A/N: The chapter got slightly retconned, because it made Akechi come off as too powerful than I wanted him to be. He's not a fucking terminator, he's an edgy highschooler with a handgun.
"We're back!" Akira proclaimed, returning with a red T-shirt and a pair of jeans in hands, with Sunny and Cheyenne in tow.
The courier and Whitmeyer were still sitting around the campfire spot, but Akira spotted them fiddling with weapons they didn't have before. Whitmeyer's pistol looked just like the handgun the courier had before, generic enough to not raise eyebrows, but the courier's new toy – a large, blocky steel handgun – resembled no other weapon he had seen, even with all the handgun models he had gone through in the past few months.
"That's the N99 pistol," the courier said, noticing his confusion. "Fires 10 mil. Guess you didn't have them in your Vault."
"Uh, ten mil?" Akira asked.
"Yea, ten mil," the courier explained. "More kinetic force than a 9 mm, but less than a .45."
"I see. And you were right, we only had 9 millimeter handguns." That was the only pistol caliber Akira knew even existed before being transported to the Mojave. "And even then, like, one or two people total had guns."
"You didn't have it before," Sunny asked. "You had a normal 9mm pistol. Where did you get the ten-mil?"
"Some prospector type came up to us and told us geckos trapped his girlfriend on that ridge there," Whitmeyer explained, pointing at it. "When we cleared them out, it turned out that there's no girl and he just wanted to get to some supply cache there."
"Of course we looted it before," the courier continued. "We would've shared, but he lied to us, so I told him to git. He then tried to draw, but I broke his nose, took his gun, and gave him ten seconds to scram. The 10-mil was in the cache, and the 9-mil I took from him, I gave to Whitmeyer."
"Uh, what did he try to draw?" Akira asked.
"A gun," the courier said.
"He tried to shoot you for some supplies?" Akira reacted with disbelief.
Sunny was surprised as well. "A bunch of geckos was too much for him but he thought he'll beat you?"
"Some people are evil and stupid," the courier shrugged. "Give Whitmeyer the clothes. I'll show you how to make healing powder while he we're off to Primm."
Makoto marched out of Primm city limits, stopping right at the spot where the ramp from the Vikki and Vance side of town joined the highway. Her destination, the Mojave outpost, was visible in the distance, marked by the large monument of two Rangers shaking hands. Between that and her was a length of seemingly empty road, dipping up and down on the uneven terrain. 'Seemingly' was the key word – there were some assorted rocks scattered around, tall enough to act as a cover for a highwayman, and in the distance, a destroyed billboard or two advertised some business that ceased to exist a long time ago. Far away from her, there was some kind of low-rise building she couldn't identify from where she was standing, and even further, the ruins of what looked like a gas station.
She decided to inspect the pistol she had on herself, just in case. It was made out of black metal, with brown wooden grips. She had a vague idea of how it should work, based on a metric ton of yakuza movies she had watched. With her finger off the trigger, she removed the magazine and pulled the slide back to eject a chambered round. She then checked how many bullets she had on herself in total; it added up to twenty six split between two full magazines. With the pistol definitely empty, she pushed on the slide release lever; the slide snapped forward in response. Pointing the gun at the ground, she pulled the trigger, and the hammer in the back sprung forward with a click. Further trigger presses didn't do anything, until she manually re-cocked the hammer with her thumb, like the gun was an old revolver. She put one magazine in her breast pocket, and loaded the other into the handgun, but didn't chamber a round. Plan A was to avoid confrontation, plan B was to intimidate any potential assailant, plan C was to fire a warning shot or two.
And so, having convinced herself that she's ready for anything, she went on, slowly, keeping her eyes peeled. After she marched for a few minutes and nothing happened, she allowed herself to reassess her general situation.
The world had gone to the dogs, that much was apparent. But even with Hayes' brief history lesson and the scraps she picked up elsewhere – lasers were more common, apparently? – her mind was unable to come up with a plausible scenario that would explain the extent to which things must've taken a turn for the worse to lead to such an extensive collapse of civilization.
The little platonic ideal of a policeman in the back of her head kept telling her to roll up her sleeves and do something about it. At the same time, the past few months back in her world had made her painfully aware that said platonic ideal did not exist in real life, and she would have to manage with shadows (ha) on the cave wall. So far, helping the NCR seemed like a reasonable solution – as far as modes of governance went, 'a country modeled after the United States but without the bad bits' seemed good enough for the time being. The fact that an officer was able and willing to admit things aren't all sunshine and lollipops had, paradoxically, reassured her; it seemed there was no official policy or unofficial pressures to pretend things are obviously fine in the face of overwhelming evidence. Acknowledging things were wrong was the first step to actually fixing them.
Of course, she was also aware that sometimes the system just won't fix itself, for one reason or another. She wondered if this world had some form of the Metaverse, like Tokyo had, and if Akira or Morgana would've been able to access i-
The train of thought got derailed because she was now close enough to a building by the side of the road – a small, single-story, flat-roofed structure, with three derelict cars in black-and-white livery parked by the side. But more importantly, she was close enough to spot the dead bodies nearby. Two men, dressed not unlike the convicts she had encountered before, lying motionless in a brown pool Makoto hoped was dried blood. Next to them, two women in tattered clothes, in their own separate pools, with bullet holes in their skulls.
Makoto tried to not think about any possible chain of events that left four goddamn bodies in its wake, and how likely it was that they had been shot by the convicts she had let go. For a brief moment she considered moving on before the authorities would come over and ask pointed questions, before she spotted a symbol on the side of one of the cars – a seven-pointed star with a circular emblem in it, its rim reading 'Nevada Highway Patrol'.
The realization struck. No authorities would come.
She didn't feel comfortable just leaving the bodies in the middle of the road, but didn't have the tools or the time or anything to conduct a proper funeral. Trying not to think too hard about all the joys of bodily fluids and decomposition, she dragged the bodies one by one to the side of the road, a bit away from the building, and arranged them in a neat row. Barely an improvement, but an improvement nonetheless, she thought. If there was a shovel, or at the very least something shovel-shaped, in the station building itself, she could've tried to dig a hole in the ground in lieu of a proper grave. She was a city mouse through and through, she had no clue just how much effort it'd take to prepare even a simple grave in the rough soil.
But, undisturbed by what she didn't know, she walked up to the entrance to the building – a metal, double door, with 'fuck you' spray-painted on them – opened it, and found herself staring at two raiders loitering about.
Let's pause for a moment.
As you remember, dear reader, the Primm convicts had fought some raiders during their march south. The thing is, they didn't actually want to spend their limited resources on a prolonged fight. And so, after preemptively shooting some raiders that were in the middle of looting their former cellmates, they promptly left the scene, and so the two raiders that remained in the building didn't even register anything had happened.
But they did register a new face in the door. And that's the moment where we unpause.
Makoto decided to act confidently; it worked the last time. "Do you guys have a shovel I can borrow?"
One of the raiders unholstered a revolver in response.
Makoto dived behind the door, out of sight.
A bullet went through the thin metal sheet, then through Makoto's forearm. She let out a yelp of pain and dropped her own pistol. She ducked, dodging another bullet, and dived to the side, grabbing her weapon with her left hand.
There was nowhere to run – the patrol station was surrounded by desert from all sides, with few obstacles nearby to break the line of sight. With at least one of the attackers having a gun, she'd need to run in zigzags and gamble that their aim was poor enough. So that was plan A out of the question. She grabbed the slide and racked it with difficulty, gritting her teeth in pain. She then hid behind the corner, desperate to, at the very least, get five more seconds of life.
She heard the door open with a screech and two people walking out.
"...man, I'm freaking out," said one of them. "I thought some chick just popped in and asked for a shovel."
"Shut up," said the other. "Go around the building from that side."
Makoto felt her heartbeat go into overdrive. She took a few steps away from the forward corner of the building, and a moment later one of the raiders turned and faced her. He was a man, not that older than Makoto herself, dressed in a white T-shirt with blood splattered on it and leather pants. He didn't have a gun on him, but Makoto spotted a pair of knuckle dusters on his hands.
"Well hello there, doll," he said, with a smug smirk that spelled trouble. "Good to have some company. Nobody's going down I-15 anymore…"
Makoto pointed a gun at him. "Back off, creep!"
He wasn't bothered. "Come on, cutie. If you go down without a fight, I'm not gonna be too ro-"
BANG!
A warning shot whizzed past the raider's head. Rather than getting him to stand down, it just caused him to charge forward to try and close the distance. Makoto could hear the footsteps behind her, with the other assailant rushing towards her, startled by the gunshot.
Let's pause again.
Makoto found herself reliving the past few months of her life. The authorities, the school and her own sister failing to protect her from the evils of her world, having to rely on a bunch of delinquents to stay afloat, and her own rebellion against those that would dare to hurt her and those close to her.
She had asked herself, many times, what gave her the right to infringe upon others' sense of self, to reshape it into what she found more acceptable. More just, whatever that meant. The best answer she found… wasn't really an answer, but instead an inversion of the question – what gave them the right to impose their injustice upon the world for their own gain? What gave them the right to hurt her?!
Maybe this was the end. Fate had finally caught up with her. It was hubris to believe she could've changed the world for the better. But if this was the end, it was going to end on her own terms.
Makoto adjusted her left hand ever so slightly.
Unpause.
BANG.
The second bullet wasn't a warning shot. Neither was the third and the fourth. Two to the chest and one to the head. She had seen that in a movie once. The raider went a bit forward, mostly thanks to momentum, but she was able to sidestep him and let him collapse to the ground.
The other guy turned the corner, noticed his buddy on the ground and then did nothing about it, because Makoto put three bullets in him without thinking. After a short pause, he toppled to the ground.
And then, silence. Makoto waited for a follow-up, for some unseen third assailant that she hadn't noticed previously to come and strike her – or try to, at least; she still had seven bullets in her gun. Alas, no such thing happened. She was standing there, alone, victorious, over the bodies of two people she had murdered. Fortunately – or not, depending on how you see it – she was distracted from the figurative blood on her hands by the literal blood trickling down her arm.
She glanced at the wound. The bullet grazed her, tearing through a muscle, but in what she had considered a silver lining, did not hit any major blood vessels, so she'd most likely not bleed to death that day. She put the gun back in her waistcoat pocket and, for lack of a better dressing, she pulled out a pack of tissues she had on herself, pulled out two, and, mostly folded, pressed them against the wound to stem the bleeding. She hissed in pain – it hurt a ton.
She returned to the main road and stared in the direction of the Mojave outpost. She had two options – continue on her journey and hope someone in the outpost will patch her up, or return to Primm and admit defeat.
In the distance, near what must've been a gas station between her and her destination, she had spotted something poking out of the tuft of the grass. As the thing turned around a bit, she realized it was a scorpion sting. With the buildings around it for reference, she noticed that it must've been as big as her head.
Without a word, she turned around and marched back towards Primm.
As Joe had expected, the ruins of a rest stop on the way housed an impromptu Jackal camp. Since he and his companion had no qualms about self-defense, their skirmish with the Jackals was brief and uneventful. They've managed to loot some better weapons, but they were short on ammunition, and hoped to scavenge some in Nipton.
The town up close looked even more disturbing. Legion standards were billowing in the wind, next to a bunch of severed heads on pikes. There were a few large fires scattered across the town, made out of tires and wood, with a few charred skeletons dotted around. On the side of the road going past the general store was a bunch of unexpectedly un-defiled raider corpses, putting the two newcomers on edge. The air was filled with smell of burned rubber and decaying bodies.
With captured rifles at the ready, Joe and Diego marched to the main junction of the town and glanced at the road leading to the town hall. There were crosses there, made out of chopped-up telephone poles. Every single one of them was toppled down and lying on the sidewalk, un-occupied.
"What the-?" Joe muttered. "What, did someone come here and-"
He was interrupted by someone running out from behind one of the houses on the side of the road, followed by an active and hostile Mister Gutsy. After gaining enough distance, the human spun on his heel and rapidly put a few rounds from a 10mm pistol in the robot, which was enough to disable the machine. It collapsed in a heap, its three limbs flopping about.
"[Goddamn tin can…]" Akechi muttered to himself, before noticing the newcomers. "And who are you?"
The two cons quietly noted that he looked out of place – few people would've worn a black necktie, white shirt and black dress slacks in the rural parts of the Mojave. They also noticed that he seemed of roughly the same age and ethnicity as that weird chick that appeared in Primm.
"I'm talking to you two," Akechi repeated, approaching them. He even had an accent like that chick. He kept the gun in his left hand at the ready, but pointed at the ground. "Who are you?"
"You will get us both shot, I'll do the talking," Diego grumbled to Joe, before turning back to Akechi. "We're just drifters that have seen the smokestacks in the sky. We came to see if there's any people to save or anything to salvage."
"Well, I called dibs on the salvage," Akechi said. "As for people to save, the fucking larpers left a bunch of people…" He made a finger-snapping motion, but couldn't make the sound while wearing gloves. "Fuck, forgot the word. Tied to the poles and left to die."
"Crucified," Diego suggested.
"Right. I got them down from the poles," Akechi continued. "One NCR medic survived the massacre, he was able to stabilize them for now. Other than him, the survivors are apparently escaped convicts and traitors, but I don't care. Nobody deserves what the larpers did to this town." He shot them a glare. "Don't fucking argue with me about it."
"I didn't wanna," Diego wondered if 'larper' was a word in… whatever they spoke back where he was from. 'Where are they now?"
"Holed up in the general store. The medic's dealing with the wounded there."
As if on cue, someone in an NCR helmet poked their head out of the general store. "Is everything okay, Mr. Akechi? Who are these people?"
"They claim to be wanderers," Akechi replied. "They aren't looking for a fight for now. Keep that lever-action rifle I gave you close by, though. Just in case."
"Got it."
The medic returned to the store and Akechi turned back to the two. "No offense to you two. I would rather trust too little than too much. After I got the wounded men down and started scavenging for medical supplies, we were attacked by a bunch of…" He glanced at the pile of corpses by the road. "...carrion eaters."
"I mean, you fought them back without issue, apparently," Diego remarked.
"To be fair, these guys specifically weren't a large threat," Akechi admitted. "They had the numbers advantage, but were not organized in the slightest and had one ranged weapon between them. I was able to pick them off from a distance with a pistol."
"Wait, so you, singular, killed all these raiders alone?!"
"I did not have a choice. The convicts are still too weakened to fight, and I couldn't risk the only medic getting wounded or killed."
The two of them suddenly felt uncomfortable in his presence - compared to the chick from before, he seemed perfectly fine with wanton killing, and it clashed with that still-mostly-clean shirt and tie. Akechi enjoyed their discomfort a little bit. "Alright, kid, who or what are you?" Joe asked.
Diego jabbed him with the butt of his rifle. "I told you to let me speak!" he hissed.
Joe wasn't deterred. "First there was the fighter chick in Primm and now there's this guy fucking soloing a group of raiders! They've gotta be related somehow!"
Akechi let out a chuckle the convicts found just a bit too forced. "Of course, every Japanese person in the area must know each other. I will admit I am not a local though, no point in denying that."
"...what the fuck is Japan?" Joe asked.
Akechi realized he accidentally blew his cover – on brand for him, really.
"Almost nobody here has heard of that place," Diego elaborated. "And the girl we encountered earlier had mentioned it. Short dark brown hair, speaking with the same accent."
"I'll say this:" Akechi growled, "her and I are from the same place, but we're not friends or allies. Fuck, she and anyone that knows who I am will most likely shoot me on sight – with very good reason." He shot them another glare. "Further questions about my background will be answered with gunfire."
Sufficiently intimidated, Joe and Diego just nodded.
"Since the cat is out of the bag," Akechi went on, a bit less hostile, "are there any authorities in the area that can pick it up from here? The scavenged resources are limited and I am not interested in running a gang. I don't have the soft skills for it."
"The NCR are the most likely to care, if only because Legion this far west is a big problem for them." He gestured in the direction of the outpost. "Head to the outpost, near that large statue of two assholes shaking hands. You'll be able to barter with what you've salvaged there, for food or medical stuff."
"The medic also recommended the NCR," Akechi said. "I would've already gone and approached them, but I worry that the moment I depart the town, another bunch of assholes will come over and kill everyone, rendering my efforts to save them null and void."
"We could watch them while you go," Joe offered. "If you pay us."
"Or give us some food and ammo," Diego suggested.
"We're lacking these two things as well," Akechi said. "As for currency, all I have in terms of local money is a bunch of larper coins." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small fistful of silver denarii. "I found a bunch of them lying around, since apparently the fuckers used the town's services in the past. Is that good enough?"
"Yeah, no problem," Diego replied. "Everyone in the Mojave takes both Legion and NCR cash now, from what I've heard. Tell you what, keep the cash, and get us…" He thought for a moment. "Food for two people for two days, a box of .357, and a box of .45 instead, and we have a deal."
"We came to an agreement then," Akechi dared to smile. "Introduce yourselves to the others while I gather goods to barter with before departing." He glanced around. "I think I saw a duffel bag here somewhere…"
Again, bits and pieces of lore (specifically the Jackals and the combat medic in Nipton) from Working on the Chain Gang. Clothes for Whitmeyer are from Spice of Life.
The title is a Polish idiom. It literally means "to surprise someone with a trick", but in its literal sense it means "to surprise someone with an attack from the left/done with the left hand". I thought it was appropriate.