Yamiko: Edge of Humanity

AN: Well, that certainly took long enough. Been focusing more on my fanfictions, of late, due to how much more popular they are, but I've been working on this slowly but surely in between.

Without further ado, enjoy!


Chapter 4: Teachers, Classmates, and Other Dangers

"There was definitely a demon here."

In the middle of a park stood black-haired youth in a school uniform, glasses, and a black bandanna on his forehead. His school bag laid at his feet, his hands were folded in front of him, index and middle fingers extended, and his eyes closed in concentration.

"The aura's several hours old, at least, maybe a day…" He muttered, "I'll have to look into this more la-" Only to suddenly be cut off as someone ran into him.

"AAH! Sorry about that!" Came a familiar voice. "Wait, Seigi!? What are you doing here?"

Tsuyoi Seigi looked over his shoulder to see a head of distinctive red hair. "First yesterday, and now you run into me again. Do you really pay that little attention, Yamiko, or do you just like getting your ass kicked?"

Recovering from her surprise, Yamiko shook her head, "Check the time, idiot! We're going to be late if we don't hurry!" Without waiting for his response, she pushed past him and began running once more. A glance at his watch confirmed Yamiko's words, and Seigi quickly scooped up his schoolbag and chased after.

After a few minutes of running together in silence, Seigi looked at his companion in confusion. 'The Yamiko I know would never pass up an opportunity to taunt me and try to start a fight, but right now he's being unusually quiet.'

Meanwhile, Yamiko was deep in thought herself. 'What should I say to him? "Sorry I've been calling you an idiot for years, turns out you were right about demons!" Somehow that doesn't seem good enough…'

"So, aren't you going to ask what I was doing there?" Seigi asked to break the silence. "You know it's not on my route to school."

Yamiko shook her head. 'You're always going on about being the heir to a Demon Slayer Clan,' Yamiko thought. 'So, of course you'd end up where I was attacked. I never would have gone back through there if I weren't in such a hurry. Although, actually having daylight doesn't hurt either.' Out loud, she said, "Nah, I've got a pretty good idea why you were there." Seeing the gates of the school coming up, she went on, "No time to talk about it now, though. How about we meet up at lunch?"

Seigi raised an eyebrow skeptically, saying, "Did I hit you a little too hard yesterday? You're acting unusually friendly for some reason."

"Like I said, we'll talk later." Yamiko replied with another shake of her head. Still moving at full speed, the pair made it to their homeroom just as the first bell rang.

…Only to sit restlessly in their seats with their fellow students for over ten minutes before the door opened again. When it did, their usual homeroom teacher entered, accompanied by an unfamiliar man with glasses, a face covered with stubble, slumped shoulders, and messy black hair.

"Attention class!" The teacher called out. Once most of the students were looking towards her, the teacher laid a hand on her noticeably pregnant belly, and continued. "As some of you may have already guessed, I'm going on maternity leave. So, before I go, I'd like to introduce my replacement, both as your homeroom and English teacher, Suhoru Redofierudo."

"Zhor Redfield," The man corrected her, his smooth, rich baritone at odds with his scruffy appearance. "Although, in Great Britain the family name goes last, so here it would be Redfield Zhor."

"Ah, s-sorry," the pregnant teacher apologized with a blush. Clearing her throat, she said, "W-Well, I'll let you take over then, and I'll be on my way. Be nice to your new teacher, class!" With that said, their former teacher left the room.

Grabbing a piece of chalk, the new teacher wrote his name on the blackboard. Turning to face the class, he cleared his throat to get attention, and when he spoke, Yamiko was again struck his oddly appealing voice. "First, let's get a few common questions out of the way. You can address me as 'Mr. Redfield' or 'Sensei'. I lived in England before this, in a small town none of you have likely heard of. I am quite fluent in several languages, English and Japanese obviously among them. Anything else can wait until later, as we're already running behind, so I'll start taking role."

After that abrupt introduction, he began to take attendance. As he did so, however, Yamiko noticed something odd. Since he had entered the room, Redfield had only used his right hand, leaving his left hand in his pocket. As he turned to face the class, Yamiko noticed his left wrist was wrapped in bandages.

"What happened to your hand?" It took Yamiko a moment before she realized she had blurted out the question aloud.

The teacher turned to face her, a frown on his face at the interruption. As his eyes met hers, Yamiko was struck by their alluring crimson color. "What is your name?" He asked.

"Y-Yamiko. H-Hikarino Yamiko." Yamiko stammered, her face heating up as his exotic eyes and commanding voice made it hard to think. His eyes, especially, were unlike any she had ever seen.

'Well, except for Mom,' Came a stray thought… which was immediately followed by a realization. 'And Mom is a demon… which means…'

"Compulsions are a weak sort of mind control. More of a suggestion, than a command."

As soon as Yamiko remembered her mother's words, the haze over her mind vanished. 'That bastard was trying to control me!' Yamiko thought, her expression morphing into a glare.

If Redfield noticed any change, he gave no sign of it, however. "Hikarino, is it?" He said, making her name sound as if he were spitting out something disgusting. "If you must know, I burned myself preparing dinner last night. Now, where was I?"

As he continued taking attendance, Yamiko glanced around the class, noticing most of her classmates acting the same way she had been; staring at the new teacher dreamily, smiling or blushing as they did. A few seemed to be acting normally, or looking confused, Seigi being amongst the latter.

It looked like they had one more thing to discuss.


Yamiko was worried as she climbed the stairs to the roof. Part of it was that she was still trying to figure out what to say to Seigi, but mostly it had to do with their new teacher. It was bad enough that he seemed to be a demon, but there was something else nagging at her that she just could not put her finger on.

When Yamiko reached the roof, she saw that Seigi was already there, sitting on a bench. At the sound of the door to the stairs opening, he looked up, his brown eyes locking with Yamiko's golden ones.

"Heh, I was worried that you might have forgotten that we used eat lunch on the roof." Yamiko said as she approached the waiting teen.

"You know I have an eidetic memory, Yamiko. You think I would forget something we used to do daily?" Seigi replied. "But that's beside the point. What's going on with you? You've been acting weird all morning." Yamiko was silent as she sat down next to him, still trying to figure out how to say what she wanted to say. After a moment of awkward silence, Seigi stood up to leave, saying, "Look, Yamiko, if you-"

"I'm sorry!" Yamiko blurted out, interrupting him. As her face flushed in embarrassment at having to apologize, she muttered, "There, I said it, alright?"

"…What?" Seigi said, after staring at the redhead in surprise for a moment. Yamiko was not acting like the arrogant, taunting rival he had come to know. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, "Who are you, and what did you do with Yamiko?"

Yamiko let out a short laugh, at how similar that was to what her mother had said. "Nah, I'm still me… sort of."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Seigi asked as he sat back down.

Yamiko took a deep breath, before deciding to just come out and say it. "Last night I was attacked by a demon. It happened in the park you were at this morning."

"That must have been what I sensed…" Seigi started, before what his rival said finished registering. "Wait, you were attacked!? How did you get away?"

Yamiko lifted a hand to her bare neck, saying, "Turns out the necklace Pop left me had some magic in it. It shattered but drove the demon off long enough for me to get away. When I got home, Mom explained some stuff. So… I guess you've been write this whole time."

"About time you realized that," her rival said as he sat back and opened his bento. As he started eating, he asked between bites, "So, what do you think of the new teacher? Something about him seems a bit off to me."

"Well, he's a demon, ain't he?" Yamiko asked. Snickering as Seigi started gagging on his food in shock, Yamiko thumped his back as she added, "I thought you were supposed to be able to sense that kind of stuff with your super ninja powers or whatever."

As Seigi finished clearing his throat, he replied. "First, I'm from a clan of Demon Slayers, not ninja, although some of our techniques and equipment are similar. Second, I have to be concentrating to sense demonic auras, and I can't at school, anyway. There's some sort of interference from the protective seals the principal set up."

"Protective seals?" Yamiko muttered, before remembering what her mother had mentioned the night before. "Oh, Old Man Domeikuni must be the Onmyouji mom told me about."

"That's right. So, if a demon managed to get through his seals, we should tell him right away," Seigi said, before asking, "How do you know the new teacher's a demon, anyway?"

"Well, he put a compulsion on most of the class. Almost got me, even, until I realized what he was doing," Yamiko explained. "Once I figured it out, though, it was pretty easy to shrug off."

"Let me guess, another thing your mother explained?" Seigi asked rhetorically. Running his hand along his headband, he added, "I suppose I should be glad my father put a seal on this to protect the wearer against mind-affecting magic. Anyway, lunch is almost over, so we should hurry up and get to the principal's office."

Finishing up their meals, the pair headed down from the roof. As they descended, Yamiko said, "Speaking of your dad… I guess this means you were right about what happened to them, too."

"Is this your way of saying you're sorry about that, too?" Seigi asked. "I'll help you deal with this demon teacher. But don't think some half-assed apology is enough to make us friends again."

"Who asked to be?" Yamiko retorted, in a way feeling comforted by the return to their usual antagonistic comments.

As they approached their destination, however, Seigi suddenly pulled up short.

"What i-" Yamiko started, only for Seigi to silence her by pressing a finger to her lips. Before she could protest, Yamiko heard a familiar voice from ahead of them.

"-need something from me?" The voice of their new teacher came from around the corner. "Lunch is almost over, it wouldn't do for teachers to be late to class, now would it?" Peeking around the corner, the pair saw him being confronted by another pair of teachers.

The first was their physical education teacher, Fukkatsushi Ketsueko. With short black hair, dark eyes, and an athletic build, she looked every bit the tomboy that she was. Yamiko had once heard that a student had asked her out, and Ketsueko had agreed, but only if they could beat her at arm wrestling. According to the rumor, she had almost lost her job after breaking the student's arm.

The other was their chemistry teacher, Fukkatsushi Honemaru. With scruffy, shoulder-length hair and grey eyes that seemed to regard everything as just another research specimen, Honemaru rounded out the 'mad scientist' look by constantly wearing an old lab coat. Yamiko could not remember ever seeing him without a book in his hand, usually some scientific or historical work with titles a paragraph long. The current book's title said something about Slovenian hay-racks, whatever those were.

"We simply wanted to give you a little friendly warning," Honemaru said, without looking up from his book. "That was a rather risky maneuver you attempted this morning."

"In other words, pull that shit again and you're gonna pay for it, got it?" Ketsueko growled, jabbing a finger into the new teacher's chest. "If you go and expose yourself, you're not the only one who's gonna be in trouble, and that would really piss us off."

"Oh my, that almost sounded like a threat," Redfield replied, sounding more amused than intimidated. "I suppose I had better be on my best behavior, then. Now, if you'll excuse me…" Not waiting for a reply, he simply walked around the pair, and continued on his way.

Pressing back against the wall, Yamiko and Seigi kept out of sight as their homeroom teacher strolled past. Once he was gone, they peeked around the corner once more, only to see no trace of the other two teachers.

"Well… that was weird," Yamiko said.

"You can say that again," Seigi agreed.

"Well… that was weird," Yamiko said, smirking at the annoyed glare she got in return. "So, do you think those two are demons, too?"

"No, I've already checked them outside of school, and neither give off demonic auras," Seigi said, as the approached the principal's office. "That said, I'm not entirely convinced that they're human, either."


AN: And there we go! Finally got Yamiko back to school, only for her to begin discovering just how close the supernatural was to her, all along.

How did a demon manage to infiltrate Yamiko's school? What are these other two teachers up to? Find out in future chapters of Yamiko: Edge of Humanity!