Chapter 6

He hated school.

No.

He loathed it...

...No.

Even that didn't properly describe how he felt about the pursuit of academics.

To paint a word picture, if Gabriel was going to die and the only way he could survive was by studying a book... He would rip out the pages of said book and choke on it.

One might think that opting for death in a less than pleasant, prolonged and agonizing way would be quite the exagerated response to being told to read and nobody would actually do it.

Maybe not.

But sitting in this class room for the second hour today, Gabe swore that if he had a gun right now, he'd blow his brains out and put it out of his misery.

It wasn't as if he didn't want to try at all.

Being an adult and all, he understood the wisdom in having a back up.

Back then his wife had already asked him to quit the ring quite a few times. And honeslty, later on he was losing more than just the fights, each one took a toll on his already rusty body.

But the best alternative for an uneducated person of his age was working the front of a store, that was another thing that made him want to off himself in violent fashion.

However, having that wisdom didn't much help with his studies this time around.

Unfortunately, it seemed that repeating his life in this world didn't help him pass subjects he'd never studied for.

Neither did the fact that he'd spent the last thirty plus years without using subjects like chemistry, physics and most especially, math. At the very least, nothing beyond the simple addition and subtraction he learned in elementay school.

The cherry on top of the crappy sundae he was being force fed was that the Gabriel he had taken over down here seemed to have about the same intelectual capacity he did. Because everything aside, he was actuallly putting alot more effort into listening to his teacher's lectures.

Sadly, that just made it clear to him, that he was still quite shit at it this time around.

And just as his brain was about to have a melt down, the bell rung.

---

His lips pursed a little as he tried to maneuver his shirt completely off.

He didn't know if the muscle pain or the bruises hurt more as his body moved, and really right now it didn't make much of a difference.

With his tiny fingers he traced the bottom edges of their mirror before curling it around both ends.

Then he paused, about three seconds before he nodded to himself and slid it upwards, and in one go the fixed handging piece in their bathroom wobbled free.

But as if to answer his worries, it's weight did make it a little difficult for his fingers to keep them from slipping.

As fast as possible, or as much as he was capable of doing without having it twang too loudly before it it hit the ground, he lowered it down. Ignoring the little shots of pain that were being delivered from various parts of his body.

Of course, he didn't exactly saunter into their bathroom as silently as possible in the dead of the night to take apart their vanity.

He was trying to get to their medicine cabinet, which to be fair was a hole in the wall the landlord wouldn't fix. And the mirror, a piece Maria had pryed off a perfectly good set someone decided to throw out.

They didn't exactly have enough money to buy a new one, nor the space to fit it without sacrificing the act of raising their hands over their heads when they were showering. It was a pretty good hole to boot, a few boards jammed into the right cracks and they had a cabinet that probably would've held longer than the building did.

What he was looking for was at the third level, a place he couldn't see and barely reach. Luckily for him, his mother always put the Thrombophob in the same place, and she was.

Perhaps if he'd been just slightly more meticulous with the memories of this world's Gabriel as his own, he wouldn't have needed it.

The thing he took out of them was that they only had to spend three hours of the morning chained to their desks, revising the general subjects, the rest of the day and not coincidentally, a large area of the school was dedicated to training their physiques and the "battle skills" Mr. Christian mentioned.

The moment he found out he didn't have to listen to another word from Mr. Geroge's mouth or any other teacher's for that matter, he didn't really care about the rest.

What he neglected to recollect from those memories was that Daniel and his boys were always waiting for him at the main entrance.

If he'd spent two seconds to think about it, he'd probably wonder why he was having trouble doing basic exercises besides running despite the fact that half of his days as a student was supposedly spent training.

He ended up figuring it out in three.

Too bad it was the same three it took for Daniel's goons to form a circle around him.