Classroom of the Elite - Seven Years After

What Amounted of Twenty-Five Years

What was the point?

Every time I found myself pondering that question, my answer would be the same: Freedom. There was no epiphany, no strong emotions, I simply wanted freedom. Control over my life. Leaving high school showed me that reverting back to constant stasis would be the equivalent of losing everything. I once thought that dropping out would practically mean suicide, but now I believed the opposite to be true. Staying caged would have been equivalent to death. The death of everything I had created for myself in those three years. I felt a desire to live. Survival is the only thing that matters. Sure, winning used to be a part of this process, but if you do not survive, then you will never see the results of your success. In the end, I decided that there was only one way to ensure that I 'lived.'

And so, I had exposed the White Room to the world. The facility was abandoned, relegating it to an empty white factory, filled with remnants of the curriculum.

Although it wasn't easy, things still managed to work out. Horikita Manabu's phone number ended up saving me, with that singular outside connection allowing many opportunities. All of it happened around two years after I had returned from the outside world. Those who were involved with the facility fled, whether it be to a different country or to somewhere else they couldn't be found. That was aside from a few who were caught, but the few they caught were the important ones. The children were saved. 'Saved.' It was slightly humorous to describe what happened as such, most of those children had been left with lasting trauma. That wasn't even to mention the ones that had died there or as a result of its influence after the fact. There was realistically no being saved from that place, it would remain as a part of you for the rest of your life. I felt this the most heavily, the White Room had been the entire culmination of my existence. I had no future outside of it.

I thought that would be the end of things, but the world didn't seem to want to forget what happened in that place. After the White Room was revealed to the public, there was a wave of uproar from every corner of the country. It became common to talk about it as some tragic historical event, even making its way into pop culture. Another stain on the legacy of Japan.

A year or two after, Yagami Takuya wrote a book about his own experiences. I was glad to see that he had recovered, his generation was affected by myself the most after all. In the book, it mostly depicted his life in the White Room as well as at ANHS before his expulsion. Seeing as I was an integral part of it all, I was mentioned many times. He spared no criticism for the White Room, himself, and me. It was in this book that I had first been revealed to be a very integral part of the White Room, even after majorly being a witness in that trial, where despite being behind the revelation of the truth I was just treated as another witness. And with that, many people in Japan became curious about exactly who I was. Add that onto the fact that a year after Yagami's novel was published, Nanase Tsubasa published her own that was specifically about me. It was from her own point of view, but it gave the public more insight into my life than I would have liked.

Since I had appeared in the trial, I knew that my face would be out there. I didn't like that possibility despite knowing what I had planned in the future. It would be my own choice to decide when it came out. I wore a surgical mask and asked them to censor my face to which the media complied, but I dislike that there are videos of my face floating around. The possibility of one image had the capability to ruin any future I wanted. Of course, nothing in the past mattered much anymore.

Unfortunately, not much in the White Room was found explicitly illegal which led to shorter sentencing for that man than the public would have wanted. Mostly child endangerment charges and aiding criminals. Even though I personally know he did much worse, there was never any evidence of the worse crimes. This also meant that he could be released from prison and go search for me again. It wasn't a thought worrying me much, but I did have to consider it in the future.