Chapter 13 - Where Guilt Resides

Perhaps it was because of his conversation with Nanaka.

As night fell and Kai’s consciousness drifted away, he had a vivid dream of that day.

It was a day that had an upcoming event for Rondo biting at its heels, and Kai had planned to stay the night at school to work on the game. He’d get in trouble if it affected his performance in class, but figured he’d be okay so long as he took a quick cat nap. No other members of the team were scheduled to come in on the night before their first anniversary event, which went without saying. If they had required that sort of plan, it would have meant they wouldn’t make the release on time.

“Development Hell” was a term that generally described the days leading up to a release, since it would be too late if you were to scramble something together on the final day. At Tsukigase, in particular, Akane would refuse to sign off on a release unless all the work (debugging included) was done before the date of release, and would instead opt for a delay.

They hadn’t had any major issues this time, and had managed to wrap everything up. All that remained was to update the application when club activities began the next day. Other than Kai, who had been driven into working on the next event, no one needed to be in the club room that night. That was how it was meant to be.

However, when he swiped his student ID card through the card-key reader to enter the room, he heard the click clack of someone typing at a keyboard. There was someone there.

The club room was dark; none of the lights were on. In the very back of the room, near the far wall reserved for the newbie freshmen, he could clearly see a computer monitor radiating blue light.

He walked over slowly.

Kai didn’t exactly sneak up on her, but the girl desperately typing away at her keyboard failed to notice him even when he was directly behind her. She must have been in dire straits, because it looked like she was about to cry at any moment as she gritted her teeth and continued to work.

As a result, even a non-programmer like Kai had plenty of time to discern what she was doing.

“Itou-san,” he said.

“Wah!” When he called out to her, she literally jumped out of her chair.

“You’re Itou-san, right?” he checked again.

She was a first-year student who had recently joined the club, and her name was Itou Haruka... or at least, Kai was pretty sure.

It hadn’t been long since they’d begun working together, so Kai had to concentrate to recall her name from somewhere in the fog of his memory. She was still inexperienced when it came to coding, but she loved social games. She was overflowing with cheerfulness and passion, and she wanted to learn how to create social games as a programmer no matter how hard it might be. Kai had never gotten a chance to talk to her, but he liked her for her unrestrained work ethic.

“Y-Yes, that’s me,” Itou answered him with swimming eyes, and her voice trailed off quietly, like a child who was trying to hide something that would get them in trouble. In fact, that was basically the situation she was in.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Kai asked. He specifically didn’t ask what she was doing, because the program she was tweaking was the script that handled the first anniversary gacha that they were going to release tomorrow. That program was not something she was responsible for—and even if it was, there had been no mention made of any last-minute revisions.

Where she looked like she was going to cry a minute ago, her face now was drained of all color. “U-Um, I, I-I-I, I di- I didn’t, um—”

“...Please calm down.” Kai ordered her to take a few deep breaths while he focused on staying calm himself.

After she had calmed down a little, she spoke in a frightened tone. “...I was changing the gacha pull rates.”

I knew it. Kai nodded silently, having surmised that she was implementing an algorithm to alter gacha rates per user. The moment the gacha was rolled, the user would be filtered into one of a few different spending brackets. They would lower the rate of the rarest SSR units for their big spenders and lock them out of an SSR entirely until they spent a certain amount. It meant they would advertise one rate and then tweak the back end to work differently.

To summarize, they were cheating.

“I know!” The girl raised her voice like she was about to go wild. “I know, but! If I don’t do this, I’m off the team! I’m the only newbie on this team and... I know I’m dead weight! You’re the president’s favorite, Shiraseki-senpai! We’re different in every way!”

“...Who made you do this?” he asked, pushing for an answer.

She gave no answer. However, there was only one person who would benefit from such an order: it must have been Ginjou, Rondo’s team director.

Kai knew that Ginjou was the type of guy to prioritize results—and the social status that came with it—over any kind of passion for the game, but Kai never imagined he’d go this far. Ginjou was obsessed with surpassing Tsukigase’s number one title, LW. They were projected to have done so last month, but their real earnings fell short. He must have cooked up this ploy in order to guarantee his victory in the first anniversary gacha.

“We’re going to be Tsukigase’s number one this anniversary!” That was all Ginjou would say, as of late.

It was true that the gacha was appealing, what with it being the first anniversary and all. It was a safe bet to assume more people would roll than usual, and there were probably a decent number of users who planned on rolling until they got what they wanted. If they implemented the cheating algorithm the girl mentioned earlier... their earnings would indeed rise.

“Have you already finished your implementation?” Kai questioned.

“...Yes.” As soon as Itou nodded, she instantly dropped to her hands and knees, and Kai could hear the sound of her head banging against the floor as she groveled.

“Please...!” she begged. “I know this is wrong! I know it’s wrong, but please, please look the other way just this once! Senpai, if you bring this out into the open, no matter how it pans out, I’m going to lose my place in the club! I... I still want to make games here...!” She was halfway to hysteria as she cried and shouted.

Kai took a moment to find the words to reply, knowing that her estimation was most likely to be correct. Ginjou was the type of person to hedge his bets and likely had a way of deleting all the evidence of the program she’d written. Afterwards, he simply wouldn’t give her any work and would quietly eliminate any place she’d once had. He’d bury it all up in the dark and—in the worst-case scenario—someone else would meet the same fate down the line.

“If you finished your implementation, then does that mean you’re done with your work?” Kai asked, taking the wind out of her sails with a simple anticlimactic question.

“...Huh? Um, yes.”

“Then go ahead and go home,” he ordered.

“But, senpai—”

“Itou-san, you did what you needed to do... I didn’t see anything. That’s what you wanted, right?” Kai heartlessly spat out the words to signify that he had no intention of continuing their conversation.

He couldn’t tell what kind of internal anguish she was facing, but she grimaced and gave him a small nod. After turning off her computer and collecting her things, Itou hurried out of the room without turning back.

Kai gave a heavy sigh that rang out into the now-empty room. The clock on the wall read a little past 9 P.M., and the rigged gacha system was set to release the next morning. He had to do something before then.

That being said, Kai was not a programmer. He didn’t have any way of changing the code. If there was something that he could do—there was only one idea that came to mind.

Ginjou had a burning sense of rivalry with Akane and hated Kai for being her protege. The reason Kai had to work this late at night to begin with was because Ginjou had given him a ludicrous amount of work to do on his own. The other club members knew that all too well. So... a problem arising from their feud would fall well within expectations.

He took a deep breath.

Shiraseki Kai would become the villain, and Itou Haruka would get off safely—she did her part, but a third party came and ruined it; to make that scenario a reality, he turned on his computer.

Kai leaked all the information pertaining to the rigged rates to the public. His dream ended there, and he woke up to the morning of the routine competition.