A Late Bloomer's Powerful Restart ~My Second Life Starts at a Prestigious School Where the Gender Ratio Is Totally Off, and for Some Reason, All These Talented Girls Get Attached to Me...!?~

Chapter 35.1: Shika’s Hidden Side

In a private room at the cafeteria, I waited for a certain person.

The whole thing with Riko had felt long but also short… and a few mysteries still remained from it.

I just wanted to check the answers.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m late… sorry.”

“No, you’re right on time. Thanks for coming even though I didn’t say what it was about… Shika.”

Shichimiya Shika… If there was any point where she was connected to last night’s incident, it would be that she used to have some contact with Riko, and——

“So, um… is this about Hanasaon again?”

“No, not that. I already know why she didn’t enroll.”

Shika’s eyes widened in surprise.

She looked a little wary at first, but when I acted completely calm and confident, she soon returned to her usual self.

For some reason, asking about Mishina Hanasaon felt like touching a taboo, so I didn’t push any further.

That wasn’t the main topic anyway.

“Last night, you were at the annex building, right, Shika?”

“…Really? Why do you think that?”

“Because otherwise some things don’t add up.”

Honestly, the source of the information that she had been at the annex was Kurumi.

When I ran into her while searching for Sasa, she said this at the end:

“Yeah. I’m glad the information helped. And——I also saw Nanamiya-san walking all the way to the annex at that hour.”

I thought it was a joke.

From Shika’s position, she didn’t need to go out of her way to gather evidence about Amane’s situation. Just giving Riko a single warning would have been enough.

She probably couldn’t do that because of her timid personality, but that’s exactly why… I couldn’t understand why she would bother moving herself.

However, if there was one possible reason, it would be——if she had noticed Sasa’s movements.

Perhaps sensing that I had figured it out, Shika quietly waited for my next words.

“Last night, a girl named Riko Morozumi turned on her camera to take a photo, but for some reason she accidentally switched to the front camera.”

“If it was dark, an operation mistake like that… could happen, right?”

“You knew right away that it was a dark place just from me saying ‘night.’”

“…The scene I imagined just happened to be that way.”

She kept acting like she knew nothing, but I was convinced.

“Whatever. The part I found strange was that when Riko tried to take another photo, she made another operation mistake… and this time she opened a different app.”

“It almost sounds… like someone hacked it… But you’re saying that was me? There’s no way I could do something like that.”

“I’m not imagining anything that extreme. Or… in a way, maybe it’s even more than that, but if she had that kind of skill, there would be no need to go to the scene in person.”

She could just extract any compromising information in advance and deal with it beforehand as much as she wanted.

But I knew a similar kind of technique well——one that could be pulled off on the spot as improvisation.

“My guess is… that was a takeover using Rimona.”

Yes… that phenomenon had one possibility other than an operation mistake.

To anyone else, it would probably seem like an impossible perfect crime.

That’s how late the misuse of Rimona had been discovered in my previous life.

But I had memories from my previous life, and experience.

I had seen faces just like Riko’s shocked expression many times… on my subordinates.

“Rimona…? Are you saying I have one?”

“Rimona is a new product from Yashima Electronics. If you have a personal connection with Kasumi Yashima, Shika, then the chances that you have one are high… That’s as far as my reasoning goes.”

“…Just from that, you’re concluding I have a Rimona?”

“Actually… Grandpa gave me a prototype of Rimona a while back.”

I placed a compact case on the table.

Even when she saw the Rimona inside, Shika’s expression didn’t change, but she probably had the same thing.

Nowadays Rimona required pairing to use, so the value of a prototype had become immeasurable, but back then it had been different.

It was just one lousy prototype. He had tossed it to me casually… so it wouldn’t be strange if he had given one to her before that.

“When I received it, he said something like ‘Use it for games or whatever.’ Honestly, I didn’t understand what he meant. But strangely, the very next day… Shika came all the way to my dorm room. Along with a game console that couldn’t be shown to others.”

The contents of the luggage I had kept hidden from Sasa.

That was probably the latest touch-panel display from Yashima Electronics——lightweight, low-cost, and made mass production possible——still not yet revealed to the public, just like Rimona.

I had known about its existence from my previous-life knowledge.

Plus, it matched Grandpa’s vision perfectly, and it made sense why it couldn’t be shown to the daughter of the Kokonoe Group.

“You said before that you developed a game for Grandpa that incorporated your own ideas, right? A new gaming experience using Rimona… You probably suggested ideas like that, roughly speaking?”

That’s why she came to my room that day without any notice. She must have heard I received Rimona and couldn’t wait to try out a new game.

That… was my reasoning for being convinced that Shika possessed a Rimona.

Last night, she had approached Riko from outside the classroom… from outside the window, and used Rimona to successfully pull off a prank like switching to the front camera.

Then, as if confirming my guess, Shika lightly clapped her hands together.

“Amazing! I thought maybe since people know I’m the Yashima chairman’s granddaughter, I might get suspected… But… that was a perfect deduction.”

She said she had predicted even being confronted like this.

There was no guilt on her face——instead, she looked almost ecstatic.

“…Yeah, I knew if it was you——you would give me new stimulation.”

With those words, she took out a ruggedly designed ring from her pocket——a prototype Rimona——and slipped it onto her finger.

“Don’t you think it’s like this ring… that we’re connected?”

“…………Were you enjoying it? Sasa’s crisis.”

“Huh…?”

When I asked her with a straight face, her expression suddenly stiffened.

The lively atmosphere from a moment ago vanished in an instant.

“What… do you mean by that?”