Chapter 79: Side Story - Deficit

Ginton’s monologue, POV

———-

The digital hum of the hall’s primary monitor seemed to compress the air, pressing down against the hundred and fifty students packed into Faction C’s section.

On the massive black screen, the numbers from Interval 1 remained frozen in hard, unyielding blue light:

Faction A: 700 Liquidation Units, Faction B: 1,250 Liquidation Units, and Faction C: 1,050 Liquidation Units.

Beneath those totals, a sharp, flashing line of text delivered the verdict that had set my section whispering.

I wanted to laugh my ass off from seeing this. Most students wouldn’t understand what was going on, but come on—is this all the school had to offer?

Faction A: 50 Prediction Points (1 Prediction Remaining), Faction B: 150 Prediction Points (3 Predictions Remaining), and lastly Faction C: 0 Prediction Points (0 Predictions Remaining).

A low, anxious wave of murmurs broke out around me. Several students from the front rows turned back, their faces tight with quiet panic.

”Ginton-san,” one of them whispered, his voice pitching just high enough to cut through the hum of the room. “We’re completely dry on prediction points. Zero. If B or A targets us with successful predictions in the next round, we won’t have any defense left to counterattack. And look at our capital—we dropped to 1,050 while B is sitting comfortably at 1,250. Shouldn’t we demand a return transfer right now?”

Another student leaned in from the left, wringing his hands. “Are we losing control of the board? People are already saying Faction B has completely outplayed us this interval.”

I see, so that’s their worry, I thought. I had thought maybe they understood what was going on.

I didn’t turn to look at them immediately. I kept my hands loosely clasped in my lap, letting their nervous anxiety wash over me without absorbing a single ounce of it.

Panic was a waste of cognitive bandwidth; it clouded judgment and signaled weakness to anyone watching across the room. Honestly, isn’t this one of the things they should already understand by now?

I had always explained to them not to worry when I’m leading them. I don’t intend to lose.

I tilted my head slightly, letting a faint, reassuring smile touch my lips—just enough to project calm authority without looking arrogant.

”Quiet down. I don’t know how many times I have to explain this,” I said, my voice low, steady, and entirely devoid of strain. “You shouldn’t worry; just understand my commands.”

”B-but, Ginton—”

”I understand your worry,” I interrupted one of the students.

”A zero-point balance on the prediction board isn’t a defeat. It’s just a cleared slate. Let the others worry about the scoreboards while we look at the mechanics.”

The immediate vicinity quieted down, the students settling back into their seats, reassured by my composure even if they didn’t fully understand the calculus beneath it.

The moment their attention drifted back to the front, my internal mental framework locked into place. I began systematically breaking down our exact position, stripping away the noise of the classroom until only the pure, structural logic of the test remained.

I opened a live explanation and layout that was shown to all my Faction members. They listened and followed carefully.

Final Score = Capital + Prediction Score + Stability Modifier.

A raw capital lead was only valuable if it didn’t compromise stability or leave the leader vulnerable to repeated, high-value predictions. B might be sitting at 1,250 units right now, but that very wealth made them an oversized target.

The Economy of Prediction Points:

Prediction points operated simultaneously as both an offensive weapon and a defensive shield. Spending them on incorrect guesses was ruinously expensive—as our current zero balance brutally demonstrated—but successful predictions extracted value from targeted factions and restored operational PP.

Having zero points at the end of Interval 1 meant our immediate offensive capability was dead. Regeneration and defensive shielding were now mandatory. We needed to bait the system into returning points without exposing ourselves to counter-predictions.

The Hidden Mechanics of Stability:

Stability punished two distinct criteria: excessive capital loss and excessive behavioral predictability.

Because the exact mathematical formula was intentionally concealed by the institution’s administrators, Faction C had to treat any large, repeated, or easily modeled pattern as an active hazard—and any sudden, unhedged capital drop as a structural risk.

Seeing the breakdown, the students understood immediately what my aim was. I also didn’t have to worry about a leak of our strategy, since all the students were completely bound to me.

Each student’s SC (‘Student Credits’) were all with me during this test. If anyone were to betray me, it would only mean they weren’t ready for school life.

And I didn’t have to worry about the school finding out, since they all signed a written contract, making it legal within school grounds. Not like I was going to hold on to it forever—maybe after the test concludes.

As for navigating the Lex Veritas Protocol, I mentally structured a strategy which I didn’t let the other members know yet.

The rule set blocked known falsehoods, but it was remarkably permissive regarding everything else. It did not block conditional statements, strategic omissions, partial truths, or statements that only became true because the opposing side reacted to them.

Faction C would live entirely within this gray zone, using technical precision to guide our opponents into self-sabotaging assumptions.

And my insight into Faction B’s current position gave us a rather unique opportunity as well, which was thanks to the previous trap I had placed them in over the weeks before the test.

Nanami over-models. She genuinely fears being predicted far more than she fears a moderate loss in capital. Because of that psychological tic, she would instinctively pivot toward small, irregular, low-information moves and would frequently submit zero predictions whenever uncertainty spiked.

The insight is simple: that hyper-cautious evasion would eventually curdle into its own predictable behavioral pattern once observed across multiple intervals.

After mentally decoding Faction A’s coalition signal, Fāng Xuě’s initial 400-unit transfer to us during Interval 1 was never charity; it was a deliberate coalition probe.

A must have wanted reciprocity and a joint pattern-break trap designed to corner B.

So for that, C could safely accept this temporary coalition for Intervals 2 through the remaining number of intervals, utilizing their capital infusion while we stabilized, and then invert the strategy the moment we fully mapped A’s underlying “Stability Trap” framework (which I calculated we could completely reverse-engineer no later than the conclusion of the last interval).

Still, that only leaves the recursive nature of the test: every public statement and every executed transaction fundamentally altered what our competitors believed about us. Therefore, Faction C’s highest-value moves weren’t the largest ones—they were the precise, calculated maneuvers that forced B and A to update their internal models of us in the exact direction we chose.

I exhaled slowly, my eyes drifting across the hall until they locked onto Nanami’s rigid posture in the opposing section. She was staring at her tablet, her mind racing through counter-strategies, entirely convinced she had broken free of our trap.

Let her think she was escaping; it’s more fun this way anyways.

The four-minute timer on the central monitor ticked downward. Interval 2 was about to begin, and Faction C’s true campaign was only just starting.

———

“Rules can be controlled, it’s just a matter of your understanding of it”