Chapter 1 – The Passing of Power
"You're certain he's dead?" Near said to Ryuk as Near nibbled on an apple.
"Of course," laughed Ryuk, "Once a name is written in a death note there is no way to escape your fate."
"Either way, Light would have died of blood loss eventually," mused Near as he tossed the rest of the apple to Ryuk, "I don't see what excites you about those fruits so much, Shinigami." Ryuk happily finished the remains of Near's apple. Near and Ryuk were back at the SPK headquarters with both notebooks. Near felt it wouldn't have been safe with the Japanese Task Force and insisted that he take them both to dispose of them himself. Near couldn't help but feel that those notebooks wouldn't be safe anywhere, not even with him. Little did he know that his uneasy feelings were deadly accurate.
Near took the first notebook and held it from it's top left corner with his thumb and pointer finger. With his other hand he took a lighter and lit the notebook's bottom right corner. As Near threw the first notebook in the fireplace a look of sadness jumped into Ryuk's eyes, but it left just as fast as it came. Near repeated the same process with the second notebook and was about to touch the flame to the corner of the notebook when he stopped. Near was deep in thought, even Ryuk, as dense as he can sometimes be, could tell.
Near's thoughts seemed to swirl around inside his head. "L is dead, Mello is dead, and Light, Light is dead too. Everyone that can stand up to me is dead." Immediately Near pushed those thoughts out of his head. "No, why am I even thinking of such things?" Near set the lighter on the table beside him and Ryuk cackled
"It seems my time here might not be over just yet." Near sat in his seat for at least an hour, simply thinking. The more he thought, the more scared he became. In every simulation he ran through his head ended in his victory.
"Unless…" Near's mind kept going back to the VSCP, Vincent's School for Child Prodigies.
Vincent Wammy, Quillish Wammy's less well-known younger brother, started the VSCP in America. Quillish and Vincent did not get along in their younger years. In fact Vincent started the VSCP simply to rival his brother's accomplishment of starting "Wammy's House." Both schools taught completely different curriculum hoping for the same results, geniuses. However, the graduates from VSCP went completely separate ways from the Wammy's graduates. Most of the Wammy's House graduates went on to become detectives helping keep the peace. Many of the VSCP graduates went on to work for crime lords, and mob bosses. Both of them were equally smart, but completely opposite in every way.
To demonstrate how different they were from each other Vincent chose a completely different way of organizing his students. Instead of naming each of his children a letter, Vincent would assign each student a number and a codename relating to that number. The most intelligent student and the VSCP's answer to L was 7. 7's codename was "Sin", hence seven deadly sins. Currently Wammy's House knew nothing about what Sin was up to at the moment, but neither did they care. VSCP usually steered clear of Wammy's and Wammy's returned the favor. But this wasn't the case for Near at the moment. Near knew what it was like living, knowing someone out there had a super-natural killing power, and he knew if Sin learned of this he would want to stop whoever had it.
After several more minutes of thinking Near justified keeping the notebook. "I will not use this to begin a mass murder. I will use this to obliterate VSCP and end Wammy's feud with Vincent and then I will get rid of it. I am certain I can match Sin in intelligence right now, and with the law and the notebook both on my side, I will bring an end to Sin and all of the VSCP."
"Heh heh, so he decided to keep it." Ryuk chuckles, "Humans are so interesting."
Near will become the next wielder of the death note, but are his purposes as righteous as he claims them to be?