On Monday of the second week of summer vacation, the door to the empty classroom on the third floor of the Old School Building was pushed open from within. Ryuen Kakeru had spent an entire week there alone. He was not hiding; he was making up lessons. Sakagami had emailed him the schedule. There were no credits, no grades, and no records that would enter his file. Only three lines: Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Location: the classroom on the third floor of the Old School Building where Ishizaki had been cornered last semester. Task: restore, page by page, every falsified record from last semester, including annotations, signatures, dates, and the original handwriting before alteration. The remarks section contained one sentence—"This is the final lesson. Once it is completed, all frozen clauses related to the Disciplinary Committee under the Old System framework will be unfrozen. Your name will no longer appear in any unresolved case files."
He saved the email in an encrypted folder, alongside the analysis report on the bloodstains on the drainpipe from the night Ishizaki climbed the wall and the ruling that rejected Kondo's group for fabricated statements in the Uninhabited Island freshwater crisis assignment. He had personally completed every document, from the original records of false testimony to the literature review for Shared Pool Allocation, from the unquantifiable "bird's nest" annotation in the observation report to the final system notification showing one hundred percent completion of his independent tasks. Now, only the final lesson remained—restoring the original handwriting before the alterations, page by page.
There was only one old desk and two chairs in the empty classroom. In the corner against the wall sat the fluorescent tube Ishizaki had left there last semester and the sports drink Sudo had left behind. The tube