Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One

by Albert Ruckholdt

  Holding onto that hope, I ran to the mesh fencing encircling the courtyard, but soon realized I had a limited view of the southern courtyard on the opposite side of the library. Even so, I looked frantically for any sign of the girl, and called out her name a few times but to no avail.

  With a cry that embodied my tortured feelings, I struck the fence, punching and kicking it, but it only served to wear me out.

  Gripping the mesh tightly in my fingertips, I bent it somewhat out of shape, before running to the opposite side of the courtyard where the fencing faced away from the school grounds.

  - III -

  When I fled from my pursuing admirers a year ago during lunchtime, clad from head to toes as the Silver Blue Princess, I discovered a gash in the fencing running along the eastside of the courtyard immediate to the north of the library’s fifth level. Back then I’d fled into the library en femme, so while that raised a few eyebrows from the girls inside, especially since I was dressed as Silver Blue, nobody stopped me even as I ran in heels up the stairs all the way to the fifth level. My plan at the time was to somehow escape from my sudden legion of admiring fans by slipping out of view and then wait for the school to empty of students before working my way back inside.

  In retrospect, it was a ludicrous plan but I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  At the fifth floor, I ran out into the courtyard and searched for a place to hide, before striking upon the idea of making my way across to the adjacent courtyard by squeezing between a machinery penthouse and the fencing that ran along the outside edge of the school’s rooftop. It was then that I discovered a long tear in the mesh fencing, and used it to exit onto the ledge circumnavigating the rooftop. Thankfully, the ledge was around two feet wide, so despite wearing heels I was able to walk along its surface with one hand gripping the fencing as a precaution against falling off to my demise. Yes, the ledge was indeed wide but it was also quite windy that high up.

  You may ask how was I able to walk and run so well on three-inch heels? That’s because the girls of the Cosplay Club had me practice until there was no chance of me twisting an ankle. To my dismay, I picked up the skill quite quickly, and thus hammered the first nail into the coffin of my male persona. I already looked feminine, and now I even walked like a girl.

  I made my way along the ledge running on the outside of the school. What I didn’t realize was the attention I would draw whenever I walking past a courtyard of which there were six on the northern arc of the school building. Most of the students were too surprised to see a girl walking atop the ledge to react, but some tried to convince me not to jump, believing that I was suicidal. However, one group of girls who clustered at the fencing in a misguided effort to prevent me from taking my life, listened when I explained my situation and they agreed to help me, though I had to plead with them not to report my dangerous behavior to the teachers. The girls told me of another gap in the fencing that I could use to get off the ledge and into a rooftop courtyard where they would be waiting for me.

  Without delving into the details, it was with their assistance that I was able to escape the school and make my way over to the Cosplay Club’s abode in the clubroom building – the same building that dominated my view out the window from my seat in Class One-Cee.

  I will point out that this nearly tragic event happened not on the first day of my cross-playing but on the third. I’ve previously mentioned that my cross-playing was a one-time only event, but that’s misleading. At the beginning of the school year, clubs are allocated a three-day period during which they advertise their activities during lunchtime and after school in an effort to recruit new members. That meant I had to dress up twice during each of the three days. By the third day, my prancing around as Silver Blue with a large sign had garnered me a sizeable following that eventually led to me being chased through the school.

  As I told Tobias, it wasn’t the cross-playing that pushed me over the edge and into a year of despair but the realization that I made a pretty girl and not a handsome manly boy like my father at that age.

  In other words, I would never be the Prince but the Princess…and that royally pissed me off.

  - IV -

  The gash in the fencing was located exactly where I remembered it.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had considered the possibility that this wasn’t the real Telos Academy, nothing more than a very accurate copy, but the tear in the meshwork fencing had me teetering on the edge between doubt and certainty. Its existence also terrified me and I was only shaken into action by the sounds of loud thumping from the inside of the library floor as the zombies banged on the permaglass keeping them locked inside.

  Getting out onto the ledge safely proved a little difficult while carrying the lightgun and school bag, but I managed to exit the courtyard and run some three hundred meters along the ledge until I arrived at the location of the second tear in the fencing. Counting the courtyards from west to east – left to right on the map – this gash allowed me to enter the second rooftop courtyard. Each of the courtyards has a rooftop hut that provides a way in and out of the courtyard. I was fortunate that no zombies were up here, and equally fortunate when I found the door to the exit unlocked. However, my good luck ran out when I descended the stairwell and encountered undead loitering with drunken movements on the steps.

  I was saved by Tabitha’s parting gift.

  While fishing into the carry-bag for a fresh magazine, my left hand encountered a large round object shaped like an acorn. It was a grenade and one that she must have dropped in there for me, and it clearly wasn’t a smoke canister. Retreating up the steps, I pulled the pin on the grenade with my teeth, and then carefully tossed it down to where the undead crowded the stairwell. The explosion that followed knocked me onto my ass on the steps, but it cleared the way for me to descend two floors before running into more undead.

  What followed was long minutes of intense shooting as I descended the stairwell and eventually arrived at the ground floor. Then it was a matter of surviving the journey through the corridor to the cafeteria entrance. I was low on ammunition, down to four magazines in the carry-bag, so I had no choice but to head for the storeroom Tabitha had told me about. After clearing myself a path through the zombies drifting in the expansive cafeteria, what I found inside the storeroom was a treasure trove of munitions. Dozens of boxes rested on the shelves, yet many of those were brimming not with food but with ammunition magazines, grenades, and so forth.

  Mindful of the undead that remained in the cafeteria, I hurriedly filled my school carry-bag with ammo and various assortments of grenades. With the bag engorged with munitions to the point I couldn’t zip it shut, I slung its straps over my neck and across my body. I groaned loudly at the weight of the bag, and then loaded the lightgun with a fresh magazine from a storage box. Walking to the storeroom’s entrance, I lobbed a number of grenades out into the cafeteria and then ducked back inside the room to weather out the explosions. Before the dust and debris had time to completely settle, I exited the storeroom and stepped around the carnage of undead bodies shredded by shrapnel, and tossed a few more grenades at the surviving zombies, careful to hide beside tables – some of which were overturned – while the explosions rocked the cafeteria.

  Weighed down with the overloaded carry-bag, and carrying the lightgun in weary leaden arms, I traversed the cafeteria at a labored walking pace. Lacking speed meant I was unable to flee from the zombies. I was having to fight my way through them as I headed for the open-air cafeteria balcony. Thankfully, the metal security shutters were up, so the only thing stopping me from stepping out onto the balcony was the permaglass wall separating it from the inside of the cafeteria. Though the security panel refused me access to the balcony, a couple of grenades tossed at the permaglass partition resulted in a large hole through which I could step through with a little trouble.

  My intention was to escape the school building by jumping down from the balcony to the grassy grounds surrounding the school,
then circle westward to the kilometer-long bridge connecting Telos Island to Ar Telica city.

  First, I dropped the heavy bag to the grass at the foot of the western end of the balcony, then jumped down after carefully climbing over the guardrail. The drop was a good ten feet and my legs ached after the landing. It took me a dozen or more seconds to recover before I could pick up the carry-bag, sling the straps across my body, and then resume my journey to the bridge and hopefully off the island.

  There were zombies to shoot along the way, dozens of them in fact, slowing my progress as I frequently stopped to take aim, shoot, and then continue. A grenade or two helped speed up my journey as well as avert a close call or tight situation when I found myself surrounded by undead students, and I discovered to my relief that while shots to the head could kill a zombie, severe body trauma from a grenade explosion was equally as effective. And so I hurried as best I could to the bridge, but when I arrived at the western grounds of the school, a few hundred feet from the academy’s entrance, I was struck dumb by the sight that greeted me.

  The bridge that should have stretched over the harbor was sheared off a hundred feet beyond the edge of the island and there was no sign of the city. A thick fog drifted over the water, obscuring everything that lay a hundred meters or more from the island shore. The overhead mag-lev line that ran over the bridge was also cut off, and I realized with a horrid sinking feeling that was I was trapped on the island.

  - V -

  Exhausted, I dropped to my knees on the harsh ground, and stared into the distant grey fog that surrounded the island.

  With the bridge gone, I had no means of fleeing to the city.

  There was a wharf on the south side of the island used by the harbor ferry service, but I doubted I would find a boat there to take me across the water to Ar Telica. Truthfully, I didn’t even know if Ar Telica lay beyond the fog. Normally you can hear the sounds of the city all the way from the island, but all I could hear now was the waves lapping against the island shoreline. There were no gulls in the air either, and my mind began exploring farfetched possibilities to explain my circumstances.

  “Is this…an alternate reality?”

  It took me a little effort to stand up, weighed down as I was by the carry-bag and lightgun.

  “What the Hell…is The Game?”

  From behind me, a woman’s voice boomed loudly and blasted aside the sound of the harbor waves. It was enough to make my heart jump into my throat.

  “Stage complete. Primary objective achieved.”

  I spun around and faced the school’s entrance, looking in the direction of the admin building. The loud voice blaring from the public address system distracted the zombies that had been advancing quickly toward me and they too turned around and faced the school.

  “Prepare for translocation.”

  I took a step closer to the school, realized what I was doing, and stepped back. “Wait—what about Tabitha?”

  “Translocation to final stage imminent.”

  “Wait—I can’t leave her behind. Where is she?”

  “Brace for translocation.”

  “Wait—!”

  The ground heaved, and I was tossed onto my back, the brusque landing knocking the air out of my lungs. Darkness swarmed over me, and the subsequent weightlessness made my innards shift about unpleasantly. It ended an interminable length of time later when I landed on solid ground. I lay on my back for a long while, gasping for air, waiting for my insides to settle down, before finding the strength to sit up.

  I had expected to be returned to the booth, then transported or translocated to the next stage of The Game but that wasn’t the case. Instead, I found myself in what resembled the plush interior of an apartment complex corridor. There was low pile carpeting underfoot, walls painted a very light beige, and warm, soft lighting from overhead recessed panels illuminated the corridor that was both tall and wide, bearing the luxurious hallmarks of a five or six star hotel. I stood up slowly, and pessimistically pictured the walls and carpet splashed in red once the next stage of the zombie apocalypse was truly underway.

  As the somewhat cynical thought crossed my mind, the door to an apartment some ten meters ahead of me opened up. What came out took me by surprise and sent a cold shiver down my spine.

  If I thought The Game couldn’t become any more disturbing, I was completely wrong.

  A little girl, perhaps no more than four or five years old, fell out of the open doorway, landing on her rump. Screaming shrilly, she scrambled to get out of the apartment, but her efforts were hampered by a woman with a bloodied appearance who crawled along the ground after her, fingers bent into claws that scrabbled and caught the hem of the little girl’s dress, and proceeded to drag the screaming child toward her.

  The girl’s screams grew more frantic, and then I realized what it was she was screaming.

  “Maaaammaaa!”

  Without thinking, I walked up to the struggling pair on the floor, and kicked the woman’s head twice with enough force to knock her over onto her back. Then I shoved the little girl aside, and once I blocked her view with my legs, I aimed and fired three consecutive mini-bullets into the zombie woman’s head, destroying a sizeable chunk of her forehead and splattering the doorway with a little blood and organic grey matter. The woman’s undead remains collapsed to the carpeted floor, and the body twitched for a second or two before becoming still.

  After everything I’d survived thus far, I was surprised to learn my stomach could still muster the will to complain. Swallowing hard, I held my breath for a few seconds, and willed my stomach to hold fast as I refused to toss my cookies just yet. That would have to wait until I was safely out of The Game, if indeed I survived long enough to escape this nightmare.

  The little girl looked up at me with horror in her eyes, but she refused to move. The sight of her sitting on the ground, knees trembling and tiny body shivering in terror, gave my disdain for The Game’s creators the impetus it needed to reach a new milestone. Had they appeared before me that moment, I wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot them with my lightgun. The sight of the girl’s despairing figure was enough for me to overcome the warning I remembered from Tabitha, and I knelt before her.

  “Are you hurt?”

  The girl continued to stare at me with frightened eyes.

  I held back a sigh. “My name is Ronin. What’s your name?”

  “…Timmy….”

  I blinked in mild surprise. “Your name is Timmy?”

  The little girl raised a hand and pointed behind me.

  My heart jumped in my chest, and I quickly turned to see a little boy crawling along the ground. I didn’t need more than a heartbeat to judge him an undead, and to aim the lightgun in my hands with the intention of blowing him away. The little girl chose that moment to call out his name, and it was clear to me that this unfortunate soul was her brother.

  “…Timmy….”

  I almost laughed as it was just the kind of cliché name I expected her brother to have. However, when he stood up on unsteady legs, I saw that he was little more than a toddler, and that his name had been printed on his shirt.

  “Michael,” I breathed out, and with one more glance at the little girl cowering behind me, I steadied my aim and blew the boy’s head apart with a trio of mini-bullets. The longer I carried the lightgun, the heavier it felt in my weary arms, and I struggled with the gun’s recoil. I had to plant my feet firmly and steel my upper body or the shots would be thrown off. At sight of the toddler falling lifelessly to the ground, my stomach threatened to revolt until I punched myself in the gut and then leaned against the doorframe.

  This is sick. This Game is sick.

  It wasn’t just my arms that felt burdened, but my heart and soul. I was tired of killing the undead, whether they be adults, students, or children, and the toll it exacted wasn’t just physical but emotional.

  In hindsight it was a foolish thought, but at the time I did think it was easier to compete as a Gun Prin
cess in the Princess Royale. I would rather face tanks and Gunbirds than a city full of the undead.

  We’ve come this far. We can’t stop now….

  Taking a handful of slow deep breaths, I straightened away from the gilded doorway, and waited to see if any more surprises would emerge from the apartment. When none materialized, I turned to the little girl sitting quietly in the corridor. “What’s your name?”

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times, before a single word slipped past her lips.

  “…Erina….”

  For a long while, my mind refused to tick over until it was jolted into action when the door to an apartment several meters down the corridor abruptly crashed outward. An overweight middle-aged man dressed in distended shorts and singlet stumbled out the doorway and fell prone on the door lying on the floor. There was no doubt he was undead, what with his disheveled appearance and ashen grey skin, but I also noticed purple bruising resulting from coagulated blood that no longer circulated through his body.

  I haven’t seen that before. Is it because he’s been a zombie for longer than the others?

  With a scream, the little girl scooted back across the corridor until her back hit the opposite wall, jarring me out of my thoughts. I waited for the unfortunate male zombie to push itself up onto its knees before blowing a large part of its head away with a few explosive tipped mini-rounds fired from the lightgun. The dead creature toppled forward onto its rotund belly and trembled spasmodically for a short while.

  Thinking that its death throes were odd, I turned and walked over to the little girl cowering against the corridor wall.