There were a lot of people in the room. Jin stopped in the doorway. An adult was standing in front of a blackboard covered in chalk writing. Before them was a large desk. The rest of the room was filled with smaller, single desks all in neat lines and rows. Children his own age sat in these, all silent and writing in thin paper books. It was one of the strangest things Jin had ever seen. Why on earth were they all sitting like that, facing the same direction? Why was every single one of them writing? Why was no one talking? They looked particularly strange all in their uniforms, like Tekken Force soldiers. He looked down at his own uniform. He was meant to be like this. He was meant to sit down in a row and write in a thin paper book too. He immediately wanted to go home again.

"Can I help you?" the teacher asked. He was a short man with wide glasses, and a haircut like a shimeji mushroom.

Jin didn't think that man could help him. Not unless he could suddenly transport him in an instant to a Yakushima beach without upsetting his grandfather.

"No," Jin said and continued standing in the doorway.

There was a pause. Then the teacher said,

"Are you meant to be in this class?"

Jin wondered at that. In some sense, he certainly was, because lots of people wanted him to be here, but really when someone said "meant", Jin always thought the word had deeper meaning than that. Like how you are meant to not drop litter, or meant to not run from a bear, or meant to only use martial arts to protect life. It was more about what ought to be done, in some kind of important sense, and Jin couldn't see any importance to being in this classroom. That backfist hadn't been protecting life, he thought suddenly. That had been a disproportionate response. He should have had better control over himself. His mother would have scolded him for it. His chest ached again.

The teacher was looking through a pile of papers. The students were no longer writing. Instead, they were all staring at Jin.

"Kazama Jin?" the teacher asked, holding a memo. Jin looked at him. "Please take your glasses off, take this textbook and this exercise book. You're late but you can copy the notes off the board to catch up on what you've missed. There's a spare seat here at the front."

Jin took the items handed to him and sat down at the desk. It was as far away as possible from the window. Jin cast a longing glance outside. He took off his sunglasses and placed them at the corner of the desk. He blinked against the light as his eyes adjusted.

The teacher begun talking again and the students started writing. Jin looked around him. He opened the exercise book and got his fountain pen out of his satchel. He started writing too, because everyone else was. He copied the words off the blackboard because the teacher had said to. He couldn't concentrate on what the words were because he was too busy thinking about the rows and rows of people behind him, and how the spacing of the desks made him feel uncomfortable.

He wrote the words down very neatly, crafting the shape of each kanji and setting each one equidistant from the one above, so that they were pleasing to look at. The teacher came and opened the textbook on Jin's desk to a page as he continued talking. Jin couldn't concentrate on what the teacher was saying, because he was busy writing. He glanced at the textbook, but all the text was tiny and there were no images, so he returned to his neat calligraphy. Ten minutes later, he was restless. His seat was uncomfortable and he needed to move around and stretch. Some of the muscles he'd overworked yesterday were cramping up. He shifted his feet and rolled his shoulders, and drummed his leg, and stifled a yawn.

A rattling bell rung abruptly, making him jump. Suddenly people around him were putting things away. Jin looked over his shoulder and started putting things away too.

"Alright, class dismissed, but I want all the questions on page thirteen answered for class on Wednesday!" the teacher was saying. "At least a paragraph on each one, and no just making your handwriting bigger this time, Toyama."

There was some snickering, and then all the students began filing out of the room. Jin sat stock still in his chair as people surged around him on their way to the door. He inched his shoulders closer to the wall.

"Kazama," the teacher said over the river of uniforms exiting the room. "I need a word, will you stay behind a moment?"

Jin ended up staying behind a moment by default. He looked around and the classroom was empty save for him. He finished putting his exercise book and pen away and picked up his sunglasses.

"Aren't you taking the textbook?" the teacher asked. Jin looked between it and the teacher. He closed the textbook and slid this into his satchel too. "You're the founder's grandson, is that right?"

Jin nodded slowly. The teacher smiled at him.

"I'm very honoured to have you in my class. You're coming in half-way through the school year, so it's going to be a little tough to get up to speed, but with diligence you'll do just fine. Come to me if you have any questions – I'm determined to make my class your favourite."

The man smiled again. He seemed nice enough, but Jin wasn't even sure what his class was about. Jin gave a brief nod and left. The surge of people had gone, leaving him no one to follow. The enormous building confused him and all its corridors looked the same. He remembered the lady in the office saying that at twelve thirty there was a lunch break. He wondered if there was a special place to go for that. He didn't much want to see other people anyway, so he put on his sunglasses began wandering.

Eventually, Jin found a door on the ground floor that wasn't locked. He wandered around to the playing fields where he'd seen magpies earlier and sat under the trees. They were green cherry trees, an ornamental species he recognised from the Mishima Estate. They would be very beautiful in spring. He opened his satchel and got out his bento. Within were two neat riceballs, sliced boiled eggs, squares of sashimi stacked by the eggs, and chopped carrots and tomatoes in a bed of fanned lettuce. He ate the riceballs first, seaweed and mushroom, then the vegetables. He eyed up the fish and eggs and decided there was no one to see him not eat those, so set his chopsticks inside and placed the box back in his satchel. Then he lay back under the trees.

Jin watched as a squirrel leapt from branch to branch, running up even the thinnest of twigs without concern. He wondered what it would be like to have that finesse and agility, and to be so perfectly adapted to one's environment. That led him to wondering if he would ever swim in the sea again, or bathe in a river with the forest leaning dark overhead, or toil in the humid summer heat up into the mountain peaks and watch storms roll in off the broad-backed ocean until the sky went black and lightning clashed against blooming, billowing clouds, and the hills ran slick with mud and rain lashed through the foliage and ran thick down the bearded, mossy trunks of ancient cedars. Jin sighed and closed his eyes.

Jin awoke what he assumed to be a short while later, with an ache near his spine from a tree root he'd lain on. He brushed sleep from his eyes and pulled out his timetable, trying to make sense of it. He got out his planner too and turned to its map. He held the map up to the building before him, turning it this way and that to try and orientate it. Then he leant over both pages and tried to work out where he was meant to be going next. After some studying of the timetable, it seemed that most of his classes would be in the room he had just vacated, and only a few were in a different place. That made things simpler, except that he couldn't remember the route he'd taken from here to the classroom.

Jin got up and wandered back into the school building. It was quiet again. It was surprising how quiet it could get, considering how many people it had inside. This time, Jin made a concerted effort to find his assigned classroom. He thought of the Tekken Force captain saying that it wasn't too late to try and please Heihachi. Jin wanted to try and get to one class on time at least.

When he did find the classroom, he found he was late again. Everyone was already seated, and they stared at him when he entered. He was beginning to hate that feeling of walking into a classroom and everyone staring at him. That same desk he'd sat in before was empty, so after murmuring an apology, Jin sat himself down, took off his glasses, and got out his notepaper and pen. He felt like a veteran now. He glanced at the rest of the room, they were all writing and glancing at the blackboard, so Jin did too.

There was a problem. Jin squinted at the board. None of the shapes on the board were familiar, it seemed to be a board filled with nonsense. He blinked and looked again. A different language… Panic set rigid in his limbs. Everyone in the room must know a language he didn't. His eyes darted round the room. He saw the teacher looking at him, so quickly bent over his paper with pen in hand. He eventually worked out that you could sort of curve your arm around the paper, shielding it from view, and then wiggle the pen in a kind of imitation of writing.

After ten minutes of this, the teacher spoke. Everyone stopped writing and sat straighter. Jin set down his pen in relief. His relief was short lived. The teacher was speaking another language. Jin chewed at his lip. He tried to subtly glance round at everyone else. They seemed to be listening and looking at the teacher. Jin decided that if he looked at the teacher too, maybe everyone would think that he was listening as well. He managed about five minutes of this before he was restless and agitated again. He shifted, bored, and started looking at the decorations in the room. There were lots of posters stuck to the walls. Some looked to be written by students and others were more informative. He started reading all the different posters. They were mostly dull and sort of obvious, but one really incensed him.

The poster was about turtles. Jin was fond of wildlife and had been raised with a healthy respect and love for it, but if there was one thing he really loved, it was turtles. Most specifically, the loggerhead sea turtle, for which is home (his real home) was an exceedingly important place. Every year for as long as he could remember, he had watched nesting loggerheads, and the highlight of the year was always observing the young turtles make their arduous journey down the beach, into the wavelets and to experience, by instinct, the call of the sea. Jin adored the way they moved, with their erratic powerful front flippers bigger than their heads, and their still soft shells, and the tracks of tiny disturbed sand trails they left behind them as they scuttled to the shoreline. He knew just about everything anyone could know about loggerhead turtles from observation, and a good deal more from his mother, who had been a wildlife protection officer.

So his irritation on seeing a misinformed loggerhead poster in the classroom was immeasurable. First of all, the year of the treaty most significantly protecting them was listed as being made in 1980. Jin knew the treaty in question. It was the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and it came into effect in 1975 not 1980. Indeed, the resolution had first been proposed in 1963, and the treaty was already open for signature by 1973. Jin had known that since he was five, so seeing such a basic inaccuracy on a classroom wall was infuriating. And second, there was some vague fact saying "Japan is important for loggerhead turtles! About a third of all loggerhead turtles visit here!". But in fact the number was closer to forty percent, and that was just the beaches of Yakushima. And third, the poster was overwhelmingly simplistic, and emphasised natural predators as a main reason for species decline, when Jin could reel off at least six reasons that were all human-made endangerment and a good deal more concerning than shark attacks or any of the other nonsense written there.

He sat fuming through the next twenty minutes of the class as the teacher spoke. When everyone got to writing again, Jin had nothing else to do, so he wrote down everything wrong with the poster and exactly how it should be corrected in meticulous detail. He was still finished before everyone else, so he filled up the rest of the page with anatomically correct drawings of turtles. Some of them were a bit wonky, which annoyed him, so he kept drawing them until he was more content with their shape. Finally, the class was told to stop writing. The teacher went around and collected everyone's sheets in, so Jin handed his in with everyone else. He was fidgety and struggling to sit still now. Probably this was the longest he'd sat in one space apart from the train ride to Tokyo. The teacher spoke in Japanese for the end of the class, mentioning something about homework and reading the next pages of a novel. The teacher then collected their things together and left the classroom.

Jin watched them go. He wondered if he was allowed to go too. He definitely needed a break and to stand up and walk around a bit.

"Are you the guy who bust Ikeda's nose?!"

Jin turned round. Now that the room was teacherless, it looked more normal. Students were rocking back on their chair legs, chatting to one another. Some were throwing things to each other or snickering behind their hands. A boy at the back of the classroom had mounted his desk and sat on it, and was now yelling down the room to him. Jin turned his chair a bit so that he could see him. He shrugged in response.

"I heard he was bleeding everywhere."

"Are you a transfer student?" a girl near the front row asked.

Jin looked at her. He wasn't really transferring from anywhere. Or maybe that was the normal way to ask if he was new. Before he could work out an answer, the girl behind him said.

"What were you drawing? You were drawing pictures in class, weren't you?"

Jin blinked, taken aback.

"He's kind of cute."

"He looks familiar."

"Hey, did you come to school in a limo?"

"Was that him?"

"He's filthy rich."

"You're filthy rich, Toyama."

Jin's head was swimming.

"Hey, how come you were late for Social Studies and English?!"

"I looked for him at lunchtime, but didn't see him… I would have noticed if he was there…"

Jin shrunk back against the wall.

"Let him talk!"

"He's one of those brooding, silent types."

The door opened and the classroom instantly fell silent.

"Lot of noise in here." The teacher who walked in was a severe-looking man with greying hair and sharp lines in his face. He wore a grey suit and a grey shirt and a blue grey tie.

He took a chalk eraser and wiped it through all the lessons of the previous class in one deft movement. Then he scrawled "mathematics" in its place. The sound the chalk made on the board ground in Jin's head and made his thoughts fuzzy. His heart was already racing after all that noise and attention directed at him. He leant his head on his hand, trying to cover his ears without looking noticeably rude. The teacher lifted his chalk from the board. There was silence now. Jin took a few moments, keeping his hands over his ears and drawing in the quiet. He took deep breaths. He was very glad it was quiet, and glad to see that they would be doing maths next.

Mathematics had bored him until his mother made him do it with the village net-weaver. The young man who wove the nets would show him the way shapes could be made or dissected with lines of thread, and how weaving together different numbers let one divide them later into different shapes to make up a different weave, and how different weaves had different utilities. From these patterns, more abstract ideas became easier to handle, until Jin found himself sometimes setting himself mental arithmetic problems to solve for fun in his head.

Jin took a steady breath. It was the last class of the day. This time, he was determined to get things right. He was good at this. He looked forward to it even.

The teacher started writing on the board again, copying out of a textbook. Jin had to really set his teeth together. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, then covered his ears until the writing was done. When he looked though, the writing on the board didn't just have numbers, but also shapes Jin didn't recognise. He wondered if they were left over from the English lesson and had got mixed in by accident. Suddenly, everyone else was getting out a textbook from their bag. Jin only had a social studies textbook in there, but he reached in and got it out anyway, and put it on his desk like everyone else.

The teacher rapped his chalk on the board.

"First day back after vacation, it's time to dust the cobwebs off those brains. Turn to page two-one-five. Use it to help solve this equation. You have fifteen minutes."

There were muttered groans, but everyone reached for their textbooks. Theirs were a lot thicker than Jin's. He didn't even have a page two-one-five in his textbook. He did the next best thing and turned to page one-two-five. Jin carded his hand anxiously through his fringe. He glanced about him, then at the board again. Was that really maths? It didn't look anything like the kinds of puzzles he had liked. Maybe he wasn't so good at maths after all. Why hadn't he been told about this kind of maths?

He spent five minutes struggling to see some kind of pattern that might illuminate what the special letters in the equation might mean before giving up and pulling his textbook to him. The font on the page was so small and dull-looking. He could have cried in frustration. He decided he hated school and never wanted to come here again. He'd rather train until he couldn't move than sit in this room for another second.

After fifteen minutes was up, the teacher talked in a very boring voice about things like 'finding x' even though the symbol he was looking for was right behind him. He talked about brackets and something called quadratics, and Jin wasn't sure how any of this related to anything. He tried to piece things together and fit them with what he knew, but there was so little common ground, that he was just left feeling stupid and frustrated. He fidgeted in his seat, and thought about just leaving. The only thing that kept him there was the thought of disappointing Heihachi. He needed to make it through at least one whole class.

At the end of the class, they again had to hand their paper in to the teacher. Jin handed in a blank sheet and put his books away in a cold fury. He slung his satchel on and was the first out the door this time. He heard shouts from behind him from classmates wanting to quiz him, but put on his sunglasses and stalked down the hallway.

Even though it was the end of school, not very many people seemed to be heading out the front exit. Jin didn't care. He was eternally glad when he saw the limousine already pulled up next to the golden Heihachi statue. As he approached, a black-suited security guard opened the door for him. Jin flung himself inside.

The interior was darkened, gently air-conditioned, and empty. Jin pulled open the minifridge door and yanked out a bottle of water. He drunk down a few gulps and slumped back in a seat, fuming.

A small window was opened to the front compartment and the driver spoke through it.

"Are you ready to leave, Master Kazama? Do you have any other business?"

"No. Drive."

The window was shut. Jin sprawled out on the seats. He was hungry. He thought about eating the fish and eggs he'd left. He wasn't that hungry. But the staff might inform Heihachi he hadn't eaten all he'd been given. He should have disposed of the remains whilst he could. He sat up and got out his bento. After a long hesitation, he ate down the contents. He sat miserably propped against the door after that, feeling awful.

When they got back to the estate, Jin stalked to his room. He threw his bag down in a corner, pulled on his black gi and immediately went out to the training grounds by the dojo. He pummelled sandbags, and punchbags, and wooden dummies until his knuckles bled, and then plastered up his hands and did push-ups until his arms shook. Finally, he pulled a pair of trainers on and ran. He ran through meadows, and up hills and through rivers, and by the clifftop, until he saw the sunset through the temple pagoda roofs, and paused. Sweat was streaming down his back and brow, and he finally felt calm as he gasped his breath in and out.

He jogged lightly back toward the mansion after that, and stopped at the bathhouse to minimise the risk of bumping into his grandfather. He washed himself down, and sat in the hottest pool he could find, letting his muscles soak and his frustrations dispel into the jade tile rafters.

He came back to the mansion, hungry, clean, and exhausted, and hair still floppy even after he'd dried it. He stopped a servant as he headed to his room.

"Is my grandfather in?"

"No, Young Master Kazama, he will be out late this evening."

"I'm hungry."

"I'll see that your dinner is served right away. Where will you take it?"

Jin thought. It was still warm out, and a beautiful evening.

"On the veranda." Jin was about to move off, but paused again. "I'd like something with tofu, please."

Once he was in an evening yukata and sitting on the veranda step looking out of the zen gardens, he finally felt himself again. The cicadas were loud and a yellow moon was rising. The gardens were still striped with colours of dusken warmth – lingering orange and gold in amid growing indigo shadows. The stars were arraying above, speckled like a dusting of snowflakes brushed onto the heavens. In amid the soft aromas of late blooming flowers, Jin ate a hot dish of noodles with marinaded tofu and fresh steamed vegetables. It almost felt like home then. Even though the owl and the rock doves sounded different to the kind he knew, their call in the dark still set him at ease.

In all of this, he was able to assess the day more calmly. It hadn't been good at school, certainly, but he had known it wouldn't be. What was more troubling was the way that being at school captured him, and tried to draw him in – made him feel like he ought to know how to belong and what to do, and how not knowing made him feel foolish. This wasn't what he wanted. None of that mattered. He didn't need schools and learning, he just needed to destroy the thing that had attacked his home. He just needed to become strong enough to kill Ogre. And his grandfather's approval. Because his grandfather was his teacher. A teacher who would help him become strong.

Jin set down his empty bowl and laid back on the wood. He looked out at the night and its cool hues, alive with the songs of insects. He wanted to fall back into old patterns of thinking – about his place in the world, and the interconnectivity of things around him, about existing in the moment, and that being more important than plans for the future of any kind, but every time his thoughts started in that direction, it all threatened to come down. Things started caving in. He couldn't let that happen. He couldn't let his mind go to those places. There were halls of grief waiting for him, and he knew that place was full of crumbling structures. He had to set his heart on revenge, on training, on channelling everything into a new purpose. School was just a fractional part of that. It was something that had to be sufficiently attended to satisfy his grandfather.

He was good at martial arts. He could see it in the flickers of registered surprise in Heihachi's eyes. He could feel it in the way his movements changed, and the way things just clicked and made sense once he'd felt them executed. Even when school or anything else tried to drag him down, he would root himself in that sense of accomplishment and purpose. He would hold strong because he had an unshakeable, unbreakable promise made to himself and all he'd lost.

After thinking all that, he still didn't like mathematics, but he did feel a bit better.