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Surrounded by corpses, Darumi sits up like a movie monster rising from the grave. She’s already dead, she’s certain—the smell of blood is sticking to the back of her throat, human beings freshly killed, the rot about to set in.
Darumi should be a corpse. The horror has already set in.
Her hair falls in front of her eyes. They were supposed to escape to the Artificial Satellite today, so she’d pulled her hair into pigtails humming softly this morning. She’d held Tsubasa’s hand and leaned into her warmth until she could imagine them escaping—somehow, somewhere. Anywhere but here.
Darumi’s fingers shake around Tsubasa’s. Darumi’s knees are scraped up from dragging her exhausted body around. A deep wound on her upper arm is making it difficult to move it as the pain sets in, no longer dulled by pure adrenaline. She’d been hit, she thinks, by one of V’ehxness’s golden armored minions.
And so had Tsubasa.
Darumi’s wound is pulsing with pain at the edges. She’d used her strength to shuffle closer to Tsubasa; wrap her arm around Tsubasa to steal her fading warmth. The blood soaking into Tsubasa’s Class Armor now decorates Darumi’s as well, hidden under the black but tacky to the touch—drying, now, in the open air. Tsubasa’s hair has too much red in it. Darumi can’t carry her away with her injury, so she might as well bleed out with her.
Footsteps approach nearby. Darumi doesn’t look back; she already knows who it is, and she doesn’t want to talk to her.
“Let me tend to your wounds,” Kamyuhn says.
Darumi shakes her head and lowers herself again to press her forehead against Tsubasa’s chest. No heartbeat, but Darumi doesn’t even have the strength to cry.
Kamyuhn stays silent for a long, unnerving moment. “V’ehxness is dead. I confirmed it myself.”
“Who fucking cares,” Darumi says.
“You can absorb her cryptoglobin, if you want to heal faster. I wasn’t very injured, so I…” Kamyuhn moves slowly but purposefully through the field of corpses. By one nearby, Kamyuhn lowers herself to her knees. In the corner of Darumi’s vision, Kamyuhn lays a hand against Nozomi’s wrist where her pulse used to be, and then pulls back.
“...Who fucking cares,” Darumi repeats, moving her face until Kamyuhn is no longer visible and the scent of Tsubasa’s blood is choking her. She’ll repeat it until the world ends. Darumi lost every person who gave any fucks about who she was; Tsubasa was her friend, her lover, her mistress, and Darumi would’ve followed her anywhere, and now she can only follow her into death.
The silence is suffocating, or maybe it’s just the smell Darumi is breathing in. Tsubasa fills her lungs.
The expanse of space in front of Last Defense Academy feels endless. Like it’ll swallow both of them up—them, their hopes, their futures. All of it gone, killed in a brutal motion by V’ehxness. A single battle, an endless struggle against someone who would kill them even after the baby was already dead and gone. Nothing here matters anymore.
“Come here,” Kamyuhn says, standing by Darumi. She’s closer now, voice soft and almost pleading.
Darumi shakes her head.
Kamyuhn is quiet for a long moment. She crouches next to Darumi—delicately, like she talks to those who grieve all the time. “Tsubasa would want you to be healthy and taken care of, so I’m going to take care of it,” she says, finally.
Darumi lifts her head. She feels dead already—what’s the point?
Kamyuhn’s fingers are gripping her skirt tightly. Too tightly—a vice grip Darumi has never seen her hold before. Darumi presses her tongue against the inside of her teeth, unable to say anything. Unable to put into words how much she doesn’t deserve to heal.
“It’s my fault,” Darumi croaks out. “I was supposed to save her. If I’d died in her place, then—”
Kamyuhn shakes her head. “She wouldn’t have wanted you to die either. We all had someone we wanted to save. If I could’ve given my life for Nozomi…” She trails off.
Darumi’s lip curls. She doesn’t want a reminder of how Nozomi would die for the people she loved. Nozomi is lying nearby, soon to rot, and she succeeded where Darumi didn’t. Kamyuhn didn’t fight, which means Nozomi was able to simply die without caring about what happened after, leaving Kamyuhn alone.
“I,” Kamyuhn starts, voice catching. She tries again, “I should’ve tried harder to help, and to get the rocket started. I could’ve… done something, for this war.”
Darumi sits up slightly. “Nozomi died for you on purpose,” she says bitterly.
Silent tears welling up at the corners of Kamyuhn’s eyes. “That’s not true. She wouldn’t leave me on purpose. She knew what it was like to—to be left alone. So she wouldn’t—she was trying to save you and survive.”
It’s too hopeful. So bright it burns, and not in a good way. Hope is fragile and falls apart too fast, and Darumi wants to crush it in her hand. But she’s so tired—Kamyuhn can believe whatever she wants. Darumi will just know the truth—that they all wanted to die for each other, and Nozomi succeeded for Kamyuhn.
Her heart crushed by the conversation, Darumi rolls onto her back and squeezes Tsubasa’s hand, trying to hold onto whatever warmth is left. Nothing else moves.
“Let me take care of you, for her,” Kamyuhn says again.
Darumi scoffs. “This is stupid,” she says. It almost doesn’t come out—she feels as drained as she always does after a battle, but worse. “Take V’ehxness’s cryptoglobin yourself. That’s what Nozomi wants. Then leave me here to rot,” she spits out the word, glaring up at Kamyuhn. “That’s what everyone wants.”
Kamyuhn’s eyes soften. “But you—”
“I’m the crazy, disposable one,” Darumi says, cutting off any sympathy before it starts. “Takumi even blew me up! Nobody loves Darumi.” Her breathing comes out ragged. Her body shudders with the weight of it. “Nobody, nobody, nobody ever loved Darumi. Not until—!”
“Sorry,” Kamyuhn’s lip wobbles, and then her shoulders pull back in a mockery of strength. Both of them are sitting in a field of corpses. They’re both fucked up for staying here.
Darumi collects herself. “Take her cryptoglobin yourself,” she says again. She’ll let Kamyuhn live. That’s the end of it.
“Really,” Kamyuhn says softly, “I don’t want you to take V’ehxness’s divine blood, after taking the divine infant’s blood went so poorly. It goes against everything we were taught, but I thought that if you didn’t follow our taboos, then perhaps it would be better for you to follow what’s right for you and your survival. After all, her divine blood can be used—to heal you, or for the rocket to guarantee you can make it up to the Artificial Satellite to see your family again. I believe that’s what Nozomi would want for you.” Kamyuhn’s head turns upward, toward the sky. The sun burns Darumi’s eyes.
Darumi puts her free hand—the one not holding onto Tsubasa—above her head to block out the sun. She wants to limp back to the darkness of Last Defense Academy.
“I hope my family dies,” Darumi rasps.
Kamyuhn looks back towards her—someone like Kamyuhn, with Nozomi and Eva and every ounce of love that’s ever been offered to a girl like her, she could never understand what Darumi is going through. Every glance from her spits on Darumi’s dreams.
“Then it’s better to stay,” Kamyuhn says lightly. “As will I.”
“I never said that,” Darumi says. Something is stuck in her throat like all that rot that’s been pervading her life. Something heavy, grief pressing down against her chest. She wants to live a human life, even if all that’s done is cause her pain. No—she wanted to live a human life with Tsubasa, and with Takumi, and with Yugamu. She doesn’t actually want to live in the ruins of this school, unless Tsubasa were here with her.
Kamyuhn simply nods in response, this time. “V’ehxness was my aunt,” she says, looking over to the woman’s body laid out flat in a sea of corpses. “I didn’t know her well at all, but I think we all knew that she couldn’t be allowed to live.”
Darumi hates knowing that. She hates knowing how human Kamyuhn is, and hates the way her young face morphs with sorrow.
Settling herself on her knees, hand still wrapped around Tsubasa’s, Darumi almost doesn’t want to speak at all. “What’s the point of any of it?” she starts, exhausted. “I’m just going to die here anyway. I’ll become part of Mistress Tsubasa. You can bury your aunt. Who cares what Nozomi would want? She didn’t know anything.”
Kamyuhn’s lips press together. “Take that back.”
“Nuh uh.”
Kamyuhn sucks in a breath, and then lifts herself to her feet. She’s blocking out the sun—a lone figure standing above Darumi. She’s silent for a long moment, worrying her lip, and then speaks again: “I will use her body to show those more trusted than myself that she’s been killed, so they can spread the word.”
What a noble thing to do! Darumi is completely empty; Kamyuhn has a future after all, and Darumi has nothing.
“Go away,” Darumi says. “Let me die.”
Darumi will bleed onto the ground here, ground connected to her school, connected to her girlfriend, connected to all her friends who died for a future that hasn’t mattered since the killing game began. She’ll wait until the flies come to fill her body with maggots.
“I’ll come back later,” Kamyuhn says softly.
She shuts her eyes tightly until colors bleed into the edges, and then opens them. Kamyuhn has already stepped back, and Darumi stares upward at the endless sky. The world is so vast and heavy, weighing on her.
If she stays here, that will be the end of everything; Kamyuhn will handle herself and Darumi will lie here. But Darumi knows she won’t stay here, because Darumi thinks about the future and about the insects that will destroy Tsubasa’s body, and she needs Tsubasa’s body to be treated with care. Tsubasa cared about things like that. Maybe Darumi doesn’t even care about herself, and maybe Darumi would’ve wanted to get her own cryptoglobin cannibalized for the greater good, but Tsubasa—her dear Tsubasa, who wanted to find a new life in an apartment that they shared—she wouldn’t want that.
Tsubasa should’ve had a funeral with her grandpa, and… whoever else she cared about. Who knows who they are? Darumi doesn’t. Maybe Takumi did. They’ll never know now.
And even worse, Darumi knows that even if Tsubasa wasn’t here, that maybe even before Kamyuhn returns, Darumi will rise from her open air grave and walk back to Last Defense Academy in order to live. Darumi will leave Tsubasa. She knows, because Darumi has tried to die over, and over, and over again, and every time she’s kept living anyway.
This isn’t the end, and it feels like that fact is going to carve out Darumi’s heart from her chest. No matter how much she wants to lie next to Tsubasa and hold her hand until the world is absent of warmth, love, and everything else good, something is going to pull her body away until the day she has a tragic, bloody death for all of humanity to watch.
It’ll happen even if Darumi will never find any other reason to live. Maybe even especially then—if she knows she’ll never be happy again, she’ll never have to hope for it. Not ever.
So Darumi stands on shaking legs. She lifts herself slowly, one body part at a time; she feels like she’s never walked before, but now she faces toward Kamyuhn, and toward safety, and toward taking care of Tsubasa for the final time.
She pauses, briefly, standing unsteadily next to Tsubasa’s corpse. She thinks about plunging her knife into Tsubasa’s chest, feeling her energy run wildly in her veins next to Hiruko.
Breathing that thought in, she turns away, and walks slowly after Kamyuhn.
When Kamyuhn spots her, her eyes widen, but she comes back for her, fidgeting with her sleeves and ushering Darumi into the school, asking no questions.
Darumi hasn’t died yet—too much of a coward to follow Tsubasa by her own hand, to end herself without hesitating and dropping the knife. So because she won’t do it until Tsubasa is gone for good and despair consumes her even more than it already has, she follows Kamyuhn inside and then sits on the stairs while Kamyuhn runs off and comes back with a large box of supplies, cleaning Darumi’s wounds. Her arm is slowly, painfully wrapped in clean bandages, and then Darumi pulls on a clean sweater, somehow relieved at the way it hurts when she moves.
Air hisses through Darumi’s teeth when she rolls her shoulder. She meets eyes with Kamyuhn, and the image of the corpses outside flashes in her mind. Before she can think, her mouth opens, and she buries the thought of what’s waiting for them after all of this.
“Well doc, what’s the damage?” Darumi asks Kamyuhn.
Kamyuhn shakes her head. “I’m not a doctor. I barely know anything.”
Not true, Darumi thinks, remembering the escape pod still waiting for them, and wrinkles her nose at the lingering scent of disinfectant. Well, if her shoulder stops working, that’s Darumi’s fault. That’s her fault for surviving. She probably won’t survive for very long, anyway—just long enough to watch Tsubasa get buried, and then off she’ll go into oblivion.
But for all she knows, Kamyuhn might stop her from going.
The life has been sucked out of Darumi, but she forces herself to move. In the worst circumstances, she always keeps moving, inexplicably. Right this second, she knows that she wants to go back to Tsubasa—needs to visit everyone while Kamyuhn checks on who-knows-what.
(Checking the escape pod, Kamyuhn said, voice wavering. Not like Darumi cares if that’s true or not.)
First she visits Yugamu; he’s lying face down near V’ehxness, a gorey hole ripped through him. He was stabbed by V’ehxness’s sword, Darumi thinks—stabbed about five billion times if Darumi had to guess, from how many times Yugamu kept being revived. Darumi thinks he was trying to protect Takumi, which didn’t work. He really tried, though.
The twins, too, were trying to protect each other. Ima had fallen before Kako, Darumi is sure—she hadn’t been watching them, but in the corner of her eye she thinks she remembers the flash of his red wings. Kako had screamed, Darumi thinks—again, she isn’t sure. She remembers someone screaming, and someone crying out in pain. She remembers V’ehxness getting shot but the attack not getting through her defenses.
Darumi remembers bloodsplatter hitting her shoes, and having to blink away the gore of her own death and her final revival. After that, her adrenaline had taken over.
Nozomi was the first to die permanently, but Darumi couldn’t get a good look at her body while she fought. Darumi knows she was first because the others had yelled, because Nozomi couldn’t come back. Lying here, her face is covered in dirt and barely wiped away blood, her eyes closed but her limbs twisted at an uncomfortable angle; Darumi walks around her body back towards Tsubasa’s.
Takumi had been fighting near Tsubasa. Darumi hadn’t.
Darumi looks down at Takumi’s lifeless eyes, his stupid dead expression that stares at nothing. If she closed his eyes, maybe he’d look like he was just sleeping. What a stupid thought. She’s thinking in fiction again—no amount of caring for his body would erase the blood loss that renders his face pale and uncanny.
“It’s your fault,” Darumi spits out. “You were supposed to protect Mistress Tsubasa, like I was trying to do. If I was too far away to die in her place, you were supposed to. Look at how useless you are. You tried to save us without telling Mistress Tsubasa about it, and look where it led—look what happened when you made yourself the bad guy.”
Darumi kicks Takumi. It’s petty and stupid, but it feels good, the first good thing since they stepped off that fucking escape pod.
“Useless,” she repeats, letting all her vile thoughts out into that single word. Kicking a dead body is stupid, but she does it anyway, and then again, stepping on Takumi’s chest with all her weight and kicking until she feels the sharp sensation of Takumi’s ribs breaking.
Darumi shudders and then buckles over beside his body, knees stinging against the dirt. “No, no, no, no,” she says, muffled into her hand. “No, I can’t, no, no.”
She doesn’t hate Takumi. She hates him, but not like this.
Her body feels cold with dread. Darumi is shaking, she thinks distantly, her body shuddering and shuddering and shuddering. She felt like this after Hiruko died too, hours after the red-hot feeling of Hiruko’s cryptoglobin singing in her veins faded and she was left cold and alone in her room. Alone in her bed, waiting for Hiruko to reappear, and replaying the memory of her death on repeat. Eventually just resigning herself to die for the killing game.
All Darumi ever wanted was to die to save someone. And she couldn’t even get that much.
And Tsubasa—for all that Darumi loves her—only understood how to pull Darumi out of the darkness, not anything about what happened before the killing game. Tsubasa had known pain, but she hadn’t known Darumi’s pain—she’d only known the surface of what they could be, an unknown potential waiting for them in their new life after the war. Darumi had been prepared to dedicate herself to Tsubasa, to let her see all of Darumi’s pain and love, because Tsubasa was the first person—more than even Hiruko—to promise Darumi forever.
And for the first time, Darumi had wanted forever, or at least as much time as Tsubasa would give to her.
Darumi muffles a sob into her hand. If she were unable to cry it might be better, because once the tears start flowing down her cheeks she can’t stop. She can’t stop crying about Tsubasa, and Hiruko, and Takumi, and Yugamu, and the twins, and Nozomi. Darumi was supposed to die for them, like Nozomi died for Kamyuhn, like Hiruko died for Darumi.
She needs to dig a grave for Tsubasa. If she’s not going to die, then that’s the least she can do for her first friend. (Second friend? Did Hiruko count or not? Now she’ll never know.)
But for now, Darumi muffles apologies. Takumi isn’t here to hear them.
It’s painful to dig the grave when her arm is straining with pain.
If she could, she’d kill herself and let the Revive-O-Matic bring her back. Kamyuhn already verified that the Revive-O-Matic was burnt all the way out in her report when she came back—no revivals for Darumi, no killing herself and savoring the pain, no repentance for not dying for good like everyone else. Darumi is miserable, an empty cavern in her chest.
Kamyuhn doesn’t stop her from digging. She even gets Darumi a small shovel after seeing her digging at the dirt with her bare hands—a shovel which Darumi almost wanted to reject, because who the hell cares about Darumi right now?
But—
When Kamyuhn joins her, shoveling dirt faster than Darumi can, Darumi can’t help but be grateful. A pained whine comes out of her lips with each push, the strain on her wound pulling at her nerves. She can’t stop until she lays Tsubasa to rest, but it hurts. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
Darumi’s arm gives out and the shovel drops down into the dirt. She gulps lungfuls of air, but the rest of her body feels like it’s a puppet with cut strings. She’s too tired to move. She’s too empty to fix this.
“You should go rest,” Kamyuhn says.
“Can’t,” Darumi pushes out of her lungs, adjusting her grip on the shovel. Her hand feels slick with sweat, or blood, or mud. “Mistress Tsubasa’s body needs—”
“I will take care of it.”
A hand meets Darumi’s head. She pets Darumi slowly, like Darumi is a feral animal. Like she’s something to calm down. And maybe she is, because she wants to bite Kamyuhn’s hand off—but if she had the energy to do that, she would just get up and keep digging, so she doesn’t. She leans into the touch because she has no other choice.
“Go away.”
“I’m going to keep digging,” Kamyuhn says. “It’s the least I can do. And I’ll dig a grave for Nozomi, too.”
A vulnerable part of Darumi lurches. “What about the others?”
“I will get help to dig their graves. I know the people of Futurum. I’m not… close with them,” she hesitates, like a nervous child, like she doesn’t want Darumi to know. “I don’t have anyone I’m close to anymore, and… I don’t know what I’ll do now. But I can trust them, and I’m sure they’ll accept me back. They will be happy to see that V’ehxness is dead.”
“I don’t want them to see Mistress Tsubasa,” Darumi says petulantly.
“Then we can bury her first,” Kamyuhn says. Her hand leaves Darumi’s head, and Darumi lifts her head as Kamyuhn continues to dig. The end of her skirt is covered in dirt, her outfit once so pristine now dirtied with labor. Darumi watches sweat fall down Kamyuhn’s forehead.
Darumi might be the worst person on the whole planet, letting her take the burden of Darumi’s suffering. Maybe that’s why everyone else here had to die, so that Darumi didn’t have any competition.
No, even then, Darumi would still be worse than anyone.
Shaking off that thought, Darumi walks sluggishly away from the grave, and falls onto the hard dirt under the warm sun.
Tsubasa’s eyes are closed, her face pinched with discomfort even in death. The makeshift coffin is nothing special, but it’ll hold her. Darumi presses a kiss to her forehead and feels like a total creep. She only really knew Tsubasa for a short time; Tsubasa was never as dedicated to Darumi as she was to Takumi. She knew that. She knew that she was secondary. But Tsubasa was first for Darumi, so she’ll steal one last kiss before Tsubasa goes.
Tsubasa’s hands had been really warm. Her fingers had pressed into Darumi’s face when they kissed, and Darumi traces the path of them with her own hand. They never had a chance to go further, it was never the right time. They never had a chance.
The killing game did this; if there had been more of them fighting against V’ehxness, they wouldn’t have lost.
Darumi is so sick of killing games; she barely even knows herself anymore.
She wants to end this, to follow Tsubasa into the grave; she’ll sleep next to her at last, press herself against a body that makes no warmth and get suffocated by the dirt above them. She imagines that Tsubasa will still smell faintly like a mechanics shop, just like the day before they were supposed to escape, when Darumi had pulled Tsubasa close and cackled when she found out where Tsubasa was ticklish. Tsubasa’s laugh was beautiful, reverberating through Darumi’s whole body.
Darumi really loved having a reason to live. Maybe losing her is what she gets for wanting that killing game in the first place.
Darumi helps cover Tsubasa with dirt. That’s all she can do.
Darumi stays inside Last Defense Academy while Kamyuhn leaves. The lights don’t turn on because the baby is dead—just like Takumi’s time travel story, no longer there to power the school. Takumi might have killed him, but Darumi can’t even understand why anymore. It didn’t let them go to the Artificial Satellite. It only kept them here.
If she could’ve given her cryptoglobin to get Tsubasa far away from this place, it would’ve been good. Easy, even. If only V’ehxness hadn’t appeared, and if only Takumi’s plan had worked, and if only, if only, if only—Darumi’s brain swims with regrets. She can’t even ask Takumi why he did it. She has no answers, and never will.
Or maybe she already knows why Takumi took that risk. She was right there with him, when Tsubasa and Yugamu took his hands in theirs and told him that they’d stay with him. And Darumi wanted to be with them—all of them.
So maybe she gets why killing the baby to save them was almost a good idea.
But it’s over now. Every trace of hope has been shattered, leaving her here. She lays in the dark and stares at the ceiling and thinks that if Kamyuhn doesn’t come back with help it might not be so bad after all.
Darumi will just die here. That’s all this is.
She stays in Tsubasa’s room, which feels almost cruel. She curls up in Tsubasa’s bed and tries to ignore the way Tsubasa spent so long in the underground room with the escape pod instead of here, fawning over tools and machinery until the very last second; Darumi tries to ignore the unfamiliarity of it, how they barely spent time together until it was almost time to leave.
She thinks of moving to Hiruko’s room, and shudders. Hiruko’s room is empty; Darumi knows because she checked on it before they left.
There was nothing Hiruko left behind to remember her by, or at least nothing Darumi could easily carry with her. Not even a hairclip or a spare pair of glasses, just clothes not in Darumi’s size and stale air. It was terribly lonely, and so much like Hiruko, and so beautiful that Darumi felt guilty for trying to remember her in the first place when Hiruko runs in her veins as undeserved power.
Darumi wants to rot alongside Hiruko, wherever her husk is—to pretend to feel her arms around her one last time. She doesn’t know what to do to remember any of them, now that writing her hopeful, painful stories isn’t an option anymore.
Should she raid Tsubasa’s stuff too? Go to Takumi’s room, or Yugamu’s? Nozomi’s stuff will be Kamyuhn’s, obviously. What about Ima and Kako’s—should she grab one of the twin’s photos and pretend that she knew Kako, like the only people who cared about her aren’t dead and soon to be buried? What would she gain from digging through the things they left on the escape pod rushing out to battle, anyway?
Darumi lays her head on Tsubasa’s pillow, and doesn’t belong here.
She could go to the satellite alone and tell everyone they’re dead. Maybe that’s how she should remember them, even though there’s nothing to go back to other than grief.
The idea is miserable. Tsubasa’s pillow grows wet with salty tears.
Darumi isn’t expecting a knock on the door. She’s been lying there for over a day, but there’s no clock so she can’t tell—she hasn’t eaten anything, has only wasted away in Tsubasa’s room with no care for herself, her injury, or anything.
But the knock comes anyway. Quick and loud, banging.
“I’m here!” Darumi calls, louder than she expected herself to sound, her own voice echoing.
She drags herself to her feet and toward the door. Opening it a crack reveals a frazzled Kamyuhn, whose expression falls into relief once Darumi appears.
“I thought you’d be in your own room, not this one,” Kamyuhn says. “Are you doing okay?”
Darumi doesn’t want to be worried over. She smiles sharply, and does her best normal-Darumi impression. “You know, in some games, if I opened the door to a cute girl like you I’d instantly get stabbed. Even though I already got stabbed!” She does a cheerful little hum, and steps outside. “Burial time, right?”
Kamyuhn nods slowly. Her eyes linger on Darumi’s face. “Your makeup is smudged,” she says.
Darumi frowns. “Rude! You’re showing me up with yours, anyway.” She pokes Kamyuhn’s cheek, where perfect triangles of orange makeup stay there. She’s perfect, pristine, a genius little girl that Darumi will never be like in any way apart from losing someone they cared for in the same battle.
Kamyuhn flinches away. “Stop it. I just… I have to look presentable for them! That’s all!”
Aw, now Darumi feels bad. Her hands fall to her sides, and she approaches the edge of the roof where they can see out to the battlefield they left behind. The battlefield has a bunch of strangers in it, as Kamyuhn had promised. They’re standing with shovels, talking in voices Darumi can’t hear. Everything ends once the bodies are buried.
Darumi can’t see herself right now, but she must look awful—makeup running off her face, a monstrous grief consuming her body.
Everything about her and Kamyuhn is different. There’s a gap between them, just like Darumi feels between herself and everything else in the entire world. She turns her back on the field littered with long-dried blood, holding the vision of it in her mind for only a second longer before smiling at Kamyuhn. “You’re pretty lucky, huh?” she asks.
Kamyuhn seems startled, eyes widening. “Huh?”
“I don’t have anywhere to go. Not like you. You have so, so many people who are willing to follow you and bury your enemy’s bodies for you. But us, we fucked it all up. We lost everything. And that’s—that’s our fault, for not being good enough at this whole war thing.”
Her smile shakes. She just can’t stop suffering, even if she tries to hide it. She killed Tsubasa by not protecting her, by not being near her. She’s never coming back to her room, and she and Darumi are never going to have a future together. She’s already gone and buried, and Darumi won’t even get to look at her face anymore.
Kamyuhn puts her hand on Darumi’s arm. “Now that V’ehxness is dead, we can try to talk to humans. We can try to end the war.”
That kind of thinking is so far away from Darumi, she might as well be in another universe. “Who cares,” she says, tilting her head back to look at the sky—cut through by clouds, but the brilliant blue watches her down here. Miserable. “I don’t care about the war. I only care about the killing game, and that’s over already.”
She wants to go back. She wants to find a way to die during the killing game for Tsubasa.
“Then you don’t need to worry about it,” Kamyuhn says softly. “I’ll take care of it. I can try, at least, and you’ll always have a place to stay wherever I am.”
“Why do you care so much about me?” Darumi asks, a question born of the pit in Darumi’s stomach, the part of her that still cries that none of this matters now that everyone is dead. “Is it because of Nozomi? She’s already gone. She won’t even care if you fuck this up. She’s just one human.”
“My mother cared for her deeply,” Kamyuhn says. “And while we may not have been sisters from birth… it was nice. Having an older sister was good, and I wanted her to keep caring for me, the way she wanted to. I want to end this war, knowing that we can connect to each other like that. It’s what my mother would’ve wanted.”
Darumi chokes out a laugh. “You would love anyone who gave you attention.”
That statement is met with resounding silence. When Darumi glances back at Kamyuhn, her eyes are downcast, her posture stiff. “Maybe so,” she says slowly. “But in a war, isn’t that all we can do?”
Darumi chokes out something that almost sounds like a laugh. She wants to cry all over again—she falls backward against the fencing; part of her hopes that the metal will bend and break under her weight, sending her toppling down the school walls.
She wants to tell Kamyuhn again that war doesn’t matter to her. This war is just the thing that put her in this position. Everything else—the continuation of the fighting, the reason she was brought to Last Defense Academy in the first place, or humanity’s future—is a loose thread of Darumi’s life for her to pick at some other day, when the grief isn’t choking her.
Darumi has never loved anyone right. The idea of loving someone in the middle of her suffering is just what love is to her, and look where it left her.
“War is so fucking stupid,” Darumi says. “Everyone died. Why were we even fighting anyway?”
Kamyuhn stands next to her, eyes downcast. “I wonder,” she says cryptically. Her voice is so quiet it’s almost a whisper. “I wonder why I suggested that Takumi continue to kill…? It seemed logical at the time. It seemed like the right thing, to save everyone.”
“Why did you want to come up to the satellite with us, if that’s how you feel?” Darumi asks. It’s not as if Darumi wants to blame Kamyuhn, but there’s nothing else she can do here except continue to blame herself for living. “I don’t know why you’d be that stupid. The only reason I went was to be with Mistress Tsubasa—I didn’t care about anything else. You’re not like me. Not even with Nozomi.”
Kamyuhn shakes her head. “I don’t know. I know I just wanted to do all I could for her. And the same for all of you, to make sure we all survived against V’ehxness—otherwise there would be nothing we could do. I knew she would kill us brutally. Besides, there are things that those on the satellite know that you don’t—possibly things that I know too, and if I could make it easier, by creating a bridge to Futurum, I—I wanted to try.” She bites her lip. “Maybe that was stupid.”
“Yeah,” Darumi says. “It kinda was. Lucky you that you’re free of us now, right?”
Kamyuhn gives her a glare, arms curling around herself. She looks more like a child than ever. “Now we have to deal with whatever they send next. But I don’t have to do it alone. If I really am lucky, even after losing my sister,” she looks up at Darumi, her face now colored with desperation Darumi has never seen before, “then you’ll help me.”
Darumi stares. “I don’t think you want me to do that. I’m a killing game freakazoid human who’s gonna stink up your entire operation.” She forces herself to smile.
“But you will help me,” Kamyuhn says firmly. “You can mourn first, of course. I’ll do the same. Think about it, and I’ll make sure they help you.” She gestures out at the people she brought with her.
Darumi’s smile falters. It takes too much energy to smile now. “I don’t know,” she says softly.
Darumi has never lived the way Kamyuhn does. She only knows ruin and pain and people kicking her when she’s down. She only knows the gentleness of Tsubasa’s lips and the adrenaline of a killing game. Even mourning is foreign. She can’t be anything to Kamyuhn at all.
“Follow me.” Kamyuhn pulls Darumi’s fingers away from the fencing. She puts her smaller hand in Darumi’s, tugging her away from the side of the building; Darumi lets her. “You can think later, after the burial. They were your friends too, and they cared about you, so you can cry to your heart's content.”
But they didn’t care enough, Darumi wants to say, but doesn’t. They didn’t care enough to take her with them when they died. Didn’t care enough to be her roommates on the Artificial Satellite, to tease her back for stealing Takumi’s girl, to play games with her, to find out what happens after a killing game alongside her. Even the scar from her neck deep down to her stomach, her last reminder of Yugamu—that faded when she revived. All of it will disappear. All they cared about her just meant she’s missing Tsubasa alone.
She wonders if they cared about her at all, or if she was just convenient. If she died for them, then simply being of use to them would’ve been okay—but she didn’t. She’s left here. Unused. Alive, just because they died and she didn’t—there’s no meaning here, no storyline that makes this make sense.
Darumi follows Kamyuhn down the stairs slowly. She doesn’t know anything. Not about the future, or about love, or friendship, or war. She just knows that after every killing game story she’s ever loved, either everyone is supposed to be dead, or the survivors will suffer from the memories forever.
She already knows which ending is waiting for her. All the hope she once had was destroyed instantly, the moment she realized she was alive.
She used to cry just to cry. The idea of crying from something other than grief seems stupid now; crying because her emotions would explode out of her otherwise; crying because everyone else already thought she was a freak—what was one more thing to make them hate being around her?
What does it mean to have friends still lying out there, a reality worse than any horror visual novel Darumi has ever loved? Friends who maybe used to hate her but didn’t want to see Darumi cry, who died wanting her to live with them, even though she’s never known herself to be good at surviving?
Darumi starts crying before they’re even outside.
Long after the bodies have been buried, the sun sets on Last Defense Academy, and Darumi leaves. Not for good—she can’t help but look back at the shape of Tsubasa’s grave marker, longing to return to her.
Instead, she follows the Futurans back to their camp, where they’ll care for her like one of their own. As if she’s not one of the humans who killed everything in her path and caused them misery until V’ehxness was gone. Darumi knows human selfishness—has felt its sting since the very moment she was born, so she keeps waiting for them to accuse her and kick her to the curb. But like idiots, they seem to think she’s on their side, since she’s not going to the satellite, and since Kamyuhn is vouching for her.
Mostly, she thinks she’s just tired.
Despite all those years of wanting to end her suffering, Darumi has never actually killed herself, so maybe she won’t now, either; she just follows Kamyuhn. The Futurans and Kamyuhn need her, since the humans don’t have cryptoglobin—they won’t be able to understand the Futurans. Darumi will be their translator, if things work out—if she can survive that long.
Eventually, Darumi wants to go back to Tsubasa’s grave, and tell her that she did something with the life she didn’t deserve. Tsubasa would like that, probably.
She can’t stop looking back at Last Defense Academy—the shape now in the distance, the dying sun’s rays reflecting off the smooth metal sides of it. The battlefield left behind, a battle that Darumi will never return to again if she’s not dragged into it by fate. The flames are gone, and soon the night will swallow the academy and all the graves whole. It’s a whimpering anticlimax, a war still going despite the weapons for it now buried underground. All except for one.
It’s the ending Darumi deserves, she thinks.