Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex Fan Fiction ❯ My Magical Gate Experience Was Ruined, As I Expected ❯ YGS: 17 ( Chapter 17 )

[Tanya/Komachi]

“I am not interested in your excuses, Sergeant. And I’m really not interested in you shifting blame to the General, either.”

“Ma’am, with all due respect you aren’t in my chain of command, hold no rank in the JSDF, and can’t order me to do anything, period. And you wrecked my car,” he growled the last bit.

“I am returning these issued weapons and this flak vest. I will get my own. I will accept 2000 rounds of 5.56x45mm NATO Type M855 green tip. I will get my own rifle and you can stuff it, REMF. If you give me any grief, remember who I serve with. And it’s MAJOR, in the German army, and they’re allies so you give me the GOD-DAMN respect of any visiting officer or I will make you run laps around the base in your skivvies. Do you understand me!” I glared. He stood at attention, then took back my crappy Type 64 rifle, my heavy flak vest, and my unfired ammunition. He turned over several ammo cases for the required rounds and I exited the armory floating them behind me just to show off. Lelei had given me several useful spell ideas, which I’d then coded and tested before adding to my computation jewel library.

My new uniform was a flight suit with a warm collar, a lined nomex grey fire suit with a heating and cooling system I’d assembled using an ethylene glycol tubing setup and a heat pump plugged to the back I could run off of a battery powered motor or magic if I had it to spare. I’d also put together a small Sterling engine I could set beside or over a campfire and run a generator which would recharge my batteries to power the computation jewel system, and my radio. It took a few hours by fireside to recharge in the field, but it gave me a huge advantage for more serious recon missions.

I had some emergency rations, commercial ones, and I had a plan to access a good weapon for my ammo. Narashino behind is we dropped off the ammo at my new house in a different part of Chiba. Taishi had found a good place, with high walls around it, and a good neighborhood where the local wives kept their gossip to themselves.

“So your father knows a guy at this base?” I confirmed with Yukinoshita. She nodded. We lifted off and headed for the next base.

The base was not detecting our approach because I’d worked out a radar cancelling shield. We were invisible to IR and microwave too. Crossing over the base in the darkness, we landed on a bunker roof and were let in through a darkened doorway to an armory warehouse. The master sergeant was a combat vet, probably one of the Japanese truck drivers for relief supplies in Afghanistan. Those jobs were not for sissies, and the numbers of ambushes, kidnappings, ransom attempts, IEDs, snipers, and recovery efforts made for some bloody messes without violating Japan’s constitution about involvement in foreign wars because these were relief supplies for villagers. We were a self-defense force, by law. But there were gray areas. We shared officers with the Americans and the Germans routinely, and an officer could find themselves fighting in the Congo or Somalia rather easily.

“I have them here. You have the gold?” he asked. I did. I’d easily found nuggets in the special region with a spell and melted them down into 99.9999% pure ingots of 4 troy ounces each. Very valuable here, and easy to transfer or hold onto for a rainy day.

In exchange for gold I was granted four new FN SCAR Mark 16 rifles and two dozen 30 round polymer magazines, modern Kevlar body armor, mag carrier pouches and strike plates. He offered me NVGs for a sweet deal but I have spells for that. Yukino and I used spells to lighten the crate. We thanked our contact and left through the roof access, the way we’d come. In and out, own the night.

Back at my house, Yukino and I settled down at the kitchen table to clean the weapons and started loading magazines while my husband looked on from the stove. He was cooking us a meal. The body armor let me carry six magazines on the front, and the paracord lanyards meant if I dropped one while flying I wouldn’t lose it. Yes, I could have gone with a heavier round, or even one of the new exotics like 6.5 Creedmoor, but the brass was rare and it was a target rifle round, for a bolt action, not an auto rifle. My combat style had shown through experience that autofire was sometimes very important. And the round was just a delivery system for a spell cast on the bullet, and firing the round would send the spell where I pointed it. Unlike the M4, the SCAR bolt was far stronger, and it had options for barrel swap and caliber change with minimal tools or time. And it takes standard ammo, most importantly. And I can make the magazines at home on my 3D printer.

“Your last novel release has gotten good sales. Your editor wants to know if you want to change it from Fiction to Biography? He’s kinda pushy about the issue,” said Taishi. With my work through the gate and all the contracts, he’d resigned his job and gone full time managing our finances. I was bringing home a lot of money, and some gold (stored in a safe). This house was bought with that income.

Niisan didn’t know, but he’s not stupid. He probably suspects that things between me and the JSDF is uneasy.

The JSDF generals keep sabotaging their potential victory with wishy-washy efforts to negotiate with the Empire that sent 140,000 men to die in order to avoid a rebellion over Molt Sol Augustus’s personal hubris. Pina Co Lada was our princess and easy to manage because she was gullible and honorable, probably due to being the daughter of a concubine, probably a slave. Her brothers were vying for the local version of Song of Ice and Fire villains, with requisite deaths. Pina would probably live, if we kept looking after her, and was sufficiently frightened and impressed, in equal parts, with the brutal technology we’d shown up at Italica, and her visit to Tokyo. Finding out that there were over 7 billion people in our world shocked her, and that Japan wasn’t even a Major Power in the world brought home just how screwed her empire war. None of the powers allowed slavery. Well, China pretended not to, but the others didn’t, and that was going to have to end if she wanted her empire to survive at all.

The JSDF negotiators were driving niisan up the wall. It was obvious we didn’t have to. Roll in with tanks and take over. Stop pretending. Did MacArthur negotiate for a partial surrender of Japan after nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki as revenge for Pearl Harbor? No, no he didn’t. Total victory is not impossible, or even difficult. The Emperor on the other side, according to Princess Coconut, was a devious evil degenerate who turned his allies into mulch at Alnus hill after his own invasion plans were defeated by… well, me. And Yukino. The death toll in that tunnel was 49,000 men. Most of them smoke inhalation from the cars I blew up at the Ginza end. I found out later, much later. Niisan didn’t want to tell me, but it was going to hit the news soon. It’s the greatest single death tool in battle committed by a single person without using a nuclear weapon, in history. Some retard in Sweden wanted me tried for war crimes, but she was on a crusade to stop Global Warming or some nonsense, so I paid no attention.

Taishi cooked dinner for us and I washed off the stink of cleaning solvents and brass before sitting down to eat. Taishi made polite conversation with Yukino as we ate. They get along well. I sometimes invite over Saki and Batou for dinner with Hachiman and Yui joining us. The table is big enough and we’ve been friends for years now. The JSDF would probably defecate bricks, but with their hands rummaging in each other’s pockets hunting for bribes, I just can’t be bothered to care very much.

It is obvious to me that the Special Region is going to be more than a gold mine, if the Gate doesn’t just vanish suddenly. I am not sure how long the mana that has flowed out over the Earth through the gate will last for my use, but it could be decades or centuries. I should do some research via folk tales and prior gate sightings. The minor portals, like the Outbreak Company event didn’t leak much mana, thus never reached me in Chiba from the site near Fuji. The actual gate in Ginza is far larger, and I was standing right beside it when it opened, something which Yukino and I were both compelled to do, though we think it was subconscious. Rory implies that we’re in contact with her god when we fight, and we’re actively praying to him as we do. She might not be wrong. It’s odd, but battle has long felt meditative, and cleansing. Prayer is supposed to do that too.

The fact that there were gods, plural, and that they were leaking through the Gate like the Mana suggested that Being X had lied to me about his nature as a singular entity, and that made sense in hindsight. He would have had little reason to admit there were other gods. Considering the nature of my first death, there was a god of revenge, which would have helped the fool I’d fired two lifetimes ago, literally. My dead had attracted Being X, probably that god in person, which suited my suffering in Germany rather well. I was suffering the consequences of his revenge wish, and a god of Vengeance who pretended to be a creator, which he wasn’t, demanding faith rather than inspiring it through good works. Being X was evil, exactly as I had thought. The lives he’d ended in the War in my last life as Tanya fitted what happened to a T. I discussed this with Taishi and Yukino as we ate and shifted over to sipping tea. Eventually Yukino bade us goodbye and took her rifle and magazines out to the garden and flew back to her apartment, something she’d kept since high school. It was a nicer place than we’d lived at, and she was used to it.

Taishi and I bathed together and spent proper time as husband and wife. One of these days I’d finally manage to get pregnant and we could get started on the next stage of our lives. I drifted off to sleep in his arms and dreamed nice dreams.