The next morning, faint marks from the wooden stick still lingered on Che's palm.
Sosuke's words from last night—"half a beat slower"—hadn't faded with sleep. When he washed his face, the water touching his palm still reminded him of that flicker of haste before the stick rose. When he reached the ninja academy, he took his ordinary pen from his sleeve pouch, paused half a beat, then placed it on the right side of his desk.
Yamashiro Takuma arrived a little earlier than usual.
Before the blackboard had even been fully wiped clean, a new roll of record paper had been placed beside the podium. It was narrower than the paper they normally used for practice, but longer, its edges pressed perfectly flat when rolled up, as though it was meant to be hung up for everyone to look at again and again. The moment Kiyo entered the classroom, his eyes locked onto it, and he lowered his voice. "Are they announcing whose handwriting is the ugliest?"
Morita Yu didn't even raise his head. "If that's the case, at least you won't fail."
Kiyo clutched his chest and sat down, looking deeply wounded yet forced to acknowledge reality. As Che looked at the roll of paper, a flicker of wariness rose in him. Anything publicly written out at the ninja academy was rarely just a record of schoolwork. Once a name went up on the wall, with space beside it for explanations, people would start remembering more than whether you could do something or not. They would remember why you could, why you couldn't, and whether your name would be put in the same category as someone else's.
Yamashiro Takuma hung the paper on the right side of the blackboard. As expected, it was a group performance record sheet.
Names