Chapter 107: Doing Bad Things in Chabashira Sensei's Room
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At this moment, a slightly dull ringtone suddenly rang from Chabashira's bed. Someone was contacting her.
This unexpected situation caused Rin's expression to shift slightly. His USB flash drive was still plugged into the port of Chabashira's mobile phone!
"Who's calling me at this hour? Is it Chie?" Chabashira muttered as she stood up. Rin subconsciously reached out and pressed her shoulders, pushing Chabashira back down.
Caught off guard, Chabashira was pushed down into her chair, her round and perky buttocks landing squarely on the stool.
"…"
"…"
Both Rin and Chabashira fell silent.
Chabashira glanced at Rin's hand still resting on her shoulder, her sharp eyes narrowing slightly. Her gaze was filled with coldness and a hint of dissatisfaction.
"Rin, what are you doing?"
"Well, I just thought it's tough for you, Chabashira-sensei, grading all these papers. Let me get your phone for you. Please, just stay seated!" Rin quickly withdrew his hand from Chabashira's soft shoulder and hurried toward the bed.
Chabashira continued to watch Rin's retreating figure, her eyes full of suspicion. Why did this boy feel so… off?
Rin put his hands under Chabashira's pillow and calmly retrieved the USB drive before taking out her phone.
Then Rin hid the USB flash drive in one hand, turned around to face Chabashira, took two steps forward, and handed her the still-ringing phone.
"Chabashira-sensei, the caller ID says 'Chie.' I'm guessing Hoshinomiya-sensei wants to invite you out for drinks again."
Chabashira's gaze shifted from Rin to her phone. Seeing the name "Chie" displayed on the screen, her face showed a mix of weariness and exasperation.
"Thanks."
Chabashira took the phone from Rin's hand, and she immediately frowned as she held it.
"Why is my phone so hot?"
Indeed, the phone felt as if it had been running some high-load application, almost unbearably warm to the touch. The overheating was a direct result of the hacker software Rin had just run through the USB flash drive.
"Hmm." Rin showed an uncertain expression and said, "Maybe it's because I was sitting on the bed earlier and accidentally put your phone under me, Chabashira-sensei?"
At this, Chabashira's pretty face darkened. She had the sudden urge to throw the phone at this exasperating student's head.
"You mean to tell me you sat on my phone until it got this hot?"
"No, Chabashira-sensei, I took your phone from under your pillow," he corrected her.
The realization struck her—he hadn't been sitting on her phone at all. And who would even do such a thing? Who would put someone else's phone under them?
Chabashira began to stare at Rin with growing suspicion and scrutiny, noticing that something was definitely wrong.
Under Chabashira's scrutinizing gaze, Rin remained perfectly calm. He blinked his eyes innocently, revealing an innocent expression, and said, "I really don't know why your phone is so hot, Chabashira-sensei."
Though Chabashira's intuition told her that the sudden heating of her phone was related to him, the boy's expression and demeanor were too normal, without a trace of guilt or unnaturalness. His calmness only deepened her suspicion, yet left her with no evidence to act on.
Someone once said that a man's IQ when lying is second only to Einstein, so Rin, who was quick-witted, expressed his guess.
"Chabashira Sensei, maybe the battery on your phone is faulty? You'd better go to a repair shop to have it checked quickly, or it might overheat and get damaged."
It did make sense that a faulty battery could cause the phone to heat up.
Chabashira directly refused to answer Hoshinomiya Chie's call and turned off her phone.
"I'm going to the repair shop to have someone check my phone. As for you..."
Rin, understanding and cooperative, replied, "It's late now, I should go back and rest."
"Alright, I'll take you out."
Chabashira sent Rin out of the dormitory and left the teachers' dormitory building with him. At an intersection, Chabashira and Rin separated. She went to the mobile phone repair shop, while Rin returned to the first-year student dormitory building.
Rin held the still-hot USB in his hand as he walked along the road. He smiled and whispered to himself, "Although Chabashira-sensei noticed something was wrong because of the abnormal heating of her phone, in the end, things went smoothly."
The hacking software developed by Rin did not implant viruses or anything like that into Chabashira's phone, so even if Chabashira asked the staff at the repair shop to check the phone's internal software, she would not find anything suspicious.
In the end, Chabashira could only consider the phone's heating issue an unsolved mystery.
In fact, Chabashira never thought that Rin was a hacker who had stolen the contents of her mobile phone through the software in the USB flash drive.
After all, in everyone's eyes, Rin was just an ordinary boy of sixteen or seventeen years old.
How could a teenager of this age possibly have the ability to write software on his own?
He was not considered a genius in the field of networking and software.
In reality, Rin was very fortunate. After Chabashira took her mobile phone to the repair shop, the staff there heard that her phone was inexplicably hot and assumed it might be related to the battery.
Without even inspecting it thoroughly, they simply replaced the battery in Chabashira's phone with a new one.
"The specific data has been copied down, so now comes the hard part. I need to sift through the data and locate the permissions for external communication," Rin murmured to himself.
However, the thought of the tedious and complicated work that lay ahead gave him a headache.
"Let's just do it. There's nothing else to do this late at night anyway," Rin said, trying to motivate himself.
But then he paused and reconsidered.
"No, I still have to read Whose Body? that Shiina lent me. She said it's her favorite classic, and if I don't read it, I'd be letting her down."
Sifting through the enormous amount of data to find the permissions for external communication would take a lot of time.
Moreover, Rin wasn't in a hurry to establish contact with the outside world, so the matter of the USB flash drive could be postponed. For now, he decided to focus on finishing Whose Body?, the book Shiina had lent him, before dealing with the data.
At this moment, as Rin walked toward the first-year dormitory building, he suddenly heard a prompt from his narration system.
[The arrogant and aloof Horikita Suzune is in conflict with a senior student.]
[If the host doesn't arrive in time to stop it, Horikita Suzune will be severely punished by the senior, and it is very likely that she will be beaten black and blue.]
Hearing this, Rin's expression immediately shifted.