"Setsunaaa! Heeeey! Over heeeeere!"
Her enthusiastic greeting shakes me back to reality. "Konoka Konoe."
I return her cheery call with a sedate wave, even as I scan the street for potential threats.
I don't see anything amiss today, but after what happened in Kyoto, I can't afford to slip up again.
Her smile dims. "Setsuna? What's wrong? You seem down today."
When I stabbed that woman in the leg... she smiled at me. "You're imagining it."
"Oh, you're such a naughty one, aren't you Setsuna? But then, that's what I love about you. You're just so... forward, when you're angry."
Tsukuyomi Aoyama. She is... twisted, distorting the goodness and peace out of this world by her very existence.
"...Setsuna, your hand!"
I stop, abruptly, and look down at my hand. Without realizing it, I clenched my fist so hard it broke the skin...
"Here," Konoka anxiously says while producing her new practice wand, "let me fix you up."
"...sorry."
Konoka pauses, looking up at me. "What for?"
I glance down at my hand. "I made you worry."
After a moment, her smile returns, as small and kind as a mother's.
"—please stop! why are you doing this?!" The gun in my hand fires twice, and the woman falls down, dead.
"Oh, Setsuna... you've been my friend for years now, and you've always been protecting me. So, it makes me kind of happy when I can do something to help you for once."
I want... to protect that smile, and the kind words that are accompanying it.
But as long as the world remains twisted, peaceful moments like this will never be able to last.
As Konoka heals my hand, I half-consciously re-adjust the wrapped-up sword on my back. "I will... cut out the twistedness from this world."
OMAKE
Princess Marina looks at me with a tenderness that I haven't experienced since I was a young girl, and with a kind of awe that I've never experienced period. "Setsuna, I... I don't care what anyone else might have to say about it," she says with loving tears. "Your wings are beautiful."
As she softly envelops me in her arms, and the world starts to seem like a warmer place, it's all I can do to try and keep from crying.
This one's probably going to make it as a full story in one form or another, but I haven't exactly figured out how I want to take it forward yet. So in the meantime, I'll just drop it here to gauge the audience reaction.