Kurumi winced. I was probably doing the same.
The teacher was starting to yell something else, but the recording cut out.
“Oh, is that all you got that day?”
“Yeah… The teacher stormed out of the room, and the whole class had to go to the faculty office to apologize.”
“Typical! Boycotting their own classes. They pull that power play so often, I’ve started to wonder if it’s written down in their lesson plans.”
It was either a stock move, or they’d made it feel like one. It often seemed like this place had reduced teachers yelling at students to a mere formality. Schools were meant to be places of learning. If a student couldn’t solve a problem, wasn’t abandoning the whole class the antithesis of that? You’re a teacher—teach!
“Well, lemme cut out the usable part and clean it up a bit.” Kurumi narrowed her eyes and focused on the screen. “I figure we won’t have control of the broadcast booth for very long. We want this to be memorable, even if they stop us pretty quickly. Gotta have something impactful right at the start.”
“Is the one we just heard a good candidate?”
“Yep. Let’s just snip out the white noise at the start and use the rest.”
She pressed play, and the new clip started with “Do you want me to kill you?!”
Yeah, that’s pretty effective. Even played at low volume, that line made my heart skip a beat.
“Should we leave in the voice of the student getting yelled at?” she asked.
“Hmmm. Good question. The back-and-forth does make it seem like a routine event, but…”
“Let’s try it once more with both voices.”
“This is ridiculous. You’re dragging the whole class down!”
“…I know. Sorry.”
“If you’re not even gonna try, just go home. I don’t need a useless lump like you in my class!”
It stopped, and there was a long silence.
“I know I made this recording,” I said, “but I don’t like it. I can’t stand to listen to it.”
“Having the student’s voice makes it raw. Would that work for us or against us, you think?” Kurumi frowned.
I could feel the muscles in my face pulling into a grimace. We were using the teachers’ insults against them, just like we had with the eraser stamps. But this time, it felt especially unpleasant.
In Kurumi’s view, that was because we were including the voice of the victim. But I wasn’t so sure. I thought the reason it was so upsetting was because of how much we knew it would hurt our targets—the faculty.
Listening to the recordings made me realize just how wild the crap our teachers said really was. No educator should ever get so worked up they start dishing out death threats.
Playing this during the school festival and broadcasting to everyone what our classes were really like would be a huge deal. The school would look for a scapegoat, and they might even force one of the teachers to retire. That was certainly raw.
It was like we’d been fighting back armed with a squirt gun all this time, and suddenly we’d gotten our hands on real bullets. We weren’t just mocking people we hated—we were actively trying to eliminate them.
This recording would be fatal. And that knowledge made me hesitant and dampened my excitement.
“Kurumi, I don’t want to expose the student like that in front of everyone. Can we cut it down to just the teacher?”
“…Yeah. Then we’ll string a few other clips after it.”
Kurumi worked for a bit, editing out the student’s voice. She played the result back at double speed. She was doing a great job, but I got the feeling she was rushing things to avoid dealing with the reality of what we were doing.
She edited the other recordings the same way, snipping out the parts she wanted and pasting them into one long string of audio.
Every time we listened to our work, I felt a pressure building around my heart. It was deeply unpleasant work. I could never have done the edits myself. I lacked both the technical skills and the grit.
“Mm, that should do it,” said Kurumi. “I think we have all the audio we need.”
“How long is the final reel?”
“A solid fifteen minutes. I’m pretty sure they’ll stop us long before it finishes, so that should be plenty.”
That oughtta do it, yeah. Fifteen minutes was a long time when you were under pressure.
“The editing’s done. Now I’ve just gotta write it to a disc. Hand me a CD, Natsume.”
“On it.”
I opened the case, took out one of the discs, and handed it to her. Then Kurumi popped out the disc drive and slotted the CD in place.
“Let’s see… The computer’s built-in software should let me write this to the disc…”
She leaned in and started tapping away. Soon enough, there was a whir as a motor kicked in inside her laptop. It was writing the disc. It felt like we were loading bullets into a gun.
“…Okay, it’s writing,” she said. “Looks like it’ll take a while.”
“Cool. What now?”
“I don’t want to waste time. Let’s discuss our plans for the big day.”
Kurumi pushed the laptop aside and pulled out her Notes on Revenge. She flipped through it, then placed it on the table, open to a blank page.
“Hijacking the broadcast booth should be doable. We just have to say, ‘The teacher’s asking for you,’ and send the person on duty packing. That should buy us enough time to put the insult CD in and start it playing.”
“…Yeah.”
“The problem is what happens after that. How do we get out? Once it starts playing, the teachers will come running. Even if we hide our faces, we need an escape plan.”
“……”