Yay, it's one year anniversary of this fanfic!

Enjoy~!

.:Scarlett's POV:.

Kirito and I finally got another mission. I guess with the whole 'disregarding direct orders' and 'destroying Big Ben' thing, nobody in their right mind would be eager to send us out, but Lord Death was apparently desperate. The particular Kishin that Kirito and I were hunting had taken out all the other pairs that came after it. Maka and Soul were the last people to have fought it, but...

"Hey Kirito, what's up with this Kishin?" I looked over, bored, at my partner.

"Weren't you listening at all to what Lord Death was telling us? Actually, don't answer that." Kirito sighed, exasperated. "This thing goes around masquerading as people. It's the most evolved Kishin Lord Death has ever seen."

"...How did I miss him telling us all this? I mean, I know I space out a lot, but this is ridiculous," I murmured. "I don't understand how we're supposed to find this thing."

"I don't either. Death said we would know it when we saw it."

"Well then, sitting here and staring at passerby isn't exactly the best way to do this, now is it?" I stood up and stretched, turning back to Kirito when he didn't stand up too. "Kirito, walking around while staring at passerby would work better, no? Come on, get up." I grabbed his hand and tugged him off the bench. We were in an area of town that was full of boutiques and restaurants, so it wasn't exactly hard to find people to watch.

As we walked through the somewhat crowded streets, nobody seemed off or out of place. As the daylight started vanishing, I threw up my hands, ready to give up on searching then and there, when I overheard a couple of schoolgirls talking about their friend.

"It was just so weird, you know? It's not something he'd normally do... It was like he was possessed or something," one of them said while the other one just nodded.

Next to me, Kirito had frozen. Then he looked at me and said, "It took so long just searching something to go off of. Could it really be this simple to track down..?"

I shrugged. "We'll never know if we don't check it out."

We ended up chasing a couple empty leads, but the latest one we had found was one about a guy who was supposedly acting really weirdly. More specifically, this guy was a soccer player who started playing all sorts of 'pranks' on people, ones that usually left the victim in the hospital. According to the girls Kirito and I had asked, this person's personality had done a complete 180.

The girls had pointed us in the direction of one of his favorite haunts. But... The building they directed us to didn't look like it had been used for years. The entire front side of the building was rotting, with faded blue paint. Nowhere else looked even half as nice as that. The rest of the place was pretty much gone.

"Kirito... This is the place, right..?" I asked as we stood outside it, not willing to go in when it looked as though the smallest added bit of weight would make the place go crashing down.

"Um, yeah. I'm pretty sure this is where those girls said to go," Kirito responded.

I sighed. "Of course it is. It couldn't just be easy, could it? No, of course not. The universe doesn't work like that," I muttered quiet enough that Kirito probably didn't hear.

A large shadow just happened to pass a window while I was staring at it. "Please tell me you didn't see that."

"The shadow thing? Of course I saw it." Kirito glanced over at me with an unreadable expression on his face.

"That's a shame. The fact that you saw it too means that we have some sort of obligation to find out what it is." I frowned. "But why the hell would anything decide to hide out in a building that looks ready to collapse? Even if you were desperate, being crushed by support beams or falling through rotting floors doesn't sound that fun."

He shrugged. "I think a better question that's easier to answer would be this: Are you ready for this?"

I nodded, and together, we approached the house, cautiously opened the door, and stepped inside.

The interior of the house was exactly like the exterior. They were both in extremely shitty shape and looked ready to give way. There was a giant hole in the ceiling that allowed a little light to filter through, but most of the house was dark.

As I was staring around the room, a creak came from over our heads.

"This can't be easy, can it?" Kirito sighed.

"Of course not." I mean, it did take out a bunch of pairs before us. "Do you want to go ahead and transform? It's better to be safe than sorry, I guess... Or," I said, "we could just burn this place to the ground."

He shook his head. "I'm pretty sure Lord Death said something about this Kishin hiding its victims. I could be wrong, but..."

"Yeah, yeah." Then, a moment later, I was holding a bow and nocking an arrow.

I glanced around the room we were in. It had absolutely no furniture and appeared to be the entire first floor. There was a narrow staircase leading up to the right side.

As silently as possible, I crept up the stairs. The staircase was pitch black, and I kept a hand on the wall the entire time to make sure there wasn't some sort of secret passage.

When I reached the top (thankfully not falling through the stairs into some unknown basement area), I nearly crashed into the door. Kirito snickered at me, and I 'accidentally' hit him on the wall a few times.

Gently pushing the door open so that it didn't squeak, I quickly looked around the room. It doesn't look like there's anything here... I don't think that really counts for much though, since I can't actually see more than a couple feet in front of me.

Cautiously, I stepped forward, testing the floor first to make sure it didn't give way under my feet. If I can't even see, let alone step forward properly, how the hell am I going to fight something in here?

Not particularly paying attention to my surroundings was almost my downfall. As soon as I cleared the door, said door slammed shut behind me. It toppled down afterward, which in turn made me jump out of the way, but that's not important. What's important was that I had found the Kishin.

"How do you even mistake that for a person? I don't care how stupid you are, that looks absolutely nothing like a human!" I yelled, narrowly dodging the thing as it attempted to jump on me.

The Kishin was really nothing like a human, with silvery eyes that glowed in the dark, a hunched back, and webbed fingers and toes. Weren't all Kishins supposedly human once? This thing looks nothing like a human.

As the thing flew towards me, I shot an arrow at it. Guess what, it missed. I scooted forward, and the Kishin overshot, going over my head in a decent arc before crashing into what I thought was a wall.

I don't suppose you can light up..? I asked Kirito.

Um, no. I can't.

That's really a shame. It'd be really useful right about now.

I shut my eyes. Now, you're probably thinking, 'Why would you do such a thing when you're in the middle of a battle you could quite possibly die in?' Well, they say that when one of your senses fails you, your other ones make up for it. Besides, it's not like my eyes were much help in this sort of battle anyway.

Back to the fight. I slowed my breathing down the best that I could before focusing on what I heard. There was the pitter-patter of little feet - This building has mice. They should really just get rid of the whole place. - the sound of me getting another arrow ready, and a tiny shifting movement somewhere to my left. I quickly took aim toward the sound as best as I could and let the arrow fly.

From the direction I had shot the arrow in, there came a loud screech. It was so out of place in the pretty much silent house that I flinched backward and tripped over the door, and the stupid thing took that time to attack, even with an arrow sticking out of its neck.

It landed on me, knocking me down to the floor even more than I already was, and the floor beneath us gave way. The Kishin and I tumbled down to the first floor, which hadn't seemed as far away as it felt when falling.

I managed to get the Kishin mostly below me as we fell, so the Kishin slammed into the ground harder than I did.

I blinked stars out of my eyes as I attempted to roll off to the side. Pain laced through the entire left side of my body, and I gave up on moving and just laid there. The only thing that really saved me was that the Kishin fell into the floor so hard that it died, and there was a red soul floating where its body had been not even a minute ago.

.

.

The next thing I knew, Kirito was leaning over me and the soul had vanished.

I held up my right hand for a high five. He obliged.

"Would you rather call Lord Death and wait for other people to get here or just get out of here?"Kirito asked.

"Getting out sounds really nice right now, but I don't actually think I can stand." But then again, I don't know.

Kirito offered to help me get outside, with an argument of 'what kind of partner would I be if I didn't?'

I don't exactly know how to refuse that, so I agreed.

He managed to get me up and started towards the door with my good arm slung over his shoulder, but I was pretty much just dead weight at that point.

Somehow, he got us both outside, and just in time too. The building gave a loud groan before collapsing into a big pile of wood and dust.

I got set down under a tree some distance away from the wreckage, and Kirito pulled out a mirror he had stashed somewhere and called Lord Death. Then he plopped down next to me as we waited for some other person to arrive.

Before I forget, I would like to add a thank you note to the guests I can't respond to. Thanks!

Anyone who actually chose to read this is amazing, so thanks to you too. ^-^

~Kirito and Scarlett