It was a terrible mix of emotions Hiroko was faced with.  Part was shock, part was joy, several parts were awe, and a very controversial part was anticipation.  All of these swam together as she felt herself standing on a solid floor once again.

Hiroko was breathing hard.  Her knees were unsteady.  Her pulse was racing.  The girl leaned gently into the wall and closed her eyes, giving her body time to calm itself and let what she could guess was adrenaline drain away.  She was hoping to calm her mind, too, but after-images of spouting flames and pseudo-flying knights danced unendingly across her mental stage.  The only word she could find to describe it all, looping around and around again, was 'fantastic.'  It was all so very, incredibly, beautifully [i]fantastic![/i]

The sound of the door rattling open snapped Hiroko back to the present.  Her eyes came open and her head came up, but she was too late to see a face; she only saw the back of the retreating figure--a figure definitely of an adult, but not one of the staff.  She felt a pull to chase after him (quite literally, her finger that bore her ring was rising, straining to pursue the opponent, then dropping impatiently with a light tap-tap-tap); however, Hiroko had grown used to the irksome ring's urges and readily ignored its whining.  She had a promise to keep to a... well, not a friend, but an ally.

The class rep turned through the doorway to see how Kyogi was doing.  He appeared entirely unfazed, undamaged, unperturbed, un-everything.  If Hiroko hadn't just witnessed him being spiritually slashed with a medieval war axe, she never would have believed it.  (And the small voice at the back of her head commented on exactly how absurd that statement was.)  [color=yellow]"You did well,"[/color] Hiroko congratulated, well aware of how much of an understatement that was.

[color=yellow]"Do you know why he came after you?"[/color] she followed up quickly.  She had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, but she was forced to contain herself to the most important one; Nishikii-sensei was waiting for her.  He, too, was inordinately interested in these rings, but the email he sent made Hiroko believe he had found something important.  That he had sent any email at all, actually, set off alarms in Hiroko's thinking; asking her to skip a class for it was nearly frightening.