The sound of Yuki's chair scraping against the floor was a raw, discordant shriek that tore through the stunned silence of the club room. It was the sound of a line being drawn, a declaration of war against the cold, clinical philosophy that had just been unveiled.
"That," she repeated, her voice low and trembling with a fury that was almost palpable, "is the most twisted, abhorrent, and inhuman thing I have ever heard."
Her eyes, usually so warm and empathetic, blazed with a righteous fire. She stared at Kaito, not as a fellow club member, but as an invading ideologue, a purveyor of a poison she was morally obligated to neutralize.
"Do you hear yourself?" she demanded, her hands clenched into tight fists at her sides. "Strategic reconnaissance? Engineered scenarios? Hacking her perception? You're not talking about a person, Ishikawa-kun. You're talking about a target. A lab rat. You want to put a human heart in a maze and reward it with a piece of cheese for reaching the end you designed. That isn't a relationship; it's a successful experiment!"
Kaito met her furious gaze without a flicker of emotion. He did not recoil from her anger, nor did he rise to meet it. He simply observed it, his head tilted slightly, as if she were a fascinating specimen exhibiting a particularly volatile, though predictable, behavior.
"Your objection is noted," he said, his voice a placid sea beneath her storm. "However, your argument is based on an emotional premise. The client's objective is not to 'honor the sanctity of the human heart.' His objective is to date the subject. My blueprint provides a clear, actionable path to that outcome. Your emotional response, while intense, does not invalidate the logic."
"Logic?" Yuki's laugh was a sharp, bitter sound. "You call this logic? This is cowardice! It's a system designed by someone too afraid to face the risk of genuine interaction, too terrified of rejection to ever be sincere! You're building a fortress of tricks and manipulation so you never have to be vulnerable, so you never have to show your true self!"
She took a step closer, her entire being radiating indignation. "What happens after the 'inversion,' Ishikawa-kun? What happens when the maze is solved and the experiment is over? The relationship you've built is a house of cards. It's based on a lie, on a manufactured persona of a 'mysterious, intellectual guy.' What happens when Tanaka-kun has to actually be a boyfriend? When he has to talk, and listen, and share something real? The entire structure will collapse, because it was never real to begin with! You're not solving his problem; you're just creating a bigger, more painful one for both him and Satou-san down the line!"
Her words struck a chord with Kenji. He looked down at his own hands, imagining himself trying to hold a conversation with Miyu about Nietzsche. He didn't even know who Nietzsche was. The brief, intoxicating allure of Kaito's guaranteed success began to curdle in his stomach, replaced by a cold dread.
Even Ren, who had been looking at Kaito with such star-struck admiration, now had a flicker of doubt in her eyes. She looked from her furious president to the unshakable boy in the corner, her expression conflicted.
Kaito, however, remained unmoved. "A valid point," he conceded with the detached air of a professor acknowledging a student's interesting but flawed thesis. "You are identifying a potential long-term structural weakness in the proposed model. This can be mitigated. Phase Five would involve the gradual deconstruction of the manufactured persona and the introduction of the client's authentic attributes. It would be a delicate process, but manageable."
"Phase Five?" Yuki was aghast. "You can't be serious! You can't just patch a relationship together with more logic! That's not how people work! Trust, affection, respect—those things aren't built with 'phases'! They're grown, slowly and carefully, through shared experiences, through honesty, through seeing someone for who they truly are and choosing to care about them anyway!"
"You are describing an inefficient, high-risk, low-reward system," Kaito countered calmly. "The 'growth' you speak of is subject to countless uncontrolled variables. Your methodology offers the client a lottery ticket and wishes him good luck. I am offering him a blueprint to build the machine that prints the winning tickets. The two are not comparable."
He turned his gaze back to Kenji, who seemed to shrink under the weight of his attention. "Tanaka-kun. You have two options before you. Option A: The President's Counsel. You will attempt to engage the subject with sincerity. You may succeed after a prolonged period of trial and error, or you may fail, reinforcing your current anxieties. Option B: The Psychological Blueprint. You will follow a series of logical steps designed to guarantee the subject's interest and lead to your desired outcome. The choice is yours. Which path has the higher probability of success?"
The question was a clinical dissection of Kenji's deepest desires. It bypassed all the moral and ethical arguments and went straight for the core of his desperation. He wanted it to work. He wanted it so badly he could taste it.
Yuki saw the struggle on Kenji's face, the terrible pull of Kaito's promise. She felt a surge of protective fury. This wasn't a debate anymore. This was a battle for a person's soul.
"Stop it," she said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous level. "Stop treating him like a customer choosing a product. And stop talking about people's hearts as if they're machines you can program. How can you be so certain of your methods when you clearly have no understanding of the most fundamental part of the equation?"
Kaito raised an eyebrow, a minuscule shift in his placid features. "And what part is that?"
"Love!" Yuki almost shouted the word, throwing her hands out in exasperation. "The very thing he's feeling! The reason he's here! The entire point of all this! Your plan has everything—logic, strategy, psychological tricks—but it has no love! It's an empty, sterile shell. How can you possibly give advice on something you so clearly know nothing about?"
The challenge hung in the air, sharp and absolute. She had cornered him, presenting him with the one variable his system could not account for, the one concept his logic could not quantify. She waited for his defense, for his attempt to define love in his own cold terms, to reduce it to another neurochemical reaction.
Kaito was silent for a long moment. He looked at Yuki's passionate, furious face. He looked at Kenji's terrified, hopeful one. He looked at Ren's confused and conflicted expression. He processed the emotional data flooding the room. He analyzed the core of Yuki's final, desperate argument.
Then, he asked the question.
It was not a counter-argument. It was not a defense. It was a genuine inquiry, spoken with the pure, untainted curiosity of a being encountering a foreign concept for the very first time, a concept as alien and incomprehensible as a color he had never seen.
In a slow, quiet voice, devoid of any irony or sarcasm, a voice that seemed to come from a place utterly removed from the warmth of human connection, he asked:
"Love? What is that?"