Shouji Gatou: Fighting Boy Meets Girl

And with that, Sousuke abruptly disappeared into the darkness.

Once he was gone, Kaname wiped Kurz's dirty face with a spare scrap of cloth.

"Ha ha. Thanks, Kaname."

"You're welcome." She paused to reflect for a moment. "By the way, Kurz, do you know why they're after me?"

"All we know is that our boss ordered us to protect you."

"Okay." She hung her head and coughed a little.

Kaname felt quite heavy-headed. While she was talking to Sousuke, it wasn't significant enough to worry her. But now, an unpleasant sensation of floating crept over her.

When the odd visions she had experienced in the medical trailer intermittently attacked her, she couldn't determine whether they were a dream or reality.

"You okay?" wondered Kurz. "They give you any drugs back there?"

"Yeah. I don't know what it was, but they said something about a nutrient. Nothing really happened—but now, my head feels weird.

"Did they do anything else to you?"

"Yeah, they made me watch some kind of freaky movie."

"Movie?"

"Strange symbols and characters that kept replacing and overlapping one another. Even though I hadn't seen these words before, somehow I already knew them. They were things like 'raw materials of intervertebral disc dampers,' and 'reagents of palladium reactors,' and an explanation of how the invisibility mode of ECS is not totally perfected, because the burden is all on the laser screen oscillation system—"

"How do you know all this?" Kurz asked seriously, his eyes bulging.

"Huh?" asked Kaname as though coming out of a daze.

"Did you just say 'intervertebral disc dampers'?"

"Inter-what?"

"That's the name of a popular AS part—very technical stuff. No one without a military connection knows the weak points of ECS, either."

Kaname pressed her hands to her temples and tried to concentrate.

Slightly agitated, Kurz said, "There isn't any way a normal high school student would know these things."

"If you say so." Kaname wondered whether there was some kind of secret locked away inside her head. Then, she recalled the conversation with the female doctor in the trailer. "The lady kept saying strange things—that I knew that kind of stuff before I was born and that I had Black Technology or whatever. She said someday, I'd have free access to that information. Information…" Kaname drifted off, losing herself in an absentminded floating sensation. For the first time, she was voluntarily conscious of the knowledge she was not yet aware of.

"Information. Infor… ma-ma-ma… Ah." Nothing came to mind, but a vague sense of disgust settled into her chest.

Then, she had a sense of déjà vu, the hallucination a person might feel when traveling somewhere for the first time but finding it familiar. It was similar, except darker and heavier.

"Remem-memb-ber? Can't. C-can't," she stuttered, only slightly aware of herself and what she was saying.

There was a monster lurking in the shadows of Kaname's mind. The more she tried to examine it, the more some part of her (her soul itself, perhaps) convulsed. Up and down traded places, preventing her from thinking anymore. It was impossible. Impossible. Impossible…

"Impossible. Impossible. Wha—wh-what's this?" Kaname struggled terribly to suppress a hysterical scream.

"Kaname! Stop that! Look at me!" Kurz barked, bringing Kaname back to Earth.

She realized that she had torn the chest of her gown.

"What? What did I—? Wow, it looks like maybe I'm a little messed up. Ha ha ha. Ha ha." she attempted to make small talk while concealing her chest, but her voice sounded dead.

"Listen, Kaname. Don't think about that anymore. Forget the whole thing. Completely—ugh!" Kurz's face twisted in pain.

"You okay?"

After a moment, he said: "No, I'm not really." He tried to lift his head, but he couldn't really manage it. "Ah, this sucks. Son of a bitch, I can't believe I'm immobile at a time like this."

Moaning over his own helplessness, Kurz's blue eyes grew damp.

"It can't be helped." Kaname leaned in to wipe his tears. "You're hurt pretty bad."

"It really does suck. If I felt any better at all, I could admire it more carefully."

"Admire what?"

"Your cleavage."

When Sousuke came down the mountain, he could see the farmlands.

After creeping in, he extracted some engine oil from a decomposing tractor. He wanted gasoline, but the current economic crisis kept most tanks empty. The fact that this area still had a tractor at all indicated it was a prosperous region.

Holding the oil-filled, polyethylene tank, he ran to the farm's fallow land. His side throbbed, but it wasn't so bad that he couldn't endure it.

After dumping out the oil on the field, he checked his watch: Oh-three twenty-eight.

Here goes.

Taking the survival kit from his pocket, Sousuke procured a permanganic acid tablet that normally would be used for sterilizing. But he crushed it, spread the powder on the oil, and lit the mixture with a Zippo.

After a second, the oil ignited, and the flames slowly spread.

Sting, the recon satellite, took extremely high-resolution pictures. On a clear day, it could easily read the headline on a newspaper. On a drizzly night like this, however, it would be difficult to distinguish Sousuke and friends from local soldiers. That's why Sousuke used fire letters to spell out A67ALIVE.

The A was for "Angel," Kaname's codename. The numbers were for "Urzu Six" and "Urzu 7," Kurz and Sousuke, respectively. "Alive" was self-explanatory, really.

Mindful not to leave footprints, Sousuke returned to Kurz and Kaname.

There was no need to indicate their location. If Sting saw those letters, it could follow Sousuke's fire-lit silhouette from space.

The oil fire probably would die in just a few minutes, and there was no guarantee that either allies or enemies would see it. It was, after all, a gamble.

"Arson?" asked Gauron.

Standing in front of a maintenance trailer where he was overseeing the Codarl's repairs, Gauron looked over the report from his subordinate.

"Yes, sir. We just got word that someone set fire to a field on a farm nine miles west of here."

Gauron harrumphed. He wondered if it was a diversion, but he decided that it was unlikely, as a simple fire wouldn't suffice. Regardless, he figured Kashim was the likely culprit. Even if Gauron didn't know what Kashim was up to, at least he knew the vicinity of his whereabouts.

"The military already is tightening their search radius. It's only a matter of time before we discover the escapees."

"Kill the man. As for the girl, they can do with her as they like, as long as she is not killed under any circumstances."

"Yes, sir."

"I'll be moving out soon, as well."

"In the Codarl?"

Gauron glared. "You got a problem with that?"

"C-certainly not, sir. But Doctor Kaneyama said you shouldn't use it much in front of the local soldiers."

"It isn't forbidden. Besides, we're up against Mithril—and Kalinin. There could be trouble still."

According to the naval report, Mithril's submarine already had fled away from the coast to nearby Chinese waters. Even if they used their urgent deployment boosters, dispatching a rescue party seemed impossible. But still…