The weapons locker, predictably enough, is where Balamb Garden stores the majority of its weapons. Weapons belonging to individuals stay with the individuals, but weapons that are the property of the Garden remain in the locker. As you might expect of an organization of our wealth, we have enough guns to stage the overthrow of a small-to-middling-nation. And while our troops are trained in hand-to-hand combat, when they're half-starved and demoralized, as Mallis has been careful to keep them, they need weapons to give them the edge. Freeing them from their restraints will go a long way to restoring their moral, but to turn the tide against the occupying force, they'll need guns. Lots of guns.

It is to that end that I stand before the weapons locker, frantically rewiring the access panel, trying to coax the doors into opening. Whoever has rewired them has taken the time to learn standard SeeD security measures, and has redesigned the system so that none of our traditional tricks work.

Whoever. The word enters my mind like I don't already know. I know full well who's redesigned the system, and she's done a damn good job of it. It wouldn't be an efficient system for arming students in an emergency, but it clearly wasn't designed for practicality. It was designed to keep me out, and it's doing that nicely.

I'm nearing the end of the rewiring when the world turns white around me. Everything seems to explode in a rainbow of colors, and I realize I've been struck, hard, on the back of the head. My face flies forward, colliding with the panel. There's a whooshing sound and the door to the locker flies open, so there's that at least.

I fall flat on my back. From my position on the ground I have a perfect view of my attacker. Again, like I didn't know. She's looking at me with this stupid little "I just punched you in the optic nerve" smile. I really want to wipe it off her face.

I kick to my feet and spin around, facing her. I recognize the pistol at her side as my own, the one I had custom-made for some covert operation or other a while back. I liked it so much, I decided to keep it. She could have shot me with it from behind, but didn't, wanting the satisfaction, I suppose, of killing me in a fair fight. Or more likely, the satisfaction of killing me with her bare hands.

We drop into fighting stances and fly at each other, my right hand arcing directly for her jaw. I always hated getting punched in the face – it's always been one of the surest ways to piss me off, and I'm hoping the same holds true for her.

That particularly inquiry has to wait, as she grabs my fist and wrenches, violently, flipping me. For the second time in under a minute, I'm on my back, staring up at the face of the woman who wants to kill me. This time, though, she doesn't hesitate, and her boot comes smashing down towards my head.

I roll aside, regaining my feet at the same time. On my way up, I take the opportunity to jam my hand into the back of her knee. She crumples slightly, and I grab her by the shoulders, driving my knee into her lower spinal column. It felt like it hurt. I hope it did.

I wrap my arms around her head, attempting to get enough leverage on her to snap her neck. Unsurprisingly, she has a different idea. She backpedals, slamming me against the wall. It's a little jarring, but I have a pretty good hold on her. Undaunted, she tries again, except this time, she doesn't aim for the wall. She crashes us into one of the windows, causing a hailstorm of shattered glass. Since I'm the first one through, I receive the worst of the cuts, but she doesn't escape unscathed.

She leans back, pressing me against the window frame with the weight of her body. It's uncomfortable, but not terribly dangerous. The fact that I'm reclining amidst a large pile of jagged glass supplies the danger. The shock is enough to make me lose my grip on her. She flips over and fixes her hands on my throat in a vise-like grip. As she's throttling me, she jams a knee into my torso and digs in, trying to grind me into the fragments, which I can feel digging into my back. There's a particularly large shard threatening to go all the way through me and come out the other side. Between blood loss and the fact that she's cutting off oxygen to my brain, I need to get her off me, now.

An ugly solution presents itself. I try not to consider the implications of what I'm about to do. I stop fighting the progress of the shard and go with it, even helping it. It protrudes from my chest and drives itself into Scarlet's kneecap, sliding – almost miraculously – underneath the patella and cutting into the ligaments there.

The pain must be incredible, but to her credit, she doesn't scream. She does, however, get the hell off my body, which was my intent in the first place. I manage to snap off the shard of glass at its base and rise to my feet. Scarlet's on the ground, trying to regain her feet and failing as her knee keeps giving way beneath her.

Now for the hard part. I reach my hands behind my back and grab onto the glass, gritting my teeth as it feel it dig into my palms. With every ounce of my waning strength, I pull, trying to move the shard back down its original path. The worst part is that I can't stop envisioning what it's doing to my innards. If I'm lucky, I'll have avoided major organ trauma, but I'm still bleeding badly.

As the glass clears my torso, I collapse to the ground. The process took more out of me than I thought. The floor around me is slick with blood and tissue. It feels like hours have elapsed since Scarlet stopped choking me, but it's only been a few seconds. I need to catch my breath, to do something to center myself, but I don't have that kind of time.

I look up at her, and she's standing again, advancing on me, reaching for the gun holstered at her side. And smiling. The bitch is smiling at me. Is this how I look when I'm about to kill someone? Because, if it is, I need to work on that. No wonder I'm single.

The gun is loaded. My little gun has a clear handle and the sides of the magazine have been cut away so I can see how many shots it had remaining without having to count in the middle of a firefight. Almost 300 changes to the basic design, and all of them made by hand. Damn, I love that gun.

She's ready to kill me. I can see it in her eyes. We're both having the same thought, that it's time to end the fight, because a war of attrition will only kill us both. Unfortunately, she has a gun, and she's aiming right for me.

A lot of Instructors wind up using my... exploits to further their lessons, but I occasionally find that they miss the point. Specifically, there's a time I found myself elbow-deep in a behemoth's mouth. Before he could rip my arm off, I grabbed a hold of his uvula and tugged, hard, ripping it off. Instead of biting me, he roared in pain, and I got my arm out with only minor lacerations.

Instructors use this as evidence that the battle is only over when you're dead, and as long as you're alive, you still have a shot. Honestly? I never saw it that way. The lesson I took away from it was that if you plan to digest my arm, I'm sure as hell taking a souvenir.

That thought flashes into my head as I see Scarlet starting to pull the trigger. She can shoot me, but I'll see to it that she pays the price. I grab the piece of glass, gripping it hard to keep it from sliding out of my hands, and lunge at her.

Every time I've been shot I have the exact same reaction: this is the worst pain I've ever endured. Each time is worse than the time before it, and this is no exception. It feels like every nerve in my body has exploded.

The first bullet slams into my shoulder, but I have anger and momentum on my side. I hear second and third shots fired, but I'm so close to passing out, so disconnected from my body, that I'm only aware of their impact in the most abstract of senses.

The tip of the glass enters her chest below the left lung. I note, with some satisfaction, that it's roughly analogous to the exit wound I'm sporting. But hers is about to get a lot worse.

I clamp down even harder on the glass, feeling it slice my hands open for what seems like the thirtieth time tonight. And I yank it, pulling it sideways as hard as I possibly can, slicing horizontally through her viscera. It feels good, at first, until I realize that it's not so much my strength slicing her open as it is gravity. My legs have finally given out, I'm starting to lose consciousness, and I'm falling to the ground, dragging the glass through her body with the weight of my body.

It's enough to take out her bad knee, and she collapses to the ground next to me. She's trying to force a hand into her wound, to stop the flow of blood, but the cut is too massive. It's ragged and wide and glittering with little chunks of glass.

My wounds are older, so I have the head start on dying, but given the seriousness of her cut, she's catching up rapidly. She's gurgling and choking on blood, and I start praying for unconsciousness to fall. I don't want to listen to her die. I don't want to watch her writhing on the floor trying desperately to think of something, anything that can save her life. I don't want to see that moment of realization on her face, when she knows that nothing will save her, that her journey has come to an end.

I don't want to be aware of these things, because they're uncomfortably familiar. Her face is my own, and I'm watching myself die.

Darkness slips over me.

The weapons locker is open. Seifer and Zell will be along soon to arm the captives. They'll retake Garden. Squall will defeat Mallis.

That's comfort enough. It has to be.