“Name’s Noa Origami, she’ll be thirty-nine years old this year.”
“That surname, Origami…”
Uh huh, Aikawa nodded without turning around. “Akagami, Iigami, Ujigami, Ekagami, and Origami. The bloodlines that represent the progeny of the so-called Four Gods and One Mirror. Then again, Noa’s not a direct descendant, she’s from a collateral branch, so her connection to the main family is weak. Which means that this academy itself has only a tenuous relationship with the Origami clan. Probably closer to Rule, actually.”
“Rule… Isn’t that Japan’s ER3?”
ER3 was more like a community while Rule was more of a network, but what they actually did wasn’t too different. So this place was something like the ER3’s feeder program…maybe?
“Bingo. Forty percent of the graduates go on to Rule. The rest, it depends… I guess the valedictorian or whatever might go to ER3. Since they’ve got the higher brand recognition. Seems like that Hagihara chick might be headed in that direction, don’cha think?”
Of course Aikawa (unlike me) would know all about the academy’s internal affairs, and about its “graduates.” Hm, to put it in more everyday terms, they seemed to be “cultivating human resources,” more or less. In that sense it really was a training facility, and the term “educational institution” wasn’t so far off the mark after all.
And yet. A school where no one’s allowed to drop out, where they nab you if you try to run away, where students refer to themselves as tacticians, a school which they themselves deride as Hang ’Em High─can you really call that an educational institution?
“Originally, Sumiyuri─Hang ’Em High’s parent organization was established by Noa’s mother. Back then, though, it was a relatively…only in comparison to now, of course, but it was a relatively normal school. A year and a half ago, her mother hanged herself. And after Noa took over, things went off the rails. It’s difficult to say exactly how─”
“It’s was the air itself,” said Hime-chan, in an unusually crisp tone. She had her back to me so I couldn’t see her expression─but I’m pretty sure it had turned gloomy again. She was a second-year now, so the new Director had probably already taken over by the time she started here.
“I put up with it for a while after I ‘matriculated,’ even though it was an awful place. But things just kept getting more and more outs of whack… Hime-chan wouldn’t call a place where your friends die a ‘school.’”
“Damn right,” seconded Aikawa, fiercely stroking Hime-chan’s head, then picked up where the girl had left off. “But you know, it’s impossible to tell that it’s gone off the rails until you see it from the outside. With no point of comparison, you can’t distinguish normal and abnormal, so it’s only natural to see yourself as normal. And a school is a locked room that you can’t see into from the outside. The insanity works its way deep, deep inside─it gets out of hand, and now here we are.”
“Is there anyone else, Hime-chan? Any other students who think this is ‘abnormal,’ ‘off the rails’? Students who want out of a school like this?”
“Used to be.”
Those few blunt words were more than enough to shut me up.
“Despite what I said earlier…I don’t actually hate Noa Origami all that much. Sure, she rubs me the wrong way, that much is true. I need to have a word with her. She can’t view human beings as anything but numbers, she can’t view people’s deaths as anything but statistics. One person dead just means two people aren’t dead. She thinks numbers are everything. But you know…it’s not like I can’t understand her vision.”
“You…used to be friends, huh.”
“Kind of. Though we had a falling out two years back.”
So this is our two-year reunion, joked Aikawa. Though the humor seemed somehow forced. I had no idea why Aikawa, who was worlds better at deceiving people than even this humble nonsense user, would put on that little performance for us.
“Listen, Jun. Please don’t let your feelings get the better of you.”
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? The point of this conversation is to secure Ichihime Yukariki’s autonomy to drop out. I’m on top of it.”
“Glad to hear it.” I stretched languidly, feeling like a man who’d carried out his duties in good order, then said to Hime-chan, who’d been silent for a while, “Hey, when you get out of here, what’re you gonna do?”
“Good question,” Hime-chan replied. “I want to have a tons of fun.” Somehow this made it sound like she’d never done anything “fun” in her entire life. “I want a fun life where every days is Monday.”
“Sounds terrible.”
I let this sincere rejoinder slip, but my mind was elsewhere. It was stimulated. The weakest part of me─the nostalgic part, was being painstakingly and meticulously stimulated. Seriously…it’s not even that they were similar. They were the same, Hime-chan and her. In which case─I thought. Isn’t this a chance for repentance, a chance to wipe away my sins? I didn’t really think I could cancel out having broken a person by rescuing someone else─I didn’t even know how to go about rescuing someone, but─
“Don’t let your mind wander, nonsense user,” Aikawa slammed the door on my reverie. “Would you look at that, here we are at the top floor.”
She got the emergency door open without difficulty. Jun Aikawa, the all-around contractor, the jack-of-all-trades who had reached the pinnacle of achievement in every possible skillset. Be it mindreading, vocal mimicry, or opening locks, there was no one better.
We hadn’t gotten very far down the corridor when we came to a truly imposing door. Not the kind of thing that would ever be installed in a mere school. Forget about bulletproof, this iron door, this blast door, looked as if it could withstand a thermonuclear attack.
Aikawa gave a perfunctory knock (seemed like knocking was in vogue with her), but there was no response. Of course not. Well then, I thought, reaching for the doorknob only to discover that this great iron door didn’t even have one. No knob, and, like the backdoor downstairs, not even a keyhole. In its place there was a biometric hand scanner.
“Tch. Even I can’t do anything about this.”
“Really?”
“Even I can’t change my fingerprints, ya know. Himecchi. What’s the deal here?”
“All the doors in the faculty building are the sames,” Hime-chan gave a thorough explanation once prompted. “Only the teachers themselves can lock and unlock them. You put your hand on the scanner, right, and it locks. Then you do the same, and it unlocks.”
“Hanh. So no chance of a master key, huh… Wish we’d brought Kunagisa along.”