How stupid does this school think I am? thought Kokoa Shuzen. She was paying just enough attention to the teacher to be annoyed by him. How do they plan out these lessons? 'Yes, I know my students are high-schoolers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they went to middle school, right? Clearly, I need to teach them how to multiply fractions.'

Kokoa sighed. Not even mentally mocking her teacher could make her feel anything. She had long since run out of ways to entertain herself. She had tried planning a way to get her sister freed from her rosary, but she wasn't able to come up with anything, though she was planning to visit her at the newspaper room later for ideas. She had played with her pencil, trying to make it balance on her desk or her finger, but gave up when she realized how pointless it was. She had tried cloud watching, but on such a nothing of a wednesday like this even water droplets couldn't motivate themselves to condense beyond a few wisps. She even tried paying attention to the teacher for a few seconds before realizing what she was doing and shaking herself back to sanity. The only thing keeping her head from colliding with her desk out of total apathy was her arm, propping her up and tilting her chin to keep her looking out the window, the sight of the dead, unmoving woods around Youkai Academy still more entertaining than anything in the classroom.

Why do they keep on teaching us these things over and over again? she thought. If you're gonna make us learn, at least have us learn something new. Kokoa sighed, the act making her neck twinge a bit. She had had her head turned for so long that it was starting to ache. Kokoa knew what this meant. Kokoa briefly thought about just letting her neck seize up to get out of class for a few days, but realized that that would mean she would have less opportunities to free her big sister. Damn it. Kokoa reluctantly switched the arm holding her head up for her left one, making her face into the classroom.

As she scanned the boring, brown room, out of a desperate hope that something had miraculously appeared on the blank walls above the sea of green uniforms. An amusing comic, an inspiring quote, a firing squad come to take her out of her misery, but no. It was as drab and lifeless as it was a week ago when she first entered the room.

Figures I get the one teacher in this school with less personality than his desk. Kokoa glared at the balding, middle-aged man droning about math with his back to his students. Kokoa's gaze now turned to those students. Her peers, all seeming equally as or more bored than she was as she swept her gaze from the front of the room to the back. That is, until she came across a bizarre phenomenon.

One student, a boy who seemed just a bit too tall for the school desk he was occupying, was diligently taking notes. Or trying to, given the look of confusion on his face. He had a black rectangle with a tiny light on it on his desk next to his pens. Four pens, all a different color.

Kokoa tried to remember why this one student, out of all worthless peons in her class, stood out in her memory. She smirked as the memory bubbled up.

Oh yeah, the spineless foreigner. Kokoa drifted off into her memory of the second day of school.

The teacher had been lecturing. Kokoa couldn't remember what it was about, she wasn't paying attention; and given the unmoving monotone the teacher was speaking in she had serious doubts that she was the only one. There was almost something relaxing about it, between the teacher's lack of caring and equally dispassionate responses from the students he selected at random to answer his questions. It was a nice hum of white noise in the background of Kokoa's daydreams, unchanging and never ceasing until the teacher called on the foreigner.

Then called on him again to make the foreigner realize that he was being spoken to. Then, once he responded, the teacher had to repeat the question to him. And again, slower so the foreigner could understand it.

The foreigner frantically flipped through his notes, speaking one nervous, uncertain word at a time, stuttering and correcting himself in such a thick american accent that Kokoa could barely understand him even when his sentence started to make sense. It was taking him so long that the teacher eventually told him to sit down and called on somebody else as the foreigner flushed and quickly sat back down in embarrassment.

Then, when the teacher told them all to study amongst themselves for a little bit, another boy came up the foreigner's desk as he poured through his notes and took one of his pens. Five minutes had gone by before the foreigner had noticed it was missing. He looked around the room and saw the other boy sitting at their desk, twirling his pen between his fingers.

The foreigner got up, after spending a minute writing on a piece of paper, and walked over to the other boy. He read from the paper, telling the boy that the pen must have fallen off his desk and requesting it be returned. The boy refused. The foreigner asked again, the boy told him to take it, throwing it at his chest and catching it on the way back.

The foreigner turned around and went to the teacher's desk, only for the teacher to send him back to his desk, telling him that his missing pen wasn't any of his business. The foreigner hung his head and went back to his desk, pulling an identical pen out of his bag and writing with that.

Since then, the bully and the foreigner had been Kokoa's sole source of amusement in class, as the bully began harassing him more and more, even flicking and poking him. The foreigner took all of that and just ignored him. He had long since given up trying to get the teacher's help.

What kind of Z-Rank monster must he be to take all that abuse without even trying to retaliate? Kokoa thought. Is he a slime? A kappa? He's western, maybe a pixie. Or a furby, I think that's one of those weird monster types they have in the west. What an embarrassment. He would've been better off at one of those human schools. Maybe he couldn't get into one. Not even they wanted to take him, they could sense his weakness.

Kokoa would have gone on, but suddenly the teacher's voice rose above a whisper over the hilltops. "On that note, I will now assign you all into groups for this project. Pay attention as I won't remind any of you where I have placed you. Once you are all together, I will give you your formula. You have until next friday to find a way to explain it simply to the rest of the class."

Kokoa listened to her name get called and placed in a group with three people whose names she didn't bother asking. As she moved over to them she looked at the clock. One hour left. Sixty more minutes she had to deal with this. Something exciting had better happen after class, she thought as she pretended to care about their plan to work on the project.

-Later That Day-

Kokoa was glad that there was no one else around her as she walked along a dirt path through Youkai Academy's dead woods. She didn't think she could keep the smile off of her face, or the spring out of her steps. Not only had she gotten to see her sister, her real sister, again, she got to watch as she ground the doppelganger into dust.

Yes, yes! Kokoa thought as she replayed the fight- no, the beatdown in her mind, still in awe at her sister's strength and beauty. That is how a vampire should be! It more than made up for her getting captured and held with that weak, pathetic, idiot of a human. Then she remembered what happened afterwards. All her previous smiles and jubilation were replaced with a frown and anger. Why?! Why on earth did she go back to being that- that weakling! It must be a curse, something happened to her mind! Don't worry sister, I will save you! Kokoa's concentration was suddenly broken when she heard something in the forest. What's that? she thought as she went towards it, figuring that in the worst case scenario it would be something she could take her anger out on.

When she got closer she started to recognize it. It was the voice of her teacher, but weird. As she concentrated on it, the most attention she had ever put on that voice, she noticed that it seemed to be repeating. More specifically, repeating that day's lecture. This intrigued Kokoa, again, a first for anything relating to her teacher. She kept following it until she came across someone sitting on a tree stump, with a pen in one hand, a notebook in the other, a black rectangle in their lap and a green school jacket on the ground behind them. Taking a closer look, Kokoa realized that she was looking at the spineless foreigner. In her brief glance, she saw him touch the rectangle and the voice stopped. She realized that it was a tape recorder.

Kokoa stifled a laugh. His japanese was so bad that he actually needed to record the lectures and translate them later. It almost made her feel sorry for him, no one should need to hear those twice, let alone multiple times. She watched as frustration contorted his face more and more as he repeated the same segment of tape over and over, trying to make out the teacher's quiet voice.

The foreigner let out a throaty scream and whipped his pen at a nearby tree. Kokoa covered her laugh and shook her head. She decided to leave him to his misery. She turned around and started to walk away.

After she took two steps, her body locked up, so fast that it took her a second to realize what had spooked her so badly. Her eyes widened, her heart raced, and her breath shook as she was hit by one of the biggest waves of youkai she had ever felt. She dropped down into a battle stance, turning her bat into a baseball bat as her eyes darted from left to right, trying to find the source. She looked deep into the forest, she looked up, she even tried checking underground, nothing.

Her eyes, already impossibly wide now threatened to pop out of her skull as she realized what the only remaining possibility was. No. No. It can't be, Kokoa thought as she slowly looked back over her shoulder, willing her eyes to unfocus to avoid actually seeing it. But eventually, grudgingly, they focused.

Just in time for her to watch the source of the youkai get up and recover the pen it had just thrown.