chapter01 · 027-ep27

Episode 27: "The Students Strike Back"

A night without anything to teach is longer than I'd expected.

It was the second night of the course break. On my desk: the envelope from the state, five students' notebooks, and the tabs I'd left in them. Nine days remained until my deadline.

I hadn't gotten anywhere. More precisely, I'd been circling the same thought with meticulous care. None of the five on paper would die. The real Abyss wasn't paper. I'd spent two days confirming that hundreds of times.

Five minutes before eight, I closed the notebooks.

Tonight, I'd decided to stop thinking. I wasn't good enough at doing two things at once to watch a student's first stream while my mind was elsewhere.

I settled onto my cushion and, just to be safe, wrote three lines on a sheet of paper.

"Objective: watch my student's first stream to the end."

"Retreat criterion: none (but don't write a single comment)."

"After return: send her exactly one observation report with my thoughts."

What sort of dive was I planning, anyway?

At eight on the dot, the screen changed.

◇

A room with an unfamiliar white wall appeared. She'd probably borrowed the equipment; the microphone sat a little too far away.

"G-good evening. I'm Amaha Hina. ...A B-rank explorer."

She stumbled over the words. Her bow was so deep her head vanished off the bottom of the screen.

【She's here】

【Hina-chan's first stream】

【You can do it】

【She looks ready to cry before she's even started】

"Today I'm going to talk about my Sensei. I don't think I'll do it very well. This is my first stream, and I'm not as good at this as he is. ...So I'll do it the usual way. The way Sensei taught me."

She held up the paper in front of her. I knew that format all too well.

"Three lines before a dive. Objective: tell the world in my own words what Sensei is really worth. Retreat criterion: keep going even if I cry. Crying is within expected parameters. After return—get scolded by Sensei. That's everything."

【That retreat criterion lol】

【She planned for crying?】

【Wait, what's that last line?】

I nearly told the screen I wasn't going to scold her. Then stopped. No comments. I had three lines to follow, too.

"I registered as an explorer four years ago, and I stayed E-rank the whole time. I failed the D-rank promotion exam four times. ...Some of you might know about me. I was famous. 'The girl who failed four times.'"

She didn't make a joke of it. She laid out the facts like she was taking inventory.

"My guild instructor told me 'everything's wrong.' Every one of my peers got promoted before me. I promised my mother I'd quit if I hadn't shown any promise by the time I graduated high school. The night I failed for the fourth time, I decided I would quit. ...I really did."

The comments slowed.

"That's when I found a course with zero viewers. A tired-looking former coach was carefully explaining things to an empty comment section. —'Before we talk gear, please let me start with how you stand.'"

"I wrote questions under the archive, and the next day he'd answered every one. Twenty-three questions, several hundred characters each. ...For free. I hadn't paid him a yen, and he didn't even know who I was."

【Twenty-three individual replies lol】

【Sensei was Sensei from the start】

【I know. They're still in the archive】

"Then I asked him to watch my exam recording. My fourth failure, where I was knocked out of bounds in forty seconds. Sensei stopped the video after three seconds and said—"

Hina-chan took one breath.

"'Your center of gravity rises at the start of your step. Your heel leaves the floor too early. So your upper body moves first and your eyeline wavers. When your eyeline wavers, you can't see your opponent's first move. And because you can't see it, everything you do comes too late.' —For the first time, somebody put four years of 'everything's wrong' in order. For the first time, the first thing that went wrong had a name."

"The fix was clenching my toes in the hallway. I did it a thousand times. The next day, I saw the ash hound's first move. The thing I hadn't seen once in four years."

She looked up from her paper.

"It wasn't talent. I know better than anyone in the world that I don't have talent. Words changed me. And words—can reach anyone. What they do can be repeated. Right now there are a hundred thousand 'me's in this classroom."

◇

Then she addressed the question the world was asking head-on.

"Everyone keeps asking, 'Can a B-rank command?' ...Um, rank is a number that says how deep someone can go with their own body. That was never Sensei's job."

"Sensei is the person who saw the three seconds no one had seen in four years of looking at me. The person who kept all five of humanity's strongest alive. The person whose forty-four lessons erased tens of thousands of nights when people would've died. If command means 'observe everyone and decide the order that gets them home alive,' then—I know exactly one person who's spent twenty years doing it."

Once she'd said it, she suddenly looked unsure.

"...Does that answer the argument? I'm not very good at winning debates. But I haven't lied once. The archives and exam records are all still there, so you can check every bit of it. Records do their work on their own once the writer's forgotten. ...That's Sensei's line, too, though."

The end went exactly as she'd predicted.

"If I hadn't met Sensei, I'd have died on the third layer. So whatever people around the world say... I—I'll always..."

She cried, but she didn't stop. The retreat criterion had been applied correctly.

With another deep bow that sent her head offscreen, her first stream ended. An hour long. An awkward, halting hour without a script or editing.

Which meant—every moment of it was real.

◇

This time, clips weren't needed.

Concurrent viewers reportedly topped two million by the end, and the moment the stream finished, the tag became a flood.

【#OurSensei A cave-in on the third layer. I'd laughed at 'set your retreat criteria before a dive,' but that rule got me home alive. Sensei, thank you for erasing one funeral—mine】

【#OurSensei My husband is an explorer. I married a man who writes 'three lines before a dive' every night. He came home tonight, too. That's everything】

【#OurSensei E-rank here. I passed my D-rank exam for the first time last month. The examiner said, 'Your fundamentals are good.' I've never been praised before】

【#OurSensei Watching from overseas. Saw every lesson with subtitles. Guilds in my country are fighting over the rights to translate the course】

【#OurSensei I'm not a student. I was rescued by one. Today I learned why the person who carried me out followed procedure so precisely】

By the time I stopped counting, there were tens of thousands of testimonies in languages from around the world.

"Can a B-rank command?" was still somewhere on my screen. But next to all those thousands of "I made it home alive," it didn't sound as loud anymore.

I suppose that's how the tide turns.

As promised, I didn't write a single comment. Instead, I sent one observation report.

"Reviewed your first-stream report. Full marks for the structure of your argument, your use of evidence, and your application of retreat criteria. One correction: under 'After return,' the planned scolding has been canceled. Well done."

She replied in thirty seconds.

"Sensei, that's not fair. I'd only just stopped crying."

Before bed, I wrote just two lines in my notebook.

【Amaha Hina's first stream. She can do things I never taught her.】

【Apparently I have a lot of students around the world I've never met. The classroom's larger than I thought.】

◇

That same night, somewhere deep in the bowels of a government office, the final seal was stamped on a document.

"Application to Change Secrecy Classification—Approved"

The occupation field held just three honest Japanese characters. The official at the desk who stamped it wouldn't learn what they meant until the next night.

◇

Just before midnight, an announcement image landed on the screen still flooded with the tag. A notice of a worldwide simultaneous stream, scheduled for eight tomorrow evening.

It came from four official accounts.

【Rei Kenjo · Official】

【Mio Hyodo · Official】

【Shishiomaru · Official】

And the fourth: a brand-new verification badge, created that very night, beside a name whose photograph was supposed to be blacked out on the S-rank standings.

【Yagarasu · Official】

Humanity's strongest swordsman, its strongest mage, its hardest shield, and—its most efficient assassin, who wasn't even supposed to exist officially.

As the world did a double take, all four posted the same one-line announcement at once.

"We're Going to Tell You About Our Sensei"