December was a time when most people were at their most cheerful, the weeks leading up to Christmas the calmest and brightest days of the year for many people.

Sainan High was no exception as students went about their daily lives, buzzing with excitement as the days came ever closer to winter break. The halls bustled with people after school and between classes as students excitedly talked amongst their friends over what they were planning to do over their break.

Momioka Risa and Sawada Mio would be tagging along with the self-proclaimed queen of the school Tenjouin Saki. Sairenji Haruna would be staying home as she did every year. Yuuki Rito would be the unfortunate host of almost all of the aliens currently attending the school...not too different from his usual life.

He and his group were still close friends with Lala and her sisters, but the battle against Yami's Darkness transformation several months before had shaken the student body's trust in the assassin. While Yuuki and Mea had explained things afterwards, as far as the rest of the school were concerned, Yami was suddenly Public Enemy #1 despite apologizing personally to all people who'd been directly affected by the incident.

It was a fair suspicion, with construction work still going on to repair the damage that the battle had dealt to the town and surrounding forest. Several buildings were still unusable after Momo's beanstalk had ripped the structures apart, and many of the female students now needed therapy for emotional trauma suffered as a result of Darkness's unfounded obsession with sexuality.

In Sainan High, accidental ecchi was a common occurrence surrounding Yuuki Rito, but while his actions were generally understood to be accidental, Darkness's had been very clearly a direct, deliberate attack on the students. Even though the incident was not officially recognized by Japan as an "Isolated attack by an extraterrestrial" until December, many students had spent the summer in fear of a recurrence.

Now, their fear was as clear as glass as they shied away from her whenever she passed, and even Rito, who had been most vocal about asking the students to release their prejudice, still avoided her whenever he could. Where he once would constantly accidentally fall into her turning a corner or catch an upskirt shot by accident when she was on the stairs, now she hardly saw him except when he was leaving without Lala.

There was only one person she knew for a fact would have an unchanged opinion of her, but no one had seen hide nor hair of the principal since she'd teleported him away at the outset of the battle...and frankly, nobody, least of all her, cared where he'd gone. The man was the epitome of a disgusting creep, he was probably locked away in a jail somewhere.

Personally, Yami hoped that he had somehow found his way offworld and would be subject to Devilukean law, but she didn't voice her wish. No reason to antagonize anyone else after all if there was no reason to.

The town had felt the shock of her attack, and she didn't even have a clue where Nemesis, the one who'd caused the whole thing to begin with, might be.

She had no doubt that the girl had survived Mea and Shizu's combined exorcism of her possession, but she had few clues on where to find her, and after being convinced to stop looking by Mea, she gave up on the search. No doubt the girl would turn up on her own time anyway to try again.

It was the least she could do to obey Mea's request to cancel her hunt for the other Trans. Her magenta-haired genetic "sister" had been central in warding off the particularly violent reactions when she passed by. The former agent of Nemesis was now constantly explaining to people that Yami had not been in control at the time, and eventually, the blame was shifted to Nemesis, though she never actually mentioned the short alien by name. Even though she was now free from her grasp, she still evidently felt enough attachment for the girl that she wasn't willing to completely betray her, and so she used other pseudonyms that the girl had used alternately on different worlds...evidently Earth was not the first world she'd attempted to attack.

Now, Yami was considered mostly blameless, but that didn't mean people didn't still find reasons to avoid her. Her volatile nature was obvious to everyone already, and despite her efforts to appear as pacifistic as she could, she still found herself retaliating any time someone got too close or got an angle on her clothing that she didn't want them to see.

She was trying to appear hospitable, but she was still unwilling to be a part of the frequent ecchi around the school after all. It was surprising that not more of the female population were like her. She always found people like Risa and Mio bizarre, but it was not her place to correct their actions. Let them do as they wanted, she only cared about how she herself was affected after all.

Still, despite her desire not to be near people, she still knew that she was lonely without the brown-haired boy around. Without him, the times she needed to wield her Trance fists and blades were cut down dramatically, but still, he had been both the one to teach her that she could belong to this world and the one who had given her her mind back when she'd lost herself to Darkness.

She'd tried to thank him for saving her that time, but no matter how many times she'd tried, either he'd find ways to avoid her or she'd get cold feet and attack him again. It was a vicious cycle, but one she had no idea how to break. She simply didn't have the willpower to hold back against him.

He was lucky that he was so durable, otherwise he'd have died a long time ago. He was her target, but that didn't mean she wished to see him dead. If anything, she enjoyed the fact that he managed to vade her attacks for this long, though she still didn't understand how he did it.

He was a simple human after all, he should stand no chance against her. So why was she always unable to hit him? His evasion was better than even A-ranked targets she'd faced before, and his ability to avoid her had only increased over time.

Mikado-sensei's official reply was that the illness affecting his inner ear, the same one that made him constantly trip over nothing and into people, also was making his body naturally much faster and better at avoiding her rapid attacks despite his brain not being able to register all of them.

In short, he was lucky.

But now, she never had a chance anyway. She almost never saw him, and when she did, she always found herself frozen in place.

She was surrounded by people every day, and yet she was alone.

However, despite that, she was not as unlucky as she could have been. She could be even worse off, as a certain tiny Trans was.