Battle Royale '03
Part Nine
56
Shizuka was looking around for some way to unzip the clear plastic keeping her from meeting the ground in a most unpleasant way. Her search was, unfortunately for her, very fruitless. She was about to shoot holes in the clear plastic when she heard the door opening again and turned, gun ready, to see Kiyoharu, Junko and Masao entering the sunroom.
"Shizuka..." Junko said in her coaxing voice. "Put it down. It's going to be all right."
"What if I go home and he's still there?" Shizuka asked, her voice becoming low and threatening. It was truly horrifying. "That's a possibility! What if I don't go home at all?"
"Please, Shizuka," Kiyoharu begged. "Put it down." Shizuka looked at Kiyoharu and her glare softened. She dropped her gun and found herself walking over to him without even knowing she was moving. Junko looked at Masao and mouthed 'It worked' as Shizuka stood before Kiyoharu.
"I promise one day I'll stop," Shizuka whispered as she fumbled around in her school coat and took out a box cutter. "It won't be today, though." She brought out the blade of the box cutter and grinned as she brought it down into the pale flesh of her arm.
"Shizuka!!" Junko wailed, waving her gun around. "Don't!!" Kiyoharu tried to wrestle the box cutter out of Shizuka's hand and called on Masao for assistance. Using a move he learned in karate, he pinched a nerve in Shizuka's neck. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she let go of the box cutter as she dropped onto the ground. Junko gasped.
"Did you kill her?" Kiyoharu asked Masao.
"No, I just knocked her out for a while." Junko let out a deep breath of relief.
"How long?"
"I think an hour or so. Not too long."
"You asshole! What if Shojiro comes before she comes to? We have one less fighter! Is there a way to reverse that?" Kiyoharu was obviously angered.
"If he comes before she comes to, which is highly unlikely, we'll just cover for her until she comes back to. Enough said."
"You make it all sound so easy," Kiyoharu hissed as he sat down next to Shizuka. "I'm staying with her. I'm guarding her."
"Fine by me, but..." Junko looked off in the distance. "Let's move back into the house. Can you carry her alone?"
"I already have before," Kiyoharu replied, smiling wearily and picking up Shizuka. "She feels like a rag doll," he noted as he descended the stairs. Junko slapped Masao across the face.
"Agh! Why did you do that?" Masao asked, rubbing his cheek.
"You were supposed to get the cutter out of her hand, not knock her out! Who do you think you are, acting so big?" She scowled at him. "Just think about what you did. I'm going downstairs." Junko began to go down the stairs and turned around to scowl once more before going all the way down and shutting the door, leaving Masao alone with his thoughts and a throbbing cheek.
5 students remaining
57
Shojiro stood atop the northern mountain, along with Miki's brutalized corpse. He tried to ignore that as he tried to focus the old binoculars in, looking for signs of life. Anything that moved, he would focus on. This meant he mistakenly focused on animals going to corpses for a bit of a snack many times, but when at first you don't succeed, just try again. He saw something moving and focused in...only to find some birds picking at Sayaka Ichiki's corpse, looking for food. Dammit. Another failed attempt. He turned the binoculars to the right just a little and was focused on the school. He could see Shinya Misao's body on the roof, one well-placed shot fired at him so long ago. He moved them down and saw a raccoon tearing a piece of meat off of Minami Shimada. He sighed and turned them right even more, moving past the residential area until he saw something at the clinic. Focusing in, he saw an exchange between Junko Mizuboshi and Masao Suzuki which began in Junko bitch-slapping Masao.
Shojiro licked his lips. Those two still seemed alive, which meant only one thing.
He had to kill them, of course. He had one of the best arsenals in the game, stealing from everyone he killed. He was the best player in the game, of course, and he was going to go show those two how this game was played. He jumped out of the viewing platform and began to slide down the mountain just as Suzuko had done long ago. Of course he had no idea that Suzuko slid down the mountain, too, it's just that his shoes had almost no traction against slippery rock, so he decided to just let the friction, gravity and all that other science stuff he slept through do its trick.
He'd get there when he'd get there.
5 students remaining
58
It was about to be 3:00. Kiyoharu eyed his watch, then eyed Shizuka, then eyed his watch again, the second time very nervously. About an hour ago, Masao promised Kiyoharu that Shizuka would only be unconscious for an hour. Can consciousness be induced? He began to wonder. But no, he couldn't leave Shizuka's side. What ifs flashed through his head. What if Shojiro broke in through the very window he was sitting at while he was out of the room getting a medical book? What if he killed off Junko and Masao, then came after poor defenseless Shizuka? Kiyoharu cursed Masao for doing this, then sighed and looked at her again. A small red line was on her right arm, dripping a small stream of blood down her wrist and onto the bed he put her on. He eyed the line nervously, then decided to just go for it. Luckily the supplies he needed were right across the hall, so he simply ran out of the room and returned with the supplies needed to dress a wound. Not a hair on Shizuka's head was harmed.
Kiyoharu sighed and began to clean up the red line with rubbing alcohol. Last time, when she was conscious, this hurt her a bit which she showed by muttering 'It stings...'. This time she was unconscious but he wanted her to be conscious again. He wrapped the wound in gauze and taped it tightly to help clot the blood.
"You know," a feeble female voice said while Kiyoharu observed his handiwork. "For not having 'any' experience in the medical field, you're a pretty good doctor." Shizuka opened her eyes slowly.
"Are you all right?" Kiyoharu asked.
"I'm a little dazed, but otherwise fine. But let me tell you, if anyone tries that neck pinch thing on me again I may be forced to castrate them. ...If they're male, of course." Shizuka smiled. "Oh, I was just kidding. What time is it?"
"3:00 on the dot. Masao predicted your unconsciousness time pretty well."
"Do you know how many kids are left?"
"Still five. We're still good to go. How are you feeling?"
"Just a bit dazed, like I said, but if Shojiro came bursting in at this very moment, I would fight for my life." She patted her school coat. Yup, her issued gun was still there. As she touched the warm black metal she remembered the only killing shot she'd fired throughout this whole game and that was to kill Shinya Misao, who would probably have taken out the rest of the class after her anyway. Now that she thought about it, the plan was well thought-out and probably would've worked in that alternate reality that Shinya created for himself by pieceing together the plots of all the manga he read. Of course, this was the real reality and now...well, he wasn't alive anymore. Probably ascended to the big manga in heaven, right? Shizuka sat up and noticed the bloodied gauze on her right arm. "You bandaged me up?"
"I figured, why not? You were losing a lot of blood. I read in this book that nothing good comes from not having enough blood." Kiyoharu motioned to the medical book, which was about the size of an American phone book.
"Good advice." She looked around the room. "Um, I'm going to go show Masao and Junko that I'm okay."
"I'm still mad at you," Junko said quietly to Masao.
"I only did what I thought was right." He noticed that she was biting her lip again. "I agree, I am a bit headstrong at times and sometimes I forget that actions have consequences. Although..."
"Although?"
"Although when I was reflecting on my life I did remember some relevant stuff."
"Really? Go ahead and tell me if it's relevant."
"Okay. I remember in seventh grade when you first joined the cross-country team. So maybe you weren't the best runner? I wasn't the best kid in karate class. I'm still not. But anyway, one day Takashi came up to me after school right when I was going to go home and said, 'Hey, we can be a little late to karate class. I want you to come see this girl.' 'This girl?' I asked. I got my ass royally whooped by a yellow belt girl when I was a white belt, so I kind of don't have any good memories around girls. I reluctantly followed Takashi and we hid behind the wooden gate surrounding the field. We peeked through a loophole in the wood and I saw you. 'Look!' said Takashi, pointing right at you. 'That one! Number four! Mizuboshi. I think you two would work well together.' I didn't believe him and it took me two whole years to believe him."
"So you like me?"
"Yes, you got it."
"Then why didn't you save me the anecdote and just tell me straightforward?"
"I'm not like that." Shizuka stepped in the room, then looked inside and saw the two getting friendly. She gasped, embarrassed, and immediately threw herself up against the nearest wall. She was a bit of an eavesdropper.
5 students remaining
59
Shojiro repeated the same little mantra in his head as he descended the mountain. 'The clinic. The clinic. The clinic.' Over and over. He made sure he still had his machine gun strapped on his shoulder as he ran in the muddy, swampy grounds towards the clinic in the rain, not able to see very well in front of him with the rain hitting his eyes and stinging. Then he paused under the welcoming branches of a Japanese pine tree to check his map and make sure he was actually going in the right direction and wouldn't run into any forbidden zones. He traced a path with his finger, deftly avoiding any forbidden zones, and slapped the map when his finger traced all the way to the clinic without running into forbidden zones. Successful mission. But wasn't that the Umeboshi creed? His family always won. If they didn't, they would wag yen bills at whomever was judging. So bribery was illegal? Whatever, as long as it let him win.
He began to follow his path down to the clinic once more, noting that it wouldn't be too long until he got there. He sloshed through the wet, muddy grass once more, getting mud all over his shoes and pants. This got him mad, because his shoes were rather expensive, but he would deal with that later, after slaying whomever was left in the game. He reloaded his gun with a new magazine, looking over it and continuing once more.
He began to enjoy the scent of blood over this trip. Was there a blood-scented cologne or perfume? They could honestly bottle one and he would buy it. What would they call it, though? How about...Umeboshi Special. Yeah. He liked that name. So what if he was egotistical?
5 students remaining
60
"It'd really be quite easy to disable these collars," Masao wrote on a piece of paper. By now he had a clue that Mr. Toyama could most likely hear what he was saying, so he moved a conversation onto paper. "I think I read a scrambled manual how to on the Internet."
"The real Internet?" Shizuka replied.
"The real one. I took the liberty of stealing the batteries out of Kiyoharu's Walkman, we could need them. I don't have the manual on me, but I do remember it."
"I don't want to die from a faulty hacking of a collar."
"I know you don't. But in the manual it mentioned that this disabling process worked on all of the testing group. What we have to do is..." Masao began to write a bunch of very technical phrases, many of which Shizuka didn't understand. "Don't understand? Don't worry. I'll do all the work."
"PLEASE DON'T KILL ME" Shizuka begged in huge kanji.
"I won't kill you!" Masao replied. "All of the ingredients as well as a manual I wrote in simple language is in my coat pocket, in case I die just take the reins. They're all parts I took from a portable stereo. I even drew pictures. Just do what the pictures and words say and you can get out of here with no trouble."
"Does it only work for one person?"
"No, it works for multiple people. In theory all four of us could escape. See, when the collar is disabled it transmits a signal telling these master computers that its wearer died. So it could look like all four of us died in a gun battle with Shojiro or something, although we could be heading up the north coast and getting the hell out of here. It's easy, isn't it?"
"And you got it all off of the Internet! Look what we're missing by having a dictatorship government!"
Then Shizuka heard a knock on the door. The color drained from her face. She quickly went for her basket of knives and her gun.
"Who should answer the door?" she whispered, slipping the paper into a pants pocket.
"Nobody," Masao replied. "We'll wait for him to open it." Junko and Kiyoharu came in closer to Masao and Shizuka so they formed a clump instead of four defined people, weapons ready. They heard the sound of a body rushing up to the door and the cracking sounds made by the door as it surrendered to force. This cracking went on for a few minutes until there was a definite banging noise as the defeated door fell to the floor.
Shojiro Umeboshi stepped into the clinic, machine gun drawn, ready to spill some blood.
5 students remaining
Part Nine
56
Shizuka was looking around for some way to unzip the clear plastic keeping her from meeting the ground in a most unpleasant way. Her search was, unfortunately for her, very fruitless. She was about to shoot holes in the clear plastic when she heard the door opening again and turned, gun ready, to see Kiyoharu, Junko and Masao entering the sunroom.
"Shizuka..." Junko said in her coaxing voice. "Put it down. It's going to be all right."
"What if I go home and he's still there?" Shizuka asked, her voice becoming low and threatening. It was truly horrifying. "That's a possibility! What if I don't go home at all?"
"Please, Shizuka," Kiyoharu begged. "Put it down." Shizuka looked at Kiyoharu and her glare softened. She dropped her gun and found herself walking over to him without even knowing she was moving. Junko looked at Masao and mouthed 'It worked' as Shizuka stood before Kiyoharu.
"I promise one day I'll stop," Shizuka whispered as she fumbled around in her school coat and took out a box cutter. "It won't be today, though." She brought out the blade of the box cutter and grinned as she brought it down into the pale flesh of her arm.
"Shizuka!!" Junko wailed, waving her gun around. "Don't!!" Kiyoharu tried to wrestle the box cutter out of Shizuka's hand and called on Masao for assistance. Using a move he learned in karate, he pinched a nerve in Shizuka's neck. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she let go of the box cutter as she dropped onto the ground. Junko gasped.
"Did you kill her?" Kiyoharu asked Masao.
"No, I just knocked her out for a while." Junko let out a deep breath of relief.
"How long?"
"I think an hour or so. Not too long."
"You asshole! What if Shojiro comes before she comes to? We have one less fighter! Is there a way to reverse that?" Kiyoharu was obviously angered.
"If he comes before she comes to, which is highly unlikely, we'll just cover for her until she comes back to. Enough said."
"You make it all sound so easy," Kiyoharu hissed as he sat down next to Shizuka. "I'm staying with her. I'm guarding her."
"Fine by me, but..." Junko looked off in the distance. "Let's move back into the house. Can you carry her alone?"
"I already have before," Kiyoharu replied, smiling wearily and picking up Shizuka. "She feels like a rag doll," he noted as he descended the stairs. Junko slapped Masao across the face.
"Agh! Why did you do that?" Masao asked, rubbing his cheek.
"You were supposed to get the cutter out of her hand, not knock her out! Who do you think you are, acting so big?" She scowled at him. "Just think about what you did. I'm going downstairs." Junko began to go down the stairs and turned around to scowl once more before going all the way down and shutting the door, leaving Masao alone with his thoughts and a throbbing cheek.
5 students remaining
57
Shojiro stood atop the northern mountain, along with Miki's brutalized corpse. He tried to ignore that as he tried to focus the old binoculars in, looking for signs of life. Anything that moved, he would focus on. This meant he mistakenly focused on animals going to corpses for a bit of a snack many times, but when at first you don't succeed, just try again. He saw something moving and focused in...only to find some birds picking at Sayaka Ichiki's corpse, looking for food. Dammit. Another failed attempt. He turned the binoculars to the right just a little and was focused on the school. He could see Shinya Misao's body on the roof, one well-placed shot fired at him so long ago. He moved them down and saw a raccoon tearing a piece of meat off of Minami Shimada. He sighed and turned them right even more, moving past the residential area until he saw something at the clinic. Focusing in, he saw an exchange between Junko Mizuboshi and Masao Suzuki which began in Junko bitch-slapping Masao.
Shojiro licked his lips. Those two still seemed alive, which meant only one thing.
He had to kill them, of course. He had one of the best arsenals in the game, stealing from everyone he killed. He was the best player in the game, of course, and he was going to go show those two how this game was played. He jumped out of the viewing platform and began to slide down the mountain just as Suzuko had done long ago. Of course he had no idea that Suzuko slid down the mountain, too, it's just that his shoes had almost no traction against slippery rock, so he decided to just let the friction, gravity and all that other science stuff he slept through do its trick.
He'd get there when he'd get there.
5 students remaining
58
It was about to be 3:00. Kiyoharu eyed his watch, then eyed Shizuka, then eyed his watch again, the second time very nervously. About an hour ago, Masao promised Kiyoharu that Shizuka would only be unconscious for an hour. Can consciousness be induced? He began to wonder. But no, he couldn't leave Shizuka's side. What ifs flashed through his head. What if Shojiro broke in through the very window he was sitting at while he was out of the room getting a medical book? What if he killed off Junko and Masao, then came after poor defenseless Shizuka? Kiyoharu cursed Masao for doing this, then sighed and looked at her again. A small red line was on her right arm, dripping a small stream of blood down her wrist and onto the bed he put her on. He eyed the line nervously, then decided to just go for it. Luckily the supplies he needed were right across the hall, so he simply ran out of the room and returned with the supplies needed to dress a wound. Not a hair on Shizuka's head was harmed.
Kiyoharu sighed and began to clean up the red line with rubbing alcohol. Last time, when she was conscious, this hurt her a bit which she showed by muttering 'It stings...'. This time she was unconscious but he wanted her to be conscious again. He wrapped the wound in gauze and taped it tightly to help clot the blood.
"You know," a feeble female voice said while Kiyoharu observed his handiwork. "For not having 'any' experience in the medical field, you're a pretty good doctor." Shizuka opened her eyes slowly.
"Are you all right?" Kiyoharu asked.
"I'm a little dazed, but otherwise fine. But let me tell you, if anyone tries that neck pinch thing on me again I may be forced to castrate them. ...If they're male, of course." Shizuka smiled. "Oh, I was just kidding. What time is it?"
"3:00 on the dot. Masao predicted your unconsciousness time pretty well."
"Do you know how many kids are left?"
"Still five. We're still good to go. How are you feeling?"
"Just a bit dazed, like I said, but if Shojiro came bursting in at this very moment, I would fight for my life." She patted her school coat. Yup, her issued gun was still there. As she touched the warm black metal she remembered the only killing shot she'd fired throughout this whole game and that was to kill Shinya Misao, who would probably have taken out the rest of the class after her anyway. Now that she thought about it, the plan was well thought-out and probably would've worked in that alternate reality that Shinya created for himself by pieceing together the plots of all the manga he read. Of course, this was the real reality and now...well, he wasn't alive anymore. Probably ascended to the big manga in heaven, right? Shizuka sat up and noticed the bloodied gauze on her right arm. "You bandaged me up?"
"I figured, why not? You were losing a lot of blood. I read in this book that nothing good comes from not having enough blood." Kiyoharu motioned to the medical book, which was about the size of an American phone book.
"Good advice." She looked around the room. "Um, I'm going to go show Masao and Junko that I'm okay."
"I'm still mad at you," Junko said quietly to Masao.
"I only did what I thought was right." He noticed that she was biting her lip again. "I agree, I am a bit headstrong at times and sometimes I forget that actions have consequences. Although..."
"Although?"
"Although when I was reflecting on my life I did remember some relevant stuff."
"Really? Go ahead and tell me if it's relevant."
"Okay. I remember in seventh grade when you first joined the cross-country team. So maybe you weren't the best runner? I wasn't the best kid in karate class. I'm still not. But anyway, one day Takashi came up to me after school right when I was going to go home and said, 'Hey, we can be a little late to karate class. I want you to come see this girl.' 'This girl?' I asked. I got my ass royally whooped by a yellow belt girl when I was a white belt, so I kind of don't have any good memories around girls. I reluctantly followed Takashi and we hid behind the wooden gate surrounding the field. We peeked through a loophole in the wood and I saw you. 'Look!' said Takashi, pointing right at you. 'That one! Number four! Mizuboshi. I think you two would work well together.' I didn't believe him and it took me two whole years to believe him."
"So you like me?"
"Yes, you got it."
"Then why didn't you save me the anecdote and just tell me straightforward?"
"I'm not like that." Shizuka stepped in the room, then looked inside and saw the two getting friendly. She gasped, embarrassed, and immediately threw herself up against the nearest wall. She was a bit of an eavesdropper.
5 students remaining
59
Shojiro repeated the same little mantra in his head as he descended the mountain. 'The clinic. The clinic. The clinic.' Over and over. He made sure he still had his machine gun strapped on his shoulder as he ran in the muddy, swampy grounds towards the clinic in the rain, not able to see very well in front of him with the rain hitting his eyes and stinging. Then he paused under the welcoming branches of a Japanese pine tree to check his map and make sure he was actually going in the right direction and wouldn't run into any forbidden zones. He traced a path with his finger, deftly avoiding any forbidden zones, and slapped the map when his finger traced all the way to the clinic without running into forbidden zones. Successful mission. But wasn't that the Umeboshi creed? His family always won. If they didn't, they would wag yen bills at whomever was judging. So bribery was illegal? Whatever, as long as it let him win.
He began to follow his path down to the clinic once more, noting that it wouldn't be too long until he got there. He sloshed through the wet, muddy grass once more, getting mud all over his shoes and pants. This got him mad, because his shoes were rather expensive, but he would deal with that later, after slaying whomever was left in the game. He reloaded his gun with a new magazine, looking over it and continuing once more.
He began to enjoy the scent of blood over this trip. Was there a blood-scented cologne or perfume? They could honestly bottle one and he would buy it. What would they call it, though? How about...Umeboshi Special. Yeah. He liked that name. So what if he was egotistical?
5 students remaining
60
"It'd really be quite easy to disable these collars," Masao wrote on a piece of paper. By now he had a clue that Mr. Toyama could most likely hear what he was saying, so he moved a conversation onto paper. "I think I read a scrambled manual how to on the Internet."
"The real Internet?" Shizuka replied.
"The real one. I took the liberty of stealing the batteries out of Kiyoharu's Walkman, we could need them. I don't have the manual on me, but I do remember it."
"I don't want to die from a faulty hacking of a collar."
"I know you don't. But in the manual it mentioned that this disabling process worked on all of the testing group. What we have to do is..." Masao began to write a bunch of very technical phrases, many of which Shizuka didn't understand. "Don't understand? Don't worry. I'll do all the work."
"PLEASE DON'T KILL ME" Shizuka begged in huge kanji.
"I won't kill you!" Masao replied. "All of the ingredients as well as a manual I wrote in simple language is in my coat pocket, in case I die just take the reins. They're all parts I took from a portable stereo. I even drew pictures. Just do what the pictures and words say and you can get out of here with no trouble."
"Does it only work for one person?"
"No, it works for multiple people. In theory all four of us could escape. See, when the collar is disabled it transmits a signal telling these master computers that its wearer died. So it could look like all four of us died in a gun battle with Shojiro or something, although we could be heading up the north coast and getting the hell out of here. It's easy, isn't it?"
"And you got it all off of the Internet! Look what we're missing by having a dictatorship government!"
Then Shizuka heard a knock on the door. The color drained from her face. She quickly went for her basket of knives and her gun.
"Who should answer the door?" she whispered, slipping the paper into a pants pocket.
"Nobody," Masao replied. "We'll wait for him to open it." Junko and Kiyoharu came in closer to Masao and Shizuka so they formed a clump instead of four defined people, weapons ready. They heard the sound of a body rushing up to the door and the cracking sounds made by the door as it surrendered to force. This cracking went on for a few minutes until there was a definite banging noise as the defeated door fell to the floor.
Shojiro Umeboshi stepped into the clinic, machine gun drawn, ready to spill some blood.
5 students remaining