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Warning: This story contains scenes that involve profanity, sexual themes, graphic violence and gore, character death, as well as references to various illegal acts within the locations that the story is set in including but not limited to use and/or abuse of alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and weapons. If you are offended or triggered by any of the above, the author advises you to stop reading and close the browser. If you insist on proceeding, the author takes no responsibility for any personal or property damages caused as a direct or indirect result of this story.
Highway 9: Education Reform Act
The Ninth Annual United States Battle Royale was the single most anticipated national event of the year, and attendance as always was off the charts. All the biggest stars were there. Politicians, movie stars, actors and actresses, singers, performance artists, authors and talk show personalities, models and athletes, comedians, radio DJs, all of them the household names in the United States. There were the people who mattered, the people who made real decisions in front of and behind the scenes; there were the people who didn't, the celebrities who smiled and glimmered at the audiences from behind big screens; then there were those who were rich enough to afford attendance.
And then there was the one person who watched from a private booth. Concealed from the rest of the audience, their identity was only known to those who worked for the game. At the end of the seventy-two hour mark (or however long it took for the cast to whittle down to the last man standing), they would be revealed as they stepped to the stage for their first post-game appearance, nearly a week after they had survived the Battle Royale as the sole winner.
It was supposed to be awesome. It was supposed to be glamorous. It was supposed to be the best damn show America has ever seen.
But it wasn't. All these people watching as the audience, they had no real idea what it had been like. The horrors that had happened to the fifty of them unfortunate enough to be caught up in the Battle Royale. None of them had any idea what it would be like. As the events of the game played out before them, they would cheer. They would applaud the glorified violence that went on. They would find their personal favorites and root for them until they were eliminated. As always.
Not this time. Come endgame, they've got something special planned for the audience. It wouldn't exactly be a crowd pleaser, if anything most of the attending celebrities would be horrified to see it play out before them. But then again, that was their purpose, wasn't it? Fuck with them as best as they could. You wouldn't be the first to do that... yeah, next year around, we're going to royally fuck with the game.
This time, they would make a statement.
Next year, if they still decided to go through with the game... well, we'd see what happens then, wouldn't we?
The pistol weighed heavy in the pocket of the anorak, but it was concealed well enough that it remained undetected when the soldiers passed by earlier. T minus seventy-two hours until it happens. Let's hope our little movement lasts that long...
To put it simply, Battle Royale hadn't always been a television show. It started off as a survival program adopted from the Republic of Greater East Asia, as a means to instill fear and subsequently control in the youth population of the nation. It wasn't until Japan started televising its games and they caught note of how well the ratings and merchandise revenue had been. At that time, the Program hadn't been exactly publicized; officially it was classified as a military research project, and while there was initial opposition from those in the know, the masses remained ignorant of the Program's proceedings. There were those who voiced that televising the game as reality television could potentially cause massive unrest, but in the end the higher ups decided to follow through with that idea, and the third season became the first televised Battle Royale in American history.
And damn if it didn't work out beautifully. Though not without a lot of experience and the broadcast proved to be rather problematic, it was deemed a resounding success. Audience feedback was excellent, and the ratings had never been higher. Seeing the success of the first broadcasted Battle Royale, the higher ups decided to continue to televise the coming seasons.
Of course, the hype never went down (aside from the flop of season five, but that was to be expected) and it only got larger as seasons went past. Massively publicized and well endorsed by celebrities and corporations alike, the Battle Royale program quickly became one of the nation's best celebrated cultures.
But much of the work that went behind the broadcast went unappreciated. It wasn't easy, taking the footage of over sixty thousand cameras and putting together a reality show. It started off as grainy footage where you couldn't see much of what was going on the screen, but that improved with the passing seasons. Rather than closed circuit surveillance cameras that had been originally used, they installed state-of-the-art high definition cameras with built in motion sensors and a capability for manual control over three hundred and sixty degrees rotation to ensure footage of all action could be captured from the appropriate angles.
Then came editing. The higher ups wanted a live feed of the game to be aired at the same time as it went on, but that proved to be impossible. They couldn't predict where the action would be, they couldn't forecast which contestants would make it far, they couldn't anticipate the need for repair and maintenance as the game proceeded. As a result, the broadcast of the game turned out to be simply, for the lack of a better word, substandard.
And so it was decided. The game would proceed as usual, but the editing would come after the game had concluded. After a clear winner (or none in atypical cases, but that had never happened) was determined, and after all happenings in the game were documented for. It would be much simpler that way.
And, well, if anybody happened to disrupt the game, it wouldn't be difficult to liquidate the current cast and start over with alternatives before the feed got out.
Pvt. Missy Leland never intended to be involved with the Battle Royale program, but, well, simply put, things happened and she found herself assigned to escorting the winner of the ninth season of Battle Royale out of the game. One thing led to another and the next thing she knew, they had a personal recommendation that she be part of the team guarding the winner's booth at the grand show. It was a simple enough task by all means, standing at the door and sending away reporters before the winner's identity was unveiled. Her sidearm was more than enough to intimidate anybody curious enough to approach, and as it was, she found herself doing little other than to stand there. At least you get to change shifts every six hours, poor bastard inside has to watch everything all over again. Man that must suck.
She looked up as the introduction music of the show blared loudly from the speakers. Amidst great applause (though she herself remained still for the most part), the host of the three day spectacle stepped up to the stage in a smart designer suit. A handsome man by most standards, Ryan Sterling looked over the vast sea of audience surrounding the stage as he flashed a teeth whitener grin.
"The biggest show in American television history is back!" he said powerfully, his voice fully amplified by the array of speakers around the arena. With this, the audience only cheered all the harder and noisier, many of them hopping up and down in sheer glee. Nearly all of the others were on their feet, hands in the air and screaming joyfully at the top of their lungs.
By contrast, the person inside the winner's booth was wholly silent. Of course, that was to be expected. Nobody in their right mind could be looking forward to a replay of the hell that they had endured. Then again, if you manage to survive a Battle Royale, you've got to be a bit fucked in the head at least, yeah?
The commotion settled only for the slightest bit as Sterling raised his hands and half-heartedly gestured for silence. Instead, he took that as the best he could get and continued with his opening speech, practically shouting into his microphone to be heard, "In the last season of Battle Royale, our very own Julie Winnfield defeated forty-nine other contestants for the title of Season Eight's winner."
He had to pause as the crowd's cheers reached decibels that were previously unexplored. High above all of them, teleprompters flashed to life, displaying the word 'SILENCE' in luminous red. That alone did not get the crowd to die down, but with a whole minute of patience (and strategically stationed armed soldiers moving in to inform those who still made noise), the arena finally became mostly quiet.
"She along with her predecessors sit here with us today," Sterling said as he gestured towards somewhere in the audience, rousing another bout of wild cheers, "in hopes of witnessing another winner's journey to join their ranks.
"And may I tell you, ladies and gentlemen," he said with a pause, "the cast of Season Nine do not disappoint us. Among us sits the sole survivor of the Ninth Annual United States Battle Royale."
Floodlights swiveled to light up the winner's booth, blinding her with a bright white light for the briefest of moments before the spotlight's interest moved on.
The focus returning to Sterling, he continued, "For those unfamiliar with Battle Royale, the premise of the game is simple. Fifty contestants from one high school senior class compete for the title of winner over the course of seventy-two hours – that's three full days for the mathematically challenged. During this time, they are to fight until one, and only one victor remains out of them all. To put it simply, it's a kill or be killed scenario."
"Only one survives to become the winner of the game. In these seventy-two hours, they will need all the smarts, skills, and luck they can get to outlive the other forty-nine."
He paused again, then continued on to say, "And I am pleased to say that Season Nine fought with such gusto it almost brings shame to the previous seasons! In the upcoming seventy-two hours – and yes, the full seventy-two hours, our cast delivered the fight nearly to the very last moment – every single one of us present today will witness the bloodshed of the game."
As he spoke, flashes of the season's highlights appeared on the large screen behind him: a girl bound by silver duct tape struggling in the water around her; a large boy wielding a fire ax as he crashed through hallways; a terrified girl repeatedly thrusting a pair of scissors into a bloodied boy; an angered boy wrestling a pistol from a girl's grasp; two girls in a Mexican standoff as they kept their guns trained on each other; a girl flung off her feet as she took a shotgun blast in the mid-section; and other images too vague to decipher. In all of those shots, the faces of the contestants involved are kept strategically off screen to hide their identities before the game's broadcast began.
With the crowd hyped up nearly to the point of an uprising, he grins and starts into the iconic introduction of the series.
"I am Ryan Sterling, and on behalf of everybody behind the game..."
The screen flashes to the game's logo as the audience starts to go wild, many of them standing up with hands in the air.
"We bring you, the Ninth Annual United States Battle Royale!"
The suspended teleprompters show the word 'APPLAUSE,' highlighted a brilliant green, but even before that the audience was already wild, yelling, cheering, shouting, screaming in complete hysterics. Still standing just by the winner's booth, Leland found herself overwhelmed for a moment as her entire world filled with nothing but deafening noise. Noise, applause, people clapping, cheers, screaming names, names that she recognized only by dead faces, more cheering, hoarse screaming, and the national anthem rising above the din. The arena was in such chaos that it was a miracle she even heard the first words from within the winner's booth.
"Fucking game..."