Stone King
a Mecha Monogatari novel
— preview —
We knew our luck would run out eventually. With the Eschatos blocking every road they could find, it was only a matter of time before we were spotted. The terrain was rougher, the further east we went, the underbrush thicker. Forced to slow to a crawl, we consulted for a few minutes, and agreed to take a chance on following one of the rural roads for a few kilometers.
It was mid-morning by that point, and the clouds in the sky were parting, heading off to rain on someone else. After observing what we could see of our new route for a few minutes, Azusa directed me to pull out onto the road. I was starting to get the hang of the ATV, and on the asphalt, my confidence high, I quickly accelerated to almost eighty kilometers per hour.
And then slammed to a halt when a New Brazilian Republic army utility vehicle rounded a curve, not two hundred meters ahead. It was the enemy. The Eschatos.
As the ATV skidded to a halt, Azusa's voice was as calm as ever. “VLEGA Gaucho,” she said, identifying the vehicle.
I wondered how she could be so calm. “Shit!”
“Keep going,” Azusa ordered me, raising her voice just enough to be heard. “;Just drive past them. Go.”
In my heart I knew that it was a bad idea. I was certain the gig was up: we were screwed. But with a fatalistic shout of “Banzai!”, I hit the throttle.
I had to swerve to avoid a head-on collision with the Gaucho, which, to my perspective, was driving on the wrong side of the road. As we zipped past each other, I saw that the Gaucho held a trio of NBR soldiers, wearing fatigues, bulky armor vests, goggles, and helmets. Each had an assault rifle, either in hand, or close by. Typical infantry gear. Two rode in the front seat, the third stood in back, crewing a machine gun mounted to the top. The vehicle was unarmored—just a relatively mundane troop-mover.
For a moment as I steered the ATV around the turn, I thought that the NBR soldiers wouldn’t follow us, but even then I knew that to be pitifully optimistic. No, even then I knew it was far more likely that they would just turn that thing around and be on our ass in a heartbeat.
Azusa, turning to look back, confirmed my fears. “They have turned around. Go faster. We might outrun them.”
“I doubt it,” I said, but my voice was drowned out by the whine of the ATV's engine. I continued to accelerate, not daring to take my eyes off the road ahead to look down at the ATV’s speedometer. It probably read both ‘too fast’ and ‘not fast enough’.
We hit a straight stretch of road, and almost immediately, the Gaucho pulled alongside us to the left. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the soldiers shouting and waving their hands vertically, palms downward. I could not hear them, but I knew they were telling us to stop. The soldier in the back was now kneeling, having traded his assault rifle for a short pump-action shotgun with a bright orange slide and stock.
Less lethal munitions. The NBR soldiers meant to capture us, not kill us. That might have been a relief, had I not remembered what had happened at the roadblock the day before. I twisted the throttle to its maximum, and managed to pull ahead of the Gaucho. I could still feel it bearing down on me. I’m not stopping, I told myself. I’m not stopping, I will not stop, I refuse to—
Thump! Behind me, I heard the shotgun fire, and instantly, Azusa’s grip on me tightened, her fingernails digging into my stomach. Oh, shit, I thought, they shot her! “Azusa-san! Azusa-san!” I felt her grip around my waist loosen, and immediately I tried to grab her hand to keep her from falling off the ATV.
But I was wrong: she was not about to fall off. With her right hand, she slapped mine aside. Her grip with her left hand was still strong. Azusa shouted in my ear, “Let go! I am okay! Get on the other side of them! Driver's side! Get on the driver's side!”
A sharp right-handed turn was approaching. I clenched my teeth, and swerved left, and just as I did, the Gaucho's driver accelerated alongside us. The soldier in back readied his shotgun again. The one in the passenger's seat was shouting and gesturing at us. The driver took one hand off the steering wheel, and reached out towards me, his fingers almost close enough to brush my arm—
“Brake now,” Azusa said, extending her arm to so that the barrel of the 9mm service handgun she held was scant centimeters from the driver’s goggles. Before either I or the driver had a chance to react to this, Azusa started firing, pulling the trigger as fast as she could, emptying the handgun's magazine into the driver’s face.
I could not believe what I saw. It was unreal. I hit the brakes, leaning back against Azusa as much as I could to keep the ATV from flipping over forward. The Gaucho shot past us, and I could see the driver falling over onto the other soldier in the front seat, and the gunner in back falling as well, clutching his hip. As I watched, unbelieving, the Gaucho ran off the side of the road at the turn, turning sideways, flipped end over end, crushing the gunner underneath it, before coming to a stop on its side and sideways against a tall, meter-thick white oak with a sickening metal crunch that shook the oak.
The ATV skidded to a halt, its engine dying, and no sooner than it had Azusa leapt off the back and ran towards the wrecked Gaucho, tossing her empty magazine aside and reloading her pistol as she ran. She scarcely glanced at the crushed body of the gunner as she ran past—it was clear even to me, thirty meters away, that the gunner was dead, and the other two NBR soldiers would soon be joining him.
Reaching the side of the Gaucho, Azusa fired off four more shots in rapid succession into the Gaucho, then knelt and crawled in. She was out of my sight for only a second, and then reemerged holding a NBR field radio the size of a brick. She ran back to where I waited astride the ATV, my hands still clenching the brakes. “First gear,” she ordered me, tucking her pistol into the waistband of her jeans against her back.
I did not react. I was too stunned by what had just happened. Azusa never hesitated, never flinched, never batted an eye. That girl was hardcore, a stone-cold killer, a modern-day samurai in the truest sense of the word.
That was the precise moment I realized that I was in love with Kirihara Azusa.
“First gear,” Azusa repeated, slinging the field radio over her shoulder. Putting her hands against the back of the ATV to push it, she looked up at me, her gaze steady. “Saionji-kun, please, put it in first gear.”
I shook my head to try and clear it. I had to focus. We had to get out of there. We had crossed a line with this: once what we had done was discovered, the Eschatos would no longer be trying to capture us alive. “Yeah. Yeah, right. First gear.”
It took three tries to get the ATV running again, as I kept on missing the timing on the clutch or hitting the brakes instead. But the ATV finally revved to life. Azusa hopped on, and seconds later, we were gone.