Black★Zero

Chapter 1: A Story That Starts From Zero

"Why am I even here?" Unsure she would ever know the answer, Rei Futaba felt like she shouldn't have been surprised by anything anymore, lost in an unknown world where she didn't even recognize herself. Yet it was hard to say which was stranger, the blue flames shrouding the left eye of the girl aiming a cannon at her amidst a deserted landscape dotted by checkered patterns and blade-like rocks, or the feeling that she surely knew that girl even though it shouldn't be possible.

It all began after Rei had gone to sleep one night, three days after she started to believe her life couldn't get any worse. "Can this even be considered God proving me wrong..." she wondered while slumped tiredly against a wall in the surreal place in which she had awoken staring at her hands, "...when it seems like I'm not even me anymore?" Her short hair and face still looked similar, but her hair was now an ashen black color and eyes a vivid shade of pink. The most glaring change though were her black skeletal claws that had replaced her hands, with large black stitches running up her arms from them. They looked partially mechanical with black metallic casing like gauntlets from the knuckles up. Able to even see her reflection in her smooth, blade-like talons, she'd gone into quite a panic at first.

Feeling as if this must be a world out of a dream, she'd awoken in a desolate place with gray land and skies littered with stone ruins, most of them badly deteriorated. Pillars stood supporting nothing, strands of black chains hung in strange places, and cracks in the parched earth here and there that transitioned strangely into patches of black and white floor tiles patterned like a chessboard. The area wasn't uninhabited, but the inhabitants had been frightening. Wearing black cloaks and hoods while scurrying about making rattling noises, despite cowering at the sight of them they surprisingly seemed more cautious of her. Working up the courage to try talking to them, they'd only ran and hid from her. Her claws crossed her mind, but hiding themselves beneath those cloaks made it impossible for her to tell if she should appear odd to them or not.

Rei started wishing she had a cloak for herself, the almost all black outfit she had on now was embarrassing. She'd found herself wearing an open-back dress with short, puffy sleeves tied together in the middle of her back by a string. Its frilly skirt had a number of decorative ribbons at the back, but was uncomfortably short. Add thigh high stockings with garters and short boots with a white stripe on them, and she would normally consider it a blessing she didn't know a soul here. Cynically thinking about that, she nearly jumped out of her skin as a voice suddenly asked, "Have you given up on talking?" She followed the voice to a bizarre young woman with green eyes and shoulder length black hair that turned green at its tips, sitting up on top of a stone pillar watching her.

At a bit of a loss, Rei just stared and didn't reply at first. Sporting a black witch hat with a green and black piece of spiked metal coiled around the pointed part of it, her top consisted of a white blouse under a brown corset and a collared black shirt buttoned at the top with the rest left undone. A black ribbon attached to its sleeves wrapped in a knot adorning her blouse like a tie. The sleeves looked stitched on, and hanging from them by gold metal crosses was a large black shawl with cream-white frills and silver decorative chains. It seemed to double as a skirt, the only other visible clothing aside from ankle-high black and silver boots.

Having failed to get a response, the witch jumped off the pillar and held up one of her black skeletal claws as she insistently said, "Have you? I was interested you see. If you haven't." Rei's eyes widened, although it was all bone instead of metallic parts and wasn't the same shape it was still similar. Getting ahold of herself, she awkwardly asked, "Uh, who are you?" Raising an eyebrow, the witch remarked, "Does it matter? What were you trying to talk about earlier, was it unimportant?" Rei felt as if she had irritated her somehow, and she shook her head quickly as she said, "No, I really need to know! What is this place, where am I? That's what I was asking them." Raising a boned hand to her chin as she took this in, the witch curiously replied, "Really? Well this is the Empress' domain. It's really not the best place to wander into."