The Regressor looked between Azi and me with cold eyes. After putting all my powers of persuasion to work, I finally managed to convince her. She remained wary of me, but apparently decided to watch for now and put her sword away.

Sighing inwardly, I suddenly grew curious and asked,

“By the way, Trainee Shei.”

“What?”

“What brings you here? Surely you weren't following us?”

“Following you? I was looking for you and just came after you!”

With Sky Cherry Blossom floating above her head again, the Regressor folded her arms and tilted her head slightly.

“Tyrkanzyaka was wondering about that lesson you mentioned. When and where you're holding it.”

“What? We're actually doing that?”

'You were the one who said you would!'

The Regressor gave me an incredulous glare. I flinched and simply nodded.

“A-all right. I'll prepare something, okay?”

“You'd better prepare well. I'll be looking forward to it.”

Turning her back on me, she added one more thing.

“After all, I'll be attending too.”

Me, teaching a class? I'd made my living drifting through back alleys. I didn't know enough to teach anyone.

I might count as one of the better-educated people here, but all I'd done was graduate from elementary civic school and drop out of secondary military school.

Getting into secondary military school did mean I'd received a better education than the average Level 1 citizen. But that was only because I'd read the thoughts of the second-ranked student in school. Without that perfectly legal mind-reading cheating, my education would have ended with civic school.

Why the second-ranked student? Because I was ranked first.

I hadn't earned that spot through my own ability. It was only possible thanks to all the students whose thoughts I'd seen in the exam room. Fellow test-takers, lend me your knowledge!

To all the students whose ranks I'd pushed down by one: you have my thanks and my apologies.

All this reminiscing was bringing back memories. Thanks to my absurdly high marks, the instructors had hailed me as a newborn genius who would bring glory to the Military State. But then I fucked up the practical exams so spectacularly that higher officer academy became a lost cause. So I dropped out, practically fleeing the place. And this was where I'd ended up.

Like anyone who'd grown older without growing wiser, I thought back to my school days and muttered,

“Maybe that really was the golden age of my life?”

The days when I coasted on nothing but mind reading. How I missed them.

I'd thought those old memories had lost all their sweetness with age, but chewing them over again still gave me something to savor. The problem was that I couldn't remember any of the actual material I was supposed to teach.

As I absently fiddled with my pocket, an idea suddenly struck me, and I clapped my hands.

“Oh! I have that!”

This would do. I smiled inwardly.

The first through third floors of Tantalus contained the prison cells. An ordinary prison brought to mind a stifling atmosphere born of oppressive order, but Tantalus, a prison with inmates and no wardens, deviated slightly from the usual archetype.

In that its stone walls had collapsed and its iron bars were bent every which way.

Apparently, iron bars and stone walls hadn't even qualified as obstacles to the prisoners here. The stone walls were smashed, the steel doors looked like thinly flattened scraps of dumpling dough, and the bars meant to confine the prisoners were bent this way and that like pulled taffy. A spear made of three bars twisted together was embedded in one wall, while an entire cell had been sliced out in a neat square and dropped to the ground. So bars could be twisted together, and whole rooms could be carved out.

Fucking hell.

Apparently, to the inmates here, a prison was no different from a toy.

Chilling. How had ordinary laborers survived in a place crawling with monsters like these?

Oh! They hadn't. They'd all died!

With that mystery solved, I climbed the stairs in considerably better spirits.

The fourth floor and above were for the laborers. They were also where I was staying, since I currently had nowhere better to go. The doors couldn't be locked, but they opened and closed freely, and there was at least a semblance of amenities, such as a dining hall and a laundry room.

I headed to the laborers' classroom at the end of the fourth-floor corridor.

“Hello, everyone!”

My “trainees” were waiting there.

The vampire's coffin floated in the air, radiating an ominous aura and pushing the desks and chairs aside. The Regressor sat slouched with her arms and legs crossed, glaring at me. Azi lay on her belly in a corner of the classroom. She seemed to be here just for fun.

With everyone's eyes on me, I stood at the front of the room. It was a modest class of just one human, one corpse, and one dog, but standing before them still made me oddly nervous.

Before I began, I exhaled deeply and steadied myself.

It was fine. I'd done this plenty of times. Just relax and think of it as peddling snake oil to suckers.

There really wasn't much difference, anyway.

“Now, let me begin with our educational objective. Based on my observations over the past two days, you possess inhuman strength but lack ordinary common sense. If you enter society as you are, you won't be able to fit in. You'll remain outsiders. And if that happens, you'll end up back here, won't you? So—”

[“A moment.”]

An eerie voice came from inside the coffin. The vampire addressed me in a displeased tone.

[“... You claim to be here to teach, yet what is that attire?”]

“What? What's wrong with my clothes?”

A Military State standard-issue shirt and shorts with built-in underwear. Casual, sure, but perfectly ordinary.

Yet even this degree of informality seemed to displease the thousand-year-old vampire fossil.

[“Instruction is like water. It must flow down from a height for those below to receive it. An educator must therefore always possess the requisite authority. How can such undignified attire inspire anyone to listen?”]

“Unbelievable. Never in my life did I expect someone in a coffin to criticize my clothes.”

[“... This is—”]

“Oh, I know, I know. It's like a wheelchair. I'm not going to give you too much grief over it.”

COUGH! COUGH!

The Regressor, who had been quietly listening, turned bright red and began coughing violently. Apparently, the wheelchair comment had set her off. That hadn't been my intention, but at least it had corrected her slouch. I'd take it.

'... A wheelchair? More incomprehensible nonsense... But what is it? Somehow, I feel insulted.'

Right. I must never explain what a wheelchair was.

I gripped the lectern firmly and blustered at the floating coffin.

“And Trainee Tyrkanzyaka, I have a perfectly good reason for coming dressed like this. Please don't doubt your Instructor before the lesson has even begun.”

[“Very well. Show me. I trust those words are not merely an excuse to save face.”]

“Just don't faint from the shock.”

I'd show this relic of a vampire the wonders of modern technology. I stretched my left arm out to the side.

“All citizens of the Military State undergo biometric registration at eighteen, around the time they finish growing. Height, weight, build, bone structure, even the thickness and length of their limbs. Everything is recorded and inscribed into their bodies.”

I flicked my wrist around. An unnatural-looking hole sat in my left wrist. The recess carved into my skin looked as though something was meant to slot into it.

“This gives the Military State the most advanced personal identification system, and has also enabled it to create several useful inventions.”

I took out the object Azi and I had found in the administration office. The small bead gleaming dark blue was just the right size to fit the recess in my wrist.

By now, most of my audience had caught on. Both the Regressor, who already knew what it was, and the vampire, who had realized that the hole in my body was unnatural, had roughly deduced how the bead was used.

“The Military State's technology is the finest in the world. This is its alchemical clothing technology, at the very cutting edge of alchemy.”

With those words, I fitted the dark blue bead into the hole in my wrist. It clicked snugly into place.

At that instant, blue threads covered my entire body.

Thick, rigid fibers traced a framework and guidelines along my skin. Fine blue threads wove back and forth between them in layer upon layer. Clothing formed instantly according to an alchemical pattern. Threads became cloth, and cloth became fabric, building up in orderly layers.

For some reason, it felt like the thing to do, so I spun around on the spot. By my third turn or so, a perfectly fitted Instructor's uniform covered my whole body.

Having transformed into the very picture of a seasoned Instructor in an instant, I gave a regulation salute and announced,

“A clothing packet.”

The time it had taken for the crisp Instructor's uniform to envelop me: just ten seconds. An invention of the century that used the information recorded in my biometric terminal to transform into clothing perfectly tailored to my body.

Even if it got torn or dirty, all I had to do was turn it back into a packet and wipe it clean.

The clothing packet: a contender for the top spot among the Military State's seven most successful inventions.

I pinched the shoulder seam between my fingers and lifted it, showing off for all I was worth.

“The invention of clothing packets freed the Military State's citizens from the curse of laundry. It also drastically reduced clothing expenses. Each person only needs two or three clothing packets to keep rotating through them.”

[“Oh?”]

“Now do you understand, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka? Why I came so casually dressed? It was to demonstrate putting on a clothing packet. It's best to wear nothing but standard-issue undergarments underneath.”

All that emerged from the coffin was a thoughtful hum. But I could hear the vampire's thoughts perfectly clearly.

'How marvelous...! So much has truly changed while I slept!'

I knew she'd like it.

It was a misconception that old people struggled with modern innovations. If anything, they were more eager to embrace them and took a keen interest. Curiosity naturally drove people to explore things they didn't take for granted.

The only problem was that nostalgia, or perhaps familiarity, made them say, “Still, the old way had its charm,” and go right back to square one.

For now, the vampire's attention was focused on the biometric terminal and clothing packet.

“An Instructor's uniform... Hmph.”

The Regressor frowned at my outfit in evident distaste. The vampire asked her a question.

[“Child, did you not lack such a thing in your wrist?”]

“I'd never have one of those things put in.”

The Regressor answered defiantly.

“It's for surveillance. A product of authoritarian control, created to monitor and manage every citizen of the Military State.”

[“Authoritarian control?”]

“It means watching the entire population and monitoring their every move. You need a biometric terminal to access major roads and institutions. That way, if anyone takes a road they aren't supposed to, they can be arrested immediately.”

[“... And is there a problem with that?”]

The Regressor, who had seen the future, might have trouble understanding, but that vampire was genuinely ancient. She'd been alive since before monarchies even functioned properly. Did she think human rights had existed back then? If they had, the vampire wouldn't have died at that age and become one.

Realizing this, the Regressor clicked her tongue softly and added,

“Besides, biometric terminals have a much bigger problem than that.”