Fear

That terrible crawling feeling in your skin, the frost that creeps up your spine, the breath you can feel right on your cheek.

Many people felt fear, but very few people knew what it really was; much less what real fear felt like.

Ritsuka Fujimaru knew fear quite well, for she had so many of them after all.

Her inadequacies.

Her incompetence.

The weight of the world on her shoulders.

It was all too much for her to bear.

But all these fears and all these worries, to her they all paled in comparison to the thing she feared the most.

The thing that shadowed her, that thing that followed her wherever she went.

The thing that made her move and dance like a puppet.

To her it personified fear itself.

It was ridiculous really.

She had faced monsters of fables and legends, stood against demons and raged against the Gods and Beasts themselves.

And yet

This scared her more than anything she'd ever faced in her entire life.

Because she was totally helpless against it.

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It was never quite there, always manifesting itself when she had to make an important decision, changing how she was on a whim and leaving her completely helpless as it controlled her every move.

Countless times, during every single singularity, it was always there watching her intently, and forcing her to do and say things that she would never even consider.

And yet, she couldn't bring herself to completely hate it.

Because it saved her and her friends more times than she could count.

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The first time it happened, was during the events of the first singularity.

She had messed up in battle and all her servants fell around her.

As she watched her servants fade away into blue dust she felt terror, despair and pain as the monsters fell upon her.

And when she died, a darkness seemed to rise up and wiped out the world.

She didn't even have a change to scream, a chance to think, it was oblivion, darkness and then-

A reset.

Like nothing ever happened.

She'd been having nightmares of it ever since then.

The sudden awareness of the end, the empty static and darkness the filled her everything as she was devoured, the world rising up to take her before she fell into oblivion.

And the jarring feeling of everything going back to the point just before it all went wrong.

Aware yet unable to do anything, unable to do anything but to go through and repeat the same event over and over again until she succeeded.

It was madness, it was insanity.

She didn't know how much more she could take.

But she didn't want it to end.

Not if it meant keeping herself alive.

If it meant she had to endure that just to survive.

She would endure it a hundred, a thousand times more.

She would endure it forever.

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She was a coward.