“Run! Hurry—” She turned back for a second, and gasped as she saw not one, but three Alastors advancing on Yang and the others, raining down gunfire and forcing the team into retreat. Kurz was under fire, as well; he’d just barely managed to dive behind a bench and run off into the darkness, herded by the shots coming down all around him.
“Don’t stop!” Sousuke called out urgently. “Go, go!”
Kaname ran with all of her might. Even when she wrenched her ankle and stumbled, Sousuke just grabbed her arm and kept running, pulling her mercilessly along with him. He didn’t even acknowledge her protests of pain and exhaustion.
“Eyes up, comrade! Our goal is near!” Sousuke said, trying to encourage her.
Comrade. It was a plain, vulgar word, and the opposite of romantic. Despite that, Kaname found herself reluctantly accepting it. Maybe this suited their relationship better than a pet name like “honey” or “darling.” But how did they keep getting into these situations?
“Some Christmas, huh?!” Kaname howled up to the sky, over all the gunfire and shouting. Okay, maybe it’s time to accept it, she told herself. I’m in love with him. I don’t know why these are the only times I can admit it to myself. Maybe it’s the sense of trust. Maybe it’s the touch-and-go nature of a firefight making it impossible to deny...
Tonight is Christmas. Normal couples all over Japan are whispering sweet nothings to each other, gazing out over beautiful nightscapes and listening to romantic music. Delicious dinners and intimate conversations; the kind of things Yamashita Tatsuro would sing about. There was a time when I thought that was what I wanted. But when I’m with him...!
Chased around by creepy robots, flinching from close-range ricochets, running for our lives, out of breath and soaked to the bone... Whoever heard of a couple like us?! “It’s got to be karma!” she yelled. “One of us was a real scumbag in a past life!!”
“I don’t quite follow, but I’m sure it’s not an issue!” Sousuke bellowed back.
“It so is!” Kaname wailed. “You’ve ruined my youth, and my 17-year-old Christmas Eve!”
“Really? This seems like an appropriate sort of night for you!”
“I hate it!”
“Then why are you laughing?” Sousuke wanted to know.
“This is crying!” she retorted.
Just then, their flight came to a stop; they’d hit a wall. A smoke stack, otherwise known as a ‘funnel,’ towered in front of them, while behind them was the wide-open tennis court. Panting for breath, they turned around and saw that roughly eleven Alastors had fanned out to surround them.
Clouseau spoke over the radio, “Uruz-1 to Uruz-7. Nearly all teams are out of ammo. There’s nothing more we can do for you. Good luck.”
“Uruz-7,” Sousuke briefly acknowledged. “Roger.”
Slowly, the eleven Alastors began to approach. They were crouched over, and ready to charge at any time. Their arm-loaded machine guns were exposed, their aim fixed on Sousuke and Kaname.
“We’re cornered,” Kaname announced with resignation.
“That’s right,” Sousuke agreed. “It’s all going just as planned.”
A faint metal scraping sound came from somewhere above them, but Kaname could barely hear it. She just clung to Sousuke’s arm as she looked out over the field of executioners. “They’re going to kill us,” she muttered.
“You’re the one who assured us they wouldn’t.”
“Well, I’m a little less certain now! And they might not kill me, but what about you?!”
Instead of responding to Kaname’s panicked concerns, Sousuke whispered into his radio. “Uruz-7, here. Have you arrived?”
The response came a minute later. It was an electronic voice, low and male. “Affirmative. I am in position. And here I thought I would never get my time to shine...”
“I’ve told you to stop using human turns of phrase,” Sousuke scolded back.
“And I have informed you that dangerous situations like these require jokes.”
Sousuke seethed. “If we make it out of this alive, I’m disassembling you.”
“I fear that you lack that authority, Sergeant.”
The Alastors prepared, and their attack would come at any moment. Sousuke clucked his tongue and said to the one on the radio, “They’re coming. I give you permission to fire at the targets. Fire, fire, fire!”
“Roger. Fire at will!”
“Do you even have will?” Sousuke muttered, but Kaname almost didn’t hear it as a new roar ripped out, louder than anything she’d heard that night.
Suddenly, a hail of 12.7mm shots came streaking down from the funnel above; each packing far more power than the rounds from the rifles and submachine guns the others had been using. This wasn’t fire meant for infantry, but for military LAVs. Any one hit could easily tear through an engine block, and they were coming at a rate of thirty per second.
The incredible curtain of fire did a full sweep: right to left across the line, then back again. It ripped the robots crowding around them to pieces. Several of the robots’ auto-destruct sequences seemed to have engaged, but Kaname and Sousuke took cover in a gutter at the end of the tennis court, so most of what hit them were wood splinters. Nevertheless, Sousuke threw himself over Kaname to protect her as tiny particles showered down on them.
Even with all of that, one Alastor seemed to have avoided fatal damage. Kaname was still its target, and it used what remained of its arms and legs to approach her. Sousuke dove in front of her, protectively...
And then suddenly, the Alastor flattened out, as if crushed from above by an invisible hammer. The air rippled faintly above it, like a heat haze.
“All targets destroyed. Orders, sir?” prompted the voice over the radio.
“Hold your fire. Stand by on Master Mode 4.”
“Roger. Holding fire. Mode 4: Stay alert, ready.”
“Disengage ECS.”
“Roger. ECS off.”
Above the machine, mercilessly crushed without a trace... a faint light appeared and began to pool out, like ink. The ‘spill’ in space slowly began to take shape, until at last it defined itself as the form of an AS.
It was the ARX-7 Arbalest. It was kneeling on the tennis court, smoke billowing around it,
