Midnight

The Dark Hour

New Moon~Sabbath

Makoto trudges through sludge, its slimy consistency sticking to his school uniform. Hopefully, Kirijo can set him up with a spare.

"Shit," the boy curses, his pulse even and every breath he takes coming out slow and steady. "Shit."

This isn't how it's supposed to be. Hunting and fighting was a significant change—his reason was the rush and adrenaline of power.

What now?

A roar pierces the rancid air, bouncing off red brick and concrete. Makoto barely flinches, and it makes him grimace.

"You okay?" Akihiko sparks up, trepidation creeping from his chest. "It's getting closer. Argh, I wish I could track its movements!"

"I'm fine," He growls out. He clenches his fists, nails piercing the meat of his palm. "Fine."

If Akihiko wants to say something, he does an excellent job swallowing his words.

The shadows warp and writhe in the corners of the dark, twisting into shapes that seemed almost familiar, almost human. But they're wrong, grotesquely stretched and distorted, like reflections in a cracked mirror. The darkness of the sewer was oppressive, but Makoto's eyes had adjusted minutes ago. Getting a torch, a gas lantern, or something to help him see in the dark might do him good.

The boy enters a large cistern layered with plaster and concrete brick. The sewer system is anachronistic and ancient in design for such a new and artificial island. Typically, these tunnels shouldn't be large enough to walk through, let alone stand, but the underground of Iwatodai is sprawling. Maybe a subway system failed, only to be redirected into a runoff? After all, the only railway transit in the city is the monorail.

Thankfully, the… liquid (hopefully, it isn't actually sewage) hasn't turned to blood upon the shift to the Dark Hour. As he stares at the mush, he absently wonders what makes it turn to blood. Is it pure water that changes? The fountains in Paulownia turned to lava but also water. Neither was blood. From the minute he could remember the Dark Hour, all water—no matter where it came from, turned into the red fluid. Hell, the friggin' ocean turns—anywhere he went, and they all were located on the coast, was blood for as far as the eye could see.

It was… beautiful, in a way.

Some of that flowing red slowly enters his eye, dyeing the greyish-green water crimson-like ink through water. The boy furrows his brow, confused by the sudden intrusion from what he's started to view as usual. He follows the new pigment, which leads to… a body.

A single corpse lays face-down in the goop, resting half-submerged in the middle of his path. The body lays, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. The skin is waxy and pale, mottled with the purple-black hues of decay. Flies buzz around the gaping wounds, drawn to the sickly-sweet, stench of rotting flesh.

"Singular body," Makoto reports, his voice cold and clinical. "Examining."

"Roger," Akihiko intones stoically. "Lemme know if we need an extraction team."

Makoto kneels beside the body, grabbing its naked, jutting shoulder. With a quick motion, he flips him over. The corpse wears a light tank top, stained yellow with sweat, speckles of red dappling close to his chest, and baggy blue jeans turning purple from blood. Delinquent-esque—scratch that, maybe a gangster. Small time? "Male, early twenties, I'm betting—tattoos on the upper clavicle resembling gang markings of a lion—piercings on ears and eyebrows. Poorly died hair and…" he grimaces as he leans closer to the sores on the corner of his mouth that don't resemble the regular gashes and bruises on his pale face. Pus, white on the interior. "Syphilis."

That settles it.

"Strega," Akihiko answers for him. "Sabbath-related, probably. If Aigis and Strega's here, that can't be anything good. Keep your head on a swivel, Makoto."

"Understood," The boy pushes himself back to his feet. "Keeping a low profile, gonna see if I can find more."

God, he hopes he finds her before they do.

The cistern stretches on for what looks to be a block and a half. There's a light haze in the air, almost fog. The guttural roars of the thing in the Labyrinth don't seem to slow, but they are getting further and further away. He doesn't like that, but it might be for the best at the moment.

He spies a red emergency light behind one of the many megalithic pillars, stealing all his attention from the simple shock of seeing something turned on.

"...?" The boy must have made a noise because Akihiko heard it.

"What is it? You okay?"

"Just… a light," He mutters, entirely enraptured by the glow. This shouldn't be. Nothing regarding electricity works within the Dark Hour

"What? You know that's impossible."

The boy blinks, and the light is gone. Shaking his head, he grimaces and reports to Akihiko.

"Look, you could just be tired." The boxer sighs. "I know you haven't been sleeping. Just… finish up here and head back. Aigis' signature is just a few more blocks away."

A faint whisper skitters along the walls, a soft, almost human sigh—Makoto freezes, every muscle tense as he reaches for his evoker, listening to the silence stretch and twist around him. Something other than that roaring beast is down here with him, something that watches and waits. When nothing makes another noise, he grimaces and continues forward, disdaining the creature for not attacking the building with every passing moment.

God, he still can't feel anything. It's all just instinct.

"Right—" Before he can continue his search, the light returns right where it was before. The previously vacant bulb is now, once again, filled with life. This time, it's pulsating.

Beckoning.

He must… go. His legs swish through the viscous liquid, the heavy, muddy water that reaches his knees. The light calls out to him, its electric hum and clicking as it switches on and off—Calling for his attention with every pulsating thrum. He can feel himself enraptured by its glow, like a moth to a flame, flying like Icarus closer and closer to—

This is wrong. A shattering realization cuts through the fog, clouding his mind. In an instant, he's no longer in the sewers but in a maintenance room filled to the brim with painted, stinking bodies lined with some sort of design that means something incomprehensible to him. The walls are covered in graffiti—symbols of macabre power, whispering tales of dark, malignant possibilities. It feels like a sin to be here, and he realizes he's carrying a sword and plunging it into his chest—his heart.

"Guh," He gasps, the pain of feeling the weapon slide into him unimaginably quickly. It pierces through his uniform, gliding effortlessly through flesh and bone with its cold, unfeeling steel. "Keh…!"

He swears he can hear a dark chuckle echo from the walls, an inhuman, gravelly laugh at his expense. It bounces off the painted walls, manifesting itself like a cancer in his eardrums as it skitters over the sad bodies around him. Typical, of course, Makoto falls for a trap.

The cold steel slid into his chest with an unnatural smoothness, and for a brief, fleeting moment, he feels the sharp, electric shock of pain. His muscles tense, blood surges, and then... nothing. The feeling fades as quickly as it came, leaving only the dull thud of his empty heart. It won't be much longer now…

God, this feels… exhilarating. A twisted satisfaction overtakes him, drawing a sigh from his emptying lungs.

"Oh no," A familiar voice he hadn't heard for weeks breaks through the continuous laughter, silencing it with his deafening care. The childish tone is accompanied by a ghostly wisp of light that enters his fading vision, blue. Then, black and white legs hover before him. "This looks painful. Don't worry, you'll be okay in an instant!"

With a strangled gasp, the sword extracts itself from his chest like a needle plucked from a doll. He can feel the blood that left his body slowly retreat within his empty heart, rapidly beginning its soldiering pump of liquid lubricant that keeps his body running.

And just like that, the feeling is gone. The exhilaration vanishes, leaving behind only the familiar void—the dead malaise he's been drowning in since the day he was forced to keep living.

Makoto's torturous existence will continue.

He pushes himself to his feet, his legs sore and body throbbing in pain, but he's alive. He looks up at Thanatos's floating, ethereal form, glancing down at him behind that lifeless iron mask. The boy asks a question that's been eating at him from the minute he entered the Labyrinth.

"Why can't I feel anything?" He asks, but even as the words leave his mouth, they feel hollow. What was the point in asking if he couldn't care about the answer? The void inside him was growing, swallowing everything, just like the shadows around him. "What happened?"

Makoto doesn't even question how he went from standing in a vast cistern to waking up in a maintenance closet, surrounded by bodies and trying to kill himself in a haze. He's not so far gone that he can't recognize what happened—he just doesn't care. It didn't work, and the moment his blood returned and the sword was pulled from his chest, the mocking laughter in the shadows vanished. It hasn't yet returned.

"I don't know." The child-like yet monstrous persona shrugs, tilting its head like a dog hearing a sound it enjoys. "Why can't you?"

"I…" He whimpers, looking down at his hands. His right still holds the sword, a well-balanced yet simple blade. It's a single-edged sabre with a straight spine. The knuckle guard curls down to his pinky finger, like a brass knuckle designed for when Shadows get too close to the blade. It does not look human, the metal swirling and absorbing the already low-light like a black hole. Letting it fall to his hip, he stares at his left palm, his lip wavering as he struggles to speak. "I don't know."

"That's okay, isn't it?" Thanatos says, his words dripping with sympathy and care. It's foreign to him, yet he can't help himself. Makoto can feel that, but anything else is a frustrating mystery. "I can't feel anything either."

God, no, it isn't—is what he wants to say, but the words refuse to leave his mouth. Instead, he grimly nods and turns away; his back turned to the bodies, the horrifically vandalized walls left forgotten within the depths of that closet. Whatever their meaning, he doesn't care. It's not something he desires to understand or finds interesting to know. Makoto barely notices the shift in his surroundings as he stumbles through the door. His body feels heavy, his mind distant, but he forces himself to focus, to re-engage. He taps his ear, hoping the voice of Akihiko will pull him back to the present.

"Akihiko, I believe I found signs of the Sabbath," He grunts, his voice tight and robotic. "More bodies and esoteric imagery. I—"

"Oh my god, you're alive!" The pure relief in Akihiko's voice runs down Makoto's spine with a deep, curling fist. "Jeez—I nearly came after you! It's been nearly ten minutes! I haven't heard anything since you mentioned that light!"

"I'm fine," the boy retorts. He decides not to comment that Akihiko has disregarded their original plan for him to run back to the dorm if things fly south. "Got… side tracked. I'll fill you in during my report later. Whatever the Sabbath is, I think it worked. There's something down here."

He's wandering through a long, dry hallway covered in steam pipes—a shaft. A prison. It's dark, but he can spy an exit sign at the end. Whatever that thing that was laughing is, it's decided to leave him alone.

"Yeah," Akihiko affirms. "The thing that's been down there since you started this expedition."

"No—Not…" Makoto shakes his head and huffs, prying open the heavy metal door to the maintenance hall he was locked in, revealing a different area he wasn't in when he arrived. "God dammit. It's different, not as aggressive, but definitely dangerous." He glances around, peering into shadows with a suspicious glare, but nothing is there. It won't catch him off guard again. "There's something else."

This cenote is massive, dark and open. No cover, nowhere to hide and no exits in sight. It's humid, hard to breathe from the weight of the wet air that stings his nose with its near sulfuric burn. The shadows cling to every corner, outcropping and shabby hole in the wall, threatening Makoto with their crawling miasma.

Nothing jumps out. But he can feel that presence in the corner of his mind that something is watching him—warily. It's… wary?

Did he scare it?

Suddenly, as if tired of being ignored, a roar rips through the winding corridors, echoing off the walls with a deafening force.

It's close. Very close.

With a breath, the boy unclasps his holster and readies the sword, listening to thumping, crashing footfalls nearing ever closer to the room he resides.

—

New Moon

The Dark Hour

Gekkoukan Dorms

Kotone stares at her bottle, lying on her stomach on the floor of her disgusting room. Clothes, skirts, and shirts are tossed haphazardly around as she stares longingly at the full amber ambrosia before her.

One sip. Nobody would notice.

It'd be a secret. Nobody would know. Makoto isn't even here, like always. He's out doing whatever it is he and Akihiko do when the Dark Hour hits, while Kotone sits here, atop her floor and stares at a fucking bottle.

Kirijo-Senpai gave her some time off and ix-nayed all excursions to Tartarus while their field leader; 'recovers from the previous night.'

Kotone appreciates the older girl. She told Junpei, Yukari, and her teachers that Kotone had a cold. No doubt Mitsuru decided it'd be best in a way to preserve her reputation. She doesn't want them to know that she got 'coerced.'

God, if only that were the case.

And so, in the silence of their mysterious extra hour just before midnight, Kotone stares longingly at her bottle, feeling the shakes from a lack of its soft touch upon her liver begin to creep up her spine and down her arms.

"I don't need it," She mutters, licking her dry lips. Jesus, is she salivating? Disgusting. There's a pounding in her skull, pulsating from her forehead to the back of her head that pulses with an electric thrum. It hurts so bad, but; "I don't need it." She repeats to herself, staring at the glass bottle, too ornate for the deathly liquid it houses.

Its long, regal neck begs for her to wrap her lips around it, to drink deep and swallow with a sigh. She craves the burn, the intoxication that drowns her sorrows away and makes the loneliness a little more bearable.

But she isn't alone anymore. To-chan is here, he remembers—not her, but…

He thinks she's disgusting—an alcoholic with a problem.

God, her stomach… she can't even move from her position on the floor. Cold sweat drenches her back, and dampens her hairline. She stares at the bottle, her brain and body begging for a single sip.

"I don't need it," She moans in pain, writhing on the cluttered floor of her bedroom. She twists and turns, her hands moving from her stomach to her head as they shake violently from the withdrawal. It's only been seven hours since her last drink, the oasis of relief she resides in from the desert of despair.

I don't…" She tries to repeat, hoping the mantra will save her from what she's about to do. Kotone already knows; she's been through this song and dance countless times. With tears in her eyes and whimpers, the pain was too unbearable to continue. She's too weak, too pathetic, too disgusting. To-chan was right, and she has a fucking problem. Sobs wrack through her body as she crawls to the bottle, weakly lifting her shaking arms and twisting the cap. Through tear-filled gasps, she mutters like whispers of affirmation, of understanding because nobody will ever truly understand her.

"I need it." Kotone cries in a whisper, guzzling the liquor down her gaping gullet. With a wracking sigh of relief followed by a gasp before she entirely breaks down, she covers her face and hopes she'll die. "I'm so gross…"

—

"What now?" Makoto whispers to himself, stomping through the muck and glaring forward—down the causeway.

This isn't fast enough. He needs to see if being in combat will make him feel something.

If not, what will? He grimaces at the thought, his teeth biting into flesh. He tastes iron, copper, and blood.

This isn't fast enough.

"Fuck it," the boy grunts, taking a deep breath and cupping his hands around his mouth.

"What—what are you doing?"

"Hey!" Makoto screams, his voice echoing through the sewer. "Come and get me!"

Suddenly, it's deathly quiet. Not even the constant dripping of liquid, whatever the hell from the ceiling, fills the void of silence.

"What the hell are you doing?! It's gonna get you!"

"That's the plan," He needs to feel something. Makoto cannot go back to what he used to be. He refuses. The boy readies himself, his evoker unclipped and awaiting his grasp.

A guttural roar pierces the humid air, reverberating through the tunnels and probing into the vertebrae of his spine. It refuses to waver.

He waits, his pulse finally beginning its rapid jump. He's feeling something; that adrenaline is coming back. He waits, listening to its crashing, thumping steps get closer and closer—

It's here, and Makoto bounces in preparation for a fight, raising his sword and Evoker as it… it's smaller than he…

The thing is robotic, covered in spindly metal pieces that jut out in every direction. It wears a helmet covering its face, but he can see red, horrific eyes behind its mask and tufts of silver hair splaying in every direction. No armour aside from its helm coats its metallic body. He recognizes that toeless foot, the guns for hands grasping a massive axe as it roars in delight upon finding its quarry.

"Aigis?" He asks in disbelief, punctuated by another warcry as it jumps for battle.