I'm a weak human.
Ah, I'm an elf now, so I should say I'm a weak elf.
Anyway, I'm weak.
In my previous life, I was a teacher.
Ever since I was a child, my dream was to become a teacher.
I wanted to be the kind of teacher who could laugh together with my students.
I never spared any effort toward that goal.
I threw myself into everything that kids of that generation might be interested in.
Games, manga, novels — I scoured the internet too.
I studied hard anything that might make good conversation topics.
I may have gotten a little too into it at times, though.
I changed my speech patterns, put on a character, and became a lovable figure — the weird, slightly pathetic teacher.
The pathetic parts weren't entirely an act, but hey, the result is what matters.
But at the same time, I kept thinking…
Is this really okay?
Was laughing together with people while putting on a fake persona really my dream?
But I was afraid of tearing down the position I'd built and showing people who I really was.
So I kept coasting along, content with the status quo.
And then, I was reincarnated into another world.
I panicked.
The last thing I remember is the memory of teaching a class.
After that, my memory cuts off clean, and the next thing I knew, I was a baby.
On top of that, everyone peering down at me had long, pointed ears.
From the nerdy knowledge I'd accumulated, I immediately recognized them as elves.
And my own current state.
Reincarnated into another world.
I'd been swept up in one of those internet trends.
I'm weak.
Unlike the protagonists of novels, I can't suddenly get thrown into another world and live powerfully, or just shrug it off and start a second life.
I couldn't throw away the fact that I am me.
So, with my confused mind, the thing I clung to was the idea of being a teacher.
I am a teacher.
If so, I have to put my students first.
Because that was my ideal of what a teacher should be.
And I happened to be born with a convenient Skill.
"Student Roster."
Probably a Unique Skill that only I possess in this world.
Its effect is this: it roughly records the present, past, and future of reincarnated individuals who were formerly my students.
If I close my eyes, the roster surfaces from deep within my mind.
If I open it, I find names written in attendance-number order from my previous life, and if I focus strongly on a name, I can view information about its owner.
However, the information this Skill can display is truly limited.
The past — this is a record of the moment they were born.
Where they are born.
That's all it shows.
The present — the current state of that name's owner in a single word.
Healthy, sick, fatigued, and so on.
I can't see their location, though.
And the future.
Here, it shows roughly when that student will die and the cause of death.
The time system apparently uses the moment I was born as zero, with 365 days marking one year.
And when I saw that timeline, I was stunned.
Nearly all of my students were going to die within twenty years.
When I saw that, I couldn't take it and fainted.
Unable to accept that reality, I spent several days trembling and escaping from the truth.
But reality doesn't change.
Even if I can't look it head-on, time keeps passing.
And then I noticed.
The name of the student who was predicted to die earliest — the one whose entry said they'd die as a baby — had quietly vanished from the roster at some point.
A blank space in the roster.
Looking at that, I had to steel myself.
Because among the remaining students, ten had predicted death dates within two or three years of birth.
I relied on my Skills.
The Student Roster was a Skill, and in a world where such mysterious powers existed, maybe something like telepathy was possible too.
The nerdy knowledge I'd cultivated during my previous life came in handy too.
I relatively easily heard the God's Tongue and succeeded in acquiring the Telepathy Skill.
What saved me was that my father,
Also, normally if your daughter started talking about a past life, you'd question her sanity, but Potimas accepted my story without batting an eye.
Apparently, Potimas had always sensed something different about me.
That was a dangerous gamble, but I won — and Potimas promised to protect the reincarnated students.
After that, things went smoothly.
From the past-life records, I knew where each student was born.
I just had to search around those areas.
The Skill search I gained later through my Ruler authority was helpful too.
Unfortunately, there were some students I couldn't reach in time, but I was able to confirm the safety of most of them.
Sometimes I resolved things with money; sometimes I resorted to something close to kidnapping.
Those were outright crimes.
But the elves didn't hesitate to carry them out.
Elves have their own reasons.
The elves were trying to create a world without Skills in order to oppose the Administrator.
And it seemed that reincarnated students were born from the start with a massive pool of Skill Points and one powerful Skill.
If such a student honed their Skill, they might catch the Administrator's eye and end up being used.
That story was credible.
The cause of death recorded in the Student Roster.
"Died after having Skills stripped away."
Still written as the cause of death for Shun and Kathia.
Most students were listed as dying from this cause.
Now, in the elf village, in an environment where Skills couldn't be developed, that cause of death had decreased.
The future entries change fairly often, though.
But no matter what I did, that line — "Died after having Skills stripped away" — could not be changed.
And the timing for when it would happen was the same for everyone.
This year.
And there are no future entries after that.
For students not predicted to die this year, the entries are blank.
Thinking about what that means is terrifying.
My name is not in the Student Roster.
Of course it isn't.
I'm a teacher.
I can't see my own information.
But this is probably how it works.
The ones who die from having their Skills stripped away are students with many Skills.
And I have many Skills too.
I'll probably die at that same time.
I think that because I die, I can't see anything beyond that point.
I'm scared.
I don't want to die.
I even considered having my Skills erased.
But I can't give up my Skill's power until I deal with
Besides, if I used Skill Erasure to remove my Skills, who knows what the elves would do.
Skill Erasure means handing your power over to the Administrator.
If you hand power to the enemy, the elves might turn against me.
Potimas wouldn't bat an eye at purging me.
That would be one thing, but the students I'm protecting might be harmed too.
The elves aren't protecting the reincarnated students out of goodwill.
If that's the case, there's only one path.
Defeat the one who comes to strip my Skills — most likely the Administrator.
I don't know if I can do that, but I have no choice.
Before that, though, there's Hugo.
What he became — that's the teacher's responsibility.
I have to take responsibility for that.
I open the Student Roster under the name Natsume Kengo.
There, it says he died in battle in the elf forest.
I swallow hard.
I'm about to kill a former student.
I've steeled myself, but my stomach still aches and nausea rises in my throat.
How did it come to this?
I just wanted to be a teacher who could laugh together with my students.
Kudo-chan's cold gaze resurfaces in my mind.
I know.
This is happening because I haven't explained anything properly.
Even if I explained, I might not be forgiven, but I think that, at the very least, the one-sided hostility might not have been directed at me like that.
But I can't.
The Student Roster, which saved my students' lives — it has one restriction.
Student viewing prohibition.
It's a curse-like constraint: I cannot tell any student about the Student Roster's information.
No matter how I try to explain, I can't leave out the Student Roster.
I can already see myself accidentally letting it slip.
What's more terrifying about this restriction is that the harm doesn't fall on me, the one who speaks — it falls on the student who hears.
Depending on the severity, it's a penalty heavy enough to cause death in the worst case.
I've never tested it, and I don't intend to.
I had no choice but to stay silent.
I want to just tell everyone everything.
The Student Roster isn't perfect either.
When Kathia was brainwashed, it couldn't detect the anomaly, and the death of Shun shown during the effort to reclaim Reston was successfully avoided without incident.
I don't know exactly what criteria cause the errors, but I suspect it has something to do with Ruler Skills.
If that's the case, wouldn't it be safe to tell Shun, who has a Ruler Skill?
I've been tempted by that thought.
But no. I can't.
I can't take on unnecessary risk.
For now, the only problem is that I'm disliked.
Everyone's frustration hasn't reached a breaking point yet.
If that's the case, then being disliked by students is just part of the job.
I'll accept it gracefully.
I'm tough enough for that.
That's a lie.
It hurts.
I'm weak.
I'm scared.
I don't want to die, and I don't want anyone else to die.
Am I doing the right thing?
Am I not making a mistake?
I don't know.
But there's no one I can talk to.
I can't fully trust the elves.
I can't tell the students.
Am I being a proper teacher?
Someone, please tell me.