Vengeance Is Mine

by Shiden Kanzaki

  Rentaro heard the dying cries of the Gastrea as they were ground to pieces, even though he shouldn’t have been able to hear them. He resisted the urge to vomit.

  Aldebaran was eating the other Gastrea that were on its side.

  “Gahhhhhhhhhh!” Angered, Aldebaran howled into the sky. The remaining Gastrea that were just about to stampede froze in midstep. Finally, they slowly returned to their positions and once more faced the civil officer troops.

  Even their enemies were afraid of their commander, and were willing to struggle to the death on its orders.

  Aldebaran was also focused on aiming for the self-defense force’s fighter aircraft. They were under attack.

  The flying-type Gastrea that had come to intercept the attack formed a large cloud to strike. The two fighter aircraft released air-to-air missiles. The spears of science from the four missiles ran into the wall made by the flying Gastrea and blossomed into flames. The sight of the countless Gastrea dropping from the sky as they screamed long screams made Rentaro’s hairs stand on end, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it for a moment.

  However, the enemy was not to be taken lightly. The flying Gastrea had strength in numbers, and a few of them went through the middle of the flames to throw themselves at the jets with a high-pitched neigh, prepared to die.

  One of the aircraft couldn’t escape completely and was grazed on the edge of one wing, losing its balance and going into a tailspin as it fell. In the end, it couldn’t recover its position and crashed into the ground.

  The remaining aircraft charged the Gastrea. With a cross counter that did not take defense into consideration, it delivered a single courageous strike to Aldebaran. The fighter aircraft let loose a guided missile at the same time that Aldebaran stretched out a conspicuously long tentacle. The alloyed metal body was pierced by Aldebaran’s tentacle, which went straight through the cockpit as it exploded. The pilot probably didn’t even realize what had hit him as he left the world. And the five-hundred-pound guided missile that the aircraft had left used GPS guidance to make slight adjustments to its position as it fell and was sucked into Aldebaran’s torso.

  The next instant, there was a huge explosion, and Aldebaran’s scream rang out.

  When the flames from the explosion cleared and Rentaro could see again, he saw that the silhouette of Aldebaran was still, not moving an inch. It had completely lost its head and was bare to its abdomen.

  “All right!”

  But just then, Gado’s dispirited comment rang inside Rentaro’s head:

  “Leader Satomi, Aldebaran is an immortal Gastrea. There is no way to kill it.”

  Aldebaran’s body twitched and wings unfolded out of its torso, fluttering at high speed. It was moving without a head.

  Rentaro looked on in wonderment. Its brains had been blown out. If Aldebaran was an organism that used nucleic acids as a base to replicate DNA to form proteins, then its regenerative abilities should have been greatly reduced, what with its heart and pulse stopped and its pupillary light reflex gone. It should have just been waiting for its inevitable death.

  “No way…”

  Was there really no way to defeat this thing?

  His shock aside, a familiar scene repeated itself before him. The entirety of the Gastrea halted abruptly and retreated while protecting Aldebaran. The flap of its wings earlier had probably been to spread pheromones.

  A mass of Gastrea troops left the Monolith and came toward Rentaro. He quickly dove into a dilapidated house nearby, removed a floorboard, and let the creatures pass him by. After waiting for the right time, he rushed out and ran back toward the civil officer base.

  “Kisara!” Seeing her among a group of civil officers covered in wounds, he waved his hand as he ran toward her.

  He could see Enju next to her, too; the girl noticed him at the same time. “Rentaro!”

  “Enju!”

  They hugged with such force that they almost knocked each other over. Rentaro embraced Enju tightly and buried his face in her neck.

  The girl’s arm went around his waist. “You idiot.”

  “Sorry, Enju. Really…I’m sorry.” Regrets flowed up from the bottom of his heart. He should have explained the situation to Enju, at least. He really thought so now, after he had seen how painful it was to spend time apart.

  “Why did you leave without informing me? I was worried.” As she said that, she half-sobbed and punched his sides.

  “Argh, that hurts, stop it. I’m injured there! Don’t touch it.”

  “Satomi……?”

  Pushing Enju away from him, Rentaro looked toward the voice and gulped. Kisara’s black hair and white skin were covered with soot and blood, and she had a cut above her eyes that forced her left eye closed from blood. When he looked more carefully, he saw that Enju’s clothes also had traces of cuts and tears all over them.

  Even so, Kisara let her tears gather at the edge of her vision as she put a hand firmly on her hip and looked at him sharply. “Jeez, you’re late!”

  “Sorry.”

  Kisara looked like she was about to say more, but no more words came out. Clasping her hands in front of her chest like she was praying, she looked down, shoulders shaking.

  Rentaro was racked with guilt and scratched his head, not knowing how to deal with it.

  Just then, a voice called out, “Hey, isn’t that Rentaro Satomi?” Rentaro raised his head as the surviving civil officers looked at him as if he had returned from Hades, surrounding him from far away.

  He heard voices raise a commotion:

  “I heard he’d been banished…”

  “Then, the missiles that flew over were…”

  “Did he defeat Pleiades and come back?”

  “No way…”

  From their reaction, he understood at once what the others had been told about his mission to subjugate Pleiades. He desperately controlled his expression to make sure his inner thoughts did not make it to his face. From their hollow eyes, he could tell that everyone was more exhausted than their visible wounds allowed. Thankfully, he still saw Tina, Tamaki, Yuzuki, and Shoma, but what was the deal with having their five-hundred-person-strong troops reduced to about sixty people before the second wave came?

  He wanted this to be a joke. He wanted to hear the sound of footsteps bringing the remaining civil officers saying, “Don’t tell me you thought we died?” and laughing it off. He would feel annoyed for a moment, but then he would be grinning happily with them.

  “Where’s…everyone else?” His voice sounded stiff, dry, and flat as he spoke.

  Kisara wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked at Rentaro solemnly. “Satomi…Leader Satomi.” Kisara saluted and looked at Rentaro sharply. “Commander Gado has died in battle.”

  He felt like he had just been hit hard in the head. Died? Gado did? The war veteran with an IP rank of 275 died?

  “According to the Adjuvant System in the civil officer manual, article 40, if the commander dies, then the authority to command the troops will pass to the civil officer with the next highest rank.”

  “Then who’s in right now?” Rentaro asked.

  All the Promoters and Initiators around them looked their way.

  No way… Rentaro shook his head slowly as he backed away. It’s impossible, Kisara. There’s no way I can do it.

  “From here on out, we will fight with you in command. Please lead us, Satomi.”

  BLACK BULLET 4

  CHAPTER 04

  DOGS OF WAR

  1

  After getting proper treatment of his wound at the first-aid station that operated out of the school nurse’s office, Rentaro could finally relax. When he was freed from being in constant fear for his life, the first things to attack him were lethargy and a sense of emptiness. The effects of the excessive amount of adrenaline wore off, and the sharp pain returned to his abdomen. But the deep emotions he felt at surviving passed, and he was soon filled with a different kind of nervousness.

  He was reminded
to stay in bed for at least a day after this, but he didn’t have the time for that. He was now the leader of this worn-out group that could barely be called a troop, even if it hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

  Thanking Sumire, he left the nurse’s office and walked alone along the nighttime street. Now that he had become the commander, there were a ton of things he had to do. However, there was one thing he had to check, even if it meant putting aside everything else.

  Rentaro headed toward some facilities a little ways away from the school that were connected to the former first-aid station. When he told the person at the entrance why he was there, he was led through to a large hall. The room was spacious and dimly lit, and he occasionally heard sobbing.

  Laid out in an orderly fashion were five rows of black body bags.

  He thought they looked just like the rows of tuna at the wholesale fish market. He looked on with a strangely cold feeling, thinking that this would be his fate, too, if he died.

  The health-care center had turned into a storage area for the bodies of civil officers and their support personnel who had died in action. The corpses should have been promptly sent back to the bereaved families, but after Aldebaran’s second attack, the personnel who would have transported them got cold feet, and the spirits of those who defended their country were now sleeping together in a huddle with no one to care for them.

  Because of the ashes from the Monolith covering the sky, temperatures had dropped dramatically, but it was actually still summer. That meant that the phenomenon called rigor mortis set in immediately after death, and it was hard to avoid the sour smell that filled the air and hit Rentaro’s nose. The sound of shoes echoed shrilly on the linoleum floor, and the sound of the power generator in the room next door made the air vibrate slightly.

  Finally, the person on duty led him to where he needed to go, and then Rentaro stood in front of a single corpse. When the person on duty checked the tab, he bowed once and left. Rentaro watched him go, then got on his knees and quietly unzipped the body bag.

  Rentaro was greeted with muddy, wet eyes and a half-opened mouth. Compassion won over fear, and Rentaro looked at him face-to-face for a while. The man had lost both arms and legs, and Rentaro could see cruel cracks in his bright red exoskeleton, splattered with blood redder than red.

  “I…didn’t hate you, Gado.” From what Rentaro had heard, Aldebaran’s second attack had been aiming for the commander, Gado, from the start. The enemy troops used an extremely primitive form of organization with Aldebaran as the head, but in terms of base instincts, humans had not changed that much, either. The civil officer troops lacked even a standardized set of indispensable equipment for modern-day warfare, and they hadn’t had time for training, either, so it could be said that they had no choice but to fight with a primitive form of organization.

  The advantage was that the chain of command was simple, so it did not take long for orders to reach the soldiers at the end. The disadvantage was obvious—all the power was concentrated on the general, so if the general was out of commission, then the organization would simply collapse and everything would fall apart.

  Apparently, Gado’s squad was lured in and surrounded, and at the end of a hard, desperate fight, they were pulverized.

  The civil officer troops didn’t fall apart at that, but only because each and every civil officer was firmly aware of the fact that they were Tokyo Area’s last stronghold.

  Rentaro had a silent conversation with Gado. Even with all that had happened, Gado had an IP rank of 275. Rentaro could not imagine how much of a handicap the man had fighting with just one leg, but if Gado had been healthy, he would not have fallen behind even if he had been outnumbered.

  Old or young, male or female, smart or foolish, good or bad—death did not discriminate. This world was fair to the point of being cruel. Nagamasa Gado had banished Rentaro Satomi and then had been forced into an inescapable situation. But Gado’s actions had all been based on a certain kind of logic, and part of that was that he was constantly making decisions in an almost heartless manner. He had cast Rentaro away mechanically based on his own logic. However, that man had also met his fate by the same reckoning.

  This was not the ending Rentaro had wanted. He had wanted to surprise this man by showing that he could come back alive from a mission he wasn’t supposed to survive.

  Rentaro turned his head to look at the rows of neatly lined up body bags. Their current combat power was a little over sixty civil officers who were up against one thousand, eight hundred Gastrea. They would not get any reinforcements. They had also run out of missiles and fighter aircraft. All of Tokyo Area was worn out, and it didn’t matter what tactics they used—they were already facing certain defeat.

  Aldebaran would come. It would definitely come one more time. Rentaro’s intuition, which had already surpassed rhyme or reason, told him that he would not be able to avoid a final decisive battle against that thing.

  The nihilist Sumire had often told him that there was no meaning to life, and that everything they did was just dancing on their graves. If that was the case, then was it complete coincidence that he was not already lined up alongside the rows of dead? Would the future change if he took command in Gado’s place?

  Rentaro shook his head silently. No, it was the same. Nothing would change.

  It was then that he noticed that Gado’s cloak had been taken off and folded. It wasn’t like they were distributing mementos, but he thought to take something back with him, so he took that and turned around.

  Suddenly, he stopped, noticing that someone was walking toward him from the front. He immediately realized that it was Gado’s Initiator. Asaka Mibu, whose hands were covered in mud from picking golden-rayed lilies, hung her head dejectedly, walking with heavy steps. It seemed she had managed to survive, but she looked so dazed—like she had dropped her soul somewhere—that it was hard to say whether she could be described with the word unharmed.

  When Asaka noticed Rentaro, she bowed and headed toward Gado’s side. When Rentaro started walking again, he suddenly heard sobs coming from behind him and stopped.

  Rentaro’s hand tightened into a fist. He ran without looking back.

  I’m not fit to be the commander.

  2

  Rentaro was still depressed as he took on the heavy responsibilities of Commander. He couldn’t even tell if he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t think he could, or because he didn’t think they could win, or if it was a combination of the two. Thinking to go back once to the hotel his adjuvant made camp in, he dragged his feet past what had once been a park and suddenly heard angry voices that made him raise his face.

  Straining his eyes to look, he saw a crowd of civil officers off in the distance. There was so much murderous intent, it was as if someone had stirred up a hornet’s nest. He could see Tamaki, Yuzuki, Enju, and Shoma. And in the middle of the uproar was a conspicuously tall masked man and a girl wearing a black dress.

  Oh no, Rentaro thought, starting to run. They had followed him and descended upon the civil officer frontline base. It looked like before they could find Rentaro, they had been found by other civil officers and had caused a commotion.

  “Kagetane, Kohina!” Rentaro shouted.

  The two of them noticed Rentaro, and Kagetane spread his arms benevolently. “There you are, my comrade. I was looking for you.”

  Enju shot a look toward Rentaro, startled. “Rentaro! What does he mean, he was looking for you?”

  “I’ll explain later, but he saved me.”

  “Saved you?!” Enju’s voice cracked.

  Just then, Kohina narrowed her eyes and stepped forward with flushed cheeks. “Enju, I missed you.” Drawing her black Varanium short swords, she licked a blade with her tongue. “Let’s cross swords, Enju. Okay?”

  Just then, a shining thread wrapped around one of Kohina’s short swords and restrained its movement. Kohina stared in surprise.

  “Wait a minute, you.” Stepping out to the front wi
th her arms crossed and looking furious was none other than Yuzuki Katagiri. “You people are the enemy of all of us civil officers! Now that we know you’re alive, we can’t just let you leave.”

  Kohina gave Yuzuki a bored sideways glance and then pulled the hem of Kagetane’s tailcoat. “Papa, these people are in the way. Can I kill them?”

  Rentaro’s hair stood on end. If they went wild here, it would be trouble.

  However, not even Kagetane would get into a brawl with this many civil officers, already surrounded on all sides. That was Rentaro’s way of figuring, anyway, but Kagetane betrayed his expectations and snapped his fingers. “Kohina, you can kill half of them.”

  Raising clouds of dust, Kohina seemed to disappear, then appeared the next moment in front of Yuzuki’s eyes.

  “Wha—?!”

  “You know, you’re kind of strong, but—”

  Yuzuki threw up her arm suddenly in defense, but Kohina’s short sword went past that to pierce Yuzuki’s side. Kohina continued on to ram her, knocking Yuzuki off her feet and then treading on the overturned Yuzuki’s abdomen with her feet.

  Cracks radiated out on the ground, and there was the sound of air being squeezed out as Yuzuki spit blood. “Gah…!”

  “It’s not over yet,” vowed Kohina.

  An Initiator with an IP rank of 1,850 was defeated in seconds. However, there was no time to be surprised as two Initiators struck at Kohina from both sides.

  Kohina spun with the speed of a tornado and slashed the stomach of the Initiator on the left and the tendon of the Initiator on the right and then kicked both to send them flying. The two of them pounded into the ground, outside of the crowd of people. She was amazingly strong.

  “Let go of Yuzuki, you little—” Tamaki rushed out, pulling the trigger of a large revolver.

  “It’s no use. Imaginary Gimmick!” A repulsion field spread out around Kagetane, who had stepped between them. The bullet Tamaki fired hit the dome-shaped field and ricocheted with a thunderous roar.