Chapter Seven

Setting Sun

Trying to find an Akashic point seemed to be a tall order, and not just because the idea was too ridiculous on its face to ever be real. Mostly, the story of where in Santa Destroy you could even find them changed constantly. Apparently, every single place in which somebody ever experienced anything weird or unexplained, or anywhere that happened to be within spitting distance of a business hoping to draw in crowds of brooding teenagers, just so happened to also be an Akashic point. Fortunately, Raiden had professional intel on his side, to weed out the locations that were secretly trying to sell him screamo-branded energy drinks.

And so it was, that Raiden found himself in front of Santa Destroy Junior High. Or, at least, the building that used to be Santa Destroy Junior High, before the Spring Dance Incident rendered it unusable as a center of juvenile education. Raiden pulled himself off of his motorcycle and took the building in. The windows were smashed, the walls were riddled with what appeared to be the pockmarks of indiscriminately fired bullets, there was graffiti in English and... was that Japanese? How unusually cosmopolitan, for street artwork, Raiden found himself thinking.

The front door wasn't locked. Which wasn't to say it was unlocked. Rather, its lock had been rendered useless by what appeared to be an excessive amount of explosives. Raiden stepped past the charred remains of the metal and glass door. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than a sound caused him to jump. He was down in a stance, clawed hands at the ready to start tearing, before he realized it was just the chirp of his Codec going off in his head.

Raiden pressed a finger to his ear. "Raiden," he said.

A series of garbled noises answered him, lost amid electrical static and background noise.

Raiden furrowed his brow. "Who is this? Your signal's weak."

The voice on the other end seemed to be struggling to speak, as though throats were something they were unaccustomed to using. Raiden managed to catch the words "ring" and "AR display," in the mass of strangled choking. He couldn't help but feel like there was something borderline recognizable in that voice.

"Who is this?" Raiden repeated. "Identify yourself. How did you get this frequency?"

Raiden managed to catch that the Codec display in front of him was displaying a null entry for the incoming call's frequency number, before it disconnected and the virtual screen winked out entirely. Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull up the number for Doktor, hoping that the man might be able to help trace that call.

Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip... No answer. Raiden tried someone else.

Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip... Boris wasn't picking up, either.

A noise beyond his heads up display pulled him away just as he was about to accuse Kevin of lying about the frequencies being the same. It sounded like... giggling? Who was giggling, in a place like this? Raiden's heels clicked against the dirty, cracked tile floor as he followed the source of the insipid laughter. Cautiously, he peered around the door frame and into the classroom, where he was sure he could hear it coming from.

Empty. And the laughter had stopped. Raiden slipped into the room, eyes carefully sweeping left and right and finding nothing other than broken desks, bullet holes, and what appeared to be burns from beam katanas. Whatever happened here, it was like a war had taken place.

Towards the back of the room, desperately out of place for it's apparent newness in the surrounding decay and age, was a lone cardboard box. The letters H-I-D-E-O were printed on one side; Raiden had to make a slow circuit around it to figure out that it actually spelled out a company along all its faces: Hideous Freight, Ltd. What a stupid name for a company, Raiden began to think.

Suddenly, the box giggled. Raiden flinched, claws out. "Who's that?"

The box only responded with more giggles, shaking in mirth and excitement.

Raiden snarled. "I know you're there. Come out slowly, with your hands up."

Suddenly, the box stopped laughing, snapping back into stillness with a violence that kicked up a little plume of dust around itself. Raiden approached the box carefully. He tapped at it with his foot. No response.

Slowly, oh so terribly slowly, he reached down and put his hands around the sides. The box came up without resistance, the bottom falling away as he lifted it over his head. He looked down, at the patch of floor where the box had lain, and there he saw...

...nothing.

Tension hissed out of Raiden's nose, as his eyes widened in disbelief. He knew what he saw. He knew what he had heard. Were his cybernetics failing him? Or was somebody playing a trick? The word "ghost" popped into his head, unbidden, which he immediately quashed. It wasn't as if...

Chirrup, chirrup...

Raiden flinched in the direction of his head's up display, as another Codec call came in. The next thing he swore he noticed was the faintest of shimmers, the softest of sounds of motion. And then, all of a sudden, something was wrapping itself around his midsection, invisible arms clamping down with sudden force.

He barely had time to say "Wha...?" before his thoughts were cut short by a violent explosion.

When he came to, he was dimly aware of the fact that some time must have passed. At least, the lack of sunlight coming in from the windows told him that much. He looked down at his body. Scorch marks covered his entire front, and he could see a couple of exposed, frayed wires. Electrolyte fluid stained the ground. Considering he was the only cyborg he was aware of for miles, it stood to reason that was his fluid.

A sound filtered in from the hallway outside. Giggling. Raiden tried to get up, but he could only get about halfway to sitting before blinding pain took his breath away. Desperately, he swung his head around, trying to find something he could use. Anything.

His eyes fell on the empty box, now charred and crumbled into bits just inside arm's reach. Something metallic glinted just inside. The cyborg reached out and wrapped his hand around it, pulling it out into the light to reveal... a gun. A Mark 23 pistol, to be precise.

Chirrup, chirrup... His Codec answered the incoming call before he even registered the number. The null entry caller began to gurgle something into his ear almost immediately.

"Who are you?" Raiden shouted, a tad too loudly, in retrospect.

The door to the classroom swung open, seemingly of it's own accord. Raiden could hear the faint sound of slapping, as of bare feet against stone floors. There was the faintest shimmer from the doorway. It began to laugh.

The choking noise from the Codec began to make some noises that Raiden assumed had to be authoritative barking. Again, he could barely make out the words "AR display." Confused, Raiden did what he guessed he was being told, snapping his augmented reality visor over his face.

The shimmer immediately took form, glowing against the blue background that Raiden's visor painted the dark room in. It looked to be a human, or at least a collection of rough slabs of meat in the basic shape of a human. It toddled over to Raiden with a gait like an old man with leg issues, giggling to itself like it was about to play the greatest possible prank. For reasons Raiden couldn't begin to guess, its right elbow seemed to glow with an intensity that the AR display registered as significant.

Without pausing to really think about it, Raiden lifted the gun and took a shot at the glowing elbow. The laughing man stopped dead in its tracks, as if frozen in time, before suddenly bursting into a cloud of glowing, marble-like spheres. The spheres scattered, swarmed in the air, and gathered back together on Raiden's body. The cyborg panicked, thinking he was about to be blown up again, until he realized that they were absorbing into his body.

Silence reigned over the classroom, after that. Raiden could only stare down at his body in confusion. He felt... better. Not repaired, or anything, but at least getting up and moving felt like more of an option. What was that stuff? It seemed to act like nanopaste, the way it worked on his body.

The voice on the Codec gurgled in his ear, some more. Something about smiles and being a soldier.

"Right." Raiden put a finger to his ear as he pulled himself to his feet. "I'm not gonna ask again. Who is this?"

The voice gruffed something. It was a very familiar gruff.

"Wait a minute... Snake? Snake, is that you? I thought you were..."

The Codec call disconnected. Raiden took his finger off his ear and balled his hand into a fist. None of it. He wasn't willing to believe any of what was going on. This was a trick. This was some kind of Psycho Mantis level mind games. He needed to keep his head. He needed to remember what was real, and what was fake.

He stared down at his other hand. The gun he had felt real enough. The wounds from that explosion felt real. Whatever that... thing was, it was hard to pretend there wasn't a threat, here.

"I can do this," he said to himself, as he moved to peek around the doorway into the hall. "Just gotta take this one slow."

His mutters to himself was greeted with giggles coming from further down the hall. Raiden took a deep breath, held his gun in both hands, and stepped out.