Chapter Two
It spun lazily in the air, chance personified, the fate of thousands riding on the slightest motion.
"Tails!"
Private Ichiro Akamatsu looked down at the 50-yen piece as though it had betrayed him. He shook his head mournfully. They'd come up with an unusual process of elimination; as the coin flipped in the air, everyone present extended either one or two fingers; one for heads, two for tails. Whoever called it right was included into the next round, and so on, until only one person was left. If everyone would have been eliminated in one round, then it was done over. Simple, really. Time-consuming, but simple.
And Ichiro had called tails. The problem was that in this particular game, you WANTED to be eliminated.
Sighing, he secured his helmet and shouldered an H&K G-36 as he made his towards the rather ordinary-looking fellow currently sitting on the curb, depression written on his face. "Um...sir?" He swallowed at the dull, hopeless look on the man's face. "We're...we're ready for the next trial."
Lloyd sighed, and hoisted himself to his feet. It had been two weeks since he'd been transformed into a tentacle demon. The meeting with the sailor senshi hadn't gone anywhere nearly as well as he'd hoped; that Sailor Moon twit had been MOST unhelpful after it had been revealed that he was actually a human; he'd had to lie, saying that if she didn't zap him, he might not be able to control himself. The fact that they were all severely underage was actually a blessing; it was a HUGE bucket of cold water on his libido. Not to mention a blessed relief; he might have been a demon, but at least he wasn't a monster.
The big problem though had been that her attack didn't do squat. He was apparently a good deal tougher than your average random-ever day-object-girls-would-easily-recognize-temporarily-changed-into-some-sort-of-daemonic-entity, or whatever the hell it was they usually fought. I mean, come on; demonic sewing implements? He was also apparently a fair bit tougher than your average chthonic, B-grade SciFi movie bishoujo senshi villain.
Long story short, they hadn't made a dent in him.
They'd tried, to. He'd been careful to insult the butch one until she was so frothing mad she'd given up magic and tried beating him to death with a park bench. It was confusing, not to mention slightly creepy, that she found it insulting to hear that a tentacle demon didn't think she was worth raping. Was she high, or just that dumb? Then again, they all wore those chokers; maybe hers was just on too tight. Or the fumes from her bottle-job girlfriend's peroxide had had an unforeseen and unpleasant side effect on her.
The soldier grimaced as he watched the demon stroll along him nonchalantly. "So uh...where'd you get the trench coat?"
"Made it," came the noncommittal reply. "It's just shape-shifted tentacles mimicking a leather jacket. Same as my pants, though those are mimicking a pair of jeans. It's not like I can find a clothing shop that doesn't empty, screaming, the second I walk in."
Ichiro nodded. It was weird, but he actually felt the demon was kind of...well, companionable. In a tragic hero sort of way. The last eight days only drove the point home.
Having pretty much exhausted any hope of a solution via magical girls, he'd found an abandoned lot and just waited for the various groups to show up and try to off him. He'd spent three hours getting swatted with those stupid paper-tassels on a stick that was apparently standard issue for a Shinto shrine maiden. They'd only left him alone (and the whole Shinto community, as well) when he'd mentioned in passing that he thought the shrine-maiden outfits were kind of kinky. He hadn't WANTED them to run screaming for the hills (and their virginity), but it had been kind of funny. In a pathetic sort of way.
Then the Christians decided to butt in. He'd never known their were bipolar lesbian samurai nuns who hung around with butch German gunslingers (1). Or crazed, Scottish, regenerating catholic priests with some sort of phallic knife obsession. At least until they came and ended up expending probably forty or fifty pounds of scrap metal (in the form of chips from the blade of a samurai sword, spent casings, shells, and thrown bayonets) on his form before he finally got bored with the whole thing and swatted them.
Reportedly, the coast guard had picked them up out of the ocean several hours later. And the German was the only one sporting a serious injury; hypothermia, namely.
At that point, religion pretty much decided to wait for God to deal with him in one form or another.
Then came the scientists. And the military
In the intervening week, he'd been shot with small arms, assault rifles, machine guns, Phalanx Vulcan cannons, 30mm anti-tank guns, 70mm RPG's, 120mm tank guns, 155mm howitzers, and even some decommissioned 800mm Nazi railroad cannon left over from World War II. The Japanese Strategic Self Defense Force had even brought in a brand new prototype anti-installation cannon, one firing a 200mm APFSDS (Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, Discarding Sabot) round with an 80mm internal hyper-penetration depleted uranium dart in a full-metal tungsten carbide jacket. The soldiers had been REALLY cocky then; they'd dragged along a scientist to tell precisely how it would kill him. Apparently, it was designed to tear through installation walls like a nail, then release a ring of explosive energy using internal shaped charges on pre-fragmented portions of the jacket. Basically it would pound itself inside him and then blow a REALLY big hole in him.
He managed a rueful smile. They'd turned literally chalk-white when it bounced off his chest.
So he was also apparently immune to projectile impact. Rather than let themselves be discouraged, the Japanese people had, in the tradition of their Toho monster movies, pulled out all the stops trying to find the weapon that would kill him. They'd bombed him, sort of half-heartedly, but it was quickly decided that if a focused impact from a bullet wouldn't hurt him, bombs probably wouldn't either. They'd napalmed him, and been very uneasy when his only complaint was that he'd liked those pants; jeans were prohibitively expensive in Japan, after all. Taking the opposite extreme, they'd dropped tanks of liquid helium on him, using shaped charges to rupture them and drench him in temperatures of 4 degrees Kelvin.
It hadn't been comfortable, but he didn't even have frost-bite to show for it.
They'd tried various poison gases, to little effect. They'd tried an industrial laser, and even some fancy new plasma-cutting torch. Again, little to no effect. They'd gone to all the trouble of making a portable clean-room environment to try and see if there were any biological ways to harm him. He didn't want to know HOW they managed to get the US and Russia to cooperate, but somehow they'd gotten a hold of the only two living samples of smallpox in the world to test on him. Then came Ebola. And anthrax. Bubonic plague, sars, blastonecrosis, radioactive isotope poisoning...clean bill of health if Armageddon ever occurred, but that was about it.
He was, as near as he could tell, immortal. The only question was what next.
"Oh. Um...we managed to convince the US to help us out."
Interest piqued, he nodded. "What are you going to try next? Some sort of super-missile, or a satellite weapon?"
Ichiro winced. He couldn't believe that they were going to all this trouble to get rid of one person. "They...they're letting us use one of the old bomb-testing sites in the New Mexico desert. We're..." he sighed. "They want to strap you to a hydrogen bomb and drop you."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"...I see." Silence reigned for a time. More than a time, really.
Right up to the moment that he climbed onto the C130 Hercules that was handling transport.
Ichiro stared at him. "Wait, you're just going to let them NUKE you?"
Lloyd shrugged unconcernedly. "I've been trying to find a way to end it for the last week. I'm just glad so many national governments are willing to give me a leg-up, so to speak. Besides," he sighed, "at this point, I'm not even sure if a thermonuclear hellstorm hotter than the surface of the sun could finish me off at this point."
"..."
"...Yeah, I can see how you might wonder."
Far away, the Diet (Japanese version of congress) sighed in relief. "It's done."
The Secretary of the Interior chuckled weakly. "I'm just glad they agreed to this. It's a win-win situation, gentlemen. If the bomb does the job, we've gotten rid of the damned thing, and improved relations with the US at the same time. And if it doesn't...well, at least it won't be in Japan any longer."
Lloyd's return (overland, cross-country; north through Utah into Canada, then Alaska, crossing the ice sheet in the Bering strait; south through Russia, Korea (north and south), and finally oversea to Japan) was unofficially the cause of seven heart attacks among the members of the Diet.
When asked why he'd come back, his reply had been somewhat unexpected. "I tell people that I have tentacles, and they just scoff. I show them my tentacles, with the very obvious phallic portions of them, and they get these huge, idiotic grins, pull up lawn chairs, and start ordering pizza and beer. I asked what the occasion was, and they said 'they were waiting for Spider Man to show up and beat the crap out of Doctor Octopus." He then shook his head disgustedly. "I was born an American, and I can't help but sigh in shame. At least here you people have the sense to avoid me."
To be continued...