Did a Lot of Homework on the Teacher

Exusiai, Yukino, Saber, and I stared at each other, the silent question hanging in the air between us.

The comments in the stream exploded, a torrent of digital panic and speculation:

[What does that mean? Someone’s being held captive??]

[Is this a pre-arranged plot or a sudden event? This is so scary! My heart can’t take this!]

[WTF that scared me, I spilled my Coca all over my keyboard, I hope it doesn’t short circuit. I gotta g-]

[Did the guy who sent that last comment get electrocuted and isekai’d?? F to pay respects.]

[This hair and note, has the props team come online? The production value is top-notch!]

[Whether it’s real or fake, this is way scarier than those ghost-hunting streams where nothing ever happens.]

I stood frozen in Exusiai’s embrace. I could feel her slender body, pressed tightly against mine, tense up the moment she saw the note. Her warmth was the only thing keeping the chill from seeping directly into my bones.

I spelled out the suspicion in my mind, word by word, my voice barely a whisper. “This hair is clearly from a girl. Paired with this note asking for help, it’s very likely that a girl was imprisoned in this abandoned dormitory and had her hair shaved off.”

Yukino deeply agreed, her elegant face tense, her tone grave as she analyzed the clues. “We already figured out that the guy who looked like a guard at the entrance was actually a homeless person living here. In that case, it’s highly likely that he’s the one who imprisoned a girl here.”

This horrifying fact exploded in our ears. Even the most flippant Saber had a look of indignation on her face, her monocle glinting ominously. “This homeless man is too despicable! Imprisoning a girl is one thing, but to shave off her most beautiful hair!”

“Is the focus on the hair-shaving??” I was utterly shocked. “And why is the imprisonment part just ‘one thing’?!”

The moment I said that, a flash of white, like a system error, appeared before my eyes.

At first, I thought I had been blinded by someone’s phone light, but when my vision returned, I found myself in a bright dormitory room. Bright sunlight shone in from the square window, suggesting it was a beautiful afternoon. The warm sunlight fell on three sets of bunk beds, the layout identical to the abandoned room we were in. It was like seeing a flashback cutscene.

There were six figures in the room. Four of them were like overexposed photographs, a blur of white that was impossible to make out, their identities redacted by whatever force was showing us this. Only a long-haired girl with an “influencer face” and a short-haired girl with a cute, round face were clearly visible.

The long-haired influencer-faced girl was lying on her bunk, eating snacks, the crumbs falling all over the floor. She glanced at the food debris on the ground with a slightly annoyed expression, then looked at the round-faced, short-haired girl who was quietly reading on another bed.

She said, her voice dripping with condescension, “Hey, you, come sweep the floor.”

The girl with the cute, round face only realized the long-haired girl was talking to her after she had impatiently called out twice. She looked at her timidly. “Um… can’t you sweep it yourself?”

“Heh,” the influencer-faced girl sneered. “Aren’t you a neat freak? I’ll give you this opportunity to make the dorm cleaner.”

As her unreasonable words ended, the light before my eyes suddenly vanished, disappearing like a popped bubble. I was still standing in the gloomy, dark, abandoned dormitory, surrounded by Yukino and the others, who were just as frozen as I was.

I couldn’t suppress the tremor in my voice as I asked uneasily, “Did you guys… see anything?”

Yukino was the first to stand up and respond, her voice steady despite the shock. “As I thought, it wasn’t just me. You all saw it, right?”

Saber, still squatting on the ground, rubbed her pale, milk-white forehead. “I saw it. An influencer-faced girl making another cute girl clean up. A classic bullying scenario.”

Exusiai, pressed against me, added, “The dorm in the vision… had the exact same layout as this one. Though, all the other dorms in this building probably have the same layout…”

I could feel Exusiai’s hands on my lower abdomen turn a little cold. I understood that Exusiai was holding me because she was coveting this beautiful body of Kiriko, but it was undeniable that her embrace gave me a lot of warmth and a sense of security. So, in return, feeling the fear in her heart now, I also placed my hands on her cold little hands, gently rubbing the delicate, supple skin, letting her know that I was there for her.

At the same time, I said, “A ghost-hunting livestream… so a paranormal event really did happen. This isn’t just a game.”

Yukino, Saber, and Exusiai all understood what I meant. System-Hime had sent us to this abandoned dormitory for a ghost-hunting livestream, and now, completely as expected, a paranormal event had truly unfolded.

I looked at the stream. The comments were scrolling like crazy:

[What’s going on? Isn’t this a livestream? Why was a video inserted?]

[Did you guys see that too? I thought my webpage automatically switched to a different tab!]

[It was a livestream of an abandoned dorm, and then suddenly a segment of an overexposed daily life scene appeared, and the room layout looks exactly the same.]

[So you all saw it. The hair part was already creepy enough, I thought my place was haunted.]

[Did the streamer insert that on purpose? For the show’s effect?]

[Even if it’s scripted, I have to give a thumbs-up for this effect! Top-tier production!]

[That sudden screen change made my scalp tingle, my scalp tingle!]

[That inserted video, that’s dorm bullying, right? I hate that kind of behavior the most.]

“The stream also showed the vision we saw,” I learned from the comments. Although the viewers didn’t experience the vision as immersively as we did, they saw the same thing through the stream’s screen.

“It really is haunted,” Yukino said, biting her delicate, pearly teeth, her face twisting into a ferocious expression that didn’t match her image. “Great! There really is a ghost. For this ghost to run into us, it’s really met its match!!”

She gritted her teeth, as if she wanted to eat the ghost alive. I completely understood her mood. Having just discovered she had been cheated on, she was at the peak of her anger. This anger needed to be vented as a desire for violence, and this ghost had just walked right into the line of fire.

Saber stood up, supporting herself on her knees, her delicate, pretty face showing no fear. “A ghost, and a ghost girl at that. A beautiful ghost girl. For her to run into us… she’s really met her match~”

The corners of her mouth curved into a meaningful, predatory smile. For Saber, who had never had a girlfriend, she also had her own desires to vent on the female ghost. But unlike Yukino, that desire did not come from violence.

“A ghost girl?” Even Exusiai, who was enveloping me in her embrace, looked relaxed. “A ghost girl poses no threat to me.”

She had said something similar before, only that time it was, “The course instructor is a female teacher? Then this course poses no threat to me.”

And sure enough, at the end of the semester, Exusiai, who had skipped more classes than she had attended, was given a perfect score by the female teacher.

She had probably done a lot of homework on the teacher after class.