Take this with a healthy pinch of salt, but I heard somewhere that there was an implication (I think in the visual novels?) that when Rena beat up those three boys at her school in Ibaraki, they had actually instigated the incident in some fashion, possibly by harassing her. That's the interpretation I'm taking for this prompt fill, anyways.

June 26th, 2022

Reina watched the slither of red drip its slow, honeylike way down the bat in her hand. Groans sounded on the floor around her, but she was caught, suspended in time like a fly in amber. Her mind shook with the strength of the revelations reeling through her. This…this was punishment. This was right.

The rules said that she shouldn't hurt other people. But what if they broke the rules first? What if they tried to hurt her?

Well then.

Well, Reina had heard about what happened to people who broke the rules. They were punished. They were hurt. So, if people who broke the rules were punished and hurt, then that meant that someone else had to do the hurting, right? Someone else had to be the hand that desperately grasped an old discarded bat from the corner of the shed and hit and hit and hit until these cruel, leering faces were knocked away from them. Someone else had to be the punisher.

Reina felt that she connected to her village's legends, in that moment. Not because the whimpering boys strewn about the concrete floor at her feet were trying to crawl away, not because her uniform was speckled and spattered with their blood, but because she understood how Oyashiro-sama was both a kind, forgiving god and also the purveyor of unhallowed massacres. Oyashiro-sama was fundamentally a kind god, a loving and forgiving god –just like Reina was ordinarily a kind girl, a happy and smiling young lady. But sometimes, people did bad things. Sometimes, people had to be punished.

Hatred smoldered in her gut, uncoiling from her soul like the stirring of an ancient dragon, as Reina began to shuffle almost zombie-like towards the shed door. Her mother had broken the rules. She had betrayed Reina and her father, left them alone and gone swanning off with some…enemy. She should be punished, but she was not. Instead, it was Reina being punished, Reina feeling the stirrings of paranoia and panic as something trod slow and patient at her heels. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. She shouldn't be the one who was punished.

Reina hated this school, raising her blue eyes towards the shining edifice of steel and glass and concrete as they blazed like the hottest fires. She hated this place as the epitome of everything that had been stolen from her, as everything that wasn't like it was back in Hinamizawa. Her old school hadn't been a box-shaped building with a smooth front like the scales of an enormous beast, it had been draggling and homely and personable and hers. Life was etched into every board and timber of the Hinamizawa branch school, and this place was cold, impersonal, far from her home. Reina hated it.

She hated it, and with a hysterical feeling she hadn't expected even from herself rising like a scream in her chest, Reina took several steps closer to the wall and abruptly swung the bat towards her nearest reflection, shattering the expansive window. It burst with a satisfying smash, and a thrill purred its way down Reina's tingling nerves. The gratification was visceral and immediate, and she tightened her grip on the bat with both hands, swinging it again.

Step by step, pane by pane, room by room, Reina walked, the screams and scampering of all her fellow classmates buzzing like flies around her ears. This girl, who refused to share her scented pencils and sneered at Reina's rural accent, was sent scrambling from her classroom with an ashen face. So was the girl who had laughed when Reina had told the teacher why she'd been down recently, and the boy who flicked paper balls at her. Reina watched them go with a stony expression, even as her heart thumped like a piston in her chest. Reina realized, now, that she was a silly girl. They were such silly people. So pathetic.

Reina raised the bat one more time, and smashed another window. Glass crunched under her feet as she continued her implacable way forward, because Reina had not removed her shoes when she came back inside. Why should she? She didn't respect this place. This was a prison, a spiffy and stuffy box that Reina had been caught in by her parents' machinations, a slow mundane winding of red tape about her limbs that chained her here, to this life that she hated. She wanted to destroy it. She wanted to smash it.

With an angry cry, Reina slammed the blood-smeared bat against another pane of glass, making it explode onto the ground. No one was rushing past her now, no screams in the winding hallways, only watchful silence. Everyone was watching, too tense to leave but too cowardly to approach, as Reina methodically smashed each and every window she could reach. She hated them. She hated this school, and she hated them. She wanted to punish them, to distract herself from the knowledge and the memory that it was her languishing under Oyashiro-sama's watchful eye, that she was the one who would soon be hurt.

Reina didn't care. Adrenalin was humming like sugar on her tongue, exhilaration firing her every nerve as she smashed and smashed and destroyed, breaking her chains one by one. They wouldn't keep her here, now. She considered finding some gasoline or other propellants, burning this dreadful place to the ground, but she couldn't. Reina wouldn't be distracted from her self-imposed task, from the sheer joy of doing what no one else in this entire grey, foreboding school would dare to do. She felt like she had leaped from a cliff with her arms spread wide, embracing the abyss as she fell and fell and fell, wind tangling with loving fingers through her hair.

Reina would destroy this place, this hated prison that held her.

And then she would find something else to destroy, before Oyashiro-sama took on his duty and destroyed her.

8.45 AM, USA Central Time

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