A dense fog lay heavy on the side of the hill that Kuruse was climbing.

She couldn't remember how she had gotten there, or why she felt such a strong urge to reach the top. She only could feel something there, pulling her along. As she walked, she would glance side to side at the world around her and wonder how such a world could possibly exist.

A world of weapons.

No matter where she looked she saw weapons. Weapons of every size, shape, and fashion imaginable. Some that she couldn't even get her head around. Weapons both mundane and otherworldly lay side by side in reddened soil. Weapons, that seemed to whisper around her as she walked past. But, no matter how carefully she listened, she couldn't catch their words.

In this world, the blades seemed to be alive, possessing an awareness that filled the air. It was almost unnerving, the sense that things that would often be classified as mere objects were staring at her. She did her best to ignore them, focusing on the path ahead of her, trying to find that which she felt like she was looking for.

Then, she saw it, a silhouette standing on the top of the hill in the distance, hardly visible through the haze. Kuruse quickened her pace, trying to reach the top of the hill before the figure could slip through her fingers.

As she got closer, he became easier to see. A tall man, more than six feet tall with tanned skin, with broad shoulders and short red hair with large patches of silver. He had his back turned to her as she approached him, so she couldn't see his face, but even so, she could tell he was a man in his prime.

She stopped a few feet away from him, not really sure what to do or say now that she had reached him. He just stood there, looking out into space.

But, before she could decide on what she should say, the man spoke. "You should choose another." The man said, his voice rigid, but sympathetic. His body didn't seem to move even an inch as he spoke. As if he was made of the same steel as all the weapons that surrounded them were.

"Who... who are you?" Kuruse asked, not understanding his words. Her hand crossed over her chest, trying to steady her rapidly beating heart. "You're my true Ashikabi, aren't you?"

"Are you so willing to follow this feeling blindly? You've had your first taste of hope. I'd suggest you give it up before you becoming intoxicated by it. Trust me when I say that no matter how sweet it tastes, it is a deadly poison." The man was trying to warn Kuruse against following her feelings, but she couldn't help it. It was different than before, when she had to struggle to maintain her sense of self under Koya's influence. It felt so warm, so comforting, like it fit her perfectly. "Everyone around me always suffers. You should turn back before you lose everything too."

Kuruse bit her lip. "Please, don't push me away." She said, feeling tears coming to her eyes. "I can't lose everything, because I don't have anything that I can lose. This feeling is all I have."

The man paused for a moment before answering. "That is where you are wrong." He said as he slowly turned around. Kuruse blinked as her vision seemed to blur around the man, his height disappearing as his hair grew out, white and red mixing together into a soft pink color. "There is always something more that you can lose." Kuro said as the small Sekirei looked up at Kuruse with her odd sad eyes.


Kuruse jolted awake at the sound of an police siren shrieking through the street next to the alley she had slept in the night before. She looked around herself for a moment before remembering where she was, along with why she was there.

Koya had always kept her and Yahan's MBI credit cards on hand, so she didn't have any money now. However, that was a small price to pay. It wasn't worth going back to that man's apartment to retrieve them. Not when she might see his disgusting face again. Even if free air smelled like a garbage dump in an alley, it was still an improvement.

Though, she would still need to think of something sooner or later. She knew from experience that hunger would start to become more and more of a problem. It had been only about a day since she last ate and she was already feeling the pains in her stomach.

She could return to the MBI, hope that they would help her get things back in order so that she could start again, but that held a risk to it. She didn't know how they would react to a winged Sekirei somehow becoming unwinged. They might try to keep her for tests, or say that she should have been eliminated from the Plan and terminate her. She couldn't risk it, not when she still had so many questions.

Her mind moved back to her dream, remembering the look that Kuro had given her. It made her whole body tingle. She wanted to see the girl again so badly.

She knew what was going on. She had been described the feeling back when she was first released by the MBI into Shin Tokyo. She was reacting. She knew it was true, but she didn't know how. Sekirei weren't supposed to react to one and other. They were only supposed to react to their human Ashikabi.

She didn't know how or why, and to be honest, she didn't care to think too deeply about it. Just like in the dream, she could feel the pull on her heart trying to lead her. So pushing herself up, she started to move, avoiding the roof tops in order to try to stay out of the way of other Sekirei. She didn't want to have any more roadblocks between her and her true Ashikabi.


Hayato Mikogami sat casually in his seat, waiting for the first class of the day to start, a book held in one hand as he propped up his head with the other.

He wasn't reading the book. He rarely read anything that didn't come in an electronic medium and didn't involve some level of interactivity. In other words, he didn't read if it wasn't part of a video game. The book only served to provide the illusion that he was reading, so as to keep his classmates from attempting to engage him in 'polite' conversation.

Hayato hated his school. It was a special private school for 'super geniuses' that all the rich people sent their heirs to, though in all honesty, since the place was practically pay to win, it was more like a social club. A social club with a bunch of people, that Mikogami had zero interest in interacting with.

Hayato shouldn't have even been there. Even though he was only fifteen years old, he had already achieved a business degree at a university in the United States. The only reason he was at this stupid school was because his parents forced him to go. Alfred always said that it was because they wanted him to make friends his own age, but Hayato knew better. They didn't care about his social life or him making friends, they only wanted their genius son to be at the school so that they could brag about it. His parents didn't care about him. He couldn't even remember the last time he last heard from his parents, let alone spent time with one of them. It had to be at least a month.

Whenever he was at school, he always did his best to ignore all of the chatter around him, as it was almost inevitably some kind of family business talk. Talk that he wanted no part of. He wasn't going to be like them, he wasn't going to be just some spoiled brat who inherited a family business, ensnared by his own position. That might have been his fate before, but the world had given him a chance and he planned on taking it. His Sekirei would liberate him from that hollow existence. He would be the one to win the Sekirei Plan and take part in the 'ascension'.

The day before might have been a bit of a stumble, he had been heavily disappointed in Yomi for losing the girl, but it couldn't be helped. Damn cheating scavengers not fighting one on one and attacking from the shadows. Didn't they care about the rules of the game at all? At least Yomi didn't break her promise to stay with him. Besides, as the Ashikabi who would win the Sekirei Plan, all the Sekirei would be his sooner or later.

Hayato looked up from his book as Professor Watanabe entered the room, making the Ashikabi stand up like all the others as the class president led in welcoming their sensei. All if it was just rules of conduct. Something that Hayato blindly followed in without any real sense of self in it. All it ever did was leave a bad taste in his mouth as he stroked the adult's ego. The teacher was just some third rate college professor who 'graced' their high school with his presence and because of it felt like he was hot shit.

"Alright class, settle down." Watanabe said, even though no one was even talking. "Now I know that summer break starts in just a few days, but I intend to use all the time we have together, so no slacking off."

Ah, Summer Break, forty days away from this cattle farm. Just five more days until he would finally be free from this pretense of being a student and able to focus his efforts more fully on the Sekirei Plan. Well, that and playing his video games.

"Speaking of which, while I know it is strange, so close to the end of our first semester, but we have a new student joining our class today." Watanabe said, hardly even trying to makes his disapproval that the school would do such a thing as let someone in so far into the semester without asking for 'his' approval. "You may come in now."

Hayato looked towards the open door and was only slightly surprised to see Kuro walking in through the door, wearing one of the white dresses that was the school uniform with a yellow bow in her hair and another around her waist. "So this is what you were up to yesterday, Mutsu." The boy Ashikabi sighed.

Mutsu was rather paranoid about his Ashikabi's safety at all times. It was hardly a secret that he had positioned nearly a dozen of Hayato's Sekirei around the school building, running security checks every single day that the boy went to school. It didn't seem to matter how many days went by without anything happening.

It all started because of a rumor that had been circulating on the Ashikabi forms a while back. A rumor that said that if you killed the Ashikabi, that it would terminate all of their Sekirei.

Of course, there was zero evidence to this effect. No one had ever killed an Ashikabi before and no one ever would. It was only a scare tactic used by some fool to try to turn people into paranoid nutters, like Mutsu. Still, even if the male Sekirei didn't believe the rumor, he was worried that someone would and that they would be deplorable enough people to actually try it, believing it was their only chance of beating a superior Ashikabi.

To this end, Mutsu had wished to put one of Hayato's Sekirei in the boy's classroom with him in the past, and would have if it won't for two major issues. The first of which was that almost all Sekirei lacked the common sense and knowledge to fit in at a school, especially one for the upper class like Hayato's. The second problem was that none of his Sekirei could pass as anything younger than seventeen, and even that was pushing disbelief.

Mutsu must have figured that while Kuro was clearly not fifteen yet, it was easier for people to accept that she had skipped ahead a few years than it was for them to accept that someone like Yomi was fifteen. And even if they realize she isn't some super genius child the semester would be over in just five more days. After that it wouldn't really matter for another forty days.

Kuro walked to the front of the class, her mode of walking a little rigid but not freezing up like some might. Some might think she was nervous, but Hayato suspected that it was because she was trying to walk in a more ladylike manner. A pattern that continued, up until she turned to face them and gave a curtsy and smile. "Hello, I'm Kagome Kurogame, please take good care of me." She said, a fairly standard greeting.

Just like before and every other time Kuro had done anything, all of it seemed a little off. It was like when you play a video game and the characters and the voices aren't quite synced so the reactions don't line up properly. It's hard to notice if you are already immersed in the game, but once you do notice it, you can't stop noticing it. Every time she does anything from smiling to tilting her head, it seems as if she is working off of a script rather than having it be natural. And whenever she gets too distracted to continue the act, her face usually shifted into the same sad, far off look that Akitsu had. Child was traumatized, but pretending she wasn't.

As grim as Hayato found the display, he couldn't help but grin inwardly at the name Mutsu must had chosen to be the girl's family name. Kagome, it's a name from an old Japanese folk song that refers to a 'lost child'. A name that's especially appropriate for the little Sekirei.

Some of the students asked a few questions about the girl's age and what her parents did for a living, and to her credit, Kuro answered, giving a good enough cover story about how she was the ten year old daughter of some MBI scientists who moved to the city to better work on their project. Luckily, Professor Watanabe wasn't willing to give up much of his valuable 'everyone look at me' time to allow for more in depth questioning, quickly telling Kuro to go and take a seat.


'I am really starting to hate the world.' Kuro thought as she found herself once again wearing a dress. While not as out there as the things the twins had bought her, it was still a dress, and she was kind of under the impression she wouldn't have to ware them anymore.

Not only that, she was going to have to change into bloomers, something that was supposed to have fallen out of use in schools because of its perverted nature, but that they apparently still had in this backwards private school. Not only that, she was going to have to change into them with all the girls locker room with all the other girls staring at her. Life was just too cruel. Couldn't Alaya give her a month to get used to being in a girl's body before dumping this shit on Shir...Kuro. Honestly, she would be happy to have one week.

The night before, Mutsu pulled her aside to inform her that she was going to be acting as Hayato's bodyguard while he was at school for the remainder of the semester. She was to stay with him at all times and keep her senses open. If she sensed any Sekirei who wasn't one of theirs, then she was to steer Hayato away from them and call for back up.

It was a simple job, and one that Kuro didn't have any problem with performing... accept for one little issue. She had no idea how to use the phone that Mutsu had given her. She struggled to even unlock the thing and once she did she was assaulted on all sides by little mini pictures on the screen. She fiddled with the thing for nearly an hour and still hadn't figured out who to even call, let alone find on this 'contacts' list that Mutsu had said was in there.

'Smart phone my ass.' Kuro grumbled to herself with a heavy sigh. Damn she was tired.

Sleeping inside of her new body still felt fundamentally wrong. Not only that, she had the hardest time getting that Sekirei from the day before out of her head. It's gotten to the point where she was in her dreams.

Kuro couldn't understand why. She thought it might have been because she was unconsciously comparing the girl to Saber, pulling up old memories. Not that they were all that similar. The two had the same eye and hair color, and they both wore blue ribbons in their hair, but that was pretty much were the similarities ended. Their overall facial structure was different, and Kuro wouldn't even compare their bodies since it felt like a betrayal to her old friend to do so. Even if she didn't seem overly busty compared to some of the Sekirei Kuro had seen, Kuruse was still a sold 'C' cup. And while Kuro didn't know her well enough to judge her personality, she didn't match up with the stoic King of Knights.

Even so, Kuro couldn't get the girl out of her head, and it made the little sleep she managed to get less than restful.

Kuro didn't bother paying attention to the class. It was a lesson on chemistry, and that was not anything new to her. The amount of understanding of chemistry it took to pull off even the most basic of Alchemy spells far exceeded what they taught at the high school level.

So rather than listen she started to pour out her prana into the surrounding area, mapping out the school with a loose structural analysis. It was an expensive trick as the cost of the spell increases by a power of three according to area, even if you don't do an in depth scan. She wouldn't have done it back when she was human, but with the reserves she had now as a Sekirei, she didn't need to worry so much.

Actually, being at the school was giving her plans.

With summer break just around the corner, the school would be empty for a good time. It was large, not close enough to any houses for her to worry about an attack on it hitting nearby people, and it had a fully stocked fridge with enough food to feed a hundred people. With all of it going to go to waste since the place would be closed until the start of the fall semester. Not to mention all of the other tools and materials in the various chemistry rooms and cleaning closets.

The place, or another school just like it, would be the perfect place to set up a home base for in case she needed to make a quick get away from the Hayato residence. She would just need to get closer to the security room so that she could figure out how to cut it off from the outside world and then she would have the run of the place for the next month. After which she should have another option lined up.

Kuro was so wrapped up in her thoughts on how to transform a second of the school into her own personal war bunker that she didn't even notice that the teacher was calling her. Though to be far, it wasn't by a form of address she was used to.

"Ms. Kagome. Ms. Kagome! Pay attention!" Kuro's eyes opened to see Watanabe glaring at her, arms crossed. "I see that our young genius believes herself to above paying attention in class. I don't know how your past schools have operated, but believe me when I say that our curriculum is much more difficult than your pervious school."

Kuro's mind drifted back to the classes she had taken during her brief stay at the Clock Tower. "Something makes me doubt that. Waver was a slave driver." She said out loud, not really thinking due to her exhausted and distracted state.

Some of the students, including Hayato, broke into a fit of chuckles as the teacher fumed. He moved over to his desk and pulled out a text book before turning to one of the pages he had marked. "I see, then you should have no trouble at all solving this." He said as he turned to the white board and started to jot down a table of chemicals at different masses. "Now then, solve for the equilibrium values of each molecule in this system."

Hayato frowned. "That's hardly a fair question. This class doesn't even get that far in an entire year." He said, challenging the teacher. Watanabe looked as though he was about to lash back at being challenged in his classroom when Kuro just got up and went to the front of the classroom.


Hayato tried to distract Watanabe away from his newest Sekirei before the idiotic man could abuse his position on the girl. However before anything could really come of it, Kuro got up and went to the front of the classroom and started to write on the white board.

Surprised didn't do it justice. He would have been surprised if she had known what an atom even was. Many of his Sekirei started off not understanding things like chopsticks, how to tie their shoes or why it was a bad thing to walk around in public naked. Yet here the smallest of them was, solving what was the equivalent of three semesters of college chemistry and doing logarithmic equations using the natural log in her head before jotting down the final answer.

"There, is that all correct, sensei?" She said, perhaps a little bit of smugness in her tone as she smiled and tilted her head in an innocent fashion. It hardly even registered to Hayato that her actions were still mechanical, as he pondered how she had been able to do what she just did.

Watanabe looked from his text book then back to the board and then to his text book again, his mouth moving, but no words coming out. He had no idea how to recover from being shown up. "I... that... good job... take your seat."


"How did you do it?" Hayato asked Kuro during lunch. Hayato had broken away from the students who were going to buy their food and went to the roof of the school with his bento, Kuro slipping away in order to follow him.

"Do what?" Kuro replied tilting her head. She knew exactly what he was talking about, but she tried to practice her act. Acting like Illya was still rather unnatural too her. It shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. Even when she was Shirou, people said she acted differently than other human beings. He was a saint, a psycho, or just plain defective. Though, that depended on who you asked.

"The chemistry problem." Hayato clarified after giving an exasperated sigh.

"Chemistry problem?" Kuro said with a frown before letting her eyebrows go up. "Oh, right. Well, the answer and all the work was written in the book he was holding. I just copied it out of there." She said with a shrug before turning back to her food. It was true that she did peak in, but that didn't mean she couldn't have done it anyways.

"Copied it out of the book? But how did you... you used your abilities to peek into the book." He said before laughing and shaking his head. "You little cheater."

"Did I do something wrong, Master?" She said.

"No, it's fine. I simply didn't realize you could use your power in such a way." Hayato said, sounding as though he actually approved. "It could be very useful. Does it have the same kind of range as when you are sensing other Sekirei?"

Kuro shook her head. "I can only get that kind of grasp on objects that are close to me. It works best if I am actually touching it. But through it I can read a book in just a few seconds. Not that I can remember much of that information for an extended period of time" She said before leaning back and looking straight up. "It's actually kind of useless."

"I wouldn't say it's useless. We will just need to plan out how we are going to use it." Hayato said with a frown. "Stop selling yourself short. It doesn't matter if you are not a strong fighter or if you are a Scrapped Sekirei, you are still mine. I won't have you defacing yourself." Kuro looked surprised at Hayato's words before she gave her first genuine smile and chuckle. "What are you laughing about now?"

"I don't know. I just felt... nostalgic for some reason." Kuro said looking back up at the clouds again. "What an unreasonable master I have." She said with a smile. However the warm feeling of nostalgia gave way to a feeling of humiliation when Hayato sighed and reached over to state patting her head.

"Well, as long as you are honestly smiling for a change." The Ashikabi said before turning back to his meal.

He had just gotten his head patted by a boy hardly more than half his age...

Kuro struggled to put down the through. She had to remember that she wasn't Emiya Shirou anymore. Holding onto those ideas would only make thing more difficult in the long run.

Still, was this how Illya felt whenever Shirou treated her like a little kid even though she was technically the older sibling?

Kuro took in a deep breath, trying to purge away the unwelcome thoughts. But she as she drew the air into her lungs she smelt something that made her hold her breath. "Oh no." She said, her eyes widening as she recognized the scent.

"Hm, is something the matter?" Hayato asked her, but Kuro didn't answer. She stood up and before the Ashikabi could do anything jumped up onto the fencing that surrounded the roof of the school. "What are you doing!?" Kuro reinforced her legs and jumped clear across the school yard an onto the street before breaking into a run towards the Sekirei she was sensing, hoping that he got to her before anyone noticed her.

If Hayato winged Kuruse, then she could kiss her secret goodbye.