My first piece of Japanese in this chapter. Sentai roughly “task force.” Sorry all. It was unavoidable.
As always, thanks for reading!
Intoxicated eyes / no longer live that life / you should have learned by now / I’ll burn this whole world down
You will get what you deserve.
Had Enough
Up until that point, certain elements of the group—Akane and Kazuya, for example—had been able to ignore, or at least pay as little attention as possible to, the predicament they were in. A few others—Mai and Mikoto, Chie and Aoi—knew that there was trouble brewing, but of what sort they were entirely uncertain. They had no solid proof that it had anything to do with them, so they did their best to pretend that the tragedies occurring in Goza were just that—tragedies, nothing more. Sick bastards perpetrating sick crimes, too bad, but damn I’m glad it wasn’t me in that store.
As with many reality-defying fantasies, however, this illusion ended abruptly and without mercy. In this case, what brought it to its abrupt, bloody halt was the abrupt, bloody appearance of a pair of corpses in their cabin—one in the boys’ room, one in the girls’. Midori supposed this was not entirely usual, but Minoru harbored no such illusions. He had ended quite a few young idiots’ fantasies more bloodily than that. He supposed he should feel sorry about that, but then, it took a special sort of sociopath to do his job in the first place, as he had been told numerous times.
But, Minoru supposed, he couldn’t be a sociopath, at least not entirely. Not when he was helping out a bunch of teens just barely done with squeaking voices and popping zits, at extreme risk to his own life, and for absolutely no money. He supposed he could chalk it up to revenge—and he did, quite vehemently, but something very small and petulant inside of his head quietly reminded him every time he tried to convince himself of this that he had never been a particularly vengeful sort, nor a particularly passionate sort. Laid-back sharpshooters weren’t uncommon; he was sure the best out there, as was the case in most professions, were all full of vim and vigor and shat something fierce about their job or cause or some such nonsense, but he had been quite happy where he was prior to this shit-storm: laid-back, wealthy, and a little above average.
Why, then, was he helping a man who was strangely smart-looking in his tacky Hawaiian shirt and a beautiful, buxom redhead who couldn’t have been more than three years out of college drag corpses out of a cabin in the middle of some tourist-trap in Goza?
He had no idea, but whatever it was, he was in it for good or ill. He could always bail at the end, he reasoned.
Yeah fucking right.
They buried them under the cabin, which was on stilts, chasing out a good few rats and a good few more spiders that Minoru would sooner never think about again in the process. The rats would come back soon enough, and they would find the corpses and probably get fat off of them, and the cabin would stink like all hell in a few days, but these were things for other people to worry about.
What Minoru had to worry about was getting them out of this situation, which meant getting them off the beach. Trouble was, he had precisely no idea how to do this; their car was almost certainly wired and watched by a bunch of independent mercs who had no desire to win an award for above and beyond the call of duty, and so stayed right where they were, waiting for orders from Scratch-ass, who was plotting god-knew-what, but appeared to have a small—or not-so-small—army of them at his beck and call.
Considering what he knew about mercenaries, it was likely to be the small. Mercs didn’t come on a global scale anymore, not when it was usually cheaper to enlist your own kids and arm them with your own sub-par weapons and use your own inept generals to tell them how best to get themselves shot. Mostly mercenaries were used in border skirmishes and by paramilitary groups with a lot of money and an agenda that nobody gave a shit about but them—he supposed that Scratch-ass fell cleanly into that category, as well.
He considered asking Midori as they worked if they had any idea what that woman, the one with the brown hair—her name escaped him at the moment—had done to piss such a powerful psychopath off so badly, but thought it best to rein in for now. If anybody knew, it was the woman herself, but she seemed in no condition to do much more than make out with what appeared to be her girlfriend at this point—something he’d witnessed and wisely ignored on their way out with the bodies.
Girlfriend though? Really? If so, they’ve gotta be about as bipolar as you were with Kimmi. Maybe.
But then, some people got off on that stuff. Sometimes, maybe, they were the ones who had it right. Their relationships didn’t get as stale as quickly, and their little nitpicks with other, the little things that really killed a relationship, never sat inside their heads, piling up until they exploded. They came out all at once.
Maybe there was something to it. What, Minoru would probably never be sure of.
They had no shovels, so they had to work with planks of wood they’d torn off the side of the cabin. Minoru had told them he’d foot the bill if the owner bitched—which, of course, he would. They were just kids, after all. He was, as he’d previously noted, wealthy. Not rich. Just wealthy. The kind of wealthy you could use to buy a house, but not a boat—that was how Yumi had put it. The kind of wealthy he could use to fix a house.
The kind of wealthy that goes away damn fast if you throw it at stupid shit like cabins. Especially when you’re not getting paid to do it.
He shrugged to himself. He had enough money. He always seemed to. Killing people was one of the world’s best paying jobs—second, it sometimes seemed, only to whatever job primarily encompassed paying people to kill other people.
Introspection: Finished. He said it once in his head, and then said it again to make sure he’d gotten the message. Maybe later, when you have no corpses to bury and no apathetic, yet surely deadly mercenaries watching a van not fifty meters up a hill from you, their approach towards your cabin probably held off only by ninja who consider bear food to be a valid tactic.
He shoveled (planked?) a final, almost symbolic scoop of dirt over the small grave he’d made for the two corpses, and then patted it down a little. The girl and her buddy were already out from under the cabin—whether because they were content to let a middle-aged coot do most of the dirty work, or because they couldn’t stand the sight or thought of burying a pair of corpses, both missing important parts out of themselves, Minoru didn’t much care. He crawled his way back out, and shook his close-cut hair out, unleashing a small flurry of dust onto the pair, who were standing at about arm’s length from each other, watching him in silence.
“Well,” Minoru said, feigning cheer. “That’s done with.”
They stared at him in silence, neither entirely sure what to say. They looked more awkward than he’d expected, and he wondered what precisely they’d been doing while he’d been burying corpses. He decided he didn’t much care about that either, but only with a little effort. Such was the nature of middle age.
Also part of the nature of middle-age was a lack of patience with what he observed to be young-person (not necessarily teenage—that girl looked to be over twenty) angst, especially while there was imminent danger. Or maybe that was the nature of surviving in his line of work.
“Okay. Don’t talk about it, but you two are going to talk to me, and you’re going to talk but good.”
Midori spoke, but her voice seemed slightly strained. “About what?”
Minoru stared at her, silently willing her to cut the petty shit out. He wasn’t entirely sure what the hell was wrong with the previously-energetic pair, but he had a feeling it had something to do with the meter’s distance between them.
As he stared, he noticed something else in her pretty, serious face; something that seemed unusual: Stress. Her brow was creased, her eyes narrowed in spite of a lack of sunlight, her mouth curved down just slightly in the kind of frown that had nothing to do with happiness. He thought about asking her what the matter was, then decided against it. She’d get through it by herself, or if she didn’t, it wasn’t his problem.
But that decision nagged at him. Just a little.
“You,” he pointed at the boy. “What’s your name again?”
“Reito,” the boy said. He seemed in better shape than Midori; it seemed, in retrospect, that his silence was mostly out of …some sort of courtesy. “And I don’t think anybody but Shizuru—”
“The one with the light-brown hair?” Minoru interrupted, still shaky on names.
“Yes, that girl,” Reito said, apparently unfazed by the interruption. “I don’t think anybody but her can really tell you what this is about, but I can hazard a guess.”
“Please,” Minoru said. “Do.”
Reito told him what he claimed to remember about the HiME carnival—leaving out his own participation—and about the First District which sought to control it, and about the Searrs Foundation. Either of these two groups may have had the money to pull off a stunt like this, he explained, but neither, to the best of his knowledge, would have a motive. Most importantly, he said, because of the destruction of the…what he called the overlord of the carnival, and thus the destruction of the conduit between this world and the “star,” neither organization had any reason to continue on.
Frankly, Minoru wasn’t sure how much of it he believed. That was to say, he was quite positive that he didn’t believe a word of it, and he would have been able to dismiss Reito as a fucking nut with ease, but for one thing: Midori. As he told the story, Midori only watched him with great seriousness, her mouth shut and her back slumped, as though from some great weight that she’d been carrying a long, long time.
And Midori, he knew, was no fucking nut.
This troubled him greatly.
“Magical girls,” he muttered. “You mean to tell me that you were…all of you were…a bunch of magical girls?”
“Not all,” Reito said mildly. “The two, Chie with the glasses and city-cut, and Aoi with the blue eyes,” (oddly enough, the latter description was quite useful for Minoru, who subconsciously noted eye color upon meeting somebody—perhaps a symptom of staring at too many people through a high-resolution zoom-scope) “had virtually nothing to do with any of this. They’re just…friends.” He intoned the word a little awkwardly, as though he were pronouncing something foreign for the second or third time.
“Magical girls,” Minoru repeated, sitting down and biting back the urge to laugh, scream, and then leave. “I’m running around nearly getting eaten by bears for a bunch of ex-fucking-Sailor Moons.” He shook his head, and then stood up again. “I mean, you are kidding, right? One of you is involved in some sort of gang, and you pissed somebody in the Yakuza off, right?”
Reito only watched him, more serious than Minoru had ever seen him while the man himself was near-hysterical all of a sudden. It made no sense—couldn’t make any sense. Maybe it was the flaw of his aged mind, supposedly inured to all of the world’s paradoxes and inconsistencies, thanks to of his armor of cynicism, the kind brought about by age. This was just some stupid kid telling a stupid joke, right? Reito was just another pretentious, oversexed, perpetually drunk college kid, trying to get a rise out of somebody wa-ay more worldly-wise than he would probably ever be in his entire coddled life? Trying to get a rise out of his girlfriend so that maybe she could get a rise out of him later?
Except there was nothing coddled-looking about Reito. And there was nothing rising on either him or the woman next to him.
“HiME-sentai,” Midori murmured suddenly. “That’s what I called us.”
“I never knew that,” Reito said gently, without looking at her.
What…the fuck. This is too fucking much. All of it. Fucking kids don’t want to admit what kind of trouble they’re in, so they try and lay it on me with a bullshit story about Magical Girls and an evil lord Kokuyou who wants…what? A new wife every so often? Who controls the entire goddamn world through his EVIL POWERS?
But what about the parts that make sense?
What parts that make sense?
What about the abrupt end of the Sino-Russian skirmishes around the time they described this “carnival” as having ended? What about the total fucking lack of contracts after that time? Why else would you have taken an assignment watching girls change through your scope? You’re not picky, but you’re pickier than that.
Minoru shook his head. This was bullshit. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull on me, Reito,” he said pointedly, angrier than he had been in months, “but stop, and stop now. You can tell me the truth if somebody’s involved with the Yakuza or something—if anybody’s going to go tattling to the cops, it ain’t me, since the cops would probably like to ask me a few questions while I was in the neighborhood. But please, do not—”
What about the ninja? What about the bears eating freelancers, just like yourself? What about the tweenie girl who managed to sneak up on that guy, Nori?
Delusions. Delusional people.
Something was tugging on his leg. He looked down, and saw the girl that he’d been escorting when the
ninja
crazy people in the trees had intervened on their behalf. Shiho, that was her name. She was sitting on the grass, eyes slightly downcast. He had no idea how he hadn’t heard her sneaking up on him. He supposed it gave validity to the crazy people in masks theory, though.
What she said, though, did not. Nor did the look in her eyes—one of near-psychotic horror, and borderline-metal-case depression.
“I killed him,” she murmured. “Please don’t make me prove it to you. They’re telling the truth—I killed him. I don’t want to have to think about it again.”
Minoru blinked. There was absolutely nothing false in her eyes. Nothing. Unsettling? Yes, but nothing that was untruthful.
Unsettling like a child who had killed somebody. He’d seen those; of course he had. The near-dead eyes, frightened and hostile all at once; usually those kids gripped an AK-47 or something equally ancient and deadly, and Minoru had always been glad that he’d been looking at them through a scope from a tree, and not a pair of combat goggles from a bush. Given a big gun and a little instruction, anybody could kill somebody given enough provocation, but it took a kid’s blind fear and unthinking reflexes to blast the shit out of any bush that moved. Kids knew nothing of standoffs. If you cornered a kid and he had a gun, you killed him or he killed you a second later.
Those had not been good days, but they were precisely the days he was now reliving, courtesy of one Shiho Munakata.
He turned his head away. Like he had before.
“Fine,” he said. “Say I believe you.” He didn’t, but he found himself willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if it meant not having to see a little kid look like that again. “Say you’re all former…magical girls…and you’re on the run from an evil organization. What do they want with you? And why the girl, especially?” Realizing that this description benefited nobody, he gestured in the general direction of the cabin for added emphasis. Reito knew who he was talking about.
“Shizuru. Shizuru Fujino. I have no idea. I’d ask her.”
“I plan on it.” He paused. “Once she’s clothed.”
Reito nodded sagely.
He would, too. If he was going to help these kids out, free of charge, and take Scratch-ass down (he was planning on that anyway, but they didn’t need to know that) then he was going to know exactly what in the flying fuck was going on.
“A kilometer, tops.”
“Why didn’t you spot them sooner?” The man with the sniper rifle wasn’t entirely sure, but the hoarse, flat man sounded almost disappointed. Like a chastising mother. The thought amused him.
“They had a well-thought-out approach vector, and they’re moving in unmarked cars. If I hadn’t spotted the guy takin’ a leak out the side of the convoy, they’d probably been up our ass ‘fore I caught wind of them.”
“I expect that if that were true, you would not have much of an ass to spot them with,” the man with the hoarse voice said. “They are, after all, coming to kill you.”
“Not quite, buddy,” the man with the scope said, and then cut the transmission by way of tossing the radio to the ground. “They’re coming for those kids down there, and frankly, I don’t intend to be anywhere nearby when they show up. Pay is nice, but the advance was enough to feed me for at least a few weeks”
Nor should he have, because what he saw was enough to drive just about anybody just a little deeper underground: A full convoy, perhaps sixteen or twenty unmarked vans, filled with what appeared to be professional soldiers, headed straight for them.
Unfortunately, he never got the chance to spend the advance. About ten seconds after the radio hit the ground, splitting into pieces, the man who was supposed to be backing him up, a man who he had never met before this day, shot him twice in the head from a tree not twenty meters off with a silenced pistol. The pistol clicked twice, and the man sagged into his harness.
“Do you think you can hit the driver of the lead truck?” the man with the hoarse voice asked this man. “If you can, then you can leave; return to your designated waiting point and I’ll be in touch.”
“You just want me to harass them, is all?”
“I need you to hold them up for at least five more minutes. I have regulars on the way, but without this extra time, the regulars will arrive to find nothing more than an empty camp.”
“Just slow them down, eh?” the man said, taking a drag on his cigarette and raising his large automatic sniper rifle to his eye. “You got it.”
“Once you’re clear, your contract is filled. Wait around for your payment is all you need do.”
“Yeah,” he said. The line went dead.
This was probably suicide. If these guys were actually regulars, they’d have commandoes in the forest by now, hunting for people just like him. Factor in the middle-aged coot in the camp who seemed to be pretty damn good with his own boomstick, and you had a simple equation: Fire, and die.
But what the hell. He’d shot the other guy, as per orders, and he expected somebody was waiting around to shoot him if he didn’t do what the throaty bastard said, also as per orders.
They were less than half a kilometer away now, on the main road, kicking up a hell of a dust cloud. Looking through his scope, he could see, through the windshield of the lead vehicle, eight men, all dressed in modern-looking combat armor, performing their final weapon checks; cocking weapons, making sure they were loaded properly, that sort of thing. All of their weapons were pointed at the ceiling, which meant they weren’t amateurs, anyway.
But maybe they were, too.
He did a quick test of the wind, found there to be none, and then shot the driver. His gun made a resounding crack in the air, which seemed to bounce off of the water and back at him. His vehicle stayed on course for a few seconds, and then started to slow down.
He started packing up. Now they would definitely be searching for him, and like the throaty bastard had said, regulars were coming from his side as well. No need for him to stick around.
No need at all.
A few seconds after the first shot, there was an explosion, and if Minoru listened carefully—which he did—he could hear people shouting. Not panicked voices; authoritative.
“What was that?” Chie asked, her voice understandably strained. They all looked at Minoru, who shrugged.
“Hell if I know,” he murmured. “Trouble is what I call it. I think we’d better go to ground, but fast.”
Midori had more or less recovered herself, and it was she who looked at him now. After a second, he met her gaze, and a silent understanding formed immediately: Minoru is the only person here who has any experience in modern warfare. That girl, Natsuki, has killed before, but she has not been to war. People will listen to Midori, so Midori must be an extension of Minoru’s orders right now.
“Alright,” Midori said, snapping to. “Everybody, to the forest, now. Safest spot to be.” As much as Minoru hated to admit it, it was probably true—he had heard soldiers, and if soldiers were making themselves heard, they were coming in bulk.
Besides, there might be
ninja
some deranged lunatics in the forest, who just happened to be damn good at tree-to-tree fighting.
They started to move. They made it about five meters before the first authoritative voice—the same one he’d heard after the explosion, shouted, “Stop! Stay where you are!”
Then Minoru heard guns being cocked.
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