Chapter 74: Side Story - Learned Helplessness

Chapter 74: Chapter 74: Side Story - Learned Helplessness

Nanami’s monologue, POV

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?The room became completely silent. I stared at the words on the monitor.

?So did everyone else.

?Before, we had anticipated that the test would involve the transfer and liquidation of resources between factions based on the old bylaws.

?That much had been known; the precise rules, however, had been withheld. Most students had assumed that the objective would be simple: accumulate as many Liquidation Units as possible.

?Our preparation had been based around that assumption. It had been a reasonable assumption, which meant it had been dangerous.

?The title remained on screen for three seconds.

?Then it disappeared, immediately after a diagram appeared.

?Three circles.

?CAPITAL

?INFORMATION

?STABILITY

?My eyes sharpened.

?"...There," Masayuki spoke quietly.

?"That’s the actual test," I nodded.

?The first circle expanded.

?FACTOR 1 - CAPITAL:

?[Each faction begins with 1,000 Liquidation Units.]

?[Liquidation Units may be transferred between factions through authorized transactions.]

?[At designated intervals, each faction leader must arrange or announce transfers according to the examination protocol.]

?Simple.

?At first glance, but then the second circle expanded.

?FACTOR 2 - INFORMATION:

?[Factions may submit predictions regarding future transactions.]

?[Correct predictions generate Prediction Points.]

?[Each correct prediction awards: 50 Prediction Points,

?+10% of the predicted transaction value and Liquidation Units]

?A murmur spread through the room.

?I immediately calculated. Ten percent of a transaction worth 300 units was 30. So, a successful prediction would produce 80 points.

?But where did those points come from?

?The next line appeared.

?[Prediction rewards are deducted from the factions involved in the predicted transaction. If wrong, 10% from the group/groups predicting will be deducted and given to the depositing group.]

?[Each faction is given 3 predictions, each requiring 50 prediction points.]

?[All factions are given 150 prediction points to start off with.]

?My eyes narrowed. "So the prediction itself is an attack."

?Reina nodded. "Correct."

?"If we predict that A gives C three hundred, and we’re right, we get the bonus," Ichika leaned forward.

?"Yes basically, but don’t make it sound so simple," Reina answered.

?"I know, but doesn’t that mean A and C lose the corresponding amount?"

?"Yes, your point?" Reina answered again.

?Ichika smiled. "That’s nasty. Because we spent 50 points to make the prediction, our net gain is only plus 30 points. Which means a single wrong prediction—losing 50 points plus a 10% penalty—completely bankrupts a faction’s predictive power."

?Exactly the point.

?"It gets worse, you know. Look up," Kinko pointed at the screen.

?The third circle had expanded.

?FACTOR 3 - STABILITY:

?[Each faction possesses a Stability Score.]

?[Stability decreases when a faction suffers excessive capital loss or demonstrates excessive behavioral predictability.]

?The hall erupted. Students began talking over one another.

?"Predictability?"

?"What does that mean?"

?"How is it measured?"

?"Can they change the score?"

?"Is there a threshold?"

?I ignored the noise. My eyes remained fixed on the screen.

?The system continued.

?[Stability affects final evaluation.]

?FINAL EVALUATION

?[Capital + Prediction Score + Stability Modifier]

?Silence returned.

?I leaned back; my first thought was simple.

?Our preparation is almost worthless.

?Not completely—that would be too convenient.

?But almost, like I see no use or advantages we have gained from our investigations. Just the fact that we were completely prepared for a transition between factions helped, but still...

?We had spent weeks predicting the behavior of Faction A and Faction C. The problem was that the test itself rewarded the destruction of patterns.

?If a faction became predictable, its Stability Score fell, and if I successfully predicted an opponent, I would receive points.

?That meant my information advantage could actually force the opponent to change behavior. Which meant the opponent could deliberately become unpredictable, meaning information had become less reliable.

?And if everyone knew that...

?My thoughts accelerated.

?Then everyone is incentivized to manipulate everyone else’s model of them.

?The room had gone from an economic game to something much more dangerous: a game of recursive prediction.

?I looked toward Faction C.

?Ginton was smiling as always. Not broadly or smugly, but I could tell from his shifts in micro-expressions that he found this situation amusing.

?My expression hardened.

?He knew?

?Not necessarily the exact rules, but he had anticipated something like this.

?Wait, does it have something to do with yesterday? Hinoko’s information. The things I had extracted and their supposed strategy for Faction C.

?It was too easy from the start; all of it had been false.

?Not completely lies, since the Lex Veritas Protocol prevented deliberate falsehood. But it did not prevent deception; a statement could be true and still be useless or worse.

?It could be true and intentionally misleading. The students from the other groups were ahead of us from the start or made it look that way, then they fed us false information about their plans while hiding their true strategies.

?Which was to destroy us mentally, breaking us psychologically into chasing a dead end.

?I should not have overlooked Hinoko’s SOAAD warning signals; it might have been fabricated somehow.

?Then the locked ID detail of Hinoko’s SOAAD metrics was just the cherry on top to completely break us, since we were assured by it.

?My breath hitched. I had noticed a few from my group were shocked and confused. I’m sure they saw this coming, but seeing their effort turn to ash like this must be devastating.

?The strategy I had spent the last weeks constructing, built meticulously around Hinoko’s hidden metrics and the "extracted" ledger data, suddenly turned to ash in my mind. Every single contingency I had prepared was completely, irreversibly invalid.

?A memory flashed unbidden: a minor notification warning regarding Hinoko’s account update that I had dismissed days ago as background noise. It hadn’t been an oversight on Ginton’s part? It had been a deliberate broadcast?

?The realization hit with physical weight.

?Faction C hadn’t been careless with their data. They had anticipated my infiltration, predicted my analytical framework, and baited me into harvesting a fabricated dataset. While I sat in my room believing I was a step ahead, Ginton had fed me a technically true, yet entirely manipulated, set of parameters to build my entire strategy upon, all while preparing an entirely separate, invisible offensive campaign.

?Around me, chaos erupted.

?Kinko’s usual casual indifference vanished, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the shifting terminal numbers.

?This isn’t like him.

?Ichika bit her lower lip, her bright demeanor entirely extinguished as she calculated our immediate deficit. Reina sat beside her, her face a mask of absolute, unreadable stone, though the tension in her posture betrayed her awareness of our catastrophic position. Faction B was crumbling from the inside out.

?What would happen next was now up to me to decide. I had directed the group into a false thread, leaving us in this state.

?A few weeks back, Faction C was considering transferring a significant amount of capital toward Faction A.

?At the time, I had interpreted it as evidence of cooperation, but the statement had never actually said they would do it, only that they were considering it.

?Another:

?Ginton has no intention of allowing Faction B to gain a capital advantage.

?True, but meaningless.

?And another:

?Faction C will prioritize stability. But what does that mean as a whole?

?Also true, but what did prioritizing stability actually mean?

?Nothing. It could mean almost anything.

?My fingers tapped once against my desk. Kinko noticed immediately.

?"I see you are thinking hard," he asked, seeing as I was deep in thought for a second.

?"Yes."

?"Pretty sure it’s not that bad, is it?" he asked.

?"Very."

?Ichika tilted her head. "Oh well, whatever."

?My eyes shifted to Ichika for less than a second; her mood sure does change really fast.

?I looked at her. "We’ve spent three weeks trying to predict C."

?Ichika nodded. "Yeah."

?"I’m assuming you guys realize that we were studying a strategy that didn’t exist."

?Ichika’s smile disappeared faintly. "Oh."

?She already knew how bad it was, so why ask? Kinko already knew, but had asked if the information gotten was completely useless—both the archive’s and the rival factions’ strategies.

?Masayuki spoke. "Not necessarily."

?I turned toward him. Masayuki folded his arms, still remaining calm and unbothered.

?"Our information was deliberately ambiguous. That doesn’t mean it was useless."

?"Explain," I interjected.

?"It means Ginton wanted us to believe it was useful."

?I paused for a moment.

?Reina’s eyes flickered, sharpening.

?"Which means the false information was itself information," Reina muttered.

?Masayuki nodded. "Exactly."

?Kinko smiled. "Now we’re getting somewhere. Not that I’m doing much now."

?I looked back at Ginton; he was still watching me, so our eyes met. For several seconds, neither of us moved. I don’t know what he was thinking.

?Then Ginton smiled. I immediately looked away first, not because I was intimidated, but because staring at him provided no additional information, not to mention that it annoyed me more.

?And then, stepping forward from the rival benches, Ginton moved.

?He walked with a cold, measured cadence, his presence cutting through the panicked noise of the classroom like a blade of ice.

?Faction A’s heart dropped as the rival faction bypassed Fang Xue’s blockade entirely. They weren’t where the stolen ledger said they would be. They were already behind her lines.

?The female student, Fang Xue, the leader of Faction A, wasn’t completely off her edge, but rather she didn’t react to her member’s sudden change in mood.

?Through the chaos of the test environment, Fang Xue’s eyes locked onto both rival leaders. Ginton wasn’t barking orders. He was standing perfectly still, hands casually tucked into his pockets, watching her with a dull, almost disappointed look in his eyes, but his smile remained still on his lips.

?He walked over to me slowly, the noise of the panic around them seemingly fading into the background.

?"You’re wondering where the error in your math was," he said, his voice flat, completely devoid of the loud arrogance I expected from a victor. "There wasn’t one. The intel you extracted was perfectly logical, actually. That’s why you bought it."

?I gripped my desk, knuckles turning white against the polished wood. "What do you know?"

?"Of course...," he replied, tilting his head slightly. His eyes had already scanned all the students of Faction B. "I left the door open for you. In fact, I wrote that specific contingency report because I knew exactly how your mind works. You look for patterns; you exploit structural gaps. So, I built a gap just for you. You ran exactly the distance I measured out for you, right into the cage."

?He glanced down at his watch, then back up at my frozen expression. "The test was over the moment you thought you were winning. Good effort, though."

?"Still entirely boring."

?The monitor immediately changed later.

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"The man who sees consistency in things is a wit; the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist."

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