start remote_rebirth.exe

[ he's known since close to the beginning of the term that the strange feeling he keeps getting exactly correlates to how physically near he is to fujiki yusaku — his mistake was in guessing that fujiki yusaku must have found a way to steal some of his research, runic-enhanced equipment that should have been kept away from anybody for their own safety. he never would have suspected the truth: he always believed that those six children that he accidentally condemned had died long ago. he saw their remains; they could not even be accurately described as corpses at that point — and maybe that was the point where a kind soul hardened, and he began keeping others at a distance in favor of studying and researching and keeping his brain always occupied, so that he would not need to think about his past.

but ryoken chose not to do anything, because he knew he would need to play his cards close to his chest. the kind of "research" he did as a child, not knowing the full implications of what he was doing — thinking that he was just playing — is not the kind of research that one can show to others without inflicting an indelible taboo upon themselves, so he decided to approach the situation with great caution.

so the fact that fujiki yusaku is about to fail out of his runic inscription class, and that the professor for that class wants him to give yusaku supplementary lessons to avoid that — it throws a wrench in his plans, to say the least. he can ignore the sense of pressure that he gets from yusaku's presence easily, it's more of a subtle awareness than an active one, but he cannot quite keep the hostility out of his tone, doubly inflicted by the fact that he cannot abide by contractors as well as his growing suspicion that yusaku must have stolen from him something that he was trying to safeguard stalwartly. and he knows the sentiment is very much returned, meaning their first private lesson is less educational and more a battle of words, to see who can get the other to break into open animosity first.

though he does not wish to give yusaku the pleasure of knowing that he folds first, ryoken's pride is finite. after one pointed barb too many, he closes his eyes, sighs sharply, and then opens them again, glaring as hard as he can at yusaku from across the table that they're sitting at. it's off-hours, so even though they're in the graduate students' office for this, nobody else is around and ryoken is fairly confident that nobody will return. ]

I've had enough of this. I can't believe that you have the audacity to talk to me like this when you've taken from me something that does not belong to you... don't pretend like you don't know what I mean. I can sense it.

[ he rises out of his seat, taking a deep breath; he curls one hand into a fist, but then slams them both flat to the table. ]

I think I'll take that back now. Somebody like you, who cannot even grasp the basics of runic inscription, shouldn't have something so dangerous in the first place. I'll give you a chance to willingly give it back first. I advise you take it.

[ he's not in a militant faction of the rune guard for nothing, after all. he doesn't fight, but that doesn't mean he can't. ]