Youkoso Jitsuryoku Shijou Shugi no Kyoushitsu e: 2-nensei-hen

The start of Ayanokouji Kiyotaka’s second year at the Advanced Nurturing High School brings no respite from the relentless machinery of meritocratic competition. As he and his classmates settle into their new upperclassman status, they are immediately confronted with a reshuffled academic landscape, one made all the more volatile by the arrival of a remarkably eclectic cohort of first-year students. The atmosphere is charged with both anticipation and suspicion, for the school’s inaugural exam of the term is designed to forge an uneasy alliance between the old and the new—pairing each second-year class with their junior counterparts for a joint written test. Yet the stakes are cruelly asymmetrical; while both years take the same examination, only the second-year students will bear the full brunt of failure, facing automatic expulsion if their partnered team underperforms. Beneath this overt academic threat simmers a far more personal and treacherous undercurrent. Among the fresh faces populating the campus, whispers and intuition suggest that one individual is no ordinary prodigy, but rather a fellow survivor of the same enigmatic White Room that forged Ayanokouji himself. Forced to navigate a gauntlet of unfamiliar personalities and hidden agendas, Ayanokouji must simultaneously safeguard his class from mass elimination and unmask this camouflaged adversary before they can exploit the chaos. With every written answer potentially spelling ruin and every interaction carrying the weight of deception, the second-year arc promises a perilous balancing act between intellectual survival and the quiet, calculated war against a ghost from his own past.