Chapter 194: The Unspeakable Reflection

Inside the pure white Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

After confirming the stats and usability of the newly rolled items, the group wrapped up this round of simulated training.

On the way out, Chris left the capsule holding the pilot-type mech with Miyabi Nagumo.

Ryuuen, walking beside him, saw it and curled his lip. He didn't say anything about it, though — he just flipped the Soul-Release Blade backhand to Kiriyama Ikuha.

Not that either of them had gone soft-hearted all of a sudden, generous enough to hand divine-tier gear to upperclassmen for free.

It was simply that pilot-type mechs had a brutal skill floor. Apart from Ryuuen, who could bully one into obeying him thanks to his cyber-ascension route, the only people in all of Advanced Nurturing High School who could actually operate the thing were Miyabi Nagumo and Kiriyama Ikuha.

With their own year's exam nowhere close to being called, hauling the mech out just to let it sit idle was a pure waste of resources.

And there was more to it than that. Take a man's gear, and you take on the debt.

In the exams to come, the moment either of them ran into a student from their class, they'd be expected to pay the kindness back — protection first, no questions asked.

Basic give-and-take. Nobody in the room was stupid enough to overlook it.

Their nerves, though, stayed drawn tight all the way to eight o'clock that night.

Several years even pooled their points to open the Time Chamber for a joint training session, grinding Jogo and Muzan through the simulation over and over. The Black Sphere still showed no sign whatsoever of announcing an early exam.

The upperclassmen said nothing out loud when they realized it, but the tension visibly drained out of their shoulders. At last, they could breathe.

"Looks like even the presiding god needs a day off." Miyabi Nagumo wiped the sweat from his brow, his tone weighted. "A few more records like tonight and we might actually pin down the pattern behind the Black Sphere and the presiding god — and then we can schedule everyone's rest days around it."

Chris was happy to let that happen.

He'd never intended to send the Black Sphere in tonight anyway.

If the students down there wanted to hunt for patterns inside despair, wanted a scrap of security and a little sense of achievement out of it… where was the harm in playing along on something this trivial and letting them think they'd guessed right?

It was nominally a "nurturing" program, after all. Call it a battle of wits.

Speaking of which… if this was about nurturing, were the teachers the school currently had still good enough?

Chris let his thoughts wander.

Forget the ordinary subject teachers. Even Tokinari Tsukishiro, who was no slouch in a fight, would be a one-shot corpse in the Black Sphere instances as they stood now.

Never mind that a raw beginner could drop ten S Points on a Combat Suit and shrug off bullets, basically a pocket-sized superhuman.

Was he really going to make the students develop supernatural power entirely by trial and error?

Chris turned it over.

'An instructor module… might not be out of the question at all.'

Koro-sensei from Assassination Classroom, Rayleigh from One Piece, Jiraiya from Naruto, or Gojo Satoru from Jujutsu Kaisen — every one of them would make an excellent mentor.

The only problem was that, Koro-sensei aside, none of them came from the same world. To learn Haki, ninjutsu or cursed techniques…

you'd need the "qualification" first, wouldn't you?

Armament and Observation Haki from One Piece were manageable enough, being built on developing human potential.

But ninjutsu and cursed techniques ran on Chakra and cursed energy — proprietary fuel.

For cross-world mentors to teach without friction, the system would obviously have to open a channel for exchanging Chakra and cursed energy.

'Which starts to sound a lot like the exchange system in the presiding god's space from Terror Infinity…'

Chris shot the idea down almost as fast as he'd had it.

S Points were hard enough to come by as it was.

If he opened too many power-up channels and split those points, nobody would have the budget to even sample them all. Combat strength would end up broad and shallow, and in the end only a handful of front-runners would benefit.

A moment's thought, and he had it.

'Better to borrow the way magnetic-field power spreads in Sea Tiger.'

When mentors like Gojo Satoru or Jiraiya were materialized, the cursed energy or chakra on them would propagate automatically through the corresponding Time Chamber teaching scenario — like a meme, or like radiation.

Any student who entered that space and stayed long enough would naturally pick up the seed of that discipline.

Zero to one. Breakthrough complete.

Of course, the perk would be strictly limited to students who spent class evaluation points and went to the Time Chamber to train of their own will.

Chris had no intention of letting anyone freeload.

Still, all of that was for later. Right now, the Revival Match in The Cabin in the Woods mattered more. The instructor module could be slotted into the system as a clear reward once the Revival Match was over.

And to open the Revival Match in a way that followed naturally from everything else…

Chris lifted his eyes and made his decision.

He'd have to run the upperclassmen's exam against the Bone King first.

The weekend.

Because time inside the Hyperbolic Time Chamber ran at such a wildly different rate from reality, everyone who had spent yesterday on edge over a Special Exam or advance test that might drop at any second found the tension thinning out over the real-world daylight hours — leaving something closer to emptiness behind.

Even Akane Tachibana, confirmed for the next advance test, had done something unheard of and put on casual clothes, heading down to the bustling shopping district to walk around and get some air.

After all, outside the Time Chamber it was nearly impossible to find a way to raise your own strength meaningfully in reality within a limited window.

Without items and bloodline enhancements, you could polish your martial arts to godlike heights and still not survive a casual punch from a monster in the exam field.

That was a gap in raw numbers.

Rather than burn precious breathing room in reality on something futile, better to enjoy the moment.

Of course… that was the mindset of dead weight.

Akane Tachibana didn't consider herself strong, but she wasn't the kind of woman who'd let herself rot, either.

It was just that today was the weekend, the student council had nothing urgent on the table, and staying in the office would only wind her nerves tighter.

So she'd decided to get out and change her scenery — clear her head while she thought through how to squeeze the most out of the points she had left.

It was while she was standing at a vending machine buying water,

catching sight of the several million private points that had appeared in her account balance out of nowhere, that Akane Tachibana realized she felt absolutely nothing.

That was what finally made her grasp how deeply the Black Sphere had reshaped her.

'Several million private points. And every single person in the school got them.'

Akane Tachibana murmured it under her breath, her gaze unfocused.

'Once upon a time, twenty million was enough to move someone into a different class. Enough to make a name that should have been expelled vanish off the list…'

'But now, no amount of private points is anything more than a pretty string of digits.'

'It can't buy a life. It can't buy peace of mind.'

Akane Tachibana shook her head with a bitter smile.

Even so, the sum was hardly small change to her.

She'd come out to relax. If she could use it to buy the kind of haute couture or luxury cosmetics she'd never have dared consider before, and please herself a little—

maybe… that counted as a decent form of self-comfort?

With that, Akane Tachibana straightened out her mood and stepped into an elegantly appointed luxury boutique.

She dipped her head politely, exchanging a greeting with a student from the school who was on her way out.

But before she could get to the shelves and take a proper look at anything she liked,

a gentle, familiar voice came from her side.

"Tachibana-senpai?"

Akane Tachibana turned toward it, surprised. "Ichinose?"

Not that running into Ichinose here was strange — loving beautiful things was a woman's nature, and with money in hand now, coming out to spend it was perfectly normal.

Akane Tachibana just hadn't expected that a random stroll would put her, by pure coincidence, in front of one of the few underclassmen she actually knew well.

"Are you here to buy something too?" she asked before she'd really thought about it.

Honami Ichinose was in casual clothes today, her pink hair falling smooth over her shoulders.

She waved a hand with a smile and lifted the two kraft paper bags she was carrying. "Nope. Amasawa in my class had something urgent come up, and I was heading out for daily necessities anyway, so she asked me to pick up the clothes she'd had made here a while back."

Akane Tachibana nodded, her gaze drifting over Ichinose's still-bright face — and then, as if something had taken hold of her tongue, she asked, "Ichinose, are you… busy right now?"

Honami Ichinose considered it for a moment, then shook her head with a smile. "Not really. We're trying to confirm the Black Sphere's pattern, so we're waiting until after four to see whether an exam gets opened early on you upperclassmen's side, and then we'll decide whether to go train in the Time Chamber. Until then I'm free."

Something loosened in Akane Tachibana's chest at that answer.

If Ichinose had genuinely been busy, she'd have been too embarrassed to intrude for the sake of her own small moods.

"Then… would you mind walking with me for a bit?" she ventured.

Honami Ichinose blinked, then made a soft sound of agreement. "Sure."

The truth was, Ichinose had only told half the story.

She was "free," yes — but the schedule she'd set for herself was packed.

Her original plan had been to drop off Amasawa's clothes and then go straight to Chris, to see how his cultivation of the Ki technique was coming along and talk over whether the technique could really be spread around by spending class evaluation points.

After that she had to hurry back and put together the next list of newcomers headed for the advance test with Kushida Kikyo.

But looking at the heavy, hollowed-out set of Tachibana-senpai's face, the reflexive gentleness Ichinose carried for other people won out, and she decided this senpai buckling under pressure came first.

The two of them walked side by side through the busy shopping street.

Ichinose followed Akane Tachibana in and out of several high-end stores and watched her buy an armful of obviously expensive cosmetics and clothing — and never once saw the relief a shopper is supposed to wear after spending.

If anything, that fine-boned face stayed exactly as tight as before.

So when the bags in Akane Tachibana's hands were about to overflow, Ichinose reached over and took a few of the heavier ones without making a thing of it, asking softly, "Senpai, are you… very tense right now?"

Akane Tachibana's steps stalled. "Is it… that obvious?"

Ichinose tilted her cheek.

She looked at the tension around the older girl's eyes and brows, at the way her gaze kept sliding away.

In the end, the kind-hearted girl decided to leave her some dignity.

"It's not that bad, honestly," Ichinose said gently. "It's just that I went through something similar once, felt the same way, so maybe I'm just picking up on it…"

Akane Tachibana's eyes settled on the polished marble floor tiles and stayed there.

The brave words she'd meant to force out turned over in her throat and came back out as a sigh.

"I don't even know what's wrong with me, exactly."

She murmured it half to Ichinose, half to herself. "I just feel… like the pressure's crushing me."

"Logically I know that quietly eating myself alive out here doesn't help anything. But every time I start thinking about it… the thoughts just spiral."

She let out a self-mocking laugh. "Ah. Maybe it's because I don't have a spare life for mistakes anymore, so I'm too scared of dying. It's left my nerves a little raw."

Honami Ichinose lowered her lashes.

She didn't answer right away, taking a moment to think it through properly.

"Senpai, I know that from where I'm standing, saying this to you might sound like I'm talking down from somewhere comfortable."

"But please believe me. I mean every word!"

Ichinose stopped walking and spoke with total sincerity. "At the very beginning, I was exactly where you are now."

"I worried every moment that I'd die at some unknown point. And I worried even more that the people I cared about, the ones I treasured, would get hurt because I wasn't strong enough."

"After a few Black Sphere exams, watching someone like Shiranami-san — someone I wanted to save — slip away right in front of me… I lost my way for a while too."

"Senpai, do you know what finally pulled me out of it?"

Akane Tachibana stared blankly. "What?"

Honami Ichinose looked at her, and then her face bloomed into a smile.

"Because I realized I had no choice at all. Because I knew that drowning in past pain and future fear would only make the present worse."

"But… the real reason I could stand up again was probably Senpai."

"Senpai?"

It took Akane Tachibana a second to catch up and realize she meant Chris.

"Mm." Ichinose nodded hard. "He's genuinely strong, and he sees things through to the end. With him out in front as a goal, I don't get lost in the dark."

She took Akane Tachibana's slightly cool hand and looked straight into her eyes.

"As for you, Senpai — I don't know what's really weighing on you, deep down. But…"

"Better to do the thing and regret it after than to do nothing and die full of regret!"

"Go and do what you want to do… and even if something does go wrong—"

Ichinose smiled, and made the promise that was hers to make. "As long as I'm still breathing, Senpai and I will bring everyone back. Every single person we can possibly save!"

Listening to that declaration — not one impurity in it, a girl standing squarely in the light — Akane Tachibana stood frozen for a long moment.

"Ichinose… thank you."

Honami Ichinose checked the time and knew she had real work to get to.

She waved with a smile. "I'll head off, then, Senpai."

"If you're ever feeling low again, or there's something you can't work out, come find me any time!"

"I will."

Akane Tachibana stayed where she was, watching Ichinose's back recede.

Only when the girl had vanished completely around the corner—

her fingers curled without her meaning them to, nails digging hard into her palms.

Her lashes lowered halfway, the violet light in her eyes churning dark in the shadow.

In the end she let her shoulders drop, like someone accepting a verdict, and drew a deep breath.

Just as Ichinose had held something back earlier to spare her pride, Akane Tachibana hadn't told her the whole truth either.

It wasn't that she'd meant to deceive her. She simply had no idea how to say it out loud.

In everyone's eyes — and in her own, originally — her anxiety came from wanting to hoard enough S Points to strengthen herself, all so she could pull Horikita Manabu out, or even bring him back to life.

But…

Now that she was staring down life and death every single day, forced to interrogate what she truly wanted—

Akane Tachibana had discovered, with something close to horror, that the protagonist who kept surfacing in her mind, the one whose presence made her feel safe, wasn't the Horikita Manabu she'd admired for years…

She tipped her head back and leaned weakly against a shaded wall of the mall, her eyes lost, at a complete loss.

"Could it be…"

"Have I really… betrayed the Student Council President, deep down?"

…

While Akane Tachibana leaned into that corner, sunk in doubt about herself,

the protagonist in her mind was already standing inside a spacious gymnasium.

He had gathered all four of the girls chosen earlier to enter the instance with him and form pacts with [Contract Beasts].

"Since this is the first time anyone's used an item like the [Instance Card], I can't be sure what the rules of the instance it rolls will look like," Chris said, laying it out for the four of them in a serious tone.

"I don't know whether it'll work like the 'extra instances' I've been through before, where nobody except the permanent Qualified One is allowed to use their own items."

"So once we're inside, stay close to me at first. We'll see how it plays out."

"Either way, I've got [Crazy Diamond]. As long as you don't do something suicidal and get one-shot, keeping you alive shouldn't be a problem."

Hiyori Shiina pressed her lips together once he'd finished, thinking it over. "It's lucky Chris-kun is the permanent Qualified One, and that the presiding god stated outright you aren't subject to the instance world's suppression… If even you got restricted, we'd be in real trouble this time."

Beside her, Hayasaka Ai nodded.

She didn't actually believe the instance they opened would curb their supernatural abilities.

But taking the long view and planning for the worst was never wasted effort.

Hayasaka Ai didn't mind that kind of caution at all.

If anything, watching Chris stand there so composed—

it reminded her of President Shirogane back at Shuchiin.

'If President Shirogane had power like Chris's… I wouldn't have to worry one bit about him and Lady Kaguya.'

After that quiet pang of reflection, Hayasaka Ai slowly raised her head.

Chris had already lifted his wrist and was working the virtual interface on the Black Sphere Watch.

Then—

Chris pressed confirm.

Hayasaka Ai's vision went black.

— End of Chapter —

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