Chapter 8

Run.

It's coming.

Run.

It had to run.

IT was coming.

The one that finished all that it encountered.

Death.

Death hunted her, sought her as it sought all.

It had to guard Yuu.

That is what the heart of its Host said and it was in no position to argue.

It had to find a way to distract Death, but how?

All Death knew was murder and the hunt. How does one-?

It stopped at a clearing.

A woman in a maid's outfit with a large sniper cannon was fighting Death. She would lose, it knew. Death was not strong, but it was relentless.

Life struggled, fought, bit and scratched and clawed to cling to life. But death is patient and it always won.

Death reflected this as she destroyed Long Range Maid with a single shot to its weapon followed by a trust from the Black Blade.

Death was victorious once again.

As it always was.

As it always woul-

Oh.

It knew.

It was awful what it had to do, but it had no choice.

To guard its charge, it had to do the unthinkable.

It had to become Life.

Its Host would torture the minds of others to turn their Hooded Children into the Masters of the Battlefields.

The new Masters would then fight Death to keep it away from Yuu.

It was awful, though the Host.

It was cruel, agreed the Child.

It was necessary, they both knew.

So the Host turned the Child into a Master.

It became Black Gold Saw.

It would become Life.


"Saya-chan-sensei!" called a voice from behind her eyelids. Saya Inori awoke from a dream she had not suffered through in years.

"I'd never seen it from her point of view though," she muttered to herself.

"Sayaaa!" came the voice again and Saya grogilly sat up.

Her lifestyle didn't really let her sleep in much, so she was taking a full advantage of these "vacations".

"What is it?" she called out.

"Their parents are here!" said the vice that she now recognized to be Yuu's right before the door opened, "do you want to hide?"

"Nope. I started this and I have to see it through," she replied as she stood, missing the object next to her bed, "time to face the gallows."


"So let me see if I understand," said Kagari's mother, Tsuyuki, "my daughter, a completely normal high school freshman girl, has turned into a mechanical embodiment of pain by a magic spell and there is no way to change her back. Can't you just unspell her?"

"Dispel, and I'm afraid it's not that simple," responded Raven.

The whole group, minus Yomi, Kagari, and Yuu, had moved to the lobby after their arrival, though Robin was not happy about their early arrival. He'd need to have a word with the ferryman later. He only counted his lucky stars that all of the parents already knew English.

"All my magic did was trigger the change in response to their emotions, not sustain it. If I'd noticed the power drain earlier then I would have been able to stop the change. At this point their new forms are fueled by their own souls rather than my magic, which makes it dangerous to try to force a reversion. All things considered, we got lucky. My magic could have easily killed them."

"Killed them?" noted Haha Kuroi, "Their change? Mato looks fine."

"My left eye tends to catch fire when I feel danger nearby," pointed out her daughter.

"Danger? What kind of danger?" she asked urgently. Her daughter had better not been playing superhero!

"Well, any-," her eye lit up in, startling her mother.

Everyone looked around, danger was not an uncommon occurrence in the tower.

"Raven! There's a wasp on your hood!" cried Saya.

"Don't move," said Cyborg as he let the wasp on his servo.

"Anyways, it's really annoying," continued Mato as Cyborg let the wasp out, "anything will trigger it, though I can do it on my own too. Beast Boy dropped a water balloon on me the other day and it lit up. To make it worse, he and Yuu keep using me to roast- DON'T YOU DARE!"

"Do – doesn't that hurt?" she asked apprehensively as Beast Boy put the bag of marshmallows down with a pout.

"Mato, you are burning the ceiling again," noted Starfire behind her.

"GREXBLOGH NI SHA!" cried the shorted girl, taking a leap over the couch to hide behind her mother.

"Was that tamaranean?" asked Robin, he could feel his eye twitching against his mask.

"Shoun," confirmed Mato, presumably in tamaranean, though she might have just bitten her tongue.

"That said," cut in Hideki Izuriha, Kagari's father, "where is our daughter?"

"She's still learning how to walk," responded Saya, "the only one that has any experience with this is Yuu, so she's been helping her out for the time being."

"Yuu does? Did she transform too?" asked Haha.

"Yes and no," said the teacher, "yes she has transformed but no, she has not transformed here."

"She transformed back in Japan?" asked the worried mother.

"Not exactly," responded Saya, unsure on how to approach the subject, "look, it'd be best if we were all together when we explain. I wasn't watching the full time that Yuu was in the Battlefields."

"What!?" snapped Raven, "you said that Yuu switched places with her Otherself once. You didn't say that she went down to the Battlefields."

"I thought that was a given," she replied, "unless you thought she stayed in the White Room, that's the only place she could have gone."

"Of course I thought she went to the place between the worlds! No one could leave the battlefields sane, never mind a twelve-year-old girl!"

"Wait, twelve?" cut in Mr. Izuriha, "Yuu's the same age as Kagari isn't she."

Saya could only sigh in defeat. No use delaying the inevitable, she supposed.

"Yuu fought in the Otherworld since she was twelve," she stated with her palm against her forehead and her elbow on her knee, "we met back then. I was on my senior year in high school and she was in middle school. These… girls were a constant problem for her back then."

"If Yuu was down there… who was with us?" asked Mrs. Kuroi shakily.

"Strength took her place," she replied, "normally, Otherselves don't have wills of their own. They fight instinctively from their Hosts' emotions. Strength was different. Where most would fight, Strength learned to hide, to protect the negative emotions that Yuu was feeling. If Strength was killed, Yuu would have been overwhelmed by the emotions that formed her body."

"Wait, you said that Yuu was having trouble with some of her classmates," noted Mrs. Kuroi, "Yuu was being bullied?"

"What about her parents?" asked Robin, having noted their absence, "Her file read that the mother died in a fire two years ago, and the father has been absent. But she should have still received help from the mother."

"You really do your homework," noted the teacher, "but yes. That's how Strength ended up living with me while he was in Yuu's body."

"If you knew what was happening," growled Raven, "why didn't you tell someone?"

"Ha! 'Excuse me, but this girl was actually replaced two years ago by a mental construct that she created to deal with the constant bullying she suffers and he parents' idiotic existence. Oh and she actually chose this change because she would much rather fight for her life against psychopathic murderers with impossibly powerful weapons than live in our world.' Tell me how that would have gone down."

"All right, we see your point," said Robin, "but you still should have done something."

"I did, and I really wish I hadn't needed to," said Saya dejectedly, something that did not escape Raven's or Robin's attention.

"Can we just see our daughter?" asked Mrs. Izuriha.

"Just a second," She turned back to the door, "Yomi! Kagari! Could you too come in now?"

"No!" snapped Kagari's voice.

"Kagari, they'll have to see eventually," pointed out Yomi.

"No! I'll just stay inside!"

"Like before?" asked Yomi.

"Well…"

"You're crazy if you think I'm gonna let that happen again."

"No, wait, don't!"

The sound of a large object being scraped across the carpet filled the air.

"Kagari, start rolling or I'll carry you!"

"You can't pick me- eep!"

"You're heavier than you look!" grunted the bespectacled girl.

"Wait! Put me down! You'll hurt your back!"

"Will you walk?"

"Hmmp!"

"Kagari…" warned Yomi.

"Fine, but hold my… claw. I'm still kinda wobbly."

A sound somewhat similar to that of an electric motor came from the hallway as Yomi turned the corner. She was wearing thick, leather gloves and was holding what appeared to the adults to be a rather savage gauntlet.

"Easy, try not to push it," she warned.

"I'm trying," whined Kagari, "you try rolling like this."

"I have a giant skull to ride on according to Inori-sensei," replied the greenete, "just hold on for a few more seconds."

The two finally made it to the door, noting the shocked gasps of Kagari's parents.

"K-Kagari-chan?" asked Tsuyuki, not quite believing that the machine in front of her was her daughter, "is that really you?"

"Hi mom. Hi dad."


Author's Notes: So it's finally out! Sorry for the delay. Real life tends to suck every so often.

Someone pointed out that Saya is kind of hard on Black Rock Shooter. I thought it was obvious that she was messing with Mato but I may have exceeded myself.