Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One

by Albert Ruckholdt

  I had no sense of time, and I could barely see the road until my mind’s eye began to clear as the flood of memories turned into a trickle.

  Blinking slowly, I saw what I failed to notice before.

  A few feet away from me, a young woman cradled a tall teenage boy, his head and shoulders on her lap as she knelt on the road. She was watching me, and probably had been doing so the entire time I lay incapacitated. When our eyes met, a flash of recognition passing between her and I, and my hands clenched reflexively as anger flared through me, leaving me cold in its wake.

  I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, and then rose less than gracefully to my feet.

  She continued to watch me in silence while I stood over her, my hands repeatedly clenching as though itching to lash out at her.

  “You….” Anger seeped into my voice. “Why are you here?”

  The young woman frowned ever so slightly, yet she remained infuriatingly quiet.

  I swallowed and tasted the rain water in my mouth. “Why are you here, Clarisol?”

  “So you remember me? That’s a promising start.”

  The sound of her voice provoked another flash of anger underscored by the thunder that boomed over the island, and I took a menacing step toward her. “Why are you here? Wasn’t it all a dream?”

  “It was only a dream from your point of view,” she replied calmly.

  I frowned down at her. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you were dreaming, but she”—the woman looked at the corpse on the road behind me—“or rather I should say he was not.”

  “I was dreaming?”

  “Yes. That was the whole problem, Princess. You were dreaming and you wouldn’t wake up. In order for that to happen, Ronin Kassius had to die so that Mirai could open her eyes.”

  “Mirai?” The name reverberated within my conscious and subconscious, and more memories were loosened from the walls of my mind, fluttering freely like paper photographs falling to the floor. “You—you mean me?”

  The woman that I knew as Clarisol nodded shallowly at me. “Yes. You are Mirai.”

  Without warning, pain lanced through my skull. In sheer agony, I clutched my head and collapsed to my knees. It grew to an overwhelming intensity, forcing a scream out of me that seemed to last forever, and when it ended I found myself crawling frantically away from Clarisol and the unconscious boy on her lap.

  I scrambled along the ground and collided with the body of the dead girl, falling onto her in the process. Her blank, dead eyes looked into mine and I felt something break apart within my mind as a mountain of memories I didn’t know I possessed now crumbled away, becoming an avalanche that swept away my thoughts, leaving me in a state of catatonia that lasted for a long while after the last memory had come to rest like the final pebble tumbling to a stop in the aftermath of a landslide.

  “Mirai…?” A man’s voice called out to gently in my ears.

  At some point I had closed my eyes. I now opened them, and wearily pushed myself up off the dead body of the petite girl with large breasts.

  “Mirai…is that you?”

  Reaching out with a trembling hand, I closed the girl’s eyes.

  “Mirai…can you hear me?”

  Slowly, I knelt beside her, and placed her hands with care over her cold body.

  “Mirai, please answer me.”

  I swallowed a number of times, but my throat wouldn’t let my voice out, strangled by the emotions that built up within me, emotions that soon overwhelmed me, and spilled from my eyes as tears quickly lost in the rain.

  “Mirai…please answer me.”

  I cried for her, and I cried for me.

  Consumed by the despair filling my body, I bent over her and wailed into her chest, the sobs wracking my body and my soul. When my tears eventually ran dry, and when my emotions had burned away and nothing but embers remained, I straightened once more and gently brushed her short hair, using her bangs to hide the horrible wound inflicted into her skull. After a moment of hesitation, I leaned down and kissed her cold lips.

  Goodbye. Sleep well, my old self.

  The voice in my ears fell to a somber whisper. “Mirai…I am truly sorry. However, there was no other way.”

  My throat felt like it was being clamped by an iron vice, so I found it difficult to reply. “You lying piece of shit…you knew…you knew about everything….”

  “Aye, my Princess….”

  “And you lied to me. I trusted you. I believed in you.”

  “Aye….”

  “Was any of what you told me the truth? Was it…?”

  “A great deal was the truth. I told you all of the truths I was permitted to divulge. All the truths that served a purpose.”

  I struggled to swallow. “I despise you. I truly despise you, Ghost. One day, somehow, I will find a way to make you suffer. You have my word on that.”

  Wiping the tears and rain from my face, I breathed in slow and deeply for a long minute, and then rose heavily to my feet, the burden of everything I had experienced weighing me down despite the enormous strength of the body I now possessed.

  I turned and stepped up to Clarisol kneeling on the ground with the handsome boy I now recognized as Tobias resting on her lap. “Why…?”

  She took a deep breath, and her eyes watched me carefully as she tried to gauge my state of mind. After a short while, she cleared her throat. “I told you already. There was no other way to wake you up. At least, there was no other way she could think of to kick your mind out of its slumber.”

  I shook my head slowly, not understanding.

  For a few seconds, Clarisol pressed her lips into a thin bloodless line before continuing. “It was her idea to have you experience a traumatic event, to be subjected to a psychological trauma, and to use the shock of death to wake you up. Your death as Ronin Kassius was necessary to awaken you as Mirai. But more importantly, you had to want to wake up. You had to desire escaping the nightmare.”

  Anger tightened my jaw, my neck, and stiffened my body. I struggled to breathe, to free myself from the rigor enveloping me, and when I broke out of it, I took a long stride to Clarisol. Reaching down, I grabbed her by her throat, and pulled her up to her feet and then into the air. Tobias’s body fell off her lap and landed on the wet road with a moist sounding thump, and I felt a fleeting pang of regret that was burned away by the fury roaring through me.

  “Is that why you made me suffer?”

  Clarisol grabbed my arm frantically. “I told you—we had no choice!”

  “Whose idea was it?” I lifted her higher into the air. “I want a name!”

  I was choking her and yet I didn’t care. With my hand crushing her throat, the odds were good she wouldn’t be able to give me an answer, yet it didn’t bother me. I was relishing the sight of watching her suffer, until I sensed motion nearby and I dropped Clarisol in a hurry.

  As though stepping through a curtain of near perfect invisibility, a tall girl wearing casual clothes, thigh high boots, and a dark jumper tied around her waist emerged into view. A rifle that was as long as she was tall was slung diagonally across her back, and she wielded a large handgun at her side.

  “If you want a name,” she said, “then allow me to give you one.”

  My eyes widened at sight of her feline eyes and ears. “You—!”

  Somehow, I intrinsically knew that two very powerful weapons were holstered to my back. Thus there was no hesitation when I reached over my right shoulder for one of those weapons. In response, one of the two mechanical holsters fitted to the back of my short jacket quickly extended up and over my shoulder, delivering into my hand a railgun that resembled a pump action shotgun. I swung the railgun down in a smooth arc, thumbing the safety off while taking aim at the girl who had yet to point her handgun at me. I had the advantage of taking aim first, and could sense that the railgun had powered up sufficiently for me to take the shot.

  However, before I could pull the trigger two events took place,
both extraordinary in their own way, and one was far more dramatic than the other.

  The first was hearing the railgun relay its ready status into my mind with a voice that was cold, mechanical, and very precise.

  The second was observing visible colors shifted across the spectrum in an instant, feeling the air grow deathly still for a long heartbeat, before the ground underfoot trembled violently. Quite suddenly everything began to float upwards as though gravity had sharply been reversed. Somehow, I succeeded in keeping my aim on the girl, though it hardly mattered when the result of being caught between multiple opposing forces twisted my innards, inducing an unpleasant nausea coupled with disorientation that had me fighting down the urge to vomit. When some of those opposing forces lost the tug-of-war, the impression of being swept away at incredible speed overwhelmed my senses.

  The sudden phenomenon ended as quickly as it began.

  With gravity returning to normal, I landed on my feet then dropped into an alert crouch, and listened to the sound of bodies falling to the ground. Mat, Felicia, Angela, Shirohime, and Clarisol all landed hard, yet it was only the latter who sat up while everyone else failed to stir.

  A sudden loud crash nearby had me turning frantically in the direction of a sand cloud that billowed up into the air. The wind carried it for quite some distance, and when it settled I saw that the overturned Humvee had made the journey with us, its rooftop partially crushed when it landed wheels up as though dropped from a great height.

  Wondering what else would make an unexpected landing, I abruptly remembered the cat girl. Swiftly looking about, I caught sight of her standing rigidly a few meters away. At first she turned slightly toward me, but then her eyes and face became lifeless as though the power cord had been pulled on her. She teetered on her high-heeled boots before tipping forward under the weight of the rifle, and then crashed to the ground with a loud thud.

  Puzzled, I cautiously rose from my crouch while keeping the railgun trained on her, however she remained utterly still even after I walked up to her and kicked her a couple of times. With no explanation for why she had stopped moving, I regarded my travelling companions lying about loosely on the ground, met Clarisol’s confused eyes, and then turned to stare in awe at our surroundings.

  A dry wind blew where there had once been rain.

  Near silence filled the air where there had been thunder and lightning.

  A darkening afternoon sky greeted us from overhead, instead of a storm wracked night.

  The island we’d been standing on had become a sandy rocky desert that surrounded us as far as I could see.

  I swallowed twice to clear my throat. “Ghost? Can you hear me?”

  Turning in the direction that my body sensed to be east, I looked up at the school building rising from an orange, rocky plateau large enough to be referred to as a mesa. Oddly, I noticed there was no Humvee driven into the entrance of the admin building, and when I faced west, I saw there was no bridge or mag-lev station.

  “Ghost? Are you there?”

  Nothing but the sound of the desert wind reached my ears.

  “Great…what now…?”

  The old saying ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ felt appropriate as I bit my lower lip and wondered when my life would turn for the better.

  After thumbing the safety switch upward to engage it, I holstered the railgun, and then walked up to my travelling companions.

  I now understood that they weren’t dead but slumbering and would eventually wake up. Whatever the cat girl had shot them with I suspected it wouldn’t harm Tobias since he was Clarisol’s brother. Until they woke up, I wanted answers…and I knew just who to get them from.

  Striding up to Clarisol who was only now rising to her feet, I kicked her hard and sent her sprawling back to the ground.

  The strength I now possessed as Mirai was beginning to grow on me, as was the sense of power that came with it.

  Cracking my gloved knuckles, I grinned cruelly down at a wary Clarisol sitting on the sandy terrain.

  “Now then. I have questions and you have the answers.”

  I punched a fist loudly into an open palm.

  “So let’s get started.”

  – Fin Book One –

  Afterword.

  If you’ve made it this far, you have my sincere thanks.

  I can only hope that it was an enjoyable reading experience.

  If not, my sincere apologies.

  When writing, I have to remind myself that I’ll never make everyone happy. I can only hope and aim to satisfy as many readers as possible. That said, for those of you that enjoyed this story, please look forward to many more.

  From the outset, my intention has been to make the Gun Princess Royale series a light story. After all, it’s a science-fiction setting with an incredible premise. Boy dies. Boy becomes girl. Girl is bad-ass gunslinger. Girl fights to get original body back – though some may wonder why.

  What’s next for Mirai in Book Two?

  She’ll get to learn why she was chosen, who chose her, and who’s really been pulling the strings. She’ll get to test out her new body and face a troubling challenger with guns, bullets, and cordite on the brain. Expect the unexpected, which sounds like a paradox but is not. Although people will probably argue it is.

  For now, I leave you with this release of Book One.

  Please look forward to the next release in the Gun Princess Royale series.

  More news and updates can be found on the blog at http://www.gunprincessroyale.com when it opens up later this month.

  Cheers and best wishes to you all.

  Albert Ruckholdt

  March 2017