"What the hell am I doing here?" Akira Osaragi muttered to himself as he stood in the hallway outside the briefing room, fidgeting nervously. The 11 members of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing, the famed Strike Witches, were just on the other side of that door. What on earth could the new council have been thinking, throwing him in like this? It was madness! Akira was 17, and tall, at just over 6' 2". He was well built, muscled, but in a lean and corded way, not overly buff, which belied how strong he actually was. He had piercing blue-gray eyes, and a spiky shock of ice-blonde hair that gave him a very striking appearance. He had small, jagged scar on his right jaw, and another one on the back of his right hand.
The door opened and he jumped in startled surprise. "You can come in now," said Major Mio Sakamoto, gesturing into the room behind her. He swallowed nervously, then squared his shoulders and stepped past her.
He stood at attention and saluted smartly. "Sergeant Akira Osaragi reporting for duty as ordered," he said quietly, but firmly.
"What? A GUY?" said a voice off to his left, and he turned to look at the speaker. Red jacket, red hair. He took a deep breath through his nose.
"You're... Charlotte Yeager, 18, from the United States of Liberion," he said after a moment. "Your magical power allows you to boost the performance of your Striker, causing your speed to increase exponentially. You manifest the ears and tail of a rabbit when you equip your Striker, which you have nicknamed 'Merlin'. You're also the first person to have ever broken the sound barrier." She was staring at him, her mouth hanging open, and he blushed suddenly. "Crap, I did it again, didn't I?"
"How did you know all that about her?" one of the girls asked. "There's no way you could have known all that, even if you'd read our personnel files."
He turned to the girl and sniffed again. "...Perrine Clostermann, 17, of Gallia. You're the heiress of the Clostermann family, a powerful and wealthy member of the Gallian nobility. You feel that you're responsible for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Gallia after its liberation from the Neuroi and have contributed your entire salary toward this end. You have also donated the use of your ancestral lands for agriculture and family castle as a school and sanctuary for children orphaned by the war." He blinked and then smacked his forehead. "Dammit, I really need to stop that!"
"Explain yourself, Sergeant Osaragi," demanded Sakamoto. "How did you gain access to that information?" Her tone was dangerous.
Akira shook his head and held up his hands in a placating gesture. "Please, I didn't mean to scare any of you. The truth is, I gained all that knowledge from you." He tapped the side of his nose with two fingers. "I read it from your scent."
"Our scent?" asked another of the girls.
Akira nodded. "Mhm, watch. Hold out your arm." The girl did so, and he took her hand and sniffed her palm before letting go. He closed his eyes for a moment before speaking. "Francesca Lucchini, 14, from the Duchy of Romagna. With a rank of Ensign, your unit affiliation was with Romagna's Sovrana Aeronautica Romagniana 4th Air Unit. You have the power to concentrate energy into a point in front of you and release it in one powerful burst. Working with your best friend Charlotte Yeager, who throws you, you can use this ability to greatly damage an enemy." He opened his eyes and grinned at her dumbfounded expression. "See? For those with the power to read it, a person's scent holds all kinds of information about them."
"But how can you DO that?" asked Charlotte.
Akira shrugged. "What do you mean, how? I'm a warlock, aren't I?" There was dead silence. Akira looked around in confusion. The girls were all looking at him with mingled looks of fear, dread, and suspicion. "Wait, what? Why're you all looking at me like that?"
"Well, you see..." one of the girls said, and hesitated when he looked at her, before continuing. "You see, the last time we came across something called a warlock, it didn't end well."
"What do you mean?" Akira asked, then paused and took a deep sniff, letting the scent, and memories, flow into him. "Oooooooh, I see. Yeah, no, that's not at all what I meant."
They looked confused for a moment. "I read the memory from your scents because you were all thinking about it just now. Yeah, no, I'm not a machine, and I'm DEFINITELY not a Neuroi. A warlock is a male witch. The army stole our name for their weapon."
He now had all the names and face fixed into his memory, so he knew it was Yoshika when she spoke up. "A male witch? I've never heard of that before though!"
"I have, though I never thought I'd meet one," said a voice from the door. Akira turned and then stiffened and saluted sharply. "Commander!"
Commander Minna Wilcke smiled and waved a hand at him. "At ease, Osaragi, you don't need to be so formal with all of us. We're friends, or at least we try to be."
"I'm sorry if I'm out of place, but did you not tell them anything about me?" Akira asked, looking from the commander to the girls and back again.
Minna shook her head. "Actually, I didn't get a chance. I wasn't notified of your transfer to our unit until a little under and hour before you were supposed to land, and at the time I was occupied with other things and couldn't get away long enough to inform the others about you."
Akira nodded and turned back to the girls and shrugged. "Well, not sure what to tell you, really. Yes, I am a warlock. I'm a male witch. I was just recently assigned to your unit as an experiment by the top brass to see if witches and warlocks can work together in an integrated unit."
Before they could talk more, the alarm went off over their heads.
"Battle stations! Everyone to your Strikers!" Minna yelled over the howling of the alarm. As the others sprinted from the room, she turned to Akira. "You ready, flyboy? This is your chance to show us what you're made of."
Akira grinned at her. "Commander, it will be my pleasure."
They raced to the hanger, and as the girls all jumped into their Strikers, Akira dashed across the hanger and opened a large storage crate that had been stacked against the wall.
"Where's your Striker?" Yoshika called over the roar of the engines. Akira yelled something back, but it was lost over the rush of the others starting to take off. "What?! I didn't hear you!"
He finally succeeded in pulling a long, flat object out of the box and turned, pulling the wrapping off it. "I said, warlocks don't need Strikers," he said, grinning at her. In his hands was something that looked like a surfboard, though it was a little shorter, only about three feet long. I was made of polished steel, with black chrome around the edges and two red stripes down the center. On the back where what appeared to be four jet engines, each about the size of his hand. He threw it down, but it stopped and hovered about a foot off the ground. Yoshika stared in amazement as he grinned even wider. "We use these boards, which we call skyblades." With that, he fed a burst of magic energy into the engines, and shot from the hanger with a whoosh of air and wail of thrusters.
They caught up with the others and quickly formed up. The other girls stared at him for a moment before turning their attention to the swarm of Neuroi that was rapidly approaching from the south.
"Sergeant Osaragi!" Sakamoto yelled through the radio link. "Where are your weapons? You will turn back this instant and get your damn gun!"
Akira simply shook his head and laughed, surging ahead of the girls with a huge burst of speed.
"Sorry, major," he said, grinning back at her over his shoulder. "I forgot to mention, I don't need weapons. My magic is more than enough!"
"Your…magic is enough?" she repeated, looking at the other girls in confusion. Before any of them could catch up to him, he had reached the leading edge of the Neuroi swarm. They opened fire on him, their beams lancing across the sky with lethal power. Several beams converged on him from multiple directions.
"Look out!" Yoshika yelled, throwing herself forward in a vain attempt to save him.
"Pro Muro!" Akira yelled, throwing his arms out wide, and several blue shields flashed up around him, deflecting the beams harmlessly into the sea below. He then brought his arms together in front of him, palms out. "Tonitruum ictus!"
Lightning flashed from his hands and lashed out at the closest six Neuroi, which all exploded with brilliant flashes. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, which glowed silver with magic power. "Ingenti vento!" A massive shockwave of air blasted out from him, swatting a dozen more Neuroi out of the air to crash into the sea below.
A beam flashed past him, grazing his cheek. He winced and then glared up at the Neuroi who had fired at him. "You'll pay for that," he snarled. He brought his hands together and slowly drew them apart, a sphere of golden-white energy forming between them. He drew his arm back and then launched it into the heart of the Nueroi swarm. "Solaris eruptio!"
The world seemed to tear itself apart. There was a blinding flash and the most tremendous roar the girls had ever heard. When their sight cleared and their ears stopped ringing, they were able to see the glittering fragments of hundreds of Neuroi fluttering down through the air. The few remaining Neuroi had retreated, and we rapidly fading into the distance. Akira watched them for a moment before turning around to the girls and grinning hugely.
"Well, I think that about does it for that batch, don't you?" he asked, gliding back over to where the rest of them hovered, mouths open, totally stunned. He turned to Minna and winked at her. "I think that proves that I belong here as much as any of you, doesn't it? Now come on, let's head back. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm absolutely starving!" He soared past them, headed for home. They stared at each other for a few moments, before Yoshika started to giggle.
The others looked at her in confusion, which made her laugh even harder. "I wish you guys could see the looks on your faces!' she chocked out, then turned and flew after Akira, still laughing."Hey, wait up, Akira!"
Shirley shrugged, smiled. "That was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life, so I say he's in. Hey, wait up you two!" She took off after them. The others followed after her, all of them grinning and laughing.
Akira, ahead of them, laughed in giddy elation and executed a flawless Immelmann turn and turned it into a series of high speed corkscrews. He was in! They had accepted him as one of them. He laughed again and punched the air. Finally, he felt like his life was back on track. He just hoped it would stay that way.