Chapter 44 - Area D (1)

On another note, I wanted to apologize to Jonathan Kudo for all the trouble I had caused him. As expected, he never came. He hadn't seemed interested in other people, so that was no surprise. Everything seemed to have worked out, so he must have made it out without any trouble too.

I focused on recovering under a barrage of nagging from Samuel. My days consisted of eating and resting, confined to my hospital room. Tom and Heshy came to visit and had a great time reading the articles about me.

When I told them I was being banished somewhere far outside the core, they even envied me.

Well, Heshy did.

"Your skills are going to improve so much!"

He really was an enthusiastic guy, every time I saw him.

"That means you're going farther in, right? I'm so jealous. When do I get to go deeper?"

"... You're jealous?"

"You're in for a rough time."

Tom's reaction was a little more sensible.

"They say the farther you go, the more wrecked everything is. I hope you come back in one piece. It's not like you heal properly, either."

"Yeah. Well, I'll just have to try not to be a burden."

"Who are you going with?"

Heshy leaned forward, his eyes shining with excitement.

"They'll be really senior people, right? Who are they?"

* * *

As for who they were...

"Richard Green, Jason Tvein, Choi Ami, William Walker, Aki."

Yun reeled off the names, then clicked his tongue. His assessment was decidedly bored.

"Without Choi Ami, you'd suffocate to death."

"... Is it that bad?"

"Didn't Richard Green come to see you?"

Yun slipped his phone into his lab coat pocket. I shook my head.

"No, he didn't."

"He came to see me."

"Why?"

"To ask whether I'd really taught my recruit neither shooting nor driving. Isn't starting with the basics a basic requirement? How many years have you served, and you still haven't got the basics down? This is exactly why I've spent years advising the head of HR to make Choi Yun a training officer too. He went on bitching at length, then left."

I was useless. Just as Richard Green had said, I didn't even have the basics down.

Self-loathing washed over me in waves, and I clutched at my hair. He hadn't said a single thing that was wrong. Not only was I lacking even the basics, I was gathering creatures around me, with some unidentified stalker after me as well.

And my healing...

Aaargh.

I buried my head in my knees, and Ami patted my shoulder.

"It's okay! I'll cover for you as much as I can!"

Ami was the light and salt of life.

"You just focus on not dying, Hilde!"

"My apologies and thanks in advance..."

"Well. If you make it back alive, your skills will improve."

Yun offered this casual assessment as though it had nothing to do with him.

"And you don't look like you'd suffer much psychological damage even if something traumatic happened."

"... Thank you for the compliment."

"That's right. It might be better than you think."

Ami patted my back at my lifeless reply, then peered at me with her round eyes and spoke brightly.

"And Richard said you seemed to have guts after he read the article! His standards are so high that he almost never compliments anyone. That alone is impressive. He won't hate you that much."

"Oh! Really?"

"That's more like stroking your cheek before he slaps you."

Yun calmly crushed my hopes.

As I despaired, Ami scolded Yun beside me. "Yun! How could you crush Hilde's motivation before he's even started!" Unfazed, he took the soy milk out of her hand.

"It's important to face reality."

With that matter-of-fact remark, he stuck a straw into the soy milk, even though he wasn't particularly thirsty. Ami hit my training officer.

A spectacular battle broke out. An elite-level battle over soy milk, with the siblings' arms moving too fast for my eyes to follow.

From some distance away, I heard Samuel grumble, "Look at these fucking idiots."

Anyway, I was glad Ami would be there. Having even one person to rely on put me at ease.

Watching the battle to reclaim the soy milk in a daze, I steeled myself. Don't die. Stay sharp. Learn everything my seniors told me before I left.

I couldn't disgrace Yun any more than I already had.

"What should I do before I leave?"

At my muttered question, barely more than talking to myself, the siblings abruptly stopped their flurry of hand movements and turned to me. They answered in turn.

"I'll tell you all about the people going with you! Make sure you remember."

"Pack."

I did both.

* * *

"A sword?"

Richard Green was the seasoned-looking man who had been the first to question me in the auditorium.

"He taught him swordsmanship? Your brother has even less grounding in the fundamentals than I thought."

"Oh, come on. He said he was planning to teach him shooting in due course."

Ami deflected the criticism good-naturedly.

"He only just joined us. He's a fledgling who normally wouldn't have any reason to leave Area E."

"All the more reason to have started with the basics. He doesn't even have a license for self-driving vehicles. Do we recruit people without licenses these days? I'll have to have a word with the head of HR."

"He'll learn quickly. We can teach him later. Hilde's smart, too, so he'll pick it up in no time."

"Later? When is later? Do you intend to teach this fledgling after he comes back a corpse?"

"We'll arrive in fifteen minutes."

Aki spoke gruffly from the driver's seat, as though oblivious to the savage conversation.

"All clear up ahead so far."

I wanted to go home.

Not even a day had passed since we'd left the core, and I was desperately missing my quarters in the old building. My game console. My comfortable bed. The window that let in just the right amount of sunlight. I missed all of it. I even missed sword practice with Yun.

I'd take the guest room at Yun's house, where the commander-in-chief lived.

But going back wasn't an option. I had to stay outside indefinitely, until the commander-in-chief lifted my banishment order.

Day one of banishment.

I lowered my eyes and studied the floor of the military vehicle to hide my discomfort.

The rattling inside battered my ears. We were heading toward a safe point said to be somewhere near the center of Area D. We'd taken a train as far as Area E, but there were no tracks from Area D onward.

Hence Richard Green's anger at my not even having a license for self-driving vehicles.

I'd heard that he was quick to anger because his convictions were as unyielding as mithril, but still.

"Putting a fledgling like him with us and sending him into Area D in the first place. What an irrational order from Yehyeon."

"That's what I've been saying."

Tvein, who had been sitting beside Richard Green watching me get berated, joined the conversation.

He really never changed. The smooth face that shone even in his pitch-black combat uniform, the air of sleazy insolence about him. All of it, down to his consistent dislike of Yehyeon.

"His judgment gets worse by the day. Ami, you live with him. Can't you see it?"

"No, I can't."

"Why would he issue an order like this? He's never done anything like it before."

"Since when do we question the commander-in-chief's orders? If an order comes down, we follow it."

Ami brushed off Tvein's words, then responded curtly to Green's half-muttered question.

"What's the harm? You were curious about Hilde yourself, Richard."

I looked up reflexively and met the battle-hardened soldier's eyes. His arms were crossed, his gaze blazing with anger and conviction.

He studied me appraisingly, then broke the silence.

"Taleb."

"Yes, sir."

"Stay alert."

His voice carried anger at a world that failed to live up to his ideals.

"From Area D onward, the moment you let your mind wander is the moment you lose your life."

A war hero who had survived the First and Second Wars. A true soldier, always the first to rush to the front lines. Without question, one of the ten most capable of all the Black Badgers.

I held his gaze.

"Yes, sir. I'll remember that."

Richard watched me for a long time, then turned away.

Silence fell again, the engine rumbling through the windowless military vehicle. Relieved that the carpet bombing directed at me was over, I let out a small sigh.

Swallowing another sigh, I looked away and met Ami's eyes. Her round eyes curved into a gentle smile.

Wow. She was so dazzling I couldn't see her face.

My senior, pure light itself, slid over and looked up at me.

"Did you pack everything?"

I glanced down at the pack wedged between my legs and nodded.

"Yes. I checked three or four times."

"What have you got?"

That was her way of saying what anyone else would have barked as, "List it, rookie."

Silently grateful for that, I recited the contents of my pack.

"Ammunition, drinking water, emergency rations, fishing line, a signal mirror, a small saw, a magnifying glass for starting fires, body armor, a magnetic compass, a spectral compass, spare communicator batteries, and basic first-aid supplies."

"What first-aid supplies did you bring?"

Richard, who had kept his eyes on me, asked the question. I answered without hesitation.

"Blood injections, suturing tools, painkillers, carbohydrates, antibiotics, a scalpel, fluid, and a fluid injector."

"Have you learned how to use them?"

"Yes, sir."

"Morphine?"

I showed him the morphine I had stowed around my neck. He fell silent again. Apparently, I'd passed his test.

I instinctively sighed in relief, and Ami smiled.

"You've learned how to use the communicator and tactical beacon, right, Hilde?"

"Yes."

In fact, Yun had even tried to teach me how to repair the communicator and tactical beacon.

["Since you don't seem to be stupid."]

But it turned out I was stupid.

Yun had soon given up on teaching me how to repair communications equipment. Not only were we short on time, but my technical aptitude fell short of his expectations.

His standards for other people's intelligence were far too high. He insisted that things I couldn't even understand were the most basic of basics, urging me to hurry up and learn them so I could start applying them.

Eventually, though, he recognized my intellectual limitations and compromised.

Which meant I had simply memorized how to operate and repair the communications equipment by rote.

I still wasn't confident I could fix my communicator if it broke. I'd blindly memorized basic troubleshooting procedures, and even then, I hadn't managed to memorize every possible case. Yun didn't expect me to repair it properly either. How could I fix something when I didn't even understand how it worked?

He'd said that if I got separated from the others and my communicator went dead, I could at least try the methods I'd memorized.

I'd just have to avoid getting separated.

As I stared gloomily down at my pack, Ami spoke amiably.

"When we arrive, we'll unpack at the safe point."

"Ah, yes."

"Then we'll go on patrol—"

BOOM!

The vehicle overturned.

My vision spun. My seniors shouted. A heavy crash.

William Walker's and Ami's strong arms caught me. As I regained my sense of balance with their support, Richard Green roared,

"Time to hunt!"