Burning now, I bring you hell.
Hell #2
They were professional, all right, and they’d been working together longer than Natsuki cared to imagine; that was obvious. They advanced in a staggered line, backs bent, assault rifles held to eye level, aimed both at and past the group. There were at least twenty of them, and they moved quickly and without reservation, knowing for certain that nobody was going to be sneaking up behind them because that was where their backup was. Natsuki thought of going for her gun—she kept it on her now, and if any police showed up to talk to her about it, she would have a few things to talk to them about—but decided against it. Even as HiME, the situation was more or less untenable. They had them by the balls, but good, and Natsuki knew it. Shizuru, wrapped now in a robe, shifted against her, and Natsuki knew that Shizuru knew it too.
Mai felt Mikoto begin to move. An unconscious twitch, maybe, from an old, now-defunct reflex, or something else. She clamped her hand—the one which was not tightly gripped in Yuuichi’s—down on the younger girl’s shoulder, staring at the advancing column of black-clad infantry in a mix of horror and wonder, and whispered, “Stay here, Mikoto.”
“I don’t like them,” Mikoto murmured, relaxing nonetheless. “They’re…bad.”
This whole trip is bad. This whole world has gone bad. What’s one more group of soldiers on top of that?
Stop it. That’s not you. Stop it.
Even so, Mai had no idea what to say. What did you say to a platoon of advancing soldiers? Hey, bathroom’s on the right, but you gotta buy something if you want to use it. Don’t forget to wipe.
The thought made Mai want to giggle a little hysterically.
Oddly, it was Minoru, the one of them who didn’t belong, who addressed the soldiers.
“What’s your business here?” he said. Mai was shocked—he, a man just moving into middle-age, a man getting a little soggy around the midsection, with, from what Mai could gather, no apparent talent for combat,was demanding something of the platoon of advancing infantry, with guns that looked like they could take a tank apart in seconds?
Apparently, he was. The soldiers stopped about five meters in front of them, and none of them moved for a moment. Minoru picked one out—it seemed at random, but Mai doubted it was—and asked again. “Talking to you, Sergeant,” he said, his voice pointed and authoritative. “What’s your business? You got none, me and my friends would appreciate you moving along. If you’re looking for somebody to shoot, there’s plenty of ‘em in the woods, I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Orders received,” the man he was speaking to said, obviously not to him. “Will comply.”
Silence for a moment, and then the man said, “Minoru Alder. Our employer is willing to buy your contract from Gina in payment for your noninterference from here onward.”
Someone from their group murmured something, and Mai herself was a little taken aback. Contract?
“Uh-uh,” Minoru said, with an air of a father addressing his petulant son. “Not so easy. I’ve had one shit contract already this week, and I’m lucky to be standing here telling you about it. How about you state your business, and then we can talk about contracts.”
“No clearance for civilians,” the man said curtly. “If you show resistance, we will retaliate.”
“Clearance, my ass. You’re mercs,” Minoru said angrily. “I can smell my own.”
“Irrelevant. Noncompliance will result in retaliation. Stand aside.”
“Where do you hail from, I wonder? Are you the Swiss Remnants? Chinese? You guys just a starter company hoping to cash it big off the Sino-Russian conflict before it ended? Shit, are you even out of your teens yet, Sarge?”
“Minoru,” Midori murmured. “What are you doing?”
“Putting a little kid in his place, Midori,” Minoru said. “This sergeant here,” he said it like it was a dirty word, “Isn’t even your age. Fuck knows he’s got no place ordering me around.”
They look pretty professional to me, Mai thought.
“Step. Aside.” The soldier lowered his weapon and drew his sidearm, a big, nasty-looking pistol with a hefty silencer on it. “Orders are not to harm the teenagers, but I’ve got nothing telling me I can’t cap some old fucking—” he stopped. Minoru smiled, and Mai could swear she heard him murmur, gotcha.
“If you’re taking these kids somewhere, I’m coming.”
“Request confirmation,” the soldier said, again not to Minoru. A moment’s tense pause, and then, “Employer consents under the condition that you agree to a buy-out, and that you surrender your firearms to us.”
“He planning on giving them back? I’m attached to them, and they cost quite a bit of money.” For one wild second, Mai saw it clearly in her mind, clear as day: The sergeant refusing, and Minoru shouting that that did it, he wasn’t going and this meant war, and then pulling his pistol, and then—
“After the contract has been bought and you’re clear. Now come with us. Please.” The last was spoken with a certain reluctance, a sort of petulance, and Mai realized that Minoru had been right—the sergeant was just a kid. A well-trained kid, maybe, but a kid.
Minoru said, “Let me consult my…” and then stopped, frowning. “Um. Give me a minute.” The soldier said nothing.
Turning to them, Minoru said, “I’ll say it frankly, I don’t like it.”
“The hell do you care?” It was Yuuichi who spoke, surprisingly enough, his voice as rough as his speech. “You’re here on contract, anyway, and they’re buying.” Somebody murmured agreement, though nobody else voiced it so openly. “You’re full of shit is what you are, and we don’t need your help.”
“I was here on contract,” Minoru said, brushing Yuuichi off like he was nothing at all. “Was. That’s when I was here watching you kids brush your teeth through a sniper scope, like a spare few mercs have been doing since.” He admitted it without shame nor sheepishness, likewise taking no pride in what this implied. Nobody blushed nor protested, maybe because the situation was too imminent to have a fit over something as trivial as maybe being seen in the buff a few seconds by a seemingly asexual old man with a sniper rifle. “Stopped being paid for what I’m doing a while back, and I’m frankly in the same boat you are about now.”
“So you’re just looking to save your own ass, then? Is that it? Or is there something else you haven’t told us? Shit, we don’t even know what kind of boat we’re in.” Yuuichi said, not to be denied, and to his amazement, Mai spoke up in support of him.
“Who…” she murmured, her voice that of a powerful train just starting to accelerate, and in that instant, Minoru knew he was in for a verbal beating, and that if anybody was going to sway the group into tossing him out and gunning it against the soldiers here, it was her. “Who the hell do you think you are? A perverted stowaway? Found you in the back of our van, and you seem to have heaped trouble on us since then, and nothing but. You take Shiho into the woods…Shiho,” she said it like it meant something, and Minoru guessed that maybe to the people who counted to her, it did, “of all people, and you have Yuuichi…you have him practically clawing his eyes out with worry…you bring this kind of trouble on us, you put us right back where we were before…before THEN, and then you think you can SPEAK FOR US?” She was, indeed a train. She was practically screaming by now, her eyes wild and furious. “You think that you have some kind of right of dominance over us? Just because you’re older? You have more guns? You think—” Yuuichi cut her off, putting his hand on her shoulder and pulling her near to him, glaring daggers at Minoru. As far as they were concerned, nothing had gone wrong until Minoru came along, which was, in some ways, true. He found that he was receiving more than a few glares—from the one with the blue eyes, Aoi, and from a couple, an innocent-looking boy and a pretty, simple-looking girl, and from the young one with the black hair. It was her that scared him more than the rest—protective, rather than offended. You upset her, how fucking dare you?
“Get the fuck out,” Yuuichi hissed, and the others nodded. “Get out and take these fucking soldiers with you.”
Minoru was at a loss—he hadn’t expected this.
“No,” Shizuru murmured, and suddenly, the attention shifted to her. She was the one who had practically fainted into Natsuki’s arms, naked and shaken. It would have been the same as if Chie, still a little shell-shocked, had spoken up. “Please. He’s right,” she said. “This is bad. All of this is bad. We need to go, and we need to go now.”
Natsuki, next to her, nodded. “Please, listen to her. I don’t know if you know what kind of shit we’re in, but—”
“But you’re about to find out,” Minoru whispered, his eyes no longer focused on the group, but behind them. To the woods.
To the fucking woods.
Fucking delusional tree-hoppers. Why the fuck did you think they could keep the woods safe?
The fucking woods.
Now he turned and spoke to the soldiers. “I think you got yourself a deal, boys, and I hope to hell you have a good goddamn piece of backup here.”
The soldiers weren’t listening. They were staring at the woods too, and raising their weapons. Minoru heard the muffled sounds of speech, not directed at him but at each other, over a private link, probably. Within a few seconds, other soldiers started to move over the ridge, but fast.
Minoru turned back to the group. Natsuki had spotted what he’d seen. So had Reito, and so had Midori. None could find it in them to speak. The soldiers they’d encountered first began to move towards them quick.
“Stay back!” Yuuichi shouted. “We don’t want any part of—”
“Tate needs to be quiet,” Mikoto said quietly, now turning to face the woods too. “We need to leave.”
“What…” Mai turned to face where Mikoto was staring, and then she gasped.
From the woods, what seemed to be a dark blob was advancing towards them quickly, like a charred, vengeful amoeba. Looking closely, one could see that it was not some amorphous, asexual, slightly crispy entity, but a line. A line of people.
A line of soldiers. Dressed in black, like the first, but their weapons were different. Longer. Not that that meant much to Mai.
Advancing very, very quickly.
“Now that we’ve spent all our leeway time speaking, I think we’re going to have to run,” Chie whispered, and now they did all turn to her.
Minoru nodded. “Move, kids. Move now.”
That was when the first shots rang out from the line. A trio of crack crack cracks was all; nothing that would seem threatening until two pockets of dirt kicked up around the sergeant. The third shot, it would seem, found its mark, and he dropped with a muffled cry. A pair of soldiers grabbed him before he had time to hit the ground and started dragging him, and Minoru shouted it this time: “RUN!”
They ran. All of them, at once, with the frantic panic that Minoru was sure he could witness at the beginning of a cattle stampede if he had the occasion to incite one himself. The soldiers, young perhaps, but professional, moved aside and advanced, raising their weapons and opening fire, their guns crack crack cracking like the others had. The weapons were silenced, no noisier than the rapping of a fist on a table, but somehow, they seemed infinitely louder, more deafening, at least to Mai, who wasn’t really seeing them at all.
She was seeing herself running. Running after Takumi and Akira. Running after the girl next to her; that sweet, evil little fucking girl with her little pigtails and her enormous sword. That fucking…
People were starting to die around her. As they passed the first line of soldiers, they formed a line around the group, shielding them, dying as per terms of their contract. People were shouting, and they were dying.
Dying.
Dying because of
SHE’S RIGHT NEXT TO YOU.
KILL HER NOW, BEFORE SHE KILLS TAKUMI. BEFORE SHE KILLS YUUICHI
YOU FUCKING WEAKLING, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE
A pair of strong arms gripped her before she knew she was falling. Before she knew she’d fallen behind, started just standing there, maybe expecting to start floating. Maybe expecting something to rise up out of the ground.
Minoru had her around the waist. She was light—light as hell, actually. He wondered briefly whether he’d see flesh or simply rib if she simply disrobed right now. He was strong—it was hard to climb trees with a five kilogram backpack and not be strong—but it honestly felt for a moment, as he picked her up, that he was only lifting air.
He didn’t know it, but for a moment, he was.
The world came rushing back around Mai, and Yuuichi was screaming her name; he’d practically tripped over himself, whipping around as soon as he realized Mai was no longer nearby—Mikoto was already tearing the sand up sprinting back towards her. Shots were starting to echo near them now, and Mai could hear the distant hum of a helicopter. A black-clad man not a meter away from them screamed, clutching at an invisible lead-bug bite in his throat, and dropped to the ground. People were shouting, voices muffled but still obviously frightened and angry all at once. Something exploded nearby—a grenade, but Mai didn’t know it—and Mikoto grabbed Minoru by the hand.
“We need to move,” she said simply.
“Don’t need to tell me, kid,” Minoru said. “Get moving. I’ve got this one.”
Mai started to get heavier of a sudden, and Minoru murmured to her, “Can you walk?”
Mai didn’t know, but she knew Minoru was about to drop her. Up ahead of them, Natsuki had now noticed them, stopped, and started back for them as well, drawing a pistol and snapping shots off at the advancing line of soldiers. Minoru had no idea if she hit anybody or not—the cries were getting too constant now. She reached them shortly, and shouted, “Is she okay?” as loud as she could to be heard over the battle around them.
“Think so. Help me carry her.” Minoru, it seemed, had no trouble making himself heard in the middle of a warzone.
Natsuki grabbed her legs. Mai didn’t protest.
Together, they made it up over the hill in only a few seconds. The others were already there, and as soon as they were clear of the battlefield, the soldiers began to retreat—a convoy’s worth of unmarked, plain-looking vans waited for them there, and they were quickly ushered into the spacious interior of one of them. They were moving less than twenty seconds later—true military efficiency, even if their possible saviors weren’t military, per se. They rode in utter silence, none of them entirely ready to look at anybody else yet. Mai rested lightly in Yuuichi’s arms, her eyes half-open, and it was that girl that Minoru thought on then.
Because, for a second there, it had really felt like she was just floating.
Short as hell, I know. This is meant to be a transitional chapter, you could say, between the first and second parts of this story; the first and second story arcs, if you will, a la School Rumble.
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