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"This is Cerberus-1. We have a casualty during the operation. We need medical support."
[...]
"I repeat. This is Cerberus-1. We have a casualty during the operation. We need medical support."
[...]
"Shit."
Out in the pitch-black dark, where you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face, only endless stretches of desolate sand dunes lay before them, and small shadows moved between them.
The enhanced soldiers created by the Solomon army—the members of Cerberus Squad—were melting into the shadows cast by the night, their crimson eyes flashing faintly and still.
It had already been three hours since they’d been stranded here.
On the way to the operation zone by vehicle, they’d been ambushed by rebels. The neighboring squad traveling with them had been wiped out the moment the fighting began when their vehicle was hit by a recoilless rifle.
After belatedly dismounting from the vehicle that had taken an RPG hit, the members of Cerberus Squad had each suffered injuries of varying severity in the rebel barrage of multiple rocket launchers.
It was a pathetic excuse for a weapon, really—just an old Soviet multiple rocket launcher mounted on a plain pickup truck—but old or not, it had more than enough power to kill people.
The survivors had gotten the hell out of the kill zone and taken cover, and after confirming the bodies of the neighboring squad’s dead, the rebels had left.
The immediate danger was gone, but there were still plenty of problems threatening Cerberus Squad’s lives.
One of them was the condition of the members.
Not only had everyone been wounded by shrapnel from the rebel rockets, but Cerberus-2, who’d been unlucky enough to catch a stray round in the thigh, had lost so much blood that her face had gone deathly pale.
If she didn’t get professional treatment and a transfusion soon, she’d die here and now.
But the terrain and their broken gear were holding them back.
Stranded in the middle of a barren desert, there was no distinctive landmark nearby to pin down their position, and their radio, damaged in the fierce exchange of fire, spat out nothing but harsh static no matter how hard they tried.
"Fuck. Nothing’s going right today."
"Tell me about it. Of all things, rebels had to set up an ambush here..."
Beside Seong-hyeon, who was angrily banging on the dead radio, Cerberus-3, Arisugawa Akira, came over and sat quietly down.
Unlike Seong-hyeon, who could see through the darkness without night-vision goggles, all Akira could make out was a faint human shape made of black shadow.
And yet, perhaps it was impossible to ignore everything they’d been through together on the battlefield.
She could tell exactly what expression he was wearing.
The man before her, who had slaughtered hundreds in a battlefield where madness and death ran rampant, was, extraordinarily enough, truly anxious.
As Cerberus-2’s grave condition worsened, unrest must have started to seep into the heart of the man who had kept his composure until now.
He valued his comrades’ lives as much as his own.
Akira placed her hand over the back of Seong-hyeon’s hand, which was still fiddling with the ruined radio.
He flinched at the warmth that touched him so suddenly, and then Akira spoke in a quiet voice.
"Leader, it’ll be fine. The people at headquarters must have noticed our signal went dead, so reinforcements will come to rescue us soon. We just have to hold on until then."
"Like I don’t know that. I’m worried because Jennifer’s in that state."
Seong-hyeon shrugged as if it were nothing, but Akira could feel it.
The slight tremor running through his hand made the weight pressing down on him all too real.
After a moment of thought, Akira decided to change the subject.
"Leader, do you remember? The day we first met."
"Huh? Of course I remember."
At Akira’s question, Seong-hyeon answered without the slightest hesitation.
The first time he met Akira, he had saved her while she’d been attached to the decoy unit during the Solomon army’s river-crossing operation.
Thanks to Seong-hyeon blowing up the tank’s ammunition rack with an RPG-22 he’d captured from an enemy anti-tank gunner before the Gibro tank could crush her, both he and Akira had survived.
Akira had been in such a shell-shocked state at the time that she could barely hold a proper conversation with him, but when they met again later in Cerberus Squad, she had become an incomparably seasoned veteran.
She had earned the nickname Queen of CQB because once she got into close-quarters combat, no matter how skilled or tough the enemy was, she’d cut them down in an instant.
"And there you were, Arisugawa Akira, crying your eyes out in my arms. How could I forget?"
"Pffft... thinking about it now is kind of embarrassing..."
At Seong-hyeon’s teasing, Akira felt her face heat a little and let out a silly laugh.
"Leader, to be honest... that day, I was convinced I was going to die."
"Yeah?"
"I’d run out of ammo, I couldn’t even see where my allies had gone, and my body was a wreck—I wasn’t in my right mind either. So I just wandered aimlessly. I’d given up on everything, thinking, fine, if you’re going to kill me, then kill me."
Akira, who had been talking without pausing for breath, took a moment to catch it and looked into Seong-hyeon’s eyes.
Her red irises shone clearly in the dark.
"But then you saved me, Leader. I thought it was all over, and then you suddenly appeared, blew up the tank, and carried me out. You probably don’t know how grateful I was."
"...That’s kind of embarrassing."
Seong-hyeon awkwardly scratched his cheek, and Akira gave a small laugh before going on.
"Leader, don’t worry. Just like you saved me that day, you’ll save us again this time."
It was certainty.
Faith that this man she knew would somehow drag her and her comrades through, no matter what hardships or disasters came crashing down on them.
"...Yeah?"
Seong-hyeon read the blind, absolute trust in the two eyes watching him, and after meeting that gaze in silence for a moment, he looked away.
Far off, he stared at the sky where the vermilion dawn had begun to rise, and a faint smile touched the corner of his mouth.
Two hours after that, after Seong-hyeon had kept pounding the radio without rest, communications with headquarters were finally restored.
An hour later, the transport helicopters that came flying in had no trouble spotting Cerberus Squad waiting atop the dunes, and Cerberus Squad returned safely without losing a single man.
.
.
.
.
The song of birds drifting in from outside the window.
Sunlight slipping through the curtains to brush against my cheek.
"..."
I stared blankly up at the pure-white ceiling of the bedroom, and then a small, steady breath reached me from beneath the bed.
Slowly turning my head, I saw Iris’s face, fast asleep.
In her light pajamas, she lay turned toward me, her lips working softly in her sleep with the innocent face of a little child.
"...Was that a dream?"
Thinking back to the desert scene that had been so vivid in front of my eyes only moments ago, I lay back down on the bed.
Maybe it was because of the stress from the phone call the Solomon NIA agent had made last night.
I’d had a feeling sleep wouldn’t come easy, and sure enough, I’d dreamed about something from the old days.
"Still, I’m glad it wasn’t a nightmare."
I felt a little grimy, and my back was slick with cold sweat, but compared to the real nightmares, this was nothing.
Dreams where all my comrades died except me, or where hundreds of gun barrels were pointed at me alone.
Whenever those gatherings of grotesque, hateful memories and hallucinations came to visit me in my sleep, I honestly had to wonder whether humans even needed to sleep at all.
Compared to nightmares that painful, this was child’s play.
"Hup..."
I brushed off the unpleasant residue clinging to my body and picked up the phone I’d left by my pillow.
It was 7:00 a.m.
I usually started streaming around ten, so there was still plenty of time left.
"Streaming, huh..."
Last night, the NIA agent had warned me to be careful with my mouth.
If I slipped and leaked classified information, they’d probably come straight to my house and either kidnap me or put a bullet in the back of my head.
Not that I was about to be scared off by that, of course.
As long as I stayed careful not to leak anything classified, the NIA wouldn’t have any real reason to hassle me.
So long as I was careful only during the storytelling streams, nothing sensitive would get out.
This was my channel, after all.
I wasn’t going to back down just because some foreign intelligence agency tried to scare me a little.
"The real problem is what kind of content I should stream today..."
The MILSIM campaign I’d been doing in single-player had ended yesterday.
Strictly speaking, the air-combat campaign was still left, but since the viewers had opposed it, I’d decided to skip that one, so it didn’t count.
Anyway, because I’d finished the MILSIM campaign yesterday, I was now in the position of needing to find some other game content.
"Hmm..."
Was multiplayer the answer after all?
MILSIM was, by design, a game that encouraged multiplayer with other users more than its campaign.
Obviously, compared to single-player, it had far stronger support in terms of updates and content.
If I ran multiplayer, I could probably pull in even more viewer attention.
The only thing that worried me was the skill level of the game’s users, but...
"...If they beat me with mechanics, I’ll just crush them with brains."
However it turned out, my future self would figure it out somehow.
And so today’s stream content was decided: MILSIM multiplayer.
I had no idea how terrible a choice that was.
Not even in my dreams.
Really.