Re:Demon - Reborn as a Demon Book 1

15

Nagi was true to her word and nearly stopped asking questions, reserving them only for the stuff she really didn't understand. For his part, Marux started explaining things in a lot more detail, which helped everyone understand better. The sudden change in both of them caused all kinds of conversation amongst the students, all of which was met by a cold glare when they came to ask Nagi anything.

As she'd feared, her home life was strained, no matter how much time passed, she found that she couldn't go back to the way things had been, for her part it wasn't because she'd been struck by her mother, but because they hadn't backed her or even tried to understand her side, so she found that she couldn't be their little girl anymore, and her parents had stopped even trying to act like a family, instead they treated her like a stranger they had to put up with, which might have contributed to her mother getting pregnant again.

Nagi supposed they wanted to try again, to see if they could get a normal kid this time. Even so, she had reservations about them bringing another kid into this world considering the way they acted towards the one they had, but she also figured that they would probably treat this one better.

The first day she'd gone back to class, she'd been asked a lot of questions, about what she'd had caught and why she hadn't shared it, all of which she'd ignored. But when she'd gotten home, she'd found her mattress back on the frame, which had ticked her off, so she'd drug it off again, which led to another argument the next night. It seemed her parents didn't like having to pick it up every day any more than she liked dragging it off. She'd flat out told them that she had no interest in sleeping on such a prickly thing again and if they insisted on putting it on the frame, she'd just have to sleep on the floor, regardless of how dirty that might make her sheets.

Her mother had nearly lost it again, it seemed that while not comparatively expensive, having a mattress was still a bit of a luxury, so the fact that their daughter was throwing it away was considered pretty selfish. But Nagi wasn't going to sleep on it, she was determined to stand firm on this, she was perfectly fine sleeping on one of the winter comforters, which was way more comfortable.

In the end, her father had stepped in and agreed to let her have her way, probably figuring that she'd either change her mind soon enough, or more likely, that it wasn't worth the friction on the already strained family.

A year later, she was still sleeping fine on her frame, though she still was distant to both of them, she was polite, as if she was dealing with strangers.

With her mother's due date coming nearer, she was home a lot more, which just made things worse for Nagi, since she had to find reasons to stay out, which led to her wandering around when she wasn't in class, leading to even more speculation from the neighbors, not that she cared.

The only thing that should've brightened her mood was that classes were ramping up to actual combat. Or at least as close as they were actually going to get in training. They'd gone through almost all of the different types of weapons, including finally getting to archery and each student was starting to find what worked for them, so it seemed the next step was going to be actual field combat, with squads and such, something that a number of kids were really looking forward to.

Most of the students had continued to grow and were now looking like they would soon hit puberty, something that Nagi wasn't looking forward to, at all. Once had been bad enough and she hadn't even gotten all the way through it on her first try, so the prospect of doing it again just depressed her.

That was, if she ever got there. While the rest of the class was starting to grow, she was still the shortest. Even Wreth had gained a few more inches, while Nagi had barely inched upward at all, another reason that she was at odds with Moss, who seemed almost as tall as the instructors at this point, though if she was being honest, he still didn't come up to their shoulders, but he was a full head over everyone except Lorth and was almost twice Nagi's height.