When Kiyotaka Ishimaru first set foot in the well-polished hallways of Hope's Peak Academy, he saw sprawling before him a future of hope and success. Inhaling deeply and letting his sturdy chest puff out with pride, the scent of order and disinfectant filled his lungs with optimism. This was it, he told himself, enthusiastic red eyes scanning every single detail they could latch onto, this was the beginning of great things for the Ultimate Moral Compass.

For him, that day had been two years ago. For his classmates, well...

Several other students from his class (the 78th Class in the school's illustrious history) were scattered around the main hall of the building, and he observed them carefully. Likewise, they returned the gesture, eyes fixated upon him as he approached. The imposing steel vault door loomed behind them, and all of them seemed confused as to how it had got there in the first place.

"Oh look, someone else!" Said the girl in the red running jacket, which her folded arms held over the white shirt t-shirt underneath. She gave the hall monitor a look of anxious uncertainty, and clearly didn't recognise him. Kiyotaka had never seen Asahina look so unnerved before. It was breathtaking to look at. A tinge of worry flickered in her bright eyes as she called out to him. "Um, hello there!"

If there had ever been a time to act, then this was Kiyotaka's time to win an Oscar. Blending in now was more important than it had ever, ever been. He brought a hand to his head, which he shook with furrowed brows of confusion. Almost as if he had a headache or… "What's going on?" He asked as he approached her and a handful of the other students. "I..."

"You walked through the doors, fell unconscious and woke up in a classroom?" Said the esteemed Byakuya Togami who, to the prefect's surprise, look almost entirely unbothered about the situation he had found himself in. "Yes, yes, I've had to hear it from everyone else already."

Kiyotaka blinked. Dumbfounded. "You mean… you all experienced the same thing?"

"This is strange, indeed..." muttered a certain girl dressed up in gothic lolita clothing.

Not many of them had arrived yet. Celeste, Asahina, Byakuya, Hifumi and…

There she was.

Kyoko Kirigiri.

She stood off in a corner to herself, hand brought to her chin and eyes narrowed as she stared at the floor, clearly in deep thought. The confusion on her face was as strong as the others' combined, and it sent a shudder of delight down the hall monitor's spine. Having apparently sensed him watching her, her violet eyes shot up at him until he turned away, at which point she did the same.

"Hey, don't take it personally," said Asahina, "we tried talking to her, too, but I don't think she in the mood for conversation."

Clearly she wasn't. If the expression on her face was anything to judge by, she didn't remember a thing either. It was a face that was trying to piece together a complex mental jigsaw with virtually none of the pieces. Watching her struggle, observing the gears and cogs breaking down as they struggled to turn… oh, it was delightful.

The girl who had almost stopped him. The girl who was only a minute too late. It was just yesterday that she had made an attempt to wrestle him away from the dispersal button, and now here she was without a single memory of the event. Kiyotaka had to wrestle with his lips to stop them from carving a smile across his mask of a face.

As the minutes stretched on, more and more of his fellow sixteen students arrived, culminating with the appearance of a similarly confused Makoto Naegi. Questions were asked as they gathered together, and opinions shared. Everyone agreed on the same facts: They had walked through the doors of the school on their first day, only to collapse and wake up in a classroom, confused as to why there were iron plates on the windows and a giant vault door in stead of the school's usual doors. To them, two years was perhaps an hour ago at the most.

To Kiyotaka, those two years had felt like a lifetime.

Introductions were made, with the prefect acting as if he didn't know a single one of them. As if he didn't know the pair of sisters in the corner or the pitiful baseball punk, or any other one of the pond scum that surrounded him. He had to pretend he did not know what vermin they were. He had to act like he did not know their crimes.

Stranger stared at stranger, former best friends eyeing each other with all the suspicion they could muster. Not one of them recognised each other. None of them apart from a certain prefect, at least.

Suddenly, admit the awkward conversations and nervous introductions, came static.

And the silhouette of a bear appeared on the monitors.

"Ahem! Ahem! Testing, testing! Mic check, one two! This is a test of the school broadcast system!"

Glances were exchanged. An uncomfortable silence fell over the room, and the air became thinner. Even Kiyotaka himself felt a tinge of anxiety flood him, despite having been the one to have orchestrated the entire event.

"Am I on? Can everyone hear me? Okay, well then…!"

The voice unmistakably belonged to his creation. To his darling Monokuma: the hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence hardwired into a robotic teddy bear. He wondered how Chihiro would react if she ever got the chance to analyse him. Without a doubt, the work Kiyotaka had poured into the bear's creation was capable of matching even the skills of the Ultimate Programmer. He didn't require talent or genius, after all. Just simple hard work and countless hours of study.

That dedication to success was what made him the one in control of this game. It was what it made it so easy to overthrow the old headmaster.

After all, Kiyotaka was nothing more than a perfectly normal individual: the most dangerous thing in all of civilization.

"Ahh, to all incoming students! I would like to begin the entrance ceremony at… right now! Please make your way to the gym at your earliest convenience. That's all. I'll be waiting!"

And, with that, the static died. Kiyotaka's heart was pounding in his ears. It had worked. It had actually worked. Even better than he could have ever possibly expected, too!

"What the hell was that just now?" Spat Junko Enoshima, her militaristic sister glaring at the screen from aside her.

"Well then," said Byakuya, already turning in the direction of the gym, "if you'll excuse me..."

Junko scoffed, clearly bewildered at the snob's sudden exit. "H-Hey! What, you're gonna take off just like that?!"

There was another period of momentary silence. More glances were exchanged, with many clearly unsure what to make of the situation. Did they follow the Ultimate Affluent Progeny, or did they mill around the lobby in the hopes of… well, whatever entertainment their feeble minds could possibly come up with.

"Oh, yeah, now I get it! The whole thing was just to get us all pumped for the entrance ceremony," declared the Ultimate Clairvoyant, stroking his chin in consideration of the situation. "Man, thank God it was all a joke. I'd be totally freaked if this was real!" He let out a laugh of confidence and began making his way out.

Oh, how wrong he was, thought Kiyotaka. For a Clairvoyant, his predictions always had the most entertaining ways of going wrong. He had a "Thirty-Percent Accuracy Rating", Yasuhiro himself proudly called it.

Unfortunately for him, the events still to come were all very much a part of the Seventy-Percent demographic.

Because today was orchestrated to end in despair.

The gym had been abuzz with conversation and chatter for the past several minutes, with many of the class remarking how the room had been set up to look exactly like an entrance ceremony. Chairs sat ready, facing the stage, but no one dared to sit on them, still too uneasy about the situation they had found themselves in. The atmosphere was one of confusion and mystery, but also a slight sense of excitement. A tiny flicker of hope that perhaps all of this was an elaborate joke.

A hope that was dashed moments later, when, having declared his introductions, a certain black-and-white teddy bear bounced onto the speaker's podium with a grin of twisted malice. Gasps came from the crowd. Sounds of bewilderment. A growing sense of fear and even further confusion. It was exactly how Kiyotaka had pictured it in his dreams for the past several months.

"Huh?" Said a shaken Chihiro. "A… teddy bear?"

"I'm not a teddy bear," the obvious teddy bear replied, "I… am… Monokuma!"

With that, the spectacle began. Monokuma made his introductions, firing off pun after pun, joke after joke, his voice suitably happy and bouncy about the situation at hand. Just how Kiyotaka had programmed him to behave. Although, just to test that the AI's parameters were programmed properly…

"I refuse to believe it!" The prefect declared, pointing at his creation with an outraged finger and tears in his eyes. "A teddy bear cannot be the headmaster of a school!"

Monokuma glared at him. "Well start believin' it, bucko! 'Cause headmaster is exactly what I am!"

It was as if Kiyotaka was just like one of the other students. There were no exceptions shown towards him. Right now, in front of the others, Kiyotaka was just as much of a victim as they were. He let out a gasp of shock and, in many ways, it wasn't staged. He was stunned at how despairingly masterful Monokuma had been designed.

Blending in had been made infinite times easier.

Almost every student took their turns firing out statements of disbelief at what they were seeing, refusing to acknowledge the two foot tall, black and white truth that stared them dead in the face. It was a truth that, once it had (very) slowly begun to settle in amidst the confusion, was obliterated by the larger one that came crashing in like a wrecking ball moments later.

Monokuma, as cheerful as ever, casually explained that they were to spend the rest of their lives within the walls of the school. The metal plates had been installed to keep them inside, he told them, and escape was utterly impossible. That epiphany caused a furore of anger and panic as the bear laughed about how no one was coming to save them.

The mood in the room shifted and turned with as much variation as the ocean waves the students were told they would never see again. The anger burned like the sun they were never meant to see. The ever-growing fear was as chilling as the evening winds they would never again experience. The room was torn between anger and fear, between disbelief and hesitant acceptance, switching between each state with rapid speed.

As the panic reached its crescendo, with Leon and Mondo demanding Monokuma end what they were still insistent was a "joke", the bear let out a delighted little giggle.

"I guess I forgot to mention one thing. There is a way for you to leave the school."

At last, Kiyotaka's classmates seemed to say with their eyes of alertness, hope! Finally, a way to undo the awfulness and the stress of this situation and put the entire thing to bed. How hard could it really be? After all, it was only a tedd-

The explanation came.

No one could fathom it.

No one dared to.

Kiyotaka had to suppress the chuckle bubbling in his throat as he watched their faces turned from scared to terrified, from panic to trauma, all the while wearing a similar face of his own.

The inevitable objections and refutations came flying at the teddy bear, who merely laughed and shrugged, continuing to insist that his every word was the truth.

"You must kill someone if you want to leave," he said with that permanent grin. "Simple as that."

Yet more denials. Yet more panic. Yet more and more refusals that this was real, that this was actually happening, that what had supposed to have been a perfectly normal entrance ceremony had become, well… this. Kiyotaka listened to the chaos ensue around him as if it were music, practically mapping out the entire composition in his mind for later enjoyment at his own sadistic leisure. He even threw a couple of his own yells of disbelief at the bear, if only to add to the symphony.

The piece had been playing smoothly, grand and magnificent, until it was interrupted by none other than a certain biker punk with a face full of fury. Of course it was him, thought Kiyotaka as he watched on silently with over-dramatic tear-filled eyes. He never had been the type to learn when to keep his mouth shut.

"Listen up, asshole! This shit's gone way too far! What the hell kinda joke is this?"

What ensued was a scene which shattered the harmonious melody ringing through the Ultimate Moral Compass' head.

Arguing. Mondo grabbing Monokuma, followed by a series of loud beeps. Kyoko breaking her long silence to scream at the biker to throw the bear away. The only ringing that remained was the aftermath of the explosion as Monokuma self-destructed in mid-air.

Had the force of the blast not been so troublesome, Kiyotaka might have applauded what was, in his eyes, another successful test run of Monokuma's functionalities. When a new copy of the bear sprung up at the podium moments later, however, that need for applause almost overtook him before he reigned in it. Perfect. Simply perfect.

As, surprise surprise, more shock and horror spread throughout the hall at the sight of the resurrected bear, the high-tech e-handbooks were handed out to each student. Most importantly, they contained the list of the school's regulations, all of which had personally been written by Kiyotaka himself, of course. He had begun with a list of four-hundred-and-ten during his first drafts, but had managed to whittle it down to nine:

Rule #1: Students may reside only within the school. Leaving campus is a punishable offence.
Rule #2: "Night-time" is from 10 pm to 7 am. Some areas are off-limits at night, so please exercise caution.
Rule #3: Sleeping anywhere other than the dormitory will be seen as sleeping in class and punished accordingly.
Rule #4: You are free to explore Hope's Peak Academy at your discretion.
Rule #5: Violence against Headmaster Monokuma is strictly prohibited, as is the destruction of surveillance cameras.
Rule #6: Anyone who kills a fellow student and becomes "blackened" will graduate, unless they are discovered.
Rule #7: Any non-approved attempts to stop the communal school life will be met with maximum punishment.
Rule #8: Moving through the hallways at speeds of over 10mph will be punished severely.
Rule #9: Additional school regulations may be added if necessary.

Perhaps it was down to personal taste, but Rule #8 was undoubtedly Kiyotaka's favourite. Even if he wasn't entirely sure why.

Once the handbooks were given to their respective owners and their properties explained, the little headmaster said his farewells, hopped off the back of the podium, and vanished.

The scent of gunpowder still lingering in the air and mild ringing still ongoing in the ears of every student, suspicious glances were once again exchanged, just as they had been earlier. Only now, it was under entirely different circumstances. Who was a predator watching prey? Who was a potential killer scoping out potential victims? How many of them, Kiyotaka wondered, were contemplating thoughts of murder already?

For what felt like the first time in his life, they were questions he didn't have an answer to, and that only made the situation that much more exciting. Who would die first? When would they die? How would they be slaughtered?

Only time would tell.

As the class began to go their separate ways, a sense of foreboding saturated the school, looming over each and every student within it.

The event could not have gone better, thought Kiyotaka, as he eventually left the room and headed back toward his dorm. Everything he had planned had been pulled off with greater success than he had anticipated, and it was all thanks to everyone's favourite AI teddy bear. Monokuma: a true headmaster.

Certainly a better choice than the skeleton sitting in a box upstairs.

As he passed by his various classmates, he made a point of asking them how they were. Not one of them was remotely okay. Even through their silence, he could smell their fear.

The school of hope, once looked up to as a beacon of order and regulation, had now been dyed with the bright red brilliance of despair.

And Kiyotaka could not have been happier.

"You did an excellent job today, my little friend."

"Aww, geez. Buy a bear a drink first before chattin' him up, huh?"

Seated in the chair of the school's control room, Kiyotaka's eyes flicked between the monitors in front of him and the intelligent bear milling around alongside him. In truth, the prefect hadn't intended on making him so sarcastic, but it entertained him all the same. The teddy bear truly had his own personality, albeit one that obeyed Kiyotaka's authority.

"I can assure you that flirtation wasn't my intention," he responded with a little smirk, currently watching Makoto and Sayaka chatting shakily in the gym on the screen in front of him.

"Hey, c'mon Mister Law and Order," said Monokuma, "I know a guy who's batting for the same team when I see one."

Kiyotaka let out a muted gasp at that, clearly taken aback. He decided not to dignify the joke with a response, however. It was hardly worthy of his acknowledgement.

"Oh, you're watching those two, huh?" Asked the bear, his own eyes observing the pair on the screen. "Think they're gonna get it on?"

"I'd much prefer if they killed each other," the prefect replied. "That way the real game can begin. I might need to give them a motive if someone doesn't give in soon."

"Whatever you say, nutjob… but I know you're just waiting to see those two get it on."

With a roll of his eyes, Kiyotaka turned his gaze to another screen, if only to shut the teddy bear up. The very same teddy bear who, face bright red, was currently huffing and puffing and rubbing his chest at his own words. If he wasn't so loveable, Kiyotaka would have been disgusted.

He watched the figures of each of his classmates scattered across the ground floor of the school, all of them either talking amongst themselves, crying together, or sitting in silence on their own. He watched Kyoko for a moment, who had taken up the task of inspecting every room she came across, albeit with a look of lingering confusion on her face. There she was, just like all the others, trapped in the web he had spun. She wasn't special. She didn't have the superior intellect that so many around her used to speak so highly of. No. She was normal. Perfectly average.

And that was why he had beaten her.

As his eyes moved from crying face to crying face, from figures still wandering in disbelief to those in traumatised isolation, Kiyotaka finally took off the mask of confusion and innocence he had been forced to wear around the others.

A grin cracked through his skin.

His fingers, like claws, grasped onto the armrests of his chair.

Heavy brows lifted with unfiltered joy.

A laugh like no other spilt from his lips. Twisted and menacing, overflowing with sadism and despair.

At long last, he had done it. The game he had spent years planning was being played out, right before his very eyes, and it was glorious.

"Y'know," said a familiar voice suddenly in the midst of the mastermind's laughter, "if you're done with the whole look-at-me-I'm-an-evil-genius shtick, I've got breaking news for ya!"

Kiyotaka's hysteria ceased, the moment ruined, his eyes of blood turning to face the wicked little teddy bear once more. "Breaking news?"

Monokuma nodded his head, delighted. "Yup! Real shockin' stuff. If the internet was still a thing, I'm sure 'yer phone would be buzzin' like crazy with notifications right now. Real headline-worthy material!"

"Just get to the point."

Monokuma grinned, as always.

"Go downstairs."

"Downstairs?"

"Go check out the bathhouse. I'd tell ya to check the monitors, but there ain't a camera in there, remember. On account of the steam. You'll have to go see it with your own eyes!"

Kiyotaka had no idea what he was talking about, but there was something about the delight and the malice and the genuine excitement behind those words that intrigued him.

"What is it?"

"Let's just say," said Monokuma, "that things have gotten a whole lot more interesting!"

When Kiyotaka Ishimaru arrived at the bathhouse, he was met with a sight he hadn't expected.

The room was devoid of any other souls, almost exactly as he had left it… minus a few things, anyway. Little bits and pieces of relative interest lay on the floor, all of them surrounding the grand masterpiece that awaited him there – the 'breaking news' Monokuma had told him about.

The old Kiyotaka would have been horrified at the sight.

The old moral compass would have screamed and cried and panicked.

Yet the compass had long since broken, and the old Kiyotaka was long, long gone.

It had only been twelve hours since the entrance ceremony. Never in his wildest, most despair-soaked dreams could he have predicted this.

There, on the locker room floor, lay the corpse of Junko Enoshima.

He had to stifle another round of laughter.

His perfect, white-toothed smile returned.

The killing game had begun.