After the squad left the building, it was already time for the Eion helicopters to arrive.
Moria spoke to the pilots through the radio. "The enemy aerial forces were luckily 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 told the pilots and his request was accepted.
Meanwhile, Arimane locked his sight on his target. He was already lying down, ready to shoot. Tieria was crouching beside him, observing with her binoculars. Jin was sitting in a corner with a laptop on his knees.
"Arimane, you have ten seconds," After a few minutes of wait, Jin suddenly opened his mouth and transmitted Moria's message.
Arimane acknowledged the order and looked through his scope. He aimed at the head of the leader and breathed in. He held his breath and made some adjustments based on Tieria's measurements.
He pressed the trigger a few seconds later and exhaled. The bullet flew all the way across the town and pierced the wall of the HQ, opening a blatant hole in it. As expected, the bullet deviated and became stuck on the floor of the room.
The man inside obviously panicked and tried to run 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 or not and swiftly reloaded the rifle with classic 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 in normal times, and its range was around two miles. But because of its old model AI's, it could only detect bigger objects automatically. That's why they couldn't catch sight of the squad who could hide very skillfully.
Arima aimed at a two-feet-wide barrel and fired. The bullet quickly traveled the distance. It entered the barrel and destroyed the turret from the inside. Arimane pulled the bolt and immediately aimed at another one. He then continued to destroy every turret with a single shot until one of the turrets abruptly moved and narrowly escaped the bullet. That same turret rotated and pointed its cannons toward the trio.
Arimane clicked his tongue and stood up. "(So, they spotted us after all. Shit, it was the last one too. There's always something to mess up everything,)" He cursed inwardly. Jin and Tieria were already prompt to bail out but Arimane did something completely unexpected.
He drew his revolver and pointed it toward the front. Tieria's eyes widened and before she could say 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 explosions occurred above the town.
After that, Arimane was out of bullets. He didn't have the time to reload since that thing was shooting two shells every second. He hastily grabbed one of Jin's grenades and threw it.
At the same time, he inserted new bullets in his gun. The grenade exploded in mid-air and deviated two more shells that went crashing on the buildings nearby. When Arima finished reloading he started shooting again.
After four bullets, the turret stopped firing. Arimane grinned and quickly grabbed his rifle, he didn't have the time to lie down. He sat down and put the stock of the sniper against his shoulder. He looked through the scope for three seconds then shot.
A terrorist who was behind the turret, controlling it, suddenly died by losing his head. Arimane sighed and shot a second time, destroying the turret.
"…no way," Jin muttered and Tieria gaped. "How the hell 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 the rifle down. He shrugged at Jin.
"It's just because it fired explosive shells. Since that model is old and not really optimized, it fires slowly and can only shoot twelve shells before having to be reloaded from an automate storage directly into the ammunition chamber."
"Don't try to explain something like that with logic," Tieria retorted with a darkened expression. "Your common sense is already out of control. You don't look like a newbie at all for your first time on the battlefield."
"Heck! He's the pillar of this operation since the beginning!" Jin bawled.
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… I guess?"
Jin raised an eyebrow and stared at Arimane with an expression that seemed to say 'what the hell is this kid talking about?'.
He scratched his head really hard. "Fuck it. First, it's your nanomachines and body, now it's your damn 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 went toward the stairs. "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 there and our aerial support will bombard the base before extracting us," Jin explained as they exited the building.
"This mission is basically over," He declared and Arimane nodded. "But seriously… It was kinda messed up from the beginning to the end. Especially when I was with you," Jin added and Tieria could only agree with him.
"…sorry?" Arimane uttered.
Jin and Tieria looked at each other and burst out laughing.
A moment later, the trio arrived in front of the HQ's door. They found many bodies lying on the ground dead with a single bullet in either the head or the heart. As expected from special forces. Even with Eion bullets, they never waste a single shot.
A few minutes after they entered, Arimane was already being hugged by Tiria whom they met whilst going up the building. Gano and Farro were also there with her.
"Let me go…"
"We already searched the entire building, we're ready to extract. Sir Moria is waiting for us on the roof," Drowning Arimane's weak pleads, Tiria reported them the situation.
"Cool. I want to leave this place as fast as possible," Jin yawned and walked toward the closest stairs.
"Ah, there's an elevator, you know?" Tiria raised her voice but Jin had already closed the door leading to the staircase. She shrugged and headed 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 by watching the town being burned by the airstrike.
The choppers then landed on the roof and everyone boarded them.
"How was it?" When the whole town could be observed from the choppers, Moria asked Arimane.
"I don't know," Arima responded and smiled wryly. "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 down at the blazing town. "I certainly felt uncomfortable when I killed for the first time but nothing really disturbed me."
Moria listened and gazed at Arimane. "… 'Outsiders' often describe the battlefield as something similar to hell, something that shouldn't exist. But for the ones who fight to the death in it, their view is different. They fight because they have the freedom and right to do so," Moria stated and lit up a cigar. "Well, at least for those who are there fighting by their own volition."
"Someone once said: if you want to discover humans' true nature, go to the battlefield," He quoted. "It's a really unfortunate thing, but it's only when humans kill one another for the sake of something that they are actually free and accomplished."
"And don't confound 'duty' and 'reason'. No matter who, when they kill their actual enemy, they will undoubtedly feel ecstatic. Human genes carry a natural instinct to kill. That is a fact. The only people who 'break' are those who can't understand why they press the trigger. They're the pitiful ones."
"Nowadays, the populace considers killing as barbaric while wars cruel and stupid. They're not wrong, but they're just being hypocritical. What they live with was built over spilled blood. 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 or bad begins and 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 faintly smiled.
"Also, don't forget; for a soldier, death is relative. You don't know what it is and don't know 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 cowards. We confront the unknown every day. If they're scared of death, they just don't want to feel the pain."
"But of course, you should never lose the respect and value you hold for life. You always need to understand, at every moment, humans came up with the word 'life' because they had created the word 'death' beforehand to describe their comrades who would never wake up again."
Arimane quietly listened and slightly nodded when Moria was done. He felt like he had learned something and wanted to think about it. One thing that he did understand right away was life's value.
How valuable was life when put in front of death?
Arimane arrived at a conclusion. As long as you're alive, you have to keep on 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 may not have wished for, but you still followed through and 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 worst, it's a punishment to make you regret your life. The true cruelty is what people do whilst 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 one 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 him in the helicopter, stared 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 a plane, the squad finally reached the orphanage and returned to their regular lives. But something had changed since that day.
Every month, the squad would be deployed to random places to do a mission. Assassination, sabotage, trading, search and destroy, even negotiation, and tutoring small armies or special forces.
Even Moria was extremely troubled by that. He could see that his squad was being tested to the very limit. But he had never seen or heard about something so extreme. This kind of focus on a single squad like theirs was really odd.
That continued for a year, without any big setback. The missions were indeed dangerous sometimes, but usually, the gravest injury a member suffered was a bullet in the arm. It wasn't a big deal for them.
Then, when Arimane turned thirteen years old, things started to change in his life. It was when he met someone who would become a figure deeply etched in his heart.