September fifth, seven forty-five in the morning.
Arc City University, College of Science lecture building.
Himeko walked down the corridor with a cup of black coffee in one hand and her lesson plan tucked under her arm, her heels striking the terrazzo floor in a steady, even rhythm.
She was not in good shape.
Last night she had spent three hours as a "special guest" on Elysia's stream, watching with her own eyes as the red-haired woman on screen — a woman with her exact face — pulled on armor that burned away her own life, charged into Imaginary Space, drove the God-Slaying Spear into a Herrscher's body, and then fell into a bottomless Abyss.
When the BGM kicked in, the danmaku turned solid white.
Elysia had cried her makeup off right there on camera.
Himeko hadn't held out either.
She'd gone to the kitchen for a glass of water, drunk it standing by the window, then come back to keep recording.
But when she set the glass down on the table, she noticed her hand was shaking.
A sense of dislocation had opened under her, deep and dark and without a floor.
That character's face. That character's voice. The tone in which that character, walking to her death, said, "Go and turn this imperfect story into the story you wish it to be" — it was identical, down to the last inflection, to the way she herself sounded standing at a lectern teaching her students.
That bastard Su Yu had reached in, pulled her soul out whole, and stuffed it into a game without altering a thing.
And then, as a bonus, arranged her a death so magnificent it made breathing difficult.
Which was why, when she looked in the mirror this morning, Himeko discovered with a sinking heart that her eyes were swollen.
Not dramatically. But anyone who wasn't blind would recognize the eyes of someone who had recently been crying.
All she could do was pat two extra layers of heavy concealer around them, sigh at her reflection, and decide that fooling a lecture hall of eight-a.m. undergraduates shouldn't be a problem.
At seven-fifty she pushed open the heavy wooden door of Lecture Hall Three.
Then she stopped dead.
The coffee cup hung in midair, halfway to her mouth.
The room was packed.
Every single seat was taken.
The aisles on both sides were full of people standing. People sat on the high windowsills. Even outside the back door there was a dense black mass of heads pressing in.
There was a boy squatting on the little side table beside the podium — the one reserved for the projector — hugging his backpack.
Total enrollment for her eight a.m. Fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics was forty-two students, and on a normal day sixty percent attendance counted as diligence from those little brats.
Today, by eye, there were at least three hundred.
Three hundred pairs of eyes swung toward the door the instant it opened, all at once, in a single sweep.
Nobody spoke.
The lecture hall, normally a din, was now unnervingly silent. She could hear the faint electrical hum of the fluorescent tubes overhead with perfect clarity.
Himeko held the gaze of three hundred pairs of eyes for two full seconds.
In those two seconds she registered several things that made her scalp prickle.
One: the boy in the front row who spent every class asleep was sitting bolt upright today, and his eyes were redder than hers.
Two: the girls in the middle rows were all clutching wadded-up tissues, and several of them had already built neat little tissue mounds on their desks.
Three: in the back corner against the wall, a boy was holding up a sheet of cardboard roughly the size of an A3 page, on which eight enormous characters had been written in searing red marker, perfectly straight —
[TEACHER HIMEKO, REST IN PEACE]
Himeko's temple twitched.
She took a deep breath, stepped up onto the podium, set down her coffee, opened her lesson plan, and cleared her throat.
"Ahem. Good morning, everyone. Today we're continuing with Chapter Seven, quantum chromo—"
"TEACHER!!!" Three boys in the front row shot up like springs, simultaneously. The motion was so perfectly synchronized it might have been rehearsed a hundred times.
The tallest of them, standing in the middle, lifted an enormous plastic bag in both trembling hands.
Through the translucent plastic she could clearly make out boxed sterculia seeds, Golden Throat lozenges, Nin Jiom loquat syrup, and one luxuriously packaged box of cordyceps tablets.
He looked at Himeko's red, puffy eyes, and his own went redder still.
"Teacher, if your throat hurts, please don't lecture!"
The boy's voice shook, thick and nasal.
"We can read the textbook ourselves! Go home and rest! Your health… your health matters more than anything!"
Himeko looked at the sack of throat remedies, enough to stock a pharmacy, and then at those three young faces written all over with heartbreak and resolve.
"…There's nothing wrong with my throat. I was just clearing—"
"Teacher, stop pretending you're fine!"
A girl came charging out of the second row.
She had a thermos in her hands, lid already unscrewed, a thick medicinal-herb smell rolling out of it.
Himeko glanced down and found that at some point three red dates, two slices of astragalus, and a generous fistful of goji berries had been dumped into her coffee.
"My mom stayed up all night brewing this Ten-Ingredient Grand Tonic wellness tea! Teacher, you have to drink it!"
Her tears finally broke through, dripping steadily off her chin.
"Teacher, promise me — promise me you'll never burn your life away!"
She seized Himeko's hand with startling strength, gripping it like the last handhold at the edge of a cliff.
"Crimson armor or no crimson armor, don't throw your life away! You're still so young! Arc City University needs you, and your students need you even more!"
The corner of Himeko's mouth spasmed.
"That is a game plot," she explained through her teeth.
"I know!" The girl only sobbed harder, face smeared with tears and snot. "But Teacher, your eyes are so red! You cried under your blanket all night alone, didn't you? Something's really wrong with your body, isn't it, and that's why you had Su Yu write you that way in the game! You treated it as a farewell letter, didn't you?!"
"I did not — I am in perfect health!"
"Teacher, you don't have to hide it from us!"
A heart-rending wail rose from the middle of the room.
Himeko turned toward the sound in despair. A girl with a ponytail had lurched to her feet, holding a white cloth banner high over her head, several appalling characters slashed across it in black marker:
[COME HOME SAFE, TEACHER HIMEKO]
It was like tripping a row of dominoes.
The girl beside her stood up too, raising another placard:
[FINAL LESSON — WE WILL NEVER GRADUATE]
Then a third. A fourth. A fifth.
The entire middle section of the hall rose as one — more than a dozen girls, hoisting handwritten banners and signs of every description, weeping in a tangled mass.
Some were hiccupping with sobs. Some were blowing their noses. Some had buried their faces in a neighbor's shoulder, shoulders heaving.
Himeko stood at the podium, the laser pointer still pinched between her fingers.
She started to speak.
"Everyone, listen to me—"
"Waaaah, Teacher, don't talk, just rest!"
"That was a game plot. I am alive and perfectly well—"
"Teacher, don't gooo—"
"I'm not going anywhere! I'm standing right here, damn it!"
"Waaaah, we all know you're just putting on a brave face!"
Himeko gave up.
She set down the laser pointer, braced both hands on the podium, and felt the vein in her forehead pulse.
At that moment, the back door of the hall swung open.
The crying cut off all at once.
The Dean of the College of Science came in first.
Behind her trailed the vice dean, the head of academic affairs, and two administrative staff.
Each of the staff carried an enormous fruit basket.
The baskets were crammed with imported fruit, gift boxes of bird's nest, Korean ginseng, and a card printed with "With Sympathy from the Arc City University Staff Union."
The Dean cut through the crowd, walked up to the podium, and took Himeko's hands in both of hers.
Her expression turned grave.
"Professor Murata."
Himeko looked at that old face, brimming with compassion for all suffering things, and a deeply ominous feeling rose in her.
"The university convened an emergency meeting last night, and after careful deliberation we have reached a decision." The Dean sighed. "For this semester, your teaching load is being cut by eighty percent. Mandatorily."
"…What?!"
"Those research projects you're running have all been suspended for the time being as well. But funding will continue to be disbursed as normal — you needn't worry about that in the slightest." The Dean patted the back of her hand gently, voice full of feeling. "The university will always be your firmest support. The road of life is long. Please don't put too much pressure on yourself."
The Dean paused, then deliberately dropped her voice so that only the two of them could hear: "And above all, don't let despair get the better of you. Don't go imitating that game and turning yourself into some kind of… martyr."
Himeko's pupils contracted to pinpoints.
"Dean, I think there's been some misunderstanding, I—"
"No need to explain." The Dean waved a broad hand, cutting off her confession. "Young people have their own burdens and their own pressures. We old-timers understand completely."
She turned and nodded to the staff behind her.
Thud. Thud.
Two heavy, oversized condolence baskets were solemnly installed on the podium.
Himeko looked at the two baskets on her left, squatting there like tombstones. Then at the three hundred young faces below, every one of them inscribed with tragic grandeur and reverence.
And finally at the Dean's expression, which said, plainly: say nothing more, I understand everything, go in peace.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz—
At that exact moment, the phone in the pocket of her white lab coat began vibrating like something possessed.
Once. Twice. Three times… a dozen buzzes in a row, urgent as a summons from the underworld.
Numbly, Himeko pulled out the phone.
The screen showed twenty-three missed calls.
All from the same number — [DAD] (Murata Ryusuke).
Under the gaze of three hundred people and the university leadership, she stiffly swiped to answer.
The first sound that came down the line was a middle-aged man sobbing in despair.
"My daughteeer—!!!"
Ryusuke's voice had gone completely off-key, so thick and nasal he sounded like he'd had a head cold for three days straight.
"Dad pulled some strings and booked you the top-tier full-body MRI at Arc City First People's Hospital for this morning! A brain CT too! Bone density, full blood panel, tumor markers, complete genome sequencing!"
Himeko's eye twitched violently and she moved the phone a couple of centimeters from her ear.
"Dad, have you lost your—"
"We're done with teaching!"
Ryusuke burst into howling, undignified tears on the other end.
"Dad's going to file three months of leave for you! We'll go to Hawaii! The Maldives! Anywhere you want to go!"
"Dad! I'm genuinely fine!"
"Don't lie to your father!"
Ryusuke's voice suddenly climbed.
"Something's wrong with your body, isn't it, something they can't cure, and that's why you had that Su Yu boy write your death that way in his game! You meant it as a farewell letter to your dad, didn't you?! Tell me! Dad can take any blow you throw at him!"
Himeko stood alone on the podium, gripping her phone.
On her left, the hospice-care fruit baskets delivered by the university leadership.
On her right, the coffee cup a girl had forcibly packed with blood-tonic herbs.
In front of her, three hundred misty-eyed undergraduates who appeared to be attending her memorial service, at least twenty of whom were holding aloft funeral banners reading "Teacher Himeko, Rest in Peace."
In her ear, the heart-shredding wails of her normally rigorous, straight-laced scientist father.
Overhead, the ancient fluorescent tube was still humming with current.
The sound was exactly like the cheapest, most absurd BGM ever scored for an epic-scale public death of dignity.
Slowly, Himeko lowered the phone from her ear.
Slowly, she pressed mute.
Slowly, she slid the scalding little slab of metal back into the pocket of her white lab coat.
Then she lowered her head, and her gaze fell on the red laser pointer in her palm — the one she used to advance her slides.
Snap.
A crisp, clean break.
The lecture hall went instantly, utterly still.
Three hundred-odd people, the Dean included, held their breath and stared in terror at the red-haired woman on the podium.
She raised her head.
Her eyes were still red.
But anyone short of a complete idiot could see that this was no longer the red of a sleepless night spent crying, nor the frailty of terminal illness.
This was the red of magma an instant before it erupts — the red that burns everything it touches. Fury.
Himeko flung the shattered wreckage of the laser pointer onto the lectern with a sharp clack.
Her ice-cold gaze swept slowly across the hall.
Everywhere it landed, students who had been weeping a moment ago instinctively shrank down into their collars, feeling the temperature around them drop a dozen degrees.
She drew a deep breath.
Her chest rose and fell hard.
And then she roared out every ounce of the suffocating pressure packed into her ribcage, along with a certain someone's name:
"SU YU—!!!"
"If I don't shove your head into the proton collider in my lab today and accelerate it to the speed of light—"
Himeko's hand shot out and snatched up the herb-stuffed coffee cup from the podium.
The red dates and fat goji berries floating inside spun wildly with the motion.
"—then my name isn't Himeko!!!"
CRASH—!!!
The heavy stainless steel thermos slammed down onto the lectern.
Brown goji water sprayed everywhere, soaking the half of her thick lesson plan covered in quantum mechanics formulas.
Three hundred students, plus several university administrators, sucked in a breath at the same instant.
The dead silence lasted less than two seconds.
Then some boy in the back rows — one whose brain the Final Lesson had already thoroughly gutted — took the lead:
"Yeah… kill Su Yu!"
That shout was a spark, and it detonated three hundred undergraduates stuffed to bursting with tears and grievance.
"Kill Su Yu, that old crook!"
"Kill the mutt of a game designer!!"
"Give us back Teacher Himeko's life!!!"
"Give us back Teacher Himeko—!!!"
The fury of three hundred university students merged into a terrifying wall of sound that burst through the lecture hall's windows, poured down the corridor, and swept through the entire College of Science building like a tsunami.
In the classroom next door.
An elderly professor, laboring through a calculus derivation on the blackboard, was so startled by the sudden war cry that his hand jerked and the chalk screeched a long white streak across the board.
The old professor pushed his thick reading glasses up his nose, gazed blankly out the window at the sky, and muttered to himself, "Young people these days… why is everyone so hot-tempered?"
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉