I Accidentally Built a Harem of Girls Who All Hate Each Other

The heavy, dark wood doors of the Student Council office loomed before me like the gates to the underworld. I had survived the stern warning of Ms. Sato, but that was just the preliminary hearing. Now it was time for the main trial, and the judge, jury, and executioner were all the same person. And I had just seen her at her absolute most vulnerable. That did not bode well for the defendant.

I knocked softly. There was no reply.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was silent and still. Reina was already there, seated at her throne at the head of the mahogany table. She wasn't doing paperwork. She wasn't reading a book. She was just sitting there, her hands folded neatly on the polished surface, staring into space. Her hair, now dry, was combed to perfection. She was back in her immaculate uniform. The mask of the Ice Queen was firmly back in place, but I could see the faint red tinge on her earlobes, the last lingering trace of her profound humiliation.

She didn't acknowledge my entrance. The silence was absolute, a thick, suffocating blanket of pure, concentrated fury. I shuffled over to my designated prisoner's chair at the far end of the table and sat down, my bag thumping softly onto the plush carpet.

The silence stretched. One minute. Five minutes. Ten.

It was a new form of torture. Far worse than yelling, far worse than giving me menial tasks. It was a cold, calculated campaign of psychological pressure. She was letting me stew in my own anxiety, forcing me to imagine the myriad of horrible punishments she was devising in her brilliant, terrifying mind. My imagination, unfortunately, was up to the task. It conjured images of me cleaning every window in the school with a toothbrush, alphabetizing the entire library's collection by the third letter of the author's middle name, or being offered up as a ritual sacrifice to the Kendo Club.

Finally, just as my nerves were about to completely shred, she spoke.

"You will not speak of what happened today," she said, her voice a low, flat monotone that was devoid of any emotion. It was colder than ice. It was the absolute zero of human speech. "You will not speak of it to anyone. You will not think of it. You will erase it from your memory. As far as the world is concerned, it did not happen. Is that understood?"

"Yes," I managed to squeak out, my throat dry.

"Your... intervention... was unnecessary," she continued, the word 'intervention' dripping with venom. "I was in complete control of the situation."

I didn't dare argue. I just nodded, my head bobbing up and down like a dashboard dog.

"However," she said, and my blood ran cold. The other shoe was about to drop. "Your actions have created... complications. You have drawn the attention of Miyamoto-san, a simple-minded nuisance who will now undoubtedly seek you out. You have further piqued the interest of Nurse Mori, a woman whose interests are... predatory. And you have confirmed my suspicions about Sato-sensei's unusual level of concern for your well-being."

She was dissecting the event, not as a personal humiliation, but as a series of strategic setbacks that were all my fault.

"Worst of all," she said, her crimson eyes finally lifting to meet mine, and they were burning with a cold fire, "you have made me indebted to you. A debt I find... intolerable."

I swallowed hard. "You don't owe me anything, Kujou-san. I just did what anyone would have done."

"No," she snapped, a flicker of emotion finally breaking through her control. "That is not true. No one else would have dared. No one else would have had the audacity to approach me in such a state. Only you. And now, that debt must be settled. Immediately."

'Here it comes,' I thought, bracing myself. 'The kendo sacrifice.'

She stood up and walked over to the tall bookcases that lined the wall. She scanned the titles for a moment before pulling out two thick, heavy, leather-bound books. She walked back to the table and dropped them in front of me with a thud that echoed in the silent room.

The titles were in German. "Grundzüge der Mengenlehre." "Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik."

"What... what are these?" I asked, staring at the incomprehensible text.

"University-level treatises on set theory and the foundations of arithmetic," she stated simply. "Your homework for the evening."

My jaw dropped. "My homework? I don't even speak German!"

"That is an irrelevant detail," she said, her voice flat. "Your task is to translate the first chapter of each book into Japanese. And you will not simply translate the words. You will write a supplementary report, no less than two thousand words, explaining the core mathematical concepts in each chapter. It will be on my desk tomorrow morning before homeroom."

I stared at her, then at the books, then back at her. "That's... that's impossible! It would take a professional translator days to do this! A math professor weeks to analyze it!"

"Then I suggest you get started," she said, a cruel, satisfied smirk finally gracing her lips. "The debt for saving my life is that you will, for one night, experience a fraction of my daily academic workload. Consider us even."

It was a punishment of breathtaking, diabolical genius. It was non-violent. It was academic. It was completely, sadistically, soul-crushingly impossible. She wasn't going to get me expelled. She was going to make me wish I was expelled.

"But... my other homework..." I protested weakly.

"Should have been completed during school hours," she retorted without missing a beat. She sat back down in her chair, picked up her own book, and began to read, a small, triumphant smile on her face. She had won. She had re-established her dominance in the most crushing way imaginable.

I stared at the German tomes of doom. My brain felt like it was melting. A thousand-word essay on safety, and now this. My GPA was going to die a slow, painful death.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A lifeline. Or so I thought. I furtively pulled it out under the table. It was from Yui. The ice had broken.

Angel: Status report. Are you alive?

My fingers trembled as I typed back, hiding the screen from Reina's view.

Noodle: Alive. Barely. The Warden has declared war. She's assigned me an impossible task. Translating two German math books by tomorrow.

I waited, expecting sympathy, outrage, a plan of action. Her reply came a minute later.

Angel: Good.

I stared at the message. Good?

Noodle: 'Good'?! How is this 'good'?! She's trying to kill me with homework!

Angel: Think, Noodle. She's keeping you busy. She's keeping you isolated. She's giving you a task so all-consuming you won't have time to 'accidentally' fall on anyone else. It's the perfect cover. You have a legitimate, Warden-approved reason to ignore everyone. Use it. We can work on Operation Fluffball while she thinks you're drowning in German.

I read the message again. And again. She was right. From a strategic standpoint, it was brilliant. Reina, in her attempt to punish me, had inadvertently given me the perfect excuse to be the "socially inert rock" Yui had demanded. I could hole up in my room, avoid all human contact, and no one would question it.

It was a prison sentence, but it was also a shield.

Noodle: You are terrifying.

Angel: I'm your handler. Now, accept the mission. I'll see what I can dig up online to help with the translation. We're in this together. Angel out.

I put my phone away, a new sense of grim determination settling over me. The task was still impossible. But it was an assigned impossibility. A mission.

I looked up at Reina, who was watching me over the top of her book, a smug look on her face.

"Is there a problem, Tanaka-kun?" she asked, her voice dripping with mock sweetness.

I met her gaze. "No problem at all, Kujou-san," I said, my voice steady. I pulled the heavy books towards me and opened the first one. The dense, alien text swam before my eyes. "Just getting started on my homework."

Her smirk faltered slightly, surprised by my sudden compliance. She had expected me to beg, to protest, to break. She hadn't expected me to accept.

The game had changed again. She thought she was punishing her prisoner. She had no idea she was actually arming her lab rat with the perfect alibi, all while his handler was feeding him intel from the outside.

It was still a nightmare. But at least now, it was a nightmare with a strategy.