The Bookworm

Link to article: The Bookworm.

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**Tohko was an interesting girl.**
**She was the type of person you couldn't understand unless someone painstakingly described her to you.** 
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**That...is Tohko. Or, was.**
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**To preface, Tohko was a scholar, in every sense of the word. She was beautiful, pale, dainty, even fragile, like a doll that was made out of pure snow, the snow that melts away even if the temperature was one degree above below zero.**
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**She was like this because, quite frankly, she had no life outside of school.** 
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**//No family outings to take part in.//**
**//No one who cared for her at all.//**
**//Including me.//**
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**And, I suppose, that's why she became like that.**
**And, I suppose, that's why she came concealing her bruises in school every day.**
**Why she flinched at every man who touched her.** 
**She was pitiful, quite frankly. Especially how people treated her.**
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**//Like a monster.//
//Like something that shouldn't exist.//
//Like something that should be put out of its misery.//**
[[/div]]


----

"Simple assessment, they said, shouldn't be too much of a problem here."

Franz said to herself, trying, in vain, to hype herself up for the current mission at hand. She had been stationed in Nara, Japan, for a reason that was unknown to her. 

"Just do what we tell you, they said. It'll be easy, what a load of horse crap." 
 
[[span style="color:black"]]//"Hey, Franz? You know your radio is still on, right? So stop being a dickhead."//[[/span]]

There came a small voice from the earpiece Franz wore, one that hurt her head every time she heard it. The shrill voice came from a woman named Siren. Obviously, it wasn't her real name, but no one Franz has met has ever used her actual name, and even fewer have actually met the woman. Regardless, Franz didn't particularly care for her any-

[[span style="color:black"]]//"Franz, focus, this is your first mission, so don't fail this. Otherwise..."//[[/span]] 

"Yeah, yeah. I know. Thanks, Siren." 

Franz nodded to herself and walked forward to her objective. She was sent to investigate the Naragakuen Junior High School for her first assessment in order to regularly be put onto GOC combative teams. She supposed the test was in order to evaluate her mental fortitude, or something akin to that.

Word from nearby embedded GOC operatives gave word that there was a Type-[[span style="color:green"]]Green[[/span]][[footnote]]Reality-Bender[[/footnote]] entity in this place that needed to be "taken care of", but Franz had no clue who it was, or how much trouble she would have with it.  

//No one should be there since it's Golden Week, but we went ahead and gave you a standardized teacher uniform just in case. If anyone asks questions, just play up the "dumb American" trope. God knows you're good at that, huh Marry?//

 And so, she walked. She didn't have much in terms of equipment, only being given a concealed combat knife, and a pistol in the design of an airsoft gun, holding exactly 6 bullets inside a concealed holster in her coat pocket.  

"That should be enough...right?" Franz thought to herself as she pushed in the door to the school.

The first thing that hit her was the white walls that surrounded every inch of the school, and the pungent smell of cleaning chemicals on the floor.

"Where is it now..." She thought to herself, absentmindedly chewing her lip as she walked the stark, maze-like corridors of the school. Siren was strangely quiet, which Franz didn't like. She justified it by thinking it was to help her focus, but in such a silent structure like this, Franz hoped for some sort of sound.

**//Shhhhhh- Clack-//**

The sound of a door sliding opening.

"Fuckin' hell, I've been searching for a god-damned hour in this school. Fuckin' slippery anomaly--"

The Englishman stood still, keeping his eyes on Franz the moment he saw her. Franz's nose was assaulted by a disgusting mix of clashing fragrances between cleaning chemicals and the harsh smell of ash that radiated off the man. 

A mess of a man, with unkempt hair and a loose dress shirt.
A mess of a man, who reeked of ash and cheap alcohol.
A mess of a man, with a serpentine-like tree tattooed just above his wrist.

"Ah, so that's what it is," Darke said solemnly, quickly shoving something into his pocket. Franz had turned to him, reacting to the sound of the door and the smell assaulting her nose. Catching her off guard, Darke ran up to her in a full sprint. Before she could react, Darke threw a right hook at her, hitting her square in the jaw, causing her vision to blur and for her mouth to start leaking some blood, falling with a pathetic spittle on the floor. 

Taking this moment to push her up against the wall, Darke heard a small softened //clack-// against the hard stone wall. Franz reaches for her gun, but Darke quickly swats her hand away, forcing his way into her coat pocket and pulled the gun out from it. Darke took the gun and quickly pressed the barrel under Franz's jaw, smirking as he pulled the trigger.

**//Clack-//** 

The pistol sounded, nothing coming out of the barrel. No blood surrounded the wall where it should have. No deafening ring filled the air as it was intended to. Considering the dangerous situation such as this, Darke assumed that the safety of the pistol would have been off, but the reality of the mishap is that Franz simply forgot to take it off.  Surprise filled Darke's face, and that made it clear that this was Franz's only chance to take advantage of the moment.

"G-gack...-" Franz feebly tried to speak, but nothing came out. Taking this one moment of distraction to reach into her concealed pocket, picking out the combat knife from the inside. She gripped it with all the remaining strength she had, stabbing it as far into Darke's arm as far as she could, dragging it towards herself, creating a gnarly gash along his arm, leaking crimson onto the brown floor. Franz at this point noticed the tattoo on the man's wrist, filling her with more drive to finally kill him. 

"Gahh.. Fuck-!" Darke said, dropping the foreign-modeled gun to the floor and clutching his now bleeding arm, dropping Franz to the floor in the process. Despite her lack of breath, Franz didn't waste a second, charging at Darke with her knife in hand, stabbing it into his abdomen, piling him over onto the floor, shifting her body weight for more leverage, into the pool of his blood. "Just die already!" Franz said, finally cracking at Darke as she kept stabbing her knife into his abdomen as fast as she could, not caring for his cries for help.

Only after around 30 seconds, Franz knew it was over. Darke lay here on the ground, in a pool of his pathetic blood. The scent of copper added into the already clashing scenes, leaving Franz queasy as she stood there. 

"He brought it on himself..." Franz told herself, though she wasn't sure if she really believed it. Regardless, she looked inside of Darke's pockets, finding a collection of notes inside of them. She walked as she read, the notes, absentmindedly stepping on more and more notes gathering on the floor beneath her feet. The note she first noticed was,

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**To say Tohko loved books was an understatement. I couldn't do it justice, even if I explained it for over a hundred years.** 
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//**She was that deranged.**//
//**She was that infatuated to something that didn't reciprocate.**//
//**She was that... pathetic.**//
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**There were also rumors around that she would do...strange things to books, such as eating them, brushing them, and even █████████ in the ███.** 
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**And I suppose it got to her. She ran out of class one day, yelling obscenities as she did. Some people saw her run into the closed-off library, but no one went to check on her. Even the teachers.**
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**I'm not even sure if she ever came out.**
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[[/div]]

Before she knew it. Franz was knee-deep in notes of varying sizes. "I wonder if these are all thoughts people had about her? Creepy..." Franz said to herself, trying her best to stay calm under the current circumstances. Franz wandered around the school a few minutes more, reading various notes as she went, rubbing her neck as she went because it still felt uncomfortable. 

Finally, she reached her location. The library. 
Said to be long since abandoned. 
For a reason she didn't know, nor cared to know. 

//**Shhhh- Clack!**// 

The door slid open, causing even more notes to spill out of the room, bringing the amount of collective notes up to her thighs at this point. Franz wadded her way into the library. Immediately, she was hit with the scent of death, causing her nose to scrunch up. Franz walked further into the dimly lit library, filled with subjects of many different kinds, though she didn't have time to look through them. 

It was then that she saw it. Tohko. The notes were right, words didn't do her justice. She lay there, collapsed against the wall on a set of four desks put together. This wouldn't have been that unnatural- but the problem was her lower half. Tohko was bisected from the waist down, and not in a clean way, but as if a wild animal had torn her open like a piñata. And from this wound, paper spilled out from her, filled with notes with unintelligible writings. 

Wordlessly, Franz raised her pistol to the entity. "I guess I should just make sure..." Franz said, slowly unlocking the safety on her pistol, aiming at the girl in front of her. It was then that Franz noticed, slow breaths coming out of Tohko's mouth. 

**//The water coming down her eyes.//**
**//The slow and pained rising of her chest.//**
**//The seemingly desperate plea for help Tohko was asking for.//**
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**//"I'm sorry."//** Franz said, before two shots filled the library with a ringing white noise. 
----

Franz walked outside the school, the sunlight hitting her face, clearing her head of the events that just transpired. Her headset came back on, and Siren finally spoke. 

[[span style="color:black"]]//"Good job, Franz. We'll get you back home, and someone will come to dispose of the body. Good work out there, and about the Serpent's Hand member..."//[[/span]]

"Don't worry about it, really. I mean, I'm alive, right? And I took care of the Type-Green, so that's all that matters." 

[[span style="color:black"]]//"Mm... Well, get back to base, we will talk about your implementation and results when you're back."//[[/span]]

The headset promptly turned back off, leaving Franz alone yet again in her silence. Franz took one look back at the school staring at the building. The image of Tohko and the man resurfaced in her mind, causing her to remain still, a somber look coming over her face. A strong gust of wind knocked her back to her senses, and after a brief moment of complication, Franz shrugged, turning the other direction, and started to walk away. 

//This was just the job. I know I'm doing the right thing.// Franz told herself, unable to recognize if she even believed herself.

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The Bookworm

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