from the open window, and flipped gracefully through the air.
It spun a perfect half-circle, hovering over the aisle, completely exposed face-up.
Tōhō saw it clearly.
Sketched on the paper was a female character wearing an aggressively microscopic amount of clothing.
The pose was incredibly bold, the line art was buttery smooth, and the foundational anatomy was rock solid.
Hmm.
How to put it.
If this masterpiece were displayed in the restricted adult-only section of a Comiket booth, it wouldn’t feel out of place in the slightest.
But floating through the pristine air of a high school classroom?
The sheer inappropriateness of it held enough destructive power to vaporize the entire teaching building.
And right at that exact moment, the paper was drifting lazily down the aisle.
At the far end of that very same aisle, the English teacher was marching into the room, a stack of lesson plans tucked under one arm.
The sharp clack-clack of their leather shoes echoed against the floorboards.
Step by step, the teacher’s trajectory was perfectly aligning to intersect with the falling paper’s landing zone.
Eriri saw it too.
She froze completely.
Every single drop of blood instantly drained from her face, leaving her looking like a freshly powdered ghost.
Her mouth hung open in a silent scream, but her vocal cords completely refused to function.
This wasn’t just a standard social death.
This was a thermonuclear, extinction-level event.
Her deeply guarded secret identity as a degenerate artist was about to be dragged into the light, and a highly risqué doujin sketch was about to be picked up by a faculty member in front of thirty witnesses!
If that paper touched the floor, Eriri Spencer Sawamura’s high school career would officially terminate today.
Tōhō glanced at Eriri’s pale, horrified face.
Then, he looked back at the paper, which was currently spiraling downward in slow motion.
Tsk.
His body moved before his brain even issued the command.
The latent physical enhancement of his Hamon Breathing flared to life, flooding his muscles with a sudden, hyper-kinetic surge of energy.
His arm shot out, crossing half the distance of the aisle in a blur of motion.
Two pale fingers snapped shut like a vice, precisely pinching the very corner of the paper straight out of the air.
Silent.
Flawless.
The English teacher didn’t notice a thing, stepping right over the invisible coordinate point where the paper would have landed, and marched straight up to the podium.
Tōhō smoothly withdrew his arm and lowered his gaze to the captured paper.
Confirmed.
It was absolutely Eriri’s brushwork.
The composition was daring, the complex details were carefully shaded, and even the base sketch for the final coloring phase was already mapped out.
Hmm.
It’s actually drawn incredibly well.
Just…
a severe lack of fabric.
With a casual flick of his wrist, he placed the paper face-down on his own desk, hiding the evidence.
In the front row, Eriri slowly, mechanically turned her head to look back at him.
Her complexion violently shifted from ghost-white to a boiling, radioactive red in the span of about a second and a half.
Her azure blue eyes were blown wide in absolute shock, her lips trembling uncontrollably.
She radiated a suffocating aura of pure despair that practically screamed, ‘I’m already dead, just bury me.’
Tōhō simply looked at her, raised his index finger, and pressed it gently against his soft lips.
“Shh—”
The tips of Eriri’s ears instantly burned crimson.