My New Life

Chapter 7: Tie

"It doesn't matter if you're bad at swimming now, but I'll make sure everybody learns. Learning how to swim will definitely be useful. I guarantee it."

What a strange thing to say.

When you go to a sports club, the last thing that they'd say is. 'Doing this will be useful.'

Why is that?

Simple, because it's not.

Learning how to pass a Basketball to someone, or being able to breath properly while running, or knowing how to shoot a bow.

None of these things are useful in the real world, to most of us who won't be participating in these sports at all in the future.

The only reason he would say something like that is that it's exactly as the teacher said.

It's guaranteed that it'll be useful in the future, but only in school.

Perhaps this aligns with those special exams?

We soon started with some stretching, and warming up, before the boys were instructed to start the 50m swim.

Students who didn't know how to swim were allowed to touch the bottom of the pool with their feet if they needed to.

Submerging myself into the water, I noticed that it was cooler than the room, but not uncomfortably so.

If I had to say, it was the perfect temperature.

I swam the full 50m length, and noticed something odd.

I felt strangely accustomed to this.

Perhaps because the movement of the arms engages the shoulder quite a bit? And I'm used to using the muscles thanks to Archery.

No, that doesn't make sense, I've not done Archery that long for that to make sense, at least not to my knowledge.

I frowned to myself as I turned, kicking off the wall of the pool.

I went faster this time, noticeably so.

I'm getting sharper at this so quickly, and it feels like my body knows what to do, and moves accordingly.

I turned a third time, swimming the full length of the pool once more.

A time flashed across my mind.

25 seconds.

Why did I want to beat that time?

I felt a strange feeling well up in my chest.

I really, really wanted to beat that time.

But why?

"Haha! Did you see that? That's my super swimming!" Ike shouted, after swimming at a fairly normal pace.

The teacher nodded to himself.

"Good, it seems that mostly everyone here can swim."

"Hehe, of course, back in middle school I was called the Flying Fish after all." Ike continued to boast.

"I see. Then you guys can immediately start competing against each other. 50 metre freestyle, separate yourselves by gender."

"Huh?"

"I'll give the first place winner a prize. 5,000 points, 2,000 if you win in your pool."

Those who were good at swimming cheered, while others were not as excited.

"Because there aren't too many girls, I'll split you guys into two groups of 5 and give the fastest time the overall victory. For the boys, I'll take the top 5 fastest times and then hold a final round."