chapter02 · 039-ep39

Episode 39: "Checking the Answer"

The seat at the very back of the hall hadn't been reserved for guests or the press.

I asked an Agency official afterward. It was a seat for the general public, assigned by lottery.

Meaning he'd entered the lottery. The man who'd built clan Genbu in a single generation had seen the official notice, applied, and waited for his name to be drawn.

When the applause stopped and I looked over again, the seat was empty. I couldn't find him or his worn envelope anywhere in the crowd.

Twenty years of observation, and I'd lost track of a single person. ...No, that wasn't it.

I hadn't lost track of him. A man who never let anyone see his back hadn't been able to show me his face.

◇

That night, seven pairs of shoes wouldn't fit by the door of the six-mat room. Only Maru-kun's boots had to wait outside on the stairs.

"Pops, time to finish what we started."

Maru-kun shook that metal flask. The one we'd poured a centimeter from on the eve of our fight in the Abyss and left sitting on a rock.

"Everyone's got a teacup, right? These are all the cups I own. Don't break them."

I'd cooked the promised potful of rice, and it vanished in ten minutes. The report meeting and certification ceremony were done, the broadcast crews from around the world had finally cleared out, and at long last, we could celebrate.

After the liquor had gone around once, I brought five brown envelopes out of the closet.

"Today's ceremony is over, but there's one more thing. ...In eight years, I never held a graduation ceremony for any of you."

Inside wasn't certificate paper. I'd walked as far as the stationery store, then changed my mind. It wasn't like me. Instead, I'd cut out the last blank page of each student's notebook—"Footwork," "Breathing," "Load-Bearing," "Shortest Route," "Gaze Guidance"—and used those.

"Graduation approved. Rei Kenjo. I have nothing left to teach you. Go with your head held high."

All five said almost the same thing. A coach only has so many words.

Rei-kun took his in both hands and didn't move for a long while. "...I'll frame it."

Mio-san inspected what was inside her envelope. "Additional note. The date is today. Not two years ago."

"Graduation can be dated the day you receive it."

"Additional note. Then I graduated today. I'll correct the record. ...That is all."

She opened that thick "Complete Course Record" to show me. Its last page, formerly blank, had been filled.

"Final lesson: Abyss. Sensei was the same as always. Verification complete. That is all."

Maru-kun raised his envelope reverently. "Already know where it's going on the wall," he laughed. His voice sounded a little damp.

When it was Yagarasu-kun's turn, I opened the third of his notebooks first. The last line. "He's the only one who mistakes it for coldness"—and at the end of it, in red ink:

"Correction: mistook. Past tense."

"The correction I promised. In red ink."

"...Yeah."

With that, the world's most efficient assassin tucked his graduation certificate into the deepest part of his coat.

Kokoro-chan pressed her envelope to her chest, then gave a small smile.

"This makes... two for me."

"The original's in your notebook. This is a ceremonial reissue. Saint-sama has to appear in public, so I thought you should have one you can display."

"...Yes. I'll treasure both."

"S-Sensei! What about mine!?"

"You're still enrolled, Hina-chan."

"No fair!"

"You don't look pleased. Let me put it another way. —I'm not ready to let you graduate yet."

"...! Th-then that's fine!"

The faces of the five strongest people alive said that was hardly fine. But if she thought it was, it was.

As the night wore on, the teacups were rinsed and refilled again and again. No one talked about ranks. It was just a party for the strongest classroom in the world.

◇

The next morning, I knew who was at the door before the bell rang.

Footsteps came up the outside stairs, one slow step at a time, as if testing the rust.

I opened the door. Togakushi Gen stood there. No representative, no secretary, no shadow of a black car. In the eight years I'd worked for him, I'd never seen my former employer in just an ordinary suit.

"...May I come in?"

"It's small."

Two teacups in the six-mat room. The head of my old clan sat where the state and a representative of that same clan had once sat.

Togakushi didn't touch his tea. He set the old envelope on the tatami and slid it toward me.

"I meant to give you this at the ceremony yesterday. ...At the last moment, I couldn't."

Inside was a copy of an old report. "Joint Selection of New Recruits — Observer's Record." Dated twenty-five years ago. In the remarks field, words in a younger, sharper hand:

"Hiiragi Shinichi, seventeen. Ordinary physique. Ordinary reflexes. Unlikely to rise far."

"But his eyes are too good. He watches older explorers move and rewrites what he sees in words in his notebook. Asked why, he says, 'I can't learn by feel.' You don't find eyes like those even once in a hundred people. —An interesting young man. Remember him."

"That's my handwriting from when I was thirty," Togakushi said. "Eight years ago, when I signed the request to hire you, I'd forgotten this. I saw the B on your record and thought I could get you cheap. That was all."

His thick fingers curled into fists on his knees.

"I saw what you could be. Then the measuring stick I made crushed you. What my own eyes found, my own chart erased over twenty-five years. ...I won't ask you to forgive me. But I thought the man who wrote this ought to be the one to return it."

Togakushi Gen placed both hands on the tatami and bowed deeply.

A man who approached things head-on and left them head-on. This was how he apologized.

I stayed silent a while.

I read the twenty-five-year-old writing from the beginning again. Ordinary physique. Ordinary reflexes. Unlikely to rise far. —All of it true. My eyes had been good from the start.

And then I laughed.

"Please raise your head, Chairman. ...Let me tell you something you don't know."

On the way home from that joint selection, one of the instructors had told the dejected seventeen-year-old, "One of the big shots observing said you were interesting." The instructor never told me who it was.

"With an ordinary body and ordinary reflexes, I stayed in this industry and kept writing notebooks because of those words. Someone out there—just one person—saw value in my eyes. So I figured they were worth improving."

I set down my teacup.

"Chairman, you were the first person to call me 'interesting.' ...Your assessment was the first student of my coaching life. I spent twenty-five years observing it, putting it into words, and helping it grow. —What do you think? It grew into a pretty good assessment. Good enough to rewrite humanity's common sense."

Togakushi raised his head and tried twice to say something. The voice that had called me a parasite in that meeting room was nowhere to be found.

"...Are you a monster?"

"No. A coach."

After a while, Togakushi took a second envelope, a new one, from inside his suit.

"A report. I'm stepping down as Genbu's chairman this month. As my last official decision—I approved all sixteen of your proposals. The training wing will open for free to lower-rank explorers. Standardized retreat criteria, shared reports, all of it. ...Sorry that signature came twenty years late."

"It's a good signature. An approval doesn't become invalid just because it's late."

Then I stood and opened the closet.

"Chairman. As it happens, I've got something I failed to give you, too."

The sixth brown envelope. I'd spotted him at yesterday's ceremony and lost the chance to hand it to him in the crowd.

Togakushi opened it with a puzzled look—and froze.

"Graduation approved. Togakushi Gen.

At thirty, your eyes saw correctly. It took twenty-five years to prove it.

You can remake a measuring stick as many times as you need.

I have nothing left to tell you. Go on to what's next with your head held high."

"...I don't deserve something like this."

"You don't need to deserve a graduation. All you need is to be the person taking the next step. And besides—"

I gently drew the twenty-five-year-old observer's record toward me. I'd keep this. An heirloom, I suppose.

"If I don't graduate my first student, I'll never finish checking the answer."

At the top of the outside stairs, Togakushi turned back once before leaving.

"Hiiragi. ...Would it be all right for m—for me to watch your course?"

I didn't point out that he'd almost said it in his old-man way. People return to themselves with age.

"Of course. It's for beginners."

Down the rusty stairs went a fifty-five-year-old new student, as slowly as he'd come, but this time with his head held high.

◇

When I went back inside, two teacups and an old observer's report remained on the tatami.

By the wall stood cardboard boxes holding a little over a hundred notebooks.

"The man who raised humanity's five strongest." Whenever I heard that, I'd always corrected it to myself. They were the ones who grew. I only stood beside them and observed.

Today, the correction didn't come.

The "interesting young man" from twenty-five years ago had apparently become a properly interesting man. ...The first and last time I'll say that about myself.

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

【Answer checked. All twenty-five years of it.】

【I was a good coach. —That is all. Verification complete.】

◇

And then came the morning after everything was over.

I woke at the usual time, washed rice, and, just as always—turned on the streaming equipment.