Once Sae Chabashira finished relaying the administration's latest instructions on the school's behalf—
Standing outside the classroom eavesdropping, Korosensei adjusted the mortarboard hat that had somehow ended up perched on his head, and jotted a few notes down in his notebook with an air of total seriousness.
Then he quietly listened to a bit more of Sae Chabashira's lesson before his tentacles gave a small twitch, and he slipped away without a sound.
In the hallway, the staff member Sakayanagi Seimori had specifically assigned as his guide saw Korosensei on the move and hurried respectfully to his side to ask:
"Korosensei, where would you like to tour next?"
"Shall I arrange a specific route for you?"
"Hmm..." Korosensei propped his chin with a tentacle and glanced up at the surveillance cameras dotting the ceiling along the corridor.
After mulling it over for a moment, he said gently:
"Let's start with the other classrooms that'll have my future students. As their future teacher, I should get a look at how the kids normally behave in class first, just to form an initial impression."
"Of course. Please, follow me."
The staff member immediately took the lead, walking slightly ahead and to the side, and—eager to showcase the school's pedigree—began narrating with visible pride:
"Counting every last member of staff, our school's total headcount is only a little over five hundred."
"The structure is extremely lean, but that's precisely why the people who remain are, almost without exception, elites chosen from among thousands."
"Especially now—practically every class has at least one student who's taken the Black Sphere exam and come back alive with some kind of transcendent power..."
The man's voice suddenly caught.
It wasn't that Korosensei had caught him exaggerating—it was simply that, at the corner of the hallway, they'd come face to face with Director Sakayanagi Seimori, walking slowly toward them.
"Director." The escort bowed hastily.
"Mm." Sakayanagi Seimori, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, nodded with a mild expression:
"You go on ahead and get back to your duties. I'll personally take Korosensei around the school from here."
"Yes, sir." The man answered as though granted a reprieve and beat a swift retreat.
Korosensei stayed where he was, sizing Sakayanagi Seimori up with a touch of curiosity.
The man in front of him lacked the off-putting arrogance so common among people in high positions.
At a glance, he looked more like a refined schoolmaster or scholar.
Yet beneath that restrained air lay a genuine trace of a politician's inscrutability, the kind that never let emotion show.
None of that surface impression mattered much to Korosensei, though.
What he actually cared about was the strange energy flowing inside the man.
It was faint, but it shone like sunlight.
It seemed to share the same origin as the fluctuations he'd first sensed inside Chris, Kouenji, and the others.
"Director, sir."
Korosensei stretched out a soft, squishy tentacle and gestured a little.
"Your school really does offer generous benefits, doesn't it."
"Do you mean to say that anyone who enrolls or gets hired here can learn this fascinating cultivation technique for free?"
At the question, Sakayanagi Seimori blinked in mild surprise, then shook his head with a wry smile.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and answered with a note of genuine feeling:
"You give the administration far too much credit, Korosensei."
"None of this is any achievement of the school's own making... It's purely thanks to the students who took part in the Black Sphere's Special Exam. They fought on the edge of life and death to bring back Ripple and Ki—techniques the general public could actually practice—and shared them with everyone, selflessly."
As he said this, a note of self-deprecation crept into Sakayanagi Seimori's voice:
"Come to think of it, us old bones with one foot already in the grave—we only got to touch this kind of power because we're riding on those students' coattails."
Hearing that, the smile on Korosensei's face softened a little.
"Nurufufufu—"
"To have that kind of open-heartedness... well, it looks like the basics—values, character—aren't something I need to worry too much about as their teacher."
Then he shifted gears, his tone turning serious:
"Well then, let's set the small talk aside for now, Director."
"As one adult responsible for guiding these children to another—could you give me a brief rundown of the actual situation your world is currently facing?"
Korosensei's tentacle curled slightly. "To be honest with you, when GANTZ first approached me, it told me flat out... that without its intervention, your world probably wouldn't even survive long enough to see me die of old age. That's the only reason I agreed to come here."
Sakayanagi Seimori's pupils contracted sharply at that—he was clearly caught off guard.
After all, Korosensei was the "new teacher" the Black Sphere's presiding god had personally arranged to send down—no matter how you looked at it, whatever information he carried was worth the administration's close attention.
Sakayanagi Seimori had, of course, already learned some basic facts about Korosensei from Chris and the others.
He knew perfectly well that Korosensei's life would run out this coming March, when a runaway chain reaction in his antimatter cells would blow up the Earth...
In other words—
Was GANTZ saying that the world they were in right now wouldn't even last until next March?!
A crushing weight settled over Sakayanagi Seimori like a storm cloud.
He furrowed his brow tightly and sighed, his face full of helplessness:
"Things have already gotten this dire..."
"But actually, just a few months ago, our world was still a perfectly ordinary place—nothing special about it at all."
"No incomprehensible alien technology, no ancient cultivation techniques like these... and naturally, no man-eating monsters either."
"If you're asking for the exact moment things started to change..."
Sakayanagi Seimori walked Korosensei along the hall
____
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