It’s that time of year again. Birds are chirping, legs are showing, and fear is spreading across the campus as people flee from armed assailants.

Assassins games have sprung up almost everywhere and epic stories of intrigue, espionage, and broken friendships abound. Kills are executed in the darkness and in the open.

At one fateful lunch in Leverett dining hall, a very public hit showed just how intense one Assassins game had gotten. This Flyby correspondent (a Leverett House resident) was enjoying a meal when a loud shout was uttered.

The hall went quiet as frightened students frantically tried to locate the source of the disturbance, perhaps wondering if their own assassination was impending. But no, an assassin had already marked his prey.

Cookies were cast awry as the assassin gave chase. His quarry faked left and right, but could find no escape. Spotting a cookie and brownie-laden isle, the prey doubled back and around the fixture, searching frantically for a point of egress. The predator raced along an array of juices and milks, his menacing gait punctuated by the spoon he held clutched in his right hand. Ten feet, six feet, three feet lay between the pursued and a gruesome death by spoon.

The assassin lunged…

But lo! The mark was not unarmed. In one deft movement, he leapt back and fired off a single burst from his Super Soaker as silver death arced through the air. And then, silence. The would-be assassin had failed.

Soon after onlookers returned to their meals and polite conversation, quickly relegating the confrontation to the back of their minds, recognizing it as a necessary feature of a campus at war.

Kirkland, Quincy, Winthrop, Adams, Pforzheimer, Currier, Lowell, Eliot, Canaday, Cabot, Dunster, Currier, the Black Students Association, and the Latino community have either started, finished, or about to begin some variant of Assassins, so chances are if you’re reading this, you have an assassination story to tell. Think it’s worth sharing? Submit your story to “M” for a chance at fame and the title “FlyBy Bond: Harvard’s Top Assassin.”

Submit your stories here!