Chapter Text
The descent was slow, but still exciting. A deep worry in Komaru’s gut said that she was going to throw up, but luckily she didn’t. Food was precious after all. Eventually, she grew bored of drifting and squirmed, trying to steer the parachute to the tallest and flattest roof she could see. She wasn’t the strongest at the moment… Thankfully, the wind guided her straight to it. She fell to the flat, concrete roof of the building and was soon blanketed by her parachute. As interesting as it looked to be beneath the parachute, Komaru was more interested in what was going on outside.
“HAH!”
BANG! RIP! KABOOM!
The undeniable sound of a fight could be heard. Eager to witness it, Komaru crawled towards the edge of the parachute and took a peek at the world. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see, but what she saw regardless of her expectations was another girl (yay!) about her age (double yay!) fighting off a bunch of those things called Monokumas almost effortlessly (triple yay!) Interestingly, the girl wielded two large pairs of bright, silver scissors that sliced open the skins of the beasts like butter. Their mechanical guts would spill as they collapsed. The young woman herself moved like an agitated ghost, fast, but somehow gliding smoothly and jerking wildly at the same time. Her long, brown, unkempt hair trailed behind her, falling in front of her grinning face on occasion. Despite that, she never faltered, not even when strands of her hair got caught in her round-framed glasses. It was almost like watching a professional dancer, though oddly, Komaru could not see her legs or feet beneath her long brown dress. When Komaru’s gaze happened to slip from the girl, she noticed that bears that weren’t even close to her were toppling over, like they were being shot by some unseen marksman. They all seemed to fall along a path… what was that? A continuous bullet flying through the air, piercing every Monokuma in its path? So it seems, at least from a distance, that this mysterious girl had tamed a living bullet, for as the last bear fell from the rooftop to the streets below, it flew to her and perched on her fingers at her command. It made a horrendous, obnoxious buzzing noise until it held still. Though Komaru hadn’t made a sound, the girl turned her head to look at her with a curious expression on her face.
“Hey there!” Komaru said, smiling and waving at her.
...
“Aw damn, you're not who I thought they were gonna drop!” the girl hissed with a raspy voice.
Before Komaru could feel any ounce of shame, the girl charged towards her, stopping mere inches from her. Komaru flinched only a little, mesmerized by how swiftly the girl could move with such control.
“Ya got any idea what's goin' on here, sugar beans?” the girl asked in her weird accent. “Ya lost?”
Komaru stood up, meeting the girl eye to eye.
“Some little kids took over the world,” she said.
“Oh thank god, that's one less thing I gotta explain,” the girl sighed, allowing a slight laugh to slip in at the end of her breath.
“You seem enlightened,” Komaru said. “How long have you been out here?”
“I just got here,” the girl said. “Lookin' for a guy I know.”
“Oh.”
Silence allowed its own awkward presence for a moment. Komaru was forgetting something and she knew it. This new girl caught on to all of this.
“So, whatcha name, doll?”
What an unexpected question.
“I-I'm Komaru Naegi…” Komaru stammered, trying to hide her surprise that she was asked first.
Oddly enough, the girl looked surprised by Komaru’s answer.
“I'm Syo of the Scissor system,” the girl said, twirling a pair of her scissors around her finger. “My host is Toko. I’m the resident cereal box killer!”
Syo points to the bug on her shoulder, the one that Komaru previously thought was a sentient bullet. Somehow, she had forgotten about it for a moment, probably because it blended into Syo’s dress so well.
“This is Kameko, my BMSB buddy.”
Komaru asked what that meant with her vacant eyes.
“Brown marmorated stink bug. Nice ta meetcha!”
Syo took Komaru’s hanging hand and shook it.
“Nice to meet you too!” Komaru almost giggled.
“Say, I gotta tell ya somethin' important, if ya are who I think ya are,” Syo quieted down as she let go of Komaru’s hand. “Do ya know of a fella by the name a' Makoto Naegi?”
Komaru nearly knocked herself over with her own gasp.
“Makoto?! He's my twin brother!”
Yes, she was grateful to see other living people, but to possibly find a familiar one sounded almost too good to be true.
“Ah! Perfect!” Syo sighed with a grin. “Y'know he went ta Hope's Peak Academy?”
“Yeah, and then-”
“Ya got kidnapped not long before graduation?”
“Yep.”
Syo frowned a little. It was hard to tell if it was out of sympathy or because she had a feeling she was going to have to explain something.
“Why don't I do a bit of explainin' while we get to the bottom of this buildin'?” she proposed rather reluctantly, confirming Komaru’s suspicion. “I'm only up here to chase that airship ya dropped from anyways!”
“Sure, why not?” Komaru said, smiling a little in an attempt to cheer her up. “I’ve got a badass gun.”
“Wicked! This way, chicky!”
Syo took Komaru's hand, nearly lifting her off of the ground as she pulled her down several flights of stairs.
“So, to make a long story short, I was one of ya bro's classmates, and this bitch took over the school, erased all of our memories at Hope's Peak, and shoved us into a killing game.”
...
“Eh, don't worry, Makoto's alive.”
Komaru let out a sigh of relief.
“Only five of us outta fifteen… I mean sixteen survived, because we're kickass. Once we beat the bitch in her own game, we left the place to find everything's gone to shit. That's when our memories started comin' back, and we made it our mission to recover as much as we had lost.”
By this point, Komaru could tell why Syo hated explaining things. Though she seemed casual about it, it must’ve been a difficult thing to relive in her head. How many people has she needed to explain this to?
“We found these folks called the ‘Future Foundation’ lookin' to rebuild the world, so we joined 'em. Surprise, surprise, they suck at their jobs, and my buddy Byakuya got kidnapped by the kiddos.”
Syo slowed to a stop, perhaps because she could hear Komaru huffing and puffing from running so much. She wasn’t used to doing so much physical activity in a short amount of time… or perhaps Syo was not nearly as considerate as Komaru initially thought, for she turned around to ask her a complicated question mere seconds later.
“Ay, you wouldn't happen to have seen a tall, skinny fella in a suit with blonde hair and glasses, have ya?”
…
“Wait, did you say Byakuya?” Komaru panted. “I… yeah! I’ve seen him! He's the one who gave me this gun. Then again, there's plenty of people out there that fit that description…”
“Not if they're dead, sugar beans,” Syo said, grabbing Komaru’s hand and continuing to drag her down the stairs. “I know Byaky Boy is alive. Those kiddos are clearly usin' ‘im as bait! The problem for them is, they don't know about my wicked arsenal!”
“Your what? I MEAN- Uh, hey, apparently they have a bunch of mutant people that they could weaponize against us whenever.”
Syo stops again.
“… Oh shit, for real?” Syo mumbled, dropping her weird accent a little. “Huh, looks like this is gonna be a lot harder than I thought.”
“I mean, I promised this guy that I'd rescue them.”
“Yeah, but we're gonna need more than just bear-fightin' powers for this gig,” Syo said. “Got any ideas about what we should get?”
CLANG!
Suddenly emerging from a door down the hall before them was a strange child. They wore a mask resembling the head of a Monokuma and what Komaru assumed were their school clothes. For a few seconds, they brushed dust off of themselves before noticing the girls staring at them.
…
The child began to run away.
“Let's turn the tables on these suckers and catch one of their own!” Komaru said, starting to run after them.
“Great idea, chicky! We're comin' for ya, kiddo!”
The chase did not last for long, with the child darting into a dark room, thus cornering themselves.
“Cornered!” Komaru laughed.
“Let's nab this kid!” Syo said with a wicked grin and a long dangling tongue, like she had an ambition to eat the kid for some reason.
Regardless of Syo’s potential cannibalism that Komaru wasn’t certain of, the doors behind them slammed shut, entrapping the girls in complete darkness.
“Ugh! Where’d they go?” Komaru groaned.
“Don’t worry! I have night vision!”
“Oh wow! Really?”
“Nope.”
From across the room came the smell of burning rubber. quickly followed by a low, nauseating gargle. Komaru would compare the sound to a zombie vomiting up sewage.
“Ew, the fuck was that?” she gagged. “Lemme see…”
Surely that fancy gun of hers had some source of light to it, right? She lifted it and fired it in the general direction of the mysterious sounds and stench. A brief flash of light exposed just enough shadow for the girls to process that whatever stood before them was a carnivorous trash pile of a robot bear. Its girthy body smeared oil and grime that oozed from the crevices of its joints onto the concrete floor. Spider-like limbs protruded from it, its fur tattered and dangling from them like rotting dead skin dangling from bone.
In the flicker of light, the bear lurched towards them fangs first, flailing its legs wildly. Not even a sound could come out of Komaru before she began firing, only afterwards did she gasp. The flashing light of her gun somehow revealed less about the creature than the shadows as she scrambled to kill it. Its oils splashed upon her feet and up to her shins, causing her to nearly slip. She froze in fear of falling. In another flash, the animated robotic rot monsters let out a gargling screech as a pair of Syo’s scissors flew into its blood-red eye. It squirmed, writhed and collapsed into a puddle of its own filth as Syo flung more scissors into its body. Komaru took this chance to crawl to the nearest wall and feel for a light switch. The florescent lights flickered on with a sickly yellow just in time to see the beast vomit up its liquid guts with every dying twitch. The death rattle chugged like a failing engine, oil spouted and leaked from its body where the scissors pierced its body. It went still, its bulging blue eye leaking a blue pus like frothy tears as it stared directly at Komaru. Regardless, it still kept its toothy smile that split across the left side of its face like an open gash. They girls held their breath, the only sound being the hum of the lights above.
“Mold,” Syo gagged. “Rotted eggs, carrion…”
She grasped for the door, and thankfully, it was still open. She let out a heavy sigh and dragged Komaru out of the room by her arms before closing the door again, forbidding another glance at the robotic corpse that now haunted the room. Komaru, still dazed by the adrenaline, allowed herself to be propped up against the wall..
…
“Er, I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”
Komaru’s head turned to look at Syo, whose voice sounded very different when she had spoken just now. It was softer, but not necessarily more gentle. It sounded exhausted, and her accent was completely gone. Her eyes were sullen, her posture more straight and sturdy than mischievously hunched over. Rather than her hands grasping her scissors on either side, they were held together gently to encase something small, perhaps Kameko. It was at that point that Komaru remembered what Syo had told her when they met.
“Komaru Naegi,” she said, her voice sounding unintentionally softer too.
“Right, thank you,” the alter said. “I just switched, so… Yeah... I'm Toko. Fukawa. You can just call me Toko.”
“… Can I call you Toki?”
“Who the fuck even are you?”
The snap was mildly unexpected, but Toko had a point. It was hardly the time for nicknames, they had literally just met.
“You’re right.”
Komaru’s voice quivered a little, as if she was nervous to anger Toko for some reason.
“Is Kameko alright?”
“Yeah,” Toko sighed, placing the bug back on her shoulder. It was almost like she had forgotten they were safe until Komaru mentioned her. “I didn’t want her flying through that thing.”
Toko rambled as she began searching through some nearby boxes that were stacked in the corner of the hallway.
“Normally I’d let her fly through Monokumas as she pleases, but that one… that one was too dirty, even for a stinkbug. Too oily, too difficult to clean off of her. It could kill her. When I heard you fall I just started throwing as many scissors at it as I could.”
“Have you ever seen a Monokuma like that before?”
“Never. I hadn’t even seen the kind out on the roof until today. The only one I ever saw before was smaller and bipedal.”
“Kinda like me.”
...
“… Yeah, kinda like you.”
With the fate of jokes landing uncertain hanging over Komaru tauntingly, Toko walked over without even a smirk and began wiping the oil off of Komaru’s legs with some cloth she had just found.
“I… don’t think this is gonna work very well,” she said, “but it should get most of it off.”
“It’s alright, thanks,” Komaru said. “Maybe we should just… sit here for a moment.”
“Hell no,” Toko snapped. “God knows where that kid went and how many more of those things its gonna send this way.”
“You don’t think it was the only one?” Komaru asked.
Toko scoffed.
“There is never just one.”
After her shoes and shins were mostly cleaned of the oil, Komaru managed to stand up, and the girls continued making their way out of the hospital.
“We've gotta somehow lower the defenses of those kids faster than they can get those Monokumas manufactured,” Toko said. “I can’t keep washing the oil off of us all the time.”
“Those kids call themselves the ‘Warriors of Hope,’” Komaru said.
“Pretentious,” Toko mumbled, “but to be expected from children. They probably have something to do with Junko… Was the broadcast really that powerful...?”
Komaru could hear exactly what Toko said, but she had no clue what it meant.
“Do you know of anyone who could help?” Komaru asked.
“My friends, perhaps,” Toko said, her voice brightening a bit as if she had somehow forgotten them and was delighted to be reminded. “I could take you to our headquarters and we can go from there. It’s a long way though, we'd have to take the bridge out of the city.”
“I'm up for it. Besides, I should see Makoto. He's a big worrywart.”
“… Did you just call your brother a ‘worrywart’ in the middle of a literal apocalypse?”
“Yes.”
Toko stared at Komaru for a moment. Hell knows what she was thinking.
“… Interesting... Let's go.”