Knock. "Headmistress?" Knock, knock. "Are you free, Headmistress?" Knock, knock, knock.

Jin put her brush down with a sigh. There was only one reason Furuta would be knocking on her door right now. "Come in. What did he do now?"

"The little cheater figured out the locking seal on the teacher's cabinet. Got in and dug out tomorrow's exam. We need to—"

Jin raised an eyebrow. "No he didn't."

"Yes, Headmistress, he did. I saw him coming out of the teacher's lounge myself, and when I looked in the cabinet the exam had been moved in the stack."

"There is no way that that boy needed to see the exam questions ahead of time. You know that, I know that, and he knows that. He was up to something else."

Furuta paused, his fussing derailed. "I don't see what...none of the other cabinets were disturbed, so he wasn't after any of the advanced instruction manuals. That one is just the introductory course materials—exams, assignments, labs, that sort of thing." He thought a bit longer. "I'll check. Regardless, this is the third time this month he's acted out like this. We can't have this. He needs to be—"

Jin rubbed her face tiredly, reminding herself that Furuta was a brilliant sealmaster and an excellent teacher with a perfect safety record and the school was very lucky to have him, even if he was a stuck-up egotistical snot who carried grudges to the ends of the earth. "Furuta, the locking seals on those cabinets are simple exactly because we want to see who will have the initiative to break them. Now go figure out what he actually did."

Furuta's face imploded into disapproval. "Yes, Headmistress."

o-o-o-o​

Done, Jin thought, setting her brush down in satisfaction. Clean desk, no more paperwork, and still time for six hours sleep before the next batch came in. Best of all, Furuta hadn't been back to whine at her about—

Knock knock knock knock knock. "Headmistress! Headmistress! Are you there, Headmistress?!"

Oh, look. Think the demon's name and he shall appear.

"Come in, Furuta." She composed herself carefully, hands clasped patiently on the desk and face composed in neutral stillness that completely masked how much she wanted to throttle the vengeful little weasel. She had been this close to bed!

Furuta stomped in, one hand waving a fistful of papers and the other clamped around the wrist of a ten-year-old boy with messy black hair and the decidely rumpled look of someone who had been dragged awake minutes earlier.

Furuta was too agitated even to sit. He shoved the boy into a chair, dropped a stack of loose papers on Jin's desk, and paced up and down while gesticulating wildly. "Look at this! This is an Article Seven violation! This little beast is a menace, and he has no respect for the art!"

Jin picked up the papers and sorted through them. "What am I looking at?"

"Mentor assignments! The brat changed the mentors!"

Jin went back through, carefully crossreferencing names to figure out what had Furuta so worked up. "I'm not seeing it. Every team has a mentor, the projects are all still the same...." She frowned. "Hang on, Arito was assigned to mentor the senior team?" She barely caught herself from saying 'He doesn't have the skills for that'; one did not criticize teachers in front of students, after all. Still, the senior team was doing a containment project and there was no way that Arito should be allowed within a mile of that.

"I know! This is a clear-cut violation of Article Seven: Deliberate Endangerment. The little beast is a third-form student so he's too advanced to be simply expelled. We'll need to execute him, and I'm thinking—"

"Hold on a moment, if you please." She turned to the slouched ten-year-old who was the subject of the debate. Despite the fact that one of his teachers was stomping around yelling about executing him, Kagome looked more sullen than afraid.

"Kagome, did you switch Arito-sensei's assignment?"

"Of course he did! He obviously wanted Arito dead, so—"

"Furuta. A moment, if you please," Jin said, a hint of steel in her tone. "I was speaking to Kagome. Young man, did you switch the assignments?"

"Yeah."

"I see. Why?"

"Stinkyhead's a dummy. Suzuki-sensei is much better."

Jin frowned. Undiplomatic, but completely accurate. There were never enough sealmasters, much less sealmasters willing to teach; the school couldn't afford to turn anyone away if they were remotely competent, but Arito was right on the cusp. "Kagome...Arito-sensei was never your teacher. How do you even know what he's like?"

"Saw him at lunch, bragging to some seniors about how he had connected a ninth-dimensional inverter directly to a Fumiwara matrix because it was easier than using a bisection for chakra suppression. 'Just as good', he said. Stinking idiot."

Jin frowned. It was...probably true that hooking an inverter to a Fumiwara would be sufficient, but it definitely wasn't as stable as a full bisection. That was remarkably advanced theory for a third-year to understand. More importantly, if Arito really had been skimping on safety precautions....

"Kagome, why didn't you bring this to the attention of one of the teachers?"

Kagome glared at her through his hair. "Like they'd listen to me? 'No need to worry, Kagome.' 'Three redirections is enough, Kagome.' 'Two hundred feet is far enough, Kagome.' Stinking idiots."

Jin raised an inquiring eyebrow at Furuta. The fussy little man waved dismissively. "The boy is ridiculously paranoid, Headmistress. He disrupts class constantly, always demanding more—"

"Oh yeah?! It wasn't my team that got turned inside out last year, was it, poopface?!"

"Kagome! You will show respect for Furuta-sensei!"

The boy folded his arms and sank down farther in his seat. "Don't see why. His face was full of poop. Probably got into his brain, too."

Jin forced herself not to smile. The incident had been a tragedy and it was only Furuta's quick thinking that had prevented it from being a disaster when the inversion nexus started growing. Still, once the furor had died down it had been pretty funny to see Furuta cursing up a storm while flapping his arms in rage; being covered in the contents of a rapidly-inverted intestine would have upset anyone, but the fussy and fastidious teacher had been outright apoplectic.

"Kagome," she said, letting ice creep into her tone, "you will be respectful of your teachers. Apologize."

The boy tried to match her stare and couldn't. He flicked a still-sullen glance at Furuta, then looked down again. "Sorry I said the poop got in your brain," he mumbled.

"Headmistress—!"

Jin held up a hand to cut him off. "Kagome, your attitude is not acceptable. We will deal with that in a minute, however. I still want to know why you endangered Arito-sensei."

For the first time, Kagome's sullen expression broke; it was replaced by a confused frown. "Huh?"

"You said that you thought Arito-sensei was a 'stinking idiot', but you assigned him to the senior team. The senior team's project is dangerous; if you thought that Arito-sensei wasn't sufficiently careful, why did you assign him there?"

Baffled shrug. "That was where Suzuki-sensei was."

Jin blinked. Something was really not adding up here. "What did Suzuki-sensei have to do with this?"

"She's good. Duh."

Well, that was true enough. As far as Jin was concerned, Suzuki was a gift straight from the kami. In ten years, not a single student had died on Suzuki's watch and there had been remarkably few maimings. Not even one breach to the Out, either.

Hang on. Kagome wasn't saying that he'd assigned Arito to the senior team, he was saying that he'd switched Arito for Suzuki. Why? Arito hadn't been Kagome's team mentor.

"Why would you switch them, Kagome?"

The boy squirmed uncomfortably. "Hoga's in second year," he mumbled.

A picture of a fat boy with an earnest face and mediocre skills flickered through Jin's mind. "How does Hoga fit into this, Kagome?"

"Stinkyhead was supposed to be Hoga's team mentor," Kagome mumbled. "Hoga's nice. Gave me half his sandwich when Taira threw my lunch in the muckheap."

Jin shook her head; she wasn't sure if she was amused, appalled, or something completely else. Still, one thing was clear: this had not been an Article Seven. Kagome had been trying to keep Hoga safe, not endanger Arito. Sure, his actions could theoretically have gotten Arito and the senior team killed, but in practice there were plenty of other safeguards in place. Among them the fact that Headmistress Jin would have noticed the assignment and changed it the moment the first design proposal was submitted for review.

"All right, I've heard enough," she said. "Kagome, you do not seem to understand what you've done. Allow me to explain a few things to you...."