On Saturday afternoon, Kanzaki Toru sat alone by a window on the third floor of the Library for the entire afternoon.
Spread out before him was the structural plan of the Old School Building, which he had examined countless times. Several spots on the yellowed blueprint were circled in red, and he had marked the old staircase at the far end of the third floor—the one sealed behind a wall—three times. The old wooden cabinet embedded in the wall that Shiina Hiyori had mentioned should be somewhere nearby.
Sunlight slowly crept across the edge of the pages outside the window, while the sounds of turning pages and quiet keyboard taps mingled in the Library. He held a pen in his right hand, while his left absently rolled a mint candy between his fingers. It was the one Shiina Hiyori had placed in his palm as she passed by before he entered the Library, the same kind she had given Sakura earlier. She had left the candy and walked away, saying only, "The old cabinet's key isn't listed in the Academic Affairs Office's registry." In other words, even the school administration might not know the cabinet still had a key.
The mint candy felt cool against his fingertips. He popped it into his mouth, folded the blueprint and put it in his pocket, then stood up.
At four that afternoon, he met Shiina Hiyori in the corridor on the third floor of the Old School Building. The corridor was dim, with only one surviving fluorescent light flickering erratically overhead. Shiina stood before the sealed staircase, holding a flashlight and a ring of old keys. She handed him a greenish-bronze key, her fingertip lightly tracing its teeth.
"This belonged to a librarian who retired three years ago. She said this key could open all the old wooden cabinets sealed away in the archives on the east side of the third floor, but not the official filing cabinets in the Academic Affairs Office. Which ones it opens is a matter of luck."
The flashlight beam cut through the darkness in the corner, revealing the old wooden cabinet embedded in the wall. Dust had sealed the cabinet door shut, and green rust covered its copper lock. Kanzaki Toru crouched down and tried keys until, on the third one, the lock clicked softly, like a sleeping throat finally relaxing its closed vocal cords. The cabinet door swung open. There were no insects or mold inside, only a neat row of files with dark blue covers. The same seal was stamped on every spine: "Advanced Nurturing High School: Old System Trial Records."
He took one out at random and opened it. Though the pages had yellowed and grown brittle, the handwriting in ink was as clear as if it had been written yesterday. The first page bore only a handwritten title: "Inter-class Cooperation System Trial Summary (Seventh Edition)." Below it was a passage repeatedly circled and crossed out in red: "Under the cooperation model, Class Points will no longer be calculated independently for each class. Instead, they will be allocated through an intragroup Shared Pool. Class boundaries will be blurred, rendering the original class-versus-class competition mechanism inapplicable—this provision was abolished in the school's fourth year. The reason given was 'irreconcilable internal divisions.'"
Shared Pool. Blurred class boundaries. Competition mechanism rendered ineffective.
He turned the pages. The handwriting in the second half of the file was noticeably more hurried and messy than in the first. It was no longer in the neat format of formal meeting minutes, but read like raw notes someone had frantically written down as events unfolded. One passage, heavily crossed out but still barely legible, read: "During the second inter-class group experiment, multiple students were subjected to planned psychological pressure within their groups. One girl consequently applied for an extended leave of absence. The parties responsible could not be disciplined under school regulations, as the coercion took place entirely in the gray area of internal group discussions."
Beside it was a finer line of faintly inked writing, apparently an addendum: "The girl ultimately failed to complete the term and withdrew from school."
Kanzaki Toru's fingers lingered on the page for a moment. A gray area—pressure applied within the rules, coercion that couldn't be punished under school regulations, and students driven to withdraw as a result. A war of attrition, Cold War-style, forcing an opponent to break down within the rules. It was exactly like Ryuen's habit of skirting the edges of the rules and using others to do his dirty work. Ryuen was a student, and these records were about students too. The same methods, repeated by different people at different times. That meant this approach had never been Ryuen's invention. It was a current that had always lain hidden in the frozen history of this school.
Shiina Hiyori crouched beside him, the flashlight resting on her knee, its beam illuminating the pages in his hands. She quietly read every page he turned. When he opened the file to show her the words "withdrew from school," she fell silent for a few seconds and lightly touched the line with a finger—not caressing it, but as if touching something still very hot.
"Something happened inside Class C last term too. A girl was ostracized during a group project for two whole months. There were no rule violations, no violence. Everyone simply and silently excluded her." She paused there, looking at the silent ink on the page. "She later applied to transfer to Class A, but it was almost the same as leaving school. She became a completely different person."
"Was it Ryuen?"
"Not directly." Shiina withdrew her finger. "He just made the girl's best friend believe she'd stolen the class funds. No one doubted what he said, not even the friend herself."
Kanzaki Toru didn't press her further. He took photos of the key pages one by one with his terminal, then put the file back in the cabinet exactly as he had found it. Before closing the cabinet, he spotted something at the very bottom that didn't belong to any of the files: a thin meeting-minutes booklet with a teacher-meeting label stuck to its back cover. On the first page, Sakagami's name appeared more than once among the teachers in attendance, circled each time.
He recognized the handwriting in those circles. It was the same red ink used to circle the seventh provision of the Inter-class Cooperation System in the file they had just read.
As he carefully tucked the meeting-minutes booklet into his bag, Shiina Hiyori gently rested a hand on his wrist. She didn't grip it; she simply placed her fingertips over his pulse, as if checking for a heartbeat beneath a sheet of ice. There was little outward emotion in her eyes, but that pause spoke more plainly than any question.
"Some of what's in there may be much closer to the line than we expect. If you're going to investigate, Kanzaki, see it through. But don't do it alone."
He said he wouldn't. Then he stood, and together they closed the cabinet again. The old wood made a muffled sound as the door shut, and all the grains of its secrets sank back into the deep pool. A soft, steady new light spread slowly along the edge of the Illustrated Guide's pages. Beside Shiina Hiyori's page, a line of text appeared: "Echoes of History—Sharing the key increases Affection by 8. Current Affection: 45. Reward unlocked—Silent Interpretation, initial form."
Echoes of History. As they read the sealed records of those who had suffered, their fingers had paused over the same line. Their two silences had crossed decades and settled together across a thin page. The keys and records she had entrusted to him had also been engraved in the Illustrated Guide as trust.
By the time he left the Old School Building, the sky had turned deep blue. The air was still muggy, and insects chirred in waves across the lawn. He carried his schoolbag in one hand and still held the greenish-bronze key in the other. The small ring on its handle left a faint indentation in his palm. His preparations for the next stage would no longer be a one-track search. Before the inter-class group assignment was due, he would have to translate the contents of the records into their report, all the while staying alert in case Ryuen realized someone was digging through the ruins of the Old System for something useful.
And among all the report pages he was about to embark on, another thought lay hidden—one he couldn't yet share with anyone. The chill that had run up his spine when he closed the file wasn't just because of the past recorded in its pages. It was because he had seen himself in that past. The pattern of using methods within the rules that couldn't be punished to dismantle an opponent, the calm calculations that could make someone gradually break without ever striking directly—none of it was unfamiliar to him. This wasn't some foreign technique he needed to deliberately imitate. It was part of his instincts, steeped into him through countless training sessions in the White Room.
Putting these old pages away might also mean putting away a possibility that could rise from the depths of his heart at any moment.
He clenched the key, pressing it against the outermost layer of his clothes over his chest, and headed toward the dormitory.
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