Life Hunter

"The enemy aerial forces were fortunately eliminated, but because of that, our stealth is out of the window. Please standby and wait for our signal, we"d want to demand support then." He said to the pilots and his request was accepted.

Meanwhile, Arimane locked his sight on his target. He was already laying down, ready to shoot. Tieria was crouching beside him, observing with her binoculars. Jin was simply sitting in a corner with a laptop on his knees this time

"Arimane, you have ten seconds" After a few minutes of wait, Jin suddenly raised his voice and transmitted Moria"s message and Arimane looked through his scope. He aimed at the head of the leader and breathed in. He held his breath and did some adjustments based on Tieria"s measurements.

He pressed the trigger a few seconds later and breathed out. The bullet flew all the way across the town and pierced the wall, creating a blatant hole in it. As expected, the bullet deviated and became stuck in the floor of the room.

The man inside the room obviously panicked and tried to leave the place but the huge caliber bullet lodged in the floor beeped before blasting apart the entire room.

Arimane didn"t even check if the target was dead and directly reloaded the rifle with cla.s.sic Eion bullets. He then orientated his scope toward the turrets around the HQ, those turrets were a double barrel type, perfect for aerial defense, but good for land defense as well.

There was no one piloting it usually, and its range was around two miles but could only detect bigger object automatically, that"s why it didn"t catch sight of the squad. Arima aimed at a two-feet-wide barrel and fired.

The bullet traveled the distance quickly. It entered the barrel and destroyed the turret from the inside. Arimane pulled the bolt and aimed at another one immediately and then continued to destroy every turret with a single bullet.

Until one of the turrets suddenly moved and narrowly escaped the bullet"s trajectory. That same turret revolved and pointed its cannons toward the trio.

Arimane clicked his tongue and stood up instantly "There"s always something to mess up everything and it was the last one" He said. Jin and Tieria were already ready to rush out but Arimane did something really unexpected.

He just took out his revolver and pointed it toward the front. Tieria"s eyes widened and before she could do anything, the turret fired. At almost the exact same time, Arimane fired two times and the same number of explosions occurred in midair. It didn"t stop there, the turret fired two more times and Arima four more times. Four more explosions occurred just above the town.

Just after that, Arimane was out of bullets, he did not reload since that thing was shooting two sh.e.l.ls every second. He just took one of Jin"s grenades and threw it.

At the same time, he changed the bullets of his gun. The grenade exploded in the air and deviated two more sh.e.l.ls that went crashing in the buildings around. When Arima finished reloading he started shooting once again.

And then, it only needed him to shoot four final bullets before the turret stopped firing. Arimane grinned and quickly grabbed his rifle, he didn"t have the time to lay down, he just sat down and put the stock of the sniper against his shoulder. He looked through the scope for a second then shot.

A terrorist who was behind the turret, controlling it, suddenly died by losing his head. Arimane breathed out and shot a second time, destroying the turret.

"…not possible" Jin commented and Tieria gaped "How can you shoot like that?! It wasn"t a dream, right? You just made clash the projectiles of two firearms, right?!"

Arimane sighed and put down the rifle. He shrugged at Jin"s words "It"s just because it fired explosive sh.e.l.ls and since that model was old and not really optimized, it fires slowly and can only fire twelve sh.e.l.ls before reloading"

"Don"t try to explain something like that with logic please" Tieria retorted with a darkened expression "Your common sense is already out of our control" She said "You don"t look like a newbie at all for your first time on the battlefield"

"Heck! He even is the pillar of this operation since the beginning" Jin followed her sentence.

Arimane smiled wryly since he didn"t know how to respond "I just have a very good reaction time and my body is a bit strange" He then found an explanation.

Jin raised an eyebrow and stared at Arimane with an expression that seemed to say "What the h.e.l.l is that kid talking about?". He scratched his head really hard "f.u.c.k it. First your nanomachines and body, now it"s your f.u.c.king mind that doesn"t make sense" He grunted and looked one last time at the screen of his laptop before closing it.

He stood up and stepped out of the room "Let"s go, Sir Moria already entered the building, with the panic from their leader"s death, the entire HQ will soon be cleaned up. Also, the mission now just changed a bit. We"ll gather at that HQ, our aerial support will bombard the base and extract us" Jin explained as they left the building.

"This mission is basically finished" He declared and Arimane nodded "But seriously… It was kinda messed up from the beginning to even now. Particularly when I was with you" Jin then added and Tieria could only agree with that point.

"…I"m sorry" Arimane only thought of that at the moment. Jin and Tieria looked at each other and started laughing.

A moment later, the trio arrived in front of the main gate of the HQ. They found many bodies lying on the ground with a single bullet hole on their foreheads. As expected from special forces, even with Eion bullets, they never waste a single shot.

A few minutes after Arimane"s group entered, the latter was already hugged by Tiria. They also had rejoined with Gano and Farro at the same place "Let me go…"

"We already searched the entire building, we"re ready to extract, Sir Moria is waiting for us on the roof" Over Arimane"s weak pleads, Tiria told them the situation.

"It"s cool then. I want to leave this place quickly" Jin said and headed directly for the closest stairs.

"Ah, there"s an elevator you know?" Tiria said but Jin had already closed the door leading to the staircase. She just shrugged and walked toward somewhere else "Follow me" She said and released Arima.

They arrived at the roof in a minute and Jin reached it in five minutes, making him the last one to arrive. When he learned that there was an elevator, he threw a tantrum saying that they could have told him by sending a message. In the end, he decompressed watching the town being burned by the Eion helicopters. The choppers then landed on the roof and everyone boarded them to leave.

"How was it?" When the entire town could be seen from the choppers, Moria asked Arimane. The latter pondered for a moment.

"I don"t know" He responded and wryly smiled "It"s my first battlefield, after all, I don"t have really anything to compare it to. Maybe I"ll understand more next time" He said and looked below "I certainly felt uncomfortable things when I killed but nothing really disturbed me"

Moria listened and looked at Arimane "Outsiders, ignorant people, would just consider the battlefield as something like a b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l that shouldn"t exist. But for the ones who fight to death in it, their view is different, they fight because they have the freedom and right to do so" Moria said and lit up a cigar.

"Someone once said: if you want to discover the humans" true nature, go on the battlefield" He quoted "It"s a really unfortunate thing, but, it"s only when a human kill another for the sake of something that he actually is free and accomplished"

"Nowadays, the populace considers killing as barbaric while wars cruel and stupid. They"re not wrong, but they"re just hypocritical. What they live with was built over spilled blood. And no matter what happens, you can be sure that humans will never stop killing each other. And most of the time, it"s with blood that something good begins and something bad ends" Moria made his little speech and smirked.

"Well, you have a strong mind. You"re young, but you still didn"t falter back there. The scariest thing on the battlefield is seeing others dying, whether it is by your hand or not" Moria continued and the other squad members listened with a smile.

"Also, don"t forget, for a soldier at least, death is relative. You don"t know what is it, and what is beyond. That"s why you should never be afraid of it. People say they"re scared because they don"t know how it would feel. They"re just cowards. We confront the unknown every day, if they"re scared of death, they just don"t want to feel pain" He declared.

"But of course, you should never lose the respect and value you hold for life. You always need to understand, at every moment, humans created the word "life" because they created the word "death""

Arimane silently listened and nodded when Moria was finished. He felt like he had learned something and wanted to think about it. And one thing that he did understand immediately was life"s value. How valuable was life when you put it in front of death?

Arimane arrived at a conclusion. When you"re alive, you have to keep living, no matter if you want to or not. Life was one day given to you and you should preserve it. But the day you face the end of the line, life becomes just a dream and death becomes relative. You reached death by living the way you wanted, that"s enough. One always needs to acknowledge that life and death come in a single pack.

If you want to live, wait for death. If you want to die, wait for life. The two lines will always connect to the endpoint. The act of killing is not cruel, at most, it"s a punishment to make you regret your life. The true cruelty is what people do while living.

The last question is: Do people think that torture is worse than death? No, they don"t think so. Why? Because one happens to be scarier than the other.

Those terrorists brought their end to themselves by spreading that thing scarier than death. Killing in itself is not morally wrong. Humans kill among themselves every day. What is wrong is why you kill. Arimane knew that as long as he could find a reason as to why he was robbing people of their lives, he could easily continue to press the trigger.

Tieria who was beside Arimane in the helicopter, looked at him and fell into deep thought, she didn"t know why, but she felt like she was sitting next to someone who experienced many hardships in his life. But she knew that he hadn"t. So, why? How could a twelve years old boy possess this kind of mind? That really fascinated her.

After a few hours in the choppers and then the plane. The squad came back to the orphanage and returned to their normal lives. But something had changed since that day.

Every month, the squad would be deployed to random places to do a mission at least once. a.s.sa.s.sination, sabotage, trading, search and destroy, even negotiation and tutoring small armies or special forces.

Even Moria was extremely perturbed by that, he could only see that his squad was being tested to the maximum. But he had never seen or heard about something like what they were experiencing. This kind of focus on a single squad like theirs was really strange.

That continued for a year, without any big problems. The missions were dangerous sometimes, but most of the time, the gravest injury a member could have was a bullet in the arm or something like that. It wasn"t a big deal for them.

Then, when Arimane turned thirteen years old, things started to change in his life, when he met someone who would become a figure deeply engraved on his heart.