The Unerasable Name

Ryuen Kakeru sat at his desk in his dormitory, staring at the notebook spread out before him. It was not a computer or a terminal, but a genuine paper notebook. This type of notebook was most common in the White Room—it could not be accessed remotely, could not be deleted without leaving a trace, and every scratch of the pen faithfully recorded the trajectory of every revision. He had held this posture for nearly an hour, a capless fountain pen pinched between his fingers, the nib hovering half an inch above the paper, unable to descend.

Outside the window, the sky was transitioning into dusk, the late May sunset dragging a final ribbon of orange light across the gray high walls. From below the dormitory building came the sounds of a soccer ball being kicked and the chime of a vending machine dispensing change; everything was as mundane as any ordinary Saturday evening. But he knew this was not ordinary. His phone had just received two messages from two different people, the content nearly identical.

The first was from Horikita Suzune—no signature, no greeting, just a single line: "The Disciplinary Committee will re-examine three inter-class disputes from last semester at next week's regular meeting. Your name is on the witness list, not as a defendant." The second was from Kushida Kikyo. Her tone was far gentler, but the core message was exactly the same: "Ryuen-kun, I heard the Disciplinary Committee is reopening those cases from last semester. If you need me to testify, I am always here. After all, we organized the materials for the investigation together back then. You told me those were the truth."

All the truth. She had only said those three words, yet they felt like five needles precisely piercing the same acupuncture point. She was the one who helped him forge testimony; she was the one who "proactively assisted" at every critical juncture; she was the one who had Manabe use her phone to record the shoving incident at the equipment room door—and now, she could appear on the witness stand, smiling pleasantly as she testified before the Disciplinary Committee Chairperson.

He set the fountain pen down, the barrel clicking against the desk with a faint sound. The card Kushida held was not the sharpest, but it was the most precise. She knew he still had the video of Sudo, but she was also hinting—you have dirt on me, and I have dirt on you. We are both accomplices. But there was a subtle difference between accomplices: from start to finish, she had never signed her own name to any of the forged materials. He had.

He flipped the notebook to a new page and wrote two characters on the first line: Kushida. Then he drew three lines beneath it. The first line was labeled "Perjury Accomplice"—with a question mark beside it. He had signed his name, but the traces of her organizing all the materials as an assistant had not been completely erased; how far it could be traced depended on how long the records were kept. The second line was labeled "Manabe's Footage"—another question mark beside it. The chain of authority she used to borrow from Class C and the device ID of Manabe's phone were still there; it all depended on whether Manabe dared to appear in court. The third line was labeled "Horikita's Trump Card"—a final question mark. Horikita definitely had more in her possession, but she chose to send him a witness notice rather than a defendant notice, indicating she still had room to maneuver and was waiting for him to decide for himself which side to stand on.

He stared at these three lines for a long time, then wrote a line at the very bottom of the page: "Tomorrow's Disciplinary Committee meeting, witness stand. Ishizaki should go, but Manabe will not." After writing this, he put down his pen, closed the notebook, and pushed open the window, letting the evening wind, heavy with the scent of grass, pour in. On the field, a few underclassmen were playing soccer; a ball rolled onto the track, left uncollected, its long shadow cast by the setting sun resting on the white line. Ishizaki used to play there too; Ishizaki used to believe that doing errands for him would earn him a starting position. Ryuen stood by the window for a long time before putting the notebook back into the drawer.

He realized he was walking down a very long, downward slope—from the old school building to the gymnasium, from forging witnesses to bribing third-years. At this crossroads, he could still choose to turn back.

At ten o'clock on Sunday night, Shiina Hiyori pushed open the door to the library duty room. She had just finished the routine weekend inventory, shelving the last cart of returned books according to their call numbers. The lights in the duty room were still on, three monitors lined up in a row, the center screen displaying the index of the Old System she was currently updating. She walked to the desk and discovered something new beside the keyboard—an old, verdigris-covered key resting on a sticky note. The note was blank, devoid of words, save for a simple icon drawn in pencil: a book with a tiny shield drawn on its spine.

She recognized this key. It was the one from the archives on the third floor of the Old School Building, which she had previously lent to Kanzaki Toru. She kept it in her own drawer, yet here it was, not in the drawer, but on the duty room desk. This meant someone had entered the room while she was away, but had touched nothing else, merely taking the key from the drawer, placing it where she could see it, and drawing that symbol on the note. The way the shield was drawn was a private mark she had used in her Old System notes, appearing only in an encrypted memo she had shared with Kanzaki and Horikita.

She picked up the key and turned it over. A tiny label was stuck to the end of the key handle, printed with a library barcode that, when scanned, would redirect to the call number of a specific book. She opened her phone and scanned it—the barcode did not point to a book, but to an old file migrated to a backup server: Summary of Disciplinary Committee Recusal Applications. The page was blank, containing only a search box. She typed Ryuen Kakeru's name into the search box; no results. Then she typed Kushida Kikyo. The screen flickered and a prompt popped up: A record was marked for manual approval before migration. Search time: The day of the Disciplinary Committee's first regular meeting last semester. Operator: Mailroom Logistics Team substitute. Handwritten note in the remarks column: "Withheld from public disclosure at the request of the individual—confirmed by the assistant present."

She recognized the handwriting. It was not Ryuen's; it was the handwriting on the final index file signed by Mr. Sakagami before his retirement. But in the signature box at the end of the document, there was another confirmation stamp from an assistant; after high-definition magnification, the blurred blue mark vaguely revealed the shape of three characters.

The following Monday, the sunset light filtered through the blinds of the Student Council office, casting long shadows. Horikita Suzune straightened the record of Sudo's shoving incident—which had been tucked crookedly into the Old System supplementary documents—alongside the full set of operation logs organized by Kanzaki and the index comparison report from Shiina. She then walked toward the Disciplinary Committee, placing a photocopy of the timeline of all Ryuen's Disciplinary Committee applications during his time at school face-up on the very top, flanked by the silhouette photo of the server room captured by Sakura. No one saw when she placed it there, nor did anyone see how long she paused by the desk. Students passing in the hallway only saw her push the door open and exit, holding a can of black coffee that had long since gone cold, her footsteps as steady as ever.

She did not include the signature "Withheld from public disclosure at the request of the individual—confirmed by the assistant present" in the public attachments; instead, in her own memo draft, she compared it side-by-side with three of Kushida's handwritten materials from different periods. She locked the encrypted partition, opened the message box, and typed four words to Kanzaki Toru: Handwriting is a match. Then she closed her tablet.

At the same time, Kanzaki Toru turned off all his monitors at his dormitory desk and leaned back, closing his eyes. In the darkness, the spines of the books in the illustrated guide glowed with a soft luster. A new annotation appeared beneath Shiina's Silent Archive: "Key returned. She drew the shield herself." Karuizawa's Perception Resonance pulsed at a low amplitude, the signal-to-noise ratio unusually clean in the dead of night—she was working with Sakura to organize the final batch of image backups in Karuizawa's possession; those photos no longer needed to be hidden in encrypted folders. Sakura's frozen moments did not light up tonight; she no longer needed to rely on the shutter to confirm where she was. And behind them, a new name began to emerge in faint strokes at the end of the guide, not yet fully formed, but already bearing its first mark of ink.

There was once a question in the White Room: When all names can be deleted, how do you ensure the history you have written is not tampered with? The answer was to carve the names into the memories of more than one person. Make the cost of deleting one name the simultaneous deletion of everyone—and no one could do that.