Well then, it is early afternoon.
Since doing it in the dormitory would be a bit problematic, the group came to the grounds and immediately took on the experience of Barrier Techniques via Naoya's Technique Reversal.
Of course, the one to lead the charge was the instigator, Yu Haibara. Standing inside a 2-meter diameter circle drawn with a line car on the ground, with Naoya grabbing his head from behind, his figure looked like nothing but a strange ritual no matter how you looked at it, but the people involved were perfectly serious.
"Naoya-kun! Please!"
"Leave it to me, I'll do it properly. Here we go. 'Water Surface Moon', 'Reality and Void'—Divine Possession."
To ensure perfection, he chanted the cursed poem to exercise the technique. Immediately after, Yu Haibara's body, forming the Sword Mudra with natural movements that didn't seem manipulated, rode the cursed energy circulating from his dantian onto the poem and constructed the Barrier Technique exactly as Naoya intended.
"Rin, Pyo, Toh, Sha, Kai, Jin, Retsu, Zai, Zen!"
Matching his vocalization, the ritual of swinging the Sword Mudra in a grid pattern starting from the top left—horizontal, vertical, horizontal, vertical...—was what is commonly known as the Kuji-kiri of the Kuji-in self-defense method.
The result created was a hemispherical barrier resting on top of the white line laid on the ground.
"Success. Did ya grasp the feelin'?"
"Oh, ohhh...!"
"Heeh, not bad, Haibara. It's a barrier that just 'partitions' with no technique effect or anything, but wouldn't it serve as a wall equivalent to the cursed energy put into it?"
"This is quite... Haibara, can you release this and do it again on your own?"
"I'll try! ...Rin, Pyo, Toh, Sha, Kai, Jin, Retsu, Zai, Zen!"
"Ah, it went squishy in the middle and broke."
"Hmm, I feel like I grasped something though... Thank you, Naoya-kun!"
Haibara thanked him while tilting his head in that manner. Taking his place and standing before Naoya was Kento Nanami. Rare for the cool-headed boy, he seemed a little nervous, but Naoya mercilessly placed his hand on Nanami's head as well. While complaining, "Nanami-kun, your height is seriously huge," Naoya exercised the technique and made him perform the Barrier Technique too.
-----
A while later. After letting everyone experience the Barrier Technique at least once, Naoya was sipping tea to take a break due to the fatigue from the continuous use of Technique Reversal, while the students were enjoying Barrier Techniques in their own ways in front of him.
"Look at this, Suguru. AT Field."
"Where...? It just looks like a thin, transparent plate-shaped barrier."
"Throw a stone at it."
"Like this? Ah, I see, orange ripples spread out when something hits it. What's the performance?"
"I loaded it with a Binding that doesn't let things above a certain size without cursed energy pass through, but lets everything else pass freely, just to pile on the visual effects!"
"...I see, zero practicality."
Completely playing around were Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. Besides the AT Field they were currently playing with, they were mass-producing toys that were useless as scum, such as a 'Monolith' and a 'Soccer Ball', grandly wasting their natural sense and intuition.
On the other hand, the ones doing it relatively seriously were Haibara, Nanami, and Ieiri—a somewhat rare combination of three.
In their case, the composition was that Ieiri, who grasped the knack early on with her outstanding sense, was teaching the two juniors.
Furthermore, among the two juniors, Haibara could somehow construct a barrier, so he was going around supporting Nanami, who couldn't make a barrier well without the aid of Naoya's 'Record-Self Sorcery'.
At a glance, it was a truly beautiful scene of seniors and juniors helping each other. But, however.
"Nanami-kun, you go goon and then bishi!"
"That's right, Nanami. You go zuzuzu and then pon!"
"...Is the fact that I don't understand at all because I have no talent for Barrier Techniques...?"
"That's not true, Nanami-kun! It's goon then pon!"
"Yeah, Nanami. The shape is almost forming, so the rest is zuzuzu then bishi~"
"Did you guys swap or something?"
The reality was that the training was facing unexpected difficulties because the theoretical Nanami couldn't receive the information the two super-intuitive types were trying to convey through their unique onomatopoeia.
On the other hand, Naoya is a theoretical, hard-working piece of scum, so teaching Nanami would be easy... but.
—It's funny, like a comedy sketch.
Since the scummy part of Naoya's inner self was finding the sight of the perplexed Kento Nanami amusing and watching it with interest, this chaos showed no signs of ending.
Incidentally, the reason Naoya's Bindings of 'Encourage Good' and 'Punish Evil', which enforce 'Good Deeds', didn't activate was that although Nanami was troubled, the advice from Ieiri and Haibara trying to help him was born from good intentions. Therefore, the option of 'I'll step in if it looks really hopeless, but I'll watch for now' just happened to be permitted.
In the end, Naoya intervened with Nanami 30 minutes later. Extending a hand for the extremely dubious reason of "I'm getting tired of this running gag," he ultimately brought salvation to him. By constructing a box-shaped barrier composed of a rectangular cuboid with a ratio of 'height 3, top surface side length 7'—a ratio familiar to Nanami's technique—Kento Nanami was successfully able to construct a barrier on his own.
—The peaceful break allowed to the Tech High students melted into the spring breeze.
—But the faint dampness mixed gloomily within that warmth was beginning to conceive the season of curses that would eventually come.
[Reviews - Power St0nes - Comments are highly appreciated to keep me going.....(+50 chapters) patre0n.c0m/talecrafter]