Emeth

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"This is the third time I've pulled a fire alarm..."

Evil Eye raised up her Gladius as one might set free a dove to flight, and it tore through the air, tracking the movement of her eye and shredding the apes who came close to her and Oros—who was acting like her usual self. Did the realization that the whole thing had been a dream mean that what happened was okay? Was she pretending to be fine? Likewise, Tsubomi seemed more lucid than before. Was everyone else just, fine? Or was it more accurate to say that she was the one who wasn't fine? Did any of it matter? Of course not. Just another unwelcome moment of weakness in a long list of failures.

Everywhere Evil Eye's gaze turned, minions and miseria alike perished, until her gaze turned finally to Tsubomi, where it simply hovered in a protective circle around her. What can two of us do against that one? The whole lot of us were unable to put a scratch on it until Rei showed up. She thought the words, but her mouth remained shut, as if the very fabric of reality depended on her ability to suppress the breath that would carry them. Just do your fucking job...

She floated to the exit and made her way outside. Releasing more black tears, they became like threads, wrapping and weaving themselves around her body, until she became engulfed in the same golem she had summoned the last time the same giga miseria and its bird-fiends had appeared. It grew larger than last time, large enough that its feet were nearly the size of the cars it was walking over as it marched toward the mountain, but there was still no comparing its size with its would-be opponent.

---

As Earthshaker approached him in the air, Abaddon moved just far enough to the side to not take a direct hit. The two spun in circles together in the air, almost like a pair of sky divers. The summoned devil had grabbed Earthshaker by the arms and was flapping his wings furiously to soften their landing. While it wasn't quite graceful—the two were still spinning when they had landed—enough damage had been averted that one could argue, in theory, he'd had a plan, and it went somewhat according to it. "Well! An explosive entrance, milady, though I was not expecting the honor of a dance so soon. I do apologize for having six left feet."

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"It's not the end of the world, yet."

Black Gate's response to Evil Eye's tirade seemed to bore her. Perhaps she was disappointed that the mask still hadn't come off. Or is there really nothing beneath? she wondered. Perhaps the mask is all that remains. Perhaps that truly is the key to the next stage. She looked around the room at the rest of the Club, her attempt to unify it against Black Gate amounting to very little. Tsubomi seemed to have decided that what happened to her had been a good thing after all, and that meant Suki was probably fine with this as well. She seemed to be considering the optics, at the very least, of going after Black Gate while a giga miseria rampaged outside, until the very moment the Club's ceiling was crashing down upon her. The floor then buckled and fell, too, and Evil Eye disappeared below while the fight began in earnest above her.

Through the ringing in her ears, she could vaguely hear a voice reminiscent of a mascot character. Why is everything this girl summons always so lame? she thought idly as she lay in the rubble. If I'm going to die, at least let me go in a blaze of glory. She only allowed a small part of her brain to entertain such feelings, however. The rest was contemplating strategy against their patchwork adversary, in spite of the fresh dose of apathy Black Gate had gifted to her heart. She pondered for as long as she was able, until Black Gate ordered her "friend" to flatten the cafeteria. "Hmph. So you'll destroy the school after all. I wonder, if this is the first time... Perhaps she's really a demon?" she wondered aloud to herself as she floated down the halls. That gave her an idea.

"Hahh... And if thy right eye offend thee..." She exhaled, and recited the mantra. The eye came out of her, along with all its blackness, and morphed its shape into that of a demon. At first glance, he appeared as a well-dressed gentleman, if the insides of his cape and coattails had not clearly been insect wings upon closer inspection. Bald, with grey skin sallow and sunken, his face looked nearly like a skull, if not for the single red eye peering back, mismatched with an entirely black one. "Madam Kuroki," he acknowledged with a graceful bow. "How may I be of service?"

"Get that goat-horned bitch out of this town," Evil Eye replied shortly.

"Ah... Do you intend indeed to cast out this devil by the power of Beelzebub?" There was a dangerous glint in his eye as he wrung his hairy and shriveled hands, producing something like a low chirping sound.

"Abaddon." She corrected him impatiently. "Put that wit to better use than giving me lip." Her remaining eye glanced sidelong at him as she turned toward the cafeteria.

He smiled, or at least something of the sort, showing his mandibles. "I haven't any lips, my dear, but I am ever at your service." With that, he flew out of the newly-formed hole in the roof to join the battle in the sky above.

"Ladies," Abaddon greeted them with a graceful bow and a flourish of his magician's baton as he emerged from the rubble of the school. "Be not afraid! Your Grand Armée has arrived." As he flicked his baton upward, a massive swarm of locusts with eerily human-like faces poured forth from the hole in the roof. They came at the patchwork monkey from all directions, seeking to devour the most vulnerable-looking stitches, where its limbs connected to the main body.

His arrival was well and good—probably—but where had Evil Eye gone?

---

She instinctively checked her pocket, only to remember that she was wearing her sleeping clothes and didn't have her phone on her. "If Rei manages to sleep through this one, the town's doomed," she remarked with a sigh. Evil Eye had no interest in being swatted out of the air like a fly, lacking all of the advantages an actual insect would have at dodging attacks. Rather than flying out of the school, she remained below, running through some miseria as they spawned with her Gladius. Black tears fell from her eye, becoming additional locusts, fueling the swarm above. Sparing my power for the battle with Ashbringer hardly matters now, anyway. That just leaves... this. She floated into the cafeteria, observing her surroundings. A large pile of sleeping students remained there. "Care" was an emotion that hardly belonged in the heart of a dark magical girl, she thought—but even if she looked at them from that perspective, the humans were juicy little bags of misery that served as the fuel to their fire. If they were Black Gate's target... "I guess that makes this my problem after all," she decided, activating the fire suppression system. She hoped the shock of water would wake the humans quickly.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

Wordlessly, Kiyo transformed while Black Gate was still talking, and Suki was checking Tsubomi. Her eyes drifted toward her as well, before shifting to Hizuki. "I already told you summoning a giga miseria was probably her goal. Were you paying attention?" Evil Eye replied, strangely with more of a teasing tone than any real irritation at all. The two tears in her hand bloated and turned into a pair of flying creatures that looked somewhat reptilian, until their bodies suddenly folded together into the shape of broadswords and hurled themselves into the pair of miseria forming in the corners of the room. "You know, I really hate liars. Honest liars, like Willow, I can deal with—but this, your particular brand of innocent ingenue gaslighting really pisses me off." Her eyes went wide and glowed crimson. "But hey! You did manage to do me a huge favor. Looks like I was indulging in a little too much light lately and went soft. So, thanks for that. I'm done playing nice now." A smile full of mixed gratitude and false joy graced her lips for but a second.

"You said whatever you pleased, trying to rip us apart and turn us against each other before we ever said a single harsh word to you—so now, it's my turn. Here's the unfiltered truth: you've caused more damage than the GEMs ever would have if given free reign. Even if Tsubomi recovers from whatever you've done to her, her reputation in the school never will, thanks to your self-serving little shit show. If this is your idea of caring and helping, it's no wonder you only ever had one friend. Real piece of work they must have been," she remarked with another smile, one full of genuine malice. It was impossible that she could have stepped on that land mine intentionally, seeing how she missed most of Michi's stage play—but in her current state of mind, she likely wouldn't have cared either way. One of the sword-demons, after it had finished feasting on the miseria, flew back to Evil Eye and maneuvered itself into its master's hand. It was clear that she wanted a fight now, and that her words were likely not meant to scold Black Gate at all—but rather to egg her on, and to rile up Nyxia and her twitchy trigger finger. That, at least, was something she could rely on, like a raging wildfire that would burn through the jungle of uncertainty Black Gate was trying to create with her craftily weaved web of words.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"As a ruby, her edges perfected, emerges from the sand and returns not hence..."

Evil Eye paused. The answer to that question—who was that friend—had been so obvious, its asking caught her off guard. But then, she laughed, in the way that Evil Eye laughed when on the hunt for miseria to fuel her stores of misfortune. "You're right. I don't care at all!" She laughed and laughed, like the irredeemable villainesses she had adored as a child, and tried to emulate when she forsook the empty promises of light for the tangible substance of darkness.

They fell generously—the tears she had been holding back to pour out against Ashbringer, as a goddess might pour out her cup of wrath once mercy had dried up. It was as if Black Gate had suddenly struck an infinite well of malice deep within Evil Eye. But whether or not that well truly existed, and whatever she might have done after tapping into it—those answers would be cut off as the girls returned, ostensibly, to the real world.

"...what fellowship does brilliance have with the vain sayings of the simple?"

A certain clarity filled Kiyo's thoughts as she arose from her sleep. She might have expected to have merely emerged from one layer of sleep into another with a false awakening, but the uncertainty of her eyes was assuaged by the guarantor of reality: a familiar pain, which brought with it a paradoxical kind of comfort. Kiyo was, at a glance, the perfect mirror of the girl who had cheerily skipped through the halls on a good pair of feet—that is to say, something like her everyday self.

"What do you care? You admitted it yourself, that we were never friends." A genuine reaction to Black Gate's question came out with no regard for caution at all. The girl who might have been the most likely to remain on the ground and pretend to still be sleeping rose first, tears still lingering on her cheeks. Kiyo herself seemed surprised to find them there, gathering them up with her fingers and inspecting them, as if considering how best to dispense with them.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"Double-reverse psychology is the new meta, Willow. Do keep up."

Evil Eye proceeded through her various viewpoints, taking in the strange sights of what she assumed to be a dream world of some description. Perhaps, she thought, she was viewing nightmares that represented the various traumas of Hibusa town's citizens. Regardless, it was a glimpse beyond the veil of a perfect world Black Gate had tried to cover their school in, and that seemed to validate some of her fear. Then, there was Michi. Were the two the same? Was the moment of despair something real? Something she was meant to see? Something she should—could—stop?

Thrown to the ground, Evil Eye returned to the present, to what was real, or simply to a different space. She was not the kind of girl who knew how to act on so little tangible information. It was the sort of situation that made a person want to reach out to the first "real" thing to appear in front of her, and that was Black Gate—but a different one... one that seemed familiar. It was almost a kind of relief to see her acting "normal," even though she stood poised to destroy her if she wished.

"Ha..." Evil Eye let out something in between a hollow laugh and a sigh. "You're right. While I was still blinded by light, all I ever tried to be was 'good,' but I didn't know how... and all I did was feel hurt for my troubles." She didn't bother to get up, but her body did gradually float up into something of a sitting position. "I thought if I could learn to be selfish, I could at least be happy as a dark magical girl—but I couldn't even do that. 'Useful' is the only thing I know how to be..."

When her eyes met Black Gate's, they were distant and unfocused. Evil Eye had returned her attention to the mogall in the mirror—the one she couldn't even be sure was real. "I think... I wanted to be the person I needed, when I had no one. A person even someone like me could trust." The mogall moved sluggishly, as in a nightmare of running away. "But I couldn't do that either. So how? How can I be happy in a world that doesn't need me..?" It grabbed the knife in its tiny tendrils and floated upwards, as if it intended to keep it away from Michi's self-destructive hands—even if its master couldn't be certain if that was the 'right' thing to do, or merely the only thing she 'could' do. "How should I feel when a friend tells me my help is effectively worthless? Should I be happy to hear that..?"

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"When the passive NPCs aggro, you're going the right way."

As usual, Willow was wont to not cooperate with whatever it was Evil Eye wanted to do. "Then do it! GO!!" she barked, still chasing after her as though she intended to kick her ass if she didn't hurry up. Even if she was going about it in her non-serious way, at least she'd managed to get one other person to treat Black Gate as a proper threat. She hoped the girls left behind in the cafeteria would eventually follow suit.

Evil Eye couldn't quite create much distance from all of the minions lurking in every corner, but by following in Willow's wake of destruction she was able to buy some time to gather a mass of inky black in her hand. Without the swift intervention of the janitor, she was able to toss it in front of her. After engorging itself on her tears, it sprouted limbs and began sprinting along with her in the form of a large black panther, with long sabre teeth and glowing red eyes.

Jumping onto its back, she began to search for her mogall as it carried her. If she had any left, she would gather them above the roof of the school.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"There's no moral to this story, is there? I didn't bring a barf bag."

If there was any guidance Evil Eye sought from Rei, or any question she wanted to ask her, she wasn't able to find it. She looked around at the room, taking in the absurdity of it. Michi was still going on in her grandiose manner—a noted 180 degree turn from the shrinking violet persona—Hizuki, bless her, was still trying to negotiate. Everyone else was some degree of broken-hearted or demoralized before the battle had even truly begun, or simply not taking the situation seriously. Perhaps Michi truly didn't want to fight, but at this point, Evil Eye didn't really care what Michi wanted. She had disrupted the Club's "normal," and that was enough.

In amidst the confusion, there was one thing that stuck out to her as real, and that was the battle she saw once Rei picked up. Whatever Michi wanted to accomplish by putting on some play in front of the whole school, if it had nothing to do with summoning a giga miseria, was beyond Evil Eye's grasp. Why the whole school, including most of the Detention Club was willing to go along with it, she couldn't fathom. Defeating an obvious enemy was within her abilities to calculate. "Who cares. She's fighting the real battle while we're all wasting time here. Black was bold enough to try to overthrow our leader, so she's dangerous. Let's go," she replied to Willow.

She wouldn't be able to outpace Michi's minions while flying, so she had to take off on foot and hope that her ankle held up as well as it had on the way to school. She wasn't sure if she could really make a difference in the battle between those two, but staying here was probably what Black Gate wanted, and that was enough reason not to. Pure spite propelled her forward, and that was enough.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"Nobody panic. I'm used to this."

"The verdict can wait." Evil Eye's admonition was short and not very heartfelt. She wanted to say something about the fact that she and Roche were the gatekeepers of Club membership, but decided she would rather not feed into the negative spiral Michi was creating. She seemed to feel many things, pulling her in different directions, but none of those feelings amounted to any action. She wanted to protect the Club. She wanted Michi to feel terror even if provoking her wasn't the smartest thing to do. She wanted to feel that her presence here was in any way justified, that she wasn't the reason everything was falling apart. She wanted to do something, anything useful.

When Tsubomi disappeared, all at once, Evil Eye's desires were silenced. The tears that had been unwillingly wiped away stopped coming, as if they had never represented her real feelings in the first place. The river of her turbulent emotions turned slow, like a rushing river rapid had become a creek of molasses. It clouded with a sediment of apathy—her desires became lost in the midst of it, like a crocodile's tears in a bayou full of filth. Only one thought made its way into her barren consciousness. Just do your fucking job.

She pulled out her cell phone and called Rei. The sun hadn't even set before Kiyo had added her to speed dial after Tsubomi had nearly been kidnapped. In some ways, it felt as if that day had never ended. It probably wouldn't matter, anyway. If she tried to flee, she would probably just find her way back to where Black Gate wanted her to be, to see whatever show she wanted to put on. If this wasn't a dream, and she could really call someone, would she be able to hear their voice? Still, though she felt as if nothing she could do would help, her checklist of contingencies remained, and needed to be marked off. Mechanically, she occupied the now-empty seat in front of her and held the speaker to her ear. She moved as if whatever had just happened inside her psyche wasn't unusual in the least.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"A true villainess never gloats until her plans are already in motion, after all."

Evil Eye tried to warn the Shuukos, but she hadn't stuck around to force them to follow. Her grip on their shoulders was light; she never meant to pull them along. She was never meant to fight in the front, either; her line was elsewhere. Instead, she flew directly to Acid Drop. "Tsubomi," she addressed Zassou, her voice hushed but urgent. There was no time to think about the new nickname. "Heartbreak. The whole room. She can use their emotions to summon a giga miseria—can you stop it? I think she's manipulating them somehow."

She had imagined such a scheme herself once before—how could she not, when her own magic allowed her to do such manipulation? The Club, especially Nyxia, had been so immediately against the idea of summoning one in Hibusa that she'd never discussed it with anyone but Shuuko—never got much further than giving it a name—but now she was seeing the opportunity right in front of her even as Black Gate openly claimed she could probably do it. If she truly was the one behind all of the strangeness of the day, it followed that she had some means of manipulating either the emotions of others or reality to exploit them. Well, two could play that game.

"I fucked up." Tears ran down her cheeks and dribbled into the mass of tar-like blackness in her hand, but there was no remorse to be found in her voice. Her tone was even and livid. "I kept her servants out of our Club room, but it never mattered. I didn't even think of her targeting the rest of the school." After all, why would she think anything of them? It wasn't like they could really know or relate to her at all. Even if they tried, they couldn't be her "fellow" anything.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"If you see something... should you always say something?"

The mirror had been snatched away from her, but Evil Eye looked like she'd chugged a quart's worth of espresso shots. Whether the hypnotism had any effect or if it was caused by what Michi said about Suki was hard to tell. For a moment, she sat still as Michi delivered her rant. It was hard to believe that this was even the same person she'd brought to the Construct-a-Cat store.

She wanted to say something clever, to show that for all Michi's superior airs, she didn't actually understand the Club at all—but for once, she was left speechless. She couldn't even refute anything Michi said. Despite outwardly expressing an interest in romance, Suki's appearance and outward-facing personality couldn't have been more effectively hand-crafted to push people away and self-sabotage her relationships. Perhaps she understood that on some level, or perhaps she didn't—but Kiyo definitely did, because although she took a more obsessive self-grooming tack, the end goal of her carefully maintained appearance was largely the same: to create a certain distance between herself and others. Evil Eye gained power from witnessing their misfortune—if she didn't quite "enjoy" others' suffering, she did see a benefit, that much was undeniable fact.

Roche was putting a stop to that rant now, but she had been sitting there from the start. It should have been her to say something, anything in her friends' defense, or even her own defense—but the fact that she needed the Club girls to have problems to keep her role in it was becoming too clear for her own comfort. She also saw herself in this terrible side of Michi: all-seeing, always judging... always plotting. Even now, Michi was suggesting something she herself once suggested in the Club room: to summon a giga miseria in Hibusa Town. The final insult was that it was her own fault for letting the viper into their midst. Even if Michi's accusations hadn't poisoned the well, what right did she have to chase after Suki now?

"There are nine members, Shuuko," Evil Eye finally replied to her question, her voice low and full of disappointment as she stood up again. It wasn't just her feeling low, either—it didn't take a Tsubomi to feel the swell of negative emotions at their table—and on further reflection, she noticed something else. She had been too stunned by Michi's words, too distracted by the strangeness of the day to notice the danger in the room.

"Too late! RUN!" With little explanation, she flew after Suki and Haruna, tugging on both Hotaru and Ember's shoulders as she took off.