I have a new cover! It's made by the awesome NiaDav who apparently not only writes like a queen but also make crazy good covers. Thank you so so much <3333 

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Mrs. Sato was one of those aunties with big hair and overly colorful clothes and a pleasant plump face. She was a nice teacher, you know the kind—she had her rules, her principles, could be a little stubborn, very traditional, somewhat hard to communicate with, but in the end she still had her students' best interests in mind. In a perfect world she would happily retire at 65 and live until 90 surrounded by adoring grandchildren, for whom she would knit muffs every Christmas.

Instead, here she lies, kind almond eyes closed, in a puddle of Miss Matsuda's blood and her own.

She did help Mr. Yamada and his crew for whatever reason to mindhack the whole school, but she also did have a change of mind in the end and did something good, so I really can't blame her too much.

Well okay actually I still kind of blame her, but then you know how irrational mothers can become when their children are involved. I know if I have kids one day and they get kidnapped or something I will be punching every single person that stands in the way until I make sure my kids are safe and sound. If I had to stab several innocent people in the gut, I would do that gladly too, no question. Yes, I would be that kind of overprotective mom. Shotgun at door, as soon as any unworthy fellow asks my daughter out, I would—

Okay, that's carrying it a bit far. This is not the time to think about my nonexistent daughter and her hypothetically unsuitable boyfriend. This is the time to be strong and do cool things.

Except I am not cool and not strong and I'm just sitting on the bloodstained carpet sobbing and thinking about all the times my life has been saved by someone else in the short span of one night.

Eventually Shun recovers enough to crawl over and try to comfort me. I want to slap him because it really should be the other way around, I should be comforting him for nearly being killed by Miss Matsuda's headache machine-TM, but of course I'm a pathetic heap of trash like always.

In my defense, you don't witness your teachers get in catfights and eventually kill each other every day. They don't teach that at school.

Shun pats me on the back, probably wondering why girls cry so much, I think—until I realize that he is silently crying too.

Moms. Moms who love their kids. They're like those manipulative tearjerker movies, you know you really shouldn't be crying over them but they just pull at your heartstrings like a curious one-year-old pulling at his dad's guitar until his dad yells at him because that is an expensive old-school guitar and his most prized possession and he got it from gypsies in a once-in-a-lifetime bargain.

I wonder how old Minami and Yuichi are. Mrs. Sato looked to be late thirties, so depending on when she gave birth her kids could be a variety of age combinations.

"It's gonna be okay, yeah? We'll go rescue her kids," Shun says, grinning at me reassuringly. But tears are swimming in his eyes. I wonder what he is thinking. Oh great I got loads of info dumped into my head and then I shot the principal and then ran away from crazy teachers with hatchets and also suddenly got a killer headache for no reason and then when it stops the teacher and the nurse are both dead. Way cool.

I wouldn't want to be him now, that's for sure. It's amazing how normal he is still being, but then I'm around so he probably thinks he has to be strong for my sake or whatever since I'm not exactly the strongest out there, mentally or physically.

"So we go rescue her kids," he continues, "but before that, we get our classmates back."

Damn guy making my heart flutter sounding all cool and hey-I-have-a-plan-ish.

–

Mrs. Sato said that if we don't start working on mindhacking our classmates soon it would be too late, so we immediately rule out leaving the school to go get the police or other people. They're not mindhackers, they won't be of any help, and simply explaining to them what we do would take up way too much of our precious time. Besides, there's also the off chance that they decide we're raging lunatics and lock us up, which means that our classmates will be left to rot because it's not like there's anyone else to mindhack them and save them from their own nightmares.

Only us. Shun and I are the only ones left in this school who can do anything for them. The rest are either unconscious or dead.

Well, as Shun reminds me, there is also Mr. Kojima, the Basic Combat teacher, who is working in tandem with the late Mr. Yamada and Miss Matsuda. He can be a potential problem since I'm pretty sure he won't be too happy to see all his crew dead and me still alive, but we don't have any idea where he is and we do kind of have an arsenal with us now (a gun, two knives, a taser, and a hatchet), so we feel like it should be somewhat acceptable to risk forgetting about him for the time being and focusing on our task.

The first problem is, of course, who to hack first. I want to go for the ones who seem to be in the worst condition, such as Yukiya, but Shun points out that just because others aren't showing any visible distress it doesn't necessarily mean their nightmares aren't as terrible. So we end up going with the logical approach: to mindhack we need a spotter, and Katsuki is the best spotter in our class. All those monitors and numbers are his specialty.

"Katsuki it is," Shun says, hoisting the guy onto his back. Katsuki is very wiry, all skin and bones, but also quite tall, so it takes Shun sometime to figure out how to fit him on his back. I offer to help but realize that I'll only be in the way, so I shrug and meekly shrink to the back to follow them, clutching our pool of weapons.

We head for the mindhacking classrooms, where we have our mock-missions and the upperclassmen supposedly have their real missions. The equipment there are better than that of the training rooms, and the mattresses are also much more comfy. Shun sets Katsuki down on one of them.

"Okay, so one of us go into his mind, one of us will do the spotting," Shun declares. "You do the spotting for me, 'kay? Usual drill.Anything weird with our stats on the monitor and you unhook us right away." He flops himself onto another mattress.

I don't like the idea of Shun hooking up to a machine and doing mindhacking so soon after he has barely just recovered from another one of those machines. Real mindhacking too, not even a mock mission. What makes it even worse is that he's going to be walking straight into Katsuki's nightmare, and god knows what that is. Mr.Yamada's crew might know, from all those months of observing us in mock missions, but I certainly don't.

Either way, I don't want Shun to go off exploring Katsuki's nightmare world, especially when alone. But if Shun unhooking himself from a mock-training machine makes him half-transparent then unhooking himself from a real mindhacking machine would probably be disastrous. Someone has to do the spotting, someone has to unhook him at the right time, so I clearly can't go in with him and have to stay as spotter. And there's no point in doing it the opposite way: me going in and Shun doing the spotting. I mean, I would gladly take on this job and brave whatever Katsuki's nightmares are as long as Shun can rest a bit from all the mindfucks he had gone through, but the fact stands that I'm still the most useless mindhacker in the entire school, can't fight, can't use weapons, can't do anything remotely helpful for Katsuki's state. What do I even do if I run into enemies in the poor guy's head? Play the elega? Like that would be of any use.

"Wait," I say suddenly, thinking out loud. "If I'm the only one immune to the whole brainwashing thingy because I suck so much at opening my mind and believing, how did I manage to conjure up that elega?"

Shun is sitting on his mattress, twirling one of the machine's cords around his finger. He looks thoughtful for a few seconds.

"I actually have no idea," he concludes. "Maybe someone else has a good guess? Katsuki might, he's the smartest. I'll get him out."

I sigh. There's no way I can talk Shun out of going in by himself. He knows it's our only choice. I know it's our only choice.

It doesn't stop me from being overly apologetic about my uselessness. "I don't really want you to go in alone, if I were better at mindhacking, I would—"

Shun cuts in. "Nah, if you were better at mindhacking, you and I'd be unconscious like the rest of them, and tomorrow we wake up as Yamada's minions. Army of mindhackers, with the world wrapped around our little finger. No thanks, I prefer you as you are."

I look down. Nothing makes me feel better than when someone like Shun compliments me in a totally assured and confident way.

"So yeah, I'm going in. Anything out of the ordinary, unhook me right away," Shun finishes, lying down flat on the mattress. I pick up the wires and hooks and begin to methodically clip them onto him. I suck at mindhacking, but hooking people to machines I can do—we have practiced this process countless times in class and it's like second nature now. I still feel nervous though because yes my crush of many years is just lying there letting me do things to him and it's not exactly healthy for my heart and imagination, but I guess it's not the right time to think about things like that.

I finish the hooking and walk over to the monitor. I look at Shun one last time before pressing the necessary buttons.

His lips curl up at the sides into a comforting grin, and he closes his eyes. The mindhacking begins, and I'm left alone with two immobile bodies of my classmates and the soft beeping of the monitors and the song of the cicadas.

It's summer, they never stop singing, those cicadas.