Hashim breathed in deeply, and then the feeling dissolved. He was left floating, and the gray around him quickly crumbled to nothing.
He emerged back into their mind, feeling a deep sense of loss, but also glowing with purpose and fortitude. He easily swept forward and took control from Xavier, then jarred the eyes closed.
Xavier had been staring, of course. And Miss Rose had been staring back.
Once again, the rest of the class was unconscious.
Footsteps approached. Hashim's hands twitched, and the footsteps paused.
"You are an interesting one."
The voice could only have come from her, judging from Xavier's reaction to it. Corpse agreed as well.
It was a risky move to speak to an opponent. You might cover the sound of your movements, but you also revealed the exact position of the most prominent target on your body.
Unfortunately for her, Hashim was currently hyperaware, but the sensation, which came with the Intent he had gained from holding the sword, was bleeding off quickly.
So when she launched something at him, he immediately knew, as though he could feel it moving through the air towards him.
"Too slow," Hashim responded, leaning his head to the side.
Then he leapt forward, tilting his head the other way as he did. He had sensed the thing adjust its course back towards him. It was far too quick to avoid if you weren't moving towards it at a ridiculous speed. A very good weapon. But not perfect.
"I tried to warn you with those assassins, but you didn't listen," Miss Rose said. Hashim didn't open his eyes. If he did, Xavier might emerge.
"Such a brute message was simple to ignore. My subordinates are not as weak as you assume," he responded. He was playing the part of the overlord. That, he could do. Even if it was in front of Miss Rose.
"Subordinates?" she laughed. "That group of lunatics and outcasts?"
Her sudden silence told him all he needed to know.
As he dodged to the side and back, he spoke again, already knowing where her blow would land.
"I would say I'm surprised at you, but I'm not," he said cruelly. "You didn't even send a third set. And simple assassins aren't enough to defeat me. Really, as though I wouldn't guess that you were behind this. A female teacher, here before the Academy became open to males, and someone targeting the strongest male student? Give me a more obvious scenario."
He was just saying things at this point. In truth, he had made a miscalculation in this regard. He hadn't guessed that this would happen so soon, one of the teachers setting themselves against him, though he knew that it was bound to have happened eventually. He just hadn't expected a teacher to have such connections among the students and send them in, rather than facing him themselves.
But it did seem to be working, despite that.
"Oh, really? Miss Rose said, amused. Her voice was coming from a place that was slightly lower than it had been. "Am I that much of an open book to you?"
Hashim laughed.
"You don't at all understand who you're messing with, do you?"
His Intent was running low. Very low. If she attacked again, he might not be able to dodge as perfectly, and then there would be blood in the water.
The second information spread that he wasn't as strong as he claimed, as completely dominating and hopeless to fight against, the predators would swarm.
He just had to keep her off balance.
It would be practically useless to attempt to continue to dodge her attacks. He had to scare her, bad.
Hashim opened his eyes to look at her.
Mistake.
Xavier pushed forward, overwhelming and burning away Hashim's remaining Intent, and took control.
Xavier stared at her, straight in the eyes. And then he smirked.
There's never been a better time for Xavier to have a power trip, Hashim thought, relieved, as he faded back.
"You're just a small fish in a small pond, Samantha," he said confidently. Samantha had been on file as her true name in the past, but recently it had "mysteriously" changed, and now everyone called her Miss Rose, even the upper management. No one even remembered her original name.
It was pretty safe to say that she had "left behind" the name, and likely, some undesirable trait of her own that she thought she had grown past. Well, if Xavier had to hazard a guess, then he would.
But it might as well be an informed guess.
Miss Rose was an appreciated and beloved teacher by many students, and not all of them were male. Her instruction style was impassioned and energetic, evoking the image of a young girl. So, her secret would be betrayed to him by her very title and position, as well as by her devoted underlings, her students.
She was, in fact, still a little girl at heart. And she was trying to move past it.
But Xavier would not let her.
She was staring at him, astonished.
He grinned.
"Yes, that's right," he continued, building on the blows before she could recover. "I know all about you. Your past. Your parents. All of it."
If she was trying to separate herself from who she used to be, then it was fairly safe to assume that it was because of something that her parents had done or said to or about her.
"You can't know," she snarled. "I buried that information with them."
"Buried?" Xavier laughed. "Is that what the lie is, then? Nothing is ever buried. Not from me."
He leaned closer slowly, only a few inches, but to her, it was enough to crowd her space and make her feel trapped. He could see that much in her eyes. Her pupils darted around, up and down his body, as though assessing his actual threat level, and around him, looking for an escape route. This was perfect.
"That trick you pulled a few days back," he continued. "The Soul Flower, Deis Requiem."
At her expression, he smirked again.
"And of course, you thought I couldn't recognize it. Naturally, though, you couldn't display such a plant in the actual class. So you turned to what you really showed us, the savornolla, and mixed the scent in the air along with the undetectable Deis Requiem. Savornolla is also a sedative and a hallucinogen, but much less potent. Even if you had pumped it into the air, it would have at worst caused maybe one or two students with low tolerances to feel a slight abdominal pain. Not a single one of us would have been knocked out, much less the whole class. Especially with my resistance. That sloppy plan wasn't anywhere near enough to fool me."
He was lying, of course, about having figured it out. Toon had seen that she had scribbled some things on a stiffened piece of presentation parchment, and the information he had just said had all been on the board. And he had been able to infer that she had been brainstorming late into the night simply by the sloppiness. Normally, she barely tolerated sloppy handwriting from her students, much less herself. Things scribbled out, written too quickly, too large, or too small, shaky words but smooth lines that tapered off like a complicated design aspect, it all pointed towards a late night spent trying to figure out a plan.
She was desperate to make it interesting.
"I wonder why you thought so hard and so long for that simple deception," Xavier wondered aloud, fixing her with an evil stare. "It couldn't possibly have been me, right? After all, I'm only one student out of a few hundred.
"Ah, but you didn't have enough time to make them for every Botany section, did you? After all, there are three. But only one of them had me."
That one was purely a guess. If it was wrong, then he would be in a lot of trouble. There was no secret evidence pointing towards that, not anything that Toon had seen or some minute change in her face.
That was merely based on the fact that, extrapolating from Corpse's description of Deis Requiem, it was quite a rare plant. To be considered divine presence even after it was discovered and displayed as an idol by numerous tribes around the same area, it must be rare enough for it to be a resource to be preserved until the most desperate times.
Along with that, he knew almost her entire schedule, collected from fragments he had gotten from students-
Yes, Hashim, they were all female.
Of course.
-during his time exploring the Academy early on. That was also how he knew that there were three different sections of Botany, which of course took place at different times, because Miss Rose would not let another teacher take over for her.
"Fine, then. You've got me," she said, smirking. "So what are you going to do about it?"