Corpse Party: Broken Bones: Bloody Bonds

by Starry's Light

Eleven souls: seven human, four vivosaur. Sent into the blackened, ammonia-smelling nexus stirring old memories and new concoctions of both fear and disturbance that they were not supposed to experience. It was irrational, the monstrosity they had been accosted into. But an old set of people practically living in the purgatory needed their help if they ever wanted to escape...

11. V: He was Led Astray

Pauleen: Uughhhhh... what just happened, digadig?

Me: ewe I can't really spoil... but then again, we don't see you again... Welp, you get the idea. Stuff happened.

Pauleen: DIGA-DARNIT I WANNA BE IN THE STORY

Dino: THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING ME

Pauleen: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Dino: SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS YOU!

Pauleen: -scrunches up face at him like he's a corpse- Ew.

Dino: TTwTT

Me: Here it iiis! -ignoring my characters- The final arc! ^^ Five more chapters and the story is over... wow, this was kinda fast...

Corpse Party: Broken Bones: Bloody Bonds V

Chapter Eleven: He was Led Astray

Hallways painted out from all sides like claws closing in, their dysfunctional, discombobulated strikes of brown and slashing red terrifying the poor little girl beyond measure as she fled from slash to slash of space, her face bleeding of color and fear clutching her by the throat, holding her just from stepping out of line. Everywhere she turned another monster waited. Every time she stopped it would breathe down her neck and make her cry and feel like—like the school was gonna kill her too. Cuz it killed Torn and it killed Trikko and she was next, wasn't she?

The scary creature framed in red had given her a haughty stare when it saw her. But she couldn't help it; that thing had just strangled and swabbed her only hope into pulpy messes: she couldn't live on with that in her head, there was no way. She was gonna keep wailing and waddling around until, eventually, the heart was bled out of her and she had nothing left to hold onto but death choking at her, and she'd be just like them.

Big brother, she wailed evermore: Big brother, save me. Where are you, my big, strong, sweet big brother? Why haven't you saved me? Why aren't you here for me?

Clogged wetness in her eyes stayed jammed in there like forbidden secrets that couldn't come undone, wouldn't sweep clean, and if they fell out, would entwine with the various bruises and clippings of blood—of memories—dyed to her skin from multiple monsters. So many dead bodies reeked the slashes of hallways it'd become really hard to walk without stepping in something, and that something making a little squirrsh right back, and it sickened her and Yuka was scared, so scared, so scared dreadfully out of her mind.

Stuck. Useless. Empty. Big brother, save me: all that was in her, but this wasn't a fairy tale where her prince came to her rescue: this was Heavenly Host. The princess of the kingdom scared her out of her wits and wouldn't leave her hanging until she died. Because she wanted them to die; she really, really wanted them all to die.

The creature thing had nothing to do with the princess of Heavenly Host—she could tell that much. Both of those entities sure felt scary... but they didn't have much correlation. They both happened to stop lives for sure. They... didn't relate, though. Not... not quite. Didn't quite touch. They had as much in common as Kizami did with big brother, practically.

Something stuck to little Yuka's throat and the pale, ghost-like girl found it censurable to swallow. Tears, maybe? That whole line had gone clogged and cold and numb in her; maybe tears. Maybe not. She couldn't tell very much. Just mindless wandering and pleading for a big brother that wouldn't save her, she knew that. Yuka had to be strong to find him! But—but it was so hard to find him, he didn't seem to be anywhere!

Such a brat. The girl with her own little crown of a pink plastic headband adorably placating her short cut of brown hairs with the touch of violet. The touch of violet that reminded her of Torn and how vividly she saw a face in his head that had violet eyes, the face of someone important. Maybe that matched up with the creature thing; but the eyes felt so full of crusty, coalescing red like an encasement trapping it to its body and its deeds. Many deeds.

She was an idiot compared to big brother: yet... she could tell that monster was responsible for all of the newly-dead corpses lingering in every space imaginable, and then some. It'd looked like it'd ran out of victims at some point, resorting to stuffing old, decaying, impeccably smelly skeletons and decomposing racks of flesh into the walls and ceilings, having run out of that much space. Why did this thing hate Yuka so much? Big brother—where are you?

That was all she thought about. Big brother; big brother; big brother.

Her other big brothers and sisters were important too, but, but: big brother! Yuka couldn't explain it... she had to find big brother; and at the same time, life felt so futile in her tiny, frigid-feeling fingers. Fruitless. Filthy—dead, no, dead. Lost.

It hurt... it hurt so much...

She wanted to go back to Torn's corpse and ask him if he was truly dead. The fortysomethinglong body of his still sat there on the stairs, and so did Trikko's—right—and she wanted to beg them to stop acting so lousy and foolish and get up and help her—but they couldn't. She struggled with the notion, wanted it gone. Wanted this entire scheme to be free from her hands and left alone, so she wouldn't have to deal with it. Vainly, a fist furled and launched from her side into a random door's paper-lined window, sending a splintered crack! down the lines like a firework. Her heart stopped for a pure second before funneling into life again, and it would've taken all her control to keep herself from attacking the window again.

But she didn't even try. Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Miniscule punctures that let the world know how she felt on the inside. Her gelid touches of fingers shook rampantly and the headband sitting a fragile piece of broken glass on her porcelain head threatened to fall multiple times. It didn't, by all means, it didn't. Yuka felt insane like Mr. Kizami, only she could recall who he was and how much scariness he produced, and why she felt insane and that she actually had control of herself to varying degrees and no, Yuka wasn't actually insane, but she wished she was.

Then the pain would be less severe. The overpowering, eating sense of pain chewing straight through her and leaving holey bits of her flesh and bone behind. On the inside. On the outside stayed her bloodied mass of fluids having nothing to do with her own. The parchment skin of hers was written in red ink, but she didn't own any of it, no holes punctured into her. Gritting her teeth and feeling her wrath begin to bubble—her powerlessness to her situation obvious—Yuka stumbled, halted and tried to catch herself, and busted her jaw on the hole she'd indented herself. Squealing as something mushy made a noise, her mouth erupted in red gush that she launched back and spewed over a wooden wall, her cold body shaking, shaking, shaking.

So tiny. So weak. So gullible; so easy—so easy to make her think that she had nothing she could do and death sat right in front of her. So easy to make her believe anything she wanted to. The things that go bump in the night startled her and blinded her to any sense within. Yuka could have been but a pawn without realization, not even when the fingers of the player crushed down on her porcelain figure with frigid hands and plotted her somewhere else. She sat there in a clumped, messy pile on one of the cushions of corpses as there was nowhere else to sit, no blank spaces, and spat. Felt crumpled even like a piece of paper gone flying into a stampede of eighth graders at school when the final bell rang.

No matter what important project-grade sheet it may have been: gone, by the unsuspecting children who shrieked and eked of joy as they wended their way into sunlight again.

At some point in the cooling air, Yuka's mind had done a somersault.

She attempted to pool her thoughts and make sense of her life.

Nope, couldn't figure it out.

Left with chaos and anarchy. Giving a sniffle-nosed sigh, the childish girl tugged somewhat anxiously at the waves of a dress clinging down to near her ankles of blue waters, adding to the effect of feeling just as hardhearted and lost as if she really was in a vortex of cold blue ocean. To nothing, pretty much. A whole, icy load of nothing. Not a solution to Yuka; it only jolted more pain into the soles of her hands where clenched knuckles throbbed with paper cuts. Blood steadily oozed, and it reminded her of the lines of red gouging down the edges of her lip, leaving a scant, metallic tang reverberating inside. Her tongue felt puffy and swollen where it hunched and squeezed into the pink and wet opening her mouth provided.

Sniveling pathetically like the runt she happened to be, the girl toyed with her pink, plastic headband and led herself on with no sort of hope lighting her path. Lack of attention caused little squirts of fluid from the carpet of bodies below to leave stray marks into her socks, recalling those yellow slippers somewhere deemed far behind her now. It was almost a lucky coincidence she could stumble over the red fortysomethinglong corpse of Torn the dimetro all over again. Almost as if under a trance, she sauntered closer to the massive, lenient structure plastered in the bend of the staircase that provided the single passage to the bathrooms.

Yuka left her back wide open for target as she plopped to the ground in a squeeze and poked at red. The scales began to resemble red mirrors of impossible fragmentation stabbed all across his body and covering every surface cleanly that his thick skin fledged into a sail from head to tail didn't. It mostly saturated the entire line of a red back in a warm, red coating casually zigzagged in shadier hues, glossy with a lighter coat, and his face, covered with stains of sloppy liquid—the big, yellow eye majorly—and dug her tiny shovels of fingers into the goo. Slopch, slopchhh, sloooopppppshhchhhhhhhh... Tenderly, curled appendages squeezed at the uncovered sight. Squuoootch... Squotch; squotch; squotch. SPLAT! It ran thick and tepid down her arm, causing a shiver of warmth to fill her body.

A shrill squeal evaporated off of her tongue drily. She licked at her lips, warm-icy blue eyes absorbed on the task ahead as morsels of gooey, tethered flesh began to patch apart and show off little glimpses of the presence inside. Yuka slowly, methodically, placed her left hand onto the thick jawline of the vivosaur and gently pressed her thumb's weight into bone. Not a move, not a crack. A little angrily, she punctured her nail through soft skin and dug a tiny hole in there.

So imbibed with her current task, she didn't notice the crawling line of drool gently curving down her hatched-open mouth, glassy eyes staring without seeing as she drew herself in.

So unnoticed to the outer world, not a shell of the others with her took the silhouette in account. So creepily poised; so perfectly pruned: not a soul would gander that had been the girl so terrified she'd gone and soiled her pants every single time she woke up in Heavenly Host Elementary School. Yes. Every single time.

So still and ingesting deep, throaty breaths all the way down to her core, her ears had shut off and couldn't tell when the distant trump of footprints took the same, morbid trounce she had.

Splort. Splort. Splort. Splort.

Slow. Every movement coordinated, as if it didn't have control, or perhaps just as absorbed as she with its task at hand.

Splort. Splort. Splort. Splort.

So imbibed with their current tasks, they didn't notice the link that had closed betwixt them, and she didn't register the clamp on the nape of her neck in acidly cold touch; it not the spring of warmth in its mitt of a hand. Having entered alone but entwined furthermore to the point of the present, the larger figure dragged the smaller in bathypelagic steps almost gliding over deep, squishy corpses that let out an inkling of sound with each pressurized point formed into it. Not a word emanated from the black thing or the dragged child as they moved along in slow, methodical reason, and she was taken to where she had to go.

A cracked, arid wind ran peacefully through the set terrain, one the overworked being in place hadn't felt for some time: actual air didn't exactly come often here. Down sets of stairs and up a final piece, planted into a space with a haunting, dazed-red texture below, the figure set to motion and sprawled up such landing, slow and meaningful and staring in amazement at how much flooring had been repaired. Last time he'd been up and running, this whole goddamned section had fallen to unholy pieces, but by now it looked particularly fresh, cutting-edge—as new as this sadistic hole got, even. Shifty blue eyes observed the area and sunkissed hands folded into black pants pockets, a blonde head surveying the area.

"Damn," he murmured, "how do they do it?"

Of course, by now, Kishinuma Yoshiki had a pretty damn good idea how they got this place so clean in such a short amount of time and how that worked, with the spaces moving and the earthquakes chiming, which now he had concrete evidence one had happened while he'd gotten his brain kicked senseless from both a sighting of someone dear to him and, well, actually getting kicked senseless via his supposed friend. As well as that whole scene with the seismo and death. He couldn't even remember the pipsqueak's name—Ayumi would. She was like that. Her boyfriend, however: not so much.

At some point, either way, those pointed, knee-length—hell, cowboy—boots had sent him sprawling and knocked the stars out of his sky. Which was unfortunate. He'd been trying to save Joe, goddammit! Why did everyone have to think he was on the other side and give him that sideways you-must-be-a-bad-kid look? It seemed cool and refreshing sometimes, especially with the distance, but when people always close you off and push you away...

He hated it.

No other word matched the loathing nocked like an arrow in his quiver of a throat. He was damn pissed about that last part. Even Joe had done away with him in the end. He had... well, okay, eight people—kind of a goddamned doozy, he knew, shut the hell up—but... there wasn't eight people in the world. Eight billion, more like it.

Still, eight was all he needed—

until they all went missing and your only hope was a cowboy and a shrunken dinosaur. And the dinosaur goes insane and kills himself and the cowboy stops you from saving his life and sends you to sleep. Yoshiki was starting to gain an unhealthy dislike for cowboys. Not so much dinosaurs; he couldn't yolk a grudge over a cracked egg like the pipsqueak, that was both tasteless and rude—which he only knew because, yeah, Ayumi drilled it in. And Shige-nii with the cute nickname they all used wanted him to stop being such an ass sometimes. He couldn't help it if he was an ass, okay. He was Yoshiki: not Shige-nii, not Ayumi. He didn't have creepy occult stuff or a cute nickname, via his cute friend Mayu, rallying him on.

Just a really pockmarked sense of humor. And a really pockmarked sense of dignity. And literally every new face searched his and found him either illegal or scary or something along those stubborn lines.

Angrily shaking specks of gently-spiked blonde hair, the boy moved up a final red step with a crack and went up the length of the hallway, stopping to the first hitch on his right, spilling out on hinges to creak and insert the opening to the good ol' goddamned infirmary. He had a feeling about this dump, and for once, it was a good feeling.

Casually stepping in, he suddenly tripped over the crunch of what felt like a hand and heard a gentle squeak as what sounded like a feminine retort losing consciousness. Oh hell, what did he do this time. Eyes rotating on heavy surveillance over the cots and the shelves and the dust and the screens and the desk like an island in the middle of a musty, red-rusted chamber: Yoshiki found absolutely nothing. When a voice started chanting to him:

She had been pushed once more,
more like a lurching shove,
and Dina tumbled out the door to the strange infirmary

Yoshiki had never before, in his entire life, heard that phrase. Or that name. That—Dina. Dina. It sounded cute and sweet and soft and docile—Dina. Something like Mayu, only gentler—Dina. Nothing like the kind of person he'd love. Hell. No. Funny, now that he thought of how much Ayumi didn't resemble that thing. Hell, was she ever not gentle with him. Kept yelling and stating her means and... staring a little glazed aside, he wore a dorky grin. Somewhat hilarious because Yoshiki never wore dorky grins. He avoided them like tuxedos. A guy with that kinda sweet girl probably wore tuxedos or something. He didn't know these things, goddammit. There was a reason why he loved someone like Ayumi.

Confounding himself, letting out a groan, the blonde turned his head aside to catch a whiff of a pair of spirits, one little girl missing her head only half the side of her companion, a blue wisp with arms stretched out and one currently disfigured by the clamp of a pair of crusty childrens' scissors. "GAH!"

He fell back and landed on his ass. Hard.

The impact of wood connecting with skin jolted up his tailbone and grated his teeth together in one massive motion, the now-winded teenager struggling to prevent his capsized figure from hitting his back on the floor, too. Concentration—the more focus he pulled into his strength, the harder it was to move. He'd locked himself on the grit and splinters, cringing madly in place and feeling like a hotheaded fool, probably looking like one. An agonized grunt, fingers to furls and fists on belay, a pair of blue slippers regained composure and gently raised as their owner stood.

It wasn't the scene playing out in front of him that had captured his attention, but the browning, scratchy, stained pocket of a bag swinging behind the scene on one of the sharpened white bones casually sticking out of the wall. This room was messed up, dammit, very messed up. It the blonde squinted his dark orbs, he could kind of get the image of what lay in front of his prize to blur and make it hard to tell exactly what sort of cyan slog he'd be storming through. And to continue that might confuse his brain to think it had nothing to do with ghosts and creepy occult things at all. Perfect.

Enough to convince him. Somehow, his tightened fists gave a loose yank and fell apart without him noticing or feeling at it, and his gait worsened of speed as he aimed and purposefully turned himself into and through the mass.

SHWING!

Not without a fight. Blinding cyan whipped around him.

Thoughts stuffed into his ears, his mouth, his eyes. Surrounded him. Overwhelming him. Pouring down into him and coating him like a second body, the skein of the situation clawing over him and leaving him both senseless and senile. Something stomped and hit with thick pressure on something else; Yoshiki couldn't even tell his feet were attacking each other. He stumbled into the wall and felt the lick of metal icing down his arm, and the background throb of other cuts, many cuts—way too many cuts. And the thoughts, words, flurried through him like a storm.

The crumpling,
silvery blade
of the metal
had injected into his arm
and left a slithering gash open,
tearing past his sleeves with superhuman strength and completely shooting chunks of thick, red conglomerate out of his leaking line of red and came
again,
and again,
mashing in and in and into the skin,
past the muscle and sinew and fluid until the white mark of bone showed,
and then past that as well.

Yoshiki stared incredulously, wildly, surrealistically, at his unmarked arm coated in fogs of cyan as thoughts crippled him and told him and mocked him and showed him otherwise with the disciplinary state of authority over a child, and the metal lashed into him again and he felt him and he cried out and it didn't show on his arm. It never would show on his arm. Desperately, wheezing, paining, aching, oozing with the effort, an appendage flung out and snagged at something that itched in his palm and tied over fingers and slammed through cyan fluid.

Eyes that couldn't see scrambled for evidence. A popped jaw sprung into motion and babbled for feed of what to say. What to say. How to say it. How to save this atrocity from curdling down on him.

"Ahh-ahh... ahh—YUKI! KANNO YUKI!" Dark orbs stared with a new feverish ferocity at the tiny, headless morsel, just a thin fog of circle above with nothing in it, nothing at all. No response. "Ah... GODDAMMIT, WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" Nothing again. Its movements suggested it was still cutting him open, but Yoshiki had broken free and began to dawn upon his idiocy. "...Oh. Uh." Awkward. "N-nevermind." He ducked away and jiggled the door op—

Locked.

He cursed his idiocy again. "Goddammit..." And he cursed his situation. "Goddammit..." And he cursed Joe for saving him from his demise and instead putting his life on the line, that goddamned asshole of a cowboy going to jam his own foot in the door when Yoshiki already did, for him, to save him because he didn't want him to die, and now he was supposed to be saved and—"GOODAMMIT!" Tears formed in his eyes. "GODDAMN YOU, JOE!"

Yoshiki wasn't really mad at Joe. He was mad that Joe had left him here. If there was one thing this blonde bastard knew about this nexus of his he'd been crammed into for however long it'd been, you didn't wander these streets alone. And with eight other people, that should've been easy. It was... it was Pippy, Joe... this new puzzle piece to his problem. To his... curse. This school was a curse. Pippy and Joe were another puzzle piece connecting into his curse who could possibly help guide a light to its cure. Its breaking point.

Quietly, the not-so delinquent shook out his head.

It was... it was like a curse, and perhaps they could break it, if they assembled this puzzle and found the cure right. So basically, now the question was where the goddamned cure was and how the hell he was supposed to break out of his new jail. A box inside of a box: the blonde in the middle. Goddammit, he wasn't that strong; he couldn't break out of this on his own. Clueless, idle, he paced and paced in front of the opening that should have pulled apart and set him free of his smaller escape. An invigorating anger burned in his powerless hands and he squeezed at the hemp bag sewn into the grasp of his fingers, and he paced.

Somewhere in a nearby realm—incredibly nearby—a pair of specimen held hands and gently wended their way through the H-shaped layout of the second floor hallway, winding down and around to a section both would rather not accommodate for. But, the male of the two inwardly, quietly sighed, now that all of their fun was over and the entire sector they could explore had gone clean, Mayu insisted they go grab some medicine she'd spied on the shelves of the infirmary earlier, when Dina was pleading with her not to enter. Well, Dina had gone missing, they now very easily recalled and fretted, and the last time they'd seen her she had been profusely bleeding after taking that fall; Mayu, taking her wounds into serious consideration, felt a need on the inside to at least stock up on bandages and rubbing alcohol or what knickknacks in the infirmary could assist in patching someone's soul alive instead of bleeding it out.

And what if they ran into the girl again? Well, Dina had gone missing, and the last time they'd seen her might match up to how she looked now. Although an abundance of action had occurred betwixt the two lovers and what happened inside of this twisted nexus, not as much time had. They had yet to search the proximity, much less the perimeters, of the school for her, and Mayu felt a burning passion in her heart that she kept mentioning about how she had to find Dina again. It... it cast an admiration upon the boy beside her to see her grow so fiery about a topic.

"I promise we won't be long, Shige-nii!" Her tattered uniform stood out like a sore spot as the brunette posed in front of her glasses-wearing dear, and the boy in question gave a small smile back. He understood that she was forcing away her fears to do this because of how desperately she wanted to help Dina, and this was a way to give that poor orange-haired girl with the wide, brown eyes and the red coat she kept so clean another chance, was she hurt. Both were loud enough to call out in the hallways and receive a message back if someone was amok; having yet to hear from that poor, tiny girl possibly meant she wasn't in a state fit to respond.

Which only further ignited Mayu's cause. She'd wiped away any and all of her fears so easily, plowing through with a clean face, determination burning an emerald fire in her eyes: the only strong sense of emotion on her. Shige-nii was a more cooler, calmer showing behind her, but he watched and protected her easily and clearly if the situation proved dire. He particularly hated the thought of entering that rickety old room where he knew the girl he felt so dearly for had lost her life so many times already—

The door creaked open upon Mayu's flourish and their faces lit up with the reflections of gore.

Someone had beaten her to it. All thoughts died on the boy's tongue as he stared at the scene painted out in front of them.

On the other end of the door, with increased proximity as the wood let out a chink as if it'd randomly unlocked, Yoshiki's face lit up as he, hemp bag in hand, sauntered out of the ghost-lit scene playing in that messed up infirmary and sprinted as fast as his legs could carry him away, away, and away of that torturous hell. Whatever he'd seen there, whatever he'd had the nerve to search through: never. Never again. Never again. Hell. No. Goddamn. No.

It replayed in his head like a song that wouldn't stop until it corrupted his brain cells. Quietly roaming through the halls and chambers, trying to keep afloat without leaving his hands off the opening into such chamber, and pasting the hemp bag to the door itself if he'd end up coming in, he would meander and examine and so far hadn't found the most enticing things. Just some junk like little wires and ropes and torn bits of cloth. No people. No really useful items, in his opinion. And, well, a couple corpses, but he was used to them. They blended in with the school too well for him. Only the really messed up ones or those that involved his friends honestly fazed him now.

That light show with the headless girl and the kid just outright letting her... stab her scissors like that... That was pretty messed up, he had to admit. He didn't usually catch the ghost brats in the middle of their act, and not when they re-experienced killing, either. It happened from time to time—he'd been in here with the others way too long for it not to—but... there was something with that. It reminded him of that random puzzle analogy thingy. Finding nothing of interest on the second floor and feeling way too shamelessly lazy to scrounge around up to the third, he took a turn over creaky wood paneling and filed down the stairs, planning to take an old visit in this one part he remembered pretty well.

For a time, further up the stairs and confined to the spot in a time zone on its own moving more slowly, what felt like hours of feeling and seeing the primary horror of the space only lasted moments as Mayu shrugged herself ahead, the task of saving Dina from something like this far too prominent. Not wanting to let her go unguarded even a moment, Shige-nii easily slipped into step after her. She was short on her own, and looked smaller than she actually was, even with her big heart, and comparing her to someone as tall as he only made her all the tinier. It further renovated Shige-nii's need to protect her.

He moved more slowly than usual, with the clogging thought of what lay ahead too severe to mentally hurdle over in an instant. It would take time... to see something this coincidentally close to where she... she so commonly lost her life and even splayed in similar circumstances, not whole but flayed over and thoroughly pasted in the entire chamber. To see this and feel something besides incredible emotion out of it. Shige-nii once saw these catastrophes more as poetical ruse than anything else and didn't feel all the so depressed for the soul. Because he couldn't remember a time he actually had that bright little brunette by his side to charm his life again, make it... make it whole. They still had seven others missing from a crew he'd come so used to, but he had Mayu. He could find everyone else if he had her.

Never did he have Mayu anymore. This alone... it was hard to swallow, to accept, to believe, this truly has happened. The cute little star who brightened up his life... with all of the uncaring and unnoticed people around it—hell... he couldn't explain it.. He couldn't explain it...

Sighing softly to himself, it simply felt wrong to be away from her.

Plop.

Red fluid shifted from the ceiling to the floor with an unruly sucking noise and shook Shige-nii into the cold, hard nexus of his reality. He caught sight of the girl sifting though bottles of dusty liquid, even sighting a small accumulation of clean ones that she strongly ignored like she knew where they were and disproved of them heavily, and her pocketing of an amount. A roll of bandages added into the ensemble, and when Mayu turned around, the pockets of her blue and fringed skirt stuck out in a pair of bulges.

"Anything that might help..." she murmured.

Shige-nii nodded. His glasses flashed slightly over his pale nose. "Yes, of course."

Making his way gently over to her, he unearthed one of her pocket's contents and only with little hesitation transferred them over to his, she unloading a fair share from her crammed other pocket and attempting to balance the scale. Wearing larger sizes of clothing came with larger pockets, so unless one squinted they couldn't see Shige-nii's bundles of medicinal objects welled up inside. Mayu, on the other hand, still had fairly thick bulges hanging off of her skirt. He thought of asking her to assist further, but he also knew she would politely decline. Mayu wanted to do whatever she could, and she would carry her fair share of healing supplies to do so.

Taking her hand again, he led her out of the chamber. Both had pointed, green-colored gazes upon the broken floorboards below, not for any safety reasons but because the rest of the infirmary had become too malformed to bear looking at on its own.

He refused to describe what he had seen. Outright refused.

Shige-nii had a particularly strong self-discipline, at that. He would... be okay.

Still, red splotches remained like combusted stars in the back of his vision as he gently squeezed Mayu's pale, little hand entwined with his larger and similarly-shaded. She was a comfort; she was a necessity. Too many pockmarked memories rotted in his mind of the times he'd lost her... the times he'd gone insane because she had died and—when she died, it almost certainly meant he would be over. And yet here he was. Mayu and Shige-nii. Something most surely... special... must have happened.

He wasn't one to root to the superstitious side, but he saw no other way that after what totaled to hundreds of thousands if not millions of scenarios trapped in this twisted nexus, that he could not recall one where Mayu and he had both lived to see one another. She tended to die; he tended to lose his mind and see her corpse first in no recognition of it. But on the inside, somewhere... The pattern was so strong he could easily pick up and tangibly recall those terrified fits of moments without her. The idea of losing her again after this time and this true, actual recollection of what was his didn't bode well. Not again.

Silent emotion reprimanded that... as well, he'd never seen Dina before this moment in time. He couldn't be all the sure on days since nothing could readily be trusted in a space as twisted as this where he'd seen ghosts take over people he'd rather not think of—and he would have recalled meeting that orange-haired girl who reminded him of little Mayu. He hadn't even met her; she had. But she didn't know her until now, and neither he, and truly, just in her presence and the people she spoke of round her—and the remains of the person she knew from the infirmary—none of it connected.

Why was she here in the first place? What had summoned her?

Not...
Could it be?

"Shige-nii, what are you thinking about?" The gentle, high-pitched squeak of Mayu's voice sent his sifting green orbs into her lighter emerald-esque coloring. "Your eyes always get so... playful, and you go so quiet, and it makes me want to know what's going on in there..." She turned back to the road in front of them. "Hee hee..."

Quickly Shige-nii grew thankful she wasn't looking because he could feel his face burn somewhat. Tch. Slowly raising his free hand to adjust his glasses, not because he needed to but because he didn't know what to do with the burning ball of warmth in his heart, he managed to murmur, "What you told me about that girl... Dina." His eyes narrowed beneath the overhang of blue bangs and the glass of his eye-wear. "She doesn't fit in here." Sure, the nexus was full of these sorts of anomalies—but by now Shige-nii and the others had been here long enough to comprehend the patterns of this place better. Usually by... its leader's doings.

At the time he couldn't recollect anything about the leader, only that its presence consoled the school, like the cause of fate in the world. Their world. And somehow things tended to make an overall, shadowy, rigid line of... sense. In its own illogical proportions. The ruler had obviously implanted a few rules to its own scheming in place: Seiko always gets hanged, Mayu's life is always threatened by the ghosts, Morishige loses his mind if he finds Mayu's corpse. There were others. Those stood the longest.

If his mind could even work back that long enough and wend down to the very inkling of the school, he just might catch glimpses of resemblance... One of his... his friends, Seiko, this female with a loud and dirty mouth and curls in her playful hair that he didn't find very stylish, had been murdered in the hanging fashion. Because unlike others he could stand it if he looked at it logically, he mentioned to himself how Mayu's... death... always wrapped around the ghost children and her body...

That was a full lie.

He stopped thinking about it.
No... couldn't take it...

Perhaps Shige-nii would chide himself for it did he not think in absolute, abominable, full-throttle loath of the subject. Truly, the bluenette couldn't stand it. His eyes grew dim beneath the shade of the glass and he sighed softly, speaking up again in his low but mostly gentle tone.

"Dina and her story casts shadows on everything we've gone through here." He paused for a moment, trying to hear himself and seek the correct wording. "All of it." No other way to say it. No other way.

"Y-yeah..."

So she recognized it as well. "I don't mean to... eheh... be... a little bit of a downer, but ever since we ended up here I've never had the chance to... to..." Her head ducked shyly. How cute... He nearly chided himself for the thought but grew slightly absorbed into how simply cute the short and bright brunette looked with her cheeks blushing of pink and a tiny beam situated on her face. And she was with him; him, of all people...

"To tell you... w-well... hee... how I feel..."

"A-ah..." True as it was... "Mayu..." He couldn't help it... His gaze flickered away and couldn't hold on any of his surroundings until as the hallway blew a sudden wind his arm yanked back and Mayu squeaked. Not one of the cute ones he'd heard when someone complimented her and she'd giggle back and out came one of her own compliments. Or when... he recalled it now... some time ago... before everything... at... at their old school... when he'd catch her looking at him and he'd look back... She'd been assigned to move out of town the next day—when had it passed? It must have passed so many times over now...

How ignorant of me, he remarked silently.

To deny and try to hide the steadily-blooming emotions deep within the grove of his heart...

But he'd found her yet...

She cried out again and in the sake of what he'd later call pure impulse and nothing else, he swooped down and took her in his arms to where her small foot twisted and the shoe popped off, the momentum she'd caught from sudden change in position forcing a glass bottle out of her pocket to roll through the indention in the ground she's merely caught her foot in.

He would have cursed himself for his thoughtlessness, but—

"Sh-shige-nii..."

The way her sweet, soft voice flickered over the nickname that she'd given him, which eventually spread like wildfire to the other seven—but Mayu, and Mayu alone, first, much earlier, back when they weren't even caught in this nexus, impossible as it seemed in time ago—the way she spoke in her gently-sloped, lilting tone and smiled in that shy way toward him, their faces so near and he could easily feel the warmth of her cheeks eradicating off of her and soaking into him, how he felt his arms wrapped tightly over her back and the other under her legs, preventing her from hitting the ground and at the same time holding her so close to him, so close their noses just barely bumped and he could feel her warming breath upon him and his to her as well, how the moment all coalesced as moonlight dappled upon a scenic view, holding it snug and warm...

Shige-nii couldn't take it for a moment longer without doing anything about it. He should move, consoled his mind, do something about it. His own idiocy had locked him in there in the first place.

He couldn't help it when his face—again, he'd later call it no less than the act of him slipping somewhere, claiming it no less with his face so palpably scarlet everyone knew otherwise—his lips just, just simply happened to graze over hers.

So locked into the embrace of the moment, nobody heard the shout below.

Trudging slowly and carelessly down the flight of stairs, tripping once or twice, Yoshiki let out a guttural growl with each hit his foot made on the wooden stains of the ground. As he descended, a storm cloud of an unexplained annoyance fell upon his shoulders. He was tired. Probably because he was tired. Then again, he'd been tired many goddamned times in the school, so what made this one any different? Well, he was alone. His only way of removing his stress was squeezing the hemp bag in his hand and wrapped up to his wrist with the strings at the top. Didn't look inside it because he had a bad feeling he knew what it was.

Kanno Yuki. The name of the owner sat like a lazy phrase inside of him and took up some lovely space. The blonde couldn't quite figure out why it felt so familiar, but it did, and it probably had to do with the squishy bad thing in the itchy sack fitting in his palm. Or maybe not. Hell, he didn't know. All Yoshiki really had a strong assurance of was his loneliness, and that was pretty sad, but, hell, he felt lonely. Joe had, again, gone and kicked him into the clutch of unconsciousness so that his slow ass could get caught by the black matter... looked like normal air, but darkening in comparison to the areas around it. Darkening to it. And anyway, his adult cowboy buddy had gotten taken by that at some point and it was old news that Pippy didn't make his fall of course: dead.

So the delinquent-looking kid, tired and grumpy and lonely, felt that he could say he was alone, if nothing else. Well, for now. There were a bunch of brats that would possibly come and check in on him at some point. One of them had to do with the girl with no head, that creepy goddamned thing.

Giving a modest jog, careful enough that his feet didn't enter into any serious injury as of yet but more than likely a couple of blisters, a few splinters, the usual when running around to keep your life, well, alive, living, Yoshiki held on forward and entered the classroom 4-A without any troubles breathing down his neck. Unless they were invisible and a few steps behind. Oh, hell, he'd gotten paranoid. Shaking his head brusquely, sending short, almost nonexistent spikes of blonde hair roiling, his dark orbs cut through the wooden door and in went the boy to the oblong, sanctioned area.

Blue slippers trod on dried planks softly in crunching motions. A throaty cough. "Oyy..?" he softly questioned. Nobody answered; he pretty much expected that. Now, actually getting a response would be damn scary. He just had to check though. To stumble in on anyone in particular had the chances of either surging his heart with an unrealistic warmth or cutting it open and flaying it over the walls. Just depending on the person. Or the ghost, if they happened to be dead. Or the asshole zombie, he suddenly thought. Oh, the asshole zombie! How he hated that freakishly gigantic man! Couldn't recall much about him, just that he was important and creepy. And—and... at the...

For some reason, everyone remembered the first time they'd entered Heavenly Host, and the first time Yoshiki did he was with Ayumi and he and she hadn't really been dating or anything yet. That came along later. He'd kind of sort of fallen in love with her some months before they entered the nexus in the first place and she still had a really sad thing for his best friend that he liked to rub in her face sometimes and she'd yell at him for it but they both knew no one was going anywhere.

It'd taken time for her to come around and realize all of the crap he'd done for her, all the wrong endings he may have suffered. Damn Ayumi; how he loved her.

But, well, that first time... Right. The big asshole zombie man.

The more Yoshiki thought about it, the less the memories came back to him. So... nope. Nothing. Shrugging quietly, more or less accepting the notion, he sauntered further, feeling strongly enough that nobody was going to pop out into the space and scare him shitless because he'd checked and nobody responded.

An irritable voice in the back of his head asked him if there may have been an unconscious person in the back. Or a deaf person. Or a blind person who was too scared to answer. Or a mute person—goddammit, they'd find a way... well, except for the deaf person. The deaf person couldn't hear him.

"GODDAMMIT, THERE'S NO DEAF PEOPLE IN HERE! NO ONE! NO PEOPLE AT ALL, OKAY!"

Surprisingly, still no response. The teen took this as a positive suggestion and continued down the narrow, long strip of hallway, dodging around and over the miniature tabletops of desks like stones in a river. He unsurprisingly found nothing to note at the island of an ending at the stump of the hallway, where the section pored open into pockmarked ground and sparse cabinet setting. Slowly, gently pacing, he found nothing of the sort to interest him and, taking a stop to movement, deliberated leaving already since he'd just randomly tore down the hall in here and now there was nothing to note.

When something fell through the ceiling and hit him in the head.

Donk!

"GODDAMMIT!"

So easily startled it was almost hysterical.

After a moment of standing there in the exact position his shaken self had been after being assaulted by a falling object that felt like a glass bottle, Yoshiki leaned over and let the thing pillow into his hand from his blonde head.

A note was trapped inside of the glass container.

With no warning or consideration he chucked the glass madly at the wooden wall in front of him and it erupted in a mess of CRACKKKKKK! Calmly, a slightly-tanned hand flickered to the ground and forked through shards of clear coloring until he could stake out the brown material upholding a small, handwritten note. He didn't look at it just yet, suddenly remembering this thing had fallen from the ceiling of all places, and looked up.

No holes. Looked very secure: strange for a place as old and as hellish as Heavenly Host. Instead, a small peg stuck out from a clasp near the tip of the flooring above and out hung another scratchy brown hemp bag. If he jumped, he could almost reach it, so without apologizing to the nearest corpse, his blue slippers squished into the cool substance and, as a stepping stool, let him grasp it.

His deep voice uttered out "Yoshizawa Ryou" a little quietly. "Maybe he's the reason I now have a bruise on my head," he grumbled throatily, having no other real response than that and tying the second, squishy receptacle onto his left hand with the first. His dominant one stretched out and dark orbs squinted to make out the message.

" 'Go to... the... reference room... for more... medicinal supplies...' Weird. Oh—wait... there's a more fainter addition... hmmm... Goddammit, my eyes shouldn't have to—wait, I think that means... 'We ran out of... places to keep them... in the infirmary'..? God, that's creepy. Why the hell do I even want to go near the infirmary?" Sighing to himself, the boy crumbled the note in his hand and decided he might as well see what the heck was in the reference room. If memory stayed intact, then that third floor to the left supplied the reference room stuffed with creepy occult books. Apparently medicine too. Or medicine textbooks. Maybe medicine textbooks. Hell, he didn't know.

A distant, fleeting call, passing by the boy's space and infiltrating one extremely close to his, close enough that merging was almost, so close to inevitable, when the voice sprung out in a slow, sleep-like drone:

"Tsuuuukaaaaaaassaaaaaaaaaaaa..."

And again.

"Tsuuuuukaaaasaaa..." Longing and need filled it, brimmed with it, giving it a thick, ringing-like manner that coated the mindful hallways thoroughly. A short, pale-skinned girl in musty clothing and a tired but warm expression, jolted.

"Shige-nii!" Mayu tugged at his arm gently, having parted from him in the suddenness of what had come upon them like a warm blanket. Her green orbs sprung with emotion and she tugged his arm a little more gently, soon arousing him. Her cheeks flushed when she recalled why his smile had grown so distant. "Shige-nii... did you hear that?" she whispered softer to him.

His darker orbs stirred, pools of murky forestry waters that opened up to her. "Hmm..?" he whispered back to her; then, "Ah..."

Because it started again. "Tsssuuuuuuuuuuuuu...kaaaaaaaa...saaaaaaaaahh..."

"Sh-shige-nii... wh-who is... it..?" Spluttering, Mayu's hands shivered and threatened to pull over her face breaking out in lines and shadows in a sudden fear—she had a strong set of emotions—when his, warmer and stabler, gently took hers in.

"I think it's Yui."

About half the time they called her miss Yui or sensei. No, no: much less than half the time. Yui had become... the name itself had integrated like Shige-nii. Mayu had begun to believe that he didn't like his first name all that much. But he took a strong liking to Shige-nii... she'd asked him if she could call him Sakutaro, when they were still at school, before this mess, before now, when she finally grew the ability to confess to him and it'd turned around and he confessed back, and he did oblige, but to what agree seemed failing.

Pausing for a moment, listening to the lingering ring in her ears, Mayu gently nodded. "I think so too. More than anyone else." She blinked slowly, looking up and smiling because she couldn't help it to the boy by her side. "Umm... do you know who Tsukasa is?"

He shook his head in response. Mayu shook hers too.

Gently, placing her back on the ground and turning his head aside, glasses flashing just the slightest, Mayu followed the dear boy's sight and caught a figure dressed in pink meandering toward them without even seeing. "Yuuuii?" He pushed his voice into it to try and snag her from whatever had overcome her dizzying appearance.

An average-sized lady, she didn't hinder with making Mayu look all the shorter. Upon calling of her name and in a suitable range, purple eyes snapped and brightened, Yui's head stopping its stroll and landing upon the duo in front of her, gaining to their feet. Her pale face brightened and a cheery smile encroached upon her face. "Is that..." She wondered, silently, how Yui saw them. Did she call them like siblings? Like... like what? A guardi..an...

She resembled a guardian and had, upon numerous chanced occasions, saved one or more of the people she'd come with. That—yes, that was another rule. "Mayu!" she finally called, "...Shige-nii... you too... You both." Her voice had a rhythmic scent to it, with its slightest air of nobility. She did know her stuff. Somehow, Yui held an upbeat internal system and worked with the song of her own heart, flourishing back her chin-length stripes of brown hair and, with a wink of a purple eye, buffeting both of the two at once in a big hug.

"I've been worried... so worried..."

Mayu mumbled weakly, woozy at the thought, "We always... um, die, sooo..."

"Yes... I as well," replied miss Yui, her cheeks a somewhat flushed state.

Shige-nii took this to notice and, adjusting his glasses to try and take notice away from his own blush—just seeing another with their face flushed made him think of how cute Mayu was, which... he couldn't deny from himself any longer—went on to say, "Your deaths are noble. Quite... inspiring. We loath seeing you die, but you always have a strong foundation to your cause. It's admirable, Yui..."

Did they not all share this strange bond, it would have been found as uncomfortable and slightly creepy that the tall, black-donned bluenette so casually called whom had been his teacher some decades upon decades upon—upon—a century, perhaps, by her name. Her real name. But they did. So no one took a notice. Nodding to herself, smiling kinda giddily to see Shige-nii's face get all cute and blushed, Mayu simply nodded with an mm-hmm to the others.

"Who were you calling out to..?" Shige-nii asked it softly, casually, watching his once-teacher's face pale at the wording.

She shook her head, the panda earrings studded in her shaking with the motion. "No one all the important. Besides, I don't think they were there in the first place..." The purple orbs grew distant, and it took Yui a moment to gain her bearings, slowly raising one hand to pull out the wrinkles in her pale pink jacket on the opposite arm. "Hmm...

"We should go somewhere safe."

Having been the guinea pigs of the leader of the nexus for too long, the younger two she addressed both gave a heavy nod. As they rose to their feet, two brunettes and one with a darker blue hue, Yui silently took into notice that Shige-nii reached for the shorter girl's hand beside him and she took it readily. She wouldn't tease them about it—yet—for there did happen to be more pressing matters at hand, pressing matters that had to do with the name she'd been moaning over, and now was not the time nor place. She with the noble heart and panda-lanced jewelry had a strong sense of morality and understood when a dose of humor may be needed. Not in the current state.

Pulling ahead of the two, her navy blue skirt swishing with her clacks of high heels, Yui led on slowly, deliberately, pulling open a third notch on the left and swinging wide open the available space of classroom 1-A. Motioning the two indoors, she followed with her clacking of shoes on reluctant wood, pale face squinted in the search of traps. She'd had the sort of those. For some years in her beginning of this strange, cursed life in the domain of Heavenly Host, repetition and repetition her only guide through this mismatched life, Yui had been labeled teacher to the arid point of redundancy and the eight teenagers joining her had called her miss or sensei. Had. As well an incredible abundance of dead children had tried to murder her for just that. Being a teacher.

This nexus could change even the most basic of traits. Like how to address a teacher. Though honestly, she hadn't felt like one of those in a very long time. Her priority was to stick unto the eight other children that had fallen into this nexus with her those many years ago and keep them safe to the best of her being.

It was strange when it became palpable they didn't want her to die, too, even shoving her out of the way on occasions to take the brunt of an attack meant for her, Shishido Yui, not an innocent friend. Friend...

Blinking back emotions, she gazed on the two sitting comfortably atop a stable desk of lined light-and-dark wood, still too closely perched in some way, some how, to be the best friends everyone had assumed they were. She smirked beside herself but said nothing for another moment. To the relief of both pale children staring a little worriedly back at her, she didn't mention what they thought she would.

"However you two actually managed to meet is a mystery to me..." Still cheery, but with a stronger sense of the nobility, upholding the attention spans of the two in front of her, sitting on elementary school desks like freelance delinquents. Adorable, dorky ones that she knew they weren't and couldn't impersonate. "But it appears I'm well and done too, thank goodness." A puff of a sigh. "Are either of you hurt in any way?"

Mayu's head rose. The golden pins holding back chocolate-colored bangs on either side shimmered, and the twisty pink hair piece pinched further above sparked as well. "I don't think so!" She offered a beam and a nod. "I almost... um, you know... things nearly happened a couple'a times, and Shige-nii started out somewhere scary, but—but somehow, we're still okay." She offered a dazzling grin with that and squeaked, "Yay!"

The boy beside her gazed on with an expression that made the adult watching over them giggle. She composed herself. "Thank goodness..." And just... trailed off there. The person she thought she saw, connected to that name—Tsukasa—still rang clear in her head, and it made her nauseous, worried: a concoction of frantic dribbling down her figure.

"What's bothering you?"

And here she thought her friend was lovestruck. He still had his Shige-nii charm, though, and must've caught her distracted look. Wiping a pale hand over a cheek, Yui sighed.

"I don—"

"NNAAOOOOMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"

"A-ah!"

In a flourish of her bouncy panda necklace, Yui was out the door, the clatter of her high heels the only thing that distinguished her from the school's darkening noises and bumps in the shadows.

Both students, grasping hands, stood and attempted to make a move, when their opening made a retreat and slammed shut. Shige-nii, his arms longer, could reach the brass knob and turn it if he felt the need to, but a frigid air shivered down his spine, and he instead took Mayu's little arm and led her to the midsection of the classroom, where they sat with their spines against the wall with no holes to puncture and reveal themselves, their bodies pressed against each other and the shared warmth breathtaking on his side.

He didn't know it, but she felt just as breathless.

Peering sidelong, it took a moment, then another, but Shige-nii watched in a wave of awe cutting through his green orbs as he took in the pinprick of light that steadily evolved into a slice, the only picture cutting into the semi-darkness of the room that only cloaked tighter round them. Mayu let out a squeak until her hand not by Shige-nii's side clamped over her mouth. He took her other hand and squeezed it gently, body rigid, ready to take off with her at the slightest instant of moment.

Steadily, like a warning, the light grew, and an incredulous force blocked in his heart.

He felt like if he moved, something made out of ghastly material would kill him. He just felt it. It jolted through him.

A... truly... friend... short, brown hair, thick body—Naomi—that girl whose name had been pierced into the air—had described it before.

That first time. That first time they entered the building, she'd encountered a dark, humanoid wisp of black material that, when she saw it, suddenly, breathlessly knew if she let it get her it would kill her. This moment seized him the same, and squeezing the hand supplied to him tightly, feeling Mayu's warmth take him in like no other comfort he'd ever felt, he knew to wait out the piercing ray of white that coalesced in the classroom, and not to move from their midpoint, or the thing would catch them and he'd lose her.

And Shige-nii could not bear to lose his Mayu.

Me: :D Yaaay, who's happy that the chapter didn't end with someone dying?

Rupert: -nods slowly- I'm... happy no one else has suffered through my fate.

Mayu: Eheh... I guess in a way you took care of it for me. Thank you...

Shige-nii: -looks away, all blushy and stuff- Yes, thank you...

Me: yaaaay happy feels-
Oh, does anyone know who Tsukasa is or have an inkling of an idea why the foo Yui would be calling out his name? :3 Just curious~
Welp, thank you for reading on through another chapter of CPBBBB. ^^ I can't believe it, but this thing is set up to finish by around Halloween. I can't believe it's almost over! Which is kind of a good thing because writing horror makes it hard to sleep at night. owo