Just like last time, the class had found their way to the scene that had been set up for the punishment. From behind a glass window, they could look into the scene. A massive room stretched before them. Artificial hills had been constructed. Smoke filled the air. Trenches and blockades dotted the landscape.

With that same sinking feeling he was starting to become to painfully used to, Makoto realised what this was.

It was an entire battlefield.

For now, there was no sign of Mukuro.

The monitors around them, playing a slight variation of the twisted music from last time, lit up. Bold letters carved from solid steel were imposed on the title card showing on the screens. Smoke blew over it, while fires burned around it.

'EXECUTION: TANKS FOR EVERYTHING!'

Tanks?

Mukuro appeared out of nowhere, running up from behind one of the hills. A gun was in her hands, and she looked exhausted. Had Monokuma given her a weapon?

For a moment, he wondered why, until cardboard cut-outs of Monokuma popped up from the ground. To his horror and surprise, they began shooting real bullets at her.

Yet Mukuro, running through the battlefield, succeeded in dodging every one of them, firing back, destroying the cutouts in the process. As more popped up, more were shot down, the Ultimate Soldier remaining completely unharmed.

She was amazing.

She was surviving!

"Come on, Mukuro!" Asahina screamed through the glass. "You can do this! Survive!"

"Go on! Do it!" Mondo cheered.

Whether or not Mukuro could hear them was another matter entirely.

Cardboard planes appeared overhead, flying over her. They began dropping barrels down onto her location, but she moved fast, running out of the way, just as the barrels hit the ground and exploded behind her. Again, she remained unharmed.

More smoke filled the air now.

"You can do it!" Sayaka cheered. "We believe in you! Come on!"

Soon, the entire class had joined in, cheering her on, holding their collective breaths as wave after wave of enemies tried to take her down. More pop-ups were shot down. More planes and their explosive barrels were avoided. Still, not a scratch appeared on her.

It seemed like killing her was impossible.

She stopped for a moment to take a breath, and the music stopped.

However, a second later, the music began again. Just like it had last time. Slowly, it built up note by note by note by note, reaching a crescendo, until…

A tank came roaring over the hill behind Mukuro. Massive, it was moving quickly, speeding towards her with the obvious intent of crushing her. Monokuma sat inside, his head currently popped out of the hatch, staring the Ultimate Soldier down as he came rolling towards her.

She noticed it instantly, and set off running.

"Go!" Sayaka screamed. "Run!"

"Don't stop! Keep going! Keep going!"

"Come on, you can do this! Keep going!"

The music kept blaring out. 'Wa-wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-woooooh...'

Sure enough, Mukuro continued to run, dashing across the battlefield. More pop-ups appeared, and she took them down yet again, still running. Planes flew overhead, and again, she dodged their barrels. All the while, the tank continued to chase her, getting closer and closer and closer, until…

Mukuro found herself in a clearing. A flat area without barricades or trenches. She stopped, turning, realising the tank wasn't following her anymore.

No one understood why.

Until, that was, the ground at her feet began to flash.

'Wa-wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-woooooh...'

She looked down, and her eyes went wide. Through the smoke and the panic of the tank, she had ran straight into a minefield without realising. She was so deep into it that there was no way of getting out.

No!

No, she had come so close!

She had to find a way out.

'Wa-wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-wo, oh... woooooh...'

The music was reaching its end.

Oh no.

The flashing grew brighter.

Mukuro looked up from the mines at her feet. She didn't move. She accepted this.

"No," Makoto cried. "NO!"

His words didn't matter.

As the music hit its peak, the mines exploded under and around her into a massive ball of fire.

Makoto had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the flash, yet his ears were still pounded by the strength of the blast.

By the time he found the courage to look back at the scene, the smoke and the rubble had began to clear. He hoped to see Mukuro standing victorious, having survived the execution…

...but there she was, lying in a burnt and broken heap on the ground. She wasn't moving.

Her limbs were missing.

The music had stopped.

The screens went dark.

Despite how awful her means were, she had tried to end the game. She had tried to free them from this insanity. In a cunning move, she had tried to turn Monokuma's own game against him. She was proud until the very end.

As a result, she had paid the ultimate price.

Mukuro Ikusaba was dead.

The hope of her classmates, just like the battlefield she lay on, was obliterated.

Dark eyes focused on the monitors in front of them.

Just like last time, the hallways were quieter than they had been a few hours earlier. A school that had been alive with frantic chatter and hurried investigation was now sombre in tone. While Asahina lay crying on her bed, Byakuya sat cross-legged in the library reading a book, bored expression on his face. As Sayaka sat huddled into the corner of her room, head bowed and hands over her eyes, Makoto was taking a nap.

Such fear.

Such pain.

Such delightful despair.

Kiyotaka Ishimaru took another sip of his coffee. It wasn't a drink he ever thought he would care for. As a matter of fact, two years ago he might have said it was a bad influence.

Yet the Kiyotaka of two years ago was a different person to the one he was now. The new and improved Ultimate Moral Compass (oh, the sweet irony of that name) loved the stuff.

"Yeesh," came a sudden voice behind him, "that was one hell of a clean-up operation!"

The mastermind spun around in his chair, low brows watching the exhausted little bear, who huffed and puffed and sighed and wheezed. "Monokuma," he said, greeting him.

"Do you have any idea how long it takes to clean up an entire frickin' battlefield? It's a while, I'll tell ya! That's not to mention trying to stitch Soldier girl back together, either. It was like a jigsaw tryin' to get it done."

"Is her body disposed of?" Kiyotaka asked.

"Sure is," Monokuma nodded. "She's in the freezers with the rest of 'em. Y'know, I suppose I shouldn't complain about piecin' her back together. At least it was possible with her. That weeaboo fella, on the other hand? He's still just a bag of sludge!"

Kiyotaka chuckled. That he was.

"The morgue is filling up fast," said the prefect. "Faster than I expected. We're not even one week into starting the game, and we've already seen two trials and five dead."

"Yup!" Monokuma chimed. "Ain't it great? It's more than ya ever dreamed of!"

Was it?

In truth, Kiyotaka hadn't anticipated the game getting so violent so fast. Sure, this wasn't exactly on the scale of the student council killing game, but it was passing by faster than he would have liked. What was the point of despair if he didn't have the time to appreciate it?

"We haven't even had to hand out motives yet. I had several lined up, too. It'll be impossible to use them all now," said Kiyotaka, clearly disappointed. There had been so many good ideas, too. "Hopefully we can hold off another killing for the time being. That way we actually have time to drop in a motive, and when we do it'll actually be interesting."

Monokuma's shoulders rose, his head lowered, and he sighed in a particularly over-dramatic fashion. "Hold off on the killing? Seriously? C'mon, don't leave a bear waitin' for the good stuff! What's the point in a killing game without the killing?"

"Constant killing is boring," he replied, suddenly thinking of how much he might have sounded like a certain someone during today's trial in saying that. Wait. That reminded him. Today's trial had been interesting, and not in a good way. "Especially when those killings threaten the entire killing game itself."

Mukuro had come scarily close to getting away with her crime. Had, like Makoto said, it not been for the tiniest things messing up her plan, the odds were that she would have been successful. Had she been successful, the entire class would have been executed.

Had the class been executed, she would have killed herself.

Had she killed herself… the entire game would have been ruined.

She had come close to completely destroying a plan that had spent years in the making.

"Before she died," said Kiyotaka, "Mukuro said something quite interesting, didn't she?"

Monokuma cocked his head, paw coming to his chin, the little bear clearly confused. Kiyotaka grunted.

"She told everyone that there was a Mastermind behind the game," he continued. "Not only that… she said it was someone within the class."

The teddy bear was quick to laugh. "Oh, yeah! That! You should'a seen the look on your face. I think it was the first time I've seen you show an emotion in front of the others that wasn't completely fake. You were sweatin' buckets!"

Kiyotaka failed to see the humour. "I'm not sure how she figured it out – she's dead now anyway, so it doesn't matter – but… what about the others? Makoto is quick to figure things out. We've seen the evidence of that during both trials. It's the same with Kyoko, too. She almost stopped me from making any of this happen in the first place… and I'm afraid she might do it again."

He thought back to that day. Only a week ago now, but it felt like an eternity ago. The day that he had filled the school with the Ushinau memory gas – erasing his classmates' recollections of the past two years. Kyoko had almost stopped him. Had she been just a few seconds earlier, she may have prevented the entire game from starting.

She and Makoto were proving to be quite the team during the trials. The most impossible challenges seemed like nothing to them. If Kyoko had managed to figure out his identity as the Ultimate Despair last time, then what was to say that Mukuro's hint wouldn't be the catalyst in helping her figure it out again? What was to say that she and Makoto wouldn't start piecing things together?

If anyone could take him down, he thought, it was going to be those two.

"I may just have to deal with them," he muttered, "before it's too late."

He had no ideas in mind, but he was sure he could think of something. If they got too close for comfort, he wouldn't hesitate in biting back.

"By the way," he said, turning to the bear, "what was wrong with you today?"

Monokuma seemed confused. "Wrong?"

"You were giving them hints during the trial."

"...No, I wasn't."

"Yes, you were. You made it obvious that Kyoko was right about the date trick. If your reaction had been more subtle, they wouldn't have been able to figure it out."

Monokuma shrugged, hopping up on a nearby chair, spinning around and around and around. "Hey," he said mid-spin, "you didn't know about the trick either. You told me you wanted to go into this case blind so it'd be more entertainin'. What does it matter to you? They were gonna solve it, anyway, and they did. All I did was speed things up a little!"

"Which you shouldn't have done."

"Relax," said the bear. "You got one helluva trial and a mess of an execution out of it, so I'd say it was worth it."

Kiyotaka's brows were lowered at the bear, the mastermind's arms folded, expression one of complete and utter disapproval.

Monokuma dismissed him with a wave of his paw. "Jeez! Chill, buster," he said. "Don't go bursting a blood vessel on me!"

With a sigh, Kiyotaka relaxed the muscles on his face and decided to drop the question. Sometimes he regretted fitting that damn bear with an artificial intelligence that was, indeed, so intelligent.

"I just hope things stay calm for the time being," said the prefect, "that way we can lure them into a false sense of security. Just when they think things are calm… you can drop the motive and sow fresh havoc all over again."

Finishing the last sip of his coffee, Kiyotaka rose from his seat and began to head for the door, walking in an almost military fashion.

"I'd best get going," he continued, before stopping in his tracks. "It's time I go and cry with the others."

His back to the bear, Kiyotaka suddenly turned to face him, his eyes streaming with tears, his figure shaking, nose dripping, his entire being completely and utterly devastated. "H-How does this look?" He asked the little headmaster. "Does it… does it look like I care enough? Do I look like I miss my f-friend Mukuro?" His every word ached of agony. The sorrow was immeasurable.

It was difficult to tell that the entire thing was a lie.

Despite the fact that Monokuma wasn't capable of changing his expression, Kiyotaka could sense the shock from him. Wordless, the bear nodded his head.

In an instant, the tears were gone. The sniffling and the stuttering had dissipated. It was almost as if Kiyotaka hadn't been crying in the first place. "Excellent," he said, chuckling, his snake-like grin wide and charming.

"You're a real psycho, ya know that?"

"That's a compliment coming from you. Goodnight, Monokuma."

Still chuckling softly to himself, Kiyotaka continued to head for the door. Monokuma sat silently behind him, watching his every step as the former hall monitor spoke one last time, still smiling brightly as he left.

"Here's to a peaceful few days."