After pa.s.sing through the school gate that we were by now completely familiar with, Yua and I went to collect a copy of the cla.s.s rosters being distributed at the entrance to the school building. Starting from the second year, courses were split into the humanities and the sciences, and cla.s.s changes were carried out. Those results were noted down in these rosters. From a personal point of view the setup where you got all excited from checking posters on a bulletin board might be favoured, but this way also made it easy to find out the cla.s.ses of other people, so it did make sense to me from a logical perspective.

Upon checking the roster, Yua's face instantly lit up.

「Great, we're together again, Saku-kun. Please take care of me this year too.」

「It's not just us that's together, pretty much everyone else is too.」

「That may be true, but I think it would be nice if you could show some resourcefulness and do me the favour of at least pretending to be happy.」

While casually brus.h.i.+ng off Yua, who was making an unconvinced face, I looked at the cla.s.s roster again. Including myself and Yua, all of the core members from the original riajuu group in Year 1 Cla.s.s 5 had opted for the humanities course.

At our school, they upheld the fundamental policy of「keeping the movement of students to a bare minimum, even for cla.s.s changes relating to course selections」.

This was a policy designed to minimize the chances of causing undue stress due to a change in human relations.h.i.+ps and to ensure an environment conducive to studying; a very prep school-like policy. Even when decisions to move students were made, they were made in ways that allowed the bonds between familiar faces to strengthen as much as possible, so this result was not particularly surprising in the least.

That said, those from our group aside, there were a lot of people originally from other cla.s.ses mixed in. This is something I once heard from a senpai, but apparently, just about every year the humanities stream and science stream would each get one cla.s.s like this.

No matter how much they tried to keep movements to a minimum, with students from all ten cla.s.ses each making their own course selections, eventually some limit to the adjustments would come. At which point they would group together those who had few or even no friends to begin with, or those with behavioural issues, or to put it bluntly, the leftover students. Into what s.p.a.ce remained, they then crammed in all the riajuu, possessing good communication skills and seemingly able to get along with anyone.

Of course, the school did not officially state as such. However, the second and third years would speak credibly of such「riajuu cla.s.s」or「loner cla.s.s」existences.

「In any case, Cla.s.s 5 again? I was actually gloating earlier, saying good riddance over the term『Cla.s.s 5's Chitose Saku』becoming irrelevant soon. It's going to be actively used for at least another year now.」

「Well, there's no need to go to the trouble of rewriting it to something like『Cla.s.s 2's Chitose Saku is a d.a.m.n womanizing rascal』, so for those on this side I have to admit it's a big help.」

「Huh? …Was there an ambush lurking this close to me?」