One Box for the Person Responsible

The accident report form had one column for who was responsible.

Seorin had seen this form twelve times over three years. All twelve times, one person's name went in that column, and that person was usually the weakest one in the group.

It wasn't the weak person who wrote it. The group decided it. The group always picked whoever had the least to lose.

Today, the person with the most to lose said he'd write it himself. That was the same thing, just a worse version of it.

Seorin looked at that column first. A single column meant one name went in it.

Doyun was already writing in it.

"What are you writing." Seorin put a hand on the top of the report.

"My name."

"Why." Seorin didn't take her hand off.

"I was the one who tried to reopen it." Doyun didn't let go of the pen. "Garam not hearing it, you hitting me, both happened because I tried to reopen it."

The logic was correct. Seorin recognized the shape of it. Tracing the causal chain backward until you made yourself the first cause.

"You're doing that because it's easier."

Doyun's hand stopped.

"Easier?"

"If one person takes all the blame, the rest of us don't have to write anything." Seorin turned the report toward herself. "Then Lee Garam doesn't have to write what he hid, I don't have to write why I used force, and Park Mirae doesn't have to write why she missed the monitoring item."

"I'm not doing this because it's easy for me."

"It's not easy for you. It's easy for us."

"If I don't write it, who does." Doyun asked.

"The four of us write it."

"The form only has one column."

"Then the form is missing something."

Doyun stopped at that sentence. It had the same shape as what Mirae had told him yesterday.

The notice confirming last place came in that morning. Twelfth out of twelve groups in the class. It wasn't a suspension from practicum, but the next assignment got pushed back three weeks.

Three weeks. The end of term review fell inside that window. The choice item they'd kept open was subject to that review, and without practicum results, no basis would accumulate for it.

Seorin had already run that calculation. Even after running it, she didn't hand the report back to Doyun.

"I'll change the form."

"You can change it?" Doyun looked at the form again.

"Not through the objection process. I checked yesterday." Seorin took out a blank sheet. "But I can attach a supplementary page. A supplementary page has no format restrictions."

She wrote four lines on the supplementary page.

One line per person.

Lee Garam. Recognized the overload five seconds after it started but did not report it for three minutes. The reason was concern over team loss. As a result, provided incorrect location information twice.

Yu Seorin. Used physical intervention to stop a group member's use during a delayed judgment. Exercised the group member's right to refuse on his behalf. Received a regulation deduction and did not file for correction.

Park Mirae. Planned ten measurements of group members' decision time but conducted only four, then agreed to a hundred person practicum anyway. Knew there was a gap in the measurement.

Han Doyun. Attempted a reopening without approval. Interpreted a group member's silence as approval. Did not disclose his own physical cost beforehand.

After writing all four lines, Seorin set the pen down.

Mirae read the supplementary page. She stopped at the third line.

"Is this my item?"

"It's your line."

"I only did four measurements because there wasn't time."

"Write the reason underneath." Seorin said. "If you write the reason, the circumstances stay on record. If you don't write the item at all, the circumstances don't stay either."

Mirae wrote her own reason underneath that line. Three sentences. There had been a deadline to challenge the higher ranked group, missing it would get the process logged as nothing but spare time, and that judgment had been hers alone.

Garam read it second. He looked at his own line for a long time.

"Can I write this myself?"

"It's your line. You should write it."

Garam erased the sentence Seorin had written and rewrote it in his own hand. The content was almost the same, with one sentence added.

He had known before it started that a hundred person scale wasn't on the measurement sheet. He could have said so then.

Doyun went last.

He read his line and looked at Seorin.

"There's a nondisclosure of physical cost on my line."

"There is."

"That's not in any clause. User cost isn't something that has to be disclosed."

"It's not in any clause." Seorin admitted. "But yesterday Park Mirae wrote a draft of Article Seventeen. It didn't get approved, so it couldn't be added."

"Then right now it's not a violation."

"It's not a violation. That's why it's on the supplementary page. A supplementary page isn't a record of violations, it's a record of facts."

Doyun weighed that distinction for three seconds.

"My left hand hurts." he said.

The other three looked at him.

"I didn't use my ability, but it hurts. It's been three days. Early yesterday morning the two lines were hot."

"How much does it hurt?" Mirae asked.

"If I soak it in cold water for fifteen minutes, it goes down. After that it's lukewarm."

"Why are you saying this now?"

"Yesterday Garam said my voice had two layers in it. I didn't say anything then." Doyun said. "And today Seorin wrote that on my line. It's not in any clause, but she wrote it anyway."

Mirae added the item to the supplementary page. She wrote it under Doyun's line as a voluntary statement.

"Go to the infirmary." Mirae said.

"If I go to the infirmary, it goes on record."

"It should go on record."

"If it's on record, I can't go out for the next practicum."

"The next practicum is three weeks away." Mirae said. "If it heals within three weeks, you go. If it doesn't heal, you shouldn't go."

Doyun had no way to argue against that math. To argue, he would have had to claim he wasn't hurt.

The infirmary's finding was two lines. Left hand, surface heat sensation, cause unknown. No confirmed correlation with magic use history.

Cause unknown. Mirae read those three words three times. In academy documents, cause unknown went in the same column as error.

"This is a dangerous phrase." Mirae said.

"Why."

"That's the column that gets treated as an error."

Seorin heard that. The eleven cases Senior Junseo had compiled over three years had gone into that same column.

The joint demerit application was filed that afternoon.

Before that, Seorin made two copies of the supplementary page. One went to the group ledger, the other to Yeonwoo's club archive.

"Why are you giving it to Im Yeonwoo?" Mirae asked.

"The registrar keeps the original filed with them." Seorin said. "Whoever holds it decides how it gets used later."

The registrar's officer looked at the supplementary page and checked it twice.

"Is this... all four of you taking demerits?"

"That's right." Mirae pointed at the page.

"If one person takes it as the representative, the other three keep clean records."

"We know." Seorin answered.

"This puts you at a disadvantage for next semester's assignments. A group with four demerits gets last priority for practicum."

"We know that too." Seorin said.

The officer took the documents. While taking them, she asked one more thing.

"Yu Seorin, you're top of the class. This will stay on your record."

"It should stay." Seorin took her hand off the papers.

Once the filing was done, the four of them stepped into the hallway. Mirae folded up the settlement sheet.

"What will they say about this at the end of term review."

"I don't know." Seorin said. "If the choice item we kept open gets ruled a way to dodge grades, it gets deleted retroactively."

"Then only our demerits stay."

"Then only the demerits stay." Seorin didn't stop walking.

Garam heard that and asked. "Did you file it knowing that?"

"I filed it knowing that."

The summons from the director's office came that evening. Doyun alone.

Seorin looked at the notice. It was from the director's office, and there was one line in the reason column.

Renewed proposal for the individual special management track.

Doyun showed the notice to the other three. It was eleven minutes after he'd received it.

"Why did it take eleven minutes?" Garam asked.

"Two minutes to read it, nine minutes to think."

"What were you thinking about for nine minutes?"

"That if I go, I could see my sister's records." Doyun said. "And that right now we have four demerits."

"Why do those two things come up together?"

"A group with four demerits stays at the bottom next semester too. If I leave, it becomes three."

Mirae checked that math. It was correct.

"Is telling us that math also a clause?" Mirae asked.

"The clause only says the proposal has to be disclosed." Doyun said. "My math isn't written anywhere. But if I don't say it now, I feel like next time I'll just do the math and not say anything."

"Article Sixteen. Disclosure within twenty four hours." Doyun said. "It took eleven minutes."

Mirae wrote down the time. Seorin didn't.

Instead she looked inside her own sheath. She hadn't checked it since hitting Doyun the day before.

Six notches.

What she'd done yesterday was strike Doyun's wrist. It wasn't fixing a decision in place, nor withdrawing one.

The fourth time. Seorin narrowed her hypothesis down to one now.

This sword doesn't measure the strength of a decision. It counts how many times someone didn't follow the answer that was already set.

In the maze she hadn't followed the maze's direction, in the evaluation she hadn't followed the designer's correct answer, in the duel she hadn't followed the prescribed firepower method, and yesterday she hadn't followed the academy's rules.

All four times were cases where she'd sided with what she thought was right.

There was a counterexample too. In the maze she'd declared nine times, but it was only one notch. Counting by number didn't add up.

So the hypothesis was still just a hypothesis. Seorin wrote that at the top of her notebook. Not confirmed.

And the person who'd given her this sword was Kwon Heesu.

Seorin took out the envelope. Materials for the succession interview. She hadn't opened it in six days.

She opened the first page.

Decision stability item. Measurement method. Crack coefficient inside the sheath of the decision fixing sword.

Below that was a reference table. Three notches or fewer, fit. Four to six notches, needs observation. Seven or more, unfit.

Seorin currently stood at six notches.

She looked at that table for a long time. After looking at it for a long time, she read again what the table was actually measuring.

It said decision stability. The director called this stability.

Seorin copied that word into her own notebook. Then she wrote another word next to it.

Obedience.

She still couldn't tell which of the two words was right. What she could tell was that reaching seven notches would drop her from the succession.

Seorin closed the envelope again. She didn't read the remaining pages.

There was one reason she didn't read them. If advice was written on the next page, not following that advice would also go into the count.

She put the envelope in the drawer. It was the drawer with the returned equipment slip in it.