Author Notes: As before, I have no claim to either Fallout: New Vegas, or High School of the Dead. As before, a big thanks to Drgyen for his beta work!
Kohta cautiously opened the battered lobby door to the outside world, and squinted in the glare of the 2 o'clock sun. Holding his rifle at port arms, he walked out into the alien world – and nearly staggered as the heat hit him like a hammer blow. Unlike the humid summers in Japan, this heat was very dry, so much that Kohta would later swear that he could feel his lungs desiccate with each breath. Recovering his balance, he moved out from the doorway, and took up a position behind one of the walls overlooking the parking lot and entrance to the compound. Seeing no lurking hostiles, he motioned for the rest of the party to advance. Min, moving in a gentle crouch, slowly walked down the stairs next to him, stepping over a ghoulish corpse that had already begun to rot in the desert heat. The litter party followed her, moving much less silently, and Saeko brought up the rear. Kohta abandoned his position, and leapfrogged out ahead of the group, taking cover behind a burnt out car. He looked for foes, and, seeing none, made the motion to advance again.
After clearing the old checkpoint, the group abandoned their advance pattern, falling back into a closer group as the landscape flattened out, leaving nothing to hide behind. Off in the distance, Novac beckoned, the dinosaur sniper's nest Min had told them about already visible. Kohta sighed with relief that Rei would have access to medical care, and that Min had told the truth.
"She's pretty scary" he mumbled to himself, "but at least she's honest, and willing to help us."
Like magic, a voice that eerily reminded the gunman of his American drill instructor sounded out from behind him. "Save your breath and march faster!"
Kohta ceased his mumbling as advised, and shouldered his weapon. For another three hours the party walked in complete silence, until Min called a halt. Sheltering under the meager shade produced by an ancient road sign, the group nearly collapsed in relief as Min pulled six water bottles from her rucksack, like a magician conjuring rabbits. The water was warm and had the taste of purification tablets, but had to be one of the most delicious things Kohta had ever tasted. The slight coolness of the shade, coupled with the faint breeze blowing across the desert, soothed his sunburnt skin. Looking at his companions, Kohta saw relief mirrored on everybody's faces to some extent, from Saya's look of near desperate gratitude at the break to Saeko's stoic expression. However, the break was over almost before it began, as a whimper of pain from Rei brought everybody back from the temporary nirvana to which they'd escaped. As Min policed up the emptied bottles with a look of disgust at the wanton consumption of most of her water supply, Takeshi, Saya, and Shizuka resumed their burden, and lifted Rei's stretcher back onto their shoulders. The party resumed their march, the dinosaur growing larger and larger.
However, the march halted once more only a half hour later. This time, it wasn't because of a called break – instead, a small group of men had stepped out of the cover of a nearby gulley. Each carried numerous weapons, and wore crimson armor that appeared to have been fashioned out of sports gear, with a wide variety of additions, including what looked like a coyote pelt in the case of the rearmost man. As the men spread out across the road, blocking the way towards Novac, Kohta suddenly felt a rough hand grab his shoulder and push him aside. Spinning around, Kohta was almost run over by the Courier, who unlimbered her repeater as she strode towards the crimson-clad men.
The man nearest towards the center of the road came forward to meet the rapidly approaching Courier. With a sharpened machete in hand, the plumed soldier put his other hand out towards Min in an imperious gesture. In a voice pompous enough to match his self-absorbed air, the soldier began yelling at the Courier. "Stop, Profligate! For your crimes against the Legion, and the murder of the esteemed Vulpes Inculta, Caesar has marked you for death, and the Legion ob-" The first round went through the man's outstretched hand, tearing the middle finger off at the knuckle. While the detached finger flew back towards its erstwhile owner, a second shot thundered out from the Courier's smoking repeater, and slammed into the man's chest plate, the force of the bullet's impact causing him to stagger backwards.
With the dull whap of metal impacting armored padding, Kohta's inertia abruptly wore off, as the other Legion-men went for their weapons. Kohta quickly dropped to a knee, and unslung his rifle, disappearing into the cold void of the dedicated marksman as he knelt. As he opened fire, some fraction of his mind casually noted that Saeko had charged ahead, and was crossing blades with a rapidly backpedaling soldier, while the Courier had begun trading fire with the man wearing the dog-hat, while running for cover. He heard a clang from behind, as Takeshi, Saya, and Shizuka put Rei's litter on the ground as gently as possible, before grabbing weapons, not minding the dearth of ammunition. Kohta himself was carefully husbanding his last eight bullets, as he tried to put down his motorcycle helmeted assailant. Finally, one of his shots fulfilled its purpose, and slammed into the shiny aluminum of the helmet.
Turning to search for hostile targets, Kohta was abashed to see Saeko's and Min's targets already down. The soldier who had foolishly crossed blades with the female samurai lay on the ground, struggling for breath as his lifeblood flowed from the stumps at the end of his elbows; Saeko stood over the man, staring down with a look of undeniable fascination, similar to the expression of a cat staring at an injured mouse. Suddenly shivering despite the desert heat, Kohta turned to the Courier. Surprisingly, she was kneeling on the ground, cradling the fallen assassin's head in her lap, as he bled out on the shattered asphalt. His helmet had been knocked off his head, and Min had taken off the man's sunglasses; without the helmet and glasses, his face looked much younger and less intimidating. The pallor of his face, and the frantic incomprehensible fluttering of his lips and eyelid further underlined his humanity. Looking at the face of the enemy, Kohta felt a sudden sense of vertigo: For the first time, he had taken a human life. The man he had just killed had a personality, hopes, and friends, maybe family. As Min gently closed the assassin's eyes for the last time and murmured over his body and as Saeko's killing vigor slipped away in the sudden confusion, Kohta collapsed to his knees, his weapon hanging loosely from his hands. Thinking that he had been injured, Shizuka rushed to his side, and started searching for wounds. Finding none, she gave him a quick, overwhelming embrace, and returned to Rei's litter. After slowly climbing to his feet in the wake of the nurse's hug, Kohta walked over to the rock behind which his fallen foe had slumped.
Squatting down beside the collapsed ambusher, Kohta gently eased the breached helmet off the dead man's head. Deformed by the bullet's passage, Kohta had to pull heavily to work the helmet off the head, but eventually triumphed. The legionnaire, as Kohta identified the attacker based on Min's stories of the wasteland, hadn't looked particularly handsome prior to his death, and the passage of the killing bullet hadn't helped his aesthetic qualities. The man's brown hair had been shorn almost to the scalp, revealing a network of scars, new and old, that also covered his battered face. One of the man's green eyes had been ruptured by the impact of the bullet, while the other one gazed balefully ahead. His lips were still pursed in concentration, while his jaw hung slack, unhinged by the bullet's concussive force. Kohta burnt every plane, every angle, of the man's face into his mind, memorizing the tracery of scars across the cheeks and flattened nose, and committing the staring single eye to memory.
Min squatted beside him. "A few years ago, a soldier on the way south towards Baja taught me a little prayer to say over the dead. 'Deep sleep, and a better life next time.' I think it's a prayer he might appreciate." She nodded at the dead man. Kohta hesitantly reached towards the dead man's face and, after overcoming his instinct to recoil away from the already decaying meat, closed the single remaining eye as gently as possible, and repeated the unfamiliar words. "Deep sleep, and a better life next time."
Courier and student stood, dusting off their knees. As Kohta began to walk back towards the rest of the group, Min clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Remember what I told you about the Legion: These are not good people; they are not our friends, and if we hadn't killed them first, they would have killed us. Life is cheap out here. That said, it's good that you feel bad about killing somebody. You should feel bad; you should feel worse if you ever stop feeling that way afterwards." For a moment, the Courier paused, as if thinking. With the air of a wise-woman bestowing knowledge, she gave Kohta another pearl of wisdom "Also, this whole encounter shouldn't have turned out this way: We got lucky, and they thought that I'd be alone. The Legion will want revenge for this." With those comforting words, the Courier squeezed Kohta's shoulder, and wandered away, leaving the short teen alone with his thoughts.
Kohta's isolation was short-lived; as Saya and Takeshi repositioned Rei on the litter, the pink haired girl noticed Kohta's short conversation with the Courier, and correctly read the distress written across his face. She went to reassure him, pausing only to glare suspiciously at Min as she returned to the group. The Courier gave the aristocratic girl a placid smile in return, earning a derisive snort from the scion of the Takagi line as she hurried to the marksman's side. "Hey! Idiot! What're you doing, moping around out here?"
Kohta, consumed with his thoughts, jerked with the surprise of suddenly being spoken to by his idol, and nearly fell down. "S-sorry, Saya-san! I'm coming!" He quickly hurried to her side, and searched her face for some sign of approval. As always, a cold and imperious expression glared back at him, killing his hopes. Thus, he was greatly and pleasantly surprised to feel slim, warm arms draw him into an embrace. "Idiot, don't worry. You saved our lives – if you hadn't put that man down, he might've been able to attack Takeshi, Shizuka, Alice or I before we could arm ourselves!" For a moment, Saya and Kohta enjoy the tranquility of the embrace, only to jump apart suddenly as Min barked at them from across the road. "Break time is over! We need to move these bodies off the road before they begin to stink!" Kohta relayed the message to the rest of the group, and went to help Takeshi move the corpses off the road and into the desert, where they were unceremoniously dropped into the same gulley they'd emerged from twenty minutes before.
The group stood in silence for another moment more, gazing at the supine corpses piled on the desert floor and pondering the nature of mortality and how transitory life can be, before collectively shaking themselves back to wakefulness. Kohta shouldered his empty rifle once more and Saeko returned her blade to its scabbard as everybody else except the Courier picked up Rei's litter. Novac beckoned, and with it, a promise of a temporary reprieve from the violence of the bitterly hot Mojave.
As Kohta walked past the boarded-up buildings on Novac's outskirts, he wondered how many other lives he'd have to end, before he and his friends would find a place of safety, or a way back home. He hoped not many… But even as he prayed for an end to the constant violence of the last few weeks, deep inside the young killer, an inexplicable feeling of mirth bubbled, as he recalled the broken face of his defeated enemy. For the first time since he'd arrived in the Mojave, Kohta grinned.