Shadows of the Old Schoolhouse

It was 5:30 AM, and the sky had yet to fully brighten. The corridors of the old school building were permeated with the scent of dust and aged paper; half the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling were dead, while the remaining ones seemed superfluous in the morning light. As Kanzaki Toru passed the third floor with the fire inspection clipboard he had retrieved from the equipment room, his own footsteps were the only sound in the entire building.

He stopped in front of the archives room on the west side of the third floor. This door shared an outer wall with the adjacent storage room, and the pipes Ishizaki had stepped on while climbing over the wall were right outside the window. He took out the old key Shiina Hiyori had given him; the lock clicked open on the third try. A smell of aged paper, even stronger than in the hallway, wafted out, mingled with faint traces of mothballs and mildew. He didn't turn on the lights, instead sweeping his flashlight over rows of iron-gray filing cabinets.

The three students Ryuen Kakeru had disposed of last semester—two expelled due to framed perjury, one on long-term sick leave. When their names appeared in Horikita's compressed files, they were merely text, but their original records, including copies that had never been submitted to the Disciplinary Committee, should still be here. This was likely what Ryuen had sent Ishizaki to find. The fact that Ryuen dared not come himself, bypassed the formal Disciplinary Committee retrieval process, and only dared to send Ishizaki to climb the wall, indicated that this place indeed held something capable of threatening him.

He found the folder on the bottom shelf of the last row of cabinets. It had a light brown kraft paper cover with no title, only a pencil-written serial number and a string of dates. He opened the folder.

Inside were five pages of handwritten interview transcripts. The edges of the paper were yellowed and frayed, but the handwriting was clear. The name of the Disciplinary Committee officer in charge was signed in the upper right corner, stamped with the Student Council's official seal. The record detailed the mediation process of a cross-class dispute from the previous semester. The party being mediated was a Class D boy named Tanaka, who was accused of stealing personal points from a classmate. The mediator was Ryuen Kakeru.

Kanzaki Toru read the transcript word for word from beginning to end. Tanaka's testimony was self-contradictory—the first page said, "I didn't steal it," the second changed to, "I only borrowed it," and by the third, under Ryuen's persistent questioning, it became, "I took it, but I didn't mean to." From the third record onwards, Tanaka's handwriting became noticeably sloppy, with numerous signs of repeated erasure. The final page contained only a single line of trembling script: "I confess. Please do not notify my parents."

He proceeded to unfold the attachments. Beside a hand-drawn classroom seating chart, Ryuen had marked several arrows in red ink, all pointing to another name—"Sato." Attached to the record was another student statement, this one provided by Ishizaki. In that statement, Ishizaki claimed to have personally seen Tanaka going through Sato's bag during free time in PE class. The signature had been altered, and the dates were chronologically inconsistent.

Comparing these pages with the electronic Disciplinary Committee records found by Horikita from the previous semester, he immediately realized the crux of the matter. Tanaka's handwriting showed abnormalities starting from the third page, and Ishizaki's signature date as an eyewitness had been changed twice—all of which had been smoothed over in the final Disciplinary Committee case file. What Ryuen had submitted was a clean version where "the facts were clear and the evidence was conclusive," while this original transcript, hidden deep in the filing cabinet, clearly recorded the pressure under which Tanaka had been forced to confess. The very process of Ryuen's mediation was a process of coercion. And at the end of Ishizaki's eyewitness statement, in the remarks column, was a line of tiny pencil writing: "Ishizaki Daichi privately admitted afterwards that he had never witnessed the incident."

He flipped back to the first page to re-read it, confirming the role Ishizaki had played. From start to finish, that dispute, which Ryuen had personally settled, had only targeted two students—the "victim" whose items were stolen, and the "eyewitness" who had appeared out of thin air. Both were named Ishizaki. The student named Sato was another of Ryuen's rivals in Class C, and following this incident, his authority as class representative had been completely hollowed out.

He took out his phone and photographed the entire file page by page. As he reached the fifth shot, a faint sound suddenly came from the end of the corridor. It wasn't a mouse, nor a window blown open by the wind; it was the sound of soles rubbing against the old wooden floor, deliberately softened. He extinguished his flashlight, leaned against the back of the filing cabinet, and suppressed his breathing to the absolute minimum. The footsteps drew closer—the sensation of soft indoor shoes, light in weight, rhythmic, and calm. It wasn't Ishizaki, it wasn't Ryuen, and it lacked the heavy, full-footed impact typical of the athletes in the hallway.

Someone else had come to the old school building at this hour, and they knew the lock to this archives room had been opened. Kanzaki Toru closed the folder and slid silently into the deepest corner between two rows of cabinets. The footsteps lingered outside the archives room door for less than half a step, then vanished.

The person hadn't entered; they had merely confirmed that the door had been opened.

He counted to one hundred and twenty in the darkness, and once he was certain there was no movement in the hallway, he stood up and returned the file to its original place. Walking out of the old school building, the morning light had just crested the campus wall, and the sound of students running early on the track crunched against the sand. He stood in the shadows of the old building's back door and took another look at the handle of the door he had opened. A small, barely perceptible trace of fabric remained on the arc of the iron handle—it wasn't left by his own fingertips, confirming that someone had indeed lingered outside after he had entered the archives room.

His terminal vibrated with an encrypted message from Karuizawa Kei—

"Someone reported to the Student Council last night that your cross-class group report contains frozen classified files. The trail leads to the old school building."