It practically flew through the streets of Death City, and everyone it touched had the evil or the madness or whatever it is in their hearts heightened and they turned evil too. Right there on the spot. It was chaos. We'd all been in class when it started. Stein had started some lesson on the anatomy of glass lizards and had been carrying on about how they don't have legs but aren't snakes and stuff when the screaming started.
"Aaaaaaaiiiieeeeeee!" The sound rattled the classroom and dust fell from the ceiling. Doctor Stein looked up puzzled, one hand firmly gripped on a rather desperate to escape lizard.
"AAAAaaaaiiiiEEEeeee!" the sound persisted, now Kid was troubled. Something about it sank down to the very center of his core. Made every bad thought or feeling come up in an instant. One of Maka's pigtails was 2 cms too long, she'd done it looser than normal. Patty had only chewed on the end of her eraser on one side. Soul's left shoe was double-knotted but the right one was only single knotted. Everything was wrong; the girl in row four had some ridiculous haircut with one side much longer than the other. The boy in row two had an incredibly sloppily tied bowtie..and the girl in row seven, he shuddered to think. All of it was coming in so fast. There was no way he could fix it all.. no way.. oh god no. no.. no.
Stop.
The screaming had stopped for the moment and now he saw that the entire room had been just as unnerved as he had been. If not worse, he was after all, the son of lord Death himself. Maka had Maka-Chop'd Soul incredibly hard. Stein appeared to have done away with the lizard. Liz was curled up in a ball under the desk and Patty looked like she'd been crying. What had happened? He looked down at his note paper and saw that in that timespan he had torn his paper from what looked like some very manic erasing to tidy his handwriting.
"What- what was that?" Maka said slowly, looking around cautiously.
"Is it gone?" Liz whispered from under the table.
"I-" Kid swallowed, straightening his neck-skull, "I believe we need to report to Lord Death immediately."
"What, all of us?" Soul asked, rubbing the back of his head where Maka had hit him.
"Yes. All of us." Kid mumbled, still frazzled from the scream.
"We should hurry before it starts up again." Maka added.
"What, you think that- that scream will happen again?" Liz moaned, clearly quite beside herself.
"Probably." Soul said, "Why would it stop now?"
"Then let's go!" Patty said, surprisingly upbeat as usual.
The five kids didn't have to go all the way to Death's office; he was outside, on the front landing, just outside the front doors of the school. Lord Death didn't even move as they approached, rather Death was staring rather intently in front of him at a tall, brown, vaguely pillar-like kishin climbing the steps to the school. Kid gasped; the kishin was not alone. it was surrounded. Hundreds of others, more corrupted humans than he had ever seen followed in it's wake.
"Father what-" he began only to be silenced by a single glance from the shinigami.
"We are under attack. I need you to get off of the premises as soon as possible." Lord Death said sharply.
"During an ambush like this, Father even you can't even begin to-" kid began stupefied.
"That is precisely why you must leave. Maka and the others may go with you. Also, at all costs do not allow the brown kishin to touch you."
"Why can't it touch us?" Soul asked, standing protectively in front of Maka.
"Because, if it touches you, you too will become a kishin egg." Death said sadly, "And then there is no hope for you."
"What!? You can't be serious!" Liz exclaimed, "Like all of those corrupted souls used to be normal people? Like we'd see in town? Not even evil people?"
"That is correct." Death confirmed. Still staring ahead of him.
"Then why don't we just take down the big brown one?" Soul asked, "I mean, shouldn't that turn everyone else back to normal?"
"In theory yes, unfortunately that would mean touching the kishin with a weapon. And only powerful weapons can survive it's touch. And then only in weapon form." At this Death turned behind him; his death scythe of choice, Spirit, had arrived.
"I'm here Lord Death." The man said, "Let's get this over with." Weapon spikes sprouted from his arms as he prepared to transform into scythe form.
"Dad no!" Maka cried, pushing past Soul to get to her father, "You can't! You can't! You can't wind up like one of those people- Dad-"
Spirit smiled sadly at his daughter, and hugged her, careful to keep his blades form hurting her. Even though he was whispering, Kid could still hear him. "It's gonna be ok Maka, this is what I became a death scythe for, just.. just remember that you'll always be Daddy's little girl."
"Dad- Dad no..Daddy.." Maka's eyes welled up and Kid had to look away, straightening the cuffs to his jacket. He glanced down the stairs; the field Death had put up was holding the kishin back for now, but it was just a matter of time before they broke through.
"Maka, go." Spirit said, pulling apart form his daughter, "Protect Kid. If anything, keep him safe. Got it?"
Keep me safe? That was a little embarrassing. Really, were they all that worried? Things were that bad.
"I… I got it Dad." Maka whispered back. "Soul," She said then, "Let's go."
"Thought you'd never ask." The white haired boy grinned back transforming on the spot. Maka nodded at Kid earnestly and he held up both hands; catching Liz and Patty in their gun forms simultaneously.
"Lead the way." He said, taking off in a dash after Maka.
Then we ran. Course it didn't take us long to figure out that the brown Kishin had the entire city barricaded. There were students everywhere- fighting the evil humans. I even saw some witches that had crawled out of the floorboards blasting down the monsters. No one was safe. Every now and then the brown Kishin screamed; turning all of us into wrecks. I saw things in my head that I thought were closed up and gone for good. Black suits and little demon men. It was ugly. And so addictive, like the brown kishin was some sort of magnet; and all of our personal evils and flaws were made of metal. At one point Liz and Patty just untransformed right from kid's hands and began to walk towards the kishin- like in some sort of trance. It took all of us to snap them out of it. And we couldn't plug our ears or anything; the scream was in our souls, not in our bodies. Maka said that it was some sort of resonance, that Stein had gone over it in class at some point. Guess I must have missed that day.
Running worked fine until Maka screamed. And that was when we all knew we were doomed.
"The sky! The sky!" Maka screamed, pointing upwards as the yellowish-tint of Lord Death's Soul Aura she'd always taken for granted wavered and cracked; and suddenly a wave of red surged across the sky in it's place. Maka fell to her knees, dropping Soul beside her.
"No." She gasped.
"Maka, what is it?" Soul demanded turning back to human and looking around.
"It's Lord Death," Maka said, her throat constricting, "He- he must have been touched."
"What?! How?" Soul yelled, looking around him, trying to see in the sky what only Maka could see. "He's a shinigami- he shouldn't be able too.. couldn't be able to… Maka, Maka that, that can't be true, can it? Kid, can it?" Soul demanded, looking back and forth between Maka and Kid.
Maka forced herself to her feet. She didn't want to look at Soul's face. At Kid's face. At any of their faces. That would mean admitting what they all already knew. Lord Death had fallen. And Dad… Dad… she cupped her hand over her mouth, not wanting to even think it- her Dad.. was probably either dead or worse, one of them. Sure she hated her Dad most of the time, after what he did to Mom and his 'alternative lifestyle' but, he was still Dad, he was still family. And she… she loved him. She had to say something, she couldn't expect Kid to. Sure they had both lost a father, but where she only had loss, Kid had just gained the title of Lord Death.
"Lord Death has failed." Kid said before maka could speak up. His voice was soft and she half expected him to burst and start putting a ruler to everything within a quarter mile. "And as far as I can tell, so have most of the students of the school."
"So, what are you saying?" Soul asked cautiously, even with them deep in his pockets, Maka could tell that his hands were shaking like crazy. Soul wasn't feeling as cool as he was letting on.
Maka could answer this one, "He means that it's up to us. We're the only ones who can take it down."
"Wait what!?" Patty exclaimed.
"You can't be serious!" Liz added, "Lord Death said that the only way to kill it would be with a seriously powerful weapon- like a death scythe. Which, I don't know if you can count or anything but we seem rather short on those."
"Not to mention the only one in the area sort of just-" Soul stopped before he could finish his sentence, apparently remembering just who that Death Scythe was.
"We'll have to risk it. As students of the academy it's our duty to destroy kishin and prevent the forming of their eggs. No matter how dangerous they are." Kid said firmly.
"There he goes with the needless heroics again." Liz muttered before saying, "Ok, so, then how exactly do we plan on fighting that thing? I mean if Lord Death couldn't then-"
"The same way we always have," Maka replied, "As a team."