“You guys... call this here... ‘junk food’,” said M3 in between big bites of a huge burger and the licking of his fingers to clean them from the sauce dripping down his skin. He was devouring the chunk of meat between a bread bun with the hunger of a starving carnivore, the fingers of his other hand energetically tapping on the table’s surface beside a large plate filled with more burgers - it was almost as if he was warning everyone in the table to not take any of his newly discovered favourite food. “But this... is not trash at all...!”

“It’s called junk food because it’s extremely unhealthy, not because it tastes bad,” explained Eki, a soft smile on his features as he intently observed all six targets eating while exchanging their first impressions on real human food. M2 had given the soldiers a description of what the lab’s food looked like when they were bringing pretty much all the food available in the small coffee corner inside of the airport and it sure didn’t resemble anything that could be called edible.

“M0, here! Have a bite too!” suddenly said M3, the hand holding the half-eaten burger quickly lunging at M0’s mouth. He swiftly stuffed it in there before M0 could even fully turn his head towards him.

“MMPH!” immediately choked M0, the large half-eaten burger getting stuck in between his jaws, which had been stretched to crippling levels with the momentum used to lung the piece of ‘junk food’ into his mouth. When he somehow managed to take the burger out of his mouth, coughing slightly due to the unexpected shortage of air, yet another piece of food was shoved there, this time quickly going down his throat after he had automatically chewed it.

“What do you think about these cookies, M0? Are they good? Are they?” cheerfully asked M5, already picking up more of the chocolate chip cookies in front of him to give them to M0.

“They’re both good but please don’t just put things in my mouth all of a sudden, M3, M5,” admonished M0, though his face ever remained completely expressionless. Even his voice was monotone, lacking in all emotions, had noticed the soldiers. When he sensed more movement of unfamiliar objects towards his body, he quickly shifted his eyes sideways and looked at M1, who was holding a white cup with a pointy, thin and hollow cylinder in the middle. “...?”

“I drank this and thought that maybe you would like it too,” said M1, leading the cup closer to him while pointing to the hollow cylinder in the centre. “This has a drink inside. You just put this cylinder thing in your mouth and suck, which will pull the liquid into your mouth. Want to give it a try?”

M0 readily nodded his head in acknowledgement and took a hold of the plastic cup, his grey eyes intently studying the object that supposedly held some sort of edible liquid inside, by the name of... well, he wasn’t actually sure what kind of name it had just yet. With a little bit of hesitation, he put the cylinder in his mouth and gave a quick suckle into it, feeling that something with a flavour that he was presumedly to categorize as ‘sweet’ was starting to climb through it as he continued to suck. When the liquid lightly touched his tongue... his whole world had been changed.

“M1, what is this?” readily asked M0, his eyes wide open in surprise, in a way they had never before. He quickly returned his lips to the cylinder and continued to suck into it, his body unconsciously relaxing at the cold liquid that was being injected into his whole being.

“I believe it goes by the name of ‘iced caramel macchiato’,” explained M1, softly smiling at how satisfied M0 looked as he enjoyed the drink. He switched his gaze back to the soldiers that kept a close watch on them, his smile switching almost immediately to a haughty smirk. “Isn’t that right?”

“Eh? Ah, yeah, that’s an iced caramel macchiato,” acknowledged Ikusaki, still slightly taken aback by the first-ever display of human emotions by M0 – he had an almost child-like enthusiasm while drinking the beverage. Which was weirdly adorable, taking into consideration that he had mass murdered a big group of scientists not even half a day ago.

“Which one did you like the most?” asked M5, picking another cookie and motioning it forward in M0’s direction, a challenging glint in his eyes as he sideways looked at M3. “My cookies, M3’s burger or M1’s iced—“

“M1,” immediately answered M0, his mouth still slowly sipping at the macchiato. “I like M1’s the most.”

“I also like M0 the most,” acknowledged M1, giving a soft kiss to M0’s cheek as he once again nestled his sitting position in his chair closer to him.

“That wasn’t even what M0 said in the firs—“ started grumbling M4, rolling his eyes around slightly, but he came to a halt to his own words and switched his gaze back to M3. “You just spelt a word wrong. ‘Commander’ has two Ms, not one.”

“Earlier you also spelt ‘memorization’ with an S instead of a Z,” added M2, his mouth filled with countless potato chips.

“Shut up! If you’re complaining that much, why don’t you do this instead of me!?” angrily roared M3, the finger that was constantly tapping on the table doing its repetitive movements with angriness and frustration now.

“I can’t hear anything,” pointed out M4, quickly adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

“Then just suck it up, M4, and let me do my thing, okay?” scoffed M3, putting one more burger in his mouth and ripping a large chunk of it with his teeth. “It’s already a pain in the ass to do this, don’t make it even more boring with your yapping.”

“Hmph!” M4 readily turned his face away from M3 and lunged his hand forward to the closest human treat – it was a round disc of some type of bread wrapped in a square plastic bag. He intently analyzed the wrapping, wondering how exactly it was opened so that its contents would be released. He was about to make his first attempt into trying to get a hold of the disc-shaped bread when a hand snatched it away from him.

“You open it like this,” explained Mizusaki, grabbing onto the top part of the plastic wrapping and pulling each side in a different direction, a hole surfacing in the top by the separation of the two sides of the plastic. “And this is called a dorayaki. It’s sort of just two small pancakes with sweet azuki beans filling.”

“I would have managed to open it by myself just fine,” said M4, snatching the dorayaki back to himself from the soldier’s hands. “So don’t go thinking that I will feel any sort of thankfulness for you having explained to me something that I could have very well done all alone.”

“Pfffft!” started laughing Mizusaki, clutching his mouth shut with his now free hand to prevent himself from outright burst out laughing in M4’s face. “What the heck? A kuudere, a yandere, a flashy blonde, an ore-sama, a cookie monster and a tsundere? Quite the colourful group of friends we got here~”

“What?” interjected M4, his head slightly tilted as he observed Mizusaki with a certain suspicion.

“Never mind. I’m sure there will come a day when you’ll understand what I just said,” reassured Mizusaki, waving his hand around to dismiss the subject. “It would be very tiring and pretty much impossible to explain that right now with your... limited knowledge of the human society.”

“Are you doubting my intellectual capacities?” inquired M4, a small glare on his eyes as he intently looked at the soldier. “I’ll let you know that my intelligence is second to M1 only, which is something that I have cursed and resented every single day of my life.”

“Ah... I don’t think M1 would understand either, so it’s not like the problem lies in you,” pointed out Mizusaki, his eyes intently observing and analyzing M4 after having gotten that sort of answer – it appeared that M4 held some sort of rivalry towards M1, though it seemed to be completely one-sided, as M1 had been pretty much looking over M0’s direction only since the moment they first reunited.

“Hmph!” M4 once again turned his face away from the soldier and motioned the dorayaki to his mouth, taking a small tentative bite at it. This type of food wasn’t that bad, actually.

Rolling his eyes around just the slightest, Mizusaki returned to near his fellow soldiers, leaning his lower back against a table while he crossed his arms over his chest. “You know, forgetting that they are mass murder machines and could take our heads from over our shoulders with a flick on our forehead... they are a complete bunch of children. Actually, brats. Not meaning to mimic Miue-san, of course.”

“Scary and extremely deadly brats, then,” pointed out Umiko, a small suspicious glare on her eyes as she once again recalled the bloody mess that they had made the lab workers become in a matter of minutes. Especially how pleased they all seemed while doing it – maybe with the exception of M0, who pretty much held a completely expressionless demeanour at all moments.

“They are sort of like wild animals, in a way,” said Kuwabayashi, an eyebrow slightly perked up as he closely studied the targets on the table. “Well, humans raised by wild animals, I mean. Rationality isn’t a word in their dictionary and all that matters to them is their instincts and doing whatever satisfies them the most. I still don’t even get why they decided to sign the contract with us and Murayama since we all know very well that they could have killed us together with the scientists and workers from the lab.”

“Maybe they still have some sort of utility to us. Who knows?” announced Eki, giving a quick shrug with his shoulders. “I have no idea what sort of utility it would be, seeing as we are pretty much leading them to the place where they will most likely be detained for the rest of their lives, if not readily killed and then dissected to be used in stud— ...!”

Eki came to a sudden halt on his words when M0 suddenly popped up out of nowhere right in front of the place where he was sat down, his face completely void of any sort of expression, making it impossible to read what exactly was going around inside of his mind.

“M-M0...” stuttered Umiko, unconsciously taking a step back due to the topic of conversation that had been going around before the target’s arrival.

“...” M0 silently stared at the group of soldiers in front of him, his head slightly tilted to the right as he did so. “You smell weird.”

“Huh?” interjected all five soldiers, not understanding if that was supposed to be some sort of admonishment towards them or simply a statement about something that M0 had taken an interest in.

“Ikusaki Shouichi, Eki Yasuhisa and Mizusaki Shinobu,” continued M0, his grey eyes intently locked into the three soldiers that he had named. “Miue Satoshi and Murayama Yamase too. You all smell weird.”

“We probably just smell like swea—“ started Ikusaki but the sides of his face were suddenly grabbed by a pair of tiny and pale hands, with a soft and gentle touch that he wouldn’t have pegged any of the targets to have.

“No, you don’t smell of that,” declared M0, his grey eyes deeply staring into Ikusaki’s. “You smell like us. Different but still the same. Even though you are only humans, you smell just as if you were one of us. I thought at first that it was because you are soldiers... but I don’t think so anymore. Kumakawa Umiko, Kuwabayashi Utei and the others smell like ordinary humans.”

“What’s that even supposed to m—“ started questioning Ikusaki, but a sudden massive shudder ran down his spine. When he looked sideways towards the table, he found M1 silently staring at him, his grey eyes turning into crimson red for half a second. He hurriedly took M0’s hands out of his face and pulled his torso away from him, trying to create the most distance between the two of them as his sat-down position allowed him to.

M0 kept staring at the soldiers for a couple more of seconds and then turned around on his heels, his body disappearing from there and then appearing back on the chair where he had been sat down while eating, between M1 and M3.

As soon as M0 returned to the table, M1 readily wrapped his arms around his torso, tugging him closer towards his body as he rested his chin on top of his shoulder. “So... Are they?”

“I don’t know,” softly whispered M0, taking another glance towards the soldiers and then towards the large mirror on the top level of the building. “I don’t think so but I can’t tell with 100% sure right now. They are... weird humans.”