The wind had not stopped since early morning.
It was not strong enough to knock someone sideways, but a light breeze that kept circling through window cracks and around doorframes. It made the corners of paper rustle softly, made the back of the classroom a little cooler than the front, and occasionally made the bell inside Saori's sleeve softly tap against the fabric.
Yamashiro Takuma stood before the podium, listening to that faint sound. He did not tell anyone to close the windows. He merely wrote a sentence on the blackboard:
From the back row to the front row.
Kiyo looked up at it for a long while. "Are we practicing projecting our voices today?"
"That's the one thing you're not lacking," Morita Yu replied.
Yamashiro Takuma set down the chalk. "Today, we're practicing relaying messages. Not passing them loudly, but passing them accurately."
The moment he said that, Che's heart first settled, then tightened again.
Relaying messages sounded simple, but for him, it hit exactly the most troublesome spot. He was too prone to smoothing out a sentence as he heard it, filling in gaps, finding better ways to phrase it. But once he did that in the middle, what reached the front was no longer the original message.
Yamashiro Takuma divided the class into several vertical lines. The child at the very back of each line would first hear a sentence from the teacher, then could only whisper it to the person in front of them, passing it forward one by one until the student in the front row said it aloud. No one in the middle was allowed to turn around to confirm anything, nor were they allowed to add explanations just to make the other person understand better.
Che was placed in the middle. Rina stood