Operation Ex3: Reason For Living
Mr. Masuda's class the next morning started bright and early and with a timed-writing assignment. "I'd like a single, planned, well-thought paragraph, class on the following topic: What is your reason for living? Some have said that there is no great meaning to life beyond what one considers one's reason for living." Mr. Masuda wrote the topic up on the board. "You have twenty minutes. Please use your tablet PC's—that way I can grade the papers during class and return them to you before the end of the period. You may begin."
I live because I hate. Before you complain that I'm foolish, listen. I do not hate people, whether it is by race, ability, or any other form of discrimination. Sure, I may be annoyed by certain people from time to time, but I hate none of humanity. I hate when something horrible happens, and all anyone does is stare and slink back in fear. I hate when the truth is distorted and lost. I hate the systems into which I am indoctrinated, because oftentimes they are defective and I hate not having a choice regardless of how perfect the system is. I hate resignation, when one gives up, says "it's no use" or "it can't be done, it's impossible". Even if it is impossible, I hate the idea of giving up. Without my hatred, I would have given up long, long ago. With it, I have a reason to live—I shall not die until I have righted this world from what ails it. My hatred gives me a goal, and it keeps me alive.
"It is an interesting socio-political statement, Miss Shinosaki, but are you sure you understood the concept of the assignment?" Jun clutched the school-issue tablet computer under her arm as she stood staring at her instructor. "I am well-aware of the assignment sir, and it is not a political statement. It's my philosophy on life. I have been faced with enough hardship that I have decided not to give in to my fears. I have given up on fear. I do not cower when threatened, instead I stand up and fight back. Had I not adopted this view, I would have probably literally died." Mr. Masuda blinked and slowly nodded. "I see. Thank you for clearing that up, Shinosaki. You're free to go. Do you need a pass to your next class?" "No, thank you." Jun quickly bowed and headed off to second period.
• • •
"Let's get going, Otani." Yuri tightened and secured the buckles on her rollerblades. The alien alert had sounded just over two minutes ago, and she had rushed out the door and ambled over to the locker room in a shed that had been temporarily set aside for the use of the Alien Party. Finished, Yuri got up, a little tipsy at first. "I'm ready, Monami." The third-year nodded. "Good. Catch." Yuri caught a lacrosse stick with her gloved hand. "Sendo's waiting outside."
"You ready Otani?" Sayuri Sendo stopped leaning on the side of the building and made a quick circle. "Yep." Monami gestured the girls forward and the two begin skating towards the school. "Otani, check the hallways, and cellcom us if anything comes up." The girl with rather snake-like hair then turned to Kasumi's understudy. "Sendo, go left. I'll take right. We'll sweep around the school."
Yuri was a bit nervous as she skated the ground floor of Hinode Junior High, carefully watching the shutters for any sign of movement. Most of the time, the aliens that arrived weren't very intelligent and thus couldn't open doors. Many other times, they could, or they simply opened them with brute force. She hoped that whatever the case, the aliens were still outside. She sighed her usual sigh and her mind started to drift when she noticed someone walking. "Um, hello?" The person in the hallway in front of her turned about-face. Yuri looked at the scarred face and quickly recognized the person. "Um, Miss Jun, what are you doing here? Isn't everyone supposed to be inside their classrooms?" Jun nodded. "I was going to the restroom when the alien alert went off, so I'm heading back now." "Oh, okay. Makes sense." Yuri's wrist mounted video cell phone took the opportunity to turn itself on. It was Monami. "Otani, we've found them. Come to the northeast side of the school." "I'm on my way." The screen flickered and went black. "Um, later." "Later." Yuri skated past Jun on her way to the door. Jun took the schoolbag she was holding by the top handle and returned it to her back.
When Yuri made it to the appointed spot, it was evident that the fighting was already over. Two large, heavily-built dog-like creatures lay still on the ground, green lines of blood running from their faces…or what passed for a face on the eyeless creatures. "You're too late, Yuri! The drams were dead when we got here. Look at this!" Sayuri pointed at the origin of the terminal wound, which, unlike most of what Yuri has seen, did not pass all the way through the creature the way an ordinary borg drill did. Sayuri wiped away the blood and shook her hand. There was a small, tube-like hole roughly the diameter of her pinky finger. "Wh…what happened?" Sayuri shrugged. "Dunno. Some sort of spike, maybe?" Monami rolled the corpse over and examined it in the sunlight. "You're not going to believe this, but I think this…is a gunshot wound."
• • •
It was shortly after ten when Jun left her home with her schoolbag and a medium-small corrugated cardboard box. She was dressed in her usual after school attire: cargo pants, a heavy-twill shirt, and a suede leather jacket of unusually heavy construction, accented by her ever-present gloves. Since the sunflower clan had not landed earlier in the day, they would probably land sometime in the next hour before hiding nearby and lying in wait for tomorrow morning when the students arrived. Jun walked past the sign announcing the school, and set her box of things next to the glass of the front doors, before leaning against the doors. Hinode was comfortably middle-class, and with a low crime rate, the school was devoid of security measures present in other wards of Tokyo. Jun waited patiently for the next twenty-eight minutes.
The familiar shape of a shooting star combined with a low rumble marked the impending landing of a spaceship. Jun watched the twinkling object for a while before noticing its flight path. She grabbed her box, and immediately went into a sprint, not stopping until she was around the concrete side of the school. The organic spaceship, jettisoning its heat shield and flaring before impact, slammed into the ground with its forespike a mere forty feet in front of the school. The impact broke the concrete paving, throwing chips of the material in all the directions. The debris-filled shockwave came whipping around the corner with what Jun knew to be the sound of a glass wall shattering. She dropped the box, grabbing a glass bottle out of it, before running back to the front of the school.
The portal on the front side of the ship opened, roughly ten feet off the ground, while the other ninety feet of spaceship lay above it. Jun methodically reached into her jacket pocket, removed a small hinged, steel lighter and touched it to the rag that was stuffed into the bottle. She waited, drawing her arm back before she hurled the Molotov cocktail into the still-simmering spaceship. Jun again heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by the sound of the thickened gasoline igniting. The girl then took off her schoolbag and unfastened and opened the flap. She took out a long cylinder. Then a much-longer slanted metallic box. And then she took the automatic pistol lying at the bottom of the bag, affixing the threaded silencer and the extended, twenty-five round box magazine to the their respective positions. The sound of gurgled shrieking emanated from the craft. Jun disengaged the top-mounted safety, the white dot being covered by the lever, revealing a red dot in its place. A blazing crab-like sunflower flew out of the portal, wailing its unnatural wail as the flames cracked it shell, having already igniting the organic "foliage" that ringed its sides. Jun kept her weapon trained on the alien, but it soon expired without further effort. Hearing no other sounds from the spaceship, Jun lowered her gun and went to retrieve her box, when three, successive, concussive blasts echoed through the street.
Jun aligned the tritium lines on the two bars of the back sights with the single bar on the front sight and carefully pulled the trigger. Her pistol had been configured for subsonic, hollow point rounds, which worked remarkably well against the sunflower clan. The round impacted the sunflower through the eye and pierced the creature's brain. Jun concentrated on the tingling feeling that illuminated her entire neck, focusing as her grandfather had taught her. She instinctively pivoted a half-turn, catching another sunflower. The first shot cracked the outer carapace, and the second shot hit the neck area, disabling the alien. Jun left it to die of blood loss and sensing the next group of aliens, made her way around the building.
The next group of sunflower aliens consisted of six members. She had precisely shot five of the six by the time the sixth one had had a chance to unhinge its neck and fire one of the cork-like structures connected to one of its roughly ten razor-sharp filament "lariats". The line caught her around the right forearm. It easily sliced and separated the sleeve of Jun's jacket, but did nothing to her arm. The alien, apparently unused to its weapon failing to instantly sever flesh and bone, stopped a moment in confusion. Jun pulled her arm backwards, yanking the alien towards her as she reached into her jacket with her left hand. She retrieved the oddly-colored silver-black knife from the sheath at her waist. The sunflower spoke plainly in a voice nearly identical to its fellows. "Fool. Drill clan weapons are useless against the sunflower clan." "Whoever said I was working with the drill clan? I'm a human." The knife had little trouble piercing the alien's invertebrate head or, a few seconds later, when Jun used it to break the now-dead sunflower's lariat off her arm, being very careful in doing so.
It wasn't until the sixth and final spaceship that an alien actually managed to catch Jun unawares, jumping from above and latching on to her forehead. It was met with an autoinjector to its neck area and soon liquefied. Jun wiped the sticky liquid mess away from her forehead and continued shooting. Her next shot actually caught a sunflower on the precipice of its spaceship's portal, knocking the instantly-dead alien back down into the ship. Within half a minute's time, the school grounds stood silent, and with it, all the tingling pricks on the back of her neck faded too. She sat down for a breather, examining her weapon of choice. It was a nine-millimeter Parabellum pistol designed to be as compact as possible. The silencer on the front was longer than the gun itself, and the extended magazine that stuck out the bottom was much longer than the standard ten round variety that would have kept flush with the weapon. The weapon was Italian, made by one of the oldest companies in the world. The company had been family-owned; ignoring the pressures to merge and incorporate that had arisen with the threat of lawsuits, the manufacturer had been privately owned since they had started casting cannons over five centuries ago. They were a perfect analog to Jun: if they could resist the pressure to incorporate, why couldn't humans do the same when it came to aliens? She quietly disassembled the sidearm and returned it to her bag.
Jun spent the next ten minutes piling all the sunflowers she could into a large, vaguely-shaped pyramid. She drenched the corpses with the small bottle of naphtha she had brought with her before sticking in several, large slow-burning campfire matches. She nestled her last Molotov cocktail firmly towards the top, and lit the wick. Jun gathered her cardboard box, empty except for the empty bottle of lighter fluid and her severed sleeve, and began walking towards home. She paused to admire her funeral pyre, smiled calmly, and walked home through the night air.
