Chapter 1. Part II

– II –

Each answer given by Clarisol had opened the door to roomfuls of more questions, but if I stepped inside to think about them then I would literally come to a stop. So as I hurried around the northern half of the circular school building, I chose to rationalize the questions to those immediately relevant to the current situation. That is to say, I limited myself to those questions that had an important bearing on the here and now.

As an example of a lesser question, there was the matter of the school buildings rising up from the sandy, rocky desert. After assuming it was a reproduction of the real Telos Academy, I chose not to wonder how it came to be here. Nor did I ask why this incongruous setting. A desert of all places? That was something I could ruminate over much later.

How we’d all arrived here was equally as unimportant – I put it down to advanced technology controlled by the Imperial Family – but it reminded me that Clarisol had said this was a game for her. Was she talking about the Empress of her people or someone else? Was she referring to a Gun Princess? Perhaps a Gun Queen. Both were daunting prospects.

I then pondered the game’s scope. If it was similar to Necropolis, then it stood to reason that there would be different stages. However, as I looked around at the school buildings and the desert they sat on, I had the impression this was the one and only stage. Something about the place had an air of finality to it, as though this was the setting for an important showdown. And yet why the inclusion of the zombies, their pained moans carried aloft by the wind? If I assumed facing the zombies was the first stage or warmup act, then I could also assume that my eventual opponent was watching from nearby, and thereby waiting for the opportunity to step in and join the fray.

That brought to mind the First Princess. On the way to the Island, Clarisol had said this was an important event for the three Princess, yet the First Princess had collapsed upon arrival here. Tobias had called her a machine and I recalled what the conspiracy theorists had said about the Gun Princesses being remotely operated bodies. If this was true, had the link between the Princess Meister and the Gun Princess been broken? I would need to question Clarisol when I returned.

Then there was the matter of Mirai, the unknown factor in all this.

I stopped to look down at myself – at Mirai’s body – for a few moments.

The outfit I wore was a black, glossy bodysuit that covered me from neck to toes, with a cropped open white jacket over shoulders. The flaring skirt, with metal sheeting that flexed just like fabric, was white on the outside and cherry colored on the inside. I counted eight ammunition magazines attached to the thin flexible metal armor. When I leaned to peer over the large twin mounds on my chest, I saw my feet clad in futuristic armored boots that were surprisingly comfortable. I’d noticed all of this before when I was inside the strange metal coffin – the Sarcophagus – being outfitted by its mechanical arms and tentacles. In truth, I didn’t need to look at myself again. I was simply responding to the urge to do so, as though confirming that nothing had changed since my emergence into the universe as Mirai.

With a sigh, I looked down at the railguns I held in both hands.

The weapons had a name, one that I recalled from memories Mirai possessed, undoubtedly given to her by her creators for I had never seen or operated weapons such as these. However, as I’d noticed earlier, I knew much more about them than just their name.

The railguns were known as Viper Vanquish Seven Six Two semi-automatic, smooth bore—as opposed to rifle bore—close-to-medium range handcannons. They were painted entirely in non-reflective matte black. They had no stock, and the handgrips extended from the rear of the casing, curving down as they did. Overall, they resembled pump action riot guns, and were twenty-eight inches long, with an under barrel supporting the main barrel, and an angular black casing wrapped around them both. The safety was a sliding switch at the top of the curved handgrip that I could easily reach with my thumb. To fire I would slide it down; to the lock the weapon I would slide it up. In essence it was like cocking an old style revolver.

The rectangular ammunition magazine was inserted into the magazine well situated just aft of the middle, and a release lever was located on either side of the handcannons. The guns were ambidextrous, and the ejection ports were covered because they were configured to fire caseless ammunition via an effect-field accelerator that simulated electro-magnetic induction. Thus, the Vipers could be described as railguns that were waterproof, jam proof, and able to operate in a vacuum.

The casing and accelerator coil had a lifespan of twelve thousand rounds before needing to be replaced due to thermal warping – a significant improvement on the previous Viper Vantage model. Ammunition was fired at thirty-three hundred feet per second, at a rate of zero point seven seconds per round. Being caseless, more ammunition could fit inside each magazine of which I had ten. Two magazines were loaded in the railguns. Eight more were attached to the metal sheeting of my skirt. The four casings on the right of the skirt were marked with blue strips to indicated high penetration rounds; those on the left had red strips to identify them as explosive tipped caseless rounds. At thirty rounds per magazine, I carried a total three hundred rounds – minus the one warning shot I’d fired between Felicia and Angela.

In my hands, the Vipers felt too light for weapons so massive, but I attributed that as a side effect of Mirai’s enormous strength. I was intuitively aware that a normal person would require two hands to operate a single Viper. The recoil alone would dislocate their shoulder so this was definitely a weapon fit for a girl like Mirai or another Gun Princess, and the thought had me sweeping my gaze about my surroundings wondering from where she might be watching. Again, I could only go by Clarisol’s words, but I was slowly becoming convinced that my opponent was another Gun Princess. Why else would I be here but to face off against a suitable opponent?

Yet, I puzzled over why Clarisol, Tobias, and the girls had also made the journey here.

I noticed with a start that I’d come to a stop on a small rocky hill overlooking the dry terrain to the north of the school building.

Several moments went by before I came to fully understand what I was seeing and a soft gasp escaped my lips.

A hundred or so feet ahead of me to the north stood a familiar structure of permaglass and Kronosteel – the high school clubroom building. However, it wasn’t the building that stole my breath, but what I could see through its transparent walls.

The saying ‘wall-to-wall’ was an apt description. Sardines in a can was also quite fitting.

Unfortunately the building wasn’t brimming with fish.

It was packed to bursting with zombies.

I shook my head slowly, and reminded myself of what Ghost had told me back at the school. “No, not zombies. Simulacra. They’re Simulacra….” I broke into a frown. “Ghost…?”

With so much to deal with, I’d forgotten about the Artificial Awareness that Tobias had called an Overlord.

“Ghost? Are you there?” I narrowed my eyes subconsciously as I strained to catch even a whisper of the obnoxious voice in my ears. “Cass to Ghost? Come in, Ghost. We have a situation.” Nothing but silence replied to me. “Shit…buggered off again. How bloody unreliable.”

I didn’t know if it was playing possum or hiding, but I had noticed during the day that Ghost was prone to vanishing for long periods of time, as though stepping out of my head and walking away to run errands before coming back a while later to resume tormenting me with its lies. With that in mind, perhaps it was better for it not to be around. I couldn’t bring myself to trust anything it said anymore. Oddly, I realized that made me feel alone and my heart ached palpably. But I also felt the stirrings of a very real fear of being abandoned, and I had to take several deep breaths to avoid falling into a funk. Caving into loneliness and despair was something I couldn’t afford. True, I didn’t trust Ghost anymore, but I worried that considering my newness to Mirai’s body, it wouldn’t have hurt having him around to guide me through the opening scenes of the second act. At the least, he was someone I could talk to.

I felt something run down my right cheek, and was surprised to realize it was a single tear.

Reaching up, I wiped it away with the back of my gauntleted right hand.

“So Mirai hasn’t run out of tears….”

I didn’t know why, but being reminded that I could still cry somehow made me feel a little better – a little more human.

“Why don’t we save the tears for later? It’s too early to give up….”

Inhaling deeply a few times, I stared up at the enormous clubroom building.

“Our fight is just beginning.”

I shook my head firmly.

“And I’m not alone….”

Though my relationship with them had irrevocably changed, and I could never view them as I had before, having them around was keeping me off the slippery slope of despair. If I’d been alone on this desert, I was certain I’d have collapsed under the cumulative weight of everything that had thus far happened to me. Though my body had changed, mentally I wasn’t a strong person, and the beating my mind and ego had taken had left me frail and weak, so I acknowledged that I needed their support. I needed their companionship to survive this situation, because to be alone right now would be unbearable to me.

Yet my tears continued to fall, and after a while I sat down on the rocky ground.

Bowing over as I bent my legs, I crossed my arms atop my knees and then buried my face into them. With the railguns gripped tightly in my hands, I waited for my tears to subside, aware that precious minutes were ticking by. But I couldn’t return to the others yet. I couldn’t afford to show them this weakness, not after the bravado I’d displayed before them not long ago.

I simply refused to show them or Clarisol my tears.

“Cass…?”

I froze, then jerked upright and turned from where I sat to look behind me.

Tobias stood a several feet away and downhill, carrying a large handgun that I recognized as belonging to the First Princess. His breathing was a little harried and his face wore concern, but at sight of mine his expression deepened into outright worry and he started walking hastily toward me.

“Don’t,” I snapped at him, and then rose to my feet as I turned away from him. “Don’t come closer.”

“Cass—”

“What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here. You need to go back.”

“You were gone for so long that I came to find you. Why else would I be here?” He sounded closer, obviously not heeding my advice to keep his distance. “Cass, it’s just the two of us here.”

I straightened my back and continued to show him my back. “So what?”

“Talk to me.”

“Why? What could I possibly say to you?”

“You can tell me how you feel. How about that?”

“How I feel?” Reluctantly I peered at him over my right shoulder. “How does it make you feel seeing me like this?”

“It hurts.”

I flinched a little, and turned a little more toward him. “Why…?”

“Because I want to help you, and I don’t know how.”

It was true that he had never lied to me, only held back on the truth. Now that I understood a little more of his situation, I could also appreciate why he’d hidden it from me, and I realized that it must have been hard for him to do so. To not lie and yet not tell the truth either. It must have weighed heavily on him.

I also realized something else.

Tobias was popular with the girls yet he’d never accepted any of the confessions they’d expressed toward him. His friendship with the effeminate me had also sparked rumors that he wasn’t interested in girls, but I knew that wasn’t true. Tobias was definitely heterosexual, yet I felt understood why he’d held himself back from accepting the affection of the girls that confessed to him. Perhaps a little of that was influenced by our friendship, but I believed it had more to do with his origins.

Tobias couldn’t open up to them with so much to hide.

He may have been as alone as I was, living in a world that wasn’t his home, a universe that was alien to him, surrounded by people that treated him like family yet weren’t his family. I also realized that if I had been born a girl, he and I would never have formed a close friendship. He would have rejected me as he had other girls, and we would never have been more than classmates. Knowing this made my chest tighten a little painfully at the emptiness that bloomed within.

“My family did this to you,” Tobias said softly yet I heard him above the sound of the blowing desert wind, and I watched him slowly shake his head. “My family and the Imperial family are responsible for all this. And I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Even now I’m helpless. I don’t know how to help you.” He looked down at the gun in his right hand, and shook his head again. “This is all so pointless. Nothing more than a grudge match with you caught up in it. Nothing more than my family butting heads with House Aventisse—challenging each other stupidly.”

I turned a little more and frowned faintly. “Mat, what do you mean?”

He chose not to look at me, but stared up at the darkening sky overhead. “House Novis lost its rank of Alus because it defied the Imperial family. Ever since then, my family has been trying to regain its status, but it’s doing so in ways that just make things harder between us. Instead of patching things up with the Empress, they’re making things worse. They tried using the Gun Princess Royale, and when that failed they tried to create a new breed of Simulacra. They created Mirai, they involved you. They’re upending people’s lives without any regard. It’s all so stupid. It’s all so wrong.”

He lowered his gaze and met mine.

“And now they took away my best friend.”

A pang lanced through me, and turned to face him properly. “Mat, they haven’t taken me away.”

That was true. My relationship with him and the girls had changed, but I still saw myself as his friend. He’d angered me, and he’d wronged me, yet I wasn’t ready to give up on our friendship.

“Mat, I’m still your friend. That hasn’t changed. I don’t think that will ever change….”

Maybe my feelings and thoughts were being influenced by Mirai’s body, but Tobias’s friendship felt more important to me than it had before. It should have bothered since I was a boy inside a girl, yet it didn’t – at least not to the degree it once may have.

For a long while, he stood still and watched me, his eyes never leaving my face. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “Is it really still you?”

I nodded and shrugged a shoulder hoping to appear casual, but then I added a faint smile. “Yeah, Mat. It’s still me.”

A conflict of emotions broke out across his face, and for a while Tobias looked older to me than his sixteen years of age. But then the war of feelings ended and he showed me a smile he’d never offered me before, and my both heart and chest tightened for a moment.

“Yeah, it’s still you.” He took a breath and added barely audibly, “Of course it’s still you….”

I turned my face away for heartbeat or two. Looking down at him again I remarked, “So you took my advice.”

“Huh?”

“You got yourself a gun.”

Tobias regarded the weapon in his right hand. After some hesitation, he climbed the rest of the way up to the top of rock hill. Standing before me, I noticed I was now taller than him by a few centimeters, though it was probably because my boots added an inch or two to my height. However, having spent so long looking up at him, it felt a little strange to be looking down at him instead. It was yet another reminder that things had changed between us.

Tobias faltered briefly before holding the gun out to me. “You should have it.”

“What? Why?”

“It would be more useful in your hands than in mine.”

I wet my lips, tasting sand on them, and my tears as well. Undoubtedly, he’d noticed I’d been crying yet he made no mention of my tears other than to look worried for me. In a way, I was grateful that he didn’t resort to well-worn platitudes to reassure me or make me feel better, but it confused my feelings to know that in some respects he was treating me like a girl – a girl he felt obligated to protect because he believed his family had wronged me, but a girl nonetheless.

Why wouldn’t he treat me differently? I thought to myself, and then asked, Is it wrong for him to do so?

I distracted myself by looking down at the firearm he offered me.

It was a Syn Hauser, forty caliber handgun with dual barrels. An oversized magazine extended out from the base of the handgrip and a second shorter magazine was attached to the lower barrel just ahead of the trigger guard. In effect, it was like having two guns combined into one frame and sharing the trigger.

I swallowed to clear my throat. “Mat, you told Class Rep that she was in for a surprise.”

He looked puzzled. “I did? When?”

“Back in the classroom—back when I told you and the girls what had happened to me. Back when things fell apart between us.” I narrowed my eyes slightly at him. “What did you mean by that?”

A briefly pained expression swept across his face, but then he surprised me by snorting softly. “My family—I mean my adopted family—had me practice martial arts for years. They figured it would help me grow as a person as well as help me to protect myself.”

I watched him chuckle a little before he reached up and offered me the gun again.

“But they have an aversion to firearms,” he added, “so they never taught me how to use one.”

I grimaced at him. “Are you sure that’s all it was?”

“Huh?”

Tobias was a terrible shot. I knew this from watching his dismal attempts to play first person shooters at the gaming arcades. He really had no innate talent for shooting a gun. The concept and practice of point-and-shoot did not apply to him. In contrast, I excelled at those games while failing at all the other games he succeeded at.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

It further emphasized how mismatched we were.

Was it one of the reasons why we became close friends?

I considered the Syn Hauser in his hands. Was it more dangerous to leave him with it?

After deliberating for a handful of heartbeats, I shook my head. Tobias was a bad shot, but at point blank range even he couldn’t miss. “No, you keep it. It makes me feel better knowing that you have something to shoot with.” I swallowed and then somberly added, “Besides, there’s so many of them I doubt you’d miss hitting at least one of them.”

Tobias frowned and tipped his head a few degrees.

I answered the question written on his face by pointing the Viper in my left hand at the clubroom building. “Take a look.”

He did so, and I watched shock turn his face as pale as writing paper.

“Sweet Jeezes…,” he whispered though I almost failed to hear it as the wind picked up and the moaning coming from the building grew louder.

I shook my head at him in disbelief. “Honestly, I thought you would have noticed by now. They’ve been making more noise since I arrived.”

He swallowed visibly, his attention locked on the building replete with zombie Simulacra. “Cut me a break. I had other things on my mind….”

“Are you saying you only have eyes for me?”

“Well, you are pretty easy on the eyes.”

“Is that all? Just easy” I frowned to myself as I realized something momentous. “Come to think of it…I have no idea what I look like.”

My admission surprised him enough to distract him away from the view of the clubroom building. “Wait a minute. You don’t know what you look like?”

I shook my head, feeling worry prick at me. “No, I don’t.”

Tobias grew aghast which worried me further even after he recovered his composure. Giving the building full of zombies a hasty look, he turned back to me and declared, “We need to find you a mirror.”

– III –

“What the Hell is this?”

I held the Humvee’s side-view mirror in both hands up to my face and stared at my reflection.

“Why the Hell do I look like Mercy Haddaway?”

After hurrying back to the rendezvous point in front of the school’s admin building, Tobias had hauled me over to the overturned Humvee and then torn free one of the side-view mirrors for me to use. His haste had me both confused and worried, especially when he strode past Clarisol and the girls without so much as a sidelong look as he made tracks toward the Humvee.

Now that I was seeing my face for the first time, I understood why.

On closer inspection, I noticed that I didn’t exactly resemble the girl that I considered the most beautiful in the universe. Rather, I bore a sisterly resemblance to her that was uncanny. I wouldn’t be surprised if her legion of fans confused me for her.

“This is just wonderful…,” I muttered when Tobias responded with an embarrassed shrug and pointed at Clarisol.

With the mirror in hand, I walked back to the young woman with dark blonde hair who busy running through the inventory of weapons and munitions recovered from the Humvee. I observed it was quite the arsenal that she was crouched before, and something I would ask her about shortly, but first I had my appearance to discuss.

Clarisol straightened upright at my approach. “So, you finally noticed.”

“Why do I look like Mercy?”

“You resemble her but you are not her twin.”

“I’m know that! I’m one of her biggest fans so I know what she looks like.”

Clarisol pursed her lips into a pout that she held for several moments. “I happen to be one of her biggest fans as well.”

“You can’t be one of her fans.”

Clarisol’s lips parted into a sneer. “And why not?”

“Because you’re a girl.”

“So are you,” she pointed out and her sneer became wicked.

“Thank you for reminding me.” Dropping the mirror to the desert ground, I reached up for the right railgun, delivered smoothly to my hand by the mechanical holster. Swinging it down in a fluid arc, I aimed the weapon at Clarisol’s head. “And that brings me to my next question. Answer correctly and you get to keep your head.”

Standing around me, Felicia, Angela, and Tobias held up their hands, each of them pleading with me to calm down. However, they didn’t concern me nearly as much as the fact that Class Rep was unaccounted for. I’d noticed she wasn’t around when Tobias and I returned to the front of the school, and being distracted by my appearance I’d yet to ask about her. However, that wasn’t what I wanted to ask Clarisol.

“When this is over, do I get my body back?”

Clarisol had been watching me calmly but I’d noticed she was holding her breath since I unholstered the Viper.

“Will I get my body back?” I asked again, inwardly surprised by how calm I sounded.

Clarisol swallowed quietly but visibly. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Because whether you get your body back or not isn’t up to me.” She took a quick breath. “It will depend on you. On whether you choose to co-operate. On whether you participate in the Gun Princess Royale. On whether you win. On whether you meet my family’s expectations…and those of the Empress.”

“Ghost said, that if I fought for House Novis they would return my body to me.” Truthfully, I didn’t remember if that was exactly what the annoying bastard had told me, but I doubted Clarisol knew either.

“Ghost?”

She flicked a questioning glance at Tobias who replied, “She means the Overlord in the Simulacrum’s head—in that copy of Cass’s body.”

“It’s in Mirai’s head, too,” I told him. “Before we all came here, it spoke to me after I emerged from the Sarcophagus.”

“And you call it Ghost?” she asked me. “Well, that’s no regular Overlord. It’s a Maestro Class Artificial Awareness.”

“Maestro Class…?” Tobias sounded strangled and for a moment he swayed on his feet. “Oh my gods. Are you serious? Use of a Maestro Class is prohibited by order of the Imperial Family!”

“Why is that?” I asked him. I didn’t need to take my eyes off Clarisol to see him. Mirai’s field-of-vision was incredibly wide so I had a clear view of Tobias without having to shift my gaze away from the young woman.

Either he didn’t hear me or he was too preoccupied with tumultuous thoughts for him to reply. Instead, Tobias took a long step toward Clarisol. “You put a banned intelligence into her head?”

“Not in her head,” Clarisol answered tautly. “It’s in Mirai’s Sarcophagus. It only remotes into her head.” She pointed at me. “Do you think a brain that small could contain a Maestro Class?”

Remotes in, I frowned inwardly while ignoring her taunt about my brain. “Is that why it comes and goes?”

Unexpectedly, Clarisol promptly looked as though she’d swallowed something unpleasant upon hearing me. “So the telemetry data was telling the truth. Not good. Not good at all….”

“What’s not good?” I was starting to lose my calm. “Don’t make me ask you twice.”

Folding her arms almost absently, Clarisol focused her attention on me. “The Maestro is your combat support and then some. If it’s not around to back you up twenty-four seven, then it’s not much use.”

“So why is he doing that? Why is he jumping in and out of my head?”

“We don’t know. And it’s not telling us why either. Rather, we don’t know if we can believe what it’s telling us.”

I snorted and then laughed bitterly. “So he lies to you as well. That’s poetic justice.” Clarisol said nothing so I continued after a breath. “If Ghost lied to me, then what’s the truth? If I fight for House Novis, will you return my body to me?”

“That’s more or less what I told you already,” she stated flatly. “Co-operate and it will be returned to you.”

“Do I get my body back now?”

The proverbial penny appeared to drop for her and she made a silent ‘oh’ shape with her lips before replying, “No.”

I started squeezing the trigger. “That was the wrong answer.”

“Cass—wait! Don’t shoot her!” Tobias addressed Clarisol in a hurry. “Why can’t she have her body back?”

Under different circumstances, Clarisol may have rolled her eyes. However, with a gun pointed at her head, she wasn’t being so flippant. “I told you before. His body is in a stasis tank pending regeneration.”

“Then why aren’t we regenerating it?” Tobias sounded confused and annoyed. “What are we waiting for—?”

“We don’t have it.”

Upon hearing that you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Tobias sounded incredulous. “We—we don’t have it?”

She looked annoyed with him. “That’s what I said. We don’t have it.”

Tobias took a step closer to his sister. “That’s not what you said back in the car. That’s not what you told me on the boat.”

“We don’t have his body now,” Clarisol clarified. “We had his body, but it was taken from our facility here on Teloria after his consciousness was mapped into Mirai’s mind.”

“Taken by whom?” Tobias asked.

“Who do you think?” Clarisol replied. “Who are we at odds with?”

“The Empress….”

“Correct. Though I said ‘taken’, it was more like we had to hand it over.”

A look of dismay settled on his face, and Tobias stepped back, giving me the opportunity to cut in.

“Why?” I asked Clarisol as I edged toward her. “Why hand my body over to the Imperial family? What could they possibly want with my body?”

“Because it’s part of the price of keeping Mirai. In exchange for Mirai, we handed over your body. It’s part of the price your sister had to pay for standing up to the Empress.”

Slowly, I lowered the railgun down to my side. “Well, she made one Hell of a one-sided deal. She threatens to destroy all of her research, but she gives away my body instead? I can tell she really values me by choosing Mirai over me.”

“You don’t understand. At this point, Mirai is more valuable than you are.”

“Say that again, and I will shoot you.”

“Your body is barely even alive. It’ll take months to regenerate it. What do you expect to do until then? At least now you’re alive and breathing. You’re not comatose inside a stasis tank.”

The railgun trembled in my hand. The urge to bring it up and shoot her frayed at my composure, what little was left of it. “So how do I get my body back? How do I go back to being a guy? What do I need to do?”

Clarisol narrowed her eyes. “Is that how you saw yourself? Is that what you want to go back to? That little femboi you used to be?”

“Don’t test me, bitch,” I warned her. “At least it was my body. It belonged to me!”

Clarisol’s eyes narrowed further into thin slits. “Don’t you want more?”

A new voice cut in between us, slicing smoothly through the air though it sounded strained. “Is this a bad time?”

Anri Shirohime’s breathing was labored as she approached us from the south, but it wasn’t the reason why I flicked a glance her way to see her dragging a heavily loaded bag along the desert floor.

“A little help please,” she asked sarcastically.

I glanced at her because I didn’t trust her. During the time I held a gun pointed at Clarisol, I’d feared Shirohime was out there somewhere out of sight, hiding out with a gun aimed at me from a distance.

Turning on his heels, Tobias hurried over to her and then picked up one of the bag’s straps. Lifting it off the ground, he and Shirohime carried it over to the rest of the munitions laid out on the desert rock. “Where did you get this? And where were you?” he demanded. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous out there?”

“I was scouting the middle school side of the academy.” She paused to catch her breath. “There’s a clubroom building to the south and its packed with zombies.”

“That’s what I mean,” he reiterated. “Dangerous. You shouldn’t be out there on your own.”

I gave Shirohime a look that went beyond a cursory glance, and noticed she was packing heat. She had two large guns resembling snub nosed shotguns holstered to her thighs, and I glimpsed an automatic rifle strapped across her back. “Where did you get those?”

She threw me a cold look. “These I brought with me from the stash in the upside-down Humvee.” Waving at the bag she’d dragged along with her, she said, “This I picked up from the second Humvee that made the trip with us. And before you ask, the answer is no, it’s not working.”

“Is there more where this came from?” Clarisol inquired.

“This is just what I could load up and carry with me,” Shirohime answered then cocked her head at the young woman. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask but aren’t you being a bit too casual about all this.”

“What do you mean?” Clarisol sounded slightly ticked off.

Shirohime met the woman’s stare with a cold one of her own. “I don’t believe you’re taking this situation seriously.”

Pointing at the weapons and munitions, Clarisol snapped, “Would I have arranged for all this if I wasn’t?”

“Then is this scenario what you expected or not?” Shirohime asked, and I noticed her hands floating over the handguns holstered at her thighs.

Tobias had unzipped the large canvas bag he’d helped carry and was looking inside. “Jezzes, Clarisol. Were you planning for a war?” He threw his sister a suspicious look. “Just what were you expecting?”

“Necropolis,” she answered. “That’s what I was expecting. And I was right. We have the zombies. We have the school setting. And we have our protagonist.”

Shirohime raised her chin at Clarisol. “And you have all of us. Was that part of the plan?”

Clarisol turned her body and faced Class Rep, planting her hands on her hips in the process. “I didn’t know how many of us would be pulled into her game. I believed it would just be Mirai and I. I didn’t even know if she would allow us to bring this much ammo with us.”

“Her game?” I queried. “Who are you talking about? The Empress?”

“No. Her daughter. The First Imperial Princess.”

“Huh?” Tobias gasped. “Why would this be a game for her?”

Clarisol took a very deep breath that she released as a heavy sigh. “Because she’s the reigning Gun Queen of Ar Telica city.”

“WHAT?” Tobias shouted while Shirohime grew as pale as her snow white hair, and I stood dumbfounded and at a loss for words.

I need to point out that during all this, Angela and Felicia had been quietly stocking up on rifles and ammunition, strapping and holstering the weaponry to their black clad dominatrix outfits, and filling small backpacks with munitions. However, they too paused in surprise after hearing Clarisol’s revelation.

Clarisol looked chagrined, which I considered an odd reaction. Hands still on hips, she released a heavy sigh. “It turns out the First Imperial Princess has been living in this universe for a while now. I learnt this last week.”

“What is this? An exchange program?” I asked in a disgruntled tone.

“Hardly,” Clarisol replied. “There is no exchange between your side and mine. It’s all one sided. But I will declare that I was quite stunned to learn that she’s attending Telos Academy.”

I surprised myself by stepping close to Clarisol and grabbing her by her duster’s lapel. “Who is she? What’s her name? What class is she in?”

“I—I don’t know!” Clarisol yelled back. “All they told me is that she’s a student. But I don’t know whom.”

I released her as I pushed her away, and she stumbled back several steps. “Is her name, Tabitha? Tabitha Hexen?”

Clarisol glowered at me as she straightened out her clothes. “If you’re referring to that minx from last Friday’s trial, I simply don’t know if it’s her. I checked the school records, and Tabitha Hexen is not a student there. If the Imperial Princess is really a student, then she may have been attending for a while. There were no mysterious transfers into the school over the past three years. All the school records we analyzed looked perfect. So I have no idea under what identity the Imperial Princess is living under However, as for that girl who stepped into the trial without warning—she is persona non grata!”

“What happened to her?” I demanded. “Did she make it out safely?”

Clarisol looked incensed. “She got away before we could lock a translocation field on her!”

“She got away?” I stood silent and confused for a short while. “So who is Tabitha Hexen?”

“I told you already—I don’t know! I don’t have all the answers!” Clarisol was growing flustered, losing her composure by the breath as she was hammered on all sides. “Cut me some slack.”

“Not bloody happening,” I snapped angrily back at her, my right hand flexing around the Viper’s handgrip.

Tobias raised his hands to both Clarisol and I. “Calm down. Fighting between us isn’t going to help.”

“Mat, stay out of this,” I snapped harshly then pointed at Shirohime. “Class Rep is right. Why did you bring them along? Safety in numbers?”

“Why not?” Clarisol asked in reply.

“Because you’re dragging people into your mess!” I growled at her. “I have no choice in this, but they didn’t have to come along! And you brought Mat as well!”

Clarisol was grinding her teeth while I berated her. “I have no intention of doing this alone.” She pointed at me with an accusing finger. “And you’re planning to ditch me as soon as the game starts!”

“And when is the game starting?” I asked her while holding a tight grip on my boiling emotions.

“Sunset. My guess—the game starts at sunset.”

“Why?”

“Because all this was arranged by the Imperial Family, and when infected with the pathogen, their Simulacra don’t work well in daylight. Ours can operate in day or night, but not theirs. Before you say that’s a good thing, it’s not because in darkness, the Imperial Simulacra zombie move about with no limits. Their bodies’ limiters are turned off, so they can exceed their normal physical abilities.”

I dipped my head at her, the gamer in me piqued. “Are you saying they’re tougher than the Simulacra I faced in your game?”

An uncomfortable look crossed her face. “They’re faster, stronger, and more vicious.”

“How much more?”

Clarisol took a long, deep breath. “You’re a Gun Princess. You should be able to keep up with them.”

I sucked in air slowly as I realized what she meant now. Zombies in film or otherwise are said to move without the limits on their bodies that prevent humans from breaking apart.

Shirohime must have understood this as well because she sounded worried when she asked, “What about the rest of us?”

“We’re not Gun Princesses,” Clarisol replied. “Feli and Ange are Master Grade so I’m hoping they’ll be able to go toe-to-toe with them. But that’s not the case for the rest of us.”

Tobias shook his head and turned away. “Jeezes Clari…this is one Hell of a shit storm you dragged us into….”

Shirohime looked ready to draw her guns and blow Clarisol away, and I wasn’t inclined to stop her. “That’s just wonderful,” the girl complained. “I didn’t get to summon my Gun Princess body. Now I’m having to face zombies like this? That’s frekking wonderful!”

I gasped softly as Shirohime’s complaint sunk into my mind. “Why did she stop moving?” At Clarisol’s puzzled frown, I clarified my question. “Why did the First Princess stop moving after we all arrived here?”

Clarisol folded her arms slowly. “Because we’ve been cut off from the outside world.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my phone has no reception,” she quipped drily.

“Very funny,” I retorted humorlessly.

Clarisol slowly wet her lips. “Even if our phones have no reception, we should still have a link back to civilization, so to speak. But we don’t.”

“What link?”

Clarisol cautiously waved a hand in the direction of the motionless girl lying on her back several meters away. “The First Princess.”

“How does she offer us a link back to civilization?” I gaped as a memory from Mirai flittered across my mind, then I broke into a frown. “The remote link?”

Clarisol nodded. “Precisely. There are two parts to a Gun Princess. There’s the operator who resides within their Sarcophagus, and then there’s the mechanical remote body. The operator controls the Gun Princess through a quantum link that is considered virtually foolproof against entanglement sudden death. At least, that’s what we’ve been told by the smart people who reverse engineered part of the Remnant technology in order to implement it. Humanity on your side and mine have had quantum communication for decades, but making it resistant to sudden death has proven problematic. However, there simply is no better way to communicate efficiently over vast distances…whether here or outside the universe.”

My frown deepened. “You mean in Limbo?”

“Yes. Not all Princess Royale matches are conducted in Limbo. Most are conducted either in your universe or mine in slivers that copy elements of our two realities. However, there are matches held in Limbo. In particular, the competitions to determine the Gun Queen and the Gun Empress. Having instantaneous communication between operator and the remote Gun Princess is essential to the success—to the realism—of the Princess Royale.”

Clarisol again gestured at the inert Gun Princess lying on the ground.

“However, the First Princess appears to have been cut off from her remote body shortly after arriving here. For that to happen, the quantum link must have been exposed to a strong noise field, triggering sudden death. Not only do we have no phone reception, but I’m certain that quantum noise is also keeping you from summoning your Sarcophagus.”

I remembered the large structure I’d emerged from, the one with tentacles. “Are you saying it’s something I would normally be able to summon?”

“Yes. Every Princess has her own Sarcophagus. It is her base of operations after all. In your case it works differently. There is no remote operator. You are Mirai, the Gun Princess, a complete package. The Sarcophagus you’ve been gifted with is designed to maintain your body, as well as serve as your personal armory. So you will have a link back to your Sarcophagus. Trying calling out to it.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Don’t you feel its presence in the back of your mind?”

Again, I bit my lower lip as I searched my awareness for anything that might feel like a ‘presence’. However, after a dozen seconds or more, I came up empty and gave Clarisol a subtle shake of my head.

Clarisol smiled thinly. “And that is the problem. We’re cut off from the outside world, and chances are this area is under a stealth-field. That means orbiting satellites could flyby overhead without seeing us. Someone would have to run into us in order to find us.” She chuckled under her breath as she looked at our surroundings.

“What about Ghost?”

Clarisol looked back at me. “The Maestro? Its core is housed within your Sarcophagus. The wetware inside your head has insufficient capacity to sustain an Artificial Awareness of its grandeur.”

“Then I’m cut off from him too.”

“Precisely. And frankly that sucks. We could have really used having it around.” Clarisol faced Shirohime who wasn’t hiding her simmering emotions any longer. “If you’d summoned your Princess, we would have lost contact with you as well.”

“That would have suited me just fine,” Shirohime countered. “Then I wouldn’t be stuck here with you.”

Clarisol narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you want to protect my brother?”

Shirohime inhaled sharply before replying with an austere tone. “I would rather he wasn’t here, either.”

The relationship Shirohime shared with Clarisol was starting to become a little clearer to me, and I recognized it as one of mutual benefit. Both had something the other could offer them. But there was no love between them. These recent signs of dissent reminded me of pair of thieves working together to achieve their own goals. But as the saying goes, there is no honor amongst thieves, and it was apparent now that Shirohime didn’t approve of Clarisol. Also, Shirohime was beginning to treat her the way she treated me before my unfortunate demise. Thus, with the situation being less than favorable the girl was starting to show her true colors.

However, for now I focused on Clarisol. “You said we were still in our universe. You also said we were probably on the second continent.”

Clarisol nodded. “I said we were still in your universe, but I believe I was wrong about this being the second continent.”

“Why is that?”

Clarisol addressed Tobias. “Brother dear, what time is it in Ar Telica city?”

Tobias frowned at her. “What?”

Her voice grew weary. “Tell me the time in Ar Telica.”

After glancing at his wristwatch, he replied, “One am in the morning.”

With deliberate care, Clarisol pointed at the sun glowing like a fiery red ball low in the sky. “This time of year the sun sets at six pm. If that’s a sunset it means we only have an hour of daylight remaining.”

“It’s a sunset,” I told her. Jutting my chin off to my left, I added, “I can feel north is that way.”

Clarisol’s eyes widened for a heartbeat before narrowing. “You can feel magnetic north? Well, that will come in handy.”

“So it’s a sunset. So what?”

“Then it means we’re around eight to nine hours west of Ar Telica.” Clarisol smiled but she didn’t look happy. “In other words, we’re more than a third of the way around the world from Ar Telica. We’re not on the Northern Continent anymore.”

I thought about the distances involved between continents. “A third of the way? But that’s not far enough—”

“Correct. We’re not on the Second Continent either. This is probably one of the large islands of the archipelago east of the Second Continent. And we know that some of those islands are nothing but desert because they haven’t been terraformed yet. We’re nowhere near the Proving Grounds. In fact, starting from the Proving Grounds we can guess we’re already halfway around the world.”

Tobias and the other girls showed mixed reactions to her explanation, though they shared one thing in common—fear.

Again, Shirohime looked ready to draw her guns, but then she turned away and crossed her arms under impressive bust.

“In that case,” the girl with brilliant snow white hair declared, “we need to find shelter for the night.”

I looked up at the school building behind Clarisol, particularly the admin building. “The fifth floor. That’s where we should go.”

“Why?” Class Rep asked while giving the top level of the admin building a studious look.

“Because other than the fire escape, there’s only one stairway up to the fifth floor. We block that and we can defend that floor pretty easily.” Pointing at the guns on the ground, I suggested, “Let’s not leave anything behind.”

There was one flaw to my logic, and that was the amount of permaglass occupying the walls of the fifth floor. That permaglass was designed to survive a severe storm, but would it be strong enough to survive a concerted zombie attack? Granted, they would need to climb the outside of the admin building all the way to the fifth floor, but if the glass failed then we would be boxed into a corner with no way out but to jump from the highest level to the ground. Unfortunately, I had no better idea to suggest, and from the look Shirohime was giving me, I had the impression she’d realized that as well, yet she remained silent on the issue.

Holstering the Viper railgun, I walked over to the bag Shirohime and Tobias had dragged over, zipped it up, then easily picked it up off the ground by its carry straps.

“Let’s get going. We don’t know if there are zombies inside the school, and we need to secure that top floor,” I declared, careful to keep my voice firm and commanding, and not be influenced by the trepidation creeping around in my chest.

It wasn’t long before the weapons were stashed into the various carry bags, and a minute or so later we walked as a group to the admin building’s permaglass entrance.

@@@