(21)

Algebra was even more boring the second time around.

Obviously, she couldn't actually recall her previous trip through the school system or how boring it may or may not have been, but the impression on her mind was crystal clear.

All of the knowledge the class had to offer springing readily to mind didn't help. Every equation the haughty old man scratched onto the dry board with agonizing slowness spelled itself out for her long before he even started his winding lecture on the operational order for solving it.

Drowsiness threatened to utterly consume her whenever she tried to force herself to listen to the teacher's monotonous droning for longer than ninety seconds, so she decided to let her mind wander instead. Naturally, it drifted quickly to the far more exciting pastime of being a witch.

She had finally managed to use her own magic instead of merely copying someone else's. Well, sort of. It was more accurate to say she had nearly fried her own ankle trying to treat it like a sword in the heat of battle, and that she had managed a reckless and uncontrolled discharge of raw magic that just happened to be in the form of lightning because that was her element. Neither had remotely been an actual spell.

On the other hand, it confirmed that she didn't actually need a spell to manifest her magic. It was a tantalizing doorway that suggested the possibility of shaping her magic to her own desires instead of being locked to predetermined forms like every other witch. If she could just figure out how to call upon it without hurting herself, and how to control its form, then the limit might literally only be her own imagination.

As she reflected on the battles she had already been a part of and imagined what forms of magic might have been most effective in the different situations, she daydreamed of everything from electrically-charged martial strikes to thunder lassos to soaring through the air as Flame Witch did, but riding the lightning instead of arcane rocket engines.

Her mind didn't stop there, either. With command of the fundamental electromagnetic forces, the things she could duplicate and pioneer were potentially insane.

She could wear a satchel of ball bearings or small coins and manipulate them as if with telekinesis before firing them like a railgun. She could ignite plasma and do the same with it, or wield it like a lightsaber. The catastrophic force of a particle acceleration cannon was within reach.

She might be able to stimulate her own muscles and neural pathways to greatly increase her strength and reaction time. Doing so directly to her mind to achieve bullet time at will was theoretically possible, as well, but considering what getting it wrong had done to her ankle, or more disturbingly, the fencing foil, that was definitely something to not even consider doing until she had a much greater understanding of the process.

Depending on how countless things may or may not work, she might even be able to heal wounds by electrically stimulating cells into regenerating more rapidly. She felt that might have been truly getting into the outrageous there, considering how little that actually worked that way. Cauterizing the wound and streamlining the body's response to the injury through pain control, vessel constriction and the like was a much more realistic treatment method with her powers.

Frankenstein was a classic, but Mary Shelley had clearly been no biologist.

But what did reality matter? The fun was in the imagining. No doubt it was far from the only thing she was imagining that would turn out to be far less feasible in practice. And it distracted her mind from the dull boredom of--

"MISS KELLY!"

Her head had drifted far away from the front of the classroom and instead toward the windows across the room, and the barking reprimand snapped her from her musings as quickly as she jerked her gaze back to the instructor, Mr. Sato.

She described him as old, and he was, but not so much as the word alone made it sound. His hair was gray and thinning, but his shoulders were still broad by the standards of a scholar, he still stood up straight, and his face hadn't collapsed into the exhausted frown of late old age.

She'd place the boring, bespectacled, balding man in his late fifties.

"Have the windows taught you how to solve the equation?" he demanded of her as snobbishly as one could expect.

Her eyes flicked to the current equation on the board that he had been in the process of explaining. She was surprised he was still on that one, it seemed like it'd been over twenty minutes.

"X is thirteen, Y is seven," the brunette promptly replied with the answer she'd worked out when he first wrote it up.

The teacher stood there for a moment, then cleared his throat as he adjusted his glasses. "Yes, well, just having the answer is all well and good, but the study of algebra is about the process. If you cannot show your work, then the answer is worthless."

He motioned back toward the board with his marker. "The purpose of this class is not to have you find the answer, but to learn how to solve the problem, step by operational step. This is something you would know if you had been paying attention instead of daydreaming. I want you to try again, and since you have been so disruptive to this class, if you can't list every step and define the operation, you will be staying after class until you can."

She set her jaw, attempting to bottle her annoyance. She was the one disrupting class?! He was the one taking time out of his holy math sermon because he couldn't tolerate anything less than a one hundred percent captive audience. Well, fine, then, he'd have his operations.

She stood up and beside her desk as she took a deep breath, and on the spot, verbally walked through the equation again from the start, listing every change and what mathematical law it used. When she finally concluded that first X was, indeed, thirteen, and then went back and solved for Y to show that it was seven, she restated the variables and returned to her seat without so much as an extra word.

Mr. Sato had wanted to embarrass her, but had now failed twice. He huffed as he tried to find something to say, and settled on putting a condescendingly sweet tone to his voice. "I'm sorry, Miss Kelly. I wasn't aware we had an algebraic savant in the room. Do tell me, my attempts to educate your lesser peers aren't boring you, I hope?"

It was a trap. It was blatantly and obviously a trap. She nearly went automatically along with the civil answer of apologetically saying that wasn't the case, she had merely been distracted and was not exceptional at all. As her display should have hopefully made obvious, she had clearly been hanging on his every word, his important wisdom essential to her progression in society.

She almost did it. Almost. If for no other reason than to avoid implying agreement with the premise, the snare itself, that all of her more obedient and better behaved classmates were inferior to her.

In front of her, Ran noticed the hesitation and glanced timidly back toward her, only to slide lower into her chair and bend closer to her book, making herself as small as possible to avoid what she knew was coming.

The brunette set her jaw again, then took a deep breath and stood again from her chair. "I apologize, Mr. Sato, but yes, I find your teaching style very boring."

The room seemed to come alive as her unexpected nerve roused the students from the stupor they had, themselves, adopted for the class. The math teacher noticed, and his face grew redder than it had already been getting. He might have tried to claim that her attitude was again disruptive and they had actually been listening attentively to him, but he knew better. None of them had even noticed anything until that moment, so zombified had they been by his performance.

His thin little fingers writhed like tiny snakes at the end of his hands before he folded them behind his back. "I bow to your superiority, Miss Kelly," he replied sarcastically. "By all means, what should I change?"

It was another attempt to get her to back down. If she answered, she would again be passively permitting his assertion that she thought herself even greater than her instructor, a terrible taboo. Rather than being effective, however, her eyes hardened. He wasn't intimidating her. He was pissing her off.

"You like the sound of your own voice too much," she opened with cannons, drawing gasps from the other students, and Ran tried to shrink even more in her own seat. "You refuse to even give us our assignments until the very end so that we can't be doing them instead of listening to you. I was disturbing no one, and yet you couldn't bear even the thought that every last one of us wasn't hanging on your every word. That speaks to an arrogance unbecoming of your station as our mentor and teacher. It tells us that the attention you get is more important to you than whether or not we actually learn anything."

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The old man's face was getting redder and redder, beginning to resemble a swollen tomato, but she continued. "Your explanations drone on for far longer than they are useful. You could have covered the entire content of the lesson in the time you've spent on this one equation, let alone the others before it. After that, you could have given our assignment to us and allowed us to work on it. You claim it is to make sure we understand the material, but you could just as easily let us come to you with any questions we still didn't understand after the lesson. If too many people are asking the same question, then you elaborate further. And finally, you should stop trying to intimidate your students into hiding from you just because you tried to humiliate them."

Finally, she put her hand on her textbook beside her. "I was content to just sit here and take the class and do my homework and turn it in. You made this an issue, Mr. Sato. And you made it about yourself."

It perhaps wasn't entirely a fair strip-down. The argument could be made that students owed their teachers the respect of listening to them, that he had been trying to remind her how such behavior disrespected their elders. The argument could be made that the time for the class was, in fact, for lectures and not to be a study hall. The argument could be made that, in continuing to answer instead of conform, she was, in fact, being the disruptive one to the class and should have apologized for being distracted and just gotten on with the class, and none of the further offense would have happened.

She had no patience for any of it. If he hadn't tried to entrap her, she wouldn't have done it, but as far as she was concerned, it just proved her words true. Any claim to the contrary would be hiding behind the aggrandizement of his actions.

He stood there in the silence that filled the classroom as, for perhaps the first time that day since the beginning of class, he truly had the attention of every student in the room, all raptly awaiting his response.

The bell sounded, and his shoulders seemed to slump. Almost autonomously, he turned and began writing the assignment on the board as he did every day at this time. When he set the marker down, he turned back and spoke again, maintaining the condescendingly sweet tone.

"I'm glad you are such a master of mathematics, Miss Kelly. It's a good thing that you'll no doubt get a perfect score on your own homework, because, since you have made yourself such a disruption that they were unable to receive the whole lecture, every point one of your classmates misses will be deducted from your own score. Maybe that will teach you to pay attention in my class, and you'll even learn a little respect."

* * *

"You shouldn't have done it."

To Ran's credit, the wallflower had held her tongue for another hour until classes were over and they were in the hallways on their way to the club room. She also didn't need to explain what she was talking about.

"He's the one that did it, Wakumi," she answered without hesitation. "Yeah, I got distracted, heck, I distracted myself just to stay conscious. But when he called on me, I answered the question, and then again with the operations. But he didn't want me to answer the question. He wanted me to screw up so he could humiliate me for not hanging on his every divine word."

The bespectacled girl cowered behind her bag a bit at that, but didn't surrender ground. For a moment, the brunette was reminded of Hisoka, who would have apologetically surrendered immediately at such a reply.

"You didn't recognize that was his goal at first," the gunmetal girl replied, "but when you figured it out, you should have played dumb and just let him have his moment."

"And what," the brunette replied, "just let him keep holding me for ransom?"

"He is our teacher and an adult, which, in case you have forgotten, you are not." Oh, yeah, there was steel there, though one could be forgiven for missing it with how quietly it was delivered. "He is entitled to your respect regardless of how you feel about his teaching methods."

"And he was going to continue to have it if he'd just let me keep my head down and plug away at it," she replied. "When he tried to use his position to manipulate me, though--"

"He wasn't manipulating you!"

The sudden interruption from the normally passive girl cut her off more effectively with its fervor than it did with its still low volume. Ran had turned toward her with the declaration and couldn't have pinned her to the wall any more securely with a barrier spell despite being nowhere near touching her. There was just the sudden presence of the girl.

If she had been Natsumi, the equivalent would have been slamming her fist into the wall beside the brunette's head and nigh-shouting, Shut up and listen, you little fuck!

The outburst seemed to catch Ran off guard, too, and she almost withdrew again, but there once more was that steel, and she braced herself to continue. "He was manipulating Kelly. Nariko Kelly. Thunder Witch. The girl you're pretending to be. Your responses are seen as her responses. Your actions may not have any consequences for you thirty seconds from any moment in time, but they'll have consequences for Nariko for the rest of her life! You cannot go around acting like that life is yours to do with as you please! She's the one that is going to pay for it!"

Ran took a moment to breathe and calm herself, physically shaking a bit with how she got herself worked up, then continued in a more controlled tone. "I don't care if it hurts your feelings. I don't care about your pride. I only care about one thing: My friends. If you hurt Kelly with your reckless posturing, you will never be forgiven.

"Now, you are probably going to fail today's homework, there are more than enough Bs and Cs in class to bring your score below fifty percent. But you need to ace it, anyway, or you'll only make it worse. And first thing tomorrow, you go to the teacher's lounge and you apologize to Mr. Sato. You say you got defensive to cover up for getting distracted, you shouldn't have done it, you accept your punishment and you will be on your best behavior going forward. And no matter what his response or how he lectures you over it, you drop it there!"

And with that, the brainy girl turned on her heels and resumed walking toward the club room.

The brunette was left standing there bewildered for a moment, only able to find one thing to say.

"... Yes, ma'am ..."

* * *

"Those arrogant, ungrateful brats!"

The normally monotone old man roared in the privacy of his own office, sweeping the top of his desk clean of papers, books and even a set of lamps with a wide swing of his arm. His blood pumped furiously through his veins like it hadn't in decades.

He'd honestly thought he had their attention. He had believed they listened to him, respected him. That Kelly girl, though, she'd opened his eyes. Oh, yes. Her brash, insulting arrogance had been so incredulous that they had snapped out of the comatose trances he'd mistaken for proper respect of one in his position. Now he couldn't unsee what had been revealed to him.

"Fools! Idiots! All of them!"

Sato continued to rage, feeling his blood pressure rise and his heart protest, but he didn't care. Expletives came from his mouth, anything he could get his boney fingers on getting hurled to one side of the room or the other. Every time he started to calm down, the sheer mass of disrespect riled him up again.

Anger issues, his ex-wife had said in the divorce paperwork. She had been a fine woman at first, early in their relationship. She understood her place, did her work, and showed him the respect he deserved. Of course he let her go gossip with other women. They were fickle things, and needed their hobbies to avoid getting lost in idleness, and a cultured woman pursued her appropriate hobbies with passion.

He was an understanding husband, and his wife was a good and proper woman. There was nothing to fear.

Then the quality of the meals she prepared for him began to decline. She was too busy preparing for this or that event, she had said, and apologized profusely. He was an understanding husband, however, and if this were temporary, he could accept that sometimes it was necessary. Distant committees didn't set their schedules based on the convenience of their participants, after all. He had even entertained the idea of sweeping her away on a vacation after things settled down, just the two of them.

His wife was a fine woman, and it wasn't any surprise that her group continued to excel, moving to ever bigger competitions. When this further impacted her responsibilities at home, he grew more frustrated, but again rationalized that it was temporary. All would settle down once the contests and competitions came to an end, and his wife would return to him.

When she came to him saying she needed better clothes, it was understandable. After all, it was his duty to provide for her, and her appearance was a reflection of that. He didn't want his wife to look inferior to anyone else there. He cringed at the prices, but these were special outfits, not whole wardrobes, so it had been manageable.

The fight had come when he realized what she bought, how she looked like a western woman, legs uncovered, heels lifting her calves, blush and lipstick in place of paint. What unnerved him most of all was how it stripped the years from her face. She had never been quick to show age, but the nearly forty year old woman had gone from looking ten years younger than her age to twenty. As young as she had been when they had married, while his hair had already started to gray and thin, his body starting to lose its grip on the firm, tight lines of youth. He was ashamed to stand next to her, certain it was inevitable someone would sooner or later assume them father and daughter.

... And would demand to know why he let his daughter dress that way.

He called the outfits trashy, he said she was painting herself up like a western tramp, he accused her of dishonoring her husband. She should have bowed to his will, she should have apologized for stepping so far out of bounds, she should have remembered her place. She did none of these things, and that was the first time he realized his perfect wife had been stolen from him, murdered by worldly ways and replaced with an imposter.

Modernity, she had called it. He had been flabbergasted at how such ideas had gotten into her head, but quickly pieced together that it had been from her thrice-blasted social circle.

In her absence, he had found solace in his classes, in doing what he could to shape the next generation. Now, he realized, his old foe had once again stricken right under his nose. Modernity ate his wife, and now he only just realized it had long consumed his students, as well. Again, all again, and he was helpless against it because it had already happened while he'd been too blind to see it.

"Oh my, is this a bad time?"

His recollections had stilled his outward rage as he bent over his desk, the furious volcano settling into a seething cauldron. Perhaps that was why he hadn't noticed the new arrival, too lost in the past. Yet when he looked up, he felt the rage leaping back to a full boil.

"And why is a delinquent like you still on school grounds at this hour?!"

Mr. Sato didn't recognize him from any of his classes, but the punk couldn't be anything else. Clad in skintight clothing underneath an unseasonal fur-lined coat and sporting nearly pure white hair, he jingled with assorted jewelry and bangles. The fool boy had even gone so far as to spread light blue body paint over every inch of exposed skin the old teacher could see.

Yet the punk had the audacity to feign emotional damage at the categorization, throwing his head back as he ran a hand through his thick hair. "Delinquent?! Why, Mr. Sato, I only came here out of concern for you!"

He dropped the pose with disturbing quickness as he leaned toward the old teacher with a conspiratorial smirk. "Something's gotten you so worked up that I can practically feel the negative energy coming off of you. Tell me who hurt you, and maybe I can help. Was it a particular blue-eyed brunette, hmm?"