Neku Sakuraba, fresh from Shibuya's Reapers' Game, lands in Tristain with scars still raw—loss and guilt haunting his every step. Dragged into a world of magic, he's gotta navigate nobles, spells, and his own busted heart. And his only hope of making sense of this new world…was a pink-haired tsundere mage whose default was set to explosive.
Zero’s Symphony: A Tale of Pins and Wands
is a crossover fic between The World Ends with You and The Familiar of Zero made by xehaga48
that details Neku as he’s transported into Halkengania just as he’s shot at the climax of his stand-off with Joshua at the end of the Reaper’s Game and forced to learn how to live amongst the populace of nobility and mages in order to try and build himself back up after his apparent failure of saving Shibuya by refusing to take the shot against Joshua. In doing so, he finds himself reluctantly bonding with Louise Françoise Le Blanc de La Vallière as her familiar and finds himself pulled into this world’s conflicts more and more. It was originally put up on June 2025.
Zero’s Symphony:A Tale of Pins and Wands contains examples of:
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Louise is much nicer to Neku compared to her canon relationship with Saito. This is a Justified example since Louise is made to deal with the raw, unfiltered trauma Neku has endured due to his tribulations in the Reaper’s Game from the offset, providing a foil to her own sense of failure that kickstarts her empathy to become much more apparent sooner than in canon. It also helps that unlike Saito, Neku DOESN’T jump up and down on her Berserk Buttons (such as pointing out her flat chest and magical failings) and instead tries to support her.
- Berserk Button: Do NOT insult Shibuya around Neku. When Guiche indirectly insults it by insinuating that it’s a backwater dump, Neku goes full-on Tranquil Fury, demolishing Guiche’s golems in a Curb-Stomp Battle. When Guiche goes on to insult it AGAIN during the fight, Neku becomes so pissed that he almost kills Guiche in a fit of PTSD-induced rage, only being stopped from actually badly hurting Guiche via Louise’s Cooldown Hug.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Siesta is a normally sweet-tempered, playful maid but when Guiche, after his 'duel' with Neku, starts insulting him for seemingly flying off the handle when he insulted Shibuya, not knowing about Neku’s Survivor's Guilt, she snaps and calls out Guiche in a brutal “The Reason You Suck” Speech that leaves even her surprised at the end of it and makes Guiche realize just how much of an ass he’s been.
- Broken Bird: Neku. In spades. On top of everything he went through in the Reaper’s Game, he’s made to believe that it’s All for Nothing since unlike in the original game, he gets transported right after he’s shot by Joshua into an entirely different world and is convinced that the people and city he fought for are now all dead. Sufficed to say, he’s not exactly the most welcoming at the start, though he slowly gets better thanks to a combination of Louise and Siesta’s efforts.
- Deconstruction: The story deconstructs a very
common part of FoZ fics, the designated Guiche fight, via having the students be terrified of Neku’s psychs for how alien they are in comparison to their own understanding of how magic is supposed to be like, especially when Neku uses his psychs to almost kill Guiche in a fit of rage. As a result, the other students become suspicious of both Neku and Louise (as the one who actually summoned him), with some even claiming the former as a demon or an elf, which, in the world of Halkengania, is not exactly a good thing to be. - Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Neku is initially not that enthused to take up Louise’s offer to help him in this new world of mages and nobles, believing it to be just the result of her pitying him, only to be surprised when Louise actively rejects that mindset because she knows what it’s like to be pitied and refuses to let that define their relationship.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Neku has this reaction when he snaps himself out of his PTSD-induced rage towards Guiche and realizes that he came close to killing someone again due to an extreme emotional reaction (drawing parallels to how he had almost killed Shiki back on Week 1, Day 2).
- When He Smiles: Louise and Siesta both note (the former internally, the latter externally) how whenever Neku actually lets his guard down around them and smiles and/or laughs, it’s actually quite nice.
