The Human Princess - Levi x Reader

Chapter 1

No one ever talks about how threatening silence can be.

They talk about the thunder of adrenaline behind your ears, and the screams of women that shatter through any peace. They all say how the whip of a sword cleaving through the air or the snap of an arrow can make you hear how you'll die, and the terror that it can strike through your heart.

But true silence – no one talks about that.

You sat – in absolute, unbroken silence – in front of the desk in your room, staring at the heavy piece of paper in front of you, tossed carelessly there earlier in the week. The darkness of your room had been chased into captivity underneath your bed, for the dancing light of the candle was putting up an admiral fight against the inevitable dark of the night.

The light was enough that you still see the ink upon the parchment.

Dear Y/N L/N,
This is your reminder that the weekly practice on Friday at midnight will still be in order. The tasks are as follows:
1) Find the subject
2) Figure out what killed the subject
3) Figure out who killed the subject

Otherwise, you may be the one to suffer the consequences.
Sincerely,
Survey Corps, Assassination Academy

You shook your head, reading through the instructions that had by now been worn into your memory. Survey Corps was indeed the academy of assassination; they trained the human children that were left within the world into becoming weapons that the world could yield as it wished.

Though their methods were as cruel as anyone could expect; every week, a single student was chosen out of the hundreds attending to kill a class C teacher. Then the rest of the students would have to find the body, identify the weapon and the murderer.

No one knew what happened to the murderer if they were apprehended - they just disappeared, slipping between the cracks of human memory and into the shadowy realm of nothing. No one dared to ask where they went.

But if no one could identify the murderer, a random student would be selected to befall the murderer's fate. And nobody wanted to just disappear, not after this chance that you had all been given. Nobody was willing to just slip into nothingness, forfeiting the chance to make the world even the slightest bit better.

When the world owes and gives one nothing, the true strength lies in making something of it anyway.

A bell ring shattered the absolute silence of the room, and you jumped from your position on your bed. Shoving the sheet of paper under your pillow and glancing quickly at your window sill, where a candle still flickered, you nodded to yourself. You stood up quickly, not willing to waste any more time than you had and stalked your way to the door. Smoothing over your barely creased uniform and admiring yourself in the mirror that hung on the back of the door was useless at this stage – at this gods-forsaken time, no one cared what you looked like.

The clock just continued ticking its merry and irritating way past the time of the bell – past midnight.

Normally, as with any human, you would willingly slaughter everyone within a mile's radius if you had been awoken at this time. But this was tradition; this is what you prepared yourself for. So, fighting the urge not to groan, you swallow your complaints that no one would hear anyway and instead decide to softly mutter "at least they're on time." Of course, as a school that was strictly enforced with punctuality and general discipline, it was to be expected. 

Grabbing your sharpened knives from where they were sitting on the desk beside the bed, you wrap the weapon's belt around your waist so that they hung from your hips, where you could easily grab them if needed. And with that, you unlock and open your door to peer out.