Murderer in the Flower of Death

  Bing, bong…

  Bang, bong…

  A hoarse chime rang out from the warped speaker like a death rattle. At the sound, Kyousuke lifted his face from his desk and opened his eyes.

  “……”

  For one merciful instant, he couldn’t recall where he was, and then, in the blink of an eye, the memory crashed down on him, and his body filled with weariness and despair.

  Scratching his head through his tousled black hair, Kyousuke surveyed his dismal surroundings and sighed. Why did I get stuck at a school like this? The unpainted concrete walls boxing him in on all sides were spiderwebbed with chips and cracks, and as if that wasn’t enough, vulgar graffiti was scribbled over nearly every inch of their surface.

  “FUCK,” “I’ll kill ya!” “Die die die die Kill kill kill kill,” “One bad bitch + another bad bitch = kill everybody,” “SCHOOL KILLER,” “I wanna XXX that cutie Kurumiya,” “ if you wanna get your shit wrecked,” “ Too late!” and so on. “I wish the world would become a peaceful pla—” appeared to have been written on one surface in blood before being abruptly cut off. The “artists” were as enthusiastic as they were obscene, and the gaudily colored text scrawled its way across the walls, the desks, the chairs, and even the ceiling.

  However, what struck Kyousuke as the most strange and repulsive was not the crumbling state of the concrete walls, or the crude graffiti that covered them, or even the thick iron bars fitted to every narrow window. No, the weirdest, scariest, most odious part, Kyousuke thought, was his classmates.

  The most pressing example of which was the male student sitting to the right of Kyousuke in the middle of the front row. “Huh? What the hell’re you lookin’ at?” he growled from beneath a Mohawk dyed a deep shade of crimson. Kyousuke couldn’t help but notice the ropy muscles peeking out from beneath the boy’s loosened striped necktie and torn dress shirt. “I’m the kinda guy who likes to take out trash like you!”

  All of a sudden the Mohawked youth had him by the collar, and Kyousuke could see that a number of the many piercings covering the larger boy’s face swayed and rattled when he talked. He certainly has a youthful vigor, Kyousuke thought to himself. Not exactly the kind of guy you want to get involved with, but then he’s just the type that’s impossible to ignore. Sweating profusely, Kyousuke did his best to force a smile.

  “Ha-ha… Well, it’s nothing? It’s just…you really have quite the striking look!” Kyousuke stammered. “Your…um…fashion sense, it’s so…turn of the century? Especially that hairstyle! Makes you look just like a rooster! Perfect for a cock like you, really! …Ha-ha-ha! So…how about letting me go?”

  “What the hell?! I’ll fuckin’ kill you!!”

  Any attempt by Kyousuke to talk it out was smashed to pieces by that reaction. With a high-pitched war cry, a muscle-bound arm lifted Kyousuke’s body into the air, bringing him face-to-highly-pierced-face with the larger boy, whose eyes bulged with rage, and for a moment, it looked as though Kyousuke would find himself hooked to a slab of meat and metal jewelry.

  He didn’t so much as flinch. “…Ah, sorry. It’s my bad, so let’s just calm down, yeah?” Kyousuke’s smile had disappeared, and he stared down the older boy, point-blank. “You see, I got all worked up from being thrown into this shithole against my will”—with a sharp crack, Kyousuke smashed his forehead into the face of his startled opponent—“so you outta know that if you start something, I’m gonna finish it, you Mohawked bastard!”

  The rest of the class, most of whom had been looking on with a kind of hungry anticipation, burst into an uproar, eager to see one or the other participant (and probably expecting it to be Kyousuke) end up on a stretcher—or in a body bag. The only thing connecting this bloodthirsty crowd to a group of normal students in their proper school uniforms was their age.

  “All right, everyone, let’s watch ’im die!” To Mohawk’s credit, he’d already recovered from Kyousuke’s sudden head-butt and seemed to want to put on a bit of grandstanding for his peers. “But since I was just getting bored, how about we make it good, eh?” Most of the other students were practically drooling at the promise of a violent spectacle.

  “Such a pain…new school, new batch of hot-blooded assholes to deal with.” Kyousuke could feel his fingers twitch in involuntary anticipation. “You sure you don’t wanna let this one go, Cock-head?”

  “Heh-heh-heh-heh!” Mohawk, it turned out, did not want to let this one go. “I’m gonna pull out yer nails with pliers, one by one…then yer fingers, one by one…”

  Among the hungry crowd, few faces stood out. There was the boy muttering nonsense to himself, as though reciting some kind of poem or prayer or mantra. There was the timid, mousy-looking girl rushing around in a dizzy panic, stammering, “H-h-h-how awful! S-s-s-someone, a-a-a-anyone! Stop him!” And then there was the older girl leisurely painting her fingernails, stifling a yawn as she ignored her surroundings.

  The more Kyousuke looked, the less the crowd seemed to fit together, to make sense. But he knew. Forced into this wretched school, crammed into this crappy classroom…Kyousuke knew, without a doubt, that there was not a single decent one among them.

  But what does that say about you? asked a small voice in the back of his mind. Kyousuke scowled. No, I’m nothing like them. Looking out over his classmates’ faces, he felt nothing but disgust swell up from the deepest reaches of his heart. And he knew that they deserved it.

  “Fine, then, Cock-head! Let’s go! I’ll do a little surgery on that ugly face…with my fists.”

  “Wha—?! I’ve had it with you, asshole!” Still holding Kyousuke’s lapel with his left hand, Mohawk brandished his right arm menacingly. “I’m gonna kill ya!” His rugged fist, a tight ball of muscle, pulled back and—

  Rattle rattle rattle…wham!

  At that exact moment, the door at the front of the classroom slammed open to reveal a lone girl standing on the threshold. Judging by the name-brand suit and bundle of papers under her arm, the girl was a teacher, though she certainly looked too young for the part.

  “Heya, jackasses! Whatcha up to, hmm? You want me to discipline you all at once?” Scowling at the motley group of students, each of whom found themselves frozen in place, was a sweet young girl with bobbed hair and a voice of authority. She couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall, and if you’d replaced the suit and papers with a child’s dress and backpack, she would have been the perfect picture of an elementary schooler.

  A moment of stunned silence fell over the class. It didn’t last long.

  “Pfh. Discipline us? This little miss?” Mohawk had taken his hands off of Kyousuke and was now pointing at the girl standing in the doorway, laughing and holding his stomach. “Oh, wooooooow—Gya-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  The girl’s eyebrow twitched in irritation, but she kept an otherwise calm demeanor and approached the battered lectern at the front of the classroom, depositing her stack of documents with a slight stretch and a grunt. “Weeeelllll, since it is the first day and all, why don’t we overlook it this one little time, okay?” Her fingers brushed the ends of her bobbed hair unconsciously, as if they were bothering her. “Now, before I go and change my mind, why don’t you cut the laughter, hmm? Or else it’ll be straight to discipline, no delay. I will absolutely not forgive back talk.”

  Mohawk licked his lips in cruel anticipation. “Well, isn’t this interesting?” With both hands, he grasped the back of a nearby chair. “Let’s do this!” In a split second, Mohawk had hoisted the chair overhead, trampled the desk with a leap, and rushed at the girl. There was no hesitation or indecision. No moderation or mercy at all. “Don’cha scream and cry, little miss! Hyeaaaaah!” The chair swung
downward, directly at the top of the small girl’s head, and it seemed her fragile skull would be crushed under the blow.

  “Hmph. You idiot…the one who’s going to scream and cry…is you! Time to die!” Out of nowhere, an iron pipe swung toward the bridge of Mohawk’s glittering, pierced nose.

  The crunch of the blow was audible. Fresh blood, dark and ruby red, sprayed from Mohawk’s face, soiling the girl’s soft, pale cheek. He let out a dull cry and then crumpled, chair clattering to the floor beside him.

  “Good grief. Seems you don’t know your manners at all, jackass… Don’t worry, though! I’ll teach you plenty, starting right now!” The girl’s mouth was pulled back into a sadistic smile. “And what will I teach you? Why, fear and loyalty, of course! Now, you might die in the process…but surely you don’t mind? Right? Right?”

  As small as she had seemed standing in the doorway, the girl appeared to tower over Mohawk now. “…Heya, jackass! How about an answer?” Mohawk only groaned and writhed on the floor, clutching his smashed face. “C’mon, let’s hear it!” The girl brandished the iron pipe above her head. “And your answer is?”

  The dingy tile floor seemed to drop out from under Kyousuke’s feet, and he fell to his knees. What is this…? Who are these people? Why is the teacher like, like, like this…? From his lowered position, several desks and chairs blocked Kyousuke’s view to the front of the room, so that he could just barely see the bloodstained pipe rise and fall again and again, accompanied by thick, wet crunching noises, scattered cries of “St-stop—” and “Can this be?!” and “My eyes! My eeeeeeyes!” and great crimson plumes of blood that painted the girl and the wall behind her.

  After several agonizing moments, there was a final dull thud, and then everything was still. “……Hmm? Looks like he already passed out! Or maybe he’s dead? Eh, whichever’s fine.” Speckled with blood and grease and shouldering the now bent iron pipe, the girl returned to the lectern. “Hey, you! How long do you plan on lying there? Do I hafta teach you your manners, too?”

  Kyousuke snapped back to his senses to find a pair of big, round, charming eyes, glittering with adrenaline, looking down at him. “…Wha—?!” He scrambled to his feet, clawing at the back of his chair for support, feeling that if he didn’t get up right then, he would absolutely die. It was only after he had frantically slid into his seat that Kyousuke remembered to breathe.

  “Heya, jackass, how about an answer, hmmm?” The pipe, still covered in carnage, twitched in the girl’s hand. “And your answer is?”

  “Y-yeeeeees!!” he answered weakly.

  The girl’s tongue darted out, lapping a bit of blood from her soiled cheek. “…Yes? I see.” She was smiling, a wide, jagged expression. “So you really want to be punished that badly?”

  It was all too absurd. Kyousuke frantically looked left, then right in desperation. “N-no, that’s not it! I meant that I will follow you obediently, teacher! It was a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding!” With his mind’s eye, he placed a mosaic over the ocean of blood, the broken shape at its center, and the human figures scattered about it, shutting them all out of his consciousness behind a mental filter.

  The girl snorted, almost childlike. “Hmph…well, I am feeling magnanimous today. Now, that feeling that you have toward me? That’s fear, mmmkay? And it’d be an awfully good idea to remember it veeery well. Heh-heh-heh…I wonder if the rest of you have learned?” She turned to the rest of the class. “At this institution, when you bite back at me, it always, without exception, turns out like this! If you value your lives, don’t oppose me! Obey me! Flatter me! Get on your knees! You filthy pig bastards!”

  Her small voice was thunder in the silent, bloodstained classroom, and with a flick of the wrist, she brought the iron pipe up and then down again, showering nearby students in slick gore. “Any questions?”

  In the midst of this nightmare tableau, where anyone sane would have curled silently into a fetal ball, the older girl to Kyousuke’s left spoke a bored “No, ma’am” and continued applying tiny rhinestones and Swarovski crystals to her vermilion nails.

  Aside from her, all were silent; even the atmosphere of the room had been beaten to death.

  “Well, then,” the teacher continued, unfazed. “I think a little self-introduction is overdue. My name is Hijiri Kurumiya. Starting today, I’ll be your homeroom teacher for the year. My favorite words are submission and domination. My least favorite words are brat and pip-squeak. I may look young…,” and she fiddled again with the ends of her bobbed hair, “but I’m in the bloom of my twenties. Nice to meet you.”

  It was not, in fact, nice to meet her, but nobody was stupid or suicidal enough to say so. Satisfied with the mute response of the class, Kurumiya continued, “Okay! Now, I know just now there was some idiot laughing…” Nobody dared look toward Mohawk’s crumpled, broken remains. “…so I waaas planning to thoroughly break you all in, but…wouldn’t that be unfriendly? Heh-heh…it might not be as satisfying, but for now I guess I’ll give you passing marks.”

  As she spoke, Kurumiya slowly surveyed the classroom, scrutinizing each student’s face in turn. After she had stared into Kyousuke’s trembling eyes for what seemed like an eternity but was probably closer to ten or twelve seconds, she suddenly relaxed, her cruel excuse for a grin gave way to a beaming smile, and in a singsong voice she recited a refrain like a requiem.

  “Welcome to Purgatorium Remedial Academy—you murderers!”

  Sludge over Ground

  GOOD-BYE NORMAL, HELLO ABNORMAL

  FIRST PERIOD

  Kyousuke Kamiya was a totally normal boy. He looked normal and dressed normally, got normal grades, had normal motor reflexes. His totally normal hobbies included music appreciation and games. He had normal plans to graduate from the local middle school in half a year, and his academic aspirations were completely unremarkable: His sights were set on the nearby central public high school. And it was this completely normal fifteen-year-old student who…

  “…”

  …had found himself in an old storehouse that was halfway to being a mausoleum.

  Kyousuke, whose bed head–tousled hair was as black as his hoodie, jammed both hands into his pants pockets and silently took stock of his surroundings with tense eyes and a severe expression. One, two, three, four…there must have been twelve in total. Hooligans, street rats, and delinquent youths in flashy clothes surrounded Kyousuke, brandishing a nasty assortment of metal bats, crowbars, chains, and hefty bits of lumber.

  One of them, a youth sporting a pompadour and wearing an embroidered satin jacket, scowled at him. “So, yer the Kyousuke Kamiya we’ve heard rumors about, eh, ‘Slayer’? Or is it ‘Megadeath,’ huh?”

  “…No, that’s not it at all. I’m just a normal Kyousuke Kamiya.”

  “Normal?! You said you’re normal?! Hah!” Pompadour laughed through his nose. “Save the sleep talking for when you’re actually asleep!”

  The rest of the hoodlums joined in with shouts of “That’s right!” and “Tell ’im!” Kyousuke silenced the lot of them with a long, slow glare, a grimace so full of icy menace that even the bravest among them were left struggling not to tremble. A couple of the less courageous looked to be fighting back tears.

  They seemed unreasonably terrified. Pompadour raised his voice in strained bravado. “Y-y-you assholes! Wh-what’re you so scared of?! He’s just one guy! …Even if it is Kamiya, from the Sonic Syndicate, with all of us here, we can—”

  “Sonic Syndicate?” Kyousuke retorted. “You mean that other gang I crushed a while back? Don’t lump me in with those assholes, you idiot!” Almost lazily, Kyousuke swung a careless fist, catching Pompadour just below the shoulder.

  “Gyaaaaaah! My arm!” Pompadour roared, clutching the place where Kyousuke’s blow had landed. “My aaaaaarm!” He dropped to the floor, rolling around on the dingy asphalt and screaming.

  Kyousuke glanced down. “Hey, would ya look at that…? It came right out.” Dumbass was definitely playi
ng it up, having a real time of it, too. Like it could even be that bad. I barely touched him! Unfortunately, not everyone agreed.

  “Mobuuuuuu!! Wha…? Of all the—! He took down Mobu with one hit?!”

  “H-his arm is just barely…what power! Is this guy really human?!”

  “Hey, you idiots, pile on him all at once! He’s Mobu’s rival. Beat him up, kill ’im!”

  The rest of the thugs, turning away from Pompadour’s cheap pity-party, seethed with anger, thirsty for blood-soaked revenge. They were quite a happy bunch.

  “…Tch, what a pain,” Kyousuke snorted. “And here I didn’t want to have to get too violent, but what can you do?” Pompadour continued to moan and sob on the floor as Kyousuke began stretching each muscle in turn. “I guess we’ve gotten this far… Nothing to be done, eh?” He warmed up his legs with deep lunges. “But if we’re going to do this, I hope you don’t mind if I go all out?” Back, shoulders, neck…while rolling them around in order, he took in a view of the hoodlums surrounding him.

  There were seven with weapons in hand and four more brandishing clenched fists, while he was alone and unarmed…hardly a fair matchup. Not that he minded such overwhelming odds; it just meant that he’d be able to finish this quickly.

  As Kyousuke leisurely finished his warm-up exercises, he began to chuckle. “…Well, what’s the hold up? Come at me! I’ll take you all on at once!”

  “Really, big brother?! You said you were just going out for a run, but you were fighting again, weren’t you? You know I can tell… Are we going to have to ban you from leaving the house?”

  “…Sorry, Ayaka.” Kyousuke hung his head dejectedly. Standing in the entryway of his home, he realized that he must look like a mess. Face covered in scratches and bruises, once-black jersey now pale with dust and grime… Of course she was mad at him, coming in looking like this. “But they were the ones who picked a fight in the first place! They were hanging out in front of the convenience store, and I tried to ignore them, I swear, but then they started in with the whole ‘Hey, how about lending me some money?’ bit, and then—”