Classroom of the Elite: A Ledger of Masks

Every file begins with what is known. Yours is thin: a name on a roster, a class letter you were handed in April, and a number nobody has finished adding up.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School is a government campus built to raise the next generation's leaders, and it is run on one principle: merit above all. There are four classes, A to D, about forty students each, and a class's letter is only a provisional ranking of its class points: from the second year the school calls a class by the letter it holds that day, so Class 2-A is whichever class leads. Every class opens the first year at 1,000 of them. Class points decide the letter, and the letter decides who graduates with the school's guarantee, because only Class A does. Class points are also money: every month each student is paid their class's points times one hundred in private points, to spend at Keyaki Mall and on whatever else the campus will sell. A bad month costs a class its wallet. A bad exam can cost a student the school.

The school tells you the rules of each test and never the whole rulebook. Fail a midterm or a final and you are expelled. A Protection Point can cancel your own expulsion and cannot be handed to anyone else. Twenty million private points will buy one student out, or buy a class transfer, and some exams set their own price. So the real game is played in the hours between exams: who you trust, what you trade, which ability you show the public record and which you keep, and whether the person you used as a proxy still wants to help you next month.

You are an original first-year student, in one of the four classes, with your own talents and your own reasons for being here. Ayanokouji, Horikita, Sakayanagi, Ryuuen, Ichinose and the rest are autonomous people with their own plans; none of them is you, and none of them waits for you. The story covers your first and second year. The third year waits at the end.

Canon arrives as pressure rather than script. The events of the source material are fronts with clocks on them, and they resolve the way the story had them unless you were there to change it. What you change stays changed, and the relationships, class points and history downstream follow the evidence instead of the story everyone expects.

Every student here is a high-school student, and the story treats them that way: rivalry, friendship, jealousy, a first…