"Do you know why you were invited to this meeting, Mr. Shiota?" Mr. Fujiyama, the headmaster of Paradise High, asked. He was currently looking through a thick file of information about the school's latest hire, which seemed to be equal parts complaints and praise.

Nagisa Shiota had been the homeroom teacher for class 3-5 for a little over two months now, and this was the first time he had been invited to a board meeting. At least, he was pretty sure it was the first time he'd been invited to one. To be honest, he'd mostly shut himself off from his fellow teachers in the pursuit of providing his students with the best education he could. He only rarely saw other members of the faculty in the hallways and wasn't confident that he could recall all of their given names or which classes they taught. After class he was always busy helping one student or another brush up on their weak subjects, so he never had time to join his peers for drinks, although they still made a point to invite him.

His self-imposed exile from his peers kept him completely unaware of any and all campus politics unrelated to his class's progress. Seeing as his class was rapidly improving and this wasn't Kunugigaoka where that could be a dangerous thing, he was content to tune most things out. He assumed he had been invited to this meeting to be congratulated on his class's progress, but it would seem cocky to say that out loud. It would be better to let Mr. Fujiyama say it himself if that were the case.

"No sir, is there an upcoming festival I should know about?" If there was, he would need to come up with an appropriate incentive to motivate his class to care enough to put in an effort. Maybe he could pull a Korosensei and give them a few seconds of free shots?

"No- well, yes, there is the cultural festival next month," Mr. Fujiyama coughed in a way that sounded fake, clearly trying to stall for time to compose his thoughts, "But that's not the issue here."

Now Nagisa was confused. "With all due respect, I wasn't aware there was an issue. My class is doing better than ever, attendance is up-" he was cut off by the homeroom teacher of class 3-4, Mr. Yamada, snorting to himself and earning a hard glare from the headmaster.

Nagisa had been suspicious that Mr. Yamada had some sort of grudge against him ever since he'd spotted the man ducking into an old storage room to avoid him the other day, but had no idea why. Was it because he'd made more progress with the "delinquent class" in two months than anybody had even imagined was possible? Was he jealous of his success? Did he think Nagisa hated him?

"Did I say something wrong?" Nagisa prompted, hoping to get to the bottom of things.

Before the other teacher could answer, Mr. Fujiyama cleared his throat and drew attention back to himself. "I'm afraid there have been some troubling rumors surrounding your class, Mr. Shiota, and was hoping that you could help sort them out."

"Wha-? I haven't heard about anything scandalous, how serious are these rumors?"

Upon hearing how clueless the newest member of his faculty was, Mr. Fujiyama inhaled deeply and began racking his brain for the best way to explain the situation.

A week after Nagisa began working at Paradise High, rumors about him began to circulate. Most of those rumors were the same sort of whispers about a teacher's possible love life or secret life outside of school that flared up any time students saw a new face. But there were a few other, more unsettling rumors making the rounds among the faculty.

"The new guy's reflexes are insane! I dropped a stack of papers in the hallway, and before they even hit the ground he was scooping them back up and handing them straight back."

"Mr. Shiota? There's something a little… off about him. I was chatting him up, y'know, trying to be nice to the latest schmuck stuck teaching the delinquents, and I tell ya, it felt like he was trying to read my mind every time we made eye contact."

"I swear I saw his face on the news when there was all that business with the monster that destroyed the moon seven years ago- hey, I'm serious!"

Of course, these were simply rumors. This sort of thing happened any time a fresh face entered the school - Mr. Fujiyama still remembered a particularly amusing theory on the woman teaching 3-2's secret past as a failed movie star. It wouldn't do any good for the headmaster to treat these rumors as anything other than rumors.

A month after Nagisa's arrival, the rumors were extending to his class. To outsiders, they seemed both more open and more shut off, friendlier but colder. They were improving academically - nobody could deny that - but they seemed distracted. Like they cared even less about what was going on at school than usual, which was saying something. This was only concerning because of how class 3-5 reacted to Nagisa.

When he approached them, they would go silent and eye him like a hawk, scanning for any potential weaknesses. They looked at him like he was a target instead of a teacher. None of the class's previous teachers would have been able to stand up to their overwhelming bloodlust, but Nagisa always greeted them by name with a smile. He kept this reaction up even when he by all rights should have been fearing for his life.

The rest of the school was starting to notice that something strange was going on with class 3-5. One day, Mr. Yamada heard a few of the rowdier students not quite whispering about ambushing Shiota Sensei in a storage closet. He dropped everything to go warn the new teacher, who had the audacity to brush the whole incident off! Nagisa told his colleague not to worry about it, his students weren't being serious.

"Besides," he added with a look Mr. Yamada couldn't quite place, "even if they are being serious, I think I can handle whatever they throw at me."

Mr. Yamada was pretty sure that he was lying - the man was shorter than any of his students - but a few days later, he saw the students in question and Nagisa. They weren't trying to kill each other, although one of the students looked angry enough to try even though there were plenty of witnesses. Nagisa touched the base of their neck, and they seemed to calm down instantly.

After that, Mr. Yamada started avoiding Nagisa. He advised Mr. Fujiyama to keep a close eye on his newest hire, claiming that there was more to him than meets the eye.

A month later, and there were more than rumors about one Nagisa Shiota. The parents of Kohaku Tsukuda, one of the girls in class 3-5, had a very concerning conversation with Mr. Fujiyama. They thanked him for their daughter's rising grades, which he couldn't really take credit for but graciously accepted and promised to pass along to her homeroom teacher, before bringing up a few concerns they had about Mr. Shiota.

"The other day, our Kohaku said a few of her classmates attacked her teacher in the middle of a lecture. She was more annoyed that the lecture was interrupted than concerned for his safety, because, in her words, 'stuff like this happens like twice a week'."

"Are you absolutely certain that your daughter was being serious?" Mr. Fujiyama didn't know how to react to a statement like that. He hadn't heard anything about Mr. Shiota's students displaying violent tendencies.

Come to think of it, that was a bit strange. With that class's reputation, there should have been an attempt to assault their new teacher or at least threats against his life on day one, but there hadn't been any complaints from Mr. Shiota about anything like that. The only interactions Mr. Fujiyama could remember having with Mr. Shiota were modest requests for more classroom funding and questions that could be expected from any new hire. Nothing about weekly attacks by his students! Surely there must be some-

"Oh, certainly. She's not the type to make up something like that out of the blue. When we pressed her further about the attacks, she made it seem like Mr. Shiota encouraged them! We're worried about his safety, and would appreciate it if you would take the time to find out what's going on."

That was concerning. If was actively encouraging the attacks, it was an automatic disciplinary hearing, which would likely be followed by his removal from the school. Mr. Fujiyama assured the Tsukudas that he would get to the bottom of this and thanked them for bringing the matter to his attention.

After replaying the events related to the problem at hand in his mind and a pause bordering on discomfort, Mr. Fujiyama finally found the words to approach the delicate subject of accusing a teacher of… something vague.

"There have been rumors circulating since you were first hired, most of which are clearly just rumors… but those aren't important right now. Have your students ever attacked you before?"

To his surprise, Mr. Fujiyama saw Nagisa nod his head. "Oh yeah, loads of times."

"And you never thought to report this to anyone because…?"

"I asked them to do it and-"

If anybody in the room had been drinking, they would have sprayed their beverage all over the room. "I'm sorry, you what!?" Mr. Yamada interjected.

"On the first day of class, one of my students who will go unnamed threatened to kill me, and I told him that he could try," Nagisa explained in a manner-of-fact way that made the temperature in the room drop ten degrees, "In fact, I encouraged all of my students to try their hardest to kill me and it's really helped them develop problem solving skills and come closer as a class-"

Mr. Fujiyama could feel a migraine coming on. "Why on earth would you tell them that?"

"To unify them around a goal and get through to them in time for them to learn something?"

Nagisa honestly wasn't sure what was confusing about this concept. It's not like it wasn't an effective teaching method.

"Let me put it this way: Why did you tell known delinquents to hone the skills required to kill a man?"

It took Nagisa an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that his junior high experiences were not universal and there was no explanation he could give that would justify encouraging violent crime.

"Oh, no, it's not like that," he replied, backpedaling furiously, "They're good kids, I'm not in any real danger, or anything."

"Okay, we don't have enough time in this meeting to go over everything wrong with that statement, so as your boss I'm going to firmly but politely tell you to get your class to stop this whole "Let's kill our teacher!" business before it gets any further out of hand. Now, about the funds requested for the art room-"

The meeting moved on to the normal agenda of budgetary concerns and scheduling updates. Nagisa looked like he wanted to speak up, but couldn't bring himself to derail the meeting. He'd just talk to his class tomorrow and let them know that the school board disapproved of their assassination attempts.

Turns out that Mr. Fujiyama had had something other than "Politely inform a class of delinquents the school board disapproves of all these rules we're breaking" in mind. To Nagisa's shock, a few of his students didn't seem to care about how many rules they were breaking. They explained that he'd literally told them to try and kill them, and the only kinds of people who would take someone up on a challenge like that didn't particularly care about following the student handbook. This was news to him, he remembered how important working juuuust within the rules was to everyone in Class E, but that part of his junior high experience must have been weird too.

Nagisa had planned on simply not talking about assassination in class for a while (which was harder than it sounds; he had to come up with so many new metaphors) and reminding his students about the not-so-new "Maybe don't try to kill your teacher" rules in the handbook. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Fujiyama happened to witness him complimenting a student on their technique when they tried to cave his skull in with a baseball bat literally two days after the meeting. Apparently "encouraging violence" wasn't something that Paradise High would tolerate, because Nagisa found himself staring down at a notice of termination within the hour.

After a busy day of packing up his desk and explaining to his class why he was leaving (they weren't nearly as surprised as he'd expected, but they were all sad to see him go), Nagisa was left with a very important question: How was he supposed to teach without assassination metaphors?