chapter01 · 010-ep10

Episode 10: "The Truth About Graduation"

One in the morning. The apartment on the forty-second floor was too quiet.

In the darkened living room, Rei Kenjo replayed the archive of the stream that had ended a few hours earlier, starting from the beginning again.

"Shin-san's Beginner Dungeon Course — Lesson Twenty: How to Tie a Rope"

"More explorers die because they can't untie a rope than because they can't tie one."

On screen, Sensei demonstrated a slipped knot. Without looking at his hands. The same steps, the same tone as eight years ago. The world was starting to learn that he was the sort of person who'd teach rope knots the day after becoming the number one worldwide trend.

At some point, a training rope had found its way into Rei's hands. He could tie it without looking. It wouldn't loosen while bearing weight, yet if you pulled the end, it came undone with one hand in five seconds. When a collapse had left Rei dangling at eighteen, what had actually kept him alive wasn't swordsmanship. It was this knot.

...Back then, I didn't understand half the value of this lesson.

Now the world was receiving it for free.

Rei's gaze strayed to the edge of the screen. Behind Sensei was the six-mat room. Four cardboard boxes stacked against the wall. Inside them lay a hundred notebooks on how to make humanity's strongest.

He paused the video. Only the sound of his own breathing remained in the quiet room.

It was time to think about the thing he'd avoided thinking about.

◇

As a child, Rei Kenjo had been called a genius.

A six-year-old who knocked over the adults at his dojo with a wooden sword. At ten, he could reproduce a form after seeing it once. "He'll be humanity's strongest someday," the adults around him laughed.

Rei alone couldn't laugh.

Because whenever someone asked, "How did you do that?" he'd never been able to answer.

His body moved on its own. Before he knew it, he'd won. He didn't understand why either. Strength he couldn't explain couldn't be reproduced. Strength he couldn't reproduce might—one morning, when he woke up—be gone.

Every time someone called him a genius, Rei was afraid. His strength had no name.

As he grew older, the fear became real. On days his instincts clicked, nobody could touch him. On days they didn't, E-ranks knocked him down. His promotion exams all seemed to land on the latter. The examiners watched his recordings, wrote "rough," "sloppy," "self-taught," and stamped them failed. No dojo or clan would take in a swordsman whose form fluctuated so badly.

At seventeen, with nowhere left to go, he washed up in a corner of Genbu's training wing. There, an unremarkable middle-aged coach paused the recording of his exam at three seconds.

"Your center of gravity floats at the start of your lunge. That'll get you killed on the third layer."

Then the man looked away from the screen and into Rei's eyes.

"...Oh, and one more thing. It's not failing the exam that scares you. You're scared because you don't know why you win on the days you do."

Rei couldn't speak.

A man he'd known for three minutes had looked straight at a fear neither his parents nor any instructor had found in ten years.

"It's all right," the man said with a smile. "You can give every instinct a name. Give me three years. I'll get you to where you can explain your own strength yourself. —Then you won't have to be afraid again."

For three years, Sensei didn't teach him a single technique.

How to stand. How to retreat. Center of gravity. Breathing. Where to look. Gripping the floor with his toes inside his shoes. Sensei observed what happened to Rei's body on the days everything clicked, put it into words one piece at a time, and wrote it in his notebook. "That wasn't a coincidence. The toes on your back foot were gripping the floor. Let's give it a name." —One by one, the genius's instincts became language.

Strength with a name doesn't disappear. The bad days began to disappear instead.

That winter, the year they met, Rei became the first person in history to pass an E-to-C skip-level exam. The recommender field read "recommendation by an individual certified coach." When the question of printing Sensei's name came up, he laughed it off: "My name won't help sell anything."

From the fourth year on, Sensei began teaching less. Instead, he became the one who asked questions. "How would you name that movement?" —Rei was the one who answered. Little by little, the days when Sensei simply nodded grew more frequent.

He could explain it. He could reproduce it. So he wasn't afraid.

On the day he reached S-rank, Rei Kenjo swung his sword from the least frightening place in the world.

◇

It was the night two years and sixteen days ago.

When Rei came to report his promotion, Sensei served him tea in a cheap cup. "Congratulations," he said with a smile. Come to think of it, the man had never smiled over anything of his own. This was the deepest way he knew how to smile.

Rei bowed his head and made a request.

"Please stay my coach. For as long as you can. I'll arrange an exclusive contract, whatever it takes. I'll pay you myself."

Sensei put down his teacup and fell silent for a moment.

"No."

The answer came almost at once.

"...Why?"

"If I stay beside you, then every time you lose your way from here on out, you'll look for my answer. And that, Rei-kun, would make my height the limit of how high you can go."

"If it's your height, Sensei, I—"

"I'm B-rank," Sensei said with a smile. "That's no height to set as the limit for humanity's strongest."

"I really do have nothing left to teach you. There's no one on Earth who can add anything to your sword from here on. Now it's your turn to give your own instincts names for yourself. ...You can do it. I've handed you the method along with everything else."

Then Sensei took a stack of envelopes from his desk drawer.

Documents summarizing the requirements for founding an independent clan. A draft recommendation letter to the Association. The steps for leaving Genbu without a dispute, down to the order in which to visit the departments he owed thanks—everything was there. Rei couldn't bring himself to ask when Sensei had begun preparing it.

"Congratulations on graduating. Oh, and—keep making a fist inside your shoes even after you go independent. That's one you'll need for life."

"...Can I see you again?"

"Come by if you're ever in trouble. Though you won't be, not anymore."

That was the last night he'd seen Sensei until he bowed to him in the outdoor corridor of a thirty-two-year-old apartment building—two days ago.

Betrayed. Abandoned by his students when they went independent. That's what the world said. Apparently that's what they said inside Genbu, too.

They had it backward.

The students hadn't thrown him away. He hadn't been cast aside. Sensei had designed the graduation of every one of his five students, one at a time, in that desk drawer. So that his own height wouldn't become the limit of theirs.

◇

Rei looked out the dark window.

Two years and sixteen days since that night. He'd counted. With ridiculous precision, he'd counted the days until they met again. —Counting was all he'd done.

He'd stopped his finger over Sensei's name in his contacts hundreds of times, yet never called. After receiving a perfect diploma, he'd had no excuse to go back to the classroom. Sensei's plan had been perfect, and Rei had remained, perfectly, a graduate.

But, Sensei.

There's one page missing from your plans.

The one for yourself, after you've sent the five of us off.

Sensei alone remained in the classroom after all his students graduated. Then Genbu called a coach with no students a "parasite" and threw him away. Our graduations—five diplomas that should have been your badges of honor—became their excuse to exile you.

He could have looked into it anytime he'd wanted. As number one in the standings, one phone call would have done it.

He hadn't. He'd taken comfort in the pretty word "graduation" and pretended not to notice for two years.

A six-mat room that cost 58,000 yen in rent. Secondhand equipment bought for 30,000 yen. Rei quietly felt ashamed of the man he'd been two days ago, who'd seen a Sensei whose way of holding his teacup hadn't changed at all and could think of nothing better to bring him than tea leaves worth a month's groceries.

What was missing wasn't tea leaves.

There was a student named Hina in the classroom now. Someday she'd become Sensei's new pride. But—the matter of the five who'd graduated and never once returned to the classroom was something else entirely.

Rei picked up his terminal and opened the group thread for the five of them. It had barely moved since he'd gone independent. Mio Hyodo. Shishiomaru. Yagarasu. Kokoro Shirose. The last post was from two years ago, when Kokoro was the last to leave the classroom: "Hope you're all doing well."

Tonight, his finger didn't stop.

【Sensei's all alone. How long are you going to keep pretending you haven't noticed?】

Send.

At one in the morning, the notification should have lit up four screens somewhere in the world at once.

—Before a minute had passed, one read receipt appeared.