"Now because Fallen and Oni each only have single horns, that means they have the same amount of nerves bundled up in half as much space. Fallen have much longer horns that loop around the circumference of the head, so this isn't as much of an issue. But for Oni - who have horns ranging from six to eight inches - the huge amount of clustered nerves results in a horn structure that is incredibly sensitive to touch," Cobalt explained, struggling to reach the chalkboard in order to draw a diagram.

He knew that teaching in a wheelchair was going to be an uphill battle, to say nothing of the school hallways' many gradual inclines. Sat where he was, he could only just about see over the top of the teacher's desk, and constantly craning his neck was starting to give him cramps. Getting to and from each class took so long that barely had enough time to rest his hands, which had begun to hurt from constantly turning the wheels. The school's stairlifts weren't much help either; they broke down so often that Cobalt would have been faster if he just got on his stomach and crawled.

"Do, uh... Do you need help or something?" someone called from the back of the room.

He shook his head and gave a weak smile.

"N- No thanks, I think I can manage!"

If there was one silver lining to the whole situation, it was that his class had been much more considerate towards him. Since the school year resumed, he hadn't been subjected to a single snarky comment or flying spitball. In fact, they didn't seem to know what to do with him. They had been leaving him alone for the most part, and for a long-suffering teacher, that suited him just fine.

"Moving on, we're gonna talk about the actual structure of the horns themselves, because they're not just spikes of bone, oh no. When viewed under a microscope, the structure of-"

He was interrupted by a series of heavy knocks that resounded from the Science room door. With a sigh, Cobalt set his chalk down and turned his wheelchair.

"Come in!" he called, nervously eyeing up the clock.

It swung open, and a particular sharp-nosed Fallen woman strutted in, arms already folded with disapproval.

"Not interrupting, am I?" Martha Cain queried, scoffing at the diagrams he had drawn on the board.

"You are, actually, but that's never stopped you before, Miss Cain," Cobalt retorted.

She gave him a venomous glare.

"No need to get sarky with me, Mr. Trayer. I've come to give you this."

She tossed a filebook down onto the teacher's desk, forcing the Incubus to lean out of his chair in order to reach it. As the class watched on silently, he flipped it open to find that it was a register of students who were scheduled for detention classes at the end of the day.

"I don't understand. Why are you giving me this?"

"Orders from the Headmistress. She wants you to start pulling your weight more. Not that you're in much of a state for that right now."

Cobalt gritted his teeth. This was just what he needed. Not only was he crippled for the forseeable future, but now the Headmistress had gone and lost what little faith she had in him. He could easily see through the thin veneer of Martha's words; assigning him to detention duty was just a way of sending him to the headsman's block. Doubtlessly Mistress Viola expected him to screw up and give her a good enough excuse to cut him loose.

"Never could resist kicking a man while he's down, could you...?" Cobalt muttered, folding the register over.

"Care to repeat that, Mr. Trayer?"

He pulled a face.

"You're not my teacher anymore, Miss Cain. This is power harassment," he seethed, narrowing his eyes.

She began to visibly lose her cool, much to the excitement of Cobalt's class.

"How the Hell is that-?!"

"Racial discrimination. Ableism. Verbal abuse. It's not really looking good for you, Martha," the Incubus continued, counting off on his fingers.

"Gah! Always playing the victim!" the Fallen cried, throwing her hands up as she turned to leave.

"May hellfire forgive when a chairbound man considers himself a victim..." Cobalt sighed, watching as Martha stormed out of the room.

She slammed the door shut behind her, nearly knocking several anatomy posters off the classroom wall. Slumping his shoulders, the Incubus wheeled himself back over to his desk and flipped the detention register open.

"Detention duty, huh...?" he breathed, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

Another issue lingering from the Autumn Festival; slashing his hair short with a dagger seemed like a good idea at the time, but his resulting hairstyle was a little less than manageable. If all he had to do was head to the barbers and get a trim, then there wouldn't be a problem. But the thing was, there was only two people Cobalt trusted to do his hair right; his hairdresser back in England, and his mother...

The school's bell suddenly rang, and at once, his class scrambled for their bags and bolted for the door, scattering their worksheets behind them.

"Wait, wait! I haven't assigned your homework yet!" he cried, watching haplessly as the last of the uniformed demons escaped from the Science room.

Like a stampede of wildebeest, they rushed out the door without heeding a single word, leaving him alone. Groaning, he leaned back in his wheelchair and eyed up the registration.

"Can't be that bad, right...?"

------

The first warning bell in Cobalt's head was learning that the detention classroom was situated in the old Sports Society building, one that had been abandoned years before whenever Mistress Viola did away with the societies program. The second warning bell went off as he slowly rolled down one of its dusty hallways, brow furrowed as he heard a few dozen voices clamouring from a room at the far end of the corridor. The students within sounded loud and strong-will; the exact kind of pupil Cobalt was the least confident in dealing with. The final fifteen bells sounded as he wheeled himself through the doorway of the detention room.

It was easy from a glance that the class consisted of the school's many troublemakers ranging from first to third year. The room itself was rather oddly laid out, with a series of scuffed tables surrounding the teacher's desk like a prison panopticon. Nobody was sitting at them, as the entire class had gathered around a pair of Imps that were currently in the midst of a brutal fistfight. A fair amount of blood had already been spilled by the time he entered the room, causing Cobalt to cry out in alarm.

"Wh- What the Hell are you doing?!"

The two squabbling demons stopped beating each other for a moment as they all turned to face Cobalt. Glancing at each other, one of the Imps wiped the blood from his mouth and shrugged.

"Uh... a hands-on debate?" he replied, slyly kicking his opponent when he thought that he wasn't looking.

Opening the register on his lap, Cobalt looked down to see that he was speaking to one of the Branst twins; a pair of Imp first years who had been sentenced to a month of detention after Lucy Branst smashed a chair over her brother Luca's head in retaliation for him setting her homework on fire.

"Could you maybe stop?!"

The siblings glanced at each other's bloodied faces before reluctantly letting go of each other.

"Yeah, sure, whatever. I was winning anyway."

"No you weren't."

"Yes I fucking was!"

"Mr. and Miss Branst, please! Enough with the fighting!"

With a shaky sigh, he rolled himself up to the teacher's desk, growing more and more unnerved as he noticed the crusty red marks on the floor. Back in the day, this particular room was supposedly used by the Boxing Society, but these stains looked much more recent...

Positioning himself in the middle of the room, Cobalt set his register open on the desk and watched as the class of delinquents begrudgingly returned to their assigned seats. They all looked none too pleased to be kept behind after school, and quite a few of them were eyeing the Incubus up with resentful glares. As he scanned their faces, however, he came across an Oni he recognised seated by the window.

"Izzbelle...?"

Flipping through the register, he found that she had been assigned a week of detention for physically assaulting a student called Magnus Rost in Applied Demonics. As a matter of fact, Magnus was also in detention for an unrelated charge; telling his core teacher to go fuck herself.

Izzbelle didn't seem to react to his presence. In fact, she just kept her head down and quietly scrawled in her workbook, doing everything in her power not to look at her teacher.

For a split second, Cobalt wondered what he had done to deserve the cold shoulder, but that was swiftly overtaken by another, much better thought. What did it matter? Izzbelle was actually knuckling down and doing her homework!

Jelli was certainly leaving a good impression on her.

"I trust you all have your own work?" Cobalt asked, silently hoping that the next hour would go by smoothly.

Thankfully, he recieved a chorus of unenthused affirmation. Though he could see that most of the students were hiding their phones under their desks or behind their books, he thought better than to correct their behaviour. At that moment, all he cared about was making it through the detention class and proving to Mistress Viola that he wasn't completely useless.

"Alright then. Just get on with whatever you have, and you'll be out before you know it!"

Again, they all just murmured at him half-heartedly, too engrossed in text conversations or mobile games to listen. And honestly, Cobalt didn't mind, so long as they were orderly.

As the detention class went about doing - or not doing - their work, the Incubus himself pulled out a stack of paperwork from his satchel and got down to brass tacks. He was still catching up on correction work that he missed out on during the midterm break, and going by the sheer amount of assignments he still had to correct, it was going to cost him a lot of sleepless nights before he was finished. Not that he was getting much sleep anyway, what with the omnipresent gaze of Mistress Viola constantly bearing down upon him. She was like an apex predator; one sign of weakness, and he was a goner.

Before long, forty minutes had passed, and Cobalt had only managed to complete a stack of third year Language assignments. With a sigh, he set his pen down and looked up from his desk, to rest his eyes more than anything. A quick scan of the class told him that things were going well; Izzbelle was still working peacefully, the Branst twins' noses had stopped bleeding, and Magnus Rost was-

"The fuck are you looking at?" the gruff Oni barked, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded.

"I- I'm sorry?"

"You were eyeballing me. I wanna know what the fuck for"

Cobalt swallowed hard as the back of his neck began to prickle. He could already feel the mood growing tense.

"Mr. Rost, I was just-"

Magnus got out of his seat, a cruel grin painted across his face. A disturbingly familiar grin, once Cobalt thought about it...

"You think you're hot shit just because you got lucky once, huh? That why you're looking down on me?"

The colour drained from Cobalt's face. He remembered now. The Oni that was giving Jelli grief when he first got to know her; this was him.

Oh no.

"M- Magnus, I assure you, I bear no animosity towards you. I swear," Cobalt reasoned, slowly raising his hands.

The Oni sneered and cracked his knuckles.

"Bullshit. We still gotta settle things from back then, yeah? And this time you don't got no purple skank to save your ass!"

"Magnus, will you just shut the fuck up?" sighed a voice from the back of the room.

They all turned to Izzbelle, who had finally deigned to look up from her homework. She still avoided Cobalt's gaze, but it was clear from her tone that she was sick of Magnus' taunting.

"The fuck did you just say to me?!" he growled, abandoning Cobalt in favour of Izzbelle.

He tossed desks aside as he advanced upon her, causing the Incubus to flinch. She in turn just stood up and squared her shoulders, fists already balled.

"I told you to shut the fuck up. You gone deaf, now?" Izzbelle retorted, narrowing her eyes.

Anger flashed across Magnus' face for a split second, but it gave way to a strange smug look as he looked from Izzbelle over to Cobalt. Laughing, he folded his arms.

"Oh, I see. Not just got his claws into a pig, but a bear too, huh? Defending your boyfriend, eh Suyas?"

Izbelle's eyes narrowed as her nostrils flared.

"Shut the fuck up. I ain't warnin' you again," she hissed.

Cobalt swallowed hard and slowly rolled back from his desk. As much as he wanted to intervene, getting in between a fight between two Oni was downright suicidal. He could only hope that Izzbelle decided to be the bigger woman.

Magnus' grin grew wider at the sight of her irritation.

"Struck a nerve? What, jealous of whatshername... Karazelle?"

He planted his hands on his hips and turned to Cobalt.

"You're not slick, 'sir'. Anybody with a pair of eyes can see what you're at. You got like, what? Five girls on the go now?"

"I- It's not like that, Magnus, I-"

"Sure it is! Karazelle's easy and the pig girl's a pushover, and everybody knows about what happened with Brode. The nurse never seems to get off your dick, so it only stands to reason that Izzbelle is-!"

"I TOLD YOU TO SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

She struck with the abruptness and ferocity of a volcanic eruption. Hurling her desk aside like it weighed little more than a feather, Izzbelle rushed at Magnus with her fists balled. He bared his teeth and made to counter, but he clearly underestimated his opponent's ferocity. Sidestepping one of his punches, she swept her fellow Oni's legs out from under him, before slamming her knee into his chest and grabbing Magnus by the horn. Face twisted with pain, he dropped to his knees, only to have his head wrenched up as she made to let loose with a powerful haymaker directly at his face. As she wound her fist back, however, Cobalt finally found his voice.

"Izzbelle!" he cried, his voice cracking at an unfortunate time.

"Keep outta this, dumbass!"

"Remember what we talked about!"

Fangs bared and knuckles shaking, Izzbelle held her position. Cobalt could see her biceps bulge in anticipation of the coming strike. Her grip tightened on Magnus' horn, causing him to wince. He could almost taste the bloodlust radiating off her.

But with their eyes locked, a strangely pensive look suddenly passed across her face.

Slowly, she let Magnus go.

"I'm buggin' out," she spat, letting him drop to the floor.

"Wh- Where the fuck are you going?! Get back here and finish this!" Magnus yelled, staggering back to his feet as she swept her belongings into her rucksack.

Swinging her bag over her shoulder, Izzbelle stopped in place on her way to the door. Shooting a disdainful look towards the other Oni, she slowly turned her eyes onto her teacher and locked eyes with him. He could see that she was angry, but somehow, she looked as though she was tempering it.

"You ain't fuckin' worth it," Izzbelle spat over her shoulder, before she left the detention class.

With that bombshell dropped, the class burst into a state of uproar, yelling and hollering as they brought out their phones to record Magnus. He spat and swore at them, gritting his teeth and grabbing his satchel as he made to give chase to Izzbelle.

As for Cobalt, he didn't know how to feel. A fight had just broken out on his watch, but he wasn't focusing on that. Instead, he kept thinking about the look in Izzbelle's eyes as she let her opponent go.

Maybe... Maybe she really was learning to stand down...

He smiled, despite the state of the class.

"Good for you, Izzbelle. Keep it up."