“I already told you. You’re thinking is too small. Simply not enough bang for the buck.” The girl addressed me. “And now it’s your turn. This one won’t be an electroshock round. It’s armor piercing.” She took at aim me with the oversized handgun and I heard the weapon whir for a second or two. “Goodbye, Princess.”
I didn’t understand why this was happening. Wasn’t I supposed to be valuable to them? And who was this girl with the enormous gun? Wasn’t she the same girl who saved me when my body crumbled away?
“Why did you save me?” I cried out. “Why kill me now?”
The feline girl cocked her head at me. “Because you didn’t wake up.”
“…what…?”
“You’re still asleep, Princess. You need to wake up.”
Before she could fire the massive handgun, she was bathed in light as the second Humvee roared onto the scene. I wondered who was driving it, then realized I’d forgotten all about Class Rep riding with Angela in the trailing vehicle.
The cat girl reacted like a deer caught in headlights before the two-and-a-half tonne machine rammed into her. Because the Humvee didn’t brake but powered on, it carried the girl along with it, half her body draped over the bonnet as the vehicle drove onto the pavement and up the steps leading to the administration building’s permaglass entrance.
The crash was loud enough to be heard above the rumble of thunder.
I pushed myself up to my feet, and watched the silent Humvee with its nose buried into the entrance, until a pair of hands grabbed onto me from behind.
“Cass, let’s go!” Tobias yelled.
“What? We can’t leave her. That was Class Rep.”
“And that was the First Princess.”
I stared at Tobias agape. “What…?”
“She’s a Gun Princess, Cass. She’s not human. She’s not a Simulacrum.”
“Then—then what is—?”
“She’s a machine. Remote operated via a quantum-link.” Tobias pulled me with all his strength toward the front of the lead Humvee. “Now get in. I don’t know what the Hell is going on, but we are leaving.”
“What about Clarisol?”
“Shit. I’ll deal with her. Just get in the driver’s seat.”
“I can’t drive!”
“These vehicles have an autopilot.”
“Then why the Hell was Felicia driving it instead?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t care. Get in!”
I looked across the open ground to the unconscious Felicia and Angela, and clenched my hands in helpless frustration. Then I heard the sound of running footsteps from the direction of the school, and turned to see Shirohime sprinting toward us. Behind her, the Humvee rocked as something climbed onto the roof, and I recognized it as the cat girl. She aimed her large handgun at Shirohime…and fired.
There was no scream. No crying out in pain. Just a faint look of surprise on Shirohime’s beautiful face before she stumbled and fell, and lay limply on the ground, her magnificent snow blonde hair splayed out around her in the shape of a fan, soaking the rain that fell upon her.
“…no….”
Again, a pair of strong hands grabbed me and this time they tossed me into driver’s seat.
“Cass! Snap out of it.”
“Mat, she’s been shot.”
“I know!” Tobias yelled in despair, then slammed the door shut.
From the backseat, I heard a weak voice, and realized it was Clarisol.
“Autodrive…authorization…Clarisol four seven three….”
“Requesting destination,” the vehicle stated.
“The dock,” Clarisol breathed out weakly. “Take us back to the dock….”
“Request accepted. Engaging autodrive.”
The engine powered up, the brakes released, and the vehicle shifted into gear. It began to move, and I grew frantic.
“Wait—wait! Where’s Mat? Where’s Mat?”
The headlights swept the ground as the Humvee executed a one hundred and eighty degree turn, illuminating the bodies of Angela and Felicia as it turned back onto the island road. The passenger door swung open and Tobias struggled to climb in. I reached over to grab him and pull him in when he suddenly jerked sharply, grew slack.
“Mat!”
Leaning over the center console, I held onto Tobias with desperate strength, grateful my Simulacrum body was stronger than I ever was. With a loud groan, I yanked him into the cabin, though I could do nothing about the door that continued to swing open.
“Mat—Mat!”
My body’s strength came in handy as I used it to sit Tobias up in the passenger seat, then half climbed over him to get him strapped in. Searching for a pulse, I pressed my fingertips to his neck but my own heart was pounding too hard for me to find his. I gave up and reached over him to the Humvee door swinging open. When it swung toward me, I grabbed the handle and yanked it shut.
I felt the first explosion as soon as I heard it. It came from the underside of the left rear quarter of the Humvee, and the vehicle bounced up into the air for a second before coming down hard. Inside the cabin, I rebounded off the dashboard with a pained cry then crashed into Tobias as the Humvee began twisting to the left, and I suspected the rear wheel had been blown off.
The second explosion wreaked havoc on the front left quarter of the armored vehicle, and I felt the Humvee tilt over despite its low center of gravity, helped along by the third blast that caught it amidships and kicked the two-and-a-half tonne machine onto its roof.
When the vehicle had settled, I found myself lying on my back on the ceiling with an unconscious Tobias strapped to his seat and hanging over me. In the rear of the cabin, Clarisol was also lying on the ceiling. She wasn’t moving and I wasn’t going to check on her condition. Instead, I started scrambling on hands and knees to the nearest door that was jammed when the Humvee’s frame warped on impact. A few kicks to the door later and I succeeded in getting it open. Crawling out of the cabin, I kept close to the overturned vehicle, and peered up the road toward the school.
I didn’t hear the bullet whistle through the air until after it struck my left shoulder. The ballistic energy spun me around like a top and I fell to the wet ground. The pain was worse than being struck by a shock-wand, making it difficult for me to breathe. With my right arm under me, I pushed myself up off the ground, then clutched the remains of my left shoulder as I struggled to rise to my feet. The second impact struck my right thigh, and I screamed in agony before collapsing again to the ground.
I couldn’t move. Perhaps because I was a Simulacrum, the pain faded after a while but my body grew numb.
“…Ghost…help me….”
“Princess, don’t be afraid. Everything will be all right.”
The sound of footsteps was almost lost in the falling rain and rumbling storm, but I could see a pair of booted legs step around my body and then stop before me.
I turned my head to look up at the girl with cat’s eyes and ears who was peering down at me. Having been crushed into the admin building’s entrance when Class Rep crashed into her with the second Humvee, the girl’s clothes were torn and bloody, her silver hair was a mess, and her left arm hung limply from the shoulder.
She’s a machine. A Simulacrum could never survive that.
“Why? Why are you doing this?” I asked her in a faltering voice, the numbness having spread to my throat. “Why…?”
“Because you have to die so that you can wake up.”
To my faint surprise, the girl’s left arm was still functional and she used it to sling her huge rifle across her back. Then she retrieved the handgun from its holster on her right thigh, and aimed the muzzle at my head.
“Goodbye, Ronin Kassius.” The girl hesitated before saying, “Mirai, I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Abruptly a familiar voice spoke once more into my ears. “Princess, close your eyes. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I shall be with you…always.”
“Ghost—?”
I can’t say I remember being shot.
I can’t say that I had an out-of-body experience afterwards.
All I can tell you now is that my mind flashed white for a moment before falling into perpetual darkness.
Since this nightmare began for me, I was always dancing in someone’s palm, dancing to someone’s tune, and when the darkness finally consumed me, I hoped I would find the peace that I believed I deserved.
Outro.
The dream…the nightmare…was over.
My eyes shot open and I sucked in a lungful of air that seemed to go on forever.
Then I broke into a violent cough that wracked my entire body.
At that moment, I realized a number of things, most importantly the fact that I was awake and very much alive. An incredible sense of relief washed through me, even as my body shook and trembled as I fought to clear my lungs and end the cough that grew painful the longer it persisted.
Being alive wasn’t the only truth I’d grasped onto.
As my mind grew clearer, I was aware of being suspended and breathing through an apparatus affixed to my face. I tasted something sweet in the air flowing through the apparatus into my lungs, and the coughing fit began to ease, soon fading into a painful memory. Having regained control of my body, I looked around me and observed I was in an organic cocoon with amber translucent skin, and through its walls I saw it gripped upright by spindly legs.
What the Hell is this?
Without warning the cocoon split along eight sides, peeling upwards like an upside down orange, and a collection of smooth silvery tentacles reached in to take a hold of me. Before I could offer any struggle, I felt something attach itself to the base of my skull, and my body grew limp as though disconnected from my will. I could still feel it, but I could do nothing to stop the tentacles from working me over.
I feared being molested as it became apparent to me that I was naked, but instead the tentacles gripped my limbs and limbered them up. I endured their ministrations for a minute or so until they suddenly released me, making way for something that resembled a cross between the trunk of an elephant and a squid. A cold black gel jetted from one of the nostril-like openings, pouring over me and hardening in seconds to form a second skin. The second nostril added a second helping of the gel, dark purplish in color, spraying it on in a pattern over my legs and arm. Soon it didn’t feel like skin anymore, but a bodysuit that I suspected was strong enough to stop a high caliber bullet.
With my attention captivated by the squid-trunk circling around me, layering more and more of the fast hardening gel, I almost failed to notice the spindly limbs that reached out for me from the surrounding darkness. They fit armored boots to my feet, and black gauntlets decorated with a golden pattern. A white skirt wrapped itself high around my waist, sheathing part of my midriff, while a short white sleeveless jacket went over my upper body.
Still in the grip of the tentacles, and with the hose apparatus attached to my face, I hung helplessly as the machinery finished clothing me, then attached something metallic to the skirt, and something mechanical over each of my shoulder blades, followed by a pair of dull thumps against my back. Afterwards, the squid-trunk retreated up and out of sight, and the limbs that had fitted my body with armor withdrew into the enveloping darkness. I heard a soft whirring like that of electric motors, and the apparatus feeding me air released my face and then it too vanished upwards.
I was breathing on my own, yet unable to move until released by whatever had clamped down on my neck. That happened a few moments later, and as I regained control over my body, I felt weightless while held in place within the confining darkness by a handful of tentacles gripping me tightly.
Thus I waited for something to happen, and sure enough something soon did.
My innards lurched unpleasantly, and the sensation of moving quickly washed through me. When it ended, the darkness before me was split apart by a vertical strand of light that grew into a rectangle, and then a square. As it widened, I realized that a doorway had opened in front of me, and the tentacles holding onto me carried me through that opening.
Surrounded by a billowing white fog that encompassed everything around me, the tentacles deposited me onto hard ground, and then quickly released me. I frantically turned to look behind me in time to see them disappear into an enormous rounded coffin, a sarcophagus fit for a pharaoh from ancient times, overshadowing me as it stood several meters high, its gunmetal grey skin burnished to perfection. The doors on its face closed seamlessly, and the dense white fog rushed through the air between the sarcophagus and I, obscuring it from sight. Inexplicably, I knew the giant device had departed to somewhere far away, yet equally so, I could feel its presence in the back of my mind. I understood that I had but to call it and it would come.
I breathed in long and deep, and tasted the rainwater on my lips, glimpsed the clouds overhead flash brightly from within, and listened to the thunder roll over the island. Protected by the bodysuit, I felt a dull chill in the air, my bare face moistened by the thick, snow-white fog and the strong rain that fell from the storm surrounding us. As the fog was pushed aside by the wind and rain, I saw dozens of hazy lights in the near distance, and the silhouette of a large building or two rising before me.
As the buildings became clearer to see, I felt my heart stop in sudden fear and confusion as I recognized it from my dream.
For an interminable moment, I studied the structure standing before me, and ran my gaze over the steps leading up to the building in the middle. A boxy armored vehicle had been driven up the steps into the entrance. Its lights were still on, but I couldn’t hear its engine.
I looked down to see a girl lying prone on the wet ground roughly halfway between the vehicle and I. The sight of her snow white hair splayed out about her elicited a feeling of dismay in my chest and soon I was striding toward her. At first my body refused to move properly and I almost fell to my knees. But then little by little my limbs began to move in harmony with each other and I walked toward the girl with growing confidence as my steps grew steadier.
Stopping beside the girl, I reached down to roll her onto her back, noticing that she was alive and breathing as though in a deep sleep, but otherwise perfectly still.
Her face provoked more feelings of dismay but this time I also felt a twinge of apprehension.
“…Anri….”
Straightening upright to look around me, I saw the bridge leading to nowhere and the mag-lev line that was shorn in mid-air. Turning back to the buildings, I remembered that this was the school. In doing so, I came to understand where I was standing.
This was the island that existed in my dream – the island called the Proving Grounds – and it was real.
“It wasn’t a dream…?”
Looking down at myself, I studied the outfit that I wore. Unlike my surroundings that evoked memories of experiences from within the dream, my clothes did not. Thus it was likely that I had never worn them before. But when I thought of the trouble I was having moving about, I began to fear that perhaps it wasn’t just my clothes that were unfamiliar but my body as well.
“…maybe I was in an accident…?”
I turned around slowly and my breath caught when I saw two girls lying unconscious a dozen or so meters away, their bodies several meters apart. After a few seconds of hesitation, I cautiously approached them in turn, putting a name to the faces that I saw.
“Angela…Felicia….”
I wondered why they were here. Hadn’t everything I’d experienced been nothing more than a very life-like dream? The possibility that I was still inside the dream began to gnaw at my composure that was already eroding away little by little as fear crept upon me.
“What if it was real…?”
I felt a throbbing in my skull, the onset of a headache, and pressed a hand to my temple. I didn’t notice it until later, but I was drifting away from the girls, away from the cul-de-sac that circled before face of the school buildings. I was headed dow
n a road that I intrinsically knew led southward as it followed the contour of the island coastline. Weaving an unsteady, ragged course down this road, I saw something in the darkness a couple of hundred feet away, and hurried toward it as though reeled in by the fresh memories beginning to play like a slideshow in my mind.
A large, boxy vehicle lay overturned in the middle of the road.
Two of the four doors were open, and when I peered inside the cabin I saw that it was empty.
Circling around the overturned vehicle, I came to a stop and stared at the body of a young girl supine on the ground, much of her forehead blown away by what I suspected was a large caliber weapon.
It is a habit for people to seek the eyes of another when looking at them. I was no different, but when I looked into the girl’s dead eyes, my body shivered in shock as I recognized her.
She was the girl in my dream, and it was through her body that I experienced the dream, and through her eyes that watched her die. Then I recalled that she wasn’t a girl, but a boy who had died and been resurrected in a body that wasn’t his own – a body that over the span of a day became that of a girl simply because someone found it amusing to see him suffer.
More and more memories from the dream began to flit across my mind’s eye.
Her name…his name…my name…was Ronin Kassius.
I swallowed as another shiver coursed through me.
In the dream, I was Ronin Kassius.
In the dream, I was this girl.
I stumbled away from the girl’s corpse, staggering down the road a few feet as anxiety morphed into a wave of nausea that had me gulping air as I clutched my chest and fought it down. Overwhelmed, I lost control of my unfamiliar body and my feet tripped over each other. Falling to the ground and landing on my hands and knees, my chest heaved as I dry wretched. The memories continued to spill through my mind, consuming my consciousness, and I slumped to the wet road on my belly.
Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One Page 40