"Same to you as well. Have a good day."

This is maybe a bit overly curt but it is, after all, her reading room.

Clay knows when he’s not wanted. He leaves. 

"You did great, you did everything right, and I'm proud of you," she tells Ayako later that day, "and so that in three years you'll know what you're doing if one of your freshmen tells you what you told me," and then Hitomi explains to Ayako, who (here in her own bedroom on the freshman level, with nobody there to see except Hitomi) looks small and nervous and profoundly fourteen, what she told Clay from Manchester and why.

((She's a little bit torn between 'do not escalate this further' and 'Clay Tatum will not go near my freshmen and I'll escalate as hard as I have to to make that happen,' but she doesn't let Ayako, who needs the stability more than she needs the information, see that.))

And after the next class on Shakespeare, Tommy meets Ayako at the library with bruises peeking out the edges of his clothes. “Hey.”

"......hey," she says, and..... doesn't ask, or at least doesn't ask here.

(Hitomi and Rin and Haruto are all in the reading room, and if they've all three independently decided to work on homework that can be done without really paying attention or easily put down or outsourced if needed, respectively, then that's their business.)

He’s… Quieter than usual, and even more prone to zoning out than he already was. That said, he isn’t yelling crude jokes in a library, so… maybe this is an improvement?

Maybe but combined with everything else it's also really concerning! 

"...so, um," she says, when it seems like they've reached a reasonable stopping point, "what... happened?" 

“Huh? What d’you mean?”

"With the, um," and she gestures vaguely at where one of the bruises is visible at the edge of his sleeve.

“Oh, that’s— that’s just Clay, I, we’ve got this little ritual and I was being annoying about it, so.” 

".......what do you mean."

“I’m s’posed to give him my mana every day, right, but I was all oh fuck you bastard you are just a big fuckin bully so he had to take it.”

"........................um."

They're going to have to kill him, aren't they. 

"Hey man, I just do as I'm told. ...Weeeeell. Most of the time."

"How long has this been going on."

"...A couple weeks? I think?"

"Is that a couple weeks you've been giving him your mana, or a couple weeks for something else."

“Couple weeks I’ve been giving him my mana, I dunno what you mean everything else. …Don’t be mad at him for maleficing, he’s my friend and he only does it when I make him.”

"Unless you somehow got a gun into the Scholomance I really don't think you made him." 

“I told you, I’m s’posed to just give him my mana. So if I don’t then he takes it. It’s—it’s not a big deal.” 

There's a longish silence that follows that, until,

              "Who the hell takes mana from a freshman," says one of the sophomores.

      "Is-- can he not build mana himself at all somehow," says a junior, "that's the only reason I can think of--"

              "Okay but that still doesn't make getting it from a freshman make any sense, freshmen barely even have any--"

"Regardless," Hitomi says, her voice like ice, "that isn't what 'making him' means." 

“Hey! He can—he can too build mana himself, he’s got so much mana. He’s the, the mana-est. And he, like, he’s cool and he hangs out with me and protects me.”

       "Okay but then why is--"

                "Protects you from--"

"Everyone be quiet," Hitomi snaps.

        Everyone obeys, instantly.

"Thank you. So, if he can build mana himself, why is he taking it from you."