"I don't want kiyasume wa iranai. I don't want itsuwari no ai mo."
- Gundam 0083
"I don't want to be buried in a Pet Sematary. I don't want to live my life again."
- Ramones
"SO SLOW."
- Ribbons Almark
"Bitches leave."
- Robocop
That annoying four-eyed brat was really in for it this time. Izumi's white Takemikazuchi was centered in her crosshairs with it back fuselage exposed. Kazusa was going to settle this rivalry once and for all with a single pull of a trigger.
She missed. Izumi must have had the Devil's luck or an inexplicable psychic ability to sense danger, because she suddenly steered her Takemikazuchi toward Kazusa's just in time to see the shots coming and dodge out of the way. Izumi responded with a volley of machine gun fire of her own as she ran across the city intersection and strafed behind an office building. Their TSF skirmish became a lethal game of hide and seek.
Kazusa kept her composure as she scanned the buildings around her for movement. Her engagement alert beeped on her left when Izumi's Takemikazuchi reemerged from behind a parking garage, now wielding one of its PB Blades instead of a machine gun. Kazusa instinctively lifted her own Blade from its backpack pylon and held it in a horizontal guarding position. When the two TSFs clashed, it was akin to a swordfight between two 20-meter-tall samurai.
Izumi's strikes were flowing and elegant, and Kazusa parried each one with perfect timing. After a while, the movements of Izumi's TSF lost any sense of style and devolved into a sequence of frustrated vertical swings that had less in common with a noble samurai and more in common with a caveman slamming his club up and down. The attacks were easy to ward off, but they left Kazusa with little opening as she gradually shrank backward with each strike.
Kazusa threw the lever that controlled her Takemikazuchi's backpack sub-arms. The left storage pylon swiveled down in a quarter-circle and deployed barrel of the machine gun on the TSF's hip. Izumi gave up her frantic swinging and hopped in reverse to avoid eating a hail of gunfire at point blank range, but not before Kazusa managed to get a few hits to her face and blow out one of her camera eyes.
Kazusa countered by unsheathing the PB Dagger stored in her unit's right wrist and charging at her stumbling opponent. She held the dagger underhand as she stabbed straight for Izumi's cockpit. Izumi veered by only a couple of meters so the blade wound up planting into the armor on her left shoulder. The force of the impact in one direction and Izumi's own movements in the opposite direction put too much stress on the shoulder joint, and the entire left arm of the TSF was torn off in a shower of sparks and smoke. Kazusa capitalized by re-equipping her PB Blade with both hands and performing her own close-range assault. She put all of her pent up vengeance into each slash, and Izumi was quickly losing the ability to block the incoming strikes with only one arm.
Kazusa's engagement system beeped again on her right. For a fraction of a second, she saw turquoise blur a Destroyer-class charging down the street in the corner of her eye. Her Takemikazuchi and Izumi's launched straight in the air in near-perfect unison, but Izumi reacted first by kicking Kazusa back down into the creature's path. The bottom half of Kazusa's TSF collided with the Destroyer's passing shell while Izumi cleared it by less than a yard.
The resounding impact could be felt all the way through Kazusa's cockpit. Even though her TSF landed on its feet, she could instantly tell the calibration of her controls was horribly off-center. It took all of her effort just to hold the throttle steady and keep her unit balanced on its own weight. An error diagram flashed in her optics telling her the TSF's jump units were damaged and her knee hydraulics were malfunctioning.
Crap.
Her Takemikazuchi sauntered backwards for two blocks before losing the fight against gravity. Kazusa curled in her seat to brace herself as the machine went into a full tilt and crashed into a crumpled heap on top of the local Anna Miller's. She was sitting on her back staring up at the sky and twenty different blaring system alerts when it was over.
The cockpit started to rumble with the sound of giant footsteps. But they weren't the lumbering footsteps of Izumi's TSF slowly approaching her to finish her off. It was the sound of a BETA stampede racing toward her.
Dozens of Tank-class blanketed her TSF like ants swarming over a dead squirrel before she could even try to make the machine sit up in the rubble. The pilot compartment rocked and screeched around her as the BETA began digging their way through way through her armor.
Kazusa became increasingly aware she was trapped. Her exoskeleton wasn't coming online and the ejection systems were failing. Her carbine had been knocked out of her reach when she was getting rattled around in the crash. She already knew her SDS button was disabled.
Fresh air and rancid alien breath abruptly swept over her when the cockpit seal was wrenched open. Her panicked gasp was instantly drowned out by the ravenous sounds of a growling, drooling mob. Every inch of empty space in the cockpit was engulfed by giant red arms reaching down to the small wiggling clump of carbon minerals packaged inside. Looking out past the vaguely arachnid forms of the Tank-classes closing around her, Kazusa saw the silhouette of Izumi's one-armed imperial Takemikazuchi standing idly in front of the sun. Its only clear feature was the dim glow of its single beady head camera staring down at her.
The BETA were desperate to fill their gaping maws with a once-in-a-lifetime Yamashiro treat. They wrestled each other like vultures competing for the kill at the same time they were tearing through the metal harnesses and plastic insulation of her Fortified Suit to expose her belly's naked flesh.
The cockpit filled with blood splatter and screams. Kazusa's TSF had been converted into an army field hospital and surgery was officially in session.
She squirmed and squealed in her seat as she could feel parts of her being taken away in greedy, globby handfuls. Her senses focused on nothing but indescribable agony. Her nails dug into her armrests through the thin black membrane encasing her fingers. Her eyes bulged into white saucers with pupils shrinking into tiny bleak dots. The metallic taste of blood washed up her throat and seeped through her clenched teeth. Her tear-strained vision was filled with giant mouths hungrily gnawing through the vibrant excavated rubies that kept her alive. Her chilling screams mixed with the TSF's cockpit alarms to form a perfect harmony of mechanical duress and human misery. Kazusa may have been an icy girl on the outside, but the BETA knew she was warm and sweet on the inside.
She felt the walls of the cockpit surrounding her bend and crumble and break apart. Her screams jumped another shrill octave as she then felt her own body bend and crumble and break apart. The mob of alien hands fighting over her wrenched her in opposite directions, causing her vertebrae to start splitting apart like bony sausage links.
All sense of space and time stopped in an instant. The world turned fuzzy black and white. A bright red gleam swept across Kazusa's vision.
SIMULATION ENDED AT 14:39:08
MISSION FAILED - PILOT DISMANTLEMENT
When she blinked, she was no longer trapped in the grip of a mob of ravenous monsters turning her insides into confetti. There was no sky hanging over her. There were no buildings to be seen. She was enclosed on all sides by a plain gray metal structure that matched the basic dimensions of a TSF cockpit. Everything she'd gone through for the past quarter-hour had been combat practice in a virtual environment.
Even though none of it had been real, the module's neural feedback emulators did a convincing job of making her brain think it was real. The feeling of being torn to pieces still spun in her head like she had just woken up from a vivid digital nightmare. She nervously rolled up her school blouse (she'd never even been wearing her Fortified Suit) to check for any signs of trauma around her middle.
Her skin looked fine. Her belly button was in the right place. Everything seemed to be tucked in where it was supposed to be. The only thing she could see that would give her a reason to be concerned were the small love handles wrinkled over her hips. Love handles meant she carried more meat on her bones. More meat meant the BETA would be more anxious to tear her to shreds at the first chance.
Eugh. She'd have to work those off.
Kazusa sighed as she pulled the blouse back over her skirt band. Silently criticizing herself, she pressed the Release button on her simulator dashboard so the top of the chamber peeled open on a hydraulic track. She stood up from her pilot seat and hopped onto the floor of a long room that looked like a high-tech computer center trying to hide its former identity as an abandoned steel mill.
Several of her squadmates were waiting to greet her as soon as she got out of the simulator. Yui was the first to rattle off something supportive to her, but she didn't want to want to hear it and blocked it out of her mind. Other girls from her team continued to anxiously gather around her to offer their encouragement. One kept talking about how cool Kazusa looked when she was fighting. Another said she'd always have more chances to get even with Izumi. Someone commented on how brave she was for not peeing herself when things didn't quite work out in her favor.
Everything stopped when Kazusa's gaze locked on Izumi's. The brown-haired girl was leaning against the simulator parallel to Kazusa's with her arms crossed chatting happily with her part of the squad. Kazusa silently glared back at her in a tense stand-off.
Kazusa and Izumi looked out for each other when they were on a real battlefield where people's lives actually mattered, but nothing was more heated than the rivalry they shared when they faced one another in training. Kazusa thought of Izumi as obnoxious common rabble who'd only made it this far as a fluke. Izumi thought of Kazusa as a cranky elitist obsessed with some outdated feudal system that said she had to be better than everyone else. Izumi had Shimako and a few other squad members on her side. Kazusa had Yui and a handful of others on hers. Aki stood in the middle doing her best to play peacekeeper.
Izumi smiled in Kazusa's direction, opened her mouth like she was about to say something, and sharply snapped her teeth together.
"Sooo, what were they going after this time?" she asked with cheerful curiosity.
"Large intestine… mostly," Kazusa grumbled under her breath.
"Really?" Izumi said while tucking her index finger under her chin pretending like she was interested. "You're moving up in life. They usually go for your kidneys."
Her smile grew wider and more thoughtful as she tilted her head toward her fellow Royal Guard.
"The log says you hung in there for 72 seconds after the cockpit breach. That's even longer than last time. Keep it up and pretty soon you'll be able to stay online long enough to feed those guys an entire three-course meal."
Every member of the squad had her own quota of BETA programmed into the simulator. It was up to the pilot's discretion how she incorporated the herd in her training, if she decided to do it at all. Some used theirs for target practice when they were running through the simulator solo. Others moved them to an isolated sector of the training map so they didn't have to bother with the little beastlies in the sparring fights. Some even spent their time studying the actions of their herd in the hope that the simulated versions could teach them something about the real-world counterparts.
Izumi deliberately let hers starve. By the time they were finally free to roam in battle, they would be driven into a wild frenzy at the even faintest sniff of fresh meat and give any unlucky training opponent caught in their path an experience she was certain to remember. Izumi had a reputation on the squad as a quiet and friendly girl who could be a bit of a sadist if you got on her wrong side, but they never had the heart to call her out on it. Everyone just accepted she was a little off after her boyfriend was killed by the first swarm of BETA to reach the mainland back in her cadet days. Her peculiar blend of brutality and resourcefulness was what saved over half of the team when the imperial capital was invaded just after their graduation.
Kazusa hung her head forward so her eyes disappeared behind her straight black bangs as she mumbled. Her mind was in a dark and unsettling place.
"Next time we're in there I'm gonna strangle you with your own pigtails."
"What's that you said?" Izumi innocently blinked. "You're looking forward to getting rid of more of your entrails?"
"Ladies!" a man's voice boomed through the simulation bunker.
Kazusa and Izumi both instantly turned in full salute toward Major Sanada Kuzou, the division leader of the White Fangs walking towards them. Boasting a slicked back crew cut and an eyepatch covering an old battle wound to his right eye, he could have passed for a dashing young bachelor looking to pick up a date in the middle of a minefield. With half of humanity already exterminated in a three-decade-long war that was still continuing to this day and the Royal Guard desperately short on troops, it wasn't unusual for a 19-year-old to be considered a grizzled veteran in charge of an all-female company who averaged around 17 years old. He always carried himself with an air of authority and stern impatience, but hidden behind it was the protective brotherly bond he held for all of his subordinates.
But more than anything else, he was unpredictable. He never showed what he was thinking in his one good eye. You could never tell if he was going to reprimand you by throwing you in the brig or making you dress up as a can-can dancer and perform in a Parisian opera. He'd probably make a decent drill instructor when he got older.
"Lieutenant Yamashiro. Captain Noto. I think you've both seen enough violence for today," he addressed the two in a strictly professional manner. "No need to drag this out into a verbal conflict."
He let part of a joking smile slip through his stony demeanor.
"Sorry, Major," Izumi quickly apologized.
"Yes, Major," Kazusa bowed her head at the same time.
"Good. Let your combat skills speak louder than your voices. That's about the only thing those bastards know how to fear," the Major said bluntly. "We'll continue the sparring matches with Takamura versus Kai next. We'll go down the whole squad in the order of last round's points. As long as we're not called out to squash a bug infestation again, we should have enough time on the schedule for everyone to get their turn today. Tomorrow we'll have physical activities. On Wednesday we'll freshen up on Hive Tactics. Do you have any questions for me, ladies?"
Kazusa remained respectfully silent while Izumi answered him with a coy subtle grin.
"When's lunch time?"
Author's note: Are you frustrated?
Author's note 2: So about a month ago I found out about those player death sequences in the Resident Evil 2 remake. I had a cute-but-weird idea to write a story from the perspective of Ada's guts as she's getting Game Over'd but I couldn't come up with enough material to make it work. This story sort of evolved out of those ideas.
Author's note 3: I had a bunch of other worldbuilding in mind for this AU. Maybe I'll ramble about it on my blog sometime.