Gantz Gaiden -0008

[TN: For the record, I'm not promising I'll translate all of these. They take an awful lot of time. But it's pretty cool translating prose for a change, so we'll see.]

[ZERO]

Ooki didn't believe in life after death.

No, in fact, he still doesn't believe that such a thing exists.

Having seen many deaths happen right before his eyes, he comprehends this all too well.

Once you die, that's the end. What was once a living being becomes just a thing, and whatever you might call a "soul" or a "self" vanishes without a trace.

Just as long as that living being is tied to the hardware known as a "body".

What lay before him now was a being like death incarnate. With a clinging, clanging noise like one piece of metal being struck against another, it came slowly closer and closer. If Ooki were to stand still and do nothing, it would without a doubt bring death crashing down upon him, too.

Just as it had done to his comrades. He had witnessed the way this thing took still-living human beings apart more than he cared to remember.

It was terrifying. The death that this being would bring. The absolute darkness and nothingness that death would bring.

Yet at the same time, it was also horribly inviting. Once death arrived, he would be free of it all. Of the fear, the pain, the anguish... none of it would be able to bother him any more.

Kashihara Ooki stared dazedly at the approaching shadow. His X-Gun, which usually seemed almost disappointingly light, now felt terribly heavy in his hands. As though suddenly remembering that it existed, he raised the fat-barrelled gun before him. He had never tried pointing it at himself and pulling the trigger, so he had no way of knowing whether it would work, but perhaps now was the time to find out.

The enemy, which looked just as disgusting as ever from up close, stood right before him. Chuckling softly to itself, with the small arms that extended from all over its body like some kind of Buddhist statue, it brandished its surgical instruments above its head.

The slightest hint of a smile touched the edges of Ooki's lips.

"No... I guess not."

In the end, it was not fear, nor even a longing for death, that spurred Ooki to action.

...Live.

Tensing once more his faltering arms, Ooki brought the X-Gun up directly before him. With an agility borne of practice, he pointed the barrel at his enemy, and pulled the trigger.

A second later, a metal support in the distance exploded. It had dodged.

But no matter. Ooki cared not.

This was his resolve.

"I'm not going to fall into your hands."

Even if he were to make it back from this place alive, it may only mean that he had delayed his death that little bit longer. Yet even so, Ooki chose to live. To fight, to defeat this enemy, and to return.

The lonely battle began.

---

[Minus 0030]

-1-

A sigh escaped his lips.

The setting sun painted the western sky a deep red. Amidst the long shadows of the buildings all around, Ooki walked along the near-deserted street, thinking idly to himself.

Today, another of his classmates had died. Suicide, apparently. "Apparently", because the reason was unclear. From the state in which they found him, it could hardly have been anything else, but there had been no message or anything of the sort.

Choosing death on a simple impulse. Somehow it felt to Ooki as though that was the atmosphere that pervaded his school recently. This was the second case this month. The fifth this year. As far as Ooki was aware, there had never been a year with so many suicides.

It was not as though Ooki could not understand the concept of killing oneself because of a general mood.

Indeed, he wondered every day why life was so full of tiresome worries.

For instance, tomorrow marked the beginning of the final exam season.

Even if a top-class grade was out of the question, there was always the distinct danger that his grades would fall too low for comfort, so a certain amount of preparation was necessary to assure a decent result.

He had a pretty good grasp of the teachers' personalities and tastes, so it wasn't too difficult to work out what was likely to come up on each exam, but making sure he had a decent understanding of those areas was still a drag.

Yesterday, he hadn't got to sleep until past 2 AM.

Though he just about made it through lessons, once after-school hours came around, the drowsiness really began to set in.

"Guess I better get some sleep soon, or I won't get anything done..."

Frankly, he wondered himself why exactly he had to go this far, but in order to take it easy on a day-to-day basis, and still obtain those average-yet-crucial grades at the end of it all, a certain amount of overwork was simply the only option.

In fact, the grades themselves didn't bother him that much at all. He simply didn't want to stand out.

Ooki had always been the type to stand out in a bad way. Call it a knack, call it what you will, but what others went through a fair amount of trouble to achieve, Ooki had a tendency to find shortcuts and achieve without putting in much effort at all.

Ooki's own skills were fairly limited. He didn't have the ability to outperform an ordinary person in general, and on those occasions when he couldn't think up a trick to accomplishing something, he was hopeless. At any rate, he was under more pressure than it might seem at a glance, but that's not how it seemed to those around him.

If you stand out from the crowd, you get picked on. It may not take an obvious form, but people have their ways of getting to you. In which case, it's better not to stand out in the first place.

Having learned this from his experiences in primary school and the beginning of middle school, ever since then, he had stopped cutting corners, so as to introduce a reasonable level of imperfection to his work.

He had stopped playing soccer, something he had been involved in ever since middle school, because, again, it was too much trouble.

He liked soccer. It was fun thinking up ways to outwit his opponents, and that sense of achievement when a strategy paid off was irreplaceable.

But the more Ooki achieved results in this way, the worse his seniors began to treat him. From a bystander's viewpoint, Ooki's style of play appeared to be nothing more than taking advantage of the efforts of others. The fact that those goals would not have been scored without Ooki's contribution, that nobody else would even have noticed the opportunities, was ignored entirely. The fact that without Ooki's contributions the opposing team would have found far more opportunities to score, too, was never brought up.

Realising how his seniors saw him, Ooki at first attempted to solve the issue by changing his style of play, but changing habits that he had built up over years of practice proved a difficult task. Without even realising it, he found himself taking those golden opportunities.

So in the end, he had no choice but to quit. Purposefully ensuring that his play was less than perfect was simply far more effort than concentrating on playing effectively. He had never thought that slacking off could be so much work.

"Ahh, why does everything have to be such a pain...?"

Ooki stretched his body out and gave a groan, then slouched back down and hurried along the homeward path. If he could have seen himself, doubtless he would have thought his actions horribly beyond his age. With life full of nothing but troubles, and no end in sight, the thought of throwing himself off the top of the nearest high-rise building had occurred to him more than a few times.

Perhaps today's suicide victim had been thinking along similar lines when he chose death over life. Still, Ooki didn't plan on making that choice any time soon, at least. Thinking about it was one thing, but actually going through with it was a whole different story.

"Aaaaaaaaahh!"

Ooki jerked his head up with a start. A scream. Not the kind of voice you hear every day. Glancing wildly around for the origin of the voice, his eyes came to rest on a scene overhead.

A child was dangling from the balcony of an apartment. Another child, leaning over the edge of the balcony, was holding onto the dangling child's hand in a vain attempt to save him, but his efforts looked to be woefully insufficient. At a glance, the apartment was on the sixth... no, seventh floor. Ooki couldn't possibly make it up there in time.

"Somebody! Call 110! That kid...!"

Seeing out of the corner of his eye a passing salaryman hurriedly pull out his mobile phone, Ooki ran over to directly below the balcony from which the child was hanging.

The child's grip on the edge of the veranda must have failed him - as though sliding on the air, he slowly began to plummet. Groaning softly from between tightly-clenched teeth, Ooki found himself leaping out to the very point on the ground towards which the child was now speeding.

It was then that he came to his senses.

"Huh? What the hell am I..."

Ooki didn't know exactly how many metres up that seventh-floor apartment was, but assuming about three metres per floor, well, about twenty metres seemed like a fair estimate. The speed of an object falling from twenty metres should amount to... ehm... about 14 metres per second? Assuming the child weighs about thirty kilograms... thirty kilograms at 14 metres per second... that's about 50 kilometres per hour......

All this went through Ooki's mind in the scant two seconds it took for the falling child to reach his body; the final thing that popped into his head was an image of one of those car-crash experiments you often see on television.

He hardly imagined that his own body could possibly be tougher than the front of that car.

The impact of the falling child was a little smaller than Ooki had imagined. As the small body made contact with his outstretched arms, in exchange for smashing them to pieces, it stretched its own skeletal structure almost to its elastic limit, foisted a large portion of its kinetic energy off onto Ooki, and finally rebounded and collapsed onto the ground nearby.

Having been struck with a force equivalent to that of a club the size of a child's body, Ooki was unable to even control his collapse, and smashed face-first into the ground at a considerable velocity. And as though to add insult to injury, Ooki's head, plummeting at a speed of around thirty kilometres per hour, was unlucky enough to strike the very edge of the pavement curb.

It was this slightly-rounded, smooth concrete corner that finally smashed Ooki's skull into pieces.

As his consciousness faded to black, along with a shock the likes of which he had never before experienced, Ooki was dimly aware that his own death had all-too-suddenly arrived.

-2-

...In which case, death was a more unusual experience than he had expected. In particular, his body itself. He had been able to tell instinctively that his wounds were fatal. And yet, he noticed, for some reason his consciousness seemed oddly clear and in-focus.

Still, there could be no doubting that he had died. The last thing that he had seen was an evening sky filled with clouds of a deep red. He had been... yes, it could not have been too far from his own house.

And yet, now. The scene that faced him was the ceiling of some kind of room. The shape of the lights, the design of the wallpaper... none of it seemed remotely familiar.

He hauled himself up, and looked around the room.

All in all, it was remarkably sparse. The wallpaper was a plain white, and there was very little in the way of furniture. All that it seemed to contain was a crowd of people.

"Th - There's another one..."

As Ooki straightened himself up, somebody finally spoke. Ooki, however, did not realise that the words were directed at him.

"Wh... Where... huh...?"

Ooki had never thought about what the world after death might be like, but this was certainly not what he had expected. Particularly jarring - or rather, so ordinary that it seemed paradoxically strange - was the shape of Tokyo Tower, visible beyond the balcony. The sky outside was relatively dark, but there were still hints of red in the sky above the Tower.

"That... is Tokyo Tower, right...?"

"Yes, it is."

Ooki had only been muttering to himself, but his question was answered by a girl standing right by his side, peering down at him.

Did I do something wrong? That was the first thing he thought upon glancing up at the girl's face. Her eyes, gazing down at him, were awfully cold.

"Eh - Ehm... I..."

The girl looked away, and gave a small sigh, before continuing.

"Well, I suppose it's only natural."

"Huh? ...Natural?"

"Being bewildered at first. It's only natural."

Beginning to grasp what the girl was talking about, Ooki got to his feet, his face still worried and perplexed.

"Do you know something about all this? Where is this place? I was quite sure that I died, so... unless there's something wrong with my head..."

"I think your head is fine. No doubt you were indeed dead."

With that curt response, the girl turned away from the still-confused Ooki, and looked around at the surrounding people.

"Could you all listen?"

It sounded more like an order than a request. Oppressive, even.

"I'm sure most of you have no idea what is going on right now, but I'd like you to all be quiet and just listen."

"The hell?"

Unable to hide his irritation, a young salaryman glared at the girl.

"We don't have time for your prattling! Why do we have to stand here and listen to the likes of you, eh?"

"Then feel free to die."

The girl's response was sharp and blunt. The man who had complained was lost for words, and spent a few moments simply staring blankly at the girl's face.

"Wh... What's that supposed to mean?! You're not making any sense!"

"It doesn't matter whether you think I'm making any sense or not. All you need to know is that if you don't listen to me, you are going to die. That much is certain."

"H - Hey..."

Ooki finally spoke up.

"You just said that I was dead, right? If I was dead, then does that mean that I've, well, come back to life?"

All eyes in the room turned to Ooki for a moment, and then returned to the girl with a new, questioning gaze. It seemed that everyone in the room had been wondering about the same thing.

Suddenly, a vulgar laugh came from the far end of the room.

"Akari, ain't no point tellin' 'em any more'n that. These idiots ain't gonna survive no matter what ya go tellin' 'em."

Looking over to the origin of the voice in question, Ooki's eyes came to rest on a large, jet-black sphere of over a metre in diameter. A strange object indeed.

Behind the sphere, a few men could be seen sitting about. Every one of them was wearing something that looked like a kind of tight, black wetsuit. The man who had spoken was among them.

"How about you mind your own business? I'm not asking for help from you or your friends."

He was a dirty-looking sort of man. His hair seemed to have been left uncut for a long while, and its tangled curls, with white strands visible here and there, stretched down to his shoulders. His teeth, peering out from amongst a mess of grey stubble, were a nasty yellowish colour, and filled with gaps.

Upon hearing Akari's words, he smirked rudely and shrugged his shoulders. The smile failed, however, to reach his eyes. His gaze was unsettling, almost reptilian.

"Do's ya like, then. Just try'n make sure ya don't get in our way, yeah?"

The woman - Akari - chose to ignore the cold-eyed man, and turned back to Ooki.

"In answer to your question, yes. The same goes for everyone else here. Will that be all?"

Finally giving a terse response, she looked around with an air of irritation at the people staring anxiously up at her.

"Oh, and don't worry, the same goes for me. But that's beside the point. The important thing is that you do exactly as I say. If you don't, then you really are going to die. I'm sure you don't want to go through that again."

"B... But what exactly are we supposed to..."

A salaryman wearing thick glasses spoke up in a quavering voice. After fixing a sharp glance upon him, Akari pointed at the black sphere.

"Soon enough, that thing will start playing music. When it does, put on the equipment that it provides. At the very least, make sure you all wear the suits."

"Suits...?"

Just as Ooki gazed at the black sphere and muttered that single word, it happened.

As though the girl's words had acted as some kind of signal, the distorted sound of a powerful drumbeat came bursting forth from the black sphere. It was followed shortly afterward by the sound of a guitar and half-shouting vocals. It sounded like some kind of hopeless rock band, but strangely enough, Ooki felt like he had heard the song somewhere before.

And sure enough he had. It was a heavily-modified version of the "Radio Exercise Song". The vocals were certainly not in Japanese, so whether or not the lyrics were intact was questionable at best.

At the same time, the surface of the sphere, which had up until that moment been a pure, jet black, began to display some kind of glowing text. Written in what looked like a clumsy scrawl, it was a strange mixture of Japanese and English words.

"YOU have all LOST your LIFEs. / THEREFORE, it is UPTO me how I USE your NEWLIFEs. / That's the LOGIC."

"...What the...?"

As the words slipped like a groan from Ooki's lips, Akari responded curtly.

"You understand what it means, yes?"

"...I don't even know what to say."

With a wry smile, Ooki turned around, only to see that Akari was not smiling in the slightest.

"Read it carefully. It's not likely to be much use, but it will tell us who we're about to be fighting against."

Returning his gaze to the sphere, Ooki read the second passage that had replaced the first.

"...Shoutoku Aliens?"

The image that had appeared on the screen looked like something straight out of the portraits from around the Asuka Period of Japanese history. A strange sense of solidity allowed Ooki to judge that it was in fact a photograph rather than a portrait, but the robed figure that stood there, ladle in hand, brought to mind a rather famous name.

"Prince Shoutoku?"

A plump office lady, kneeling right beside Ooki and squinting at the sphere, dubiously voiced the name in question.

Beside the picture, in addition to the name, "Shoutoku Alien", the following details were written.

"Characteristics: Looks like Prince Shoutoku / There are lots of them / Watch out for the ladle // Likes: Prince Shoutoku // Favourite Phrases: 'Don't call me Umayado!', 'I issue these Seventeen Articles', 'Aaaaaghhhhhh'"

"Looks like he's just messing about, doesn't it? But there's nothing amusing about it."

Akari's words seemed so heavy in tone, Ooki glanced at her face with a frown.

And then, the up until that moment flawlessly smooth surface of the sphere split softly apart. Suddenly, the left, right and rear sides hurtled outward, revealing a number of metal racks, containing guns and a number of small cases with handles.

Akari looked back at the crowd, who were once more murmuring with unease.

"Everybody go around to the back, and find the case with your name on it from the rack."

As she spoke, Akari pulled off the sweater that she was wearing. Ooki was startled for a moment, but all that appeared from below the sweater was a black suit, identical to those he had seen on the group of men before.

"Time is short. You'll find suits like this one inside, so hurry and put them on."

"She's right... there are names on them..."

A kindly-looking middle-aged man with a combover took a case in hand and stared keenly at the characters carved into the surface.

"Erm... is there an Ooki-kun here?"

The man held the case up, and sure enough, the name "Ooki-kun" was engraved into it in clumsy hiragana.

"Y - Yes, that's me..."

Looking hesitantly over at Akari, Ooki was rewarded with an face that could only mean 'go and get it'. He got to his feet, walked over and took the proffered case.

It was lighter than it looked. For a moment he wondered whether there was a suit inside at all, but he need not have worried. Upon opening the case, he was greeted with a neatly-folded suit. He had expected something a little tougher, but upon actually touching it, the suit turned out to be terribly thin; it was extremely difficult to imagine that this thing could be of any use whatsoever.

"This is ridiculous!"

A young, heavily made-up girl threw her suit roughly aside. Ooki himself was distinctly reluctant to actually wear his, but noticing Akari's cold gaze still upon him, he hurriedly began to undo the buttons of his uniform.

Then it happened.

The body of the girl who had thrown her suit aside began to disappear.

To be precise, the very top of her head had vanished as though sliced off by a very sharp object. And yet no blood emerged from the wound, and the girl herself showed little reaction other than bewilderment at the stares from around her.

But the girl's disappearance did not stop there. As though being whittled away, her entire head disappeared, little by little, until even her shoulders, chest, torso, and arms were gone completely.

"Wh - What the?!"

"It's the transfer."

Unable to grasp the meaning of her words, Ooki glanced hesitantly around, and with a sigh, Akari looked at him with an irritated expression.

"We're all about to go to the battleground. There's no point thinking about how we get there. Just put the suit on. If you can't concentrate, there's no guarantee you'll survive even with your suit."

"Th - This thing?"

Ooki looked down at the suit in his hand.

Once the first girl had disappeared entirely, the next to begin to vanish was the cold-eyed, dirty man who had originally called Akari by name. Showing no sign of impatience, he disappeared in the process of checking the weapon he had taken from the rack.

-3-

The transfers continued without rest. In the end, of the large crowd of people, only Akari and Ooki remained.

As Ooki stood there in a daze, he found a large handgun with the barrel separated into three being pressed into his hand. Looking up, he saw Akari, already mid-transfer, looking at him with her sharp gaze.

Before he had the chance to ask anything, Akari vanished from before his eyes. Immediately, Ooki's breathing became rough, and his body was flooded with a sudden mad panic. What on Earth was about to happen? He tightened his grip on the strange gun in his hand.

Suddenly the view before him changed. Crowds of people were walking back and forth in front of him. From a little way off, he could hear the voice of a cheerful salesgirl, and the general noise of the bustling crowd came from all around.

Evidently he was in a shopping district somewhere. The road where he was standing was narrow, with shops lining the street on either side. An arcade roof hung above his head, and continued a fair way off into the distance.

"Wha... Wh... Where am - H... Hey!"

As though unable to see Ooki at all, a housewife with shopping bags in either hand had walked right into him. After glancing in confusion at the spot where he stood, she proceeded to once more walk straight towards him, and he was forced to hurry out of the way.

No sooner had he done so than another person bumped into him in the same way. Apparently a businessman on his way home from work, he mistakenly thought he had bumped into someone else, and stopped a man walking past Ooki in order to complain.

"Huh...?"

Naturally, as the second man had been falsely accused, the atmosphere quickly became unpleasant. For a moment, Ooki made to correct the misunderstanding, but then he stopped. There was no need to involve himself in a nasty situation like this right now.

"They can't see you."

The sudden sound of Akari's voice caused Ooki to tense up, and he spoke without thinking.

"A... Akari... san...?"

"Once the mission begins, the only ones who can see us are the enemy. Likewise, the only ones who can see the enemy are us."

"I... I see..."

Despite Akari's warning only moments ago, the sheer normalcy of these new surroundings had lulled Ooki into a sense of security. Somehow he felt that perhaps this whole business was not so dangerous after all. Akari probably only said all those things to get everyone all excited. This was probably just some kind of prank or TV trickery, and there was an audience watching him right now and laughing.

In fact, Akari's calm demeanour suggested the same thing. In which case, there wasn't really much reason to get all tense after all, surely. Ooki felt as though he had finally found a reasonable answer.

His nerves all but vanished, Ooki looked over at Akari again. Yes, she had to be some kind of actress; ordinary girls weren't that attractive.

"Your name?"

Looking straight back at Ooki with her forceful gaze, Akari spoke again in her usual graceless tone. Feeling as though she could tell exactly what he had been thinking, he looked back up at her with his heart suddenly pounding.

"Ooki-kun, wasn't it?"

"My name's... Kashihara Ooki. And you?"

After a moment's hesitation, he decided to ask her name as well. He knew that she was called Akari, but who knew whether that was her given name or her surname, or indeed her real name at all? Perhaps if he heard her full name, he would recognise it from somewhere.

If she really were an actress who had appeared on TV or the like, the chances of this being some kind of hidden-camera stunt would shoot up.

"Jinguu Akari. Just call me Akari. Could you try hiding yourself somewhere? You've got the suit on, at least, but if you want to survive, best not to be found by the enemy."

Still scowling at Ooki, Akari spoke as coolly as ever.

"Oh... well, I guess you're right. I don't want to get in the way or anything."

A little miffed by her tone, Ooki decided that doing as she said was the best course of action.

He didn't recognise the name Jinguu Akari, but it seemed clear that wherever this was, it wasn't the real world. In which case, there was no reason not to play along with the act. You didn't get the chance to experience something like this every day, and it wasn't like there was anything waiting for him at home besides sleep and a long night's revision.

Nodding in response to Akari's words, Ooki moved to turn away, but as though she had just remembered something, Akari grabbed his shoulder and stopped him.

"Don't wander too far. If you hear a sound like a music box in your head, don't take another step in that direction."

Apparently that was all she had wanted to say; she released Ooki's shoulder.

"W - Wait a minute..."

As Akari, this time, moved to walk away, Ooki called out to her. She stopped where she stood, and turned around.

"What?"

"Music in your head? What do you mean?"

"No need to think too hard about it. It means exactly what I said."

"Exactly what... huh?"

Pulling back her hair, Akari responded with clear irritation.

"Could you please just drop it? We don't have the time. If you survive, I'll explain everything to you afterwards, so - "

Suddenly Akari's eyes flashed wide. Drawing a gun identical to the one in Ooki's hand, she fired it over Ooki's shoulder. A powerful wind sped just past his face.

"Eh - ?"

He turned around to see a figure entangled in the wires of light that had apparently been launched from Akari's gun, struggling and wailing in a strange voice. It was a child. Whilst it was wearing an ordinary T-shirt and jeans, what caught Ooki's attention was the hairstyle - gathered in looped bunches by each of the ears. The child's face, with its miniscule, heavily-bagged eyes, looked like a painting brought to life.

"Don't call me Umayado!"

Startled, Ooki glanced around to see where this new voice was coming from. His eyes came to a rest on a tall nearby figure, and he froze completely.

It was Prince Shoutoku. There were no other words to describe it. For some reason, it was wearing a T-shirt reading "BORN IN USA", along with denim jeans, and glaring at him with a terrible expression. In its hands, clasped in front of its chest, it held a brown ladle.

It was only then that Ooki realised. The child from before looked absolutely identical to the children on either side of Prince Shoutoku in the picture.

[TN: Image might help!]

"DON'T CALL ME UMAYADO!!"

Opening his mouth so wide Ooki thought it might tear his face right open, Prince Shoutoku screamed. As the area around him shook, the Prince took his ladle in hand, and swung it down with force.

Ooki thought then that something had gone wrong with his eyes. The space just in front of Prince Shoutoku seemed to bend out of shape, and slowly the distortion began to spread outwards.

At the same time, Ooki heard a popping sound inside his head. Like the sensation of taking a high-speed elevator many tens of floors up or down at once, the sudden change in air pressure was damaging his eardrums. As Ooki clasped his hands over his ears, and fell moaning to the ground, some kind of terrible force seemed to pass by.

A moment later, there was a huge explosion. With a flash, the area burst aflame, and in an instant the shopping district was an image of Hell.

"Wh... What... the..."

Glancing around with teary eyes, Ooki's gaze came to rest on the child who had been caught in the wires. Just like the phenomenon that had brought Ooki and the others here - the "transfer", Akari had called it - the child was disappearing from the top of the head downward.

Right beside the disappearing child stood Prince Shoutoku, looking down at the scene in floods of tears, and howling to the heavens.

== Next Issue, [Story No. -0007]: A Great Man Howls - The Shoutoku Alien begins his counterattack. ==