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By the time Shinobu toppled over onto the finish line, where the red-haired assistant of Headmaster Aria was, she had fully expected that at least a couple of other students would have made it there as well. The young girl didn’t have a super accurate internal clock, but surely there would have been others who also found their way to the end, right?

Turns out that she was first, and that the giant mechanized beast that she had hypothesized and did her best to avoid was finally laying waste upon the ruined city. Even though she was a few kilometers away from the explosions, the very fact that she could still feel the violent rumblings of the ground made Shinobu glad that she had avoided that thing to the very end.

All the stress and tension melted away as Dana got off her shoulders, and the petite girl collapsed on the ground, arms hanging loosely to the sides. Letting out a long, long breath, she looked at the plastic card crumpled in her tracksuit’s pockets, before grinning. The first step was taken after all.

[i]“Congratulations, dearie! See? You definitely could do it!”[/i]

Yeah, guess I did.

[i]“The first one to get there as well!”[/i]

Ehe, guess so.

[i]“Don’t get too confident though!”[/i]

I know.

[i]“After all, overconfidence is a s-”[/i]

-low and insidious killer.

[i]“Good luck and give your best!”[/i]

I will.

Despite her plethora of injuries, and how Ari’s present had more than just a few holes in them, the girl pushed herself up, standing once more. She looked up at the red-haired demon girl and said, [b]“Yeah, lotsa marshmallows, please.”[/b]

It tasted of saccharine dreams and bitter reality, and it scalded the tip of Shinobu’s tongue, but she drank it down in anyways. Because, regardless, it was pleasantly, deliciously warm. The taste of success, after five years of inadequacy, huh?

Feels good.
[hr]
That pleasant feeling disappeared when the test concluded, and a very displeased Reiko greeted them at the stone courtyard. In the faint light of the morning, her angered figure had a particular sense of gravitas around her, a choking, suffocating feeling that cut through the sugar-high, sleep-deprived, hungry state of mind that Shinobu found herself in. Swaying side to side at this point, the little girl fought against the urge to yawn, trying not to make any worse of an impression than she already had.

Other than a single person, they were all failures, huh? Shinobu bit her lower lip, hanging her head. Looked like, even if she was one of the two who had made it to the finish line, she was still a pathetic sack of shit, huh? That made sense. She could understand that. After all, she had basically avoided all contact with the drones they should have been fighting, killed only a single one of them, and then made it out of the Downtown Ruins only because she managed to get some pity-mercy from Dana.

It made sense, but her stomach still felt like it was getting cut into pieces.

Shinobu took in a deep, shuddering breath. Others were rightfully indignant, what with the test ending early and a bunch of supposedly ‘unexpected’ factors popping up, but she ignored them all. Her heart was pounding, anxiety rising, exploding. Her hands were shaking once more, violently, frightfully. As the rose vines disappeared, opening up to the interior of Akatsuki Academy, Shinobu narrowed her eyes.

She was still trash, but she was too damn close at this point, just to give up and be discouraged because she had been found wanting in the eyes of one of the teachers.

[b]“A Chaser doesn’t protect the weak.”[/b]

She slipped through the hesitant, chaotic crowd.

[b]“A Chaser is simply strong enough to do so.”[/b]

Once again, she found herself before the flight of stairs heading up.

Once again, she found herself as the first one there, uncaring of whether or not any others were heading up alongside her.

And once again, she took that step forwards, alone except for the voices in her head.