Pain encompassed the whole of Naegi's world, swirling around him in a howl of dizzy black rings. His left side burned with constant jolts of agony, every twitch flinging bolts of lightning from fingertips to shoulders. That pain should have been enough, should have at least drowned out the rest of his nerves… but no, even through the mess of his arm he could feel the jolting through his legs as he was dragged along the ground, the ache where the chained collar had gripped his throat, and through it all, in the midst of everything, the throbbing tangle of darkness that pounded through his skull.
He could almost be grateful for the ache of confusion in his head, the way that it made the world shudder in and out of focus. The pain never disappeared, not entirely… but when aching head sent the world blurring around him, the physical sensations seemed to be a little further away. It brought him just enough relief to reach for the confusion, letting it flood through his mind and drag him down into its mire. Down into the darkness…
Into the shadows…
… into the nightmare unfolding through his mind…
…
… Hope's Peak stretched tall and proud above him, so lofty it could brush the sky itself. Hope's Peak Academy, where he'd been invited to attend as the 78th class's Ultimate Lucky Student, where he'd walked up the steps on the very first day, where he'd walked through those heavy doors to find the fifteen people who would change him forever…
…
Fifteen people… no, fifteen classmates, fifteen friends who spun around him in a maddening whirl. He couldn't see them, not clearly, not through the dizzying whirl that grew faster every time he blinked… but he didn't need to see them, not when he knew them all so very well. He could hear them laughing happily, one after another, and he was almost… almost sure the sound hadn't come from the depths of his head.
The laughter of his friends surrounded him, Maizono's bright voice mingling with Celeste's practiced snicker, and Fujisaki's shy whisper of a giggle nearly drowned out by Ishimaru's booming rumble. He could hear them all, as clearly as if they stood here with him outside the school… the laughter of his dead friends.
…
… They stood together in the entrance hall, meeting as a group for the first time. Sixteen smiles, shy and open, proud and nervous, sixteen people all waiting to see what would happen. Sixteen people about to become friends.
They'd gotten closer over the course of a year… a long year that had lasted a lifetime… a year that had been much too short. Those first fragile connections had deepened, and new bonds had formed that they hadn't expected. The year had taken them through twists and turns, transforming them from strangers into a group, a class, a team… but this had been the start of it, here at the academy entrance where they'd met for the first time.
…
… where they'd met…
…
… for the first time…
…
Faster and faster the ideas spun through his head, blurring into a haze as the line whirled him round the room. All the world disappeared, lost behind the dizzying veil of motion — but Hope's Peak Academy stood there in the center, looking somehow wrong but still unmistakable. It was all he could see clearly, shuddering in the middle of his vision, shaking and swaying as he spun faster than ever. The front doors shot past his eyes, doors that he'd only gotten to walk through once…
… hundreds of times, he'd walked through that door every day for a year, up those steps and into the building without a second thought…
Windows flashed by, nearer and farther, nearer and farther, like the line was zigzagging instead of circling. Open windows, clear and airy, windows like he'd never seen at this school…
… windows in every classroom, letting in the light, opening the world up to the students because no one believed there was anything out there to fear…
And there wasn't — they'd been right. Fear was inside the academy, fear was within them, among them, worse than anything the world could do to them. Fear was what the academy had unleashed on the world, fear and horror and despair…
Laughter echoed in his ears, the recorded voices overlapping one another until the happy sounds bled together into a long mad cackle that seemed to shake the very walls of the school in front of him. Not just the voices he knew this time, now there were others, voices he didn't know…
… voices he knew, people he knew, friends he could never forget…
Mukuro Ikusaba, whose quiet laugh had to be surprised out of her.
Headmaster Kirigiri, proud and welcoming to them all, but with a fond, sad chuckle reserved for the moments after he caught sight of his daughter in his halls.
And another voice… a voice from his nightmares, a voice he knew too well…
There could be dozens of other voices, hundreds, thousands — and still, that one laugh would ring out clearly, distinct from them all. Her voice clawed at his brain, deep wounds from sharp red nails the same bloody shade as Monokuma's lightning bolt eye. Her voice, her voice, one that he should have heard and hadn't, that had been missing where it should have been present, that had been laughing in his head for days…
…the last voice he'd heard, the last laugh he'd heard, burning into his brain in those final few seconds when he'd realized that nowhere, nowhere, could ever be truly safe from despair…
Not even Hope's Peak Academy.
Especially not Hope's Peak Academy.
The school had nurtured despair, becoming a breeding ground for the very thing it should have most strongly opposed. It had been shaken, twisted, rocked to its very foundations…
The school rocked on its foundations, tilting back and forth until even caught in this whirling loop he could see that it wasn't just happening in his head. The school tipped one way then another, as if shaken by the whirlwind of students dancing around it. Their laughter tore at it, knocking it round and round, this way and that, until no building could stand up to the strain. The walls shook… shuddered… and one fell away from the other three with a crack, smashing through the line of silhouettes opposite Naegi.
The impact jolted up through his injured arm, along his twisting spine, and out through his throat in a strangled, gasping scream. But he couldn't continue, didn't have breath, because even with half of the students crushed the line never stopped its maddened whirl. It dragged him on, over the crushed silhouettes, through the pools of blood bursting from their shattered forms, onto the broken remnants of the wall. His throat seized and spasmed, trying to find enough air to fill his lungs just one more time — but a second wall crashed through another segment of the line before he could.
Broken figures lay on the ground, not bodies but the idea of bodies, a reminder of what human flesh would look like torn asunder, drenched in blood, scattered carelessly across the ground. He could see them, people he knew, friends that he knew, he could see them in the unidentifiable pieces that remained, his mind filling in blanks that should have been meaningless.
A roar of wind, a thunderclap at his side, and the third wall crashed to the ground, inches away, smashing through the figure that had been unmistakably Kirigiri. His right arm stretched as he was whirled away, cuff stretching out from his wrist — stretched and twisted —
Black exploded across his eyes as something tore inside his arm. The cuff broke away from the rubble, but his arm flopped uselessly at his side as he spun. It hurt, both of his arms hurt, pain screaming through his veins until his whole body throbbed with it. He wanted it to stop, wanted it to stop —
And in the midst of it all, in the blackest depths of pain, in the ruins of the school, memories of the dead surrounding him… he heard her laughing. The voiced he knew but hadn't heard, the girl he'd never seen but who had been present for every moment of the game, the one person at the root of every nightmare he had.
He knew her.
Of course he knew her.
The darkness fell away from his eyes, and he didn't know if it was a real vision or a hallucinated memory or some twisted combination of the two… but as the final wall plummeted directly towards him, he saw the face of the figure across the circle, bright and smiling and crueler than anyone could imagine.
Junko Enoshima.
