The Ultimate Nemesis
Part 1: The Adventure of the Dancing Bears

He fled across the rocky shore, his waterlogged trenchcoat flailing in the wind. Ocean to his right, nothing but a sheer cliff wall to his left. He could hear the horde behind him, their claws crushing the basalt sands beneath them, their mocking laughter echoing in his ears.

Makoto Naegi - a.k.a. the Ultimate Hope, a.k.a. the Ultimate Lucky Student, the latter of which he'd been given frequent reason to doubt over the years, up to and including his present circumstances - kept running. He dodged around a boulder lying in the middle of the thin beach, risking a glance back at his pursuers. He still had a little distance on them, albeit one much shorter than he felt comfortable with.

To be clear, he was being chased by a large crowd of Monokuma robots, of the sort that continued to litter the world years after the Tragedy and tended to pop up in Makoto's life on a distressingly regular basis. He hadn't run into this particular variant before, however. The machines hunting him looked like... well... bears, for lack of a better word. But actual bears - complete with four legs, sharp claws, a length of at least three meters, and canine teeth that looked more like tusks than anything else. None of these things struck Naegi as any sort of an improvement.

He pulled the hacking gun out of his pocket and aimed a shot back at the horde. It just clicked uselessly in his hand, error lights flickering on its side. Dammit, Makoto thought. Of course the seawater must've soaked into the battery or something. He redoubled his pace.

He considered his options as he rounded a corner in the cliffside. He didn't have any, or at least any that he cared for. The hacking gun didn't work. The revolver he wore in a holster behind his right hip was completely jammed, choked full with silt he didn't have time to clear out. Then there was that other thing, but that barely even counted -

Wait, he thought. What's that?

He saw something in the distance. Some kind of booth or shed of some kind. (Maybe an outhouse?) It stood on a short spit that jutted out into the water on the other end of the beach from him. He had no clue what it could possibly be doing there, or who had built it. Could even be a trap in of itself, for all he knew.

As if I have any other choice right now, Naegi thought. He sprinted for it, letting his panic take over and provide him with that extra little burst of speed, trying to ignore the burning feeling in his lungs...

Then a Monobear tackled him from the cliff above.

It knocked him to the ground, sending the hacking gun flying out of his hand. He rolled, barely managing to dodge the thing's foreclaw as it came down right where his head had been.

The mechanical bear's jaw swung open. "Heya, Naegs," it said in that same fucking voice he'd been tired of hearing for years. "Nice face ya got there! Mind if I borrow it?"

Makoto reached beneath his back and pulled out the only card he had left to play - a long, somewhat pointed piece of driftwood he'd managed to sweep off the beach while running.

The Monokuma just looked at him. "Really, short stack?"

"REALLY!" Naegi snapped. With that, he shoved the driftwood as far back into the bear's mouth as he could.

Somehow, miraculously, it managed to connect with something and jam in place. Makoto saw something spark at the back of the robot's throat. The bear sat back on its haunches and dumbly pawed at the piece of wood with its massive claws. Naegi took the opportunity to stumble to his feet and run for it once again.

He got maybe five or six paces before the Monokuma exploded, throwing him forward back onto the ground and sending him rolling into a shallow channel cut by the surf into the beach. He pulled his face out of the inch or so of seawater, spitting out sand. Gotta keep moving, he thought. Gotta move gotta go gotta -

But by then, of course, the horde had him surrounded on all sides.

He tried to think of something - anything - but he could only come up with a single sentence, repeated over and over again: she is totally gonna kill me. All the so-called Ultimate Hope could do was stare up from the ground, mud dripping from his face, as the mechanical bears raised their heads and made what was, without a doubt, the lamest possible sound in the world to die to, made even worse by the fact that so many had:

"Upupupu... UPUPUPU!"

Another noise cut through the blather - a kind of high-pitched electronic whistle. Shortly followed by the familiar screech of the hacking gun - only magnified a few dozen times louder than normal, to the point that it sounded like a cannon singing falsetto.

The bears stopped laughing. "Wait," one of the Monobears said. "What the sh-"

The entire horde exploded at once. Naegi flung himself back into the saltwater pool, hands covering the back of his head. When he raised it again, all that remained of the closest robots were smoking piles of scrap.

He caught a glimpse of a non-ursine shape strolling towards him through the smog. Makoto blinked, trying to clear his eyes. He couldn't seem to focus them properly.

"Hey," he called out weakly. "Kinda having some trouble seeing right now. You wouldn't happen to be a white-haired knockout in purple boots, would you?"

"Not so much, sorry," came the cheerful, decidedly male reply. British accent, though hell if Naegi could tell which kind right now. "Mind you, I could go and change if you wanted."

Naegi relaxed a little. "I'm good, thanks. Guessing that means you haven't run into anyone like that, huh."

"Afraid not."

Makoto sighed. "Yeah, that figures..."

"Still, might be your lucky day here." The lanky man in the brown longcoat extended his hand down towards Naegi. "Just so happens I'm a doctor."

On a remote island far to the south, the patient stirs in his bed. With a gasp, his eyes fly open. "No! N-" His voice cracks and fails him.

It's night. The lights in his room are off. He can feel the IV drip in his arm, the sting of the catheter. Hear the whir and hum of the machines around him, keeping him alive, controlling his pain.

"Is - is anyone there? Mikan? Hajime?" He presses the call button in his good hand. "You have to listen to me. I - I remember. Oh, God. I remember everything.

"I helped them too much. Helped them get what they wanted without even knowing it. They're strong. So much stronger than any of us knew. I -" His head spins as the realization settles on him, heavier than any weight. "I don't know if we can win! I don't know if hope is enough! I -"

His chest spasms. He starts to hack and cough. He has little choice but to ride it out until the fit subsides.

"It's not over," he whispers through cracked lips. "It hasn't even started. He's here now. The one they've been waiting for. The destroyer. The Ultimate Enemy... he's already here..."

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Ugh. Told myself I wasn't gonna do this. I was finally gonna finish this episode of Shinji and the Doctor, because this is so frigging ridiculous. But then I was having trouble recapturing the Tenth Doctor's voice, so I tried writing a warm-up piece to get back in the flow. And, well... things just kinda ballooned from there.

This is set post-Danganronpa 3, with a few differences which should shortly be made clear. I'm not quite sure where it fits into the Who timeline, aside from occuring later on somewhere in the twenty-first century. It's also in the same continuity as The Observation of Trifles, part of which is going to be included in this story as a flashback at some point. You shouldn't need to read it to get this one, though. It's more just supplemental material than anything.

Credit where it's due: certain character voices are influenced (if not outright defined) by Faulerro's brief but brilliant Danganronpa Abridged Thing. I am in particular indebted to his Gilbert Gottfried-esque take on Monokuma, as well as Megami33's particularly dry, totally-done-with-everything rendition of Kirigiri.