How

Sawatari fell to the floor, backing up as far as he could into the wall. Sayaka was dead in front of him, and the rest of his friends were also dead, scattered about the mansion. But he couldn't focus on that. He was staring in horror at Yugo - somehow alive and without any slashes or bruises on his neck - and Rin, his mind reeling. How could they do this? Why did they do this? Did he really only have a few more minutes to live before they decided to kill him?

He thought about getting up and running, running as fast as he could. But he knew Yugo was faster than him - and where would he run? The blizzard was still as horrendous as ever. Even if he found his way outside, he would probably end up freezing to death before he reached safety.

Instead, his body was paralysed. He couldn't move even if he wanted to. He was the last one alive. Even if they killed him, he had to know why they did this.

"Come on, Shingo!" Yugo chuckled, and Sawatari's blood ran cold "At least look a little more excited to see me!"

He spun the knife between his fingers again, Sayaka's blood splattering onto Sawatari's cheeks. He gritted his teeth, but not in anger. He didn't even know which emotion to feel. Sadness? Agony? Fear? Maybe all of them.

Tears rolled down from Sawatari's eyes, salty residue mixing in with blood. He couldn't bee bothered to wipe them away; his arms were numb anyway.

He glanced at Rin, now smirking as Yugo continued to chuckle. Sawatari had so many things he wanted to say - possibly yell if anything - but he could only manage to barely squeak out the first words that came to his mind.

"H-How … How did…how are you still alive…Yugo?"

"Oh, skipping ahead, are we?" he grinned "No no no. We can't be having that. I'm illiterate and even I know all adventures must start at the beginning, not halfway through."

Yugo's smirk appeared to widen and Sawatari wondered how that was even possible. Yugo looked like a demented clown with that freaky smile. He was psychotic, he had to be.

"W-Why…" Sawatari barely managed to speak "Why did…you do…this…?"

"Would you really like to know? Why don't I tell you…" He twirled the knife between his fingers once more before training his eyes back onto Sawatari.

"But first, let's start with how we pulled all of this off. Killing off that many people took a lot more planning than we thought. We sure had to improvise some. Didn't we, Rin?" he looked over to his girlfriend, who nodded and leaned against the wall, clearly willing to let Yugo take the reins for this part.

"Okay, so Ruri was our first victim, right?" Yugo asked Rin like he seriously had no clue.

Sawatari furrowed his eyebrows. He knew that Yugo knew the exact order in which they killed his friends and Sawatari despised how much he was enjoying explaining how he did it.

"I took care of her" Yugo announced, shrugging his shoulders "We were all heading back to our rooms, but she had lingered in her room for a while. While walking with Serena and Sayaka, she said she had to change jacket or something. I overheard and, well, may as well set the ball rolling at the first opportunity. So when you said you were going to the bathroom, I told you I would catch up with you later. I walked into her room and she told me she was planning to get Reira and Reiji. But before she had a chance to leave, I slashed her in the back with a knife I'd picked up at dinner. Oh, the kill was thrilling!"

He clenched his free fist in front of him, looking overly excited. Sawatari was extremely disgusted. He could still picture Yugo walking away down the corridor earlier that night, telling him he would go ahead, Sawatari could catch up later – the party couldn't start without him after all, he was the Birthday Boy! If only he'd had some excuse to stop him – maybe he could've saved Ruri's life.

"But I wasn't expecting Yuya to walk by and witness the whole thing" Yugo bit the inside of his mouth, now looking awkward "I had to threaten him with the lives of the rest of you if he so much as thought of telling anybody. Which is why he didn't speak once we came back downstairs. I had to tell Rin what happened." He looked over his shoulder at his girlfriend. "Sorry about that by the way."

Rin shrugged indifferently.

"So Yuya knew the whole time that the two of you were the killers!" Sawatari half-gasped "Then why didn't you just kill him then?!"

"Because we were the only ones who still hadn't returned to the main room besides Reiji, who everyone knew was with Reira the whole time" Yugo frowned at him as if Sawatari was so stupid Yugo couldn't comprehend it "If you guys would have discovered both Ruri and Yuya's bodies, with me being the last one to enter the room, I would have been instantly accused."

Sawatari suddenly remembered the chaos that followed the discovering of Ruri's body and his frantic attempts to call the police, then escape via his duel disk. "Wait, what about the police? And my parents? Why couldn't I get a hold of anyone? The phones rang, so it's not like the connection was cut off or busy. That meant that no one was answering!"

"Oh, that?" Rin waved her hand "I redirected the phone numbers of the police station and your parents to my own phone, which is in my bag in my room on silent."

"What?" Sawatari stared at her "H-How?"

"Hey, I managed to build two Duel Runners out of scrap with only this lug for help. Redirecting a phone number? Absolute piece of cake in comparison" Rin smirked at her accomplishment.

"Does that mean you set up the jammer to stop us from escaping too?" Sawatari lowered his head as he continued silently crying. The tears just wouldn't stop every time he looked at Sayaka's horror-struck face.

Rin clapped with a grin and Sawatari officially classified her as crazy as Yugo. "Very good questions, Sawatari! It's just too bad you weren't able to play detective a little sooner. Maybe could have saved some lives."

Sawatari tried to not let that get to him. He wasn't as smart as a lot of people he knew like Reiji or Yuto, and this revelation may have blown their minds as much as it did his.

"Okay, let's see, who's next?" Yugo put a finger to his forehead in a thoughtful pose "Ah! Reiji! Yes, we figured he had to go right at the start. He would've figured us out before we even got to murder Number Three."

"I'm the one that took care him" Rin took over for him "We'd split up. I supposed to take care of Reira, Yugo Reiji. Simultaneously get rid of them both. Yugo shook off his tail of Yuto, and Sayaka fell asleep, so I could escape. But I wasn't expecting Reiji to still be in there. We thought he would have left by then. He was suspicious immediately. So he became my target instead. A quick slash to the back. And with me leaving Reira alive, he would have been the obvious suspect."

"But Reira wouldn't have been suspected of killing Ruri" Sawatari pointed out.

"We knew at some point the thought of two killers would have been brought up eventually" Rin shrugged "We had to continue trading off and trying to focus the blame on others before Yugo and I could have been thought up as suspects. Which is why when Sayaka started running around on her own looking for Ruri, and Yuto wanted to check on Reiji and Reira, they could have easily been seen as suspects as well."

Sawatari couldn't believe they could have let Reira, Sayaka and Yuto of all people become suspects. But he also was still trying to wrap his head around the thought of Yugo and Rin killing everyone off. He didn't think any of his friends were capable of something like this.

"Then Gongenzaka was next" Yugo smiled "Oh, he was the most fun. After Rin told me what happened, instead of using the bathroom like I told Yuto I was doing, I made my way back to the main room and found Yuya and Gongenzaka were the only ones left. I rushed in and killed Gongenzaka first. Yuya begged me not to kill him. He tried to stop Gongenzaka from bleeding out, but he was already a goner, I got to him too many times. Yuya couldn't believe it. I had lied to him, after all."

Yugo started laughed and Sawatari felt his stomach churn.

"But what about Yuya?" He asked. He still couldn't understand how Yuya could have lasted as long as he did after witnessing two murders, one of his best friend.

"Easy" Yugo shrugged "I killed him."

Sawatari's eyes bugged out. How was that possible? Until about a minute ago, Yuya was alive! He'd run down the ground floor corridor! Yugo couldn't have killed him before then!

"I know exactly what you're thinking, Sawatari" Yugo jabbed into his thoughts "And yes, I did kill Yuya after murdering Gongenzaka. I had to; he had seen too much for him to keep it a secret anymore, he would have blabbed at some point or other. I strangled him, so he left no blood; he was too terrified to fight back. But I thought up this brilliant plan to keep Yuya 'alive' and get any possible thoughts of me being a suspect out of people's heads. I faked my death and posed as Yuya."

Sawatari couldn't believe how nobody had noticed. So after discovering that Gongenzaka was dead, any time they saw Yuya…it was Yugo the whole time?!

But how? Sure they had the same facial structure – when Sawatari had first truly come face to face with Yugo after their duel in Synchro, he'd remarked upon that. But there were apparent differences as well. Yuya's red eyes sucked you in and then spun you back out again every time you looked into them whilst Yugo's baby-blue ones belonged on a puppy. Or at least, they had before. They looked more like they belonged on Hannibal Lecter or Keyser Söze now.

"Yeah, I know. How could he have possible pulled it off?" Yugo crouched down and leant forward, so his face was just inches from Sawatari's "You wanna see?"

Sawatari didn't want to just as much as he did want to. But his feelings on the matter were regardless, since he was sure Yugo was going to show him anyway.

Yugo removed something from his back pocket. It appeared to be a very thin plastic tub of some kind, it's tiny volume filled with liquid. Sawatari finally got a break from the slasher grin as Yugo ducked his head, his hair hiding his eyes, and he cracked open the tub, a few drops of liquid splashing onto the blood-stained carpet of Sawatari's home. He appeared to pick something very thin up from the tub with his finger and…guide it towards his face?

Yugo groaned as if in pain and Sawatari honestly didn't know whether he should be pleased with that or not.

"Be careful" Rin warned him, a worried frown gracing her features. Sawatari found her easier to look at than her boyfriend. She at least seemed to know the direction in which reality was.

"I know! I know! I'm fine!" Yugo insisted before flicking his head up for Sawatari to see "Ta da!"

One baby-blue eye still stared at him, but the other was now Yuya's soul-sucking red.

Sawatari's heart sunk. Coloured lenses, of course. He was stupid not to think of that first. Those coloured lenses and a wig, a change of clothes and a bit of acting; not even Yuzu spotted the difference in her childhood friend.

"See, it's not all that hard to pretend to be someone else" Yugo told him, taking out the coloured lens, putting it back in its tub with its partner and the tub back in his pocket. "I swapped my clothes with Yuya's, put in the lenses and the wig; that was all that was necessary. We're lookalikes after all. I was perfectly prepared to pretend to be Yuto or Yuri instead. Rin had her disguises – we had it all worked out in case anyone got close to guessing. When Rin found 'my' body, I pretended to kneel behind her and weep. I told her what had happened, and we made our way from there."

Sawatari gritted his teeth. Yugo was the perfect actor. There was no way anybody could've seen that coming.

"As for Yuya's body, I'll explain that in a little bit" Yugo continued "Once we regrouped with everyone in the living room, Rin made it apparent that it was urgent that we find 'me'. So when you came up with the idea to separate us with cards, we had to go along with it and hope that we could find a way to kill more people whilst grouped together."

"The groups ended up better than we thought" Rin added on "Not only were 'Yuya' and I separated, but most of the groups of best friends were separated as well, just in case anyone made the assumption that two close friends were working together."

"Which is how killing Sora worked out perfectly!" Yugo cheered "The power went off at just the right moment! It couldn't have gone any better! Well, it could've. I missed Yuto in the dark, clipped Yuri instead. God he was such a bitch about it – wish I'd hit his lungs instead. Thankfully no one noticed."

"What?" Sawatari was confused "You mean; the power wasn't meant to go off at any particular point in time?"

"Nope!" Rin shook her head "I set that up in the beginning in the hopes that it would help us with something later on down the line, in case we were having trouble killing people off. But it ended up working to our best advantage. I killed Sora and Yugo almost got Yuto. We basically just went after whoever we could get to; it didn't really matter who."

Sawatari finally moved his hands in order to clench them tightly. At that moment, he could have been the one to die…

"And from then, Sayaka and Yuto began thinking of the possibility of you being the killer since you were the one that thought of grouping us by the deck of cards!" Yugo recalled with a huge grin "Oh, it was great! Everyone was losing their minds! Panicking and thrashing about like rats in a barrel with no escape!"

Sawatari remembered clearly the horror of being accused by people he thought were his best friends. The one person everyone should have been accusing faked his death from the beginning.

"When we made our way to the kitchen, Rin and I took that chance to swipe some more knives, since Rin didn't have a weapon anymore, with it being stuck in Sora's spine and all" Yugo explained "We also took that time to start a dispute over who could be the killer. With you and Yuya and Sayaka seeming like the most likely to have murdered everyone, we were keeping the accusations off of Rin. Of course, someone would have possibly wondered about Rin's innocence after a while, so we couldn't ignore accusing her at least for a little bit. If not everyone had been accused at some point, she could've ended up being the most likely suspect."

Which is why they'd gotten involved in the argument in kitchen. Sawatari began to realise that the only time Rin had really been accused of being the killer, beyond Yuri's 'accident', was when 'Yuya' said something about it. Yugo had been suspected in his absence but was obviously off the hook once they found his 'body'.

"Then came time for some of the group to get some sleep" Yugo raised his hand to examine some of Sayaka's blood on his fingers "I figured that would happen at some point, and Rin and I knew that there was no way that everyone was going to sleep at once. And since we were all going to stay together at this point, we were going to have to get creative. Then when Dennis suggested going to his room, I knew we were doing good." Yugo snapped his fingers.

Dennis' room… Sawatari glanced over at it. That was where everyone discovered Yugo's 'body'.

"I'm sure you're just dying to know how you guys managed to discover my body when I was right next to you the whole time, right?!" Yugo laughed "Get it?! Dying?! Ha ha!"

Sawatari cringed. Yugo was insane.

"Yugo, I told you, stay focused" Rin thankfully hurried things along.

Yugo pouted at her disappointedly, but continued anyway.

"Anyway, after I killed Yuya, I dumped him in Dennis' room, what with him being grouped with Yuri so I knew he wouldn't be in there, and dressed him in my clothes, put a wig like my hair on him. Nobody suspected a thing! The reason why you guys didn't find 'my' body the first time you searched Dennis' room is because I hid Yuya's body deep in the wardrobe, and made sure only myself searched it. When the search party left, I doubled back and pulled Yuya's body out in the middle of the floor. I was planning to drag it out into the corridor later, but Dennis saved me the work by trying to be helpful. After that, once we went into Gongenzaka's room, we had to find a way to lure out more people to kill. As long as we remained in place in that room, there was no way that we could kill anyone else. So when we made our way to Gongenzaka's room I grabbed hold of that shelf, pulled myself up and moved a vase so it was in danger of falling if everyone started moving around enough. Sure enough, it fell. Don't you remember the crash that led Yuto, Yuzu and I to leave the room to check it out? It got Yuto killed! Yuri wanted to tag along, which would've been fun, but Yuto said he had to stay. Shame – he was the one I was looking forward to."

"But…the lights switched off again" Sawatari remembered everyone freaking out while they were in still in Gongenzaka's room. But this time the generator hadn't switched back on. "How did that happen?"

Yugo looked at Rin in confusion. Rin, who also looked confused, shrugged.

"I guess the blizzard must have just been on our side" she decided.

Yugo also shrugged, accepting this answer. Sawatari found this a little hard to believe, but Rin and Yugo both looked genuinely confused. Maybe they'd planned to kill everyone with the lights on, or had another plan that failed.

"Yuzu had her stupid flashlight, but I was still able to slip a knife into Yuto's neck" Yugo mimicked the motion of stabbing him "It was easy to convince Yuzu that someone else was in the hallway with us, so all we had to do was run back to Gongenzaka's room."

"Next…was the kitchen" Rin mentioned.

"Ah, yes! The poisonings!" Yugo grinned "I wasn't expecting to use the poison; it's not as fun as stabbing people."

Sawatari cringed again. How could Yugo have been able to hide all this time that he was a flipping psychopath?! His excitement at killing people was beyond disturbing!

"But when Dennis and you got hungry, we figured we needed to start dwindling the numbers. There were still lots of people left to kill and it was taking just a little more time than we had thought."

"Yugo, you have to admit that you did want to take your time" Rin pointed out.

"Yeah" Yugo shrugged "But it would have been morning soon and I wasn't sure if someone would be coming to check on us, making sure the teenagers hadn't trashed the house overnight and all. But moving on," he waved his hand as he continued. "Rin mentioned checking for silverware, in which Allen said something about a strip search. If anyone actually went with it, we could have easily slipped them somewhere inconspicuously so that we couldn't have been suspected. And Rin could have just pretended to search me so that no one could tell it was really me. But with the boys being embarrassed about the girls being searched, no one went with it anyway."

"We had poison ready in case we absolutely needed to use it" Rin pulled a small bottle containing a white liquid out of her shorts' pocket. "It didn't matter who we killed as long as we had killed a few people."

"Wait…" Sawatari thought for a second "The poison wasn't in the food… You were the one that handled the silverware!"

"That's right!" Rin chuckled "I poisoned three of the forks and set the table with those poisoned forks in three random places. We just made sure not to sit in those spots and let the poison do its job."

"In which Reira, Serena and Allen got one of the forks" Sawatari recalled.

"Yep!" Yugo grinned "And with three people handling the food and another three handling the utensils, it was difficult to tell where the poison came from."

Sawatari sat for a moment, trying to remember what came next. His eyes widened. "Yuri."

"Oh, skipping ahead aren't we?" Rin waggled her finger "Someone wants to die quickly, huh?"

"No" Sawatari said, shaking his head frantically "But I just now realised that when we left the kitchen to go to my room, Yuri fell down the stairs and bashed his head. But he didn't fall at all, did he?" He glared at Yugo. "You pushed him, didn't you?" He then looked at Rin. "At least, one of you did. You were both walking next to him."

"Yuri?" Rin's face scrunched up and she shook her head "No, that was an accident."

"Shame as well, Yuri's was the one I was most looking forward to" Yugo commented bitterly.

Sawatari didn't believe them for a second, especially when they traded some kind of knowing glance. Maybe Yuri had figured it out, from one psychopath to another, and one of them was quick to silence him without consulting the other beforehand. They probably didn't want to admit to diverting from their original, meticulous plan in front of him. Clearly something had gone wrong on those stairs that had resulted on Yuri being thrown down them.

"Anyway, then it was finally my turn to get someone!" Yugo threw his fist into the air in joy "So when we got to your room, who poisoned the bar of soap that killed Dennis?" He pointed at himself, as if Sawatari seriously had no clue who had done it. "Everyone had been nervous, so I figured if I poisoned the soap someone would eventually bite their nails or something. I hadn't expected Dennis to wash his whole face and ingest some of it immediately, so that was a plus. But then it quickly became a minus because I had gone into the bathroom before he did. My only saving grace was that Yuzu and you had gone in there as well, plus it was your room."

Sawatari knew he was right to accuse 'Yuya' of poisoning the soap. But since both he and Yuzu had been in there too, there was no way of proving it. Everyone had been accusing everyone else, so his words would have just sounded like speculation and trying to blame someone else for something he'd done.

"After moving to Sora's room for us to wash our hands, we had to get creative again" Rin went on "So I acted like I heard something in the hallway."

"Which urged me to peek my head out" Yugo added, holding his hand over his eyes as if searching for something.

Sawatari's eyes widened. "It was you who screamed!"

Yugo just smiled at him innocently, a look that definitely no longer suited him after what Sawatari had just heard.

"So that lead Shun out the door" Rin picked up from there "When I chased after him I took that moment to blindside him, kill him and throw his body down the stairs, claiming that it had been Yuto that had really lured him away and murdered him."

"And while you and Sayaka were chasing them, I quickly lunged at Yuzu and killed her – sweet revenge after all those damn fans. I mean, really, where did she get the idea she could go around slapping guys around with paper fans anyway? I'm pretty sure that stuff's illegal" Yugo pondered, as if he had forgotten his own extracurricular activity of murder was also illegal. "At that point, there were very few people left. If anyone accused me, Rin and I could just quickly kill the rest of you guys off. But we got lucky when you guys fell for the Yuto-faked-his-death-plot."

"I mentioned that maybe Yuto backtracked and killed Yuzu. But I suggested we all search for Shun and Yugo here pretended to freak out at Shun's body. And since 'Yuya' took off, you and Sayaka waited around whilst I chased after him before 'Yuto' got to him" Rin took over for a little bit, sharing the storytelling.

"But in truth, I was just doubling back and pulling Yuya's body from Dennis' room and planting it in the hallway for you guys to discover, although all along it would've been the second time you had seen it" Yugo explained "I didn't have time to change all his clothes again, plus there were the bruises on his neck, so I left him without his shirt and jacket and stuff, got rid of the wig and slit his throat and hoped you guys would be too freaked to notice."

The rest all came to Sawatari without help. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to forget that moment when Sayaka's sentence was cut off by a knife in her back. He couldn't believe he was still crying; he figured his tears would have finally dried up by now.

"And that's that!" Yugo gave a mock bow "Pretty amazing, huh?!"

"I'll say, we're good for first-timers, hey Yugo" Rin smirked, walking over and ruffling her partner-in-crime's hair, making Yugo grin with delight.

Sawatari sat for a minute before speaking up. They still hadn't answered the most obvious question.

"…Why…? Why would you…do this… What did everyone do to you to deserve this…? Sayaka? Yuya? Gongenzaka? Reira? I don't understand… I DON'T GET IT!"

He smashed his hand into the floor as hard as he could, not caring how badly it hurt. It would never feel as bad as all of his friends felt as they were being murdered.

Yugo smirked as he stepped forward and knelt in front of Sawatari, who tried to scoot back but the wall was preventing him from doing so. Rin then came up behind her companion.

"You don't know what it's like, do you Sawatari? Growing up in such a fancy house, Daddy's boy, getting anything you could possibly imagine. You don't know what it's like to grow on the streets of a place like The City – kill or be killed. You do what it takes to survive. Eventually that's all you find yourselves living for – that rush of adrenaline as you go in for the kill. Even when circumstances change and you don't have to kill anymore, your hands still tremble for that rush. That's what being alive is really like, Sawatari Shingo."

"Of course, you don't expect a privileged Standard like you to understand for one second" Rin added, just as Sawatari turned to her for a true explanation.

"Like rats in a barrel, Sawatari Shingo" Yugo told him, and Sawatari swore Yugo was close enough to feel the puffs of breath on his face "Eat or be eaten."

He made it sound like it was such a simple explanation. There clearly wasn't one though. Yugo and Rin were just plain psychopaths, worse than Yuri or Leo Akaba or anyone they'd ever been confronted with. And they'd hid it so well too. Sawatari wouldn't have thought for a second they'd even imagine doing something like this.

"Here" Yugo turned around to find Rin handing him a clean butcher's knife. "He sat through our story. Least we could do is kill him with a clean instrument."

Yugo snatched the knife from her and spun back around to face Sawatari.

"Thanks" Yugo smiled wickedly, probably the most demented Sawatari had ever seen him "Are you ready to die?"

Sawatari didn't want to die. But when he actually thought about it, even if he had a way out of this mess, would he really want to live? All of his friends were dead. No more entertainment duelling with Yuya. No more teasing Yuzu. No more being shouted at by Shun. No more doodling with Reira. No more trying jokingly trying to recreate Dennis' accent with Serena as Gongenzaka told them off for it. No more screaming at Yugo with Rin for setting stuff on fire.

No more. Ever.

And if he were to make it out of this alive, could he ever trust anybody again?

"J-Just kill…me…" Sawatari gasped for air.

Yugo blinked in confusion, his smirk dropping. "What?"

"JUST KILL ME ALREADY!" Sawatari screamed in his face.

"Just kill him, Yugo!" Rin shouted "Shut him up!"

"Fine!"

Yugo tightly gripped Sawatari's throat to throw him to the ground face first. He was on his stomach, his head turned to face the dead Sayaka next to him. Yugo was sitting on his lower back, holding Sawatari's head still with his hand.

"Time to end this!" he shouted as he gripped the knife tightly in his hand.

Time seemed to move in slow motion as Sawatari stared at Sayaka, his short friendship with her flashing through his mind. His friendship with Yuya. With Yuzu. With Reiji. With Reira. With Gongenzaka. With Serena. With Yuri. With Sora. With Dennis. With Shun. With Allen. With Yuto. With Ruri. Even good times he had had with Yugo and Rin. He smiled to Sayaka.

'I'll see you and all of our friends in a minute, Sayaka' he thought 'And let's just hope that Yugo and Rin don't get too close to anyone else so that this doesn't ever happen again. And hopefully, they'll never find us...wherever we're going.'

And there it is! This 30,000 word behemoth of a story is finally over! Remind me to stick to one-shot comedies after this!

But finally it's over! My notes keeping track of who killed who, when and where are so scribbled they're destined for the recycling pile. I guess that's what I get for changing the murderers three times!

So for everyone out there who's thinking "What? Yugo and Rin, seriously?", allow me to explain. Whilst going through my list and trying to decide who was ultimately behind it all, I decided someone from Fusion or Xyz would be too predictable. So I thought some more and it came to me: "How come literally everyone in Synchro is crazy except for Yugo and Rin apparently?" (And I suppose Crow too, but this story was complicated enough without him as well) And considering the Synchro dimension's reaction to Dennis literally being blasted by a laser from space, severely injuring him, they're pretty immune to acts of violence as well. You can't tell me that in a world like that, as well as a situation that involved 99% of the population fighting for 1% of the resources, that Rin and Yugo didn't grow up seeing death and violence as a part of everyday life. And that's when the idea of them having killed before and feeling the rush to do it again, seeing Sawatari's birthday party as the perfect place to settle their bloodlust, was born. Though I'm still not happy with how Yugo explained it. I probably should have had Rin do it, but it's too late to change it now I suppose.

As for Sawatari being the last to survive, well...no, I have no explanation for that. But I blinked and suddenly he and Sayaka were the last ones left. And since it was his party, I guess I kinda liked him getting the explanation better.

Thank you all for having read this story, especially to those few who reviewed (very sorry about Yuto and Reira, but they were all going to go at some point), and I hope you'll stick around to see me write more Arc-V stories in the future. Preferably with less murder involved.