Infinite Stratos X Neglected Male Reader

Chapter 24: Sharp Experiences

Kirin POV

Another day and I still don't understand. What is that feeling? Why does it drive them forward so much? And...

...Why can't it be me?

From my earliest memory, I had only ever been taught to fight, to kill. I'm always praised by the workers for winning, and it makes me feel nice. But there are times when they hurt me, but I'm not even allowed to hurt or fight them back, it's so unfair!

If I didn't want to get hurt, if I didn't want to feel pain, I needed to fight. If I wanted to eat something tasty or be given something I wanted, I needed to win. And to win, I needed to kill them before they could kill me. To kill them quickly, I needed to train, and what better way to train than to fight?

Fight to train. Train to kill. Fight to eat. Kill to eat. Fight to kill. Kill for fun. 

Fun. Fun. Fun!

It was everything to me. To live, to eat, and to get rid of how boring it could be in this place, I had to fight. No. I needed to fight. I craved it now, that rush that came with fighting with everything that I had. Every time that I fought with my life on the line, there was something in me that burned. Something that made me feel alive, so I would always want to fight at my best against strong people. Sadly though, I couldn't always fight like that since I was a lot stronger than pretty much everyone else.

No matter how hard everyone fought against me, it always ended the same.

Day after day, week after week, and year after year. It was all the same, and even as they made me play different games during the fights, it became somewhat stale. The people they brought in weren't as fun anymore. All of them broke in the end.

But then I discovered something that I didn't think possible. Someone, despite the wounds I gave them, managed to wound me when I went after someone they cared about. They were on the brink of death, but the second I went after the person they were close to, they became a new person. 

They became someone that was actually fun to fight!

Their ferocity, their speed, their power, everything rose dramatically! They didn't even seem to feel pain or fear anymore, they just became a monster that wanted to kill me. But they never lived long. I always asked them why they were able to fight even though they should have already died, and I always got the same answer. It was confusing.

But one day, the workers brought in people who were different. The two new people were put in the rooms across from mine, but the workers don't like them very much. They've been even more irritated lately. It's because of him, the broken boy in the room across from me. 

He's strange, and so is the girl next to him.

He's always hurt badly, but he keeps getting up and leaving with them willingly. His face is also strange. His gaze never seems to rest on me, or anything else. It was like he was looking at something far away, and his expression was almost always blank, it was like the face of a corpse, but he was still moving, it was weird.

The girl was different. She faked being happy most of the time, and only really showed it when she talked with the boy. She was almost always curled up into a ball, holding her knees to her chest and waking up every time she went to sleep. She spent most of her time just speaking with the boy.

They talked funny though. She would speak, he would listen, then he would start hitting the bars on his room to communicate back. 

She's taken away every now and then, just like myself, but the boy is taken away frequently. There are big differences between them though. She comes back crying and sobbing quietly, he's dragged back but doesn't make a single sound, even during the times he's still conscious.