[SWAMP 4]

Masaru opens his eyes and leans up from his spot in the bog. He takes in a deep breath of the reassuring air around him—thick, alive, and calming in a primal way.

“Alright,” he says. “Two out of three.” He’s not staying here longer than he has to, he reasserts in his mind as he takes up his briefcase, giving a gentle nod of acknowledgement to the frogs watching him from behind leaves and tree trunks.

He starts down the path with a steady pace.

As if by habit, he begins thinking back to his gaming days. He wonders if this is how Shattered Souls characters feel on their eighty-eighth run on a boss. He chuckles.

Fourth time’s the charm, he says to himself, perfectly at ease in the atmosphere, despite knowing what’s coming his way once he walks away from the lake and the sun goes down.

So… is it preparedness? Masaru asks himself as he thinks back to all the traps. He bites his lip. That can’t be right. We didn’t technically get hit by a trap last time. He gives an irritated sigh as he thinks it over. Is it about always moving? He crosses his arms, his gaze slanting as he remembers all the traps he ran into.

It’s not about brashness, nor does it seem to be about preparation. It must mean something else… Maybe we should be trying to kill it, he wonders. But he recalls the other attempts, with Valerie’s rifle hitting it to minimal effect. He sighs as he rounds the bend on the mossed-over rootwork of his path.

As he steps along, he thinks back to the others. Valerie and he have been through this too many times. He’s sure she’s as terrified of facing off against The Stranger as he is.

Masaru pauses. He thinks back to the death in the cabin, with its transformation.

Just when I think I know you, you become something else. What the hell are you?

He peers along the canopies of the trees. Small, furtive figures dart beneath the shadowed underbrush of the swamp, too fast for him to make out their shapes and too dark for him to see their colors. The swamp is a beautiful place, but he realizes just how mysterious it is even in the day. He places his hands on his hips as he takes stock of the team.

I guess it’s fine Yuna’s not here, he says with a wince. The kid doesn’t need to go through that. He smirks. I don’t know how much help he’s going to be, he adds, thinking of Sato. What an idiot.

As he continues deeper into the swamp, he gets closer to the lake. Despite him starting in an identical area, the path through the swamp always seems to change.

It’s like it doesn’t even matter, he thinks. Kind of like the others. It forces you into the moment. He ponders back to The City, stopping his thoughts. Actually, there’s nothing really forcing me to leave the office, is there?

He scoffs.

Whatever.

He muses on the now-comfortable memory of the night, the irritating grin and the wide look of anger in the better Masaru’s eyes. But the further he gets along, the more his memory flashes with the red eyes of The Stranger.

Damn cat, Masaru mutters to himself. He shakes his head, and the place seems to lighten up just a tiny bit.

You’re the reason I’m here… and maybe it’s not all that bad.

He says this with only half a heart.

He’s facing off against murderous psychopaths; if it’s not “that bad,” then what is he tangling with right now? What is his heart trying to say? By all reasoning, he should hate that stupid cat for distracting him, smiling weirdly, and leading to his death only seconds later. Why doesn’t he hate that thing? It’s all so annoying. But something moves through him, begging him to reconsider.

There’s more to this. It’s not simply an annoyance. All of this means something. He drops the line of thought as he sees a rim of light unfolding in front of him. The trees grow thinner, and he knows he’s arrived.

“Okay,” Masaru says, already thin for breath. “Game time.”

He reaches the lake at the same time Valerie does. He nods over to her, and she smiles, albeit nervously.

“Nice walk?” he asks.

“Perfect as always,” she says, glancing to one of the dragonflies orbiting them as it continues to provide safety. “Why do you think they do that?”

Masaru shrugs. “I don’t know. They want to eat mosquitoes?”

She hums at the thought. “Maybe. But it seems like even the things that we don’t understand here are consistent… Like the traps.”

“I think you might be reading a little deep on that one.”

She giggles and gives him a playful nudge. “Well, yes, but also…” she says, slowly, savoringly revealing her wrist. Masaru glances at it, looks away, and then does a double-take.

“Y-you have…”

“That’s right, only one left,” she says.

“How did you do it?” Masaru asks, stupefied.

“Well, I was thinking the whole time you were fighting with yours,” she says, glancing over to the rundown cabin, which looks like an advertisement for some thrilling new movie coming soon to a theater near them. “I kept asking myself, why was she afraid?”

Masaru sighs. “I don’t think she was afraid. Honestly, I don’t think mine was afraid. They just look, you know, full of themselves. They’re angry at us for being worse than them.”

“Right,” Valerie says before glancing back to Masaru. “But it’s like you said, we’re the real ones. What are they trying to hide from?”

“I don’t know,” Masaru shrugs. “Insecurity?”

“Exactly,” Valerie answers, winning another glance from Masaru.

“Okay,” he pauses and takes a deep breath, “but that doesn’t make sense because they’re literally better.”

“No, Masaru. They had to sacrifice something to get what they had. They’re not better than us.” Valerie stops herself, and shakes her head. “Anyway, she was dealing with something that I didn’t have to deal with. She said yes to something when I said no.”

Masaru’s expression mixes with thoughtfulness as well as a twinge of guilt. “I’m sorry. I guess that makes sense.”

“So mine was how… comfortable I was with certain people doing certain things with me,” she says. “And yours must be something else.”

Masaru sighs. “But the moment I walk in there, he’s in attack mode. Like, he’s ready to go. He’s ready to blame me!”

“Well I guess the reason why they’re there is because they’re trying to run away somehow.”

“Run away?” he asks, just as the glint of insight crosses his eyes. “The vacation center. You could book day trips, plane tickets. You could go anywhere.”

She nods. “That’s right. So I just ignored her. I ignored her as long as I could. I actually didn’t even go in the room. I went down and I started looking at brochures. And eventually… she came down to look for me.”

Masaru blinks. “But if she’s trying to run away, why would she care?”

She shakes her head with a smile. “Because she needs me to know that she’s still doing better than me, that she’s in charge, that she’s the best. Don’t you get it?”

Masaru squints again, just as the two can hear rustling leaves behind them.

“About time Sato got here,” Masaru says.

But it’s not Sato. The two of them freeze.

Emerging from another conjoining path is none other than Kenji. Having spotted them already, he just stares them as he walks out into the clearing.

“Well,” he says after a pause, “ain’t that a coincidence.”

“Kenji?” Masaru asks. “For real?”

Kenji shrugs. “I guess it was only a matter of time before we crossed ways.”

Another much louder, less economical rustling from the leaves picks up in their hearing. The three of them turn to see Sato lumbering breathlessly through the swamp, his head raised towards the heavens with each steaming breath.

“This is… terrible!” Sato barks out as he joins the others. “They could have at least given us a break or something before starting the next trial.”

Masaru and Valerie exchange a sly look when Sato finally notices the rifle-toting man in front of him. “Oh, you’re here too?”

Kenji shrugs. “It seems so.” He looks Sato over with a raised brow. “I have seen stranger things,” he adds before glancing over to Masaru with a look of both accusation and something Masaru could almost place as awe. It’s as if Kenji believed it couldn’t be done and Masaru has brought proof of it right in front of him. “Well, alright then. I suppose it’s only fair that we cooperate on this one.”

Valerie crosses her arms. “And you’re definitely Kenji?”

Kenji looks at his hands with a faint smile. “I definitely am.”

She purses her lips as she glances over to the cabin.

“Don’t worry. I was considering it too. Was thinking of lighting you guys up in the treeline while you two were whispering loudly about the city.”

Valerie glances aside as Masaru gives a nervous chuckle.

“Okay,” Masaru says.

“But I realized The Stranger probably wouldn’t know about that,” Kenji says. He squints. “Or, at least it wouldn’t use that against us. Can’t say I know for sure, but you all seem the part. For all intents and purposes, let’s assume everyone is actually themselves. What is our plan?”

Valerie squints, looks at the sky, looks at the ground, and shrugs. “Well, Masaru and I have done this a few times. I really can’t think of anything.”

Sato looks around. “The plan for what? We’re not, like, swimming to that cabin, are we?”

The three of them chuckle. “No. We’re definitely not swimming to the cabin,” Kenji says reassuringly.

Masaru’s brow twitches, though, as Sato gives a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. That would have been horrible. I hate swimming,” he says. “So what’s this one about, anyways?”

Valerie looks over. “This is the one with The Stranger.”

Sato pauses a moment, his eyes steadily widening, as if seeing one of his plastic models tip off a shelf. “Oh, no. The mean one? What’s he like?”

The three others look at each other for a moment. Masaru turns to Sato to explain just what their relationship with The Stranger has been up to this point, an exchange of moments most people would at least refer to as “mean.”

Sato screams. “Th-that’s terrible! You’re kidding, right? That’s not even like a test. That’s just… an execution.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kenji says. “It’s going to be fine. We are going to find a way,” he says, his expression already reflecting a renewed confidence.

Sato, despite his assumed better judgment, clenches his teeth and nods.

“We’ve got to ambush this thing,” Kenji says.

“Ambush?”

“Yeah, like set a trap. We’re going to hit the weapons cache, get the guns, go to the bell tower, and we’re going to wait for that bastard to come waltzing in. It never starts off in freak mode, so it’ll be walking.” Kenji looks over to Masaru. “I think you might have just what I need. You do have a… light source, don’t you?” He says, shooting a furtive glance over to Valerie.

Masaru nods and produces the bright red flashlight.

“Amazing,” Kenji says. “That’ll make it much faster. Just make sure you’re checking the ground, the trees, and eye level. All three for every few steps.”

“And what the hell’s the bell tower?... And the weapons cache?” Valerie cuts in. “I thought you were joking back then. There’s weapons!?”

Kenji shakes his head. “Nah, what I got here,” he says, patting his rifle, “is better than anything else in there. But they do have claymores, and I think that’s the key to our start.”

Masaru squints. “Okay, but like, what does it represent? What does it mean?”

Kenji looks at Masaru as if he has something growing out of his face. “What?”

“Well, like…” Masaru reels in his hands as he realizes just how silly this will probably sound to Kenji, who’s been able to get through many of these, apparently cluelessly, by the force of his own will. “I… Okay. So, this isn’t really a prison, per se... It’s like a…” Masaru glances aside as he tries to think up the most suiting word. “It’s like a… classroom… with uh, high stakes.”

Kenji pauses and Valerie squints at Masaru. “Really?” Kenji says.

“Yeah,” Masaru says, moving his hands in emphasis. “It’s like every one of these areas, every one of these enemies is trying to teach us something, and I’m pretty sure it’s trying to teach us something about ourselves, Kenji. So, because all three of us have this area in our loop, that must mean we all three have something in common that it’s trying to… I don’t know,” Masaru shrugs, “warn us about, tell us about, help us understand… something like that.”

Kenji pauses a moment and his eyebrows slowly lift with a smile. “Okay, buddy. If that were the case, if this spirit were doing that to teach us, why wouldn’t it just plop us down in an actual classroom and give us a lecture on, you know, holding hands and making friends?”

Masaru grits his teeth at the thought. “No, it’s not like that.” He blinks, as if he’s just realizing this for himself. “If people were that simple, then that would be great. But we’re not. We’re,” he pauses again. “We’re really stupid. Like, we need things spelled out for us, and it needs to be in a way that cuts deep into our psyche, something that we can’t forget… and maybe The Enemy, whatever it is, if it can’t make you get over the reasons you wanted to…” A spark strikes through Masaru’s eyes, and this one’s hot, the kind of spark that could light a whole forge.

“What is it?” Valerie asks.

He just stands there for a moment. “The reasons why we said we didn’t want to be here anymore,” he whispers, almost to himself. “All of you, you lost consciousness in the alleyway, right? The one next to the hospital?”

Sato nods. “Yeah. I got pushed over on the concrete and hit with a brick.”

Kenji squints. “I heard a cry for help in the alley. I turned to go check it out. There was a gunman waiting for me.”

Valerie squints, then looks towards the ground pitifully. “…Her and I were talking about how we should just… end it all. We thought that somewhere nice, like this city, would be a good last memory before we did it.”

A kind of cutting sobriety settles over the three men. As Valerie gulps down saliva to continue speaking, her gaze shifts. “But when we were talking about it,” she squints, “in the alleyway,” she adds, as if it were some kind of revelation. “I heard the shutter of a camera.” Frustration marks her face. “I assumed it was one of those creeps from where we worked before, and I was going to call the police on them. But first we went in deeper to the alley to confront the guy. He just took a picture of our faces and I couldn’t remember anything else. I just woke up in The Plains.”

Masaru squints at the ground. “We must all be in the hospital right now,” he says matter-of-factly. “Aside from that, it brought us here to challenge us. If it didn’t intervene…” Masaru hates to think about it, but the idea had crossed his mind. Wouldn’t it be better if I just wasn’t here? He takes a deep breath. “It would have turned out worse. It’s giving us a second chance.”

The three of them are silent as they stare at Masaru or the ground or the cabin in the middle of the lake, trying to come to terms with this theory.

“That might be right,” Kenji says with a poorly hidden scowl. “But let’s stay on topic here. We’re fighting The Stranger.”

“That’s it,” Masaru says. “It might not be a fight.”

A sly look crosses Kenji’s face. “Hey, I’m gonna need your help with something,” Kenji says.

Sato sighs. “Can’t the others do it? I’m tired.”

Kenji shakes his head. “That is where our problem is going to come out of once it becomes night, and you are going to help us find him early.”

“Okay,” Sato says with an unsure squint. “How exactly will I do that?”

“First, a question for you. Did enemies from The Plains or The City notice you?” Kenji asks.

Masaru and Valerie share a surprised look as Sato shrugs.

“I don’t… think so.”

Kenji smiles and begins explaining the plan as they head along. It doesn’t take long for him to find the weapons cache, filled with an unusual amount of guns, ammunition, and supplies, as well as some bespoke munitions like the aforementioned sensor-equipped claymores. It’s the kind of box that humbles even the mighty cabin in its preparedness.

Masaru hums as he ponders over the implications, and the steadily darkening night. “You find this every time, Kenji?”

The veteran nods. “If it’s part of my plan. The traps change placement, but the supplies and waypoints do not. Once you get to the lake shore, the map becomes finite again.”

Valerie gives an impressed hum. “So it goes on endlessly until we hit the lake, and then it becomes the same area.”

Kenji nods. “Not that that’s going to be very important. This is going to be the last time we’ll be here after all,” he says, handing a serious-looking rifle over to Masaru. “You know how to use one of these?”

Masaru glances over to Valerie, then back to Kenji with a smile. “I was taught by the best,” he says, winning a chuckle from Valerie, who just taps him with the side of her shoe.

“Good,” Kenji says. “Now let’s get to the bell tower and I’ll relay the specifics.”

The clearing of the bell tower unfolds like a setting from an old picture book. A far cry from the rustic and comfortable cabin, the bell tower looks like something more likely to be found in a gothic horror movie. Its crumbled spire reveals patches of stairways and floors, but at the very top, the grand bell still remains, hung by its great wooden beam and tilted just an inch to the side.

Kenji explains, re-explains, and then has back-briefed to him the various positions and roles that everyone will fulfill on this operation that he refers to as an “L-shaped ambush.” Masaru, who can humbly admit he usually doesn’t understand what Kenji’s talking about, especially when it comes to military acronyms or slang, simply crosses his arms and nods as Valerie asks all the important questions.

They take some time to fully secure the perimeter. There are multiple paths that lead up to the bell tower, and so long as Sato signals the location of The Stranger early enough, Kenji can employ the mines along its route of approach. Masaru asks what a mine’s going to do against The Stranger when they’ve shot it so many times. Kenji shakes his head with a smile.

“Nothing walks after a claymore,” he says with a knowing smirk.

Masaru and Valerie just decide to go with it. Sato, the poor clueless fellow, is left outside the tower, about a hundred meters away from Kenji, who’s lying low with the mines ready to go with a spool of detonation cord tucked under his arm. Valerie and Masaru are at the top of the tower now, watching in the thin darkness of the night.

There’s a faint glow to the place; the fireflies compete with the muffled moonlight, creating waving tapestries of gold and azure on the water.

Up in their perch, Valerie taps her shoe again into Masaru. He leans over from his spot, looking out from the red dot sight that Kenji helped him figure out.

“What is it?” he asks.

Valerie just nods her head forward. Masaru looks over to where she’s facing, and he can feel it. There’s a slight breeze coming from that direction, and it’s perfectly in the cadence of something breathing. The salaryman fails to suppress the hideous chill running up his spine.

“It’s a pretty smart plan,” Valerie admits. “But I don’t think we’re going to need Sato for it.”

Masaru smirks. “Whether he understands the plan or not, telling him to just stand there and wait would be pretty effective if it weren’t for the…” Masaru glances back to the rustling trees and the breeze. “You know.”

She smiles. “I guess Kenji didn’t notice.”

Masaru nods. “I suppose neither did we. There are so many little details to this place that are so easy to overlook, and it feels like it changes when apparently it’s the same. It’s frustrating.”

Valerie nods. “We’ll figure it out. Kenji seems confident about this one.”

Masaru just hums and nods. He’s not too sure about it, but Kenji does seem particularly certain this time.

Then… a sound from inside the wood line.