It wasn't nearly as short as I predicted. Good.
Mostly just Natsumi wandering around this chapter. I hope I kept it okay even though it features really only one character.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
The first thing Natsumi noticed was how barren the land seemed outside of her house. It was like an old western, just dirty sand.
Not a single plant was noticeable, although there was a lot of wreckage from the bombing. It was clear nobody had been present wandering around outside for a very long time.
In fact, Natsumi's house seemed the least wrecked when she looked over her shoulder to look at it. It had collapsed a little bit, like a slumped over sad looking house, but it wasn't completely flat and broken.
Not only that, but after breathing in quite a bit of what Natsumi hoped was fresh air, she noticed the smell of the outdoors.
Death still lingered. Skeletons littered the streets, and rotting corpses were still everywhere.
Natsumi covered her mouth. Yes, it was definitely the best idea to deal with this herself instead of gathering her friends.
Holding her arms to bundle up, she began walking through the streets looking for a source of food. That was her mission, after all. Perhaps a grocery store was still intact with non-perishables.
The breeze she once loved had grown quite cold as she felt alone and nauseous.
Everywhere she looked, there were more dead bodies. Her fears about her friends and her being the last humans seemed legitimate.
Nobody else had survived.
She walked miles, dragging her feet behind her, the confidence buzz wearing off as only the mission raged in her head.
Bring back food for my friends before I expire, she reminded herself. She had lived for a rather long time, but she didn't know when the radiation would get to her, if or more like when her body would expire.
It frightened her. Would it be instant? Painless? Or would it be slow and torturous?
She had thought a lot about death in the past year. It was very likely her mother and grandmother were dead, and most of her friends too, but the aspect of her dying still scared her.
She didn't want it to happen. Although she knew she'd probably have longer than any of them had, thanks to the bombing.
After her body died from radiation, would there be peace? Would she reunite with Giroro in death? Was there anything there for her?
She didn't know. Thinking about these things caused her body to shake, for fear to set in now that she was all alone.
She slumped down against a slab of concrete that had most likely fallen off a building. She hated seeing the corpses and bones littering the street but she wanted to rest, to figure out what to do now.
I'm alive. Natsumi flexed her fingers and looked down at her hands. She wasn't smart enough to be aware of any of the effects of radiation, so she didn't know what to be on the look out for, but being able to move was enough for her.
She needed to figure out what to do now, where to look for food. A grocery store would be ideal, but very unrealistic, considering everything was wrecked.
Out of the corner of Natsumi's eye, she saw something move. She snapped her head toward the movement, happy to see anything that might be alive.
A giant rat scurried across the street and leaned down to start chewing on some tough, radiated, rotten meat.
Natsumi covered her mouth. So rats had somehow survived, but humans hadn't? And not only that but they were ginormous and disgusting.
She wanted to vomit as she saw the rat nibble on the tough, leather-like meat. It didn't seem to pay attention to her. Maybe it wasn't used to moving around humans and didn't care enough to expand its curiosity.
Natsumi stood up, pressing herself against the concrete. How many of those things were there? Probably a lot, she realized. She didn't know the effects of eating toxic rat, so killing a couple and dropping them by the base probably wasn't a healthy and safe food source.
She didn't want to put her friends through that. Even thinking about eating those made her nauseous.
Still, it would be best to come up with some sort of make-shift weapon, she decided, just in case they attacked. They didn't look friendly.
Her hands made the position of a gun. That was what she wanted. She smiled a little thinking of Giroro.
He would like that.
And perhaps maybe one of his guns was out there.
Natsumi trekked deeper into her old city, looking for food and weapons. Eventually, she came upon a wide street filled with the remains of broken tanks.
People's bodies stacked up, charred to a crisp. Some aged uniforms were still present on their bodies, and Natsumi recognized them.
The military. They must have been trying to evacuate civilians or attack or something, Natsumi deduced. It was so sad to see so many people like this.
They all seemed to be pointed in the same direction, though. Some of them had even died standing up, melted to the asphalt of the ground. Natsumi could clearly see what direction they were looking in.
They're looking at the sky above my house... she realized. She remembered that a bomb had dropped on her house, but something had hit it out of the way or it had been a dud and exploded in the air. It had never hit the ground, from what Kululu had told her.
I wonder what happened. She thought briefly before noticing something on the ground. An intact gun! Yippee! She got distracted and grabbed it.
She checked the number of bullets. Six. Enough to protect herself in emergencies. And there was sure to be more in this pack of soldiers.
Natsumi had mixed feelings about looting the dead, but she knew it was necessary. It might protect her from the rats and whatever other mutated monsters were out there. She had seen a bit of movement of kind of meshed-up monstrosities. One of the corpses had even moved a tiny bit, to her horror, but not much.
It was like out of a bad zombie movie, except it wasn't after her brains.
Still, all the mutations and monsters she had seen had one important thing in common. None of them made vocal sounds. They made sound from movement, but nothing else.
They didn't seem really alive.
Natsumi looked in the opposite direction of where the soldiers were looking. She needed to head farther away. She had found one thing... Maybe her luck was looking up.
She deserved luck, after all the things she had been through.
So she tried to keep optimistic as she walked.
The sky got slightly darker as time continued passing. There were no signs of food.
As Natsumi scanned her new environment, she did spot something. From her knowledge of her town and geography, she was getting closer and closer to Alien Street. And as she got closer, she spotted a slab of concrete that looked like it had once been part of a wall. It still stood up strong, but the rest of it was gone of whatever shop it had been a part of.
What was the most spectacular about this rubble, though was that it had her name on it in large letters. NATSUMI. It read as if someone had carved it in.
Natsumi instantly ran up to it, beckoned by the words. It could have been some other Natsumi written about, but she needed to know what the smaller words under it were.
As suspected, it was a message, or more like a letter.
Natsumi, it read.
Most likely I have died. Natsumi tried to keep her eyes away from the message. She didn't want her fears to be confirmed that this was one of the Keronians who had written to her. She wanted this to be a message by someone to some other Natsumi, not her.
But she continued reading nonetheless.
This message might never be seen by you, because you shouldn't leave the base, but I need to write you this message.
At this present moment I do not believe we are going to survive. Our time limit is running out for our suits, and I suspect the radiation will effect us.
So I wanted to write you a farewell message even if it will take a few of my precious last minutes. Keroro, Kululu and Dororo are searching the area and I am pretending to, while I write this, so please let me just get this off my chest even if you'll never see it.
I love you, Natsumi. I always will. I'll love you forever and ever and I'm so glad to have met you, to come to Pekopon and met a warrior like you.
But what I did, telling you that I loved you and getting together right before a suicide mission was wrong. I will hurt you by dying and I don't want that.
Not only that, but I was selfish. I made you promise to wait for me, to not get together with Saburo out of my jealousy. But as I near closer and closer to death, I realize that was wrong.
You should be with Saburo. Please get over me, move on from the pain I will no doubt cause you. Don't be loyal, I know you're a pure valiant spirit who is honorable. You'd never break your promise, but break it. Move on. Be happy.
Saburo can give you happiness, please feel free to be with him. I know it's what you would want.
And I'm sorry.
- Giroro.
Natsumi didn't know what to say or do after reading the letter. She knew Giroro had died, but at the same time, she didn't want it ever confirmed. She didn't want to hear these things.
And getting closure like this from a letter still felt wrong. She wanted to cling onto her little hope, not face the facts that her boyfriend was dead and that this was his final message.
She dropped to her knees and cried, pounding on the concrete wall with her fists and sobbing her head off.
All the tears she had kept in for her friends' sake were leaving her. She could no longer hold them back at all.
She just loudly wailed her head off, eventually grabbing a few pebbles and just throwing them in all sorts of directions. It made her feel better to exert her energy. To let herself feel angry.
One of the pebbles hit something. A cracking noise filled Natsumi's ears as glass broke. Turning her head, she noticed a little ways away an entrance to a somewhat intact grocery store that was no longer blocked. The glass doors that had been melted shut were now broken.
She hadn't noticed it because her attention had been on the letter. Weakly, she got up and walked forward like an emotionless zombie, holding another rock in her hand.
She reached into the door to punch a bigger hole. There already seemed to be a small hole in the corner of the door, probably made by a giant dog-sized rat.
Eventually, she cleared the entryway and went into the store. The ceiling was low, only barely letting her stand up straight. Dust and broken things were all over the place.
A few counters and shelves still seemed to be there, but Natsumi couldn't see what was on them because it was so dark. The only light source was from the light of outside.
She threw her rock, hoping she'd knock something down so she could see it. She hit a high shelf and noticed what fell while it was falling as it glistened in the sunlight.
Bottled water. And it didn't look like it was bad. It was just water, pure and clear. It fell to the ground, rolling a bit away from Natsumi.
Suddenly, something shot out from under some rubble. It was a yellow creature, a bit smaller than the giant rats. A thin tail trailed after the creature with some sort of orb on the end, following the creature like a ball and chain, imprisoning it.
Natsumi couldn't see much of the creature because of the dark, but the orb thing looked like a giant eyelid. The creature scurried across the ground and toward the water bottles, grabbing them, and then sneaked back into the darkness so Natsumi couldn't see it.
"Hey!" she yelled before covering her mouth. She didn't want this creature attacking her. But she recalled that the mutated creatures she had seen weren't that intelligent and probably wouldn't attack.
Unlike the other creatures, a sound answered her, echoing throughout the room.
It was an unmistakable sound. A sound that had echoed through Natsumi's mind a lot throughout the past years.
"Ku, ku, ku, ku, ku, ku..." Sinister laughter filled the store as Natsumi's hand shot up to her ears, instinctively covering them.
Her eyes adjusted to the dark a bit and she squinted, seeing the creature hiding under a board and noticing that it was the one laughing.
The laughter was unmistakable, and who the creature was was unmistakable too.
Natsumi felt her legs getting weak as her mind grew hazy. She felt like fainting. But instead she screamed.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
The thing in front of her, the mutated creature, it was Kululu.
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