Buzz… Buzz…
The low hum of idle chatter rang through the classroom like static beneath the skin. Pages flipped. Desks groaned under shifting weight. Someone in the front row stifled a yawn, while a burst of laughter shot up from the far corner like a firework misfired indoors.
But at the very back—where light dared not reach and the air hung just a little heavier—three boys sat in silence.
Or rather, something that looked like silence.A tension. A stillness sharpened by things unsaid.
Mugiwara Shotaro leaned back in his chair, his body a portrait of casual detachment. One leg propped lazily, arms folded behind his head. Crimson eyes half-lidded, staring blankly at the ceiling above as dust drifted across beams of dying morning light.
From the corner of his mouth, he exhaled.
"…That Amaya chick seems less obnoxious these days," Hiroki muttered, fingers drumming restlessly on his desk. His blue eyes flicked toward their leader, flickering with curiosity he refused to admit out loud.
Next to him, Zenchichi "Bird" Gojo gave a lazy grin.
"Yeah, Aniki," Bird whispered, eyes shining beneath his white bangs. "What'd you tell her?"
A faint twitch of annoyance flickered in Shotaro's expression. His eyes slid over to them—cool, unreadable.
"Why would you want to know?"
"Because we want to," Bird replied without hesitation, lifting his chin like a cat begging for a slap. "Come on, man. Share the secret. Give us something we can use to fix the crazy ones."
"…Tch."
Shotaro didn't sigh. He didn't laugh.He existed, calmly, in a moment where most would have cracked a joke.
And then he spoke.
"I told her something simple," he said. "Something I didn't expect her to understand."
Hiroki leaned in slightly. Bird stilled.
"Everyone's broken," Shotaro said flatly. "Everyone's either been broken… is being broken… or will be."
The words dropped like pebbles in a bottomless well.
"And everyone's pain is different. Different shape. Different voice. But pain? That part's universal."
His voice lowered. Not softer—heavier.
"Suffering from it, though? That's a choice."
No punchline. No laugh track. Just three boys and a world too large to care about any of them.
"We're all fucked up in a world that doesn't give a shit about us," Shotaro continued, eyes drifting to the pale sunlight just outside the smeared window.
"…And that's okay."
Silence.
It wasn't awkward.It wasn't tense.It just was—the kind of quiet that exists only in places where something real had been said.
And then, after a long pause:
"Blaming the world is pointless," he said. "It's not listening."
The sounds of the classroom carried on. A pencil snapped. A giggle erupted two seats away. Someone coughed and whispered a secret into the next desk over.
And for a moment…
They were still.
The classroom—their world in miniature—remained steeped in that rare, silent rhythm. In the back corner, three boys sat like carved idols of delinquent wisdom, untouched by time, by boredom, or by the chattering cadence of their classmates. A sanctuary of stillness in the constant current of adolescent chaos.
The air buzzed faintly with fluorescent light. Chalk dust hung suspended in the slats of morning sun, filtering through the window blinds in golden stripes. Faint scuff marks covered the linoleum floor, tracing the aimless wanderings of countless restless shoes. The board at the front still bore yesterday's formulas, untouched, as if preserved like sacred relics of an ancient struggle between numbers and sanity.
Then—like a blade drawn in ritual silence—the door clicked open.
Heels.
Sharp. Confident. Rhythmic.
The kind of steps that didn't ask for attention—they commanded it.
Standing at the head of the class, with the kind of poise that rewrote gravity itself, was Ms. Sayaka Korusawa.
The mathematics queen of Toyotaro Miracle High.
No—she wasn't just a teacher.
She was the teacher.
A walking legend who had once made a jock cry without raising her voice. The woman who could explain Euler's identity with the cadence of a love confession—and simultaneously give you a crisis about your GPA and your masculinity.
Her presence was impossible to ignore.
Tall. Radiant. Sculpted like a goddess who had wandered into a classroom by mistake and decided to stay out of boredom. Her wavy black hair spilled like ink down her back, each lock smooth and intentional, cascading just past the delicate inward curve of her spine.
Her skin was flawless—smooth as porcelain yet warm in tone, a complexion that suggested expensive skincare and zero tolerance for nonsense.
Those eyes.
Deep brown. Almond-shaped. Laced with both elegance and something sharper—an intelligence so surgical it could cut through excuses like a scalpel through silk. When they swept across the room, the noise died. Naturally. Inevitably. As though the air itself stiffened beneath her gaze.
Her lips moved—painted in a whisper of red, the kind of color that didn't shout but lingered in the mind, soft and dangerous. Every word she spoke carried a weight, like each syllable had been chosen not just for meaning but for effect.
And her outfit—
A white blouse, crisp and fitted, the fabric drawing smooth, clean lines across her frame. The top button was left undone—not carelessly, but calculatedly—just enough to reveal the faintest curve of cleavage. A tease wrapped in authority. Beneath that, a high-waisted pencil skirt in deep black, hugging her hips with the cruel precision of a tailored suit, ending just above the knee.
And of course—her glasses.
Thin-rimmed, black glasses perched elegantly at the bridge of her nose. They didn't make her look softer.
They made her sharper.
She was the kind of woman who could ask you to solve a calculus problem and have you questioning your life decisions before the first derivative.
A MILF?More than that.
A storm in silk.A predator in high heels.A woman who could fail you on a test and haunt your dreams in the same hour.
And now, she stood at the front of the room, clipboard in hand, her expression unreadable beneath her perfect features.
Then, her voice—smooth, clear, and clipped with the kind of authority you don't argue with—filled the room.
"Alright, class. Settle down."
Every conversation died on command.
She looked over the students, her gaze briefly touching the back corner—and Shotaro, who, for once, didn't look away.
"We have a new student joining us today," she continued, her tone cool and efficient. "Her car broke down, which is why she's late."
A pause. A turn of her head.
"But I assure you, she's still more punctual than most of you."
A few nervous chuckles. No one dared test her more.
And with that, the air shifted again.
The static hum of classroom tension thickened, like pressure before a thunderstorm. Every student turned instinctively toward the door—some with curiosity, some with indifference, and a few with the quiet, hungry anticipation that only comes when something entirely new is about to walk in.
Then—she did.
A girl stepped into the room, back straight but eyes lowered in quiet restraint. Her features weren't Japanese—not in the slightest. Hiroki's gaze flicked over her face, caught off-guard by its difference. Her skin held the sun-warmed tone of distant deserts, and her bone structure bore that slight, unmistakable sharpness—an angular elegance he couldn't quite place.
He blinked once, then again, and whispered beneath his breath.
"Arabic… maybe?"
She moved with purpose, but also with the kind of haste that said she hated being late. Her steps were quick, light, barely audible despite the silence she walked into.
Her head was covered by a hijab—black, smooth, wrapping cleanly around her head and neck, worn without flair or decoration. But from beneath the cloth, a few stray strands of flaxen blonde hair had slipped loose, catching the classroom light like pale silk. Whether she noticed or not was unclear—her expression didn't change. It was as if she hadn't even registered the eyes locked on her from every corner.
Then there were her eyes.
Flaxen.
Not brown, not gold—flaxen. A color that didn't seem to belong to skin or hair, but to firelight reflected in glass. They were alert, observant even in their shyness, flicking from desk to desk like scanning for escape routes rather than people.
She wore the standard Toyotaro Miracle High uniform: maroon blazer neatly buttoned, green tie tied perfectly at the collar, crisp white shirt underneath. Her grey skirt reached regulation length—but unlike most students, she wore black leggings underneath, opaque and cleanly fitted. Modesty layered over formality. Religion, maybe. Personal code, more likely.
Her shoes were polished. Her nails unpainted. Her presence quiet—but not forgettable.
Something was… wrong.
Not with her. Not visibly.
Shotaro, from the back of the classroom, sat up straighter.
It wasn't the way she walked or how she looked—it was what radiated from her.
There was something in the air around her. A subtle pressure. A current of something unseen brushing against the skin like static before a lightning strike.
Mantra, he thought.
But not just mantra.
It wasn't an energy that flowed into her from some divine or hidden source. That would've been expected—normal for those attuned. This… this was the opposite.
What she exuded was residue. Remnants.
A tantra.
A tantric echo—the lingering aftertaste of spiritual power. A subconscious emission of force, like mist rising from a blade just unsheathed.
Shotaro's eyes narrowed.
This girl was emitting mantra residue just by existing in the room.
Bird felt it too.
Zenchichi Gojo's posture stiffened subtly, the grin sliding off his face as his hand tapped instinctively against his leg—a rhythm break. An old habit when something felt off.
Hiroki frowned. Not visibly—but his fingers had stopped spinning his pen.
They all felt it.
A soft, cold pulse.
The sensation of walking into a temple long buried underground—where the incense had stopped burning centuries ago, but the gods still remembered the scent.
She stood beside the teacher now, head slightly bowed, flaxen eyes never quite meeting anyone's.
And in that heavy silence, as the class collectively recalibrated itself to her presence—like a constellation silently shifting overhead, suddenly revealing a new star—
she bowed.
The motion was subtle, brief, too mechanical to be natural. Her body understood the etiquette; her soul did not. It was a gesture made by someone who had watched others do it on screens or in passing, but had never grown into it. The kind of bow you perform when you know you don't quite belong, but you do it anyway—out of respect, out of survival.
Then her voice followed, soft but polished. Her Japanese was smooth, practiced, spoken with the deliberate clarity of someone who had been corrected often.
"Good morning," she said.
It wasn't shy.
It wasn't bold.
It was the sound of someone walking barefoot through a room full of knives—quiet and calculated, aware of every step.
"My name is Fatiba Darvish."
Her gaze rose slowly to scan the room—not with defiance, but a tempered curiosity. As if measuring the temperature of the people she would have to coexist with, even if she never quite blended among them.
"My family settled from Iran during the Second World War."
She paused, giving the sentence time to settle—perhaps anticipating the questions it never quite answered.
"We own the Darvish Diamond Company."
A few heads turned at that. Some eyebrows lifted. In a place like Toyotaro Miracle High, wealth wasn't uncommon—but it still carried a weight. Especially when wrapped in mystery.
Fatiba's tone didn't flaunt it. She spoke as if it were just a fact she had learned to disclose early—like gender, or blood type, or allergy to gluten.
"I hope we get along… for the following years."
She trailed off.
Her words lingered just a breath too long in the silence, like perfume in a hallway.
Her eyes darted quickly, nervously—left, right—never locking on anyone for more than a second.
A pause.
Then—
A girl near the front raised her chin, expression painted with polite indifference. Her voice cut the air with a lacquered sharpness.
"Why are you two months late to class?"
The question was simple. The tone wasn't.
Fatiba's lips parted.
A beat. A breath. Then—
"Um… I… I was in London," she replied, her voice fraying at the edges. "I was enrolled in a school there."
She hesitated, her eyes flicking toward the floor. Her voice softened.
"But I decided to transfer… and come study here instead."
She bowed her head slightly again, shrinking into the fabric of her blazer like someone trying to fold into invisibility.
Shotaro Mugiwara didn't speak.
Didn't blink.
But his crimson eyes narrowed just slightly, tracking every flicker in her expression, every staggered breath, every gap between what she said and what she meant.
He leaned back in his seat.
Mugiwara Shotaro was many things.A punk. A delinquent. A tactical mind hidden beneath a mess of silver hair. A compulsive neat freak with a love for perfect omelets and chaos in equal measure.But above all, he was a reader of people—so deeply and instinctively attuned to behavior that it bordered on inhuman.
He didn't hear lies.He felt fractures.
"She did something in London," he thought, eyes narrowing further. "And now she's here."
Not as a choice.
As a consequence.
And in that moment, while the class still debated whether to ignore or dissect the girl wrapped in silence and scarf—
Shotaro had already filed her under a different category entirely.
Not new student.
But unsolved variable.
The silence fractured.
Barely a breath after Fatiba stepped away from the front of the room, a ripple passed through the classroom—a whisper becoming a murmur, a murmur blooming into a low, contagious buzz.
It started in the middle row.
Two girls leaned in toward one another, hands cupped over their mouths like conspirators in a royal court. Their eyes flicked toward Fatiba, narrowed in curiosity wrapped in skepticism.
"Did she say diamond company?"
"From London? Is she royalty or something?"
"She's late. That's never a good sign."
Behind them, a boy in thick glasses nudged his friend. "That accent—did you hear it? Her Japanese is too perfect. Like… practiced. Weird."
And then, more softly, from the left side of the room:
"She's probably lying about everything."
"She has money. You can smell it on her."
"Headscarf girl? She's got trauma, for sure."
The whispers slid through the classroom like threads of smoke—thin, invasive, impossible to ignore. No one said anything too loud. No one said anything to her face. But the looks—those came easily. Quick glances, raised eyebrows, side eyes masked behind yawns and textbook pages.
Even those who didn't care… started to care.
She was different.
Not loud. Not flashy. But she carried the kind of presence that made people want to assign meaning to her silence. Humans hated a blank page.
And Fatiba Darvish was a page no one could read yet.
Shotaro heard it all.
Not word for word—but through tone, body language, breath patterns. He didn't need to listen.
He simply knew.
The gossip evolved.
As whispers spread like rot through old wood, the tone began to shift. What began as curiosity curdled into something meaner—something uglier.
It started, as it often does, with a laugh.
A boy in the second row leaned over to his friend, cupping his mouth to hide a grin that was far too wide.
"Yo, do you think she came here to blow up our math scores?"
The laughter came sharp—suppressed but cutting. A wheeze through a smirk. A nudge. A whispered joke passed under desks like a smuggled weapon.
Another voice joined in. Lower, closer to venom than humor.
"Bet she's hiding an AK in that bag. What do you think's under there? A bomb or baldness?"
A few boys bit their knuckles, shoulders shaking with laughter. One girl near the back snorted in surprise, then immediately looked away, pretending not to have heard.
Fatiba didn't move. She didn't look at them.
But Shotaro, from the back of the classroom, saw everything.
He saw the way her shoulders tensed—only slightly. The way her hands, so perfectly composed when she introduced herself, now gripped the edge of her desk like it was the only anchor she had. Her breath had shortened by a fraction, just enough for him to feel it.
She wasn't crying.
She was locking everything down.
He understood that look. That silence. That unblinking forward stare that screamed, "Don't give them the satisfaction."
And it pissed him off.
Shotaro had made a lot of jokes in his life—vulgar, tasteless, even cruel ones. He was no saint. But there was a line he never crossed: you stop when it hurts.
The others? They didn't stop. Because they didn't care.
So he coughed—just once—into his fist.
The sound cut through the room sharper than it had any right to.
Then he stood.
Every head turned like it had been yanked by string.
Because they knew who the hell he was.
Mugiwara Shotaro.
The boy with the silver hair and red eyes who dragged the Red-Eyed Ronins from the red light area of Mushashi no yamato. The one who beat Purple Lightning and took control in the Battle of Control—A gang war infamouse in the city's mythos.
Every banner in the alleyways bore his gang's sigil now. The Ronins weren't just delinquents anymore. They were folklore.
And Shotaro?
He was the Big Guy around- not even a worm comes out on the surface during rain without his aproval.
They'd seen him knock a senior unconscious with a notebook.
They'd seen him force the principal's daughter—the infamous sadist to be in burning humiliation.
So when Shotaro walked to the front of the class?
They shut up.
No one dared to breathe wrong.
He didn't say a word.
He just reached into his pocket, pulled out a thick black marker—uncapped it with his teeth—and turned toward the whiteboard.
But he didn't write on it.
He turned it on himself.
With the same surgical calm he used in combat, he drew a massive, ridiculous mustache over his upper lip.
Then he added jagged eyebrows—cartoonish and lopsided.
Then fangs on his chin. A spiral on his forehead. A monocle. Cross-eyes. A massive wart. A unibrow. A "kick me" sign stuck to his back.
Every line was done with perfect deadpan focus.
The class began to snicker. One by one, students started elbowing each other and pointing. The air shifted. Attention peeled away from Fatiba like dust sliding off glass.
Someone whispered, "What the hell is he doing?"
Another laughed out loud.
Shotaro finished with a flourish, then spun around like a bad circus act.
"Ladies," he said, arms out. "Gentlemen. I present to you: Modern Art."
The room exploded.
Laughter—actual, honest-to-god, belly laughter—tore through the classroom like a broken dam. People laughed so hard they wheezed. A few clutched their stomachs. One girl nearly fell out of her chair.
Even the math teacher, Ms. Sayaka Korusawa, lifted an eyebrow from behind her glasses and muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, "Good grief."
But none of it was what mattered.
Because in the corner of his eye—just for a second—Shotaro saw her.
Fatiba.
Still seated. Still silent.
But her knuckles had relaxed. Her fingers unfurled. Her eyes had softened. Just slightly.
She looked at him.
And though she didn't smile, didn't speak—
he saw the shift.
She saw what he'd done.
That he had stepped into the fire. That he had dragged the spotlight off her and set it on himself. That he had allowed himself to become a clown so she wouldn't have to be the scapegoat.
He made himself the fool, so she could be the human.
Shotaro bowed deeply at the front, his face still scribbled like a fever dream, and said:
"Now that we've all laughed… how about we shut the hell up and go back to learning something?"
No one argued.
Because when a king tells his court to laugh…They laugh.
But when he tells them to be silent—They listen.
And in that moment, standing at the front of a fluorescent-lit classroom with crude black scribbles scrawled across his own face like graffiti on porcelain—
Shotaro Mugiwara was completely at ease.
He didn't care that his silver hair now stuck awkwardly to marker ink.He didn't care that someone in the back was struggling not to snort again.He didn't care that he looked like a vandalized statue from a forgotten temple.
Because Shotaro Mugiwara had never once cared about pride.
Not in the way most people did. Not the brittle, hollow pride that so many clung to like armor made of cracked porcelain—the kind that shattered the moment it was scratched.
To Shotaro, shame was a currency for the weak.A leash for the ego.A cage built by people who feared being laughed at more than being wrong.
What did he have to fear from shame?
He could throw any one of these people through the nearest wall without lifting more than a hand. He could dismantle the bones of the boys who whispered behind backs. He could humiliate the girls who wore cruelty like perfume.
If he wanted, he could ignite the classroom like a spark in a paper house.
But he didn't.
Because power, real power, wasn't about dominance.
It was about freedom.
And in that, Shotaro had evolved beyond pride and shame. He wore absurdity like a cloak—not because he had to…
…but because he could.
He could look like a clown, act like a fool, draw a dick on his own forehead with permanent ink—because he was not fragile. His identity did not fracture under laughter. His worth was not up for negotiation just because someone pointed and giggled.
To him, humiliation was nothing but camouflage.
And humility—not weakness, but voluntary descent—was a blade more deadly than arrogance could ever hope to be.
Pride told you to stand above others.Humility taught you to kneel, so others could stand beside you.Shotaro had mastered both—and used them like twin fangs.
Because sometimes, true strength wasn't in standing tall…
But in knowing when to lower yourself for someone else's dignity—
There lay a quiet kind of strength.
He didn't always have the right words. He wasn't always gentle, or eloquent, or perfectly moral. But when a girl sat on foreign soil, under foreign eyes, her voice swallowed by the heat of whispered mockery and the weight of a history not hers—
Mugiwara Shotaro moved.
Because he had long since evolved beyond the small theater of shame and pride.
Those were tools for the weak, or chains for the proud. He had no use for either. He navigated a deeper current—a river carved by conviction, compassion, and controlled chaos. When others watched for the spotlight, he looked for the shadows behind it.
He was a fool when the world needed a fool.
An seeker when the world wanted revelations.
A shield when it desired protection.
And now—covered in ink, his face a child's coloring book desecrated by sincerity—he took his seat like a king returning to his throne.
The altruistic clown sat among his court of brittle stone.
Then—
Scene cut.
The tone changed with the ring of the bell. Laughter faded. Notebooks closed. The lights flickered slightly overhead as the class filtered into the sterile chill of the second period: Science.
The door opened.
And like an eclipse swallowing sunlight, she entered.
Professor Maya Hibiko.
Lead Science Faculty at Toyotaro Miracle High.
Her presence didn't arrive with fanfare or force—it entered like a slow ripple through still water. Calm. Absolute. Quietly unstoppable.
She was tall—statuesque in posture but fluid in motion. Her skin was a smooth, dusky bronze, with warm undertones that caught the light like a polished antique sculpture. She moved with the calculated precision of someone whose every step had once been measured against silence, and who had won.
Her hair was a glossy sheet of ink-black, cut in a clean, jaw-length bob that framed her angular cheekbones with the elegance of a masterstroke. Not a strand was out of place. She wore no accessories—no earrings, no necklace. Just a single black digital wristwatch, resting perfectly against the bone of her slender wrist.
Her eyes—
Amber.
Not light brown. Not hazel. Amber. Rich, unsettling, and unnaturally still. Eyes that seemed to know when you were bluffing, lying, or breaking inside. The kind of eyes that had once examined the decaying structure of galaxies and the trembling souls of students with the same quiet intensity.
She wore a fitted lab coat, sleeves rolled precisely to mid-forearm, revealing subtle inked script tattooed along the inner side of her left arm—Sanskrit, maybe, or something older. Underneath, a charcoal-grey blouse tucked neatly into jet-black trousers. No skirt. No heels. Just matte-black boots, polished enough to reflect faces.
Professor Maya Hibiko wasn't just a scientist.
She was the result of four continents worth of education, hardship, exile, and self-forged identity.
Born of Indian heritage. Raised in the frost-bitten academic caverns of Russia. Tempered by the clinical rigor of the American Ivy League. And now—here. In Japan. The fortress of tradition.
She didn't belong.
So she mastered the system.
Twelve PhDs, read her record. None of them honorary. All earned. Her specialty? "Multiversal biological coherence and particle logic interaction in closed-loop physics." Whatever that meant—it frightened the faculty just enough to leave her alone.
As she stepped to the front of the classroom, her voice carried no emotion, no rise or fall.
"Open to page 274."
Her Japanese was flawless.Her authority unquestionable.And when she looked across the room—
All eyes obeyed.
Except one.
Shotaro didn't look away.
And for just the faintest second—Professor Hibiko met his stare.
Not with challenge. Not with scorn.
But with something almost impossible to define.
Recognition.
Then, she turned to the board.
Her fingers, slim and steady, picked up a white marker with the same grace a calligrapher might lift their brush. She held it loosely—yet with absolute control.
And with a single, fluid stroke, she drew a clean horizontal line across the black glass board. No wasted motion. No hesitation. It was not chalk. It was not noise. It was authority expressed in silence.
Class had begun.
"Plato," she said.
The name alone echoed like the opening note of a symphony.
Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It rang with the resonance of pure clarity—low, articulate, and calm. A voice trained by years of lectures in cold lecture halls and warm debate chambers across three continents.
"Plato proposed the idea of an unconscious."
She paused. Let the words breathe.
"Now some of you might be wondering… why I'm opening a science class with a philosopher's name."
A few students shifted, unsure if it was rhetorical.
She turned around slowly, marker still in hand, her amber eyes sweeping across the classroom like a scanning sensor, evaluating every eye, every breath.
"I ask you this: What is science—if not philosophy made measurable?"
Silence.
Even the window blinds seemed to hush.
"In the dialogues of Plato," she continued, "he posits the concept of anamnesis—the idea that learning is not acquiring new knowledge, but remembering what the soul already knows. That what we call 'understanding' is a process of unveiling."
She turned back to the board and drew a dot above the line she had just marked.
"This," she said, tapping the dot gently, "is your conscious mind. The thoughts you recognize. The facts you memorize. The numbers you recite during exams."
Then she moved the marker beneath the line, drawing a web of chaotic shapes—spirals, fractured lines, a tree-like pattern.
"And this… is everything else."
She stepped back. The board now resembled a map. One point above a line. A jungle of geometry below it.
"The unconscious," she said softly. "Emotion. Pattern recognition. Intuition. Fear. Inherited memory. Patterned trauma. Sub-symbolic logic. The root of your instinct to flinch before you fall."
A pause.
"Modern neuroscience confirms this. Plato dreamed it. Freud built a career naming it. And now, biology and computational theory are racing to catch up with something a man in sandals wrote down two thousand years ago."
She clicked the cap back onto the marker with a quiet snap.
"In a way, science is just like philosophy," she said, "only applied."
She crossed her arms behind her back, posture relaxed—but not soft.
"Philosophy asks: Why does the apple fall?Science says: At exactly 9.8 meters per second squared."
"But neither one works alone."
Her gaze swept to Shotaro, then Hiroki, then Bird, and even briefly—Fatiba.
"To map the how, you must first imagine the why."
She walked slowly across the front of the classroom, boots making soft contact with the polished floor.
"We are here to study the measurable structure of the natural world. Yes. Molecules. Energy. Particles. But if you think this class is just about numbers, you've already failed."
She stopped. Faced them fully.
"This is a course in understanding reality. Which means we must respect all of it. The seen and the unseen. The proven and the questioned. The conscious and the subconscious. The formulas and the mysteries."
Another pause.
She smiled faintly.
Not a smile of joy. Not warmth.
It was the curve of understanding—quiet, sharpened at the edges. The kind of smile worn by those who had seen too much of reality, and had learned to teach it with restraint.
"If you came here expecting just chemicals and formulas," she said, voice calm but razor-clear,"You're in the wrong universe."
Then—
She turned back to the board.
And began to teach.
The marker glided across the surface again—this time with surgical structure.
She drew a square. Then, beneath it, a taller one. Then another—larger still. Five stacked boxes—like a tower in slow ascent.
"Reality, as you perceive it," she said, "is layered. Think of it not as a flat plane—but a vertical construct. A building."
With each word, her hand moved.
She labeled each level:
First FloorSecond FloorThird FloorFourth FloorFifth Floor
"To move between these floors," she continued, "you do not walk. You ascend in dimensional jumps. Think of stairs as dimensions. The more stairs between floors, the wider the ontological gap."
Then she turned.
Her eyes scanned the classroom with precise calm.
"Let's begin at the base."
She drew a short stack—four steps.
"First Floor: The realm of direct perception. Length. Width. Height. Time. The four-dimensional material universe as you understand it. Reality's operating table. The classical framework."
She drew a taller stack beside it—five steps.
"Second Floor: One additional dimension. Not simply a 'fifth' spatial axis, but a compression of possible timelines—alternate events that can branch, recombine, or remain parallel. The dimensional difference from the previous? Call it V1. A vector shift—not linearly measurable, but existent."
A taller stack now—seven steps.
"Third Floor: Higher branching timelines. The beginning of what we call quantum layer interference. Realities where entire laws of physics can vary slightly. V2—the vector difference—introduces rule-level variation. You are no longer just changing outcomes. You're shifting constants."
Now—eleven steps.
"Fourth Floor: Universes with variable mathematical axioms. At this stage, numbers don't mean the same thing. Gravity doesn't obey Newton. Energy may not conserve. Time may loop, or run backward. This floor begins to resemble large-cardinal math—strong inaccessibility comes into play."
She pauses, eyes glinting with subtle severity.
"V3 separates this from all previous states. A strongly inaccessible cardinal is not just larger—it is fundamentally unreachable by smaller sets. You could spend eternity trying to build to it from below—and fail."
Then—twenty-seven steps.
"Fifth Floor: Realities that house self-containing multiverses. Infinite stacks. Infinite variations. Meta-laws that govern law-generation itself. Dimensions begin referencing themselves. This is where recursion becomes a physical event. V4 is where language, logic, and structure begin to fracture."
Then—
She draws a monstrous tower of steps.
Sixty-five thousand five hundred and sixty-three stairs.
The room shifts. You could feel the number hanging in the air like gravity.
"Sixth Floor: A cardinal leap. The gap between here and the Fifth is V5. Not a step. Not a difference. But an impossibility manifested. Any being or structure at this height appears as nonexistent noise to lower floors. Strong inaccessibility becomes hyper-inaccessibility. You cannot perceive what you are not structurally built to conceive."
Shotaro blinked. For once—even he looked… curious.
Maya Hibiko turned slowly, marker still raised.
"These levels continue—indefinitely. What you call 'reality' is the ground floor of an infinite structure, spiraling upward with no ceiling."
Then—
She drew a long horizontal line, stretching from one side of the board to the other. In the middle, she etched a small dot.
"Dimension Zero."
She pointed to it.
"This is the midpoint. The balanced axis. The point where all dimensional tensions cancel. Positive dimensions stretch infinitely right. Negative dimensions stretch infinitely left."
She wrote quickly now—symbols of infinity, aleph-naught (ℵ₀), cardinality equations, and tiered logarithmic scales filled the board like sacred runes.
"On the right side," she said, "you ascend."
"+1, +2, +3… up to positive transfinite sets. Aleph-null. Aleph-one. Aleph-sub-inaccessible. The infinite class of constructible universes."
"On the left," she tapped, "–1, –2, –3… Negative layers. Regressive structures. Anti-reality logic. Subtracting coherence itself. Imaginary law. Lawless math."
Her final words fell like scripture:
"The total number of positive and negative dimensions is not just infinite…"
She underlined the symbols twice.
"It is absolutely infinite. Not countable. Not constructible. Not sequential. The way set theory treats these levels is through strongly inaccessible cardinals—objects too vast to be reached by anything built from below."
She stepped back.
The board was now filled—covered in a spectrum of symbols, staircases, layer schematics, cardinal representations, and abstracted metaphysical geometry.
The class sat in stunned silence.
No one moved.
Maya Hibiko placed the marker down gently.
Folded her arms.
And in that serene, unflinching voice, she said:
"Now. Any questions?"
"Yeah why the fuck are we learning it in high school"
"Cause Earth is constantly in danger from higher level of existances dumbass"
"Are we?"
"Yeah beings that sees us nothing but dreams are trying to wipe us out, we just always win cause they 'myesteriously' gets beatun up badly & have to retreats"
Fatiba looked at Shotaro who was gulping when they heard about this mysterius force.
A stunned voice cut through the tension like a blade clumsily swung through smoke.
"Wait… someone's beating the actual fuck out of higher-level beings?"
It wasn't sarcastic.It wasn't mocking.
It was genuine confusion. Disbelief. The kind of question you ask when the floor underneath your worldview suddenly shifts a few centimeters to the left.
The class didn't laugh this time.
No one whispered.
No one smirked.
Because the weight of Maya Hibiko's words was still pressing on their skulls like a second atmosphere—and the way she'd said "crushed… dissolved… erased" hadn't sounded like hyperbole.
It had sounded like post-mortem data retrieval.
Professor Hibiko slowly turned toward the boy who'd asked. Her amber eyes were calm, but beneath their stillness, something shimmered. Like a ripple on the surface of a bottomless trench.
"Yes," she said quietly. "Not just once. Repeatedly. Categorically. With precision and force."
A pause.
"And with no trace of the defender left behind."
Her tone didn't rise. It didn't need to.
The silence that followed wasn't stunned anymore. It was haunted.
"Every time a higher-level entity reaches down," she continued, "its influence begins to warp localized physics. Pressure anomalies. Color inversion. Symbolic entropy. You wouldn't notice it—unless you knew." Her gaze swept over the room again.
"But just before the point of no return—just before our layer is rewritten like corrupted code—something appears."
She took a step forward.
"And that something doesn't just repel the invader."
Her voice lowered to a near-whisper.
"It destroys them."
The word lingered.
Not killed. Not driven off.
Destroyed.
Erased from a reality where even death has structure.Obliterated in ways that higher-dimensional minds shouldn't be vulnerable to.
Shotaro's fingers, which had rested idly against the edge of his desk, were now curled slightly—tense, as though clenching the invisible weight of memory.
No one else noticed.
But Fatiba did.
She didn't speak. Didn't blink.
Her eyes stayed fixed on him.
Because while everyone else was still processing the idea of something impossible being killed—
Shotaro Mugiwara was the only one in the room who didn't look surprised.
And that—more than anything—
was terrifying.