2

Kazuto was hungry. Ever since he had regained consciousness, all he had to eat was some bread. The testers said that he would be given more to eat later, but they also told him that it was critical that the tests be done now. Kazuto couldn't see why most of them were critical, but it wasn't like he really had the choice to argue—he was naked, and his arms and legs were secured against the cold metal wall of the test chamber by vector-proofed metal cuffs so that he was unable to escape.

Right now, they were testing his body vector's bullet-resisting properties. The test was simple: Kazuto would remain as he was while a soldier stood at the other end of the cell firing different types of bullets at him from assault rifles. This test was really the only one whose purpose Kazuto could understand: they were looking for the type of ammunition that they would use to kill him should he ever try to escape.

Kazuto withstood all of the bullets that had been shot at him so far, including all of the armor-piercing ammo—an unusual feat for a Diclonius, but not out of the range of possibility for a Neoclonius. They were currently testing .30-06 Springfield armor-piercing ammunition with an M1 Garand, an American World War II vintage semi-automatic rifle—Kazuto was surprised that they would even consider using that old beast. A laser sight was attached to the front of the gun so that the shooter could be sure that the round would strike in a non-lethal place if it did exceed Kazuto's ability to stop it harmlessly.

"Load up," said the organization official running the test. The soldier loaded an en bloc clip with one .30-06 armor-piercing cartridge into his M1. Kazuto focused his vector abilities into his torso—there was no need to turn his arms or head invisible. The color of his body faded and then turned transparent. This is what the institute called "engaging vector mode."

"Fire." The soldier took aim at Kazuto's stomach and then pulled the trigger. Crack! A faint ping could also be heard from the gun, signifying that it was out of ammo.

Kazuto let out a short gasp of pain. The armor-piercing bullet struck him in the gut, but his body was still clear; the bullet did no harm to him. That's not to say that the shot did not hurt. Quite to the contrary, actually: it hurt like hell. The bullet dropped out from Kazuto's torso, falling to the ground with a tiny clack clack clack. Kazuto's body reappeared with a small bruise right where the bullet hit.

"Number 42's giving way," said the test operator, a lean man of around 37. "Shouldn't be much longer."

"Can't we take a break for, like, two minutes?" inquired the pained man.

"Sorry, Kazuto," said the female voice that belonged to Anna, his American surrogate mother. "My boss insists that this testing be done immediately."

"Why, Mother?" Kazuto asked, looking up towards the window at the other end of the room behind which the operator and she were standing. He vowed to reserve the name "Mom" for his real mother. "So my pain doesn't stop until I'm nearly killed?"

"I've learned not to ask," she replied. "Trust me, you'll be okay."

Kazuto sighed, looking up at the fluorescent light that illuminated the test chamber. No matter what time of the day it was, it shed its bright, cold light around the entire room. Everything in the room could be described by that one word: cold. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, the air: cold. The test supervisor and the soldier: cold. The organization's attitude towards its Diclonius and Neoclonius subjects: cold. Kazuto had had enough with this seven years' winter. He longed to return to the warmth of his home.

"Move up to the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle," said the operator. "Fire a full magazine of .30-06 Springfield armor-piercing rounds into Number 42."

A full mag!? thought Kazuto in shock. He was well educated when it came to gun knowledge. The Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, was another American weapon used in World War II and other wars up until the 1960s. A full magazine of a BAR contained twenty .30-06 cartridges. He was about to take twenty armor-piercing bullets straight to the chest!

The soldier went over to the rack of guns that he had brought into the chamber for this test and selected the BAR from among the various other types of ordinance. He loaded up the double-column box magazine with twenty rounds, inserted it into the weapon, and pulled back the spring-loaded bolt to cock the weapon. Krik-chack!

At this point, Kazuto began to wonder why these people were using so many American weapons. He could understand why his escorts from the American institution would carry US ordinance like M4s and M16s. But here in Japan, they were still shooting him with American guns. Hell, not just American guns—World War II vintage American guns. And a whole slew of them, for that matter (or so it seemed). By God, there was even a Thompson submachine gun and a Springfield bolt-action rifle on the rack that the shooter had pulled the BAR from! If Kazuto weren't in pain from hanging by his arms and legs for two hours (obviously, they wanted to drag out the time to test his endurance further), he would have cracked up. If these Japanese guys really wanted to use a World War II arsenal for these tests, then why were they so afraid to use more country-appropriate weapons? Why didn't they use old-time Japanese guns like the Arisaka or the Type 100? The only logical conclusion: this organization had to be based in America.

"Safety off," ordered the operator. The soldier did as he was told, flicking the selector lever from "S" ("safety") to "F" (single "fire") and finally to "A" ("automatic" fire). He flicked on the laser sight and took aim at Kazuto, who engaged his body's vector properties once again. "Open fire."

The BAR was a slow-firing weapon. Surely, that was not intended to be a part of this torture, but to Kazuto it made things all the worse: instead of having a bunch of bullets enter at once, he had to feel each individual bullet enter his body. All Kazuto could feel was the pain of one bullet after another striking his chest. Again, they were doing no harm, but the repeated hits could quite possibly knock his concentration off, thus cutting off his ability to give his torso vector properties and letting the rest of the bullets strike his body and do real damage. In short, they didn't; Kazuto made it through the test without sustaining any damage.

Kazuto let his body return to normal. All twenty rounds cascaded to the ground. It almost sounded like a brief rainstorm, if the raindrops were replaced with bits of metal. When color returned to Kazuto's body, he had twenty more small bruises on his chest. But that wasn't all: his nose and mouth were beginning to bleed. The strain of resisting the onslaught of bullets was becoming too great.

"Can we please stop?" Kazuto demanded, shedding a tear of blood. "This is going too far!"

"I agree, Mr. Yoshigawa," concurred Anna, "you should stop for a while. You're going to do serious damage to him if you continue."

"The point of this test, Miss Carpenter," responded Mr. Yoshigawa, the test operator, "is to have Number 42 sustain damage, not to get to the point where he is in danger of taking damage." He shifted the wire-rimmed glasses set upon his nose a bit. "We must continue until he can't take any more. Move up to the Barrett M2043 high-powered assault rifle. Use one .50 BMG round."

Kazuto had never heard of this rifle before, but he was well aware of the ammunition it used. The .50 BMG was a bullet typically used in high-powered sniper rifles and machine guns. From the sound of it, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, an American firearms developer that was well known for making .50 caliber sniper rifles, had designed an assault rifle that could harness the power of the .50 BMG for a handheld automatic weapon as well as a single-fire rifle. This next test would only use one round, but if that failed they would go to burst fire—if it had that feature—and then to full automatic fire. At that point, Kazuto would be on his last strands of sanity.

"No!" shouted Kazuto in a panic. "Please, stop! Mother, aren't you gonna to stop him?"

Anna remained silent. She looked as if she were about to shed a tear, but for some reason she was holding it back. She hung her head down. "As you will, Mr. Yoshigawa," she said gloomily. Yoshigawa ordered the trooper to continue.

"Wait, you're not actually consenting to this bullshit, right? RIGHT?!"

The soldier grabbed a weapon off of the gun rack. For an assault rifle, it was huge. He loaded a single .50 caliber bullet into the weapon's huge box magazine. It looked like it could hold up to 20 rounds—a number that wasn't very much for an assault rifle, but the enemy wouldn't care because the shells it packed were .50 BMGs, and those bastards hurt like all hell. They also generated an enormous amount or recoil when fired, so a soldier's arm would probably be dislocated if Barrett had crammed any more bullets in there—though sustained fire of the thing in its current state would probably do serious damage anyways unless the shooter was a Mr. Universe bodybuilder. The bullet itself looked like greatly scaled-up version of the .30-06 rounds used earlier, and, like those bullets, this one was an armor-piercing round. It was a miniature missile.

"Oh, God, no! Have mercy, dammit! I'm cold and hungry and tired and I can't take this shit anymore!"

The soldier slammed the massive magazine into the weapon, racked the charging handle, turned on the laser sight and took aim.

Kazuto was now in tears. "For Christ's sake, just stop! Just two minutes, I beg of you! I'll do anything! Please! God fucking dammit, STOP!"

"You will go through with this, Number 42," said Yoshigawa. "We have to do this testing now. If you keep refusing to engage vector mode, you will be shot and killed for insubordination. And this soldier here will not hesitate to go straight for the heart." As if to reinforce that point, the red dot to the left of Kazuto's heart quickly shifted to the center of his chest.

Kazuto's face was sore from the tears that continued to rain down from his eyes. He knew that he would be shot either way. He hung his head and moaned. He was torn: his mind desperately wanted him to die, but his body just didn't want to feel the pain of death. Eventually, he succumbed to his body's request. His body once again turned transparent. He put all of his energy and concentration into going into vector mode and stopping that bullet, though in his current condition he was not at all confident that it would be enough. Besides, what would he gain if he stopped that bullet? A chest-full of twenty more, that's what. Nevertheless, he closed his eyes and, filled with dread, awaited the shot.

"Safety off," ordered Yoshigawa. The shooter shifted his aim back to the left and switched the gun from safe mode to single-shot mode. "Fire." He squeezed the trigger. Boom! roared the untamed monster.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!" The bullet struck Kazuto's body. He tried to resist it, but it was just too much. His body immediately turned back to normal and let the bullet through the skin, like a gate being smashed down by a battering ram. It pierced his flesh just to the left of his stomach, tore all the way through his rib cage, and made it out the other side, denting the steel wall behind and staining it with blood. The shot didn't kill him, but he now desperately wished that it had.

"That's enough," said Yoshigawa. "Pack up your weapons, soldier." The trooper did as he was told. As he walked towards his gun rack to unlock the wheels, Yoshigawa pressed a button. With a pop and a hiss, the cuffs clamping Kazuto to the wall released, allowing his body to slump face first onto the floor. As he lay there, a pool formed, fed by the tributary that was the river of blood flowing from his wound.

The heavy steel blast door slid open. Mr. Yoshigawa came in with a small syringe filled with a clear fluid. He turned Kazuto over as if he was handling an unfamiliar corpse, took up his left hand and inserted the needle. Kazuto looked up into his handler's face. Though his slick black hair and gray suit looked very professional, he could see nothing in him but the evil that he was ordered to do. Uncaring son of a bitch, thought Kazuto. The operator gingerly depressed the plunger, as if he were performing some delicate biological experiment—one that didn't involve torturing a live sample.

"This needle has a strand of DNA from a Neoclonius like you, Number 42. Her body has regenerative properties, so this will help you recover from your injuries." In retrospect, Kazuto would rather have been executed. "It is only enough to help you in this one instance, but your wound will heal before the effects wear off." With that, he pulled the needle from Kazuto's arm and left without another word.

Next through the door was Anna. She came swiftly to Kazuto's side and took him up in her arms. Even though she works for these monsters, she's very much like a mother, Kazuto thought as he looked up into her beautiful young face. He met her blue eyes with his red ones; her sorrowful, sympathetic gaze, partially hidden by a couple of locks of her long brown hair, was all that comforted him then. Though he was in a ghastly amount of pain, he managed to wrench a faint smile on his face. It was an infantile reaction, but he couldn't help it: this woman, no matter who she worked for or what she represented, had cared for him ever since she had been assigned to him when she was 24. She loved him almost as much as his own mother, and he returned that affection.

She brought her lips close to his ear. "I'm sorry they had to do this to you," she said in a low whisper. "I would've done everything in my power to stop him had I had the choice."

"So why didn't you?" Kazuto whispered—or, more aptly, groaned quietly—back.

"If I had made my intentions to stop the testing public, my boss would've killed me."

"But didn't you say that you wanted to stop the test earlier?"

"That was acceptable in the company's view. If I had persisted, though, he would have had me killed." Anna paused, and then brought her head closer. "Kazuto," she began again, "I don't know how much more of this I can take. You're the only son I have, and likely the only one I will have in my life."

"Don't sweat it. The time will be right to escape soon. I have a feeling."

"I hope so," she whispered. Tears came to her eyes. "This is becoming too much for me to bear." She looked over her shoulder. "I have to go. My boss is waiting for me." Then she held him tight and kissed him on the forehead, right on his third horn. "Hope you get better." At that, she left, hiding her tears to avoid getting killed.

Then two doctors came in rolling a stretcher. They lifted Kazuto's limp and bloody body off of the crimson-painted floor and propped him up on the bed. Their jobs done, they carted him out of the room, followed by the soldier and his rack of firepower. With that, the lights automatically shut off—someone would come to clean up the mess later.

End of 2