chapter01 · 002-ep2
Episode 2: "It Was Supposed to Be Just the Basics"
Viewer count: 【1】.
I spent a while just staring at the username—【Amaha Hina】.
E-rank explorer, Amaha Hina. D-rank promotion exam: four straight failures.
When you've spent twenty years in a corner of the industry poring over death reports and exam records, there are names you can't help memorizing. Hers was famous in the worst sense. "A hard worker, but hopelessly devoid of sense." "Failing four times is a problem that comes before talent even enters the picture." The kind of name that gets used as joke material in guild waiting rooms.
That girl—in my course, of all places?
"...Well. Whoever's watching, what I do stays the same."
That night's stream, she never said a single word the whole way through. The viewer count stayed at 【1】 until the moment I hit the end button.
It was after I'd cut the stream that I noticed something strange.
The archives of lessons one and two. The comment sections nobody was supposed to be reading were packed tight with questions.
【12:34 In the lesson on standing, you said "don't ride your heel too much." Is riding your toes too much also bad?】
【23:05 How do I fix the habit of my shield-side shoulder dropping?】
【41:50 "Don't stop breathing"—does that go for the moment you take a hit, too?】
Twenty-three of them, all timestamped.
I read one and sat up straighter without meaning to. ...Good questions. Every last one of them was the kind that only occurs to someone who has actually tried what the course covered. Three days into streaming, and she was already out there testing it.
I forgot all about cooking rice and wrote replies to all twenty-three. A few hundred characters apiece. By the time I noticed, it was morning.
Not that it was enthusiasm or anything. Answering questions is the work I've done for twenty years. In other words, routine.
...That's what it was supposed to be, anyway.
◇
Fourth night. The viewer count went to 【1】 the instant the stream started.
【Good evening. Thank you for your replies on the archives. I read all of them three times over.】
"Thanks. Three times is overdoing it, I think."
【Um, so. There's something I'd like to ask you about.】
A short pause, and then a URL went up. Official record footage from the Explorer Association—last month's D-rank promotion exam, examinee number seventeen. The record of Amaha Hina's fourth failure.
【It's the recording of my exam. Would you watch it and tell me what's wrong? The guild instructor told me "everything."】
"Everything," huh.
"I'll play it."
The mock combat zone. She failed to handle a thrust from the examiner that could not kindly be called fast, and forty seconds in, she'd been rolled out of bounds. I see. Brutal. The kind of collapse that makes anyone watching from the sidelines want to say "everything."
But there's no such thing as a person whose "everything" is wrong. A collapse always has a first domino.
I rewound the footage and paused it at three seconds in.
"Yep. There it is."
【Huh?】
"When you lunge, your center of gravity floats at the start. Your heel leaves the floor too soon—before your first step is even out. So your upper body goes first, and your eyeline wobbles every single time. When your eyeline wobbles, you can't see the opponent's first motion. When you can't see it, everything you do lands a beat late. —That'll get you killed on the third layer."
For a few seconds, the comment section stopped.
【Wait, how can you tell?!】
"It's right there in the footage."
【That's three seconds out of a forty-second video! Not one of the guild instructors ever—】
"It's not the instructors' fault. People who can do it by feel just can't see the logic of people who can't. ...Want to try the fix?"
【Yes. Please.】
"A hallway at home is fine. Put a hand on the wall, and before you step in, grab the floor once with your toes. Like making a fist, inside your shoe. Keep your heel on the floor until the very last moment. Then go. ...That's all."
【That's all?】
"That's all. Dull, right? Probably shockingly dull. —But you'll stop dying."
It's a fundamental I did a thousand times, twenty years ago, when I was the most talentless man alive, so that I wouldn't die. In notebook terms, it's on the first page of the third one.
I wasn't teaching her anything special.
At the time, I truly believed that.
◇
—As it turned out, "dull" was not the word for it.
Amaha Hina, seventeen. In the hallway of her apartment building in the middle of the night, she stood with one hand on the wall.
(Grab the floor with my toes...)
Honestly, she was half in doubt. Four failures in four years. The instructors had given up on her, every one of her classmates had promoted ahead of her, and her mother had made her promise: "If nothing comes of it by the time you graduate high school, you quit."
Her "everything," all because of one single habit? No way. Impossible.
The only reason she tried anyway was simple: there was nothing else left for her to cling to.
One hundred times. Nothing but wrongness.
Three hundred times. All at once, she noticed her vision wasn't shaking after she stepped in.
Somewhere past a thousand, the hallway window started to pale.
A few hours' sleep, and that afternoon she dove into the second layer like always. The very edge of what an E-rank can solo. The goal: herb gathering, and something like an excuse to herself called "combat training."
At a corner of the passage, she ran into an ash hound.
A second-layer standard. A dog-type that leaps at you from a low crouch. This thing was her weak point. The instant it jumped was completely invisible to her; every time, she got blasted away shield and all, tumbled, and ran. Four years, always like that.
The ash hound growled. Hina grabbed the floor with her toes.
—The world changed.
It wasn't that everything went slow motion. Not a skill, not magic. Her eyeline just wasn't shaking. With nothing more than that, for the first time in her life, she "saw" it. The instant before the ash hound leapt—the hard sink of its hind legs. That first motion.
(...I can see it)
Half a step to her left-front. Just that, and the ash hound snapped its jaws through the empty air where she had been standing and bared its defenseless flank. The sword she brought down followed the same arc as her practice swings and struck true.
Watching the monster scatter into grains of light, Hina sank down right where she stood. The hand gripping her sword was shaking. Not because she was scared.
The "way the world looked" that four years and hundreds of near-deaths and all the laughing hadn't taught her—one sentence.
One thousand toe-grips in a hallway.
"...What... is this..."
She scrubbed roughly at whatever was running down her cheeks, and she never noticed. A little way down the passage—the camera of a streamers' party on their way back from the third layer had caught the whole thing, by pure chance, in the corner of the frame.
◇
That night's stream. Viewer count: 【1】.
The moment it started, the comment section scrolled with back-to-back posts.
【Sensei】
【I saw it】
【I saw the ash hound's first motion. For the first time in my life, I dodged first, then cut】
【Sensei, please teach me more】
In front of the mic, I went quiet for a moment.
...I see. So you saw it.
"I'd rather you dropped the 'Sensei.' ...Well. Fine."
I opened the second notebook. In the classroom where there had been no one, one student was sitting.
"Then today we'll talk about how not to die after you dodge. Lesson five—'Where you put your first step decides your second blow.'"
What I taught was just fundamentals. Written in my notebooks for twenty years, never once taught to anyone in words, doable by anyone—just fundamentals.
That any of it might go and change the world—not a thought of it had crossed my mind yet.
◇
Same night, right around when the date rolled over.
A comment went up on the dungeon archive of Gamma, a mid-tier streamer.
【1:22:08 Look at the far left of the frame】
【What is this girl's evasion? Did she dodge the ash hound's leap after seeing it?】
【Wait, isn't that gear E-rank? ...Hold on. Isn't this that girl? The four-in-a-row failure?】
2 a.m. Someone clipped those twelve seconds.