Chapter 6 — What He Was Made For

The car kept moving long after the city vanished behind them.

Arata avoided the main roads, guiding the vehicle through narrow countryside lanes where the fires no longer reached and the air didn’t taste like smoke. The screaming faded into memory. The sky darkened into deep blue.

Silence settled in.

The engine sputtered.

Once.

Twice.

Then died.

“…You’re kidding,” Takeru muttered.

Arata didn’t respond. He eased the car onto the shoulder, cut the ignition completely, and stepped out. The shotgun was already in his hands as his eyes swept the treeline.

No panic.

No hesitation.

“There,” Riku said quietly.

A rural shrine stood just beyond the roadside, half-swallowed by trees. The torii gate leaned crookedly. Stone lanterns were cracked and moss-covered, their carvings softened by time.

They moved quickly.

Inside, the shrine was cool and stale. Old prayer charms hung torn from the beams. Dust blanketed the wooden floor.

Arata positioned the shotgun near the entrance, angled to cover the doorway. He checked the windows. Glock secure. Knife where it always was.

Then he sat against one of the pillars.

Not resting.

Waiting.

The others watched him.

He didn’t slump.

Didn’t breathe out in relief.

Didn’t look like someone who had narrowly escaped death.

He looked like someone between assignments.

Minutes passed.

Then—

“Who the hell are you?” Takeru snapped.

Arata’s head turned sharply. “Quiet,” he said. “You want infected hearing you?”

“I don’t care,” Takeru shot back. “Just—who are you?”

Arata stared at him for a long moment.

Then he exhaled softly.

“…What a pain,” he muttered.

“Fine. You want to know?”

He leaned back against the pillar.

“There are five of us,” he began. “All orphans. No families. No records.”

The shrine felt smaller.

“We weren’t recruited,” he continued. “We were taken. Given numbers. Designations.”

A brief pause.

“My codename was Thirteen.”

Riku swallowed. Haruka’s hands tightened in her lap.

“They experimented on us,” Arata said. His voice remained flat. Clinical.

“Cutting. Injections. Chemical trials. Nerve response testing.”

“You never knew what they put into you,” he went on. “Or if you’d wake up the next day.”

His gaze drifted slightly, unfocused.

“Afterward, you still trained.”

His fingers shifted almost imperceptibly.

“Fail a combat drill,” Arata said, “and you don’t stop. You get whipped.”

Mina’s breath caught.

“Then you redo it,” he continued.

“Again. And again.”

His jaw tightened.

“Until it becomes instinct.”

Mina’s hands locked around her sleeves.

“You don’t eat,” Arata said. “No breakfast. No dinner. Sometimes no sleep.”

Haruka’s face drained of color.

“That’s how they test hunger tolerance. Pain tolerance.”

He sounded like he was reading from a manual.

“From the dorms, you could hear the labs,” Arata added quietly.

“Screaming. Sometimes for hours.”

Mina’s eyes widened.

“Sometimes it stopped suddenly,” he said. “Sometimes it didn’t.”

Silence pressed against the wooden walls.

“At some point,” Arata continued, “we stopped reacting.”

He looked up at them.

“No more screaming. No more pain.”

His voice lowered.

“Just instructions.”

Riku shook his head slowly. “…That’s impossible.”

“No,” Arata replied. “That’s conditioning.”

A beat passed.

“Masahiro was part of it,” he said. “Combat instructor. Evaluator. He trained all five of us.”

Riku frowned. “Then why—”

“Because he realized what they were turning us into,” Arata said.

His eyes hardened.

“To them, we weren’t people.”

A pause.

“We were soldiers.”

Another.

“Weapons.”

Mina finally looked away.

“He tried to save us,” Arata continued. “All of us.”

For the first time, something shifted in his voice—faint, almost invisible.

“But you can’t pull five kids out of a place like that,” he said. “You get one chance.”

Silence stretched long.

“And I was the one he could get out.”

No one asked about the others.

“He gave me a name,” Arata said. “A life.”

His fingers curled slightly against the wood.

“Something they’ve been trying to take back ever since.”

A noise outside.

Arata stood instantly, lifting the shotgun without a sound.

“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll take first watch.”

Riku hesitated. “You don’t sleep much, do you?”

Arata didn’t answer.

He took position by the entrance, becoming part of the shadow itself.

Behind him, Mina whispered—not in fear, but in something heavier.

“…How do you live after that?”

Arata didn’t turn.

“You don’t,” he said quietly.

“You function.”

Far in the distance, engines rumbled.

Convoys moved.

Radios spoke in coded fragments.

And Subject Thirteen was still at large.