Weird Requirement

The night before D-Day, or school day, I had to go to a post office. The reason was that: "Anybody who has artifacts such as weapons or antique watches must send them to the school before the deadline," which was today's midnight.

I printed out the registration paper from the school website and quickly filled out the form. I then put all my items that were required to be sent in a cardboard box, wrapped the box up with tapes, and wrote my name and address on it to act as a shipping label.

Normally, a proper shipping label would be mandatory when sending packages from one city to another. However, that only applied to normal shipping. There was one other service that would only take minutes for packages to arrive at a specific destination. It was called Dimensional Shipping Portal, or DSP for short, and the school mandated us to use it.

It would only function when both the sender and the receiver had the device. Supposedly, packages would travel through multiple-dimensional wormholes that were connected in different locations. In simpler terms, they were teleporters for transporting items. As for teleporting humans, I doubt we could exploit this.

To use it, I had to submit an entry to the office to get approval. I also needed to pay the extra fees for using it. I did all of the procedures days before, so I had all the information required on my phone.

As for Saki, she used her tachi and pocket knife for combat. Her dad, Hirawa Inosuke, was a renowned blacksmith who crafted her weapons. Incidentally, my father's katana was crafted by him.

All weapons he made were infused with a material called Elysium, a valuable ingredient for almost all advanced technologies. The only way to obtain Elysium was to slay monsters. The stronger the monsters, the more condensed Elysium could be found inside. They were essential for the development of every region.

Elysium made swords more durable and sharp around the edges as it had regenerative properties. Moreover, it could reduce the weight of weapons via its minus-gravity factor. Elysium became valuable at a global scale because of that.

Though to get your hands on it without being a Repulsor, you either had to pay an absurd amount of money or had a high-ranking title in the government or the military. The first option sometimes wouldn't be plausible because you had to connect with a black market network to buy it.

People could be spending recklessly in the black market without knowing the authenticity of Elysium. I once accessed a black market via an overlay network that concealed every movement I made.

A bunch of interesting items appeared but I only wanted to look for Elysium's price. My body froze when I saw the price tag. One kilogram of Elysium could go up from billions to hundreds of billions depending on the purity of the raw material.

But it was listed on a black market, it couldn't be trusted that easily. People could be sent counterfeit versions of Elysium without knowing. I didn't know much, so I could only speculate.

How Inosuke-san had the most valuable ore in the world in his possession was an enigma. Even Saki couldn't get her dad to utter a word about it. I guess he had a trusted Repulsor as his personal provider that gave him the goods.

Back to the matter at hand, Saki had a package of personal weaponry that she had to send as well. I contacted her days before to remind her of the entry submission so I hope she got everything completed.

If not, we would have to pay for the supplement fee which would increase based on the total weight of the packages. Incomprehensibly, it cost much more than registering a separate order.

After finishing everything up, I called Saki to check up on her progress.

[Hello?]

"Finished packing your stuff?"

[I'm almost done! I was about to call you because I'm having quite a problem.]

"Do you need something?"

[My printer is broken so I couldn't print out the registration form. Could you print one and bring it to me?]

"Sure. I'll be at your house in five. Anything else you need?"

[Nothing more. You're a great help! Thanks, Hiryu-kun~]

The call ended. I printed out another form, folded it in quarters, and put it in my pocket. I wondered why the school didn't take the online registry route instead. Now that I thought about it, the school had been using complex routes to communicate with its students.

The school website was a one-time rotation website, meaning if the user closes the site, the address automatically deletes itself before sending a new address to the user. It was encrypted so that even if the user tried to share it, the address wouldn't appear as the original inscribe.

Moreover, the school used an end-to-end encrypted texting program to send information to students. Only the school and the student had the key to decode the texts. Third parties couldn't read the chat unless the key was shared with them.

Similarly, online registration might leave traces even if the school had used the hidden service that featured overlay networks. As it would transfer data from one location to another, information could be breached by unexpected attacks.

Furthermore, DDoS attacks were common among these types of networks. If the website's internal system was not secured enough, hackers could exploit vulnerabilities to hack the server. Understandably, the school would wish to avoid these complications.

Putting the form in the package and then delivering it using the DSP was the perfect choice. Though the school's staff would have to record the data manually, it had to be done to protect the school.