[SWAMP 4 – STRUGGLE]

“Who the hell are you?!” Sato screams, before running up the trail. It’s quite a ways, and Masaru realizes that it probably would have been better if he were the one running, considering Sato’s speed. But just as Kenji begins planting the claymores along the route and sets the timer for their preparation, Sato digs his heels in and reaches the tower, the very moment The Stranger emerges from the wood line.

“Didn’t kill him,” Masaru notes with a hum.

“Quicker than he looks, too.” Valerie adds with a shrug.

At first, it just stands there, looking out towards the tower. As Kenji finishes placing the mines, he creeps back slowly, quietly along the upturned logs of sharp, petrified wood. Even though Masaru is certain Kenji was spotted, the veteran continues on, creeping as if it were the only thing he knows. A realization creeps up in Masaru.

“We are doing this the wrong way,” he says.

Valerie says nothing, but gives a slight, bemoaning scoff.

“Dear God, what is that thing?!” Sato gasps out as he bursts into the first floor of the bell tower.

“Up here,” Masaru says.

Sato begins fumbling up as he gasps for breath. “What is that?”

“That’s The Stranger,” Masaru says.

Kenji creeps in right behind him. “I think I got through okay, I don’t think it’s expecting anything.”

The three of them stay quiet as Valerie finally looks away from her scope to look down at the others climbing up to the second floor. “So when do we shoot?” she asks.

“When it hits the first mine,” Kenji explains, securing the detonator in his grip. “That explosion will be our cue.” He hands a pistol over to Sato, who nods, though fumbling with it all the same. “Alright, time to commence the operation,” Kenji says with a killer’s gaze, turning over to watch The Stranger. Surprisingly, it hasn’t moved an inch from its spot, but it watches them.

Masaru can feel it now behind those red eyes: disappointment. For the very first time, Masaru sees some kind of expressive movement from The Stranger. It pulls down the brim of its hat, as if it couldn’t even bear the sight of them, as if it was thinking about what to do.

Masaru squints at it as the others discuss.

“What the hell is it doing?” Valerie asks, her index finger waiting patiently outside of her rifle’s trigger well.

Sato groans. “It spotted you, Kenji. It’s going to go around.”

Kenji shakes his head. “We’ll see. If it bypasses the mines, we fire on my cue.”

They nod at him as Masaru continues to watch, motionless through his scope.

Finally, The Stranger pulls up the brim of its hat, and just as it does, the fireflies disappear, the moonlight is shrouded, and the noise returns. This time it’s like a weight placed on Masaru’s back. He struggles to breathe with it, the continual droning tenor of the sound isolating his soul from his body.

It’s because we’re trying to prepare, Masaru thinks. Trying to trust in the world around us. Traps. Caches. Places that look safe. Places where we can run. It’s speaking a completely different language. He mutters this under his breath, close enough for only Valerie to hear.

She says nothing.

Finally, The Stranger steps forward. It takes down the thin path of the roots, precisely as Kenji had planned. There’s little violence in the movement, however. It’s more like it’s just strolling along.

“Get ready,” Kenji says, his voice like molten lead. His hand ready on his first detonator, but it’s apparent he won’t need it.

There are only seconds of needle-thin silence before Masaru hears the deep, confirming tock sound of a tripped sensor, causing a fuse to slide into its charge. In an explosion of light and sound, the claymore bursts out, firing a dense wall of shrapnel into The Stranger.

Everyone fires. Sato screams with every shot. Kenji maintains perfect, controlled bursts, each one hitting the huge target, as Valerie goes for the head every time. Masaru takes a few shots but then stops himself. He mostly watches now as The Stranger continues walking along the path.

“This ISN’T WORKIIIIIIING!” Sato screams at the top of his lungs as he finishes out his clip and scrambles to reload a new one with trembling hands.

“Keep going,” Kenji says, folding one clip into the place of another with the practiced movement of an infantryman. They continue firing, and then The Stranger crosses the second mine’s sensor. Another tock and another boom. Another explosion, another screen of high-speed shrapnel enters The Stranger, but amidst the hundreds of bullet wounds and the entanglement of metal shards in its body, not a single drop of blood flies free.

The Stranger simply continues on at the same pace.

Sato begins screaming as loudly as he can as The Stranger approaches the bell tower. “WHAT DO WE DO?! WHAT DO WE DO!?” he shouts between barking, gasping screams.

“Stay calm,” Kenji says, stress clear in his voice.

Masaru can already feel the grasp of The Stranger upon him, that crushing force, those blade-like teeth.

Up on their little sniper’s perch, Masaru can feel Valerie affix her feet around his shoe as she fires— a final comfort before it enters. The two shift up from their positions and aim down as Kenji rushes up the staircase. Sato begins groveling his way up the stairs, breathless, confused, panicked, and everyone turns for the entrance.

There are no windows in the place, other than far up on the perch, where the dilapidated wood allows for Valerie and Masaru’s firing points. They peer out and wait in the dark of the mist. With Kenji shining the red flashlight into the aperture.

“Where is it?” Sato whispers, still crawling up the steps.

Everyone’s quiet. Everyone waits. Everyone trembles down the scopes of their weapons. Masaru takes a moment to check everyone’s [RES] stat. Even Kenji’s terrified. No one’s above 30/100.

I’d feel that way too, Masaru thinks, if it was hopeless. He pauses a moment, But it’s not hopeless, is it? We just pursued this from the wrong direction.

Then, at the very top floor of the bell tower, Masaru feels something behind him… and it’s not Valerie.

He turns just in time to see The Stranger, looming over them like a god of the night. With a simple budge forward, it knocks both Masaru and Valerie down the three stories through the open floors of the bell tower onto the cobblestone below.

“There!” Kenji shouts, shooting upwards into the bell tower as The Stranger moves like a demonic blur out one of the top windows.

“Are you two alright?” Kenji asks, keeping his aim up high as he pats Sato to check out the front door.

Masaru groans as he fights through the pain. Valerie is the first to speak. “I think I’m okay,” she growls as she turns over onto her back and aims for the entryway.

Masaru takes a moment to regain control but continues flinching. There’s something wrong with the way he fell. Something in his waist feels really hot, like someone shoved a burning coal into the base of his spine.

“Masaru?” Valerie asks, giving him a nudge, but not looking away from the entrance.

“I’m… okay,” he pushes out with a wince.

“Hold your weapon steady,” Kenji asks as he pushes against the wooden wall. “This freak could come out of anywhere.”

Then, in a brutal stroke of irony, an arm smashes through the wooden wall of the bell tower, wraps around Kenji, and pulls him outside. Kenji roars as he fires his weapon backwards, the splinters of the wood peeling into him like a wall of teeth.

“You’ll hit Kenji!” Masaru snaps, but Sato continues firing.

“I WON’T LET THAT FREAK TOUCH ME!” Sato cries out.

The group waits as they hear a few more bursts of rounds outside, a grunt, and then a dense, crisp, tearing noise before the sound of something wet falls upon the floor.

The three wait wide-eyed.

As they listen outside, Masaru groans and winces as he tries to angle his rifle to a somewhat useful position while the other two wait, paralyzed in their spots.

Then, after a few seconds, there’s nothing.

Only the noise holds tight on the air. The flashlight waits on a stair pointing towards the entrance. Everything else is bathed in gut-wrenching darkness. In the shadows, Masaru saw a glimpse of red at the corner of his vision. It could be his imagination, or perhaps blood. More and more, he feels just how hopeless they are, how completely powerless they are against the will of their predator.

His eyes flash in both pain and insight. It’s not simply The Enemy that’s the key. It’s the situation of the matchup. It’s how we find ourselves in the moment.

“I get it now…” he whispers to himself, just as Sato, now a trembling shadow of a man, breathes in critically one last time.

“I… I CAN’T TAKE IT!” he shouts before running outside, at a speed neither Masaru nor Valerie would expect from him.

“Stop, idiot!” Valerie snaps.

“I’M GONNA KILL YOU!” Sato screams as he rushes around the corner.

Valerie flinches forward to move, but Masaru holds up his hand, and she stops.

They listen to The Noise mixed with Sato’s stressed breathing, frantic footsteps, and gasps.

“COME OUT!!” he shouts, now rounding the side of the bell tower, its foundation shaking from the prior attack as the beams of wood above wheeze. The two listen in, focusing everything they have in their hearing.

“THERE YOU ARE!” Sato says, and then he fires. The two listen as the cacophony of pistol shots cut through the air, and to Masaru’s complete dumbfoundment, he hears the sound of a trigger clicking into an empty chamber.

It let him fire his shots? Masaru asks himself.

There’s another long silence.

“Why aren’t you DEAD?!” Sato screams. A scraping sound can be heard, like the picking up of a rock or a piece of wood, and a dense thud. Valerie, her hands trembling over the rifle, affixes her grip as Masaru’s eyes widen even more.

“Ironic,” a voice says, blacker than pitch and deeper than any prison, “…for your sake.” It adds this just before Sato gives a short, uncertain, “huh?”

The sound of a person collapsing can be heard.

Valerie’s scant breathing picks up. “It got him,” she whimpers, her gaze still held towards the entryway.

Then the footsteps move around their tower to the door at last. The Stranger stands there, its eyes filled with something that Masaru now correctly identifies as impatience. Valerie fires wildly, exhausting her ammunition in a sweep of shots. The Stranger just stands there, staring them down, and it reaches out its hand. Masaru isn’t sure how it happened, but a bolt of what seems like pure bone shoots into her neck. She grasps at the blood spilling from the artery for a few seconds, tears running from her eyes. She looks up to The Stranger, back to Masaru, and then back to The Stranger again as the blood choking her words slowly pools out of her body. After a few more seconds, she collapses, and The Stranger steps on her skull in a way that makes her look like less than a bug. Only Masaru and The Stranger remain.

Masaru holds his aim tight on The Stranger as if waiting to fire. He still has at least half of his clip left, and The Stranger isn’t moving. It’s an easy shot. But something holds Masaru back.

“…Well?” The Stranger asks.

“Nothing we do…” Masaru starts, but he shakes his head. “No. It’s the way we’re approaching it.”

He can’t be killed, not by the way they’re fighting him.

At long last, something akin to pleasure marks the many red eyes of The Stranger. It begins growing, looming over Masaru until it’s at least three stories tall. New folds of its long coat form to cover its body as it looks down on Masaru one last time. “As if I could make it any clearer,” it says, before reaching up one of its arms, now meters long, up to the top beam holding the bell. It gives it a slight flick, and that’s the last push needed. Splintering out, the giant bell falls down.

Masaru doesn’t scream. He doesn’t rage. He just watches as the bell slams down, cutting deep into the center of his mouth, shattering his teeth and cutting through the backside of his skull. He feels cut off from the rest of his body, numb but filled with pain. He begins to gray out as the top part of his head flips back onto the floor. His vision is upside-down now. He can see nothing but the red flashlight on the stair, shining out like a beacon of certainty: a lie of safety.

He gets it now.