Some lessons gave no sign of where they were leading on the surface, but when you truly looked back, you realized they had gathered all the scattered threads ahead into one place.
That day, Yamashiro Takuma neither took them to the training ground nor opened the demonstration room. He simply had everyone remain in the classroom and place on their desks the practice sheets from recent weeks, their pebble records, sparring summaries, and that folded paper bearing the words "Don't prove it yet."
Kiyo looked at the papers spread all over his desk, his face scrunching up. "Is Sensei making us look back on how we embarrassed ourselves step by step?"
Morita Yu didn't even raise his head. "If that's all you get from looking back, then all those previous lessons really were wasted on you."
After everyone had laid out their papers, Yamashiro Takuma did not begin by calling out who had written well, nor did he ask who had improved the most recently. He merely wrote a new term on the blackboard:
Outside Hand.
The moment those two words appeared, the classroom first fell silent, then filled with faint confusion. Unlike "stop," "watch," or "report position," it did not look like an action at first glance. Nor was it like "Don't prove it yet," which, though weighty, at least let you feel which string in your heart it touched. Outside Hand sounded like the name of a ninjutsu, yet not quite.
"What does it mean?" a child in the front row asked.
Yamashiro Takuma set down the chalk. "It means that many times, when you think you're facing the person in front of you, there are actually other hands exerting force alongside you."
As he spoke, he gave the simplest example first. "In wooden sword class, you think