Emi was woken up early the next morning by someone tapping on her window.

Now, Emi was no stranger to waking up before everyone else. In fact, her job demanded it.

However, 4 AM seemed just a bit too early to be knocking on people's windows.

Emi stuck her head out of the window and yelled at whoever was doing the knocking.

To her irritation, she saw it was the girls from yesterday.

"Ayukawa-sensei, I can't believe that you survived!" one of them said.

"Are you sure that the monster didn't attack you?" said another.

Detention had apparently done nothing to deter them.

Emi shouted, "Okay, that's it! This time you get a week of detention for spreading false rumors AND disturbing a teacher! And if you do this again, I will talk to the principal!"

The girls scattered.

The inhabitants of the infirmary had been woken up by the yelling, judging by the lights that were being turned on.

Emi walked over there from her room and told them to go back to sleep, but found that she couldn't do the same. Oh well. Now that she was up, she could finish clearing out that file cabinet.

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That file cabinet was hopeless, Emi decided. She'd just have to dump out all the stuff and organize it from there.

Thankfully, it was breakfast time, so the inevitable was delayed for now.

Emi went around doing the routime morning check of everybody in the infirmary before getting the food out.

There weren't that many people, and most of them were still asleep, so that task went by pretty quickly.

Only one person was left now and that was...

Hey, where did Misawa go?

Oh, there he was! He had been hiding under the covers for some reason.

Emi pulled the covers off, only to find that Misawa had fallen asleep hunched over his math textbook.

She woke him up and said, "You did your homework last night, didn't you? So why are you looking at the book now?"

Misawa attempted to reply, but whimpered in pain.

Apparently, his throat had gotten so bad that he had lost his voice.

Emi quickly checked it. Sure enough, it was swollen so much that there was no way he could eat a proper breakfast without terrible agony.

His fever hadn't decreased noticeably, either.

Well, he couldn't just stay by himself like this! Any worse and they'd have to take him to a mainland hospital!

With a sigh of resignation, Emi cancelled all her classes for the day.

The first thing she had to do was get something for Misawa's throat. She would have to hurry, because Misawa looked like he just wanted to die.

As she was heading to the supply room, her cell phone rang.

She answered it. To her great surprise, it was one of her friends from back home! They hadn't seen each other since summer break.

Well, she should really be getting the medicine, but she was sure it could wait for a few minutes while she had a brief chat!

30 MINUTES LATER

Emi finally hung up. That had been a fun talk!

Even though it had been about trivial subjects such as makeup and the latest celebrity news, Emi had appreciated the short break from her job.

Now what time was it?

Ai-yi-yi. She'd been talking longer than she had planned!

And what had she been doing again?

Oh HELL. The medicine! She had forgotten all about it!

Emi ran off so fast that she almost tripped over her own feet.

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She felt like the biggest idiot on the planet.

How could she just have forgotten like that about a student in pain?

Especially THIS student!

Sure enough, Misawa could barely lift his head up from his pillow when Emi finally got back. He looked for all the world like he was about to cry.

Emi apologized so much that she felt a bit undignified.

Misawa seemed to have already forgiven her, but who could ever tell for sure with him?

Thankfully, things improved after breakfast, when the medicine finally kicked in.

Misawa went back to his textbook, and Emi tried to sort out those darned files some more.

At lunch time, Emi just decided to let the assistant sort through it.

Misawa was still involved in his textbook. Emi jokingly asked him if he was going to do every problem in the book.

Imagine her suprise when he nodded with all signs of seriousness!

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Finally, around 3 PM, Misawa finally got a visitor! It was Judai.

Emi let Judai in the building so enthusiastically that he actually looked a bit scared for a second.

Now that that was taken care of, Emi decided to give the girls' dorm a quick inspection. After all, she hadn't been there since yesterday morning!

Everything was fine, so she was soon heading back. Judai was just leaving.

Misawa looked quite a bit happier during the rest of the day. Emi hoped it would last a while.

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Unfortunately, the dreams happened again that night. The mystery person in the dream was still abusing poor Misawa.

And apparently he didn't know why, because he kept saying that he "hadn't meant to".

Hadn't meant to do what? It had to have some basis in truth, for the dream had occurred two nights in a row.

Tomorrow Emi would interview everyone in the girls' dorm, because that was where all this seemed to have started.

While she was at it, she'd look into those rumors as well. It was high time to find out who had started them.