All You Need Is Kill

Orange light shone through a hole in the west wall. When I glanced at the chronometer beside my display I could hardly believe eight hours had elapsed since the battle started. It was already dusk. No wonder I felt like my Jacket was lined with lead. I didn’t have the muscle for this. My batteries were drained and systems were about to start shutting down. I’d never been in a battle half this long.

Rita’s red Jacket crept into the cafeteria. I blocked a horizontal swing with my axe; my Jacket’s frame creaked. If I’d stopped it head on, the torque from the actuators would have torn my Jacket apart from the inside out. Fear of what Rita was capable of gripped me anew. Rita Vrataski was a prodigy in battle-and she had learned to read my every parry and feint.

Each move in battle happens at a subconscious level. This makes it doubly difficult to compensate when someone learns to read those moves. Rita was half a step ahead of me, already spinning to deliver a deadly blow to the space where I would be before I even got there.

It hit home. I instinctively stepped into the arc of her axe, narrowly avoiding the full brunt of the swing. My left shoulder plate went flying. A red warning light lit up on my display.

Rita kicked, and there was no way to avoid it. I sailed across the room. Sparks flew as my Jacket grated along the broken concrete floor. I spun once and crashed into the counter. A shower of chopsticks rained down on my head.

Rita was already moving. No time to rest. Head, check. Neck, check. Torso, right shoulder, right arm unit-everything but my left shoulder plate checked out. I could still fight. I let go of my axe. Digging my gloves into the counter’s edge, I vaulted up and over. Rita swung, shattering the counter and kicking up a spray of wood and metal.

I was in the kitchen. Before me stretched an enormous stainless steel sink and an industrial strength gas range. Frying pans and pots large enough to boil entire pigs hung along one wall. Piles of plastic cutlery reached to the ceiling. Neat rows of trays still held uneaten breakfasts, now long cold.

I backed up, knocking platters to the ground in an avalanche of food and molded plastic. Rita was still coming. I threw a pot at her and scored a direct hit. It sounded like a gong as it bounced off her cherry-red Jacket helmet. Apparently not enough to dissuade her. Maybe I should have tried the kitchen sink instead. With a swing of her axe, Rita destroyed half the counter and a steel-reinforced concrete pillar.

I backed up further-into a wall. I dropped to the ground as a vicious horizontal swing sliced toward me. The bodybuilder’s face, still grinning mindlessly down over the kitchen, took the hit in my place. I dove for Rita’s legs. She sprang out of the way. I let the momentum carry me back to the ruins of the cafeteria counter. My axe was right where I’d left it.

Picking up a weapon you’d already thrown away could only mean one thing: you were ready to fight back; no one picked up a weapon they didn’t plan on using. It was clear I couldn’t keep running forever. If Rita really wanted to kill me-and I was starting to think she just might-there would be no running. Fending off one attack after another had left my Jacket running on empty. It was time to make up my mind.

There was one thing I couldn’t let myself forget. Something I’d promised myself a long time ago when I resolved to fight my way out of this loop. Hidden beneath the gauntlet on my left hand was the number 160. Back when that number was only 5, I had made a decision to take all I could learn with me into the next day. I’d never shared the secret of those numbers with anyone. Not Rita, not Yonabaru, not even Ferrell who I’d trained with so many times. Only I knew what it meant.

That number was my closest friend, and so long as it was there, I had no fear of dying. It didn’t matter if Rita killed me. I would never have made it this far without her anyway. What could be more fitting than redeeming my savior with my own death?

But if I gave up now, everything would be gone. The guts I’d spilled on that crater-blasted island. The blood I’d choked on. The arm I’d left lying on the ground. The whole fucking loop. It would vanish like the smoke out of a gun barrel. The 159 battles that didn’t exist anywhere but in my head would be gone forever, meaningless.

If I gave it all I had and lost, that was one thing. But I wasn’t going to die without a fight. Rita and I were probably thinking the same thing. I understood what she was going through. Hell, she and I were the only two people on the whole damn planet who could understand. I’d crawled over every inch of Kotoiushi Island trying to find a way to survive, just as Rita had done on some battlefield back in America.