Author's Note i. before I begin, I would like to thank the mods for throwing, organizing, and keeping this event running so smoothly. It's been a fantastic experience and it really impressed me with how well organized it was.

I would also like to thank my two wonderful artists, DryWavelength and SwordBreaker06; I'd say I owe you my life but considering how many people I say that to that's probably going to equate to about two or three years of my life as your share lol.

Finally, thank you to one of my wonderful best friends for forcing me to read the soul eater manga and cry with her and telling me "no" all the god damn time and telling me I'd just fine in comparison to everyone else because OH BOY DOES THIS FANDOM HAVE SOME REALLY HIGH QUALITY FIC LIKE LITERAL GOALS. I am not worthy.

sounding like the first speaker to a debate aside, I'm gonna have to swear that debate is not my event whilst apologizing for the poor characterization and/or any ooc moments bc this is my first se fic, as I'm sure you all can tell, and I'm just starting to get a grip on these characters and how they write.


Word Count: 9,581


She wakes up in a place she does not know.

It is dark, it is night, and all the countless stars are glittering up above, as if they have any business shining over a light polluted… city?

She sits up, brushing dirty blonde wisps of hair out of her bright green eyes, blown wide with wonder and confusion. Where did her city go? Looking around, she can see now that she's on a strange school campus, but schools belong in cities, at least from what she knows.

She frowns. What does she know? Staring at her hand as though it might somehow provide her with an answer, she struggles to remember her own name.

M.

M?

Mmmmm…

Yet after the initial M, she can remember nothing.

"Oi."

The suddenness of the unfamiliar voice jolts M out of her struggling train of thought. She glances wildly about her surroundings, her sights landing quite quickly on a tall, blonde-ish girl crouching behind a bush, a gun in hand.

"What's going on?" M begins to hiss, but the blonde girl simply holds a finger up to her lips and shushes her, gesturing with her gun to look around the bush.

M obeys and catches sight of a boy around their age, his shocking white hair sticking up in tufts, kept out of his even more startling red eyes by a grey headband. And while his clothes look like they belong to a different decade, with his black and yellow jacket and red pants, they're otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.

It's his teeth that are the kicker.

She doesn't notice them at first, but when he glances in their direction and scowls slightly at them, it becomes impossible not to, for they appear to have been filed into sharp points, not unlike those of a shark. A chill runs down her spine, but she refuses to be afraid.

"Who's that?" she finds herself asking.

"That's the Demon Scythe," the girl whispers back. She looks as though she's about to continue, but her eyes suddenly widen, almost imperceptibly so. Suddenly, she hisses, "Get down!"

"What?"

M is pushed harshly to the ground and loses consciousness before she knows what happened.


She wakes up in a panic, alone. Midafternoon light is streaming into the room, which at first glance appears to have been meticulously arranged into perfect symmetry. But upon closer inspection, she realizes it is only because the wall across the room is not merely a wall, but, in fact, a mirror.

The door creaks open, and she finds herself holding her breath when it does. The same tall blonde who knocked her out she met the night prior(?) (She has no way of telling how long it's been.) pokes her head in. "Yo."

M exhales to calm herself down. "Hey."

The blonde steps into the room and is followed almost immediately by another bouncing blonde who is about a head shorter, but still still strongly resembling the other.

The taller one leans against the mirror, watching with mild interest as the shorter blonde runs up to M and jumps onto her bed, laughing. "I'm Liz," she says, "and that's my little sister, Patty. We didn't introduce ourselves last night."

"Your wording seems to imply you were both there."

"We were."

"Pardon?"

"Patty." Said blonde stops bouncing on the bed and glances over at her sister. "Soul resonance."

Immediately there is a flash of light, and when it dies down, a gun lies on M's bed where Patty had been, and Liz's clothes have changed to those more appropriate for a cowgirl. M's gaze switches between the gun on her bed and now-cowgirl Liz, trying to process what had just transpired before her.

For the strangest reason, the concept of soul resonance doesn't feel new to her, and although she suspects it's merely a case of déjà vu, she hasn't the time to consider it at the moment, so she neglects the memory.

Liz waves her hand in M's general direction, allowing the cowgirl outfit to disappear in a much milder flash as the gun turns back into her sister. "Soul resonance is a bit of a tricky concept to explain, especially since most of us have other memories associated with the phrase, but I promise it will all make sense when our leader explains it to you later. But for now, all you need to know is that when you find the person you resonate best with, you will change. Physically. Just, uh, not in the puberty sense."

Darn, M finds herself thinking, I'm forever doomed to having a flat chest.

"Anyway, you're awake now, so we really should take you to HQ to meet everyone else."

M blinks a few times. "Y-yeah."


Liz and Patty lead her down yet another impeccably symmetric hallway (though this time, it's not because of a mirror), all the way to a rather plain-looking door labeled Principal's Office. She steps inside (Why is everything in this school so perfectly symmetrical? she wonders. It's actually a little creepy.) and finds a pile of teenagers her age, give or take a year or two, lounging about a coffee table and chatting amicably.

She pauses for a second, taking in the scene for as long as she can before their chatter soon fades to nothing as one by one, they notice her standing silently in the doorway.

Liz gives her a good push, and she nearly loses her balance right then and there, but she manages to catch herself as she stumbles into the room.

"Hey," M says. Before anyone else can respond, the lights dim, and a swivel chair that has been facing the windows slowly turns around.

The pale boy sitting in it looks her over carefully with an unreadable expression. M has no idea what he's looking for, but it creeps her out just as much as the perfect symmetry of the building.

"So you're the new kid," he softly says, pausing to observe her. "I like your pigtails. They make your face look more symmetrical."

"…Thanks?"

"My name is Death the Kid, leader of the Anti-Demon Scythe Battalion, and symmetry is my aesthetic. I'm sure you have many questions, but worry not. Everything will be told in due time."

"Kid, can you cut the mysterious act? We've already told you it's getting irritating. Just tell…" Liz glances over at M, who is suddenly embarrassed upon the realization that she does not know her name.

"M," she says. "That's all I remember of. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. No one does at first," Liz gently tells her, then turns back to Kid with a bit of a glare. "Just tell M the gist of how things work around here."

"Liz is really letting the new girl know who wears the pants in their relationship," a pink-haired girl sitting on a couch whispers none-too-softly to the girl sitting next to her. Both Kid and Liz threw a glare at her, who immediately put her hands up in the air with the slightest of smiles.

"…First things first, you're dead."

M blinks. "I'm dead?"

Everyone in the room gives her a look, some exasperated, others sympathetic.

"I know it's very hard to process at first," a tall, ponytailed girl says, her voice soft and gentle. "I arrived here weeks ago, and I still forget at times that I'm not alive anymore. You'll just have to learn to take things as they come."

"Secondly, not everyone here has souls. People without souls are called NPCs."

"Isn't that a video game term?"

"Yes, but it applies well to the soulless beings you'll find wandering about during school hours. They might not say the same thing over and over again, but they're definitely not one of us. You'd know if you talked to one of them.

"Third: just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't be obliterated." This particular statement leaves M with more than one question, but Kid seems to be getting really into this explanation thing. She remains silent in hopes that they get answered when he elaborates. She is not let down.

"Obliteration happens when you settle into a daily routine with the NPCs," Kid continues. "No one knows what happens when you're obliterated, only that you're there one second and the next, you're not. In short: it's death after death, and there's no guarantee that there's an after-afterlife."

"Uhuh." M nods.

"The fourth thing is the most important. Soul resonance."

"Liz explained that to me already," M blurts out, but the blonde shakes her head.

"Not nearly well enough. I only covered the bare minimum."

Kid eyes the both of them with a mild bit of disdain. "Anyway," he says dryly, "Soul resonance, for whatever reason, is familiar to all of us. It's the only constant in all of our backstories, so while what we call soul resonance here isn't half of what it is in our memories, it works. The core of what it is here is the same, however: it's the magic of two souls colliding with one another just right to produce and amplify an attack or simply a wavelength of magic."

"Not everyone resonates perfectly with everyone, though," Liz cuts in. "The way Patty and I resonated— that was an exception. Usually, you have to search for the person with whom your wavelengths line up with, or adjust to one another. Patty and I are sisters, as I already told you, so that makes our souls automatically compatible."

"Mhm!" Patty chimes in. "Even then, it's not our true resonant forms. That only happens when we resonate with Kid."

"Tch." Everyone turns to look at Kid again. It's clear from his expression and the fact that his face is notably more colored (Considering how pale he is, it would have been harder not to notice) that he does not particularly enjoy making a spectacle of his soul's preferences for resonance.

"That's very true. While everyone is capable of resonating with everyone to some degree, there will be very few people with whom you can achieve your full potential with. You'll know your ideal partner when you resonate with them. Not only will your physical appearance temporarily change, with there also being a coin flip of a chance that you'll end up as a weapon, but you will regain the memories of your past life as well. Moving on—"

"Wait."

Kid raises an eyebrow at M, inviting her to continue.

Her throat feels dry, and for some reason, she feels nervous asking her question. She asks it anyway. "What was soul resonance like in you guys' previous lives?"

Everyone's expression turns rather wistful, except for the ponytailed girl. Hers only falls.

"It was nice," someone offers.

"Definitely," someone else agrees.

"There was a lot less transforming."

"At least, on the meister's part."

"Yeah. And we could become a weapon any time we wanted then, too. Now we're just restricted to when we resonate."

"I remember it was so much more intimate than what we've got going on now."

Only Kid and the ponytailed girl don't contribute to the memories. M gives the girl what she hopes is a meaningful look, and the girl smiles ruefully back.

"Overall," pink-hair says, "There were less drastic, but more frequent, transformations, and it led to a lot more soul bonding. Here, we mostly just resonate to fight the Demon Scythe. But then…" She trails off for a moment, then shrugs. "We should leave that for you to remember on your own time."

A moment of silence.

"The fifth thing you need to know about this universe is soul resonance," Kid says.

M is about to point out that he had just explained that point. If that was all there was to say then she knew enough about soul resonance now, thank you very much, but Liz covers her mouth.

"Let it happen," she whispers. "There are only four things, but he recites them backwards after that so that he can turn it into eight. It's a symmetry thing."


Kim Diehl. Jacqueline O'Lantern Dupré. Kilik Lung. Fire & Thunder. Ox Ford. Harvar Éclair. Hiro. Meme. Anya. They are among the squad of teenagers hanging out in what really should be the principal's office. All the names start to run together in M's mind after a while, never mind the faces.

Most of them have partners already: Kim and Jackie, Ox and Harvar, so on and so forth. All of them at least remember their full names, so they've at least been able to find someone they resonated with decently well. Well, all except for the ponytailed girl.

"Nakatsukasa," she tells M, the last of the group to do so. She looks a little embarrassed as she continues, saying, "That's all I can remember. It's my last name, but since it's kind of hard to pronounce and remember, everyone's been calling me Tsu. That feels right anyway."

"So you haven't met your partner yet," M realizes, and Tsu nods with a small smile.

"I've been told it will more often than not take some time to find them," Tsu explains. "But it's okay. Some days you'll wake up and you'll have a fleeting memory of your previous life to snatch onto, and there are bits of muscle memory that remain, too. You won't be in the dark forever, whether you find your partner tomorrow or next year." She glances over at the main hub of people. They have left them alone to bond for a while, to become comfortable with one another so that it will be easier to resonate later. She looks a little wistful, perhaps a little lonely, as they watch Kim cackle with laughter at some joke Jackie told her. "All I remember right now is that I had an estranged brother and that I went along with the stream of life without protest." Her expression remains unchanging, although her eyes dim a little. "Sometimes I wish I hadn't."

M nods, although she doesn't fully understand. She has nothing to say to what Tsu just told her because she has nothing she remembers but her initial.

Fortunately, Kid unwittingly comes to her rescue."Liz tells me we've failed to explain to you the purpose of the Battalion. I should amend that," he says.

Tsu notes that she is not a part of the conversation, waves goodbye, and wanders off to socialize with other members, leaving M alone to get an answer for a question she hasn't even realized is burning in the back of her mind: why?

"You've seen the Demon Scythe, correct?" A chill instinctively runs down M's spine at the memory of him, and Kid (correctly) assumes it's a yes. "We fight him because he's against us."

M blinks. Well, that's stupid. "Why's he against us?"

Kid shrugs. "I don't quite remember."

The entire Battalion grows shadier and shadier to M by the moment. "Then why haven't we made peace with him yet? If neither side remembers why they're fighting, why don't we just make peace before someone pulls a Romeo and Juliet?"

"You'll find out later tonight. We have an Operation Kishin coming up so you'll be able to see firsthand why we haven't stopped yet. And in all honesty, it's unlikely anyone would ever pull a Romeo and Juliet on us. First of all, it's us against only him; and secondly, it's debatable as to whether he even has a soul and therefore a capacity to love."

M flashes back to her one glimpse of the Demon Scythe the night prior and knows in an instant which side of the debate she'd be on based off his eyes alone, if there ever could be one, her resolve is so strong. "Okay, but what's 'Operation Kishin'?"

But it seems that Kid is done with the explanations, distracted by his sudden need to reorganize the desk when Patty accidentally knocks over one of the coffee cans. She'll find out later, she supposes.


That night, she's stationed atop the cafeteria roof with Tsu and Hiro for lookout duty. Tsu because she's currently not very useful for their fights against the Demon Scythe due to her lack of a partner; Hiro because… it's what he's always done? Patty whispers to her during the briefing that it's actually because no one really likes him, so they keep him far as far away from as many people as they can. Beneath their feet in the cafeteria itself, Kim, Jackie, Meme, and Anya set up stage for a performance to take place in about fifteen minutes.

M checks her watch and throws a glance at Tsu, who stands on the left side of the roof. All her attention is directed at scanning the crowd of NPC students gathering at the cafeteria doors for the Demon Scythe, (although why he should bother to show up is a complete mystery to M) so her pleas for a conversational partner are ignored, albeit accidentally.

What the girls plan to perform is a mystery to all but the performers themselves. M has no idea what to expect, so she sets the bar to nothing.

The NPCs are still squishing into the cafeteria when she hears the first few test chords play, reverberating around the high-ceilinged room and simultaneously rousing and calming the crowd. The chaotic noise of dozens of different conversations happening dies down into a singular, excited buzz. M assumes that it's the result of a positive feedback loop. When the girls play a test chord to let the crowd know they're going to start soon, the crowd quiets to let the performance begin. It's impressive.

Scanning the stragglers for the distinctive head of spiky, white hair, M concludes he's not here and relaxes to listen to the music.

One of the guitarists begins idly playing, and the audience soon begins snapping along. The percussionist joins in on a set of bongos, and M can only imagine how Kim sways and bobs her head as she plucks a few strings, waiting for her entrance.

"It's on you… can you handle us? So cool, baby, scandalous."

M knows that it can't be any of the girls singing because the voice is far too low for any of them to feasibly reach, and there's only so much voice filters can do without adding a disorienting amount of noise to the audio. Perhaps a recording of one of the boys? On a whim, she takes a glance at Hiro, surveying the area from the very peak of the cafeteria roof dome, and notes the smirk on his face.

The little she's seen of him so far tells her that this is one of the few things he's allowed to take pride in.

"I'll show you ~ what I'm talking 'bout; so cool, baby, scandalous."

M has to rein in a snort from the thought of him in one of the classrooms recording this.

The urge leaves her when the recording ends and Kim begins to rap, albeit with a filter that drops her voice about two octaves.

She tunes the girls out when her intuition spikes and her eyes begin to take inventory of her scouting area of their own accord. M's hands absently begin to go through the motions of twirling a baton despite the fact that all they hold is air, only noticing what she's doing when she swears she hears a mop clatter to the floor.

She surveys the area around the cafeteria more consciously this time as the girls move on to their second song, this one of a less laid-back style, but with vocals far more suited to Kim's range. She's not sure what she's expecting from simply looking around, but when she spots the white shock of hair wandering over to her territory, she chides herself for her doubt. She should have been looking for the entire time rather than listening to the concert.

Her gaze is instantly pulled to Tsu, completely blind to the Demon Scythe making his way towards them. Her brain tells her to yell and alert everyone that he's coming, he's coming! But her soul sings a different song, asking her to wait and see; if she does, she'll see for herself if all this fighting is worth it.

In the end, she listens to her heart, walking backwards to Tsu, never taking her eyes off the Demon Scythe as he ambles lazily toward the cafeteria. He doesn't look dangerous…

A single gunshot rings through the air, catching M with so much surprise that she nearly falls off the roof. (Not that it would have mattered if she had fallen, she supposes. If this is the afterlife, then there should be no way to feasibly die)

"Dammit, M!" she hears one of the Battalion members stationed below her yell. "You were supposed to give us a warning that he was coming!" Before she can even respond, Tsu has already sprinted to the right side of the cafeteria, snatching M's hand as she ran by and effectively dragging the other girl along.

"Where'd that gunshot come from?!" M asks Tsu in the short time they have running on the roof, yelling out the question for want of a quieter environment. "Don't you have to do soul resonance to initiate transformations?!"

"Ground patrol carries guns filled with blanks in case of an emergency!" Tsu yells back.

The second song ends, and the third one bursts forth from the cafeteria just as the two girls jump off the roof, its prolonged rest coinciding perfectly with M's stopping heart as they begin to freefall.

The song's beat returns with her heart's, and before she knows it, she's hit the ground and back to back with Tsu, ready for anything that might come their way, even if they had but one target.

"Fire, Thunder! Soul resonance!" she hears a boy yell, his voice harsh and throaty. M flinches when he speeds by her and Tsu, his fists crackling with fire and thunder as he charges on the bored-looking Demon Scythe.

"If the lamps of linked souls point to your heart, can you hear the echoes now, stronger than words?" Kim sings, clear and strong, from inside the cafeteria.

The Demon Scythe scowls as he takes a step back to avoid the boy's attack, a step to the right for the next, and ducks as he brings his feet back together, easily and gracefully dodging the other boy's every move.

"We barely look each other in the eye, and yet our very fates are entwined."

"M, come on!" Tsu tugs on her coat to pull her attention away from the fight. "We have to join in, too."

"Our destinations overlap completely, so run with me through the slippery night."

ThatIt is that exact moment that M loses herself in a flurry of motions that will forever afterward never be anything sharper than a blur. The moment she and Tsu's eyes meet to the second she finds herself with a short ninja sword in her hands. For a split second, she's lost in the joy of a soul resonance compatibility but it's quickly forgotten when a bullet whizzes by her ear.

"M, pay attention!" Kid yells a distance away, the three lines in his hair crowning his head and wielding two guns upside down.

"Though the glare that may be too tenacious may carry over into bad dreams…"

"Right!" M replies, adjusting her grip on the new Tsu-weapon, and charges headfirst into the battle with the Demon Scythe.

"If the lamps of linked souls point to your heart—"

She meets the Demon Scythe's eye for a fraction of a second as she brings the blade down on what was supposed to be his shoulder. She misses, of course—

"Can you hear the echoes now, stronger than words?"

—but she's not surprised. But the narrowed eyes of the glare she knows he's shooting at her does, however. He doesn't attack her, not outright anyway, but he violently pushes her to the side as he literally dodges a bullet.

"Do you hear the bells ring?"

As she stumbles away from the heart of the fight, she swears she hears the deep ringing of a church bell coming from somewhere, but it's a chaotic hell all around her, so whether it was real or not is anyone's guess. She can see why it's called Operation Kishin now: everyone and everything interacting with any member of the Battalion is going insane.

"And our souls…"

She spares a glance towards the sky, hoping a glimpse of the vast multitude of stars might clear her mind.

"Connecting?"

A slip of paper flits out of the open cafeteria window. Then another, and another—

"It's raining lunch tickets," M murmurs as one falls into her outstretched hand, Tsu's weapon form slipping between her fingers but transforming back into a girl before she hits the ground. The sounds of the battle cease behind them as the slips flutter through the air, soft as the night breeze that carries them through the air and making nary a sound when they hit the ground.

There's a rare moment of silence as the third song ends and they are between songs. The tickets still float to earth like cherry blossoms in the spring, undisturbed by the gaggle of teenagers standing amidst the storm.

But the moment is over before it can fully take hold, really.

It begins with a cheerful, repeating ditty from the guitar, and the drummer joins in soon after the first iteration. Kim's voice, made unrecognizable by both the several layers of voice distortion, begins rapping, but M isn't listening.

Remembering with a start that they're in the middle of a battle with the Demon Scythe, she whirls around only to be faced with…

…only Battalion members standing, still holding their weapons and breathing heavily as the tickets continue to rain to earth. The Demon Scythe is nowhere in sight, vanished without a trace.

One by one, soul resonance wears off. One by one, weapons transform back into people in a flash of light and; one by one, meisters' appearances return to normal. One by one, a squad of child soldiers become once again only children.

A single guitar riff echos through the air, fading into nothing when the last lunch ticket falls to the ground. There's not even a moment of silence to savor either, for the crowd erupts into cheer.

M takes this time to take a good look at the ticket that fell into her hand.

Coffee, black. ¥350.


"So we didn't achieve true resonance? But Tsubaki turned completely into a weapon! She remembers her full name now!"

Tsubaki sorrowfully shakes her head. "Perhaps we should have told you this before, but I have multiple resonant forms."

"What?!"

"It's different for everyone who wields me, and they've all tried for the sake of knowledge. We don't know why I'm like this, but for now the assumption is that, aside from regaining all my past memories, my partner would have the ability to choose and change my weapon form based off the situation. Sorry, M."

"Besides," Ox adds, pushing his glasses up as if it would make him look cooler, "you got none of your memories back upon resonation, and nor did anyone recall seeing your physical appearance change. Therefore, you do not have the potential to achieve full resonance with Tsu."

M deflates a little. If Tsu isn't my partner, then it might take a while to get my memories back, she thinks. She looks out the window at the clouds floating in the sky. No one seems to pay attention to her anymore as she sits on one of the couches staring out the window, for they have all gotten lost in their own private conversations, conversations she feels she is not privy to.


She finds she had wandered into the cafeteria, the place strangely dead and hollow without all the flashing lights, chaotic noise, and people, NPC or not. She stands before a register, black coffee ticket in hand, unsure of whether or not she wants it this late into the day.

With nothing else to do, she feeds the machine the ticket, and it obligingly gives her a cup of coffee, black as the night itself, and nothing more.

There are no cups of creamer or packets of sugar, fake or not, to be found in the entire cafeteria, and so with a sigh, M resigns herself to drinking the terribly bitter coffee as she leans against a balcony rail, watching the little specks of PE students run about the various sports fields.

"You seem quite disappointed."

Startled, M whips her head around to see who spoke to her. "Liz," she says, half a statement, half a greeting.

The blonde girl raises a can of school coffee to her lips in greeting and takes a sip. "That's me."

Silence.

"If it makes you feel any better, the fact that Tsu remembers her full name after resonating with you means she's marginally more compatible with you than any of the other current Battalion members."

Again, silence.

"C'mon, M. Let's go on a walk together."

M does not budge. "Why?"

Liz shrugs. "Just to talk, I suppose. It's only your second day here. I'm sure you still have a lot of questions. Besides—" she pauses to take another sip of coffee— "right now, you remind me a little of how Patty used to be, lost and fragile as glass with no idea how the world around you works. It's endearing."

M stands up properly, clutching her coffee cup in both hands, and gives Liz a small nod.

The smile the blonde gives her is motherly and kind, and it makes M both yearn for something she does not remember, feeling safe and loved.

"There's a reason why Patty and I go by nicknames rather than Patricia and Elizabeth."

It's M's first time even hearing the sisters' full names, so the thought that they went by nicknames, let alone had a reason for doing so, hadn't occurred to her. "Oh?" she asks. "Is it because you guys couldn't remember your full names when you first came?"

Liz's footsteps slow. She shakes her head. "No, we remembered most of our lives up until around the time we died just fine. We're sisters, so it wasn't as though we didn't have a partner close enough to an ideal resonation compatibility to bring back the majority of our memories. It's rather more symbolic of our rebirth into this world."

M takes a sip of coffee, fearful for what it might do to her should she drink more than a bit at a time.

"Our past lives were rough, to say the least. We raised ourselves on the streets, daughters of the prettiest whore in town, and everyone knew it. No one wanted to interact with us for fear of getting their pretty, little reputations tainted."

She pauses, and M notes that the sides of Liz's coffee can are slowly starting to dent.

"But that's all right. Infamy had its perks. We moved to Death City when I was fifteen. No one knew us there, but with nothing but the clothes on our back to our name, our living situation was hardly any different from the city in which we were born.

"We died only a few weeks later. We got mixed up in a gang that had liked to eat human souls, and before even three days passed, Patty and I found ourselves being used in a fight against students from the local school, Shibusen. We're guns in this realm; we were guns in the real world. Some things just never change, except that now our transformations are limited to when we resonate."

She has long since stopped walking, and her expression becomes far-off and almost wistful. M has since quieted her "oh?"s, now completely absorbed in Liz's backstory.

"After devouring the lost souls of our wielders, the Shibusen students shattered us both before we could even transform back into our human forms."

M can only watch as Liz, who had been leaning her back against a wall, slides down into a squat, her trembling hands still clutching the now empty can until it crumpled. But she does not cry. "Say, M…"

"Yes?"

"Do you ever wonder why the world is so cruel?"

With no backstory of her own to offer Liz in return for receiving hers, M struggles to find conversational topics aside from the mundane. She hasn't yet had the time to recover little bits of her memories to chat about, so she asks questions to change topics after her emotions stabilize again.

"What happens when you get a fatal injury?"

"You wake up in the infirmary."

"What about your stuff?"

"In the same condition as it was when you quote-unquote 'died'."

"How did you and Patty come to join the Battalion?"

"We founded it alongside Kid."

"So you remember why we fight the Demon Scythe?"

"Unfortunately, those are Kid's reasons and Kid's reasons alone. We're just members."

"What did Kim mean yesterday when she said you wore the pants in the relationship?"

"Not answering that."

M pouts, fighting the temptation to shake Liz gently to try and pry an answer out of her. Damn coffee, making her all jittery and touchy-feely… "Why not?"

"Are you really that naïve so as not to figure it out on your own? Come on; based off all your questions, I'd've thought you were a smart girl in your past life."

"You guys are a thing?"

"You can make it more blatant than that."

"You're his girlfriend?"

Liz finally takes the time to toss her crumpled coffee can into a garbage can. Her emotions have long since calmed down into something again resembling cheerful. "Yup. But Kid doesn't like to flaunt it, so we don't talk about it in front of others."

"Wouldn't that make Patty the eternal third wheel?"

"Things are only as awkward as you make them, M'darling," she nonchalantly explains, throwing in a nickname for M while she's at it. "It's hard to have an awkward situation when Patty's around, so she never ends up as an eternally awkward third wheel. Not to mention the fact that I don't think she even realizes what third wheeling is. Besides, as much as I love Kid, I'd always choose her over him anyway."

They fall into a pleasant silence as they watch the sun slowly make its way towards the horizon. Dusk is upon them.

M's mind wanders, for lack of a topic, to the Demon Scythe. "Liz," she slowly says.

"Hmm?"

"What's the Demon Scythe's name?"

"I don't know, M'darling."

"But even the NPCs have names. I've heard them talking to each other. How can he not?"

"I never said he didn't have one, just that if he does, I don't know it. I don't think anyone in the Battalion has ever considered that, so I don't think anyone here has an answer for you, either. I suppose if you really wanted to know, you could find him tomorrow and ask."

M thinks about his frightening red eyes, filled with a fishlike apathy, his shark teeth, completely capable of mauling her in a fight, and instinctively shivers. But then she remembers the fight from the night prior and how he was on the defensive the whole time. Maybe, she decides. Maybe.

Before she can think of anything else to ask Liz about, the blonde girl gets up and stretches. "That's enough for one evening," she tells M. "Let's head back to HQ so that Tsu can bring you to your dorm. I'll have you know, we only crash in the principal's office on operation nights."


She can't sleep a wink, even long after the moon is over the horizon. In the room she now shares with Tsubaki, all she can hear are the softest, gentlest snores coming from her now roommate as she slept soundly.

Damn coffee.

M pulls herself up into a sitting position and finds herself staring out the window at the moon. She realizes she does that a lot, actually, simply finding herself doing something rather than consciously doing it. She wonders if it's for lack of a memory leaving her with a desire to do something to make up for it, or if it's merely muscle memory that she always finds herself finding herself doing something.

The stars are out, and they're beautiful. She stares at them, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dim light so that she may see them more clearly. Off in the distance, she sees a faint, yellow glow by one of the school buildings. Kim and Jackie are on patrol.

Her eyes tell her to rest, but her brain is bouncing off the walls, wide awake long past midnight. She closes her eyes as she rests her chin on the windowsill, hoping that she might possibly be able to fall asleep if she believes herself enough, but her brain is having none of it. And frankly, her soul is starting to yearn, adding to the 'Keep M Awake Tonight' train running through her head.

She cracks open an eye. Yearning for what? A twitch in her leg tells her to move, to go out on a walk, and she shall be satisfied.

With a sigh, she obeys her listless soul, slipping out of the room to wander the grounds alone at night.

The ground feels pleasantly cool beneath her bare feet, and a warm breeze blows gently passed her, giving her bare arms goosebumps.

She's hardly out for more than a few minutes when the buzzing in the back of her mind dies down and she can think clearly once more. She relishes the quiet, punctuated only by the soft pitter patter of her feet against the concrete. Her heart, once beating erratically in her chest, has now slowed to a more reasonable tempo. The only remnants of the coffee remaining in her system manifest in the fact that she's still wide awake, feeling as if it's three in the afternoon rather than three in the morning.

She takes great care to avoid the girls out for patrol, not wanting to explain to them why she was out and about. She heads instead for a building on the outskirts of the school, one of the many she has yet to explore, taking a path less travelled to pass the time.

She expects the doors to be closed, locked up tight for the night by the faculty, but to her surprise, she finds a side door ajar and slips inside.

To call it pitch black inside the building is a lie. Her eyes are already adjusted to the dim light provided by the eternal crescent moon; plus, a window at the end of the hall lets said dim moonlight stream in, leaving silhouettes and coloring everything into greyscale.

It's not quite silent in the hall. On occasion, a cricket chirps as she silently slips through, her footsteps muffled by the coarse carpet, but that's not what makes it not quite silent. Indeed, she swears she can hear a turbulent melody playing in the distance.

Her heart asks her to follow it. Her brain tells her to avoid it. Her soul does neither. It simply remains still, soaking in the music as it fills a hole in her she didn't realize existed.

It spins a tale of loyalty and trust, taken and shaken and rocked to the core, broken and mended and shattered again. The harmonies grow questionable, and chills run down M's spine as fragments of a life flash before her eyes, solidifying the themes of loyalty and trust, only this time it is their foils are portrayed.

Her breath leaves her, violently so, when the already discordant piano playing turns into a terrible keyboard smash, as if the pianist were simply slamming their hands down wherever they please without any thought for the aesthetic of sound.

Yet, though she is fearful of the chaos, she finds herself drawn to it. Her feet begin to move toward it of their own accord, and she has to force herself to remain rooted to the spot.

The random chords cease for but a beat, and for a moment, M thinks the piece is over. But it returns again, a quiet glissando starting from the highest note down an octave, overlapped by another glissando going down yet another octave, each one louder than the last until the last few low notes are booming through the hall, far louder than any piano has any right to be. The low A hardly even has time to be properly heard or played when all eighty-eight keys are abruptly played in ugly unison.

Its spell over her is broken. M can't help herself: she runs off. Whether fueled more by coffee jitters or fear of the piano playing, she cannot tell for herself. She crashes into her dorm room, slamming the door behind her without a second thought for all the other girls she most probably woke by doing so.

She collapses onto her bed, breathing hard and staring, staring, practically glaring at the door when she hears Tsubaki stir.

"M? Are you okay?" she sleepily asks, her voice hardly more than mere mumbles.

But M's eyes are already closed, her breathing already steady, and in a word, asleep.


Time passes, as it tends to do. M never acquired any tickets for coffee quite like the stuff she had after Operation Kishin, so she doesn't have it again. She sleeps through the night, early to bed and early to rise, though it doesn't make her particularly more healthy, wealthy, or wise.

She falls into routine with the rest of the Battalion, dicking around on campus during class hours with varying other members, occasionally actually attending out of desire to learn. She takes great care to never interact with the NPCs for long, fearful of obliteration. She notes that while there is variance in their personalities, most of their conversations are devoid of any real meaning. The girls talk about love, the boys talk about their petty feats, with neither gender ever creating a relationship with the other that doesn't end in them eating face in the halls. Hell, sometimes they end up eating face in the halls regardless of gender. None of it matters to M, equally disgusted by all of them.

M sometimes wonders how much longer her love of knowledge and desire to accrue more of it will hold out among the sea of teenage hormones.

It's on one of the days where her avoidance of couples overtakes her desire to learn that, whilst wandering the grounds idly chatting with Tsu, she meets the new boy.

Well, it's less that they meet him. It's more like he drops from the sky (literally or not is anyone's guess) and announces his arrival from the tops of the buildings (this time most definitely literally).

He cackles, the sound booming all around campus, and its suddenness causes the girls to nearly jump out of their skins. Both of them whip their heads around to see who's speaking and find him standing on his tiptoes, balancing precariously atop the rails around the school roof. His hands are on his hips in a condescending manner, but they can't see his face because it's tipped skyward, sending his roaring laughter to the heavens.

He seems to somehow notice their stunned expressions and with a grin, he leaps down to the ground before them, leaving a blast crater where he lands.

"HELLO, PUNY MORTAL!" he blasts, despite the fact that his volume is completely unnecessary (he's standing right in front of them!). "HELLO, PRETTY MORTAL! IT IS I, YOUR GOD, THE GREAT AND GRAND BLACK STAR, COME TO REDEEM YOUR SORRY BUMS—"

M can't help it; her eardrums are going to burst if she has to listen to any more of this Black Star's speech. Seeing red, she marches forth— if looks could kill, the boy would have woken up in the infirmary a hundred times by now— and plants herself right in front of him. He spares her a look, but it's hardly warning enough for what's about to happen.


Her handprint is still imprinted on the blue-haired boy's cheek, bright red and declaring to all the world what happened to him, when she and Tsu lead him to the principal's office for the drilldown from Kid. He whines the whole way there, but M warns him that she still has ample steam left to blow off if he would so care to be blasted by it. The only reason he doesn't get a matching handprint on his other cheek is because Tsu has the quick wit and strength to restrain her.

Strangely enough, the Black Star boy, as obnoxiously egocentric as he had been acting but a few minutes ago, follows her every command, becoming as meek and gentle as a lamb when she tells him to leave M alone. Granted, it's also paired with the most terrifying death glare she has ever seen in her life, and most definitely one that does not match Tsu's normally soft and kind expression, but considering the fact he had just been declaring himself God above them, M decides it's not within his normal character to be cowed so easily.

She's still fuming when they open the door into Battalion Headquarters, less so at the fact that she's the puny mortal (she has long since come to terms with her waif-like build) and more so at the fact that a literal slap to the face did less to rein in his ego than one look from Tsubaki.

She hopes she doesn't have to try and resonate with him later, but when she mutters it aloud to Liz when she walks in a minute or two later, the latter laughs and says if she feels that strongly against him, no one's going to make her; it's highly unlikely that they would be compatible with that attitude, anyway.

Kid is summoned soon after (he'd been in the school garden, arranging the flowers down to the petal), and once sufficient levels of cleanliness and symmetry are achieved, he settles into the principal's chair and attempts to give the blue boy the same speech he had given M on her first day. It's clearly futile halfway through when Black Star, upon realizing he's going to be told the same things again but in reverse order, promptly defenestrates himself, but it's imperative that Kid finishes the recital. Even if he does so to a room empty of everyone but himself, since all the Battalion members present run after Black Star.

It's little surprise that the introduction of the new character of Black Star opens up a whole new can of worms.


M sighs. It's been but three hours since the boy arrived on campus, and already, she needs a three hour nap to recover all the energy he's sapped from her fragile, introverted body. At least he's stopped calling them mortals. After finding out that none of them can die and are therefore all technically immortal, he declares himself God among gods, but, still recognizing their quote-unquote "godly status" refers to them on a more equal level of dudes.

Nevermind the fact that not all the Battalion members consider dude to be a gender-neutral term, Kid's a dude, Liz's a dude, they're all dudes.

But meetings are meetings. Everyone's known that there's to be a meeting to discuss the next operation for a while now, and M hates it when she's out of the loop.

She hears the wailing long before she enters the room, although she can't comprehend any of the muffled blubbering that comes along with it. It puts her on edge, making her question whether or not she really wanted to go to the briefing this time around. It could be a lone exception, an absence on her record before she establishes herself, and she can always get the details from Liz or Tsubaki or one of the other Battalion members later anyway.

Such are the things she contemplates with her hand on the doorknob, on the edge of leaving whatever drama currently happening behind said door, behind said door, never to be heard of again unless someone decides to tell her about it later.

The intense wailing seems to have died down, replaced by sobbing, so at least if she chooses to enter, her eardrums won't burst. So with the thought that she'll probably regret entering buried in the back of her mind, she twists the knob and steps into headquarters.

"Tsubaki?"

Her eyes dart back and forth between the ponytailed girl and the short, blue-haired boy whom she's clutching and burying her face into as she cries and cries and cries. Black Star allows it without complaint, his entire god-complex seemingly dropped. She can see it in his eyes when he spares her a glance for just a moment, only to return his full attention to Tsu. He says nary a thing to anyone, but he holds her in his arms and strokes her hair and wow, M is positive that there's something more going on between them now.

M looks at the other members present— currently only Liz, Kid, Patty, and some rando whose name she doesn't even know— with a desperation in her eyes born out of confusion and the desire to know. Their expressions are that of awkward shock (except for Patty, who instead is ignoring the entire fiasco and drawing on the walls, giggling all the while), and they can offer her no explanation.

It's Tsubaki herself that tells them. Well, rather, there's finally some coherency to her muffled sobs, and she weeps, "I killed my brother! I was a murderer, and I killed my own brother!"

M, having absolutely no idea how to handle this new revelation, shoots a horrified look at Liz as Tsu dissolves into sobs again. Liz gestures for M to just go, we'll handle this. We'll tell you about it when she's better.

With another round of tears seemingly on its way, M looks regretfully back at Tsubaki before she turns to leave. But her heart lies easy in her chest, for it knows, it just knows, she'll be in good hands, both figuratively and literally.

She stares at her shoes as she exits, and because of that nearly crashes into the next person about to enter.

"M? Is everything okay in HQ? Aside from the blatant crying, we're supposed to be going into the office for the meeting, not coming out the door looking like you just saw a ghost."

M looks up, straight into the bright, concerned eyes of Kim. She opens her mouth to respond, "Yes, everything's fine. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's fine," but knowing it to be a complete and utter lie, shuts it and shakes her head instead.

"Yikes," Kim says, grabbing her arm and tugging her away. "Meeting's probably postponed until tomorrow, then, so let's go!"

M blinks but walks with Kim anyway. "Go where?"

The pink-haired girl merely shrugs and pulls M along. "Wherever the wind takes us."

M falls in step with the other girl.


They're standing on one of the balconies, sipping canned coffee from the school vending machines as they appreciate the dusk. Hours have passed since Kim whisked her away from the drama happening in headquarters, and M is grateful for the distraction. Tsubaki's words haunt her mind; of all the people she would have ever thought to have previously been a killer, she never ever would have guessed it to be the sweet, motherly Tsubaki, and she tells this to her companion.

"Killed her own brother, you say?" murmurs Kim, almost to herself, as she takes a sip of coffee. "I have to say, that's one of the most brutal backstories I've heard to date." She throws M a rather sly look. "Unless, of course, yours ends up taking the cake, hmm?"

M looks away, her heart aching for a past she has yet to even remember. "We won't know until I find my partner," she says. Seeing just this one small glimpse into Tsu's past, she's no longer sure if she wants to find them, even if doing so would satisfy the terrible yearning that flowed like a fountain of tears from her soul.

"Mm, well that's true." Kim stretches and yawns. "But I doubt your story's that bad. Backstories as tragic as Tsu's aren't exactly a dime a dozen." She takes another sip of coffee. "All I really was when I was alive was an outcast."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I don't exactly have one of those sob stories like Tsu seems to have acquired. I was merely shunned from all the groups I ever tried to join. Mortals, witches—"

"Witches?"

Kim bites her lip just a bit before ultimately deciding to let it go. "Yeah, I was a witch when I was alive. Big deal. But my magic— healing magic— didn't exactly go with the natural destructive flow that runs through all other witches, so they ostracized me.

"So I went to Shibusen," she tells M, who is surprised yet again at the mention of the school that taught the students that killed Liz and Patty in their past lives. "I signed up to be a meister there, and they accepted me. Because even with a soul protection spell on to disguise my status as a witch, it was still strong enough to be a good meister."

She pauses, a faint smile on her face as she assumedly thinks about a few cherished memories from her life at Shibusen. But her gaze soon falls from the now-setting sun to the lip of her coffee can. She swirls the remaining liquid around a few times before taking another gulp of the bitter drink. M finds herself staring at her, her mouth every so slightly agape, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I thought I could trust my weapon when I told her what I was. But I couldn't. She betrayed my secret to Shinigami-sama, who struck me down with his own death scythe. I died a traitor to both witches and mortals alike, shunned from both groups I thought would be my family." Unlike Liz when she revealed her backstory, Kim's eyes are growing moist. She's tearing up, and in a panic, M realizes she has no idea how to comfort her.

But it's okay. Kim wipes away the tears before they can even fall from her eyes and smiles again. "But it's okay," she says, "because the people in the Battalion love and understand me. They all have the same hard luck stories as me, so now I can pack up all my care and woe and practice singing low." Just because she wiped the tears away doesn't mean they can't return, and when she turns to look back at M, M can clearly see her eyes are watering again. "They've all been lifesavers. Especially Jackie. She's a good partner."

The sun's light rapidly fades from sight, erasing Kim's expression with the dark that falls soon after. M can hardly see anything with the daylight gone and the moon not yet shining, but Kim tugs on her sleeve.

"C'mon," says she, "We have a meeting to attend tomorrow."