chapter01 · 001-ep1

Episode 1: "The Man They Called a Parasite Coach"

"Your coaching philosophy is just parasitism."

The top-floor conference room at the headquarters of Genbu, one of the industry's giant clans. Across a polished long table, Chairman Togakushi Gen said it like settled fact.

Fifty-five years old. A man who'd made his name as an A-rank attacker in his active days, then built the industry's biggest clan single-handedly in a single generation. His voice had that flatness only things already decided can have.

"Rei Kenjo. Mio Hyodo. Shishiomaru. Yagarasu. Kokoro Shirose. —Five S-rank explorers. That much is true, Hiiragi-san. You were the personal coach of every single one of them. I'll admit that."

"Thanks."

"But it's been two years since the last one went independent. All five. Every one of them. There's nobody left in your hands now."

Togakushi rapped the table once with a thick finger.

"Just think about it. The kind of talent that reaches S-rank gets there even if you leave it alone. All you did was stand next to it, making a face like you were the one raising it. ...It's parasitism, Hiiragi-san. Parasitism on talent."

A single sheet of paper slid across the desk. Notice of contract termination. Someone had even thoughtfully stuck a tab on the signature field, so I wouldn't sign in the wrong spot.

If I wanted material to argue back with, I had it.

Three years spent shaving 0.2 seconds off the first motion of Rei's lunges. Fourteen hundred hours rebuilding the breathing behind Mio's incantations. The weight distribution across the soles that supported Maru's "hardness." The training procedure for Yagarasu's dark adaptation. The gaze guidance that doubled Kokoro's healing range. All of it is still there in my notebooks.

But—I can't prove any of it.

The results of a job called coaching become the student's own the moment they're complete. Rei's speed belongs to Rei. Mio's magic belongs to Mio. That's obvious, that's how it should be, and that's how I chose to raise them.

In other words, the proof that you raised someone vanishes the moment they graduate.

That's the kind of work I'd done for eight years—twenty, if you count the stack of notebooks.

"...Well. Fair enough."

I folded the notice in half and tucked it into my jacket's inner pocket.

"All five of them can survive without me now. Which means my work is finished. —Thank you for everything, all these years."

I bowed and left the conference room. I caught a glimpse of Togakushi looking caught off guard for just a second. He'd probably expected me to cry or raise hell.

At forty-two, I don't have the stamina left for either.

When I got off the elevator, the new girl at the front desk smiled and said, "Hiiragi-san, thanks for your hard work." She still didn't know that, as of tomorrow, I was a man who wouldn't be coming here anymore.

"Yeah. You too."

I walked out of the Genbu headquarters building. The June evening sky was disgustingly clear.

◇

Rent: 58,000 yen. A thirty-two-year-old apartment building. Four cardboard boxes were stacked against the wall of the six-mat room.

Inside the boxes: notebooks. A hundred-odd of them.

Each cover had a date and a name written on it. "Kenjo Rei — Footwork." "Hyodo Mio — Breathing." "Shishiomaru — Load-Bearing." —And at the bottom of the oldest box, a few dozen notebooks with no name at all. Those were from my own active days.

Me, Hiiragi Shinichi—my rating as an explorer was B-rank, for life.

I hit my ceiling at twenty-two. Slow reflexes. Average magic reserves. Unremarkable physical output. In the face of the dungeon's unreasonableness, effort was no substitute for talent.

But there was one thing I could do longer than anyone else.

Observation—and putting it into words.

The movements strong people did "by feel"—I'd watch them, break them down, turn them into words. Why you didn't die with that particular way of planting your foot. Why your magic didn't leak with that particular way of breathing. The things everyone called "sense" and nobody ever explained, I gave names to, one after another.

It came too late to make me strong. But the year I turned thirty-four, retired from active duty and moved into coaching, a seventeen-year-old sword trainee with nowhere to go drifted my way.

—That was Rei. And the first thing I hammered into that kid was, once again, the "just the basics" nobody ever teaches.

Eight years since. Five raised, five graduated, and today, the world decided it no longer needed my work.

"...Right, then."

No point staring at the boxes forever in this damp six-mat room.

I pulled out the thing I'd impulse-bought last week and left sitting around ever since. A full set of used streaming gear, 30,000 yen. The clerk at the secondhand shop had asked, "Starting a stream, are you?" and I'd told him, "Just killing time."

It was supposed to be a joke. But now that I thought about it—

What's in those twenty years of notebooks was never S-rank-exclusive. If anything, the opposite. Everything I ever put into words was "fundamentals for not dying without talent." Words meant for the most talentless person I ever knew: me.

And the ones who need those words most right now are—beginners. Whoever they are, wherever they are.

Plug in the cables. Stand up the cheap mic. On the camera's preview screen appeared a middle-aged man in tired glasses. Even I had to admit: a spectacularly unglamorous shot. For the account name on the streaming site, I hesitated a little, then settled on "Shin." I didn't have the nerve to use my real name.

Channel name: Shin-san's Beginner Dungeon Course.

My finger stopped, just for a moment, over the Start Streaming button.

"...Well. Not like anyone's going to watch."

I pressed it.

In the corner of the screen, the viewer count—【0】.

Figures, I thought, smiling, and opened my mouth to an empty comment section. Strangely enough, my voice came out calm.

"Good evening. I'm Shin. I'm going to run a course on dungeon strategy for beginners. I'm a former coach. ...Former."

Nobody laughed. Of course not. Nobody was there.

"First, let me make one declaration about what this course is going to do. —Ninety percent of explorer deaths happen at depths shallower than the fourth layer. Most people die by the third."

That's not a statistic. It's the gut sense of a man who spent twenty years in a corner of this industry, reading death reports the whole way.

"And the world writes that off as 'not enough talent.' But from everything I've seen, that's wrong. In the way the dead moved, there was almost always the same gap. —The fundamentals were never taught to anyone, in words."

The people who can do it by feel can't teach it. The people who can't don't have the words. So this industry's "fundamentals" have stayed hollow the whole time.

"In this course, I'm covering only those fundamentals. No flashy techniques. No talk about the strongest gear. It's dull. Probably shockingly dull. —But you'll stop dying."

Viewer count: 【0】. Comment section: silence.

Even so, I opened the first of my notebooks. The first line, written twenty years ago by a me who was trying not to die.

"Lesson one: 'Before we talk gear—please let me start with how you stand.'"

In an empty classroom, the course that would go on to rewrite humanity's common sense of dungeon strategy—began like this, quietly.

◇

It was the morning of the third day of streaming.

The archive views hadn't even cracked two digits. Today, again, I cooked rice, flipped through notebooks, and prepped for the night's stream. A perfectly wholesome unemployed life.

That night. I hit Start Streaming like always, and I doubted my own eyes at the viewer count display.

【1】.

"...Oh."

My first living viewer. I straightened up without thinking—then my eyes went to the username, and my hands stopped.

It was a name I recognized. Failed the promotion exam four times running, the whole industry turning "should've quit already" into a running joke—the name of an E-rank explorer, famous as a washout.