Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Eito Aotsuki prided himself on his intelligence.  

With his cognitive distortion, he hadn’t been able to excel socially.  School activities like sports or theater were out of the question, especially once he’d been shut away in the hospital.  Trapped in four sterile, white walls, there was little else to do but study.  Whatever books he could get his hands on became the subjects of his quests for knowledge.  The more he read- history, ecology, anthropology- the more he realized that he wasn’t the one who was wrong.  Humanity was really as ugly as they looked.  Clearly, his vision, his senses that had been called “defective” and “abnormal” were in fact the truth.  His righteous vision, his righteous duty to wipe them out entirely and free the Earth from humanity’s tyranny, once and for all.

As he stayed in the adolescent forensic psychiatric ward to finish out his high school experience virtually, he hadn’t strayed from this ambition even once.  His path was clear and he knew exactly what he needed to do to achieve it.  There was nothing wrong with him!  Some day the vile creatures around him would see this, surely.  Even if it took cutting them down by his own hands.  They’d learn.  They’d see.

And then the Tokyo Residential Complex was invaded.  The monsters swarmed the hospital, killing indiscriminately, painting the familiar white walls in bright red blood.  Eito leapt out of his bed and ran down the hall.

The monsters were faster than he expected, hot on his heels.  He pushed one of the medication carts into the way of one of them, hoping to buy himself some time.  One of the nurses in the hall was crushed, her distorted face split apart like a watermelon.  Some of the monsters who’d been chasing him stopped to brutalize the body further.  Eito was able to duck into a supply closet, shutting the door and barricading it with a broom.  He huddled into the corner, closing his eyes tight.

“Aotsuki!  Wonderful,” a cheery voice said.  It sounded… normal to him.  Why did it sound normal?  It couldn’t be a hospital employee if that was the case.  Can… the monsters speak?

He cracked open one eye.  Standing in front of him was something he couldn’t fully explain.  It was… egg-shaped.  It looked gelatinous.  It was wearing a bowtie, and a silly hat, and carrying a little cane.  Its plain colors and speech led him to believe this wasn’t one of the monsters attacking the hospital, but an entirely different, entirely unexplainable creature.

“What the hell?” Eito said, trying to scramble further back into the corner.

The creature tapped its cane against Eito’s foot.  “Aww, don’t be like that!  I’ve come to present you with a shining opportunity!”  It pulls out a sheathed blade, about the size of a standard kitchen knife.  “Wouldn’t you like to be a hero?”

A hero… well, yes, that was his goal.  Probably not in the way everyone else would assume.  To him, the idea of being a hero meant destroying humanity.  The creature shoved the blade into his hands.

“It’s easy, Aotsuki.  All you have to do to be a hero is shove that blade into your chest!  Obtain power like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of and save the people of this hospital!”

Eito snorted derisively.  “Save the people of the hospital?  I’m not sure how you know my name, but you clearly don’t know me that well if you think I’d want to do that.”  He looked down at the blade and took it out of the sheath, inspecting it carefully.  After being kept here against my will for years… I have no fondness for these cockroaches.  The blade was dark red, the tip of it dark like long-dried congealed blood.  He only had to look at it to know it was incredibly sharp and could cut through his layers, and his flesh, like butter.

The creature took a step back, his expression confused.  “Even if that’s the case, that door isn’t going to hold them forever.”  As if on cue, the door started shaking under a violent barrage of attacks.  Eito could hear the broom start to crack.

“If nothing else,” the creature sighed, “do it for yourself.  I don’t think you want to die here, Eito Aotsuki.  And you will die if you don’t use that there Infuser.”

Eito nodded.  He could concede that point to the creature.  He had no intention of dying in this hellhole, surrounded by the things that had imprisoned him here under the guise of making him well.  If he was going to die, he was going to take humanity down with him, and he couldn’t do that here.

Another loud bang on the door yanked his attention back to reality.  He stood up, shaking a little.

“It’s now or never!” the creature said.  “Go for it, Aotsuki.  Take your destiny into your own hands!”

“When this is done,” Eito said, voice measured as he lined up the tip of the blade (the thing had called it an “Infuser”, whatever that meant) with his heart, “I’m going to have a lot of questions for you.  And I expect answers.”

He plunged it into his chest without even a wince.

Whatever it was that happened next, Eito couldn’t explain it.  He loved logic, he loved categorizing things into neat boxes.  He couldn’t do that with this, no matter how hard he tried.

The pain was sharp and incredible, far worse compared to the stab of the Infuser.  It spread like a fire throughout his body, and suddenly he felt like he was floating in something thicker than water.  All he could feel, smell, taste, was blood.  He screamed, and blacked out.  

When he came back to himself, his clothes were… different.  It was similar to a school uniform in some ways, not that he’d worn one of those in years.  There was a hole in the chest, filled with white smoke that pulsed and danced in time with his racing heartbeat.  Even more baffling, in his hand was a comically large scythe, the spikes on its handle pierced through his hands.  His senses felt sharpened, and he felt stronger than he thought possible.  Everything felt natural in a way he couldn’t explain.  

At that moment, the door burst open, and he found himself face to face with the monsters.  The egg-jelly creature was nowhere to be seen.

Eito pushed up his glasses and narrowed his eyes.  In the narrow space of the closet, there was limited room to do anything.  He used the butt of the scythe to force the big monster blocking the door out of the way, and he shoved past it and out into the hallway.

There.  That was better.  He swung the scythe down, easily bisecting the larger monster.  It disintegrated in front of him, but three smaller monsters took its place within seconds.  He took a deep breath, looking down the hall and seeing dozens more falling into ranks.  There wasn’t an immediately obvious end to the wave. Seems I’m in this for the long haul.

He lost count of how many monsters he killed over the minutes that followed.  Before long, the hallway was soaked in blood and monstrous corpses piled up in a circle around him, with no reinforcements in sight.  He was struck by how easily using the scythe was, how effortless it felt to wield it.  He leaned on the scythe for support, breathing heavily.  His vision was blurring with exhaustion.  Even with his powerful physique, that hadn’t been a kind of stress he was used to putting his body through.

“Well done, well done,” he heard a now-familiar voice say.  He looked around, seeing the egg-jelly creature reappear a few away.  

Eito scowled at him, saying nothing.  It was too much effort to stay on his feet, let alone voice the swirling questions in his mind.

“That was an impressive display of combat technique, Aotsuki!  We’ll make a leader of you yet,” the creature continued.  “Oh, where are my manners? I haven’t introduced myself.  You can call me Sirei, and I’ll be your commanding officer going forward.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Eito snapped.

“No time for that,” the egg-creature chided, waving his cane in the air.  “You’ve passed my entrance exam with flying colors!”

Eito took a step back, tripping over the fallen body of a doctor.  The human’s sightless eyes and deformed face stared at him judgmentally as he struggled to get back to his feet on the blood-slippery floor.  “Entrance exam!?”

The creature- Sirei-  stepped over the bodies to get uncomfortably close to his face.  “Eito Aotsuki, I hereby formally and majestically authorize your immediate transfer!  Congratulations, soldier, and I’ll see you on the other side.”

He wanted to ask so many questions.  Had he been given some ridiculous cocktail of drugs again?  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been unwillingly medicated like that, considering his violent history.  But none of the hallucinations that caused had ever been so… strange and vivid.  Before he could ask his questions, a bright light split the ceiling above him, and he began to float upwards.  He screamed, grabbing onto anything in reach to anchor himself to the ground.  It was futile; the tractor beam was too powerful, and he was ripped upwards.  It dimly reminded him of some of the banal science fiction movies he’d been forced to endure while still on the children’s ward, before they gave up on making him attend group activities.  The ceiling seemed to disappear.  The hospital exploded around him into a prism of colors and floating furniture and he found himself falling through it.  Scenes from his past played on screens shaped like glass fragments.  His stomach did flips as he tumbled without gravity.

Killing his parents, standing holding a kitchen knife in hands, staring at his own face reflected in a pool of blood.

The years of psychiatric evaluations, of experiments, of drugs and surgeries that followed, years of therapies and counseling that never made any difference before the doctors and specialists finally threw in the towel and deemed him a lost cause.

Blowing up the original children’s hospital where he was being held, the sole survivor of what was later deemed a “tragic accident”.

The new hospital staff looking at him with thinly-veiled disgust and pity in their eyes.

Hideous monsters, ugly, ugly, ugly!

His body collided with one of the mosaic frames and it shattered into a million pieces.  Eito’s vision faded to red, and then to black, and then his consciousness was gone entirely.

Eito was sitting on something hard.  That alone wasn’t shocking, given the hospital wasn’t exactly known for its comfortable amenities.  It was the fact that his body was awkwardly bent over a table that made him more confused.  Had he passed out during some failed attempt at exposure therapy, or, god forbid, another round of electroconvulsive therapy?  His brain felt fuzzy enough for that to be the case.  His eyes felt glued shut and his body wasn’t responding to his demands to move.

A foul stench hit his nose, one he was all too familiar with.  It didn’t exactly clarify his situation at all.  It was something he was forced to endure daily, after all.  Sure, the hospital staff clustered their cares to minimize disrupting him as much as possible (and out of fear for their safety), but they still sullied his room several times a day and made him suffer their putrid presence.  It was the reek of humans.  As badly as he wanted to look around, he still felt frozen after several minutes.

Maybe whatever they’d given him to cause that weird dream was why he felt so paralyzed.  He was no stranger to the various paralytics and sedatives used for the procedures he’d been put through, or just when his behavior was too much to manage without drugs.  As he grew and matured, that was an increasingly uncommon occurrence, though.  He could think of maybe one or two times it’d happened since he turned sixteen, and none in the almost two years since then.  It wasn’t impossible for those drugs to give him weird dreams or hallucinations.  That’s all this is, right?

With a moment of intense focus, he was able to tap his finger on the surface of the table.  After some concerted effort, he lifted his head up and opened his eyes.

His vision was blurry and he squinted, trying to bring the room into focus.  He almost considered taking his glasses off, since the wrong-prescription lenses weren’t helping matters, but if there were humans around, he couldn’t risk that.  The glasses were an important part of the facade he put up around them.  They protected him from the unsightly visages of humanity.  He’d also realized that they made people write him off as some innocent, harmless nerd.  That was also a vital part of his defenses, and if he had to meet new people today, he would need that advantage.  He blinked a few times, and the room slowly came into focus, allowing him to look around.

He had been slumped over a desk, one of a handful in the room.  And similarly groggy, sitting at most of the other desks, was a human.  He counted nine others and held back a wave of nausea.  That was simply far too many for him to deal with.  Where the hell was he?  He hadn’t been inside a proper school in almost ten years at this point.  This had to be some cruel joke or experiment by one of the doctors.  That was the only sane explanation for this Eito could think of.

The humans were stirring, too, starting to take stock of their surroundings.  Making disgusting sounds of confusion and fatigue.  God, how he hated them.  

Eito started getting into character early.  The longer he kept the mask up, the easier it would be to maintain.  He looked around again, noticing that one of the humans was starting to get up.  He couldn’t tell gender from appearances easily, given they all looked like diseased, rotting corpse-monsters to him.  But he could tell this one had striking red hair cut short, and based on its clothes, he assumed it was a boy.  Those assumptions had gotten him into trouble once or twice, but until he figured out a better way to identify the identities of the humans, he would accept the risk of hurting somebody’s feelings.  The red-haired one stood, propping itself up on the desk with its hands.  From what Eito could read of its expression, it looked extremely troubled.

Well, it was time for the act to begin.  Eito scrambled to his feet, his movements still clumsy and uncoordinated.  “Huh!?” He forced as much panic into his voice as he could, looking at the red-haired corpse with wide, wild eyes.  The others were starting to get up too, acting similarly scared and confused.

In the first few minutes, they established a base set of knowledge: nobody knew where they were other than ‘a school’, nobody knew each other (except for the two in matching uniforms), and nobody knew why they were there.  Eito was grateful for the prolonged silences between each exchange, since it granted a brief reprieve from having to listen to the shrill, distorted voices of the assorted humans.

One with a particularly grating voice, blue hair, and a gaudy outfit began ranting about killing games or some other nonsense.  He immediately stopped listening and everyone else seemed to as well, as they started looking for ways to leave the room.  They come up empty handed, and Eito thought if he had to stay in here with them much longer he was going to explode.

As much as it pained him to conversate with them, he decided to pick their rotting brains for information.  “Last thing I remember, I was fighting some kind of weird monsters.  There was a bright light… and then I was here.”

The humans all chimed in with similar stories, which made the uneasiness Eito felt a thousand times stronger.  He swallowed loud enough he was sure the filthy things would hear it.  So that… that wasn’t a hallucination or a dream?  Unless we all had the same one somehow?  They also confirmed that the egg-jelly creature called Sirei had appeared and been the one to give them those strange knives, the Infusers.

The room devolved into chaos as the blue-haired one started talking again.  Thankfully, it was interrupted by a friendly chime that Eito found reminiscent of the overhead announcements of the hospital.  

Text flashed across the digital blackboard at the front of the room.  Eito squinted so he could read it.

It’s time to get to know your new teammates!  Let’s all introduce ourselves!

Eito could think of about fifty other things, very painful things, he would rather do instead.  Two of the corpses took this as an invitation to start their horrid bickering again.  He interrupted them to save his own sanity, or what little of it remained at this point.

“Everyone, please,” he interjected in a pained voice, crossing his arms across his chest.  They’d assume it was because he didn’t want them to fight, not because he was tired of hearing them.  “Perhaps we should do as the blackboard says, at least until we know more about the situation.  It can’t hurt to just exchange names and some basic information, right?”

That’s a format he would be familiar with, from years of mandatory group therapy.  He already had a cover story he defaulted to that he would be able to use here and draw some suspicion away from his behaviors he couldn’t control, surrounded by as many vile, disfigured things as he was.  

Everyone seemed to think that was reasonable, and the room split into separate conversations.  He made his rounds, giving the condensed and highly edited version of his backstory to these filthy strangers.

Hello there, my name is Eito Aotsuki.  That much was true.  Currently a high school senior.  Also true, although he left out that he’d been attending virtually from a forensic psychiatric ward.

He knew he totally fucked it up with the red-haired one.  For a reason he couldn’t put his finger on, that one put him on edge.  He uselessly word-vomited a bunch of questions at it, ones he’d been forced to answer so many times at the hospital in group.  It chided him in a way that made him seethe with rage, but he played his part well and acted contrite and embarrassed.

I’m sorry, I’m not very good with social situations.  I tend to get nervous and overcompensate.  It was true he didn’t handle socializing well, but he didn’t say it was because every waking second is focused on not screaming in horror or vomiting.  He did get nervous too, but for the aforementioned reasons.  His overcompensation was just a desire to end the interaction quicker.  The more strange he acted, the more quickly the humans tended to leave.

The red-haired one- Takumi, he corrected himself - had the audacity to give him what he assumed was a gentle smile (would reading the expressions of the living dead ever get any easier?  Their pustule-filled faces and melting skin made it so difficult, even after nearly eighteen years of practice.) and assured him he’d been doing fine.  So this one is a compulsive liar, he thought.  He continued his story.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital, so I don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to making friends…  Obviously he’d spent the last ten years in the hospital, but he omitted why that was, letting Takumi draw his own conclusions about why that was.  No one had ever made the correct assumption with that little info.  If I do or say anything strange, please let me know.  I’m trying to do better so I don’t make people uncomfortable.  That part he’d started adding towards the end of his time in group therapy.  The humans ate it up, knowing that they could lord over his behavior, and the pity it generated bought him some leeway.  Takumi didn’t seem to be any exception.

Eito did notice Takumi’s eyes looking him up and down carefully when he mentioned the hospital.  His clothes were bulky and covered his body well enough that he knew Takumi wouldn’t see what he was looking for- some obvious sign of illness or injury.

He’d just about reached his limit with this many people around him and he clutched his chest, feeling bile climb up the back of his throat.  He fought it back down with considerable effort, and then noticed Takumi was staring at him again.  Rude little beast, he thought.  “I can’t remember the last time I was around this many people… it really puts things in perspective,” he said quietly.  He did remember the last time he was around this many people.  It was the last mandatory group therapy session he’d attended, and he nearly beat one of the other kids to death.  The hospital decided pretty quickly after that that making Eito go to group was too much of a liability.

The repulsive ogre he’d been talking to looked at him with pity, like he was a sick puppy.  “Are you going to be alright?  Let me know if there’s anything I can do, okay?”

Eito could barely hide the contempt he felt in that moment.  “I will.  Thank you,” he said through his teeth.  A liar with a savior complex, but probably incredibly easy to manipulate.  He made a note of it, and continued with his rounds.

When they were finished, another announcement chime played, and Eito thought he was going to collapse to the floor.  He hadn’t had to act like this for so long in at least a year, and it was so incredibly draining.  What else could they possibly need to do right now?  He needed to go vomit somewhere privately, or it was going to happen in front of the rest of the group.  He looked at the blackboard again.

Everybody stand ready to greet your commanding officer!

Sirei popped out dramatically from behind the lectern.  Eito stood still with his fists clenched as various members of the group shouted nonsense he couldn’t be bothered to listen to at Sirei, and of course, Sirei responded with threats.

“With that out of the way, it’s my pleasure to welcome you all to Last Defense Academy!” Sirei said cheerfully.  

Eito knitted his eyebrows in silent thought.  Academy…? Oh no.

Sirei had moved on by the time Eito could voice his objection.

“Hold on a minute!” he shouted, feeling sweat beading on his face.  “Do you seriously expect us to live here from now on?!”  Do you seriously expect me to live here with them!? 

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Sirei repeated, irritation in his voice.  

Takemaru shouted another threat at Sirei.  Eito wished the muscle-bound monster would lower his voice.

“Now now, don’t get so riled up.  Also, there’s one thing I need to make absolutely clear,” Sirei said, and for a robot, his expression turned rather dark.  “That’s not a request.  It’s an order.”

Takumi was the next to protest, yelling from where he stood next to Eito.  He flinched at the sudden outburst.  He’d assumed Takumi was more mild-mannered than that.  Clearly not.

It devolved into chaos again in a matter of seconds.  Takemaru was running at Sirei, and Sirei stopped him short with a few barked sentences.

“Don’t you dare lay hands on your commanding officer, soldier!  Or do you want me to detonate the bomb I had implanted in your body!?”

Eito felt his blood run cold.  From the chatter, it seemed everyone felt similarly.  He tuned them out, listening only to Sirei as best as he could.

Sirei told them in no uncertain terms that destroying him would be pointless.  That returning to their lives in the TRC was impossible.  Not that Eito had anything worth returning there for, of course.  “Not possible?  So it’s not just a matter of you not letting us go back, but that we physically can’t?” he asked.

Sirei laughed.  “You’re a sharp one, Aotsuki.  But let me explain for the slower students…”

The school, Last Defense Academy, wasn’t inside the TRC.  It was somewhere far away, which Sirei demonstrated by opening the metal shutters on the windows.

The endless blue sky, the ruined and collapsed buildings, the eerie pink flames which Sirei told them couldn’t be extinguished.  It wasn’t something Eito could reconcile with his knowledge of the TRC.  He was forced to accept, at least on a surface level, what Sirei said.

Darumi, the blue-haired one obsessed with killing games, started up again, and Sirei quickly quieted her.  Eito was struggling to keep up with everything but the next words Sirei said rooted him to the spot.

“No, what I have in mind is more of a… calculated, one-sided massacre.”

“A massacre…?” Eito repeated, before he could stop himself.  If they were massacring humans, maybe he could get on board, but…  no.  All Sirei said was something vague about ‘enemy troops threatening the school’.  

The little robot got cagey with his next question, though.  Seemed his assumption that some mastermind had to have been behind this elaborate, nonsensical plan, pulling the strings, hit a little too close to home.

An alarm began blaring.  Eito resisted the impulse to cover his ears with his hands, hoping that the tears that formed in his eyes weren’t visible to the others.  He could barely hear himself think.  The alarm continued, saying something about unauthorized personnel on school grounds, and summoning them to battle.  The monsters attacking the school, visualized on the blackboard screen, were identical to the ones Eito had killed in the hospital.

Every second that passed just grew the amount of questions he had.  Worse, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get answers.

Understandably, a lot of them refused to fight.  Why would they?  They were being kept in the dark about too much for them to feel comfortable putting their lives on the line.  Eito stayed where he stood, watching Takumi, Takemaru, Hiruko, and Darumi ready themselves to fight.

“Sorry, but you can count me out,” he said.  Takumi looked personally offended, and Eito had half a mind to slap him upside the head.  He restrained himself, of course.  He explained his reasoning, and Gaku of all people chimed in in support.

The doors were unlocked, and the small fighting team rushed out to battle.  

Within the first few minutes, as the non-fighters watched on the monitor, Darumi died, crushed to death in the hand of some giant thing that appeared on the battlefield.  Its form was entirely at odds with the cartoonish nature of the other ‘invaders’ as Sirei had called them.  It tossed Darumi’s dead body aside like it was an unneeded receipt.

Tsubasa threw up.  Eito wanted to do the same for different reasons.  He wasn’t particularly conflicted by the death of some random human he’d met maybe an hour ago, after all.  But he did find it upsetting how little their lives seemed to matter to whoever was behind this.

Eito didn’t pay attention to the rest of the battle.  He focused his efforts on keeping his mask up.  The giant invader retreated, and the combatants returned to the War Room.  Eito and the rest of the group hurried to meet them.

It devolved into arguing.  Takemaru remained as incapable of normal-volume speech as ever, until the door burst open and Darumi walked in.

Her outfit was different, sure, but Eito recognized the voice through the distortion and of course, the blue hair in long twintails was a dead giveaway.  But how?  He’d watched her die not even half an hour ago.

For once, Sirei gave them a straightforward answer.  As long as they died on school grounds, they could be revived, thanks to their hemoanima.  Even with Sirei’s alleged candor, though, Eito couldn’t take that explanation at face value.  It was far too simplistic for such an insane concept.  It strengthened his resolve not to fight even further.

After a meal of dry bread (for Eito and the other non-fighters) and a feast fit for a king (for the lunatics who went on the battlefield), Eito found himself struggling to keep it together.  He excused himself to a concerned Takumi, and went to his room.

The second the door was shut and locked, he ran to the bathroom and vomited until all that was coming up was green bile.  There wasn’t a lot in his stomach to begin with, but whatever was there was entirely gone now.  He stayed knelt on the ground in front of the toilet until the nausea passed.  His throat burned in the aftermath and he gulped down cold water from the sink.  He showered and scrubbed himself til his skin was raw and pink and scalded from the hot water.  He brushed his teeth at least three times.  And after all that, he still felt contaminated.

I have to spend 100 days surrounded by these freaks?

Eito would rather kill himself.  He’d tried before.  It didn’t scare him.  But that wasn’t even an option here.

But something was eating at the back of his mind.  If this fight was to save humanity, didn’t that give him an incredible opportunity?  He stood up and washed his face, looking at himself in the mirror.  He took off his glasses and the image sharpened.

His face.  The only face he’d ever truly seen.  In this world of rotting corpses and shambling monsters, he was the only normal one.  The only righteous one.

He crawled into bed, staring at the ceiling, his head swirling with thoughts.  He knew he wasn’t going to get any sleep at this rate.

So, he began formulating a plan.

After all, Eito Aotsuki prided himself on his intelligence.

The next morning, after maybe a few hours of sleep, Eito awoke to a white ceiling.  

But it wasn’t his white ceiling, the one he’d spent the last few years looking at at the hospital.  It was a different one.

He sat bolt upright, abject terror setting in as he looked around the room.  It was sterile enough to pass as a hospital room, for sure.  And then he remembered what had happened, and where he was.  The fear stayed, but lessened to a more tolerable level.  He put his hand on his chest, centering himself with the feeling of his heartbeat.

Another day here meant another day surrounded by monsters.  Eito had the bare wireframe of a plan, and it would take him the rest of the day to get all the pieces together.  For now, he needed to go to the Cafeteria.

He put on his glasses and the world blurred in a familiar, comfortable way.  It wasn’t a challenge to navigate like this anymore.  A nurse had suggested it as a way to minimize the effect human faces had on him years ago, and he hesitantly had agreed to give it a try.  To his surprise back then, it worked well enough, even if it gave him a headache.  And so he’d worn the wrong prescription every day since then.  

His gloves came next.  Normally he would put some essential oils on his upper lip to complete his defenses, but he didn’t have any in this accursed place.  He would have to do without.

At least the breakfast of dry bread was palatable.  He couldn’t eat if humans were around, at least not usually, if he actually wanted to enjoy his meal.  There was nothing to enjoy about the stale slice of wheat bread from the Ration-o-Matic, so he choked it down with a sullen look on his face.  Most of the other students weren’t even there yet and the stench was already overwhelming.  He could feel a pit in his stomach as he thought about having to do this every day for one hundred days.  It’ll be a miracle if I make it through this without putting any of these monsters out of their misery.  But would that really be so bad, or so different from what I’m planning on doing regardless?  They’ll all die anyway.

The thought gave him a little comfort as he finished his meager meal.  Sirei was supervising the Cafeteria to ensure none of the non-combatants got anything other than their single ration of bread, and to announce that he would reveal whatever grand truth was behind all of this tomorrow.  He wouldn’t get the chance, of course, if everything went according to Eito’s plan.

Eito pulled him aside to a quiet corner to speak privately.

“What’s the matter, Aotsuki?  You look like someone pissed in your cereal.  Or in your case, on your bread,” Sirei said with a chuckle.

Eito fidgeted with the hem of his jacket, hoping the action conveyed anxiety instead of his actual irritation.  “There’s something I need to discuss with you.  I think I want to join the fight.”

Sirei looked delighted.  He clapped his nubby little arms together.  “Wonderful!  We’ll be lucky to have your incredible strength on our side.”

“Can you keep this a secret from the others, though?  I want it to be a surprise for them,” Eito said, putting on the most innocent smile he could muster.  

“I don’t see why that should be any issue,” Sirei said.  “Why don’t we meet in the Gym tonight, after the evening announcement?  And I’ll bring your Infuser, of course.”

Perfect.  That really couldn’t have gone any better, Eito mused as he returned to his chair.  He finished his cup of tea- black, no sugar or cream, same as he had every morning in the hospital and joined the rest of the students in exploring the campus.  

He found himself drawn to the Entrance Hall, with its grotesque statues of Sirei, comically large shoe locker, and the fire extinguishers.  He sat down on the floor, enjoying the silence as he read through the manual for the extinguishers and exploring the surrounding areas.  It detailed the resources that could be found in the different areas around the school, and Eito found it interesting enough to distract him for a long period of time.

“Oh, Aotsuki,” a distorted voice called.  “You came to check out this place?”

Eito’s head snapped up.  Those disheveled clothes, the shock of red hair… that one must be Takumi.  He gave the corpse a welcoming smile.  “Takumi!  Yes, I’ve been reading these manuals.”  He stood up and held out the book to Takumi, who made no move to take it from him.  After an awkward second, Eito pulled the book back to his chest.  In hindsight, I doubt this thing can actually read.

Eito provided a brief summary of what he’d learned from the book and his own investigation.  He made other half-hearted small talk, while desperately looking for an escape to the conversation.

Thankfully, Takumi excused himself to continue exploring, and Eito was left alone again.  He spent a few more minutes with the book about the fire extinguishers, memorizing a few key details about their operation.  If everything went according to plan, he would need to dispose of Sirei’s remains outside the school grounds to avoid suspicion.  

He got to his feet, stretching.  Today would’ve been one of the days he had gym privileges, where the hospital’s gym was emptied so he could work out alone for a few hours.  He almost missed that aspect of his routine, and he craved the clarity a long gym session could give him right now.  It wasn’t even like he could run laps around the school without damaging his carefully cultivated sickly persona.  He resolved to do some bodyweight workouts in his room later after he was done taking care of Sirei. 

Eito wandered aimlessly around the school, pointedly avoiding the others as much as he could.  He ducked into the bathroom more than once at the sound of warped voices coming towards him down the hall, and went to the Cafeteria early to grab his allotted slice of bread without interruption.  He managed to go the rest of that day without speaking to another person.  By the time he made it back to his room, he was starting to feel more normal than he’d felt the last few days.  Even his nausea was back to baseline levels.

There wasn’t much he could do until the time he was supposed to meet Sirei.  He took another long, hot shower, washing every inch of himself several times over, and put on clean clothes.  He was just finishing drying his hair with a towel when the evening announcement played.  After yanking a comb through the tangled mess, he hurried to the Gym.  

As promised, Sirei was waiting for him.  The robot was holding Eito’s infuser.  The Gym was entirely empty except for the two of them, and Eito’s footsteps echoed throughout the room as he approached.

“Aotsuki, can I just say, I’m so glad you’ve seen reason and decided to join the fight,” Sirei said.  It sounded genuine enough.  “I was really expecting you to hold out the longest, at least until I told everyone the truth.  Such a pleasant surprise!”

Eito wrung his hands in front of him, feeling his palms sweat under his gloves.  He’d made his peace with what would happen when he killed Sirei - the bomb inside him would detonate, and he would die.  But as long as Sirei was killed in one strike, he wouldn’t be able to remove Eito’s data from the Revive-O-Matic, and he would just come right back.  Eito wasn’t particularly afraid of the pain of dying, but this awkward conversational piece where he had to pretend he was interested in anything other than bisecting the robot in front of him was agonizing enough.

“You said I would be a powerful addition to the team,” Eito said sheepishly.  “Were you being serious about that?”

Sirei nodded, as much as something without a neck could.  “Yes, very serious.  I’d say second to maybe Sumino or Shizuhara, you’re potentially one of the strongest members we have here.”

Eito hummed thoughtfully.  Second to Takumi or Hiruko, huh?  Well, if the others are all weaker than me, this certainly shall go quicker.

“So imagine my relief when you told me this morning!” Sirei continued.  He stuck out the Infuser to Eito.  “No time to spare, let’s get a move on.  You already know how to do the first part, of course.”

Eito took it, and with a sigh, stabbed it into his heart.  He knew this part was necessary for his plan to proceed.  The pain of the transformation was, at least, not entirely new to him at this point.  The feeling of fire replacing his blood and coursing through him, burning him alive and feeling like he was drowning in blood were unpleasant, but he’d done it before, and would most likely have to do it again.  He opened his eyes, pushed up his glasses which had slipped during the transformation, and looked around.  The floor was covered in a pool of blood, and he tried not to look at it.  His gaze lingered just a few moments too long and - 

The weight of the kitchen knife in his hands, handle slippery with blood, mangled, disfigured corpses a few feet away, his own face staring back at him in horror in the red-hued mirror the pool of blood creates -

“Aotsuki?” Sirei’s voice called to him, cutting through the fog of the memory.

Eito shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He was going to need to get that under control if he was seeing pools of blood this regularly.  The memory still came to mind unprompted occasionally with specific triggers, and he’d gotten a lot better at fighting it over the years.  It would be dangerous if this were to happen in battle.  “Sorry, it’s nothing.  I just don’t like blood…”

Sirei laughed jovially.  It vaguely reminded Eito of the cartoons of Santa the hospital would show him every year.  They’d specifically redubbed it with a robotic voice that still showed up in Eito’s nightmares sometimes.  “You’re gonna have to get used to it, kid.”

“I know.  I will,” Eito said.  He meant that.  If his more passive methods of getting rid of the SDU failed, he’d have to do it himself.  His eyes naturally drifted to where he was holding the scythe, the spikes piercing his hands not as painful as he’d expected.  It still felt natural in his grasp, in a way he couldn’t explain.

After walking around him in a wide circle, Sirei spoke again, facing away from Eito.  “Alright.  Seems like you’ve got the hang of summoning your Class Weapon.  We can get into attacks and such now.”

“You really couldn’t give me a better opening, could you?” Eito said, swinging his scythe in a wide arc, and cutting Sirei in half with no real effort.  The cut was clean and precise, and both halves fell to the floor with a loud thunk.

Several things happened at the same time.  Eito felt his body begin to vibrate and a piercing, high-pitched drone filled his ears.

Probably the bomb, he thought to himself.

The door to the Gym flung open, and in walked Takumi.

‘Walked’ was too passive of a word.

Takumi stormed in, and from what Eito could tell of his face, he was wearing an indescribable mask of hatred.  The Gym’s atmosphere warped into something violent and oppressive.

“Aotsuki!” Takumi screamed, his voice filled with primal rage.  The white flame on his chest from the Class Armor was almost blinding.  His sword was drawn, too, the blade consumed with dancing blue fire.

Eito turned to face him, gave him a polite, mild-mannered smile, and then exploded.

Death was as pleasant as Eito hoped it would be.

There was just absolute silence around him, no sounds, no smells, no unsightly, ugly, rotting humans.  He was adrift in a black void, floating on his back, although he couldn’t actually tell which way was up and which was down.  

He wished he could stay there forever, truly alone, finally at peace.  But he knew he had work to do, and he would inevitably die some other day, if there was any justice in the world.  As his mind started to return to his body, he felt a growing pain.

It started at his toes and worked its way upwards, a warm, tingling feeling that progressively got more and more needle-like, like he was being repeatedly poked with electric probes.  It got worse as the seconds passed, until the needles grew to red-hot knives.  He would’ve screamed if he could’ve, but his body still wasn’t responding, even if his consciousness was back.  He wondered if this was the way the Revive-O-Matic was meant to work.  Maybe they were meant to feel this much pain to discourage them from excessive death.

Gradually, he was aware of a pulling sensation from the small of his back.  It was drawing him down through the abyss, down towards his body.  It felt like a punishment.

Feeling returned to his body little by little.  It wasn’t that dissimilar to how he’d felt when he woke up the day prior.  He sat up, immediately hitting his head.  His vision blurred and he crawled out of the Revive-O-Matic, blinking against the light.  The Infirmary was still dark, but it was still brighter than it had been in the machine.

He wasn’t alone.

Takumi was waiting for him, standing still and stone-faced.  He was holding his sword in one hand, and his Infuser in the other.  Eito thought he looked different, somehow, even though they’d seen each other just hours before.  There was a hardness to his face, a weariness, that hadn’t been there prior.

“Ta… kumi?” Eito asked, scrambling to his feet.  “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I can assure y- “

“Save it, Aotsuki.  I was too late to save Sirei, but I can still stop you.  I need to stop you,” Takumi said.  He sounded exhausted.

Eito laughed nervously, putting his hands in his pockets.  He hoped the gesture conveyed innocence.  “Stop me?  What are you talking about?  Are you feeling okay?”

“Just shut up!” Takumi shouted, holding his sword at the ready.  “I know everything.  I know how you see me - us - as monsters, I know you killed Sirei so you could sabotage the mission and destroy humanity.  So please, don’t fucking insult me by playing stupid.  You took,” Takumi drew a ragged breath in and let out an anguished sob, “you took everything from me.”

How does he know about my cognitive distortion?  How does he know about any of this?  Why is he so different all of a sudden?  Eito’s mind was swirling with questions, and panic started setting in.

Takumi continued, advancing towards Eito, bloodlust in his eyes.  “I have to stop you.  I can’t let you destroy everything.  I have to… protect her, no matter what.  I promised.”

“It seems you do know everything,” Eito said.  He let the mask slip.  Clearly it was pointless.  Whatever was going on with Takumi, it wasn’t worth trying to convince him in this state.  He tilted his head to the side, unimpressed.  “But you’re really going to kill someone who’s unarmed?  So repulsive of you, Takumi.”

“I know how dangerous you are,” Takumi snarled, and he swung his sword in a downward arc.  Eito didn’t dodge in time, and pain blossomed in a long slash across his chest.  It was a shallow cut, unlikely to kill him.

“I can tell how much you hate me.  You refuse to give me a quick death.  Will you like seeing me suffer and slowly bleed to death?” Eito said through gritted teeth, clutching his chest.  Even though his eyes were watering, he could see Takumi’s face twist in rage.

Takumi stabbed forward, his blade aimed directly for Eito’s throat.  Eito feinted to the side, throwing himself to the floor.  His head smacked against the ground, and through the blur of pain an idea came to him.  He laid there, motionless, like he’d gone unconscious.  It was an underhanded tactic and Eito knew it.  But… at the end of the day, he’d never been granted a fair fight.  A fair chance.  So why would he extend that courtesy to someone who was trying to kill him now?

He heard Takumi approach, slowly and cautiously.  There was a clang of metal near his head.  He cracked one eye open and couldn’t believe his luck.  Had this moron really just set his Infuser down within reach?  He grabbed the Infuser, kicked Takumi’s legs out from under him, and Takumi fell to the ground.  He let go of his sword as he crumpled, and it disappeared into a puff of red mist.

Eito climbed on top of him.  Takumi made a valiant effort to struggle, but it was useless.  Eito had the size advantage and his mass alone was enough to keep Takumi pinned to the floor.

“Aotsuki,” Takumi said, his eyes wide with panic.  “We can compromise.  You don’t have to do this, I can just take you prisoner instead of killing you.  There’s cages in the Courtyard-”

Eito growled, raising the Infuser.  “That’s a fate worse than death.  For someone who claimed to understand me, you sure are clueless.”

“Please, please, don’t,” Takumi begged.  “Aotsuki, please!”

“I don’t fully understand what’s happened here, and I don’t think I ever will.  But this is goodbye, Takumi,” Eito said, and he stabbed the blade down into the chest cavity of Takumi’s Class Armor.

It was as easy as he remembered.  Stabbing someone was a lot less work than people expected.  If you aimed at the right place, avoiding bones or thick cartilage, it took less force than one might think.

Even a child could do it.

Takumi screamed and convulsed.  He coughed up blood, and his hazy, unfocused eyes met Eito’s for a final time.  “I’m… sorry, Aotsuki.”  And then he stopped breathing entirely.  The white flames in his chest flickered and vanished.

Something Eito couldn’t explain happened next.  Blood flowed from where the Infuser was lodged into Takumi’s body, living, snaking tendrils curling around his arms.  He couldn’t move.  Takumi’s blood, his hemoanima, forced itself into him through his nostrils, his mouth, his ears.  Rotten, sewage-tainted blood was all he could taste and smell and see.  But there was a powerful thrum in his veins, and what he could only describe as a surge in his hemoanima.  Like he had when he’d transformed the first time, he felt stronger, his senses sharpened.  This was an entirely new level though.  His body felt feverish and it felt like his heart was trying to break through his sternum to escape his body.

The red of his vision faded to black, and he slumped off Takumi's mummified corpse, dropped the Infuser, and lost himself entirely.