“A new year at Hex High has started! There’s nothing out of the ordinary, but everything changes when Shiro Kaname receives an invitation to a secret Battle Royale Club. After visiting the first meeting, he is reluctant to join them, but he has already signed an arcane contract with two main restrictions: nobody speaks of the Club and nobody is allowed to leave. Now he needs to prevent a series of murders and rescue a new transfer student, a mysterious bespectacled idol named Yomi Homura.”

— “C.R.I.M.E.: A Good-for-Nothing at Magical School” animation synopsis

October 29, 2025

The wind was whipping her cheeks, the cold cut her to the bone. Niji looked at Dasnor and realized that there was no life left in his body—and no Celestial in the world could bring it back.

Why?

Why did that happen?

Why did Rem appear at the very moment Niji believed she had finally found something meaningful in her life, something valuable and precious—just to take it away from her? Why? Because he couldn’t accept he would never be anything more than a friend to her?

Why?

Why was he here to destroy it all? What gave him the right to ruin her so hard-earned moment of happiness?!

“Niji… you… your face…”

When she heard his trembling voice, the emptiness that filled her heart was replaced by pure wrath. The girl’s veins grew swollen and began throbbing through her pale skin with branching purple threads crossing her entire body as if her insides were longing to get out. Niji felt like something had exploded in her head. The bloody net appeared before her eyes, and a torturing fire hissed in her chest. A horrifying, non-human scream broke out of her lungs, but releasing it didn’t help her get rid of the burning sensation inside.

Don’t.

The last bits of sense were whispering in despair, but the blood was hitting her veins so hard that she was losing herself more and more with each second. The whole world was now painted in deadly violet colors, and there was no escaping it.

White rooms, bright liquid. Dripping, flowing, streaming. Dasnor lying in the pool of his own blood. She was responsible for it… no, she wasn’t. This bastard next to her was. He was trying so hard to prove his worth that he didn’t even hesitate to kill the person she cared for.

Niji raised her left hand. She had neither lighter nor her glove around her—yet a fire formed in the center of her palm. It gripped her fingers and headed towards Rem, engulfing his body with vicious flames. Niji heard his cry, which sounded ten times more excruciating than those of Freyja’s victims. But at this moment his harrowing shrieks didn’t make her scared. Instead, she felt weirdly satisfied.

She began to realize that the flame bursting from her hand was a real one. As an Elementalist, she used to control only the energy, gathering it from a suitable source. But now it was totally different: this fire was her very own. The fire of her soul, which embraced its essence and captured her mind in its tenacious strokes.

At last, she wasn’t cold.

At last, she was doing everything right.

She was pure. She was free! Wasn’t it the whole meaning of magic—to create something without any stupid restrictions?

While Rem was suffering from tormenting burns, Niji, wrapped in a flickering purple-red aura, removed her hand and slowly walked toward the Lackluster that was her precious friend not so long ago. The skin on her arm was burning furiously, and the concrete of the roof melted under her bare feet, but she didn’t pay any attention to it. More than anything, she wanted Rem to disappear once and for all... to pay for what he’d done... and to leave her alone.

“How could you?” she asked in a despising, metallic voice.

“I just wanted to help… I… wanted…” he choked through his pain.

“Why did you kill him?!” Her reprimanding tone changed into uncontrollable hysterics while tears gushed over her face. “You should have never come here!”

“I just wanted to protect you…”

“Protect me from what? From people who accepted the real me?! Who tried to help me?! Are you still so angry that I left you and joined them?”

Now it all became clear, as if her inner fire highlighted the things she didn’t see… or had ignored. All these years Rem had been following her in the attempt to mean something to her. Faint-hearted and weak, he’d tried to talk her out of joining M.A.G.E.—those she rooted for and considered a family deep inside her heart. But she didn’t listen and met him there. The man that had just opened a new world to her but was now dead for good.

Niji didn’t have enough air to breathe, let alone speak.

“Or was it… was it just a stupid act of jealousy, Rem? Pathetic, mean jealousy...”

“I am… so sorry...” Rem whispered with all his remaining strength, not letting go of the stolen amulet. “I wish it all had never happened!”

The rune on the relic glowed bright white. For a second or two, everything stopped frozen. Then Niji felt like she was witnessing events from two angles: from the point where she was standing and amidst some rewinding motions. Everything before her eyes got blurry, the images overlapped and doubled like in a sickening stereo picture. The girl sensed the violet flame sucking back into her hand and the cursed lines vanishing from her body. She saw her own figure retreating to the back room while her voice screamed somewhere outside the body: “Rem? NO! Stop it!”

The flow of time dragged her back inside the building, but she heard Rem’s distorted voice: “All your abilities are to her credit. You have no more arcane blood than I do.” Despite the fact that the words were played backwards in her ears, for some reason Niji got their meaning.

Finally, her body merged with a duplicate in a slight crash. Blood throbbed in her ears, the vision was still unclear, and the fusion blow made her stumble on the stairs, hitting her knee and elbow with one of the cold steps that led the roof. Swearing from pain, the mage girl climbed up as fast as she could and made it outside yet again.

It was all the same: the wind wild and freezing, the windows of nearby houses still shining with different colors. However, Rem was nowhere to be found. As for Dasnor, he was lying on his side a little further from the massive blood stain with no visible wounds.

Niji limped closer and crouched next to the enforcer. Her knee responded with sharp pain, but the girl hardly noticed that. She looked at Dasnor’s face, whose cheeks were cold-bitten pink. He was alive. Goddess, he was alive!

“What the—” he gasped. “What the fuck is going on?”

He turned on his stomach and vomited.

“You.. you’ve been…” the mage girl started, but she couldn’t pronounce the word “killed” without breaking into hysterical crying.

“Uuuuugh, feels like drinking all night long… shit, I’m so wasted...”

A strong sentiment with heated, foul language followed. Meanwhile, Niji gathered her thoughts, and an unpleasant thought came to her mind. Nervous to her very core, she asked: “You… you don’t remember any of it, do you?”

“Fuck me if I ever forget anything.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Seems like… ugh… I saw something on the TV about… some hotel or whatever and cops and… ugh.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah... what’s this place, anyway?”

Niji's heart performed a triple jump and sank somewhere down her stomach. Seemed like she would have to cross out from her biography not only the last five minutes, but the whole night.