No Rest for the Wicked Sally sits in the interrogation room as a lawyer stares her down. He speaks, but she barely listens to his chastising words. In her sleep-deprived, pancked state, she blabbed and gave the police a case against her with words she struggles to remember.
More words, more ignorance. Anything to hold onto the shred of peace in mind that this is an extended nightmare. She gave scattered prayers to God in the hopes they would be answered as the man leaves for the day to try and "save her ass from juvie" while the sheriff takes her to her cell, advising her to sleep. The girl doesn't question it, curling up as if, for the first time in her whole life, she was catatonic with fear.
Like a coward who can't face the music that's coming.
The music that came early the next morning was gunfire, shouting, and protesting. Her community wasn't letting her be buried by chicken-shit, pencil-pushing bureaucrats that look at free people and see a problem.
For a moment, Sally felt ready to cry tears of joy.
Sally wakes up in the testing facility's infirmary, taking a slow breath. Her head hurts like she was kicked in the head by a horse or got hammered on whiskey on the 4th of July. She clutches her wound and breathes a sigh of relief that she wasn't bleeding as she notices a suited woman looking over her. It was her teacher, Miss Rosethorn.
She tries to stand, but the woman stops her. "You need rest, McCathy. You pushed yourself far enough and did your best." She tries to reassure the girl, but the slightly concussed nun still shakily attempts to stand. However, she quickly has to grab onto her bed for support.
"I'm not done... There's still time... I can't... I'm NOT giving up!" Sally says as she tries to fight through the pain that radiates through her whole body.
"There isn't. You gave it your best try, and you'll have your chance next year, when you've had more experience, when you're stronger, and when you're even smarter about how to use your quirk in a safe way." Rosethorn says as she helps her problematic student back to sitting on her bed.
Sally looks toward the ground, her head pounding with a cascade of dark thoughts. The European guy who brought her back should die. Hoge deserves a bullet for leaving her to be clobbered. Her failure was rigged by a system that wanted her to fail and just accept being a drone that ignored the divine instruments of punishment in her limbs.
She unsteadily walks to a bathroom as Rosethorn sighs and follows the stumbling American. Sally stares at the almost magically repaired but still lightly marked right side of her skull. A patch of ice is attached to where the impactful fist met her skull.
A part of her wanted to cry, but a vengeful part of her starting to form a full-metal jacketed 2.23 in her arms was taking up more and more mental space. As Sally throws her uniform cap and habit to the ground, Rosethorn looks toward the girl and grabs her shoulder.
"{Sally. You did your best. This is designed in a way that a majority of the people who enter will get filtered out."
"{I don't care about the license anymore. Where the hell is Hoge?}"
"{She's not here, or in the break room, or outside. She could have made it to the next stage. Why don't we go cheer her and the others who made it from our class on from the sidelines?}" she says, trying to transition into a sweeter, more encouraging voice as Sally gets a look of fury.
Sally is about to shut the teacher up with a gunshot directed toward the ceiling, but something stops her: a voice in her head.
A voice of control. Noah's voice. The words aren't important for her, or even something that matters in her state; just the sound of them and the mental image they create are. She looks over at the other students being treated, who rest and chat, eat, sleep, or walk to go cheer on their own classmates.
"{Noah thinks everyone deserves a chance to do better. Even if you've been wronged, you only commit another sin when you seek revenge.}" The voice says to her, the boy's red eyes and relaxed expression fresh in her mind.
But that anger lingers. Like a violent bull shot with a tranqulizier, it needs time and space to work itself out where it can't hurt the rest of the herd.
"I'm going home, Sensei." Sally says respectfully to her teacher.
"Be safe on the way home and remember to go to bed early, okay? You earned a good meal and an early night." The teacher hero says with a smile.
"U-Understood." Sally says as she goes to change into her casual clothes, stuffing her Shiketsu jacket and cap in her messenger bag and taking a long skirt and sweater out. She tightens the skirt's belt tightly around her waist as the sweater's sleeves go all the way to her knuckles. She slings her bag over her shoulders and leaves, out into the streets of Nagoya.
The demon that almost came out is still in there, bashing against its cage and wanting reprisal for what was taken from her. She puts her hymn playlist in her headphones to shut it up as she boards the train back to Kyoto.
Sally couldn't sleep, even after she got on a Brazilian Handful of Dollars server and got a 15-kill streak with her ever-reliable Remington Army (with fanning, of course). It was late, and she wasn't hungry, and the demon inside would settle for symbolic murder in exchange for letting her sleep.
The gun nun tears a photo of Hoge out of the pamphlet she received when she arrived at Shiketsu, her cocky, half-smiling PR face making her blood boil as she puts a jacket on and heads out. Sally walks a familiar path through the streets, cutting her way to the forests outside of Kyoto on the dark streets.
She eventually reaches the forest, venturing far inside to her usual spot: a small glade with a tree she's shot up multiple times before with paper targets she pinned to it. Tonight, however, she pins the photo of Hoge with a thumbtack she drives into the bark with her hands.
Sally takes aim in a crouched posture, the 2.23 rounds that had never left her arms finally finding their mark in spirit. In a way, Sally hoped that a sleeping Hoge felt the impact of the round puncturing her even if the American had calmed down enough to not wish death on her class rep.
After a few minutes, the photo had been turned into Swiss cheese. As Sally went to stomp it into the dirt, she heard something moving in the dark forest around her. Something fast and stealthy, much like a mountain lion or a bobcat. She presses herself against the tree as cover, all her father's urban operations training he was willing to tell her running through her head more than any test on The Tale of Genji ever did.
A .50 cal round from a suppressed rifle comes screaming into the bark of a tree next to her, the noise still alarmingly loud at as close a range as her attacker must be at. Sally's heart starts to beat faster and faster in panic before she takes some deep breaths. Stepping out of cover and running was suicide until she could force the sniper to reload, wound him, or knock him out. All Sally McCathy could do was wait for more shots and follow the trajectory or tracers.
"{Impressive showing. It seems I have lost track of you.}" A noble and old man's voice says.
"{Perhaps your training is less substandard than I thought.}"
Sally remains quiet, not willing to give up her position to make a witty remark.
"{And even strong against provocation: a good trait for a killer.}" The man says.
Sally growls lowly, feeling wrathful rounds form in her arms. She could just barely hear the sound of a magazine being ejected from a weapon, her body peeking around the corner and seeing a shadowy figure run to another closer to her cover. She fires off three shots before she sees the shining steel of a .45 caliber handgun with a custom slide and ducks back into cover. Where she was a second ago, three shots landed, with two more just to her left.
"{I'm impressed, Miss McCathy. Most of the members of your class are substandard under the best conditions, yet you're sharp enough to not get tagged, even when I know your position. You even found space to make me move and fired back.}" He says with a genuine voice as the echoes of the gunshots ring out in the distance.
"{I can offer you a place with me and my associates, a place that will make better use of your abilities than any hero agency could. They'd never even let you get that far, given the fact that they will never let you graduate until the skills that allowed you to survive my volleys have been beaten out of you and replaced with flashy garbage designed for cameras to gawk at.}" The old man says, knowing full well about Sally's situation.
Sally grits her teeth. "{Why would I join a man so shady he won't even identify himself?}" She says, a dam of anger starting to break within her.
"{It's painfully clear that even your own class, even the other Americans in your class, would rather you gone, and I understand. Exceptional people often struggle dealing with those around them that would prefer to drag them down to their level than let them reach their full potential.}"
"{I see an exceptional person in you, one born for a reason much higher than to be a passing fad in the news or to sell bible covers and cereal boxes.}"
Sally runs in a crouching posture to another tree, closing the distance as she makes one of many moves to get closer to the unidentified assailant. "{And what would you have me be doing? Robberies? Gang Killings? You're dead wrong if you think I'll play hitwoman for you.}"
"{A hitman does not do robberies or drive-bys. You would be an assassin. You're a living weapon after all; four guns on you at all times of varying caliber with a 100-meter range are more than enough to bring down the hardest target with a proper plan. And well... you'd be very well compensated for that potential expertise.}" The old man says respectfully.
"{Where did you learn my quirk!?}" Sally exclaims before sneaking to a nearby tree. Fourty meters away from her target, by her estimation.
"{I know much more: You're quite the celebrity back in America, I must say.}"
"{Sally McCathy, Hero Name Last Rite. Daughter of Fredrick and Molly McCathy. Born in Great Falls General Hospital on July 9th.}"
"{Your quirk allows you to alter bullet trajectories within 100 meters of you to a slight degree and to use your limbs as guns. Internal Armory was the name of it in your file, I believe.}"
"{I'm not scared of you, asshole!}" Sally shouts his way as she leans out to return fire with more rifle rounds, still going for a precise approach.
Sally shudders in silence as she hears more about what this suave devil has dug up on her. "{Of course, you're also on a commuted sentence from your kind judge, sent to be broken into the mold of something safe for public consumption after you killed two men and injured a woman in Montana. Your sentence is one that many would kill for: enrollment in Shiketsu High, the second-best hero school in all of Japan.}" He says with a degree of pride.
"{Unlike that school, I understand the righteousness of what you did.}" The old man says as Sally switches cover again, shaking as she can see the gleaming slide of the handgun follow her even when she's in cover.
"{I'm not going to be your killer. God... God gave me my quirk to stop criminals like you, not become one!}" She says with zealous bravery.
Sally fires a spray of hard-tipped 9mm rounds into where she thinks the man is, only to feel a bullet miss her shoulder by a matter of millimeters. "{What's your goddamn name!?}" Sally demands as she sprints for cover and hunkers down. She could tell he was playing with her. He could have planted a round in her stomach, her heart, or her head, but he chose to miss as if demonstrating how far above his skills were to Sally's.
"{Desolator. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Sadly, we are out of time. If you want a change in career, seek me out.}" Desolater says as he silently moves through the brush, Sally firing magnum buckshot everywhere in the hopes of even slightly wounding him.
It did not take long for the police to arrive and question Sally, though the tone was much different than the usual warning of noise complaint fines and accidental violations of hunting laws she got from them when they came up here to bust her. She mentioned the only piece of information she had on her attacker, a man who called himself Desolator.
Sally gulps when the police take her, of all people, dead seriously. They inform her that she survived a shootout with an internationally wanted assassin and that she should take this as a sign to be much, much more careful with her little shooting sessions. They drive Sally back to her apartment building and call her teacher. She expected to earn the same privilege of needing a buddy everywhere that Christopher needed, except she had the PTS pre-packaged.
What was almost as alarming as the world-class assassin that was playing around with her life and offering her a job as his apprentice was the fact she had a text from her parents.
They were visiting her dingy, cluttered apartment next week; her parents were excited to see her boyfriend and how well her education at Shiketsu is going. Sally was much less excited by this prospect as she lay on her bed and felt the wrathful demon in her appeased for the moment.
Her night was sleepless as she couldn't stop Desolator's words from worming into her brain. If anything, her failure at the exams was proof that she had failed a challenge sent by God and that his blessing on her was fickle.
For a brief moment, the Gun Nun questioned her faith and saw things from Desolator's perspective: she was a born killer, and the two lives she already took were proof of that.
She spends the night praying in her bed for forgiveness, for strength, and for self-control in the face of whatever is coming next.