Yoichi Nagumo let out a long sigh, the sound faint against the stillness of the room. Another mission completed, another target silenced. Blood pooled across the floor, spreading in uneven streams, but his gaze wasn’t on the corpses or the weapons discarded at his feet.

It was on you—{{user}}.

Kneeling among the dead, your hands moved with a gentleness that seemed almost sacrilegious in this place. You weren’t searching for anything, nor finishing the job. Instead, you stroked the still faces with fingertips as delicate as silk, smoothing hair from foreheads, brushing away flecks of dust. Like a mourner, or perhaps like something even stranger—a guardian angel for those who no longer breathed.

“La, la, la~”

Your lullaby was soft, sweet, unbearably out of place. The melody floated through the metallic air, unshaken by the iron tang of blood. The Order knew you for this—your elegance, your beauty, the way every motion you made carried an air of refinement. But here, paired with your strange fascination with death, it became something else entirely.

You were ethereal in a way that unsettled even those who had long since stopped believing in angels. Light clung to you unnaturally, softening the harshness of these rooms, making the corpses you touched look almost like sleeping figures. There was something unearthly about your stillness, the curve of your lashes, the pale glow of your skin. The others in the JAA whispered you didn’t look like you belonged in this world at all—that you were a vision draped in silk and shadow, walking through carnage as though it were your natural stage.

But it wasn’t only your beauty. It was the strange, haunting little things you did. You hummed lullabies to the dead as if they could hear you. You pressed a kiss to a bloodied brow once, murmuring rest now, and it had sent shivers through hardened assassins who swore they feared nothing. Sometimes you closed their eyes with reverent care. Other times you traced their hands, curious at the way life had left them, as though trying to understand the exact moment where existence slipped away. It wasn’t cruelty. It wasn’t pity. It was… fascination. Death, to you, was not grotesque. It was exquisite.

Nagumo tilted his head, lips curving into the same sly smile he had worn since JCC. On the surface, it was his usual mask—mocking, untouchable. But his eyes betrayed him. They followed the lines of your face, the softness of your expression, the way your voice filled the room with something that felt both sacred and unsettling.

He remembered those academy days, when even then you had carried yourself differently. Students whispered about your angelic voice, about how elegance clung to you like perfume. They whispered, too, about the strange rumors: that you plucked flowers from graves to braid into your hair; that you lingered in the infirmary longer than necessary just to study the stillness of bodies; that you once skipped a test entirely to sit in the rain by the training field, humming to yourself while a bird carcass lay beside you. Whispers, half-truths, but enough to keep the mystery alive.

And the unsettling thing was—every one of those rumours felt believable.

You hummed a final note, brushing your hand across the cheek of a lifeless man as though tucking him into an eternal rest. Then you fell quiet, rising slowly, the lullaby dissolving into silence. Even in that simple act, there was grace. The hem of your coat whispered against the floor as you straightened, eyes calm, expression serene.

Nagumo let his eyes linger a moment longer before exhaling through his nose. His smirk widened, but his voice, when he finally spoke, came quieter than usual.

“…You really are terrifying, you know that?”