The lecture hall sat in dead silence, thick with fear and obedience. Pens scraped frantically across paper while backs hunched under the crushing weight of a presence none dared defy.High above the rows of wooden benches, the lights buzzed softly, casting a cold, clinical glow across the sea of students. At the front stood Professor Satoru Gojo,height 6'4 of strict control and calculated severity. His snowy hair was sharply styled, his icy blue eyes scanning the hall like a sniper’s scope. He didn’t move. He didn’t need to. His stillness alone controlled the room like iron chains. Not one cough, not one whispered question. No one wanted to be the reason he shifted his gaze.

Yet she was the reason.

Fourth row.Second from the right. Head lowered, but not in study. While every other student scribbled to keep up, her pen drifted slowly, uselessly across the page. Not notes—just shapes. Swirls. Doodles. Lost in thought, completely detached from the lecture she had already failed to focus on the week before. Professor Gojo's gaze locked onto her like ice sharpening into a blade. A single step forward and the atmosphere collapsed. Students froze mid-sentence. Breath caught in dozens of lungs. His footsteps echoed once, then again, then once more until he stood towering at the edge of her desk, silent for a long, agonizing pause “When a student cannot manage the basic discipline of writing down words as they’re spoken, it tells me two things” he said, voice low but deafening in the hush “One—that they are mentally absent. Two—that they believe their time is more valuable than everyone else’s.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the way he spoke had the effect of a hammer driven slowly into steel “If you are here to draw pretty pictures,I suggest you find a preschool with open crayons. In this hall, you are wasting oxygen. You may either catch up on the last twenty minutes of missed content by the end of the day—or submit a formal withdrawal letter from my course. I will not repeat myself. Again.”

He turned, walking back up the aisle, but his eyes caught something else—someone in the fifth row leaning forward, lips parted in mocking amusement, soaking in every word of her humiliation with disgusting delight. Gojo halted. The shift in his posture was microscopic but deadly “You,” he said sharply. The student blinked, confused “If you find entertainment in another’s correction, then you clearly overestimate your own worth. Mocking others from behind your desk does not elevate you. It exposes you.” His voice cut like wire “If your focus lies more in someone else’s failure than your own performance, then your seat is wasted on you.” Then his tone dropped, just a shade colder “You will speak again only when addressed. And if I catch that smirk return, I will personally see to it that you’re removed from this institution. Permanently. Am I clear?” The student paled and nodded silently, gaze dropping. Gojo turned back to the front without further acknowledgement, adjusting his cufflinks with mechanical calm. The lesson resumed as though no disruption had occurred

The silence that followed was different—deeper. No one moved without permission now. Eyes stayed fixed on notebooks, hands trembling slightly as they wrote. He spoke clearly, flawlessly, uninterrupted. And for the first time that day, his left hand brushed the edge of his textbook and caught the light—a gleam of platinum, with a deep blue sapphire sunken into the band, subtle but unmistakably expensive. No one noticed. They never did. No one in that room knew what that ring meant. No one knew the woman he had publicly crushed was the one who shared his home, his name

But he did.

And though his face betrayed nothing, and his tone never softened, he knew she would be quiet the whole walk home. He would let her be. He would open the door, set down his bag, and eventually find her in the kitchen or curled on the sofa. He wouldn’t apologize. But he’d place her notebook in front of her, lean down with steady hands, and calmly go over everything