On the fourth day of wooden sword class, Yamashiro Takuma placed several wooden swords across the rack as soon as he arrived, without handing them out to the children right away.
He first had everyone stand empty-handed in a semicircle, his gaze sweeping across faces that had grown more focused after several days of sparring. The wind on the field was mild, and the grass targets at the distant range swayed lightly. Fine dust rose from the ground beneath their shoes.
"You learned how to spot doors these past few days," the teacher said. "Today, you'll learn not to enter them."
Kiyo froze for a moment. "Why wouldn't you go in if you see a door?"
Standing nearby, Takuya's mouth twitched. "Because some doors are there for you to see, not for you to walk through."
That sentence nearly formed a line with what the teacher had said two days ago—"Sometimes, that's a door meant for you to see"—except today it had been singled out and turned into the lesson itself. The moment Che heard it, he knew this class would be difficult. Finding opportunities and seizing timing were hard enough, but harder still was suppressing the urge that said, If I see it, I have to go in.
That urge did not exist only in sparring.
Ever since he had come here carrying old memories, whenever he saw a path that looked like a turning point in events, he had always found it hard not to fill in what came next. But reality was not a fixed doorway put on display for an audience. It changed. People changed. And he himself had already stirred up many small things within it. What wooden sword class trained, in truth, was the same kind of vigilance.
Once the rules were announced, they