I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

  The thought hammered inside of Saya’s skull as she stared at the sughter. It wasn't a battle, but rather a one-sided harvest, as knights were plucked apart like insects by a swarm of invisible bdes.

  Their heavy pte and broad shoulders made them easy targets for the relentless, tiny projectiles. The once-silent night air was now consumed by screams, the night dyed a deep, sickening crimson.

  “Help—!” a knight gasped as he reached out from the grass. As his hand rose, a dagger pinned his palm to the ground, and a second ter, the same dark blur silenced his throat.

  A few soldiers managed to form a defensive circle, as they raised their weapons with their backs against each other, but it didn't matter. The bdes moved with an impossible, sickening speed, plucking eyes from sockets before they could react.

  The air grew heavy with the sharp, metallic tang of blood, the same copper scent Saya had smelled on herself earlier, but now it was everywhere.

  “Call Armenta!” a survivor roared, pointing toward the small golden bell mounted near the command tent.

  Another knight lunged for the bell’s cord, his fingers brushed the rough brown rope just as a bde hummed through the air.

  His head slid from his shoulders, a fountain of red liquid erupting from the stump of his neck. As his body colpsed, it clipped the bell and sent it tumbling into the dirt with a hollow thud.

  Albo’s hand cmped onto Saya’s wrist, forcefully yanking her body toward him.

  “Saya! Come on!”

  His voice was jagged with panic, at this very moment, he didn't care if he hurt her, he just needed her to move.

  With blood rushing through every crevice of his veins, he sprinted back toward the academy entrance.

  Saya stumbled before him, her mind had stalled, unable to process what she had just witnessed.

  She was able to move, but she wasn't running, she was drifting. The sudden events had nullified all the senses in her body, even negating the painful sting that she felt only moments earlier.

  Recognizing her state of shock, Albo didn't waste any more time shouting. He swept her up into his arms, his muscles straining as he pushed his body into a desperate sprint.

  Without a word, the knights turned their attention back to the darkened field behind them, their faces draining of all color as they got closer to the battle.

  As they were re-entering the academy, they met the same knights that they had snuck past only moments earlier. But this time, they had no regards for the two children before them, only focusing on the targets ahead. Albo locked eyes with them, and in that brief moment, a silent understanding passed between them of the duties they needed to fulfill.

  The great courtyard was no longer green. In the moonlight, it looked bck, stained with the blood of the queen’s elite.

  Saya tightened her hold on the chained book to her chest. She had lost the history text in the grass earlier, but her fingers were locked around the cold metal links.

  Her desire to clutch it was no longer about acquiring knowledge; the chain was the only thing keeping her grounded as her teeth chattered in a rhythm she couldn’t stop.

  “Snap out of it!” Albo excimed as they reached the stone halls.

  The silence inside the academy was wrong. Despite the screaming and the cshing of steel outside, the dorm doors remained shut. No nterns were lit, and no curious students peered out.

  At an academy where a dropped food tray was usually enough to bring a dozen heads to poke out, this silence was an anomaly that felt far more out of pce than the sudden deaths around them.

  Every student knew the knights were on high alert, they should have been pressed against their doors, whispering and watching. For them, it should have been an all-nighter kind of night, a night to remember and admire as the knights worked.

  It was all wrong. How could they not take notice of what’s happening? The silence made Albo’s skin crawl. He began to shout, his voice cracking as he exhausted his lungs.

  “Help! Someone help! Help!”

  A sharp pain stabbed his side, a thousand needles poking his diaphragm, but the adrenaline wouldn't let him slow down.

  Taking a sharp turn to his left, he smmed his shoulder into the heavy wooden door of Hector’s office, hoping that the man’s habit of working te had applied to this night as well.

  As his body made contact, the lock snapped with a sharp crack of splinting wood. The sudden ck of resistance sent him stumbling and the weight of carrying Saya threw off his bance.

  Before they hit the floor however, he twisted his body, taking the brunt of the impact to shield her. They tumbled across the floor, the wood groaning under them. The heavy chains of the book hit the floor with a loud, metallic rattle that echoed through the room.

  Albo scrambled to his feet and rushed to Saya’s side. She sat up, trembling, her knee scraped from the floorboards. The sting of the wound seemed to finally break her trance.

  Saya’s eyes cleared as the world stopped spinning, finally focusing on her surroundings and the situation that they were in. The familiarity of the room that she had been in over a hundred times aided in the release of tension, however small it may be.

  His chest loosened when he saw Saya was safe, only for cold night air to rush in through the open doorway.

  The office was unnervingly quiet. The screams from the field were now seemingly gone, as if it never happened, and the only other noise coming from within the office was the steady rhythm of the clock’s second hand.

  On guard, Albo half-stood, slowly circling towards the desk. “Professor?” he whispered.

  The chair creaked, rotating slowly toward him. As the dark silhouette shifted into the light, hope returned to his voice as a disgruntled smile formed in his face, “Professor! You’re here! W-we saw them, they were dying, everyone was—”

  “Albo…” Saya called out, her voice shaky, cutting Albo’s own words like a guillotine.

  Her tone was so cold, so fearful, that Albo froze mid motion. He looked back at her, but she didn’t do the same. Saya’s gaze was focused on the chair before her. Her knuckles were white, trembling at a rhythm of pure, unadulterated terror.

  “Stop... Albo, stop. Don't... go... near...”

  Terror flooded back into his own eyes, as he scrambled backward. Heat in his chest vanished, and in its pce was a void. A sickening, hollow cold turned his stomach as he looked at the hand on the armrest.

  “Hm, that’s strange. So, so, so, so, so, sooooo strange.”

  The mysterious voice did not match that of the professor. Hector’s voice was much deeper, elegant and composed. The voice speaking to them was none of the above, being higher pitched, disgruntled, and disorganized.

  What Albo once thought was the professor’s hand began to melt, transforming its structure into something else. It was almost as if what was supposed to be skin and bones was nothing but mush, making squelching sounds.

  As the person before them came to full view, Albo took a few steps back, shielding Saya from whatever could be standing before them.

  “You shouldn’t be alive…”

  The voice sounded like wet leather being dragged over gravel instead of a human. The man came into full view, short stature no rger than the desk before him, skin like charred meat, and teeth sharp like bdes.

  From behind the messy curtain of brown hair, red eyes that had long ago abandoned sanity peered out, wet with a hunger that made Albo’s skin crawl.

  “How come YOU’RE STILL ALIVE?!”

  Albo gripped Saya’s wrist once more, this time, she was ready for whatever they had to do. The shock of the knight’s rolling head was behind her for now, and her mind, body and soul were determined to survive the night.

  “W-What did you do to the professor…?” Saya asked, as she slowly stood back up, her legs trembling.

  The figure before them smiled, “aah- the old man with the long robe.”

  “He was so delicious, so amazing, so filling, so amazing! Ah, I wish I could gnaw at his bones again, eat his mind and savor his voice as he begged for mercy.”

  “What did you do?!” Saya’s question was a scream that tore through the office. And then, the "gift" was revealed.

  The man reached down to pull up a corpse, or what was left of one.

  It was Hector. The man who had lectured them just hours ago was now nothing more than a collection of meat and bone, stripped of dignity, stripped of life. The stench hit the duo like a physical blow, sending their stomachs to a violent, sickening flip.

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

  The word had lost all meaning, as Saya repeated the word at the same pace as her heartbeat. Fear pulsed all throughout her body until it felt like her ribs were about to snap.

  No. Not him. Anyone but him. Please.

  But it was already too te; reality didn’t care for her pleas. The man who had been an anchor for both students, the one who had supported them when all seemed hopeless, was no longer alive.

  A man with dreams, a childhood, and memories, was reduced to a “thing”.

  To say he was "no longer alive" was a lie. A beautiful, cowardly lie. This wasn’t death, but rather, an “end”.

  Death was a luxury. Death was often a quiet, cold, but swift conclusion to a life once lived. But what y before them didn’t even possess the dignity of a corpse, as that right had been stripped away completely.

  It was an amalgamation, a jigsaw puzzle of biological parts that had been forcefully bitten off and rearranged to fit the twisted desires of the one that stood before them.

  Her heart colpsed in on itself, as if an unseen hand had reached into her chest and crushed it whole. What remained of her will splintered, draining every ounce of strength from her body, until she couldn’t even find the breath to scream.

  “But at least,” a long tongue vioted the professor’s neck, as it ran through the bumpy Birthmark. “I still haven’t tasted the best dessert one could eat. Ehehehe…”

  Albo seized Saya’s wrist and dragged her toward the shattered cssroom exit. They were only steps away when a wet, thunderous mass of muck smmed down, sealing off their only escape.

  They spun around just in time to see the man’s arm stretched unnaturally long, its form sagging and flowing like living slime.

  Heavy liquid dripped down his arm. “That’s no good. You have horrible manners, did anyone tell you that?! Schools, schools… they’re so useless. What is the point in going to school when you’re going to be rude to those around you, anyways?!”

  The arm snapped back into its socket with the sound of wet mud being spped back together. He then began to lick, his tongue long, pale, and frantic, slurped up every st bit of the filth clinging to his fingers.

  The noise he made while doing so was so intimate, that it made Albo’s skin crawl even more than it did before.

  “I’ll have to teach you both a lesson, yes. Ah, but who to teach first, the boy or the girl?”

  Albo moved without thinking, stepping squarely between the murderer and Saya. His body acted before fear could catch up. At the sight of defiance, the man’s lips curled as he bursted into ughter.

  “Amazing, just amazing! You’re such a hero, a real dies man. What, do you think that if you become her knight in shining armor, then she’ll gdly spread her legs and let you bear her child? How naive, how cute, how young. What a lustful, sinful boy you are.”

  “SHUT UP!” Albo yelled, fury drowning out the tremor in his voice. His Birthmark ignited, fring into a brilliant orange as heat surged through his veins.

  Without hesitation, he unleashed the same fireball he had tested on the training dummy just days before, his personal record, before hurling it straight at his opponent. His fear, his rage, his grief, was all pced into a single, massive ball of fme.

  In response to its master’s call, the ball of fme ignited, spreading heat across the room as it ferociously made its way toward the danger.

  But the fire did nothing, it did not even make contact. The man simply unmade himself, splitting apart like a piece of fruit, letting the heat pass through the void where his heart should have been.

  The roar of heat and light nded behind him, an explosion sending out a shockwave across the room. Shards of gss transformed into a rain of diamond, glittering beautifully as it all fell to the wooden floor they stood on.

  “Too bad! Try again? You probably worked so hard for that, come on, let's try again!

  Albo fred his Birthmark once more, but before he could fire another shot, a mass of heavy mud smmed into him, hurling him against the wall and pinning him in pce.

  “Aw, is that it, dear hero?”

  His gaze shifted, locking onto the trembling figure behind him. Saya stood frozen in pce as the man turned away from Albo and began to approach her, his steps slow and deliberate on purpose.

  He intended to instill as much fear in Saya as possible, and as much despair in Albo as possible. To him, this simple act was like adding extra seasoning to an otherwise bnd meal.

  “No! Leave her alo-” before Albo could finish, the mud surged upward, filling his mouth, choking his plea into a pathetic muffled gurgle.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll let your voice out when it's your turn. But for now, have fun watching your cute little damsel get chewed up.”

  Albo squirmed as hard as he could, muscles straining, yet the mud did not surrender. His Birthmark remained dark and unresponsive, no matter how hard he tried to call for its help, while the substance clinging to him leeched his magical energy away.

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Saya. I’m sorry.

  The apology looped in Albo’s fading mind, a broken record of failure. But then, the atmosphere around him fractured. His senses grew out of control at the overwhelming amount of magical energy that suddenly appeared in the room.

  A violent roar of wind then shredded the mud encasing his body into mist. Through the shattered window, bathed in moonlight, a red-haired knight vaulted into the room with both bdes drawn.

  She unched herself at the killer, her Birthmark igniting in a pale green fre. Her steel matched her ferocity, as though alive, symbols etched along their lengths bzed with the same hue.

  Unlike what he had done with Albo’s attack earlier, the man physically dodged the strike that was lunged toward him.

  Hana nded in between Saya and the killer. She pointed one bde toward the blocked doorway, a violent current of wind then coiled outward, spiraling into a vortex of pure elemental energy.

  “I’m sorry I was te, now run!”

  Without hesitation, Saya grabbed onto Albo as they sprinted out of the room.

  “So rude, so annoying, ruining my f-”, before he could finish his sentence, his eyes swept over the standout hair and the twin bdes in her hands. The frown of a spoiled child vanished, repced by a slow, spreading heat.

  A jagged smile split his face. It wasn't the smile of a man meeting a savior, but a glutton looking at a feast he hadn't dared to dream of.

  “Ah... ahahaha! I see! I see, I see, I see! So the rumors weren't lies! The red hair, your two swords... you’re the one, aren't you? You're the Sword Saint! You were really here!”

  “You…” Hana’s eyes brimmed with a pulsing rage, her Birthmark violently pulsing in a fre of blinding, angry green. She had assumed her target had gone to great lengths because they were aware of her presence, but it was clear from the man’s reaction that this wasn’t the case.

  The man folded his body into a deep, mocking bow, “Nice to meet you, Sword Saint. Hana Armenta.”

  Hana tightened her grip on her bde, her fingers crushing the leather wrap of her hilts. She crouched low, her weight shifting from defense to offense.

  Across from her, the "thing" that wore the body and face of man began to melt rapidly.

  With the sickening sound of wet cy being torn apart, jagged shards of steel, or perhaps just hardened muck, erupted from his fingers and shoulders. They didn’t grow from him, but rather bursting forth from his bones.

  Multiple arms also emerged alongside it, as a parody of a human body stood before her. “I am Rias Sol. A 'Feather' of Celica!”

  “I have no need to converse with you further, cultist.” Hana spoke through her teeth, decring the man’s affiliation like a slur. If the massacre wasn’t enough, his self-introduction was the final, true confirmation of hostility.

  Rias’ eyes bulged, the blood vessels popping from his eyes as he let out a frantic scream of joy.

  “Yes! Yes! YES!”

  He unched himself, his multiple arms whipping through the air like a cluster of bck, uncontrolble ropes. It was a chaotic, violent thrashing that should have turned the room into a sughterhouse.

  But Hana didn’t flinch, her bdes carefully deflecting each and every lethal blow that came her way. Her grace was an insult to Rias’ effort. When he was twisting his body, she was dancing elegantly to a rhythm.

  Saya and Albo sprinted as fast as they could, fleeing the csh between Rias and Hana.

  “Where is everyone?!” Saya shouted, her words fighting for breath as her lungs struggled to keep pace with her legs.

  Albo had shared the same thought when he was carrying her just moments earlier. The academy was still unnervingly silent.

  Even if the cloaked killers had attacked in their sleep, surely there would have been at least one scream, but there was nothing. It was as if they had stepped through a void where they were the only two living humans left.

  Rias’ ughter vibrated the stone walls around them, echoing against the surface of their skulls. The joyous expression of a maniac, that made Albo want to cut his own ears off.

  Then the ceiling above them began to crumble. Albo skidded to a halt, his boots screeching against the floor as dust and debris rained down.

  At first, he believed it to be the killers cutting off their path, but his theory was instantly disproven. Through a choking cloud of dust, a figure descended gracefully.

  Almost like a royal entrance, the figure’s adorned jewels shone brightly against the moonlight. Veronica touched down before them with effortless elegance, a faint look of annoyance on her face whilst brandishing her unmistakable purple Birthmark.

  Above where her room used to stand, terrifying cloaked men and women were entangled in dark branches of wood, its thorns piercing their flesh to hold them in pce. They writhed violently, green ichor spilling from their mouths.

  Relief washed over Saya and Albo; she was the first person in the academy they had encountered who posed no immediate threat.

  As much of a bully as she was, the sight of the dark assassins strung up in death brought Saya an unexpected sense of relief. For now, at least, they were on the same side.

  “I see you’re still alive, mudbiter.”

  The thorny branches released the bound intruders, their tainted bodies colpsing to the floor one by one.

  Veronica pointed at Saya, smirking with calm confidence.

  “I’ll lend you a hand.”