The door to Ms. Hibiki’s office creaked on its hinges as Bastion slipped out to let Phil in. As they passed each other, Bastion patted Phil on the back and smiled reassuringly.

“This should be a quick process.”

Phil absentmindedly nodded. He had an idea of what to expect from the debriefing. Not that he had done any back on Earth, but more that he had gone through a few by now in the academy.

The door closed behind him with a soft click and Phil took a seat in one of the chairs in front of Ms. Hibiki’s desk. The headmaster of Slifer Red was shuffling through a small stack of papers, only pausing once Phil had settled down to flash him a quick smile.

“Good afternoon, Phillip. How are you holding up?”

Phil took a moment to consider the question, but eventually shrugged his shoulders. “Oh you know, another day, another dollar. Any sign of Dimitri yet?”

“No.” Ms. Hibiki said with a shake of her head. “But the police have put their best men on the job.”

“What, like that Magure guy? The dude was a snake, and honestly the guy flat-out looked like someone you’d buy meth off of in a back alley. Not to discriminate against people wearing eyepatches, but wearing one that looks like the damn millennium eye? Even if a guy like that wasn’t evil, I still would be too scared to be in the same room as him.”

Ms. Hibiki sighed. Dark bags hung from her eyelids and from where Phil was sitting, it didn’t seem like she had managed to get a wink of sleep since the whole Shadow Rider affair had started up. “We’re still working on that too. However, that’s not why I called you here.” Ms. Hibiki paused for a moment to withdraw a cracked foam stress ball, which she absentmindedly squeezed with terrifying force as she began to speak again.

“I understand that you have involved yourself in this situation fully by now?”

Phil nodded. “Ain’t no way I’m going to sit this one out when my buddies are putting their lives on the line. Bastion explained to me why I didn’t get a key. I get it. The line of thought makes sense. I wouldn’t give me a key if I was in your shoes. But I’m not going to stand back and watch. Hell, with how Alexis, Syrus, and Chumley got involved, I don’t think I have a choice anyways. What a bunch of hostage-taking wusses.”

“I see. And Bastion tells me that the two of you are the strategists of your little group. Could you tell me the reasoning behind your choice to gather everyone this morning?”

“Well, Magure was hella shady, so Bastion and I got to thinking after the keys were re-hidden. What if he was a traitor? We hoped he wasn’t, but if he was, we would pretty much just lose if he could steal all of the keys. So, we moved the hiding places of a few of the keys while keeping Bastion’s key in the same place that Magure suggested. Then I got the boys together and camped out in my room since I’m just down the hall. That way Bastion and I could soothe our raging paranoia about the dude. Early in the morning, I’d say around five or six o’clock, Bastion noticed the key was missing. Luckily the sneaky lad thought ahead and hid a camera in his laundry to record the night. After that all we had to do was bug the librarian to open up a little bit earlier than usual, find an SD card reader, and bada bing bada boom we had a video recording of Magure yoinking the key. We showed the proof to everyone else and figured it would be a good idea to let you guys know just in case.”

Ms. Hibiki nodded along to Phil’s words. “Then you paired everyone off to gather in Vellian’s office.”

“Yup. We went with the buddy system just in case there was an ambush or if Magure decided to drop the act. That way if one got caught in a duel, the other could run and get backup.”

“And why did you not do that when you encountered the duel in Marco’s office?”

Phil fell silent for a moment while he considered his words. “Well, he didn’t seem like he needed help… and I guess we just got so focused on watching the duel that we forgot.”

“I see…” Ms. Hibiki looked back down at the papers on her desk while she squeezed the stress ball like she was trying to turn coal into diamonds through pressure alone. “That brings us to the next part. How are… how are you holding up?”

“What?” Phil replied in surprise.

Ms. Hibiki glanced away from the papers to look at Phil kindly. “You watched a man die today.”

Phil nodded slowly. “Oh. Right. I dunno. No blood, no body parts. I mean, I know that was a shadow duel, but I’d assume that usually if a man gets punched so hard that his body is destroyed, there would at least be a bloodstain left behind.”

The foam stress ball cracked and split in two while Ms. Hibiki just stared at Phil. After a moment she looked down at her now-empty hand and withdrew another stress ball from one of the drawers in her desk.

Oh fuck me I said the wrong thing didn’t I. Phil abruptly realized. Part of what he had just said was him thinking aloud. The working theory that he and Bastion had hammered out while they had waited for Ms. Hibiki to finish talking to Bernardello was that Magure was most likely a duel spirit. Phil was doubly sure since the guy had started calling himself Don Zaloog, a card that Phil was quite familiar with through his experience with the fan-made GOAT format, where Don Zaloog was quite the powerful card. It also helped that the man himself had literally stepped out onto the field when Don Zaloog was summoned, instead of a hologram appearing. The only real leap in logic the two of them had to take in that though, was how real the man had seemed. And that, Phil had eventually said in annoyance to Bastion, was ‘probably some magic fuckery with that Egyptian eye the stupid bastard left behind after he got pancaked’. Bastion concurred with Phil’s theory through the use of more elegant wording.

“You don’t seem very bothered, even if he was an enemy.” Ms. Hibiki eventually said. Even Phil could hear the concern dripping from her voice.

“It is what it is. He tried to get the keys and trigger the end of the world as we know it. Bernardello stopped him. It was a shadow duel. What happened to Magure, he brought upon himself. The man could have just as easily decided to not go after the keys and get a donut at the police station instead.”

“It is what it is.” Ms. Hibiki softly repeated to herself. Then, with a slightly louder voice, she continued. “Let’s talk about it then.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

“How was it?” Were the first words Bastion spoke to Phil once the latter had exited Ms. Hibiki’s office. Phil seemed to be deep in thought, hardly even noticing that his friend was there until Bastion tapped his shoulder.

“Oh, sorry mate. Got to thinking. No, it wasn’t bad. I don’t know what she did for you, but Ms. Hibiki mainly just confirmed what we saw in Bernardello’s office and played therapist for a bit. Nothing real crazy.”

Bastion nodded as the two began walking down the hall. “She’s simply concerned about us.” Soon enough, they passed one of the many janitor’s closets littered around the campus. Phil slipped in quietly while Bastion kept watch, eventually pulling back out with a hammer from the tool kit kept inside clutched in his hand.

“Yup. I respect her for it. Not many teachers would bother.” Phil replied. A mercifully short walk later and the campus maintenance building met their eyes. It hardly looked any different than it had the night Phil had jacked the golf cart, but the contents of the building were not their goal this time. Instead, it was the pile of discarded wooden pallets that lay in a forgotten heap next to the loading dock at the side of the building. Most of the wood was rotten or flat-out disintegrated, but after a few minutes of throwing the rotting pallets around, the two boys found one near the back that was new enough to be usable.

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“A bit wet… but no rotting.” Phil mumbled as he assessed the wood before handing the pallet to Bastion to carry. “Should do the job. We’ll need to make sure to account for the change in size when it dries.”

The pair continued to walk in silence, rounding a few corners until the doors to the infirmary blocked their path. Phil knocked, and after a few seconds the door was opened by Alexis.

“Phil, Bastion.” She greeted them. “Good to see you.” Her brows rose upon noticing the pallet of wood Bastion carried that was almost half his size, but she kept her questions to herself in favor of stepping out of the way.

“Sup. You hanging out with Atticus?” Phil replied. The boy still hadn’t regained consciousness, but that hadn’t stopped Alexis from visiting nearly every day when she had time.

Alexis nodded. “Yeah. No changes, but I like to think he can hear me, like Bastion said he might.”

“Even being able to hear only a few words may do wonders for his peace of mind.” Bastion remarked. The two boys sauntered inside, waving to Nurse Fontaine and moving towards the broken window. At some point in time since Dimitri’s escape the few pieces of glass that had fallen inside the room had been swept away, so all Phil had to do was to cover his hand with the sleeve of his jacket to sweep away the remaining shards of glass in the windowsill down into a bag Bastion held.

Once that was done, Bastion set the bag aside and both the boys grabbed the pallet while Alexis and Nurse Fontaine watched on with bemused expressions. It was obvious the boys were planning something, but they weren’t quite sure what it was just yet.

“A-one, a-two, and three!” Phil chanted as he knocked out pieces of the pallet with his hammer on every ‘three’, coordinating the strikes with Bastion so the boy could brace his body against the pallet to hold it steady against the hammer blows.

The noise of the hammer striking wood filled the room, a noise that only intensified once Phil had finished tearing apart the pallet, grabbed a few nails from his back pocket, and began to hammer the boards into the window one-by-one.

“Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all.” Phil hummed in happiness as he took in the boarded-up window. “Bastion, did you remember to grab those spare markers from the teacher workroom?”

Bastion confidently smirked back. “I didn’t even need to do that. Instead, I asked Ms. Hibiki and she gave me a pack once she figured out why we wanted them. That, and I think she’s just happy we actually asked this time. Remember, the best solution is not always to sneak around, Phil.”

Phil took a moment to consider those words while Bastion broke apart the package of colored markers. “Fair. However, counterpoint: sneaking around is more fun.”

“Yet asking doesn’t land you in detention like a few of the other times you’ve tried the sneaky option.”

Alexis grabbed a red marker from the package once she realized what the boys had planned and shrugged her shoulders. “You know, Bastion is making a very good point.”

Between the solid logic of his two friends, Phil was forced to fall silent. However, once they stepped back to look at the finished project, Phil’s small rebellion against their common sense unfolded into plain sight.

“Phil, do those flowers have faces and fangs?”

Phil looked over to Bastion with a deadpan expression. “Yup.”

“Did they really need to be eating those poor stickmen?”

“……” Phil’s deadpan expression began to crack, threatening to expose his shit-eating grin for all its glory. “Yup.”

Nurse Fontaine laughed for the first time in a few days as she took in the scraggly, makeshift wooden window, colored in various drawings to make it feel more like a piece of art rather than a depressing replacement for the broken window. A full quarter of the window, dominating the upper right half, was filled with Alexis’s drawings of her various Cyber Angel cards. Some were skating, others meditating, and a few more stood at attention to guard against threats, like a troop of mighty spirits that watched every shifting shadow with a stern glare. Another quarter of the window, dominating the upper left half, was covered by one singular drawing. It was an extremely detailed anatomical drawing of the human body, with all of the major muscles, organs, and bones painstakingly labeled by Bastion in a sort of detail she had earlier assumed would be impossible by using markers alone.

And then there was the bottom half. A cadre of fanged flowers with frog-like faces munched on bunches of screaming stickmen. A fat, badly drawn zeppelin opened the doors to its bomb bay to unleash hellfire upon a trio of three-headed stickmen with enormous muscles and pairs of absurdly detailed eyes Phil had convinced Alexis to draw for him. A stickman with five legs and no arms smoked a joint bigger than his head while a speech bubble saying the words ‘OH YEAH!’ drifted above his head. But the cherry on the top was near the uppermost points of the bottom half, where it was made quite obvious that Phil had finally cracked Bastion’s persona of seriousness. Looking above it all, was a giant sun with a maniacal smile and an extraordinarily detailed, exposed brain that was raining down lasers towards the zeppelin in an attempt to bring the flying machine down.

In the end, both Bastion’s and Phil’s deadpan expressions crumbled to dust as the boys began to giggle like a pair of lunatics. Alexis’s shoulders began to shake, but she powered on nonetheless in order to place her signature above the stern, watchful drawing of Cyber Angel Vrash, where the elegant signature contrasted Bastion’s professional signature on the arm of his anatomy drawing, and Phil’s sloppy initials that filled the cloud of smoke the five-legged stickman exhaled.

“Thanks kids, I needed that.” Nurse Fontaine said when her laughter subsided. “Normally Mr. Gorg would fix the window, but I haven’t been able to find hide nor hair of him all day. He might end up replacing this when I find him, but I couldn’t stand looking at the window for much longer.”

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ms. Hibiki watched Phillip leave her office. Technically, Professor Bernardello should have spoken with him and Bastion, but after she had seen the two boys watching the shadow duel, well, their behavior sent out warning signs more obvious than a blaring klaxon alarm. Plus, her coworker seemed a bit… off. She didn’t know a better way to put it, but the way Bernardello had dueled against the inspector, the way he had dispatched the man in the shadow duel…

She knew that the circumstances were abnormal, but that man had made it seem like the duel was just a game, instead of a battle of life and death.

Phillip, despite his continued use of casual language mixed with foul words, was showing a rare side of him that was alarmingly mature, while Bastion seemed to sink into deeper and deeper levels of planning as a coping mechanism. If the boys had been a bit more toned down in their approach, then she might have seen it as normal. They were the strategists for their friends, after all. However, despite them not being in her own Slifer Red dorm, Ms. Hibiki had interacted with them more than a few times before this had all started. That is to say, she had a decent baseline for their normal behavior.

But now? It was like their ‘normal behavior’ had been dialed up to eleven as they attempted to fight in a war Sheppard had forced upon them. They saw it as their duty to be the thinktank for their friends, and Ms. Hibiki could plainly see that they thought that every detail they missed, every plan that went wrong, was their fault. That it was their fault and they should have planned better.

Ms. Hibiki placed her third stress ball of the day onto her desk as she began to organize the stack of papers Professor Crowler had given her upon request. She hardly needed to organize them to begin with, but it was a habit at this point, and she was running out of stress balls. They really needed to make those things sturdier. Even the quote ‘super-special’ one Crowler had gifted to her at the last faculty gift exchange had only lasted a few weeks longer than the others.

Her phone rang, and she jumped with a startled curse forming on her lips.

“This is Hibiki.” She answered out of habit.

Crowler’s voice sounded out from the other end of the line. It was nervous, far more than it had been since… well, since Professor Sartyr’s body had been found on the beach. “I found Zane.”

Ms. Hibiki’s breath caught in her throat. “Where? Is he alright?”

“In the abandoned dorm. He appears to be in a coma. I can’t wake him.” Crowler replied.

“U-understood. I’ll send the head of security over to you with a cart. We need to get him to Fonda immediately.”

Crowler’s voice fell silent for a moment, long enough for Ms. Hibiki to realize that there was something else going on… and the man seemed extremely hesitant about it.

“I… also found the head of security. He’s dead, Midori.”

She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “Jim’s dead?” Ms. Hibiki asked in a daze. She hadn’t known the man well, but they had still worked together at the island for several years by now. And for all their disagreements about his drinking problems, she had never wished him harm.

“Yes. In a bush, near the edge of the jungle facing the beach. Stabbed. And, well, I’m no detective, but the size of the wound looks similar to what poor Sartyr had on his body.”

“Okay.” Ms. Hibiki sighed and stood up from her chair. There would be a time to process the death later. All they could do now was to ensure the safety of their students. “I’ll grab one of the Gators from the maintenance building and meet you down at the abandoned dorm. The best thing we can do is get Zane to safety under Fonda’s care. Perhaps she’ll be able to make some headway on waking them up.”

Crowler grunted in agreement. “Have you found the janitor yet? We could use some muscle to help move Zane.”

“No. Mr. Gorg still hasn’t shown up in his office. I’ll leave a message for him to meet us at the abandoned dorm just in case.”

Ms. Hibiki sat the phone back into its cradle with a sigh. First Sartyr, now Jim. Atticus and Zane were both in comas. The janitor hadn’t been seen all day, and Fonda had reported that the normally reliable Nurse Meanae hadn’t reported in for her shift that was supposed to start a few hours ago. She hardly even wanted to know what kind of dreadful workload the nurse would have to take on in the absence of her coworker.