Horikita Manabu's student council was actually very thoughtful.
During busy times, they'd assign tasks ahead of time. And if you finished your task, you didn't have to come to the student council room—you were free to go enjoy school life.
After all, the most important thing was the class competition and moving up to a higher class. So Horikita didn't want to overload students with student council work.
That would just be missing the point.
That's why, during Shirogane's first two visits to the student council room, it was usually just President Horikita and Secretary Tachibana Akane there.
At the same time, Horikita Manabu didn't work himself to death every day either. He knew how to take breaks—like switching shifts with the public morals committee to walk around and check the campus.
As for Shirogane, he had just started learning the basics of being a secretary.
Even though he worked hard in his studies, this was still a new job, and it was natural he needed time to get used to it. Luckily, the president had prepared documents from past secretaries to help with the learning process.
So Shirogane was trying to teach himself.
He pulled 22 folders off the shelf.
A secretary usually only worked through 1 or 2 folders. Since this was already the 15th student council, and the first three years didn't keep complete records, Shirogane took all the secretary-related documents from the 4th to the 14th years and carried them to his desk.
"You look pretty serious,"
said a voice.
Shirogane's desk was close to Vice President Nagumo Miyabi's, and Nagumo had already walked past him three times with a cup of tea in hand.
It looked like a senior checking in on the younger students, but Shirogane knew better—Nagumo already saw him as a rival and was watching him closely.
Shirogane knew this day would come eventually. Once he stood on President Horikita's side, he was bound to face Nagumo.
And based on what he'd heard through the system's narration, Nagumo Miyabi basically controlled the entire second year.
He was also eligible to run for student council president.
So in the end, it would all come down to votes.
That meant Shirogane had to win over all the first-year students and at least half of the third-years.
Only then could he take over right after President Horikita stepped down.
With that in mind—
*Rustle rustle rustle*
Shirogane flipped quickly through the documents, trying to learn how previous secretaries handled things.
"Hah… can I really learn all this?"
```
Right away, some people in the office started to look confused.
That's because Shirogane was flipping through pages really fast—so fast that to others, it just looked like he was casually flipping, not really reading.
But what they didn't know was that Shirogane could finish an entire test booklet in under 50 minutes.
He had built up this skill over time, starting from when he was a kid. Now, his speed when going through test materials had reached a scary level.
Meanwhile, Kushida was quietly reading through an old student council work log from a previous member.
As a total newcomer, she wasn't assigned any real tasks today either, but like Shirogane, she was starting by learning from the past members' records.
Unfortunately, she had only just been recommended for the student council today, while Shirogane and Ichinose had already been approved the day before. That meant the two of them would start receiving the student council stipend right away, but she would have to wait until next month.
In other words, she was working for free this month.
But that wasn't such a bad thing—after all, she had actually made it into the student council.
It was still something to be proud of.
That said, Kushida had always focused more on making friends than doing this kind of work, so her experience in student council stuff was pretty much zero. Now, she was finally starting to study seriously.
Time passed quickly while they were working.
Nagumo finished his tasks after an hour and got ready to head out to club activities.
He was part of the soccer club—and a star player too.
Basically, Nagumo was someone who could balance both student council work and school life, enjoying everything school had to offer.
"Flip, flip, flip."
Shirogane kept going through the old files at the same fast pace.
If you looked closely, you'd notice that the tall stack of documents he had at first was already cut in half.
But his speed was so fast that it made people wonder how he could possibly remember anything.
Horikita Manabu glanced up from his work for a moment but didn't say anything.
…
Since they were all new, their main job today was just to get familiar with the work they'd be doing.
After going through work records from 11 past student council secretaries, Shirogane decided to leave early.
His work for the day wasn't just reading documents—he had also made plans to meet with Ichinose after they finished their student council duties.
The goal was to ask Ichinose's class to help tutor the weaker students in Shirogane's class.
Now that they knew it was possible to move up to a better class by collecting 20 million points—and do it without anyone getting expelled—Ichinose's class, which wanted to follow the same path as Horikita Manabu's class, would definitely be more interested in earning points.
So they'd probably take the job.
And as Shirogane went through the records of 11 generations of student council secretaries, he found it was a great way to learn more about how the school really worked—both its history and its systems.
The records showed a lot of student council work that supported school activities.
There were also notes on certain things.
Like how some students were punished for breaking the rules, or how others were rewarded—and how the secretary had to be involved in those decisions.
One thing in particular stood out:
Cases where students were expelled.
The withdrawal process must be completed within two hours. First, the student has to sign a withdrawal form. Once the student council president stamps it, the process begins right away. The student also has to sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to tell anyone outside the school what happened. After that, they only have two hours left on campus to pack up their things. They can take anything they bought at school with them as personal items and bring them off campus.
To finish this process, the student council president, a secretary, and the student's homeroom teacher all need to be involved.
In other words, students dropping out is a normal part of life at this school.
And there's another point—one that's especially important for Shirogane.
From the way many past secretaries handled things, you can see the school has been improving its system. Starting with the 10th graduating class, a special change appeared.
That change is that there's no clear information about students from the 1st to 3rd graduating classes.
But from the 4th to 9th graduating classes, the school began collecting students' phones and wiping the private points on their student IDs when they were about to graduate.
In other words, the school took those points back.
This made some students angry. After saving up hundreds of thousands of points, they lost it all at the end.
So they handed those points to younger students, shaking up the point economy for lower grades. Some upperclassmen even tried to spend huge amounts to "sponsor" underclassmen, which broke the rules.
To fix this, starting with the 10th class, the school changed the system. At first, students who dropped out weren't allowed to take anything with them, and only got travel money from the school. But now, they can take valuable personal items too, and they still get travel money.
As for graduating students' points, the school now buys them back at a certain rate.
In short, the school is trying to be more generous to students.
It's more fair and thoughtful now.
The secretary doesn't just help with records—they also update class ranking scores. The president gets the results first, then tells the secretaries to log them.
But there isn't only one secretary, so they split the work. Thanks to this, Shirogane was able to get the class score records for students from the 4th to 14th graduating classes.
Among these, there were four total cases where a lower-ranked class beat a higher-ranked one. The most intense one happened in the 6th class. One class climbed from Class D all the way to Class B.
That should've been Chabashira-sensei's year.
It really was a shame.
Climbing up from Class D and passing every special exam along the way showed how united that class was. But in the second half of their third year, they lost.
They were close—just one step away from overtaking the top—but before they could react, they got left behind again. In the end, Chabashira-sensei's class graduated as Class B.
Not being able to graduate as Class A was a real regret.
Now, back to the present.
Shirogane had now gathered data about the current third-years—the same year as Horikita Manabu.
It seemed that last year, there was strong competition among them. But once they became third-years, Class 3-A settled into a stable lead.
Class 3-B, on the other hand, seemed to lose their will to fight.