Let's All Be Friends

Final Grace

Tsumugi Shirogane was going down with the game, just like Junko Enoshima...

A lot of people would say she loved it, performing the perfect copycat crime.

But did she?

Only a sicko would enjoy something as twisted as this and Tsumugi wasn't one of those people. She was just your plain, normal weeb who loves anime...

A plain normal weeb who experienced killing games twice, who sent all her classmates to their 'deaths', and... despaired all over it.

A painful feeling that she slowly got used to, until she told herself that it was OK to feel like that. Although, in the beginning, why would she want this? Things were better played out through the screen rather than done by yourself.

Yet have it she will, because she was the mastermind. With that stupid mastermind perk, remembering everything, even outside the damn killing game. And what they wanted out of her or else...

And the fact that she was stuck with her former classmates of Hope's Peak, and Rantaro Amami of all people... which shocked her to no end.

Because... what did that mean? Her classmates, which although they forgotten, she remembered... with their plans, the bunker, their cause. What were they thinking... being here? Why? After everything that was done...?

Because she remembered everything, but she had to play along. She had to put on a good show, she couldn't disappoint them. She had no choice.

'If it's a show they want, it's a show they will get,' Tsumugi thought when the whole thing started, her cosplayer's knowledge of anime giving a good story plot... the need to make this as long as possible and the advantage of knowing her classmates enough giving her a way to stage the killings as interesting and despairing as possible.

And she told herself, 'It's like role-playing. You are supposed to be the big bad mastermind, while there would that one protagonist that would thwart you. And how about the other characters, what casting will play? Oh, it's just like a story. How will it go?'

That was when she started telling herself it was a story, where she was simply a character and the rest were characters and it will have to end soon.

But the ending she knew would be a long way. Because who would want a story with a short ending? Who likes bad endings? Who likes stories that don't even begin?

In the boom and flashes of the dome breaking down, Tsumugi could only think of what she had done, uncaring where this will go.

The only thing she could do as she awaited her untimely death was go back to her story, and thought how everything spiraled out.

Reminiscing as life would flash before her eyes, but of this killing game... instead of everything before.

Before... Tsumugi briefly touched upon, of happier times within her cosplays, conventions, shipping pools, her classmates, festivals...

But she no longer can feel happy about that, it just despaired her instead. Because after everything she done...

So, her mind went about to the killing game instead, a fake story unlike her real memories as she role played throughout it. Never herself, just someone else.

And it was less painful.

Rantaro and Kaede, they were threats. Killing them in one go was the best, even if it didn't go exactly the way she wanted, but the end justifies the means. And the time limit motive was gone, all didn't need to die, they were satisfied and onto the next chapter.

Ryoma and Kirumi, the one with the no will to live and the one with the most. What a neat irony, opposite spectrums that played so well with each other. Two that could have gone far in this killing game, with their intelligence, open mindedness and aloofness, cut so easily by their simple desires. Another two threats down, a lovely chapter. Act three.