I'm writing this on the 19th, and I just taught my sister how to drive today! Well, of course, "teaching" being something of a misnomer, since she took the permit test and the lessons before that, and so on, but I was with her when she went behind the wheel for the first time and figured out how to turn, accelerate, and brake! We did it in the parking lot of my old elementary school, same as I did when I learned to drive, and she even drove home after, same as me. And we didn't crash, not once! I'm so proud!

I mentioned this earlier, WriterGreenReads, but I'll be doing arc-ly updates now for this fic. So once I finish each "monster of the week" mini-arc, I'll update however many chapters that covers in a daily sequence. It'll help you guys keep track of where I am in the story better, I think.

A warning now as ever: unlike German, which I kinda sorta almost speak due to four years in high school, I've not the faintest clue how to speak Italian, and am relying entirely on the inscrutable mercy of Google Translate. Any Italian-speaking readers, feel free to correct my undoubtedly many mistakes.

March 22nd, 2022

Arya's POV:

I'd wondered why warehouses were so often the site of various action scenes, but a quick mental revision once we'd gotten to Italy and some gossip I'd picked up from the AISE riding with us in the trucks told me why for a very simple reason: it was easy to acquire squatting rights to a warehouse. All you had to do was rent it for a bit, then make some noise moving things in and out, and nobody'd pay a lick of attention to what went on inside until your rent period was up. Keep renewing your rent in perpetuity, and you had a pretty slick setup, provided nobody stuck their nose where it didn't belong.

Still, it wasn't your typical place to cram a gang's home base into, either, and I gathered that we were expected and this was where they were falling back to. That made sense too, I guessed. The gang would have to be idiots to have rented this place under their real name, so even if got shot all to hell during our ensuing clash, all they had to do was vanish and the cleanup wouldn't matter. They could dump the site and be gone without even a lick of evidence to hold the survivors, whereas their lawyers would have some pretty explaining to do if the same shootout happened in, say, whatever totally legitimate business practice Cosa Nostra was running to launder his money.

Presumably they'd had time to fortify the place, too, and I found my eyes sliding jealously to the bulletproof vests all the AISE guys had on more than once. Allegedly, we EAT kids didn't need 'em, and sure, the whole "swing your sword in a bunch of weird loops to deflect bullets" was probably possible in this universe, but I certainly didn't know how to do it. As an EAT student, I was, apparently, supposed to be one of the first in the firing line, and I certainly didn't fancy my non-magic chances of guarding against a hail of bullets.

Then again, firing line implied the guns would be aimed at me, and depending on how fast I ran and how suddenly we bust in, that might be an option we could circumvent. They were almost certainly expecting us, sure, but the where and when and how would be up in the air until we actually arrived on scene.

My hand tightened around Rex's, and he sent me a reassuring look behind his glasses. I was taking no chances here: the second something bad happened, Rex would transform and be in my hands for retaliation.

Nothing did, though, and my pulse climbed steadily as we swung onto the street the warehouse complex was on and people began unbuckling their seatbelts and shifting their feet on the rumbling metal van, getting ready to leap outside the van and run for the building the second their feet touched the ground. I was right on the edge of the bench, too, facing off against the captain for our squad with the both of us sitting right next to the back doors to the truck.

A rat-tat-tat of bullets exploded almost directly behind me, making me damn near jump out of my skin as I half-turned around and Rex instinctively transformed. I gulped as I saw a trail of divots rake its way from above my shoulder on the doors themselves to across the side of the truck behind me, accompanied by that thunderous noise. Evidently, someone had decided to greet us with a machine gun.

The truck suddenly screeched to a halt, and I barely had time to wonder if that was a planned stop or a tire being burst before the captain hit the side of the undamaged door with his fist, slamming it open.

"Tutti fuori!" he yelled, suiting deeds to words and leaping out of the truck as he brought up his gun, and I hauled Rex's point up from the ground and banged the other door open with my shoulder as I tumbled out of the van, managing to land on both feet as well. My whole body tightened in anticipation of being hit with a slug as I ran past the shielding doors, but the gangster at the doors with a rather stereotypical Tommy gun was aiming it at the captain and the other AISE members bundling out of the van behind me, already moving to exchange fire. Given as the guy was at least twenty feet from me and armed with a gun that could definitely shoot bullets faster than I could run, I did the only reasonable thing I could.

I threw the four foot buster-sword with all my strength, and ran to follow it immediately after.

Rex squeaked but didn't transform back as he whirled in three surprisingly lazy circles, before his heavy blade miraculously hit the gangster point-first, in about the ribs, and even more miraculously, slammed the man backwards against the warehouse door. Whether that was enough to kill him or not was irrelevant, since I slammed into them both a minute after. The gangster had been too occupied with exchanging shots with the armed mob and then Rex crashing into him like a thunderbolt to notice me dashing towards him –which was entirely fair, and also the only reason I'd dared to do it– and now that I was within arm's reach, I could use my elbow to keep the spasming mook from turning his gun on me as I used the momentum from my run and my grip on Rex's hilt to drive the blade even deeper into the man and the wall behind him. I felt a sickening pop as the sword in my hands slid between the gangster's vertebra, and he went limp.

His body went dark, folded in on itself, and burst into the hovering red sphere of a Kishin Egg.

It was over in seconds.

It was all over so fast –too fast.

I'd just killed a guy in less time that it took to microwave some meals.

Silence fell on our side of the complex as I pulled Rex out of the wall, though gunfire in other areas told me that we weren't the only one to be challenged at the gate, as it were.

"Molto bene." the captain said as I stood there, panting, coming up to give me a clap on the shoulder. "Questo è esattamente ciò di cui abbiamo bisogno."

"Uh, yeah." I said distractedly. "Grazie. Stavo solo facendo del mio meglio."

"You are new." he replied wisely in English. I gave a grunt of assent, watching as the others quickly moved to plaster themselves against the wall of the warehouse itself, some talking rapidly into radios and the others watching the few doors and windows warily, like cats at a mouse hole. They'd obviously done this sort of break-and-entry before.

"Arya? Shouldn't we grab the soul before we go in?" Rex asked, apparently having recovered from me throwing him like a mega-oversized knife.

"Oh, uh, right." I said, and awkwardly held him near the wall where the soul still floated, getting a sort of…sense, that that was what he wanted. Rex's blade shimmered, glowing a soft blue, and one incongruous arm reached out, still wearing a piano jacket and white undershirt, and grabbed the soul, before schlooping back into the blade as the glow faded and showed ordinary steel.

The captain looked at me, and I gave a sheepish shrug. You signed up for disturbing and physically-impossible bodily contortions as a matter of course with the DWMA.

***Time Skip***

The fact that there were a number of small shipping containers piled around the warehouse we'd broken into –probably there specifically to give cover for the gunfight going on– had reminded me, somewhat unpleasantly, of the ship Campania from my days in Black Butler, whose cargo hold I had been trapped in when a horde of zombies had overrun the ship.

Well, okay, they were called Bizarre Dolls, and they didn't infect people with their bite, but they had every other hallmark of zombies –they were mobile rotting corpses, they groaned and moaned, they tried to rip people open with their teeth, and you could only kill them by destroying the head. If it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it was a duck.

Still, the very unpleasantness of that memory had given me an excellent idea, and while the rest of the mixed AISE and graduated DWMA meister squad poured through the maze of stacked metal boxes, guns blazing, I set my foot on the hinge, then the handle, and then the next hinge of one of the shipping containers, pushing myself up as I rapidly climbed the front door and tossed Rex onto the roof. Leaping after him a second later, I picked him back up and starting dashing across the top of the stacked containers, my feet banging on the hollow metal. Now I had a birds-eye view of the fight going on below, and I fully intended to make use of it.

Rex wasn't suited for being swung around in those small corridors between the containers, so when I spotted a trio of gangsters hurling themselves down one of the corridors below, I tightened my grip on his hilt and before I could think any better, jumped down, swinging Rex down overhand above my head. The guy closest to us lost his head with barely a thud vibrating down the blade, and the second one reeled back as Rex's tip scraped across his chest, slicing open a stream of blood. Thankfully, he knocked into the third guy, which gave me time to land and swing Rex again, depriving the second guy of his head as the third shoved his collapsing body to the side and aimed a gun at me.

Shit!

I reacted instinctively, yanking Rex back in front of me and flattening his blade as I placed my palm against the back. I heard the pistol fire and Rex yelp as a bullet clanged off of him, making his heavy blade jerk back a little, but even as I'd shielded myself, I'd realized that I couldn't risk staying still, and as soon as I felt that impact I lunged forward, slicing Rex out towards our attacker. I smacked his tip against the bottom of the mook's gun hand, flinging it up towards the ceiling, and followed it up with a quick spin and slash that tore out his throat in a shower of blood.

Like the other two before him, the dying gangster's body blackened and bulged like a writhing pillar of smoke, before it burst and revealed the hovering red soul. Two others floated around us, and I caught a sort of…twitch from Rex, a sense that he had the urge to transform and grab them. I wasn't having that, though, not with thudding bodies and gunfire all around us, and held him out to each soul individually as Rex sprouted an arm and dragged them into his blade, where he presumably swallowed them whole in typical Weapon fashion.

I then turned back to a different wall of crates and started climbing, letting my heart rate slow and the tension that coated me like a second skin ease, relaxing under the fact that there was no longer anybody to directly shoot at me. I had a few seconds to catch my breath as I struggled back up over the top of the crates, and took several deep inhales to settle myself further. The rattle and pop of gunfire was all around me, filling the air with the scent of hot metal and blood, along with the colder and older scents of dust and dry concrete. People were shouting in Italian, mostly curses and orders or cries of defiance, and I rolled my shoulders a little, shifting my grip on Rex's hilt.

Part of me wanted to move slow and careful, since my footsteps tapped so loudly on the probably-empty metal containers, but with this many bullets flying about, that just made me a better stationary target. Reminding myself of the whole stormtrooper rule of the more mooks there were, the worse their accuracy became, I burst into motion again, running atop the maze of cargo containers and leaping from wall to wall as I searched for my next target. The people I was with were well-trained: they were moving quickly and efficiently, locking down each section one at a time as they moved inwards towards the center of the complex. Already, most of the gunfire was coming from the east side of the building, the opposite of where we had entered.

Clanging and banging, I ran in that direction, trying with every other step to unclench my muscles and stop worrying about getting shot. It got easier the more I ran and the more I didn't receive a bullet to the chest for my hubris, but still. It took a special kind of guts to run headlong towards the sound of machine guns without wearing a bulletproof vest and not flinch, and I definitely didn't have those kind of guts. Not yet, anyway. Give me a few more months of training with Rex, and I'd be a lot easier in charging at bad guys with weapons leveled towards me.

Speaking of which, we were working together fairly well. He was heavy in my hands, but it was a good kind of heavy, a solid sort of heavy that promised momentum and damage the more that I swung him. I was able to swing him smoothly and with confidence, though that was just about where our skill level ended. It still didn't feel natural to fight together, as evidenced by my gut reaction to just plain throw him at the first guy we encountered, but that was something that could be fixed with enough practice. At the very least, we were learning to fight as a team. Speaking of which…

"Arya, down!"

There was a faint current of thought from Rex, a twinge of communication that made me look down rather than hit the deck, and I saw another of the gangsters rushing towards the source of the gunfire below. Given as he held yet another machine gun, and most of our forces were concentrated on the east side, his intent was obvious: a blindside attack from behind that would catch all or most of our people unprepared.

Well, not if we had anything to say about it.

I jumped down again, slashing rather than stabbed with Rex. While such a move was much more unwieldy in these cramped quarters –the corridors between the shipping containers were barely wider than Rex was– it also gave me a lot higher chance of success than a simple downwards stab. The guy could take a few steps in any direction and there I'd be, plunging down like an idiot as Rex sank into concrete and my huge, unwieldy weapon was left stuck for a solid ten seconds at least. Given as I'd be standing next to a very angry enemy with a machine gun for the duration of that time, that was a situation I was keen on avoiding.

Slashing worked better, because while it was easier to block, it was also a lot harder to dodge. And to be frank, the guy that could block a surprise four-foot buster sword coming down on him from a height with all of my weight and momentum behind it could probably deal handily with me no matter which moves I tried.

Thankfully, this mook was not that kind of guy, and while he was placed in such a way when Rex hit that I didn't decapitate him like the others, we did carve diagonally down through his shoulder and almost all the way to his ribs as my momentum carried both of us (well, three of us counting Rex) down to the ground. The gangster sprawled on the concrete floor as his machine gun flung itself out of his hands with a clatter, and I was left kneeling in a very sticky mess indeed for about two seconds before he dissolved and I bumped down to the floor, a red soul floating in front of my chest.

My jeans were filthy with blood and grime, but Rex snatched the soul out of the air without asking, and I slowly, cautiously got to my feet as my breathing slowed. This was…surprisingly easy. Not in the sense that it was easy for me to kill these guys –my stomach was roiling in a way that told me rebellion may be forthcoming if I didn't start behaving a lot more nicely– but in the sense that I'd just taken out…five…yeah, five gangsters that the Italian FBI had been worried about with one strike each. I hadn't even needed to exchange blows with any of them.

That was concerning for reasons I couldn't put my finger on. Was this all a setup? No…if it was, it was a setup that involved real, live, Kishin Eggs. These guys had corrupted souls, no bones about it. It couldn't be a fake-out. Were they just easy to kill because they were mooks and I'd caught them entirely by surprise almost every time?

That was one of the trickiest bits of the whole situation I found myself in, I thought grumpily as I began to climb the stacks again. I had a respectable understanding of anime tropes and how they intersected with one another, but how they intersected with me, and my native reality, was a lot trickier to tell. I knew I was affected to a certain extent, but how far and how much was a nebulous sort of question mark that I wasn't even sure how to test, never mind how far. I was pretty sure I needed to find out soon, though, since it would probably be either a key strength or weakness in the fights ahead. Or both.

Too much stuff to learn and do, too little time. I thought with a short sigh. The gunfire was dying down, and as I bounded from one line of crates to another, I saw our squad continuously pressing inwards, towards the center of the complex. This warehouse was almost entirely cleared, with only a few gangsters remaining –most of whom were gunned down just as soon as I spotted them by the other DWMA agents and police forces.

"Libero!" I heard from the back of the warehouse, where we'd busted in. Several more cries of the same word lifted up from the corners, and I looked around quickly, dashing towards where I thought the captain of this squad would be.

"Libero!"

"Libero!"

"Libero!"

"Uh, what exactly do we do now?" I asked as I dropped down to where the captain and half a dozen other AISE and meisters were gathered around the east wall of the warehouse we'd infiltrated, by the doors that led deeper into the complex. The captain glanced at me, but it was a fellow DWMA agent that answered.

"This warehouse is clear, so we move on." she said, twirling a stiletto knife around her fingers and glaring at the door. "To the next, and the next, and the next, until all our forces converge in the middle and this rat is slain."

"Mmm." That made sense, and without any further conversation I lifted Rex, preparing to move with the others.

Unfortunately, it turned out that that guy circling around to try and flank our forces was my last kill of the night: as the gang got pressed in closer and closer by the circling AISE and DWMA forces, those of us with guns had a tendency to pick them off from a distance, and plenty of the adult, graduated meisters seemed to have a bone to pick with this Cosa Nostra guy and his gang, since they were usually the first in after the gunfire started up, using shadows and the very same crate-running technique I had pulled out to ambush, advance, and otherwise slaughter the overwhelmed mooks.

A part of me was disappointed at that, just a little, but I contented myself with the reminder that these people probably had a lot of grudges against this gang, since they were locals and I was not, and who was I to get in the way of a good revenge arc. It was also a lot less stressful for me, unarmored and inexperienced as I was, to be at the back and not the front, where all the bullets were flying.

My squad wasn't with the guys that apparently tracked down Cosa Nostra himself and killed him, but the news certainly rippled down the line as the gangsters we were fighting began to panic. Even then, I was still at the back as the local meisters and the AISE guys surged forward, invigorated by the idea of crushing the gang once and for all. Within a few frantic, bloody minutes, it was all over. A few of our guys collapsed against the wall or the floor, bleeding and broken, but there were plenty of red souls and discarded weapons strung everywhere about, and I heard the whistles begin as commanders signaled up and down the line that their squads, too, had finished clearing up.

I opened my hand, letting Rex transform, and he landed beside me and looked around.

"We won?"

"We won." I answered. To my surprise, Rex visibly hesitated for a second, and then put his arm around my shoulders.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

I sucked in a deep breath, looking around, at the bodies slumped everywhere, the brisk movements of the AISE men and the meisters, the orders shouted up and down and through the warehouse. I looked at my jeans, filthy with blood and dirt and probably a bit of ichor, and the blood droplets spattered over my arms and shirt.

"Dunno." I said at last. "Bad. Good. I want a shower."

***Time Skip***

As it turned out, I was not the only one to want such a thing, and when we were all packed into the trucks to take us back, we weren't taken back to the airport, but instead to what I guessed was either a spa center or a gym, since it had locker rooms and a longue and cleaners who seemed only slightly resigned to a night's work of cleaning blood out of a variety of clothes after our coordinator paid them. I went into the women's section with Tessa and a few of the other girls who'd managed to get stuff on them, and scrubbed quickly, wanting to minimize my time exposed. It wasn't even because I had more than a few scars that I was keen on not being asked about, it was the whole anime fanservice thing. Such tropes dictated that someone see me almost-naked at least once, and that was a trope I would be particularly glad to dodge. Or kick in the face. Or both!

Soaped and scrubbed and smelling faintly of an unfamiliar floral scent, I wound a towel firmly around myself and went looking for my clothes. One of the downsides of being done early was that the industrial washing machines we'd commandeered weren't done yet, and since I was now dry enough to wear it, I went back to grab one of the fluffy bathrobes hanging outside the locker rooms, folding the halves as far as they would go over my chest and knotting the middle strip firmly.

Turns out, some of the washing ladies knew poker, and we spent an entertaining ten minutes playing with soap pods for chips as more of the other girls slowly percolated into the washroom. Eventually, all our clothes were clean and dry, and I went into a bathroom, locked it behind me, and changed into the serious, businesslike garments with relief.

Some of the others were already waiting in the lobby when we came back, including Rex, and I plopped down beside him with a semi-contented sigh as he looked up from his magazine.

"So," I began. "Five souls, right?"

"Mm-hmm." Rex nodded, sitting up a little in his padded leather chair.

"Feel any…better?" I asked hesitantly. "Different? I mean, you really noticed it with the first soul."

"Its…hard to explain." Rex said, listlessly playing with the pages of the table magazine that he'd been reading when I came in. "I feel…more. Just a little bit. But not that much more, you know? I mean, th-that makes sense, I've only got six souls so far, but each one makes me feel a teeny tiny bit…more. I just wasn't ready for that feeling, the first time."

"Mm." I nodded, a thoughtful twist to my mouth. It made sense: Death Scythes were Weapons who had unlocked their fullest potential and power, and it was only logical that that was a progressional and not an instantaneous thing. I mean, Soul had definitely felt a tremendous surge of power welling up when he'd mistakenly eaten Blair's soul, so clearly there was an exponential jump when you finally did manage to hit Death Scythe, but it seemed like the whole "the more souls you eat, the more powerful you get" thing didn't just apply to illicit Kishin Eggs. Weapons, even when they were being fed properly, apparently went along the same lines.

"Alright, listen up!"

We both straightened as the voice of our coordinator rang out, realizing that everyone else had finally trickled in. He was standing in front of the circle of comfy padded chairs and couches around the magazine-strewn coffee table, his ubiquitous cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth and a scowl firmly nailed onto his place.

"You did your job on the mission, well and good, but don't get cocky yet." he continued. "Cosa Nostra and most of his boys are dead, but until AISE finishes raking over the warehouse and confirm that every single member of that gang is dead and gone, we're still on duty, which means you lot are still on your extracurricular."

"So we're not going home yet?" someone asked. Our coordinator drew out his cigarette and tapped some ash onto the ground.

"Not yet, and I'll thank you not to interrupt me again."

There was a nervous pause, before our coordinator stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and continued.

"We'll be staying in the city for another one, two nights. This's largely a formality, but we don't want a breach of practice to end with a knife through somebody's ribs, so. The extra forces from the DWMA will stick around until you're given the all-clear to head back to Nevada. They'll be calling us with your hotel details soon, so until then, you stay right here in this lobby. Got me?"

We all agreed yes, absolutely, we totally got him, and I nudged Rex as everyone began to disperse.

"So, looks like we'll probably have at least one free night." I told him. "Didn't you want to go to the opera?"

10.04 AM, USA Central Time

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