Heroes to Hunted

Through foliage, past waterfalls, and over watering holes, we walked for the next two days without rest, aside from a minimal amount of shuteye each night.

It was tough to sleep anyway. I was too anxious to leave myself vulnerable to an ambush. I skipped the whole "sleep with one eye open" by avoiding it as much as I could.

Despite my feelings, I hid my paranoia and unease from the others, especially since I was kept under the watchful vigil of either Shrug, Suda, or both. I didn't want them to form a worse impression of me than they already had.

I apologized to them, of course, but it wasn't easy to earn the trust of others. Especially when you'd threatened their lives and the lives of their friends.

Suda was particularly pissed at me, to put it lightly. Whenever I approached her, she hissed, shoved me aside, and eyed me with blatant distrust.

I overheard Mizuno trying to calm Suda's animosity. She tried explaining that I was doing what I had to with the information I had available. Suda agreed, but she still couldn't forgive me for harming one of her allies.

Shrug, while less openly hostile, too glared at me. His expression silently said, "I'll kill you if you try that again."

Mizuno, when I approached her to officially apologize, said she understood. She was aware and even respected that I attacked her when I thought she was a vampire. She said it meant "I wasn't afraid to take action." A trait she apparently always respected in her subordinates.

Since I couldn't make amends with the two others, I altered my priorities.

After we set up camp the second night, I checked on Takagi. Ever since  Kamida informed me he'd shut himself away from reality, and why, I worried about him.

I worried because I'd seen this before. He took his first life...brutally...and lost the life of someone dear to him, both on the same day. It's a story many others have suffered through. The story of a rookie soldier.

Some pulled through on their own, without the aid of others, but many lost themselves to wallow in their own misery. They would forget there was a present to return to since they obsessively lived in the past.

Given Takagi's condition, it looked like he was on the fast-track to being the latter.

So, while the group sat around a crackling campfire surrounded by a wall of pine trees, eating and exchanging banter, I reached out to Takagi's shoulder. I felt obligated to help him, to help all three of them however I could. Kamida, Agawa, and Takagi, all three risked their lives to preserve mine. Without any orders, no less!

"Hey, we need to talk." I wanted to pull Takagi back from the brink before it swallowed his consciousness whole.

He was unmoving and ignored me. Within his scarred and muck-covered hands was a shining, silver flask. From what Kamida told me, it belonged to the late doctor Nakamura.

He wouldn't respond to me, a classic move of one that walled themselves from the outside world. But he'd listen. Somewhere in his mind, I knew he'd hear what I said next.

"You know, I had a teacher in my platoon when I first enlisted. A former high school teacher..." I sighed; reminiscing such memories was unusual for me, but it was necessary.

"She was five years older than I and, maybe from her time as an instructor, she was a fantastic role model. She always listened to the gripes of new recruits and sweetly laughed the days away with us. She was someone we could always rely on when times were tough. Some soldiers, myself included, relied on her a little too much..." I took a deep breath to stem my emotions. Mentioning her opened old wounds, and the story salted them.

"She was my mentor. Someone I trusted to be there for me, to comfort my anguish when I failed to save or when I ended another life. I had grown dependent on her."

Her memory brought a bittersweet smile to my face. But that smile burned away with what came next. "On the day of the Eastern Collapse, when the death toll in Asia reached an all-time high, our battalion was redeployed to defend Kyoto from invasion."

Images of her played through my mind. Scenes of camaraderie, laughter…and sorrow when a sniper brained her during a routine patrol.

I swallowed my growing anxiety. The scene of her fragmented skull and splattered brain across the ground dug up a spring of old emotions. Emotions a series of deep breaths could narrowly hold back.

"Abruptly, during that mission... She died... The person I spent four months with while training and three with while fighting, the person I trusted to help me through my duties as a soldier, died within the span of a second."

I stood up, moved in front of Takagi, and kneeled to exchange eye contact. His were lifeless and empty; he wasn't looking at our world but at memories of what it once was.

I saw my old self within him. When she died, I locked myself up and became reckless...emotional. Those factors caused the deaths of many others. It became a spiral of self-blame and despair that only dragged me down deeper the more I dwelled on it.

Many comrades paid for my recklessness with their lives. Many civilians suffered because I couldn't "see" them; I was too focused on "saving" her. I was replaying the events of that day in my mind, always thinking of what I could've done better.

Those thoughts prevented me from improving myself in the present. I became a liability, a danger to myself and those around me. I couldn't let Takagi experience the same.

"Takagi," I grabbed both of his shoulders and exchanged eye contact, "I'm going to give you some terrible advice. You need to follow it to the letter." I took a deep breath and looked into Takagi's eyes, hoping to reach him. "Forget Nakamura. People die quickly, so you need to move on from them quickly."

It was a horrible thing to say; I knew that. But it was the only way for him to survive. In a life-or-death situation, which we were very much in, there was no room for grief. The only option was to keep trudging forward, step after step.

Upon hearing my words, Takagi's eyes flickered briefly with life, and his fingers twitched. It was a good sign, a sign he was listening, so I continued.

"You need to bury what you're feeling deep inside yourself and leave it as an issue to deal with another day, another year. Now isn't the time to mourn. You need to figh-"

Takagi's left fist balled up tightly as I spoke, and a sorrowful fury filled his hateful glare.

He stood up, raised his fist, and threw it straight for the center of my nose.