Title: Gaming
Author: Miru
Rating: T for violence, language
Warning: Vague spoilers for the movie plot
Notes: I have a fondness of imaging backstory for characters who don't get any. So, I present to you, imagined backstory of Kazama Souji of the Wild Seven from Battle Royale II. 90 percent speculation, 10 percent actual information scrounged from various websites. Enjoy.
PRE-GAME
He had just entered middle school when he first learned that his left eye focused a little funny. Not noticeably, obviously, since he hadn't realized it before, but he found out during the class archery session, that his vision was a couple degrees off. As a result, when he was aiming with a bow, if he just nudged the tip of the arrow three centimeters off-center to the left and then shot, it was always a perfect bull's-eye. Imperfect perfection, in a way. The archery club begged him to join, and he said sure, okay, since he really didn't have anything better to do, except maybe go to the nearby arcade with his friends and play a few games (he was a whiz at that sniping game, since the same 3cm trick worked perfectly, and won lots of cheap key chains or game tokens as prizes), or play with the dog, or do some homework. He figured, sure, why not. Archery's a morbid enough sport.
He always liked morbid things, because they were weird, and weird things were interesting. Perfect people, normal people were boring, but macabre things weren't and he was fascinated with them for a while. Not that he told anyone, because if he told anyone (his younger brother, his parents, his dog, even), someone would tell the teacher, who would tell the authorities, and he'd probably be shot for being a potentially dangerous terrorist. He found that idea morbid and interesting, too.
He was in second grade of middle school when he finally hooked up with Sayuri. They'd known each other for, what, five, six years? They went steady, but it wasn't really a "here, let's be a couple so we can fuck each other without rumors of cheating" sort of relationship, but more of a "let's just admit we're a couple so that people stop accusing us of it, but things are the same as before" sort of relationship. They sat back to back reading books a lot, though he tended to reads comics more than actual novels.
Not that it really mattered. Her back was still warm, as was his, and they sometimes fell asleep like that, even after second grade passed, and they entered third grade, and they still got together a lot to read like that, or go to the mall (and play some shooting games, since it was almost a habit to him, by then), or play with the dog. Homework? …whatever.
ROUND ONE QUARTER ONE
Okinawa. They were on the bus to the airport, thirty-eight kids piled onto a bus, along with a teacher and a bus driver and an attendant; not exactly the most quiet group, but it was all good, since they were going on a trip, after all. A little bit of rowdiness was forgivable. After all, they fell asleep within minutes when the sleeping gas was released.
One kid died during briefing. Matsumoto. He'd been a dumbass anyway, always challenging the teacher with arguments that never made sense, but always got away because his parents were filthy rich and practically kneaded the school faculty in their hands; it didn't work this time, because when he tried to argue his way out of the classroom, the teacher calmly pulled out a gun and shot him in the middle of the forehead. The teacher didn't have to aim to the end of the gun off-center, but just put it against his pimply forehead and pulled the trigger. It looked easy.
He spent the first twenty minutes of the game huddled in the shrubbery just outside the perimeter of the school, breathing hard (but silently; it was a skill he'd mastered a long time ago, when he had asthma as a little kid, and wanted to keep it secret for fear of being disliked by his peers) and glancing at the entrance of the school building every two minutes to check for Sayuri, because he didn't want her dead. There were three people (six minutes) left for her to come out when he was ambushed by an idiot with a baseball bat. He ran, then, because he didn't yet know how to really use the Glock 30 he'd been lucky enough to get.
The first person he killed, he shot in the chest three times about four hours into the game. He still doesn't remember what happened, just that they were tumbling on the ground, tearing at each other for the gun that went clattering to the ground; he had longer limbs, and got to it first, and shoved it into Hatori's chest and pulled the trigger three times before he knew what he was doing. The boy took a long time to die (or so it felt; it was actually only ninety-four seconds).
Sayuri was the third person killed in the game, and the first name mentioned during the six o'clock announcement. (She was girl number 5, it made sense.) It took him the next two hours and another killing (the girl attacked him first, though, and it was after a long shoot out and a full magazine of bullets before she was hit on the shoulder and spun, stumbled, plunged over the edge of the cliff) before he realized that he wasn't crying.
It took him another twenty minutes to come to the conclusion that he must have been a cold, heartless bastard to not be crying, and he nearly walked straight into a trap because his vision was blurred with tears. He killed the person who set up the trap with a bullet to the head, just like the teacher had done. It wasn't easy.
He made sure he slept surprisingly long time, because he'd read in a comic book a long time ago (Sayuri at his back) that sleep was important in a survival situation. Lying flat on an abandoned truck with the canvas covering over him, he slept like a corpse (it always amused his parents how he slept silently, without moving a muscle) for eight hours. It would have been more if a fight hadn't broken out just two feet away from the truck. The black nightmares (three centimeters) he was having dissipated instantly as he lay there, listening to the screaming (two girls were fighting), then there was a deafening shriek, and the noises stopped. He climbed out of the truck an eternity later, and found one of them with her throat slit. Her eyes were already closed, so he didn't have anything to do before running off into the forest, her blood on his shoes (they'd been white).
He lost the tip of his right ear, almost like in a movie, at his next encounter. Mikio shot at him with a Colt M1911 (or was it a 1900?) and he felt his ear explode. There wasn't much pain until an hour later, when he was nursing it in one of the abandoned houses, the Colt now tucked into his belt along with the Glock, each with appropriate ammunition in his bag. (Mikio had fled, and he considered it lucky, because they'd been friends…apparently, not very close ones, since he'd been attacked first.) The house was going to be a danger zone in half an hour, so he just wrapped two rolls of cloth bandages around his head, and nicked a hat (a camo-patterned beanie) to keep the bandages in place before running back out into the forests.
It was only even later that he realized that his couldn't hear anything with that ear any more. One eye unfocused, one ear unhearing. He was like a rag doll, he noted, with little pieces missing all over the place. It was a morbid thought, and it amused him. The fact that it amused him just amused him more, and he gave a grim smile before shooting Mikio in the neck. (One, two, three centimeters to the left.) It wasn't his fault, really, he told himself; Mikio was the one at fault for ambushing him again. He told himself that thirty times, and on the thirty first time, he finally fell asleep up on the branches of a tree.
When the next announcement (was it the third? Fourth?) told him that there were only seven contestants (lucky number seven) left, he blinked, because it meant that thirty-one kids had been killed off. He counted on his fingers how many of those had been his own. One, two, three…four…five, and then six. Almost a fifth. He gave another grim smile, pulled his hat down (the right side was leathery with dried blood) and slid down the tree.
It turned out, he only killed one more person, because one of the lucky seven left had a machine gun, and ambushed the five other survivors (three girls and two boys trying to escape) and gunned them down. Then it was a one-on-one showdown, as announced on the 12 o'clock broadcast. The teacher sounded excited, and told them to do their best before signing off the speaker system with a crackle of static. He found Sayuri's body moments after the announcement ended, coincidentally enough, and found that her eyes were open. Kneeling down, he closed them, then sat next to the cold body for a moment. "Hey, Sayuri." He didn't notice that her body slumped over onto its side after he left, because he was busy trying to stop his side from bleeding.
Guts. He saw guts. It was fascinating. Just the very tip of them (or was it the outer covering? Whatever, he never liked biology class that much), but it was slimy, and disgusting, and interesting, because they were pulsing, and there was lots of blood. Machine guns could give you a gutshot without killing you. They said you learned something new every day. He was still musing over that, lying on his back, dazed, his blood-reddened hand held before his face, with the girl looming over him, gun aimed at his head. When the click of the machine gun's empty magazine lit the air, he pulled out Mikio's Colt and shot the girl through the right eye. He'd aimed between the eyes, but he'd shot only two centimeters to the left (the gutshot made him waver), so it ended up entering her right eye and exploding out the back, up into the sky. Brains rained down onto his face as the body swayed and fell over onto its side. They tasted like shit.
He passed Sayuri's body on his way to the school building, and wanted to sit by her, but couldn't, because his feet were dragging him over to the campus, even if he didn't want to go. While he was wondering if his guts would come spilling out like in those novels (The Long Walk by Stephen King, an illegal import from the United States of America, and it fascinated him all the more because it wasn't allowed), he'd made his way over to the building, the dusty field billowing like in those movies. He didn't know why, but when the camera was shoved in front of him for the news reel, he gave it his grim smile (the same one that he gave when he first saw the tips of his intestines) and smeared a handful of blood (gut blood) on the lens (the cameraman gave a dismayed scream, saying the equipment was delicate and expensive) before collapsing. It seemed like the right thing to do, and he wondered vaguely if that also made it on air, or was edited out.
FIRST TIME-OUT
The hospital staff was disgustingly kind to him, and fawned over his wounds, perhaps more than was needed. (Guaranteed, a split stomach and various other hurts require lots of care, but even so.) He later learned that it was because the hospital had been put in charge of keeping him alive, and, if word ever got out that he'd died at that hospital, it would most likely be boycotted or smashed by the government or something. So, he was obliged to hate it. He hated the nurses who tried to make him smile and offered him nice things to eat and tried to cheer him up, but he hated it most because they were fake. He could tell. Three centimeters off.
Three weeks and a couple dozen stitches later (the scar ran jagged and pick across his stomach like the stroke of a paintbrush, and still hurt a bit), he returned to him home with a souvenir (the doctors gave him the bullet that had been lodged in his side, strung on a metal chain; he kept it in morbid amusement, though he never wore it) to find no one there. His parents, he found out through some research, had been killed protesting against his participation in the game. His brother had been sent to an orphanage. The house had been abandoned and, except for his old dog lying starved and dying in the back yard, it was devoid of life. (The dog died three days later, unable to chew what food it was given, on an unstoppable run towards death.)
The government subsidy he got kept him alive, but that was all. Then again, that was all he needed. Food, water, a little bit of air, and lots of sleep, as much as he could. He spent an awful lot of time sitting by the window, watching the sky. There were still a couple months before the new school year started, and he'd have to attend again, held back an year. He wasn't exactly looking forward to it; a magpie flew across the sky and perched on a telephone wire, piping into the breeze.
Returning to school wasn't as bad as he feared; it was less the torture he'd imagined, but more being ignored. He became known as "that tall, silent guy," and he was satisfied that way. The kids ignored him, or feared him, and he was satisfied that way. The teacher seemed more than happy to let him brood at the back of the classroom, doing a mediocre job on his schoolwork, and spending most of his time sitting on the school rooftop, staring up at the sky, and he was satisfied that way. He sometimes snuck onto the school archery course after all after school clubs had ended, and shot a couple rounds by himself, aiming three centimeters to the left and watching the arrows thud into the center of the targets.
When he heard that the school just in the next neighborhood had been chosen for the year's BR program, he ditched school for a week, staying at home with the old television left on at the smallest volume, until he heard who had won. Kengo Yonai. A guy. Covered in blood, dazed, obviously not very lucid. He wondered absently if he had looked the same when he had been on air. Turning off the television set took him a long time, and, even though he attended school the next day, he skipped all his classes and sat on the rooftop, fingering the bullet that the doctors had pulled out of his guts.
He graduated middle school, graduated high school, attended some halfway decent college studying god-knows-what, dropping out after an year, simply walking out after a history lesson that kept on praising the country's glorious leader and wonderful government. It disgusted him. Instead, he came to learn a lot of things by himself. The history of the nation. The atrocities committed. The handling of weapons. Information networking. Hacking. Terrorism tactics. It was fascinating in that morbid sort of way.
Imakire approached him when he was aimlessly wandering the back alleys of Tokyo in the middle of winter, somehow recognizing him despite the scarf and hat he'd thrown on to hide his identity. (A crazed government supporter had once asked him for his autograph while he was out buying water, and he all but throttled the girl.) Their conversation was simple, because he recognized the older man's face. (He did his research well; he'd glanced at the news reels of previous winners upon his return. It was a morbid enough activity to hold his dazed interest.)
Nanahara Shuya. Escaping the system of Battle Royale. Rebellion. Tearing down the entire works.
The conversation started with, "You are still in a lot of pain."
It ended with, "Help us destroy the system," because his answer was only a silent nod.
ROUND ONE QUARTER TWO
One year later, Christmas day. He didn't really like the mission he'd been given, but he did it anyway, because he wanted to. Wanted to tear the fucking country down, or at least a couple buildings in it.
The bomb was packed into an inconspicuous duffle bag, heavier than it looked. Fifteen kilograms of pure Semtex. Connected to a detonator, connected through a complex electrical signal to nine identical bombs (each in different bags, of course) planted on various floors of the building. Another set of ten bombs for the second building. A couple dozen spread around a few more building in the middle of Tokyo.
His job was the take two of the bomb bags, leave one on the sixth floor of the Republic of Greater East Asia East Trade Tower, drop the second one on the twelfth floor, then make his way out, without getting caught or noticed by anyone. Not exactly the easiest job, but it wasn't impossible either.
At least, in principle, it wasn't.
He left the first one in a dark corner at the end of a hallway, inconscpiciously perched next to a couple bags of garbage. The janitor wouldn't be picking up the trash until the end of the day, he knew, so the bomb would be safe there. (The first facility it would take out when it exploded would be the coffee house, he mused. At least the people would die with full stomachs.)
The second one was harder to place, as the twelfth floor was a shopping facility, and had a few people milling around. People. It made him nervous, god, it made him twitchy. Having people moving, walking, talking around him; he'd once been like them, too, talking and interacting and trusting all the time, before he learned the art of blowing other's brains out. Three centimeters to the left.
It was nearing the start of some big shot singer's concert, so people were beginning to trickle towards the music hall, and he took his place at a café two-person table next to a potted tree, waiting for the plaza area to empty. Acting inconspicuous meant to blend in, so he ordered a cup of coffee to make it look like he was relaxing. (He wasn't, he was tense as ever.) When there was no one around, he would leave the bag under the leaves, keep it hidden, then make his way out. Simple.
"Is this seat taken?"
It was a girl, looking about seventeen, slender, cute, short hair in a boyish cut, and she was smiling at him as she pointed at the chair opposite him, a steaming cup in her gloved hands.
She reminded him of Sayuri, slightly, but he shook the thoughts out of his head, then pretended to brood over his own drink (untouched, it made him uncomfortable), avoiding her eyes. (God, her eyes were the same as hers.) Thirty more minutes, maybe, and people would be leaving, just thirty more minutes…
"It's cold, isn't it?" She asked him brightly. (Damnit, so was her voice.)
His voice felt rusty after avoiding human contact for so long, so he just nodded. (Truth be told, he now wore the scarf to keep his face hidden, the hat to keep his half-blasted ear hidden, out of habit. The wound still stung when it was cold.)
"But it's not even snowing. And I was so hoping for a white Christmas this year." She gave a small laugh that made him flinch (why?), looking out the window of the building. Below them, the Tokyo cityscape sprawled across the horizon like a lazy man, gray and imposing. "It's so much prettier when it snows, even just a little."
"Hmm." He found himself also looking out the window despite his attempts to feign disinterest, nodding in response. Well, the city was quite ugly, especially from the inside out. (But not many people knew how ugly it was inside, they just guessed.) At least he'd be leaving it soon, the moment these two buildings were reduced to rubble.
"I guess I shouldn't be annoying you any further, you look quite busy. I'm sorry." Words spoken in an appropriately apologetic tone came wafting through the air, and she got up, giving him a small bow, taking her now-empty cup in her hand. "Merry Christmas, and I hope you have a nice winter!"
As she skipped off, the heels of her boots clicking on the floor, he had the sudden urge to warn her, to tell her to leave the building as soon as she could, to get away from this country. But he couldn't, and he didn't, and he silently placed the bag of explosives underneath the potted tree, hidden well by the foliage, before he left, his untouched cup of coffee now cold, abandoned on the table.
He never found out, but the girl died quickly and painlessly when the two towers collapsed. A two-ton piece of rubble smashed her head to bits. A single body among eight thousand others.
No one noticed, but he came close to crying on the boat to Senkanjima, for some reason. He was disgusted with himself for that, though, and instead occupied himself by disassembling and reassembling his rifle. (He was a quick learner.) It wasn't enough to interest him, really, but it at least gave him something to do so he wouldn't have to think.
HALFTIME
For some reason, despite the intense discomfort he felt around most people, the children never bothered him. They were oddly pleasant to have around, and they didn't seem to be scared of him (which he found strange), hanging around him a lot and calling him "Kaza-nii." (He hadn't been called by any nicknames since Sayuri's "Soji-kun," and it took him a while to get used to responding to that name.) When he wasn't off helping Souda with surveillance (the girl was a genius with computers, he had to admit) or organizing the weapons stocks, he tended to stand around watching them run around the center compound of the headquarters, pulling apart any kids that were fighting and making sure they didn't fall off the monkey bars.
Living on Senkanjima was a strange experience, like living in a broken-down Wonderland. (It had been his favorite book when he was younger). The crumbling buildings, the tattered metal barriers, the barren fields. All these things fascinated him, and he took to sitting on the rooftops a lot, like back at school, but the sky there was much wider, much freer, much darker. The stars shone ridiculously, and the thought that the same stars were muffled by air pollution over in Tokyo made him smile in his grim way. (Those moments were growing rarer, though; he tried to hide them because they scared the kids. They were innocent enough to know that his smile wasn't a happy one, but a violent one, and it terrified them to see their "quiet big brother" smiling like that.)
When Saki Sakurai first arrived at the base, it was raining. He was sitting, almost dozing, in the corner of the large room where the kids were playing some sort of indoor tag game. He'd developed the habit of keeping his rifle by his side at all times, and it was leaned against his shoulder as he absently watched one of the younger boys tackle a girl, the two going down in a pile of squirming limbs and happy screams. She approached him first, commented, "I heard you're a fantastic sniper?"
He nodded. Somehow, without trying very hard, he'd become the group's designated marksman. The position made him tense (it made him feel cowardly, to kill people from such a distance), but it was the truth, and he didn't want to lie. (The country lied enough for all of its people twofold, he didn't want to add to it.)
"Let's have a competition."
Even as he stood at the end of the room, shouldering his gun and bringing it up to aim, he wasn't sure why he was doing it, but the older children's cheering egged him on, and he did his usual stunt: three centimeters to the left, then pulled the trigger. The snap of the gun firing blasted the air (hers went off a split second afterwards), and the two tiny paper targets at the opposite end of the room exploded.
"A draw! A draw!"
"Wow!"
"They were both dead on!"
"Do it again!"
He toed the empty bullet shell on the floor, kicking it aside, before looking up to give Saki a look. She stared back at him. There was a moment of awkward silence before he gave a short, barking laugh (it startled the kids; he never laughed, didn't smile much, always looked serious) in amusement.
"Nice aim."
The words, spoken in a long-unused voice, felt bittersweet in his mouth as he turned to leave the room, her answer oddly amusing.
"You, too."
They competed from time to time (it excited the older kids, fascinated the younger, and a couple wasted bullets wouldn't break their meager funds), aiming at progressively smaller targets at the end of the shooting room (bottles, tin cans, bottle caps, paper cranes), usually ending in a draw, though sometimes she won, and sometimes he won.
"Hey, Kaza-nii!" (God, that still sounded weird, but he still looked up in response to that name.) "Teach us to shoot, too! We want to be able to shoot like you and Saki-nee!" Shiro was one of the more persistent kids, but he always answered in the same way.
"You don't want to."
ROUND TWO QUARTER ONE
From the moment he killed the first armor-clad figure on the meager motor boats (a clean shot straight through the chest), he felt something was wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Why? He'd killed plenty of people before (hell, he'd helped kill eight thousand people in Tokyo, haha), shot them from afar without blinking, always aiming a perfect three centimeters to the left, but now?
Still, he forged on, reloading (the bullets felt tiny in his fingers, the metal cylinders looking so harmless in his gloved hands, like tiny little pendants) as quickly as he could and darting from window to window of the stronghold, aiming quickly and shooting. Effective. Fast. One shot, one kill; if the first shot isn't fatal, just shoot again. Sakurai was in the next room, doing the same.
He found himself grinning as he pulled the trigger. (How many had killed by then? Five? Six?) When the first break was called (the soldiers were pathetic, which he found suspicious, but who was he to complain?) to look after the wounded, he found himself breathing hard, the smile still on his face (it was a good thing most of the smaller kids were away, being protected). Leaning against the graying walls, he reloaded his gun, trying to look out at the sky. It was a nasty white.
Barely recovering in time, he was just back at the window, aiming for a scurrying figure, when the crackled voice came ringing in his ear through the old headset. "They're wearing collars!" He almost shot, then, his body tensing and his finger tightening in reflex, but he managed to pull himself away from his station as the soldiers – no, they were kids, kids, like he used to know – blasted into the building.
The bullets he yanked out from his pack nearly slipped through his fingers (they suddenly seemed a hundred times more tangible) as he made his way through the twisting hallways and tunnels of the buildings towards the face-off point. The sickening green light reflecting off the murky waters made his sight waver, as he aimed his rifle down at the kids, leaning precariously over a mesh of steel beams and metal sheets. (Why were these kids here? Why?!) The shouts echoed through the area.
More bullets, machine gun fire. A couple went whizzing into the air, a couple punctured the metal sheets surrounding the compound, and more than a few buried themselves into Shiro's body ("Hey, Kaza-nii!"). The splash of the body hitting the water was fantastic, as were his reflexes. His shot at the same moment as Sakurai did, and the kid who'd killed Shiro (a girl, it was a girl) died with two bullets in her chest. He nearly lost his other ear during the resulting shootout (haha, he would have looked funny if he did), moving back just in time to avoid the stream of bullets the machine gun spat out into the air.
The beeping, all over the place, with mismatched timing. He felt like it would make his head explode. (It was so familiar. He'd heard it during his own game, that horrid noise at the base of his neck, during a 24-hour standstill that ended with the sound of a machine gun rattling at the other end of the island.) The girls panicked, and he was considering putting them out of their misery with a bullet to the head (better a hole through the brain than a blasted windpipe) when Souda came charging in with the electromagnetic pulse bomb.
Boom, crackle, lots of sizzling, and the steady beeeeeeep of lost communication.
He must have been smiling as he helped drag the bodies out of the water (they were already starting to bloat, pale and pasty white, a lot of blood drained out due to osmosis with the water), because after the third body (was it the fourth?), Imakire tapped him on the shoulder, said to leave the bodies with the others, that they should probably go up and look to the kids that had been dragged in. He nodded, dropped the water-logged bundle he'd been tugging on, and followed. The blood made the floor slippery.
Three; he counted three new candles burning on the floor as he watched the kids being led in. When Yonai threatened them, bayonet edge sharp and glistening, making the camo-clad kids cringe, when Sakai dragged the frightened girl over to the corner, when Souda undid the collars, scowling the entire time, he laughed quietly (almost silently) to himself, because the whole thing was so dumb. So faked. He was still trying to hold down his amusement when Iwamoto alerted them of the special troops.
One of the little kids clung to him, terrified, as he helped herd the noncombatants to the back rooms; they'd be safe in the little concrete cells, sheltered from gunfire, but she still clung to him, trying so hard not to cry. He only managed to tear her away from his side when he Kouta's confused voice. ("Yuuma? …Yuuma?!") The feel of the trigger against his finger felt natural, delicious, almost, as he turned to shoot at the troopers, the adults.
SECOND TIME-OUT
The fight between Nanahara and the bleach-blonde kid, in his honest opinion, was hilarious, because it was so pointless, and so full of meaningless anger. (He watched the student slip and fall, and had to keep from smiling; Yuuma would have had a good laugh, had he seen that.)
When Nanahara spoke, he turned his back to the entire mess because he was tired of looking at that kid. The rain made the air heavy, wet, nasty, and dragged down whatever meaning spoken words had, turning them to bland mush. Still, he thought a small prayer (haha, since when was he religious?) for Yuuma (sorry, kid, I guess I should have shown you that trick you so wanted to see me try) and Shiro (I guess I should have taught you how to aim; maybe you would just have to point straight ahead) and all of the other dead as the skies began to clear.
"There is war behind every peace." Of course, they were fighting that war right now. "And if humans forget the significance of that war…" They always did; they always forgot. "Then that peace isn't worth dog shit." Such childish wording for such a meaningful phrase. They were still just kids in the end, rebelling against the adults.
"And for all the children fighting out there. You might be alone. But don't fear being alone." You're not. "All of the abandoned children of the world…" There are a lot of you out there, right? "Let us all rise, and fight together."
Nanahara's words hung heavy in the air like wind chimes, and he looked up at the gray ceiling, closing his eyes (misfocused), letting the words linger (only able to hear through one side). "This is a message for all of the adults who tore away our freedom, and oppressed us." Fuck you. "Merry Christmas from Nanahara Shuuya and the Wild Seven."
The sound of the bombs was deafening (macabre holiday bells), and he only barely managed to shelter Kouta, drag him out of the way of the falling rubble, before the candles were smothered by falling chunks of concrete and asphalt. (There would have been ten, fifteen more to light, but they were all gone now.) Even outside, next to the bonfire, the boy took a long time to fall asleep; it was only after Kouta's breathing had become a steady, silent rise and fall of the chest that he whispered under his breath, loud enough for only himself to hear. "Merry Christmas to you, too."
ROUND TWO FINAL QUARTER
He perched precariously on a narrow ledge of metal plating. Point C, standing guard over one of the three entrance points to the base with Yonai. Somewhere in the back of the building, he knew, the children were being edged into the underground tunnel, rushed to safety. (Their numbers were so reduced, it made him sick.) The students were leaving, too, and all for the better. Hopefully, they'd be able to live normally now; saved by the Wild Seven. He gave a small laugh to himself at the thought, shaking his head when Yonai looked at him questioningly. No matter how he looked at it, this entire mess was stupid.
He would probably die. That much, he knew, and he wasn't so stupidly optimistic as to hope that he would make it out alive. Kouta would probably have recoiled in fear if he heard this sort of thinking, and he thought for the fourth time that that was why it was good he hadn't said goodbye to the little kid. No need to frighten the boy any more. The headset he fitted into his left ear was strangely uncomfortable as he settled into place, the scope of his rifle held up against his eye.
The soldiers looked like ants, termites, mice, lice, fleas, he mused, watching them scurry through the ruins (some fires were still blazing here and there), trying to make themselves as small as possible as they came inching towards the headquarters. "Not yet…" One step, two steps, right, left, right left, a sneaky, deadly march. "Just a little further…" One of the soldiers looked in his direction, and he smirked as he aimed, three centimeters to the left (it was natural now). "Attack!!!"
Aim and shoot, aim and shoot. He habitually counted the number of bullets he used versus the number of people he killed, but he lost track this time. Five, six, seven headshots, and now a clean blast to the chest. A bullet went bouncing off the metal plating in front of him, and he flinched, but reloaded, aiming at the bastard that had shot at him. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? He laughed as he pulled the trigger.
Yonai's near-panicked shout of warning came far too late, because he only realized the soldiers were behind him when the shotgun blast tore into his leg, neatly puncturing the flesh and bone. He turned, aimed quickly (too quickly) and shot, once, twice, a third time, knocking the shotgun away from bloody hands. Just one more shot to the head now—
But the trooper stumbled forward, eyes already starting to glaze over, hands windmilling wildly and clutching at his neck as they went crashing backwards and through the flimsy walls of the base. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he acknowledged the fact that one of the wooden support beams of the building had pierced his side as he fell through, but the jarring pain that came from falling two floors and landing on bloodied limbs overcame that thought. (Oh god, it hurt so much.)
Somewhere out there, Yonai called his name again (don't, you idiot, you're supposed to be hidden, remember?), and he smiled grimly (damn, hadn't he fixed that habit by now?), trying to struggle back onto his feet. (He knew it was impossible, though; the now-dead trooper was weighing him down, and that was probably a splinter of bone sticking out of his leg.) The forest of combat boots and camouflage-clad figures surrounded him in an instant, and he thought again, I am going to die now. (I knew it.)
The sneers the soldiers gave him ("He's still a fucking brat!"), reloading their guns ("Just a terrorist bastard in the end."), kicking aside the dead trooper as they formed a tightly woven circle around him ("Come on, let's get this over with quickly."), meant nothing to him, and he looked up at them blankly, trying to read something, anything, in their faces. Nothing. These adults, even when they gloated over their victory, felt nothing towards them. Maybe a little enmity, but not much else. Merry Christmas, sirs, I hope you enjoy your present. We sure did enjoy ours. A blinding series of lights (Christmas lights, how fitting) and the rattle of gunfire splashed through the air.
He counted thirty-six bullets entering his body, felt the pain smash through his nerves and overload his pain receptors (everything started going numb; shock, was it?), before he collapsed back onto the ground, trying not to gasp for breath. (He was supposed to be silent, quiet, always sturdy and calm, that was what the kids knew him as, not some desperate young thing trying not to die.)
The last thing he heard was Nanahara calling his name.