DANGANRONPA- Bloodletting~!!

Chapter: 0 「Prologue- Part One」

I woke up.

Okay.

That's a lie.

I'd actually been lying here, staring at the eddying darkness of my eyelids for the past... well, ever. I was scared of opening my eyes. Terrified, to be exact. I couldn't even begin to fathom the world beyond my stuck-together eyelashes. Waking up to tattooed bikers or men in makeup didn't even begin to compare to the thoughts rushing through my head. Why? Because...

...the last thing I remember, before coming to my senses, wherever this was... was being brutally assaulted with a machete. I remember the agony, the aching, the feel of blood trickling down my skin. The only place I could imagine myself was in the ground, with worms eating my eyeballs. Either I was officially undead, or...

I opened those resilient eyes of mine.

Trash.

I was surrounded by it. Bags upon bags of combustible garbage. No banana peels, or spoiled milk, only miscellaneous cardboards and paper waster. A dumpster? I glared down at myself with sleep-ridden eyes; my clothes were tattered and torn, and not to mention, covered in portentous bloodstains. However, I was unharmed. There were no seeping gashes or slash wounds on my skin; there wasn't even dirt under my fingernails.

Asking myself something predictable, like 'What happened to me?' really wasn't going to help now, and escaping the recyclable garbage quicksand that I had sunken into was no easy task. It took all my pent-up strength just to plant my feet firmly on the moldy concrete of the alleyway. Where... is this place?

It was a dark alleyway, leading out onto a street lined with fluorescent lights... but I couldn't hear the rumble of traffic or the furious honking of taxi horns as you would normally expect to come from an intersection such as this one. In fact... it was totally quiet. I couldn't hear birds, or people chatting, or even crickets. There was just that horrible silent sound ringing through my ears.

All the doors leading from the alleyway and into the restaurants beside it were locked; the handles were even rusted over. The fact that there were bistros all around this alley but no five-minute old french-fries and hamburger patties in the garbage concerned me; this place... was like a ghost town. I was almost expecting a tumbleweed to blow past, but there wasn't even a faint breeze.

Over the curb and beyond the lonesome tarmac of the street, was a fountain that had long run dry; only dust remained in its concrete and granite pools. However, beside the fountain was something much more intriguing; a girl. A blonde girl in a lavender-colored jacket rimmed with faux fur. She turned and looked my way with sea-green eyes as I stumbled over the pavement.

I was about to ask her all those nosy, stereotypical questions, when her voice cut through my train of thought. "Woke up, eh?" she said, sounding like an ugly birdcall. "Have a nice dream?"

"U-um..." I stuttered, dumbfounded. Being asked rhetorical questions like that wasn't exactly a forte of mine. "Do you..." The blonde girl interrupted me before I could finish speaking.

"No." She rolled her eyes. "I don't know where this is, so don't waste your breath."

There was an abrupt silence as the sun gradually grew lower in the sky. I glanced around with weary eyes; by the side of the fountain was a bus timetable. It was in Japanese, thankfully, but the destinations had all been crossed out with some kind of sharp tool, so the place names weren't even readable. Occasionally I could make out an 'a' or a 'h', but... ugh, never mind.

"Maybe there's something there..." I whispered to myself with a voice that sounded hoarse and foreign.

What felt like hours of searching the small streets between the bleak, empty buildings provided nothing. The alleyways were all dead-ends, squared off by ominous concrete walls that were too high to climb. Unfortunately, there was nothing quite big enough to use as a stepladder, either.