Magical Girl Hunters
Part 6: "On the Waterfront"
By Andy Kent
Created by Aaron Shattuck

Warning: This fic isn't bright and cheery, even considering the subject
matter. There's a couple of parts where the author's penchant for
minute description of the effects of expensive military technology on
the human body may have indeed exceeded the limits of good taste, and
he really hopes that you enjoy every one of them. Mail comments and
death threats to akent@pdq.net, please.

Quick thanks to Addison Godel and Myungsu Suh for nice, quick edit jobs.

---

"Come into my parlor," said the spider to the fly.

Of course, when one is looking directly at two people that were
certifiably dead, not but a few hours ago, neither of them exactly
overjoyed at the experience, it seemed more like a couple of spiders
dropping by the fly's office, but what hey.

"You know, that -hurt-." Kyo had one of those grins, the kind that said
'I'm about to go postal on somebody and enjoy it very, very much, thank
you' with loud capital letters. Obviously, she had issues to resolve.

I decided to attempt to think fast. "Hey, sorry, but no harm done,
right? I mean, I can't even tell that you were shot." This was indeed
true; there weren't any scars, marks, or bruises. "How'd you do that?"

Mai chuckled, and as I looked at "her" I wondered how I could have
mistaken anybody with an Adam's apple -that- size for female. "So, Yoi,
is this the part where we divulge all of our evil plans to you and let
you escape?"

To be honest, I didn't give a rat's ass about their evil plans, though
escaping did sound like a good idea. "Anything that doesn't involve
massive bodily harm to me is okay, I suppose."

"Well, I forgive you. Guess I'm just an old softie..." Kyo sat down in
Itami's chair, and I grabbed mine before Mai got any ideas. Be damned
if I was going to be the one left standing this time. "But, anyway, we
don't have any evil plans per se. What's evil, anyhow?"

"That's right," Mai chipped in. "We really -are- youma hunters. Of
course we come back from the dead; would you have entered this business
if you had to worry about silly things like getting your head blown off
your shoulders by a brownish blast of energy?"

I refrained from commenting that I was currently in that business and
didn't much look forward to confirming my own mortality, so I nodded.
"So, what exactly where you doing, tearing up Mashi's place? I mean, is
he the source of all magical girls or what?"

"Don't be silly." Kyo stuck out her tongue. "Any self-respecting
magical girl outfit goes in for more training and such, you know? As
far as we can tell, Mashi is popping out a few magical girls of his
own, to discredit the ones that are doing their job. You know what I
mean?"

Actually, yes, I did know what she meant. While you wouldn't have
guessed it, considering the fact that I hunt rogue magical girls for a
living and felt pretty good about it, there were a few of them that I
honestly felt were a good thing for the world. Naturally, most of those
had been around long enough to graduate from "magical girl" to "female
superheroine", but experience had to count for something.

"Or whatever is posing as Mashi," I mused. Lesson to be learned, kids:
Don't muse when potentially unstable killers are having polite
conversation with you. Mai's eyes nearly bugged out of her forehead
staring at me.

"You know something that we don't, Yoi?"

Ah, what the hell. I spouted off the whole story of my first visit to
Mashiland. There were a couple of moments that I enjoyed, and maybe I
embellished the number and strength of the opposition a little...

By the time I was done, Kyo had sparklies dancing in her eyes. "Oh,
wow. That's so cool..."

Erk. Another lesson. I may have my kinks, but cross-dressing is not one
of them. I don't do it and I'm not attracted to people who do either.

Mai smacked his partner on the back of the head. "Okay, yes, we're both
in awe, stop idolizing already. Jeez. Hey, Yoi, we're off. Next time
you see us, you think you can refrain from shooting us? I mean, save
your ammo!"

I nodded and said, "Solemn promise." Of course, my fingers were crossed
behind my back. I asked Kyo, who was being physically dragged from the
room by her over-muscled partner, "Hey, how did you know my name?"

"How else? You're on that 'list of great Evil Empire people', you know.
You -and- your cute pal." She winked at me before Mai shut the door
behind the pair.

Oh, man. Life just kept getting more complicated.

---

My apartment was small. Really small. I hardly ever went there, except
for sleep and some occasional entertaining, but even I had to admit
that it was not too far removed from a rathole.

I shouldn't have been thinking of my apartment. I should have been
asleep, having dreams where I removed Sailor H's fuku and proceeded
with acts of wild debauchery, or failed to remove said fuku and did the
same. Insomnia was a bitch.

Where did this whole thing start? I mean, where do you get the stuff to
make a Magical Girl, anyhow? Why not magical guys? Or old drunks? There
had to be some logic to it, right?

No, I reminded myself, there didn't. Life isn't logical. No force of
goodness would deliberately have chosen to create Captain Kawaii. It
was just some odd manifestation of entropy, or a realization of
mankind's secret impulse to die screaming, or a natural by-product of
all the youma that hung around. Probably.

Any supreme or nearly-supreme being listening in on my thoughts would
probably be laughing His (or Her; I should know better than anybody about
female powers and such) ineffable ass off at the moment, if He wasn't
too busy looking in on my partner. Itami had all the luck with the
ladies.

---

The next morning was nice. I came in to the office, nice and early, and
proceeded to remove various sharp objects from the dart board. Itami
staggered in, maybe an hour later, and slumped down in his chair. He
looked haggard. He looked tired. He looked rumpled, but that was hardly
unusual. "Hey, Itami, how was it?"

He glared at me, with all of the intensity of a flashlight that had
been left on for a month at the bottom of a pond somewhere. "Grunt," he
said. Mentally, I wiped my brow. Seemed like H-chan was every bit as,
well, hungry for affection as she looked.

We had a client coming in at eleven. Hey, I know what you're thinking...
why are we waiting around for clients, when we can just go smash the
Mashi imposter and shut off a source of magical girls? It's simple,
kids... first off, I'm running a business here, not a charity, and it
takes a lot of money to keep us in weapons and ammunition, not to
mention rent in Tokyo. Second, I wanted to sit back and see how he'd
react to recent developments. Third, he had fifty-nine stinkin' magical
girls around the place, at -least-. I wasn't crazy.

I passed the time by doing the books. What with the take from Mashi and
our last couple of actual paying jobs, we were solidly in the black. In
fact, we could actually afford to pay ourselves a bonus this month.
Heck, maybe I'd even file taxes this year... nah.

The doorbell rang at ten twelve. No way in hell that it was our contact
from Mizumo Fishing Industries; he had told us that he had a busy
schedule and that he couldn't arrive before ten forty-five or so. I
looked at Itami, I nodded, he nodded, and we both went rooting around
in our desks. I came up with a nice .45, and he had various sharp-
looking bits of metal, so I figured we were ready for business.

One of the disadvantages of having a snazzy frosted glass door with
your business name painted on it, in nice and stylish English
lettering, is the complete impossibility of installing a standard
peephole. One of these days, we'd get around to installing a state-of-
the-art camera system complete with a closed-circuit TV, so that we
could scope out our visitor before going to the door. Right after I
picked up that new place and home theater system, probably.

As it was, I had to fling the door open, grab the girl's mouth with one
hand, and haul her inside. Kicking the door shut, I pressed the gun to
her temple and said, "What, you thought it would work again, huh?
Nobody pulls the same trick on me twice..."

Itami was looking at me strangely, and I glanced down at my captive.
She wasn't wearing sailor fuku. Hell, she probably wasn't even a
magical girl. What she was is sixteen, and cute in a sort of frumpy
way, and about to insane with fear.

Oh. Um... gosh, that's embarrassing. Makes me look like I'm paranoid, which
I am, and an idiot, which I'm not unless you ask Itami. I turned her
loose and sat back down, careful to keep the gun trained on her. After
all, just because she didn't have a wand out in plain sight didn't mean
she didn't have a wand.

"Sorry about that." I gestured with the gun, and she took a seat on an
overturned garbage can. "You've got exactly one minute to explain what
you're doing here and why."

"I, um, I need some help. People told me that you knew what you were
doing..."

I shrugged. "We normally work by appointment only. You have a magical
girl problem?"

"Uh-huh..."

Oy, vay, please don't let it be one of those problems where a magical
girl is fated to spend eternity with this chick's boyfriend. We'd run
into one of those, almost a year ago, and when things were finally
over... the magical girl in question was dead, as well as five or six of
her cohorts, but the guy swore off women and became a monk, and our
client was so depressed that she hung herself and stiffed us on our
fee. See what kind of collateral damage these girls make?

I put down the gun. Aiming weapons at potential clients was a serious
social gaffe. "Details, please."

She fiddled with a thick braid of brown hair. "Um... it started a couple
of weeks ago. I was watching the fight between those youma and the
troops in Osaka..."

I immediately decided that she was crazy. Nobody watches fights with
youma anymore; they're too common and every so often a bystander gets
hit.

"I got hit with something, some kind of beam whatever from one of the
magical girls that showed up. I thought, figures, right, you're dead
now, Aika... Right before I grey out, somebody bends over me, mumbles
something, and I'm all fixed... sorta."

"Sorta?" Itami hadn't put down his knife. I think his encounter last
night had left him more twitchy than usual. Funny how it relaxed most
people...

"Here, um, I'll show you. Just watch, okay?"

She stood up, turned around, and pulled something out of her pocket. It
wasn't a little pink wand with a heart on it, like I was half-
expecting. It was a nicely maintained Maglite, and when she flicked it
on, it had a pinkish beam.

I flatly refuse to describe the next thirty seconds. After all, we are
talking a standard magical girl transformation here, and doubtless
you've seen them a million times before. The end result, though, that
I'll describe.

She still had the thick brown braid and glasses. The white and blue
fuku was new, though, and somehow she'd acquired a headband during the
process. Not to mention bodily changes. She must have grown ten
centimeters... oh, and she was taller, too.

What can I say? These are the things that I noticed.

"They... they turned you into a magical girl?" My jaw was hanging, and
not just because of the view. The very thought of being -involuntarily-
converted into one of those hellions was rather disturbing. I hadn't
thought it was possible, myself.

"Um... yeah. I didn't ask for it, honest. I just wanted a look at the
guns! I mean, everybody has a hobby, right?" I nodded dumbly.
"Everybody says that you guys are the best for taking care of magical
girl problems... can you help me out?"

This was bad. Really bad. "Look... Aika, wasn't it? You do know how we
take care of magical girl problems, right?" She looked at me, but she
obviously didn't understand. I picked up my gun, pulled back the slide,
and ejected a bullet from the chamber. She understood -that-.

"Um, yeah, okay, I'm willing to try that..." She screwed her eyes shut.

---

I had told Itami that he shouldn't smoke. It was going to kill him, I
said. Our line of work was dangerous enough, I said.

He never believed me, not until his cigarette fell out of his mouth and
set fire to the clutter on his desk.

Between the three of us, we managed to get the fire put out before it
did anything more than attractively scorch the faux wood finish. Still,
though, it was a hell of a shock.

"Let me get this straight... you want us to kill you?" I wasn't prepared
for this. Really.

Aika nodded. "I don't think I can live like this. I'm not into the
whole 'sweetness and light' thing, you know? I want to join the
national self-defense force, not the armies of goodness."

Briefly, I considered how good life would be if they all did this sort
of thing at the beginning. It'd save us a hell of a lot of legwork. On
the other hand, though, nobody would pay us to sit around and shoot
them as they came. Which reminded me...

"Okay, no problem. Our fee is five hundred thousand, up front. You have
it on you?"

I must admit, I was rather pleased when she turned grey. "Five h-
hundred thousand? I've only got three thousand."

Itami shrugged. I continued, "Yeah, we can't kill you unless you can
pay the fee. We'd feel bad, you know?" Hell, I probably would, too.

"I can't get that kind of money!"

"Work for us."

I hadn't said that. I stared at Itami, and he returned a "it sounded
like a good idea at the time" look.

The prospect immediately brightened her. "What? I never thought of
that... you mean I'd get to kill magical girls?"

"Well, yes, that's the general idea." Itami, what in hell were you
thinking? I wasn't about to be saddled with one of these. Hell, we both
–knew- about "friendly" fire from magical girls.

Then again, there would be a certain irony in it. Heh.

---

We stashed Aika in the back room when the Mizumo guy arrived. After
all, it wouldn't be any good to spook him. Somewhere along the line,
we'd talked her into changing back to normal (admittedly, it was her
idea, and she did it before we asked), and once again she was a
potentially cute but bookish girl. It was scary. Most of these girls,
heck, you can spot them even when they're not 'in character'.

Itami took off for a walk. He didn't exactly have a relaxing effect on
the clients, and he definitely needed the fresh air.

The Mizumo guy was a complete salaryman. Business suit, business tie,
business card, the whole package. Maybe fifty pounds overweight, but
the suit fit well enough. He sat down and pushed a folder across the
desk. "We would like these girls... eliminated."

I flipped open the folder to find a passel of photos, all depicting
magical girls. There were three group shots (one of them posed!), each
including a round dozen of the youngsters and what looked like a
dolphin. The other pictures gave me faces, aliases, and a bit of
information on them. I'm not going to complain if the client does his
own legwork.

"They call themselves the Ecologically-Minded Dozen of Light. So far,
they've wrecked eight offshore oil platforms, six of the older model of
supertankers, and quite a lot of small, independent waste disposal
contractors." The suit coughed. "Recently, they started focusing on our
operation. As you know, we are one of the few whaling fisheries still
in business..."

Actually, I hadn't known. Nodding seemed like a good idea, though, and
he continued.

"We have only two factory ships suitable for processing whales, due to
recent environmental regulations. Two weeks ago, these girls attacked
and nearly sank the Aoizumi, halving our operational capacity. They
will probably strike next for the Akaimizu. We intend to employ you to
stop them, of course."

Well, time for standard client schmoozing. "Man, you guys are down to
one ship? Must be harsh."

The suit brightened. "Actually, these regulations have been a godsend
to our company. With the restrictions on whaling, we can take our
legally mandated maximum with a tiny fraction of the overhead costs
incurred before regulation, and sell the products at a huge markup,
blaming a restricted supply. Our stock has never been better. Although,
I must say, if these terrorists manage to disable the Akaimizu, we will
be in serious financial trouble."

You could almost hear the sound of me blinking in shock. It occurred to
me that there were more forms of evil in the world than the kind that
spawned youma or magical girls. It also occurred to me that this guy
had just asked me to take on a damned team all at once. Oh, happy day.
"We can do it, but a dozen is a lot for me to hit, you know? Could be a
stretch."

"We are prepared to compensate you with your standard fee..."

To -hell- with that. I don't do "buy one, get eleven free" deals.

"...for each of the girls that you can confirm eliminated. Plus a bonus,
of double that amount, if the entire team is disrupted. We realize that
it is a dangerous job, Yoi-san."

I somehow kept my jaw off the floor, but the little cash register in my
head was still going "ka-ching!" for all it was worth. I didn't mind,
really. "Sir, you've got yourself some troubleshooters."

---

I parked outside the warehouse and hopped out of the car, checking the
door twice to make sure it was locked. It wasn't exactly the sort of
neighborhood that you wanted to park in, after all. I wouldn't live here. I
wouldn't work here. Hell, I didn't particularly like visiting. But the Finn
doesn't go to you. You have to go to him.

Maybe I'd better explain that. The Finn was our weapons dealer, fence,
and general busybody. He was the sixth Finn that we had used; four of
them we dumped when they didn't manage to come up with enough
hardware. The fifth got capped by a stray Magical Girl six months
ago. They all called themselves the Finn. Supposedly, it came from some
old gaijin sci-fi book, but that kind of thing wasn't my style. Hell, I
didn't care what he wanted me to call him, really. And this guy always
had the goods.

One corner of the warehouse was Finn's 'shop'. Lots of tools, racks of
parts to cars and guns and things I didn't really want to speculate
about, circuit boards by the box full, all were piled up in some way that
obviously made a lot of sense to the Finn. In the middle of this, attacking
some kind of handle piece with a grinder, was the Finn himself. The guy
was even uglier than the others; more of a rat than a human, really,
although he wasn't a mutant or youma or anything funny like that. Just
somebody that nature had decided to whack with the ugly stick a few
times when he was little. More than a few times.

"Hey, Finn." The rodent looked up from his crafting and smiled. "You
got my shipment?"

"Ah, Yoi. It's always a pleasure to see you." Finn walked over to a
rack of lockers and eased one open. "Although it's much more
pleasurable when you call and tell me that 'money is not an problem'."

"I recently happened into some cash." This was true; that pile I'd
ripped off of the Ultra impersonator was a bit more than we were used
to using, and I was a firm believer in the principle of careful
reinvestment. "So, what've you got?"

Finn pulled out several closed boxes, stacking them on a grimy
workbench. "It's your lucky day, Yoi. I impress even myself with my
skill and luck, getting you all of this hardware." Did I mention that
Finn had a tendency to toot his own horn? "Here, you'll like this one."

The first box had... a gun. Pistol, fat, big clip. "I've got pistols,
Finn."

"I'm hurt, Yoi. This," he said, as he gestured to the weapon, "is a
genuine Smith and Wesson factory prototype. Burst fire capable pistol,
nine mil, with a cyclic rate you ordinarily see on point defense
systems on ships. It'll put three rounds through the same hole,
period."

I hefted the gun. A bit heavier than I was used to, but it had good
balance. "Sounds good. Reliable?"

"Didn't jam once. I took it out to a range and test-fired a few hundred
rounds. Wrist felt like I'd broken it for an hour or so afterward,
though. For a nine mil, it's got one hell of a kick." Finn gestured to
another box. "I took the liberty of preparing a few clips of ammo for
you. First round is a kinetic penetrator, second is hollow-point, third
is azide explosive. Ten thirty-round clips."

Thirty bullets was one hell of a large clip for a pistol, it turned
out. Oh, well. If I ran dry, maybe I could beat one of them over the
head with the thing. "What else?"

"Try this on." He had some kind of jacket, which looked like but
definitely wasn't leather.

"I like my jacket, Finn."

"You'll like this one better."

I shrugged, pulled it on. Warm. A bit stiff, though. "I hope you don't
think this is armored..."

"Better than that. A couple guys pulled it off one of the guys in Youma
Disposal Team 23, a couple weeks ago. You hear about that?"

Damn. I hadn't, but Aika had clued me in... the Teams were our
government's way of telling the people that it had the youma problem
under control, and to be honest, they generally did a good job. The
average youma didn't stand up well to military firepower, anyway. 23,
though, had made a big mistake; they'd been caught between their
targets, a pair of nasty things that looked like the illegitimate kids
of Godzilla and Gamera, and a pack of magical girls bent to subjugate
the two. The Team had taken something on the order of eighty percent
casualties from the encounter, plus assorted casualties like my new
pal. Gave a whole damn new meaning to 'friendly' fire, I suppose.

"Well, actually, they pulled a few fragments off, took it to their
shack in Osaka, and reverse-engineered the thing. Consider this a test
run."

"Okay, what's it do?"

Finn smiled. "Impact armor. Hardens up when you get hit. Watch." He
grabbed a crowbar and swung it at my arm, faster than I'd have thought
a rodent could move. I tried to get out of the way, but it hit... and my
entire arm froze up for a second, and when it came back I was fine.
Heck, didn't even feel it.

Now it was my turn to smile. "This might come in handy."

"Don't get cocky, kid. That stuff won't stop a bullet, and it sure as
hell doesn't work against whatever juice your little friends put out."

There were other things: an absurdly short sawed-off shotgun, a bunch
of ammo for the guns we already had, and pink smoke grenades. "Pink?" I
asked.

"Yeah, pink. Figured it might give you a bit of an edge."

He might be right, at that... no telling -what- these freaks would find
to be 'cute'.

"Oh, and one more thing..." Finn reached under his desk and pulled out a
small leather sling, filled with a dozen or so throwing knives. "For
Itami. Smith in Texas heard about you guys, made a 'donation to the
cause'. Maybe he can use 'em, I dunno. So, you think you can take a
round dozen of them now?"

I'd asked for that, last week when I called, but now it wasn't going to
be enough. "Probably. Can you do five times that?"

Ever see a rat go pale? It's not pretty. "Five freakin' times? What the
hell?"

I gave him the story. We had been lucky, only running into five out of
the sixty-four "Crayola Knights", and I wasn't looking forward to
seeing them again, but you know how Murphy's Law works, and so do I.

It took the better part of half an hour to get it all out to the car,
inconspicuously and safely. Still, though, I felt good. I think I now
know what Mom meant when she talked about how much she liked to shop,
anyway.

---

"NO, you can't come with us!"

If Aika had been a bit more attractive, I would have called what she
did a "flounce". As it was, it was more of a pout than anything else.
"I don't see why not... I mean, it's going to be really tough, right? You
need the help!"

"No, we don't. And -gimme- that!" I snatched the .45 from my desk from
her and stuck it in the waistband of my pants. I'm very proprietary with my
weapons. "Look, I don't care how good you are with a gun. If you go out
there and get yourself killed, you're no good to us."

She swallowed. "Um... I guess I could, um, change. After all, magical
girls aren't easy to kill, right?"

I grew a sweatdrop large enough to fill a shot glass. "And what happens
when I look up and there's a bunch of fuku in front of me? I hate to
say it, but you don't look that different from the others in uniform.
And don't think you're going to trick me into shooting you by
accident!" After all, I'm better than the people I hunt, right?

"That's true..." Aika turned around.

"No, it's not."

I dived for cover behind Itami's desk, shoving Aika to the floor, and
came up with the shotgun. Anything coming in through the -window-
wasn't friendly. Especially anything looking like an ugly buzzard.

An ugly talking buzzard?

"HEY HEY HEY point that damn thing somewhere else, you bastard!"

A foul-mouthed ugly talking buzzard.

Aika pulled herself to a chair, rubbing her head. "Murray, don't -do-
that. I told you not to sneak up on me, you idiot bird..."

The buzzard snorted. "I'm not any happier about it than you are, bitch.
It's not like I asked about this either."

The sweatdrop was back, along with its older brother and sister. "Hold
on a minute! What the heck is going on?"

And they told me. Murray, it seemed, was Aika's cute animal friend.
Seemed he was 'in the neighborhood' of Osaka a couple weeks ago, saw a
bunch of dead bodies, and went in for a snack... next thing you know,
he's bonded to, in his words, "a half-witted bookworm military otaku
with no idea how to actually have a good time". Well, something
approximating his words; I have no particular need to describe all the
various curses that he used.

She wasn't any happier to have a "disgusting carrion-eater" following
her around. In fact, though they hadn't said anything, I guessed that
she'd already tried to "get rid" of him a couple times.

It took me half an hour to stop laughing before I remembered Murray's
first comment. "So, what's not true?"

"What are you talking about, you no-load pus... um, oh yeah. Well, it's
like this. She's not exactly differentiated herself, the moron. That
lame-ass fuku is kind of a default option. She could try showing up as
something else, if she used that ball of crap she calls a brain."

Well, that certainly had potential.

---

When Itami came back, he was carrying a poster tube covered with
shipping labels; apparently, he'd stopped by the post office on his
walk. He didn't react to the bird. Instead, he sat down and opened the
canister up, sliding out...

An ornate katana with sheath. Oh, joy. "Look, Itami, I seriously hope
that you're not planning on using that thing. Sounds like something
that our little pals would do."

"It was Mother's. A family curse. It made her a little weird..." He eased
two inches of blade from the scabbard, and the temperature in the room
immediately dropped twenty degrees. I -swear- I saw little black flecks
swirling around the exposed blade before he covered it again.

Aika burst through the door to the back room, carrying one of my old
nine mil pistols. "What was -that-?" I gestured at Itami's weapon, and
she shivered a little. "I felt that from the other room. Cold, dark, I
dunno, evil?"

Oh, just great. The last thing I needed was a partner carrying around a
freakin' beacon for every magical girl in the city. "Can you feel it
right now, Aika?"

"I don't think so, Yoi... maybe. A little?"

---

I'll remember the drive down to Mizumo's docks for a long, long time.
Not because the scenery was nice, which it wasn't. Nor because I spent
the entire time "briefing" lil' Aika-chan on what we were about to do
and why she was going to wait in the car, although I was, and it wasn't that
fun.

I gave Itami my keys and let him -drive my car-. I'd snapped, but then
again reality had already delivered a few swift kicks in the nuts over
the last couple days and I was getting used to insanity.

We paged through the files we'd gotten, which were fairly nice. You
don't hear too often about the Ecologically-Minded Dozen of Light, now.
For all that they've been around three or four years, they don't see
much action. Of course, if they'd quit going after polluters and
illegal dumpers and start kicking youma around like normal girls,
they'd be national heroes.

It seemed they had a kind of astrological theme going... each one had
taken the name and an attack or two from a different sign of the
zodiac. Coupled with a touch of color coordination in their respective
fuku, this gave me an advantage; I could know what to expect if I was
lucky enough to remember it before it shot me.

Aries, Taurus, Scorpio, Pisces, and Leo all had fairly standard blast-
type attacks, nothing we hadn't seen before. Aquarius was transport.
Capricorn and Sagittarius had really complicated magical powers that
would be utterly useless in a fight, so I wasn't gonna worry about
them. Virgo and Libra were more sensors than anything else.

And they'd never seen Gemini do anything special, for all the pics they
got of her in bright yellow fuku. That gave me the creeps; every so
often you run into one of these with a "world destroyer" attack or something
equally dramatic. Something they're never ever ever supposed
to use, unless you panic them, in which case it's always the -first-
thing they reached for. I tell you, once we came maybe half a second
away from the Apocalypse; damn good thing my gun hadn't jammed.

---

We were set up, hiding behind stacks of crates, maybe an hour before
they showed up. The dock workers split immediately; after all, if a
dozen girls march down the middle of a busy industrial district with
brightly colored yet monochromatic fuku and large wands bearing symbols
of Western astrology, there just isn't any good way to take it. The
men, havoc-avoiding people that they were, melted away.

That's how I liked it. So far, I've never whacked an innocent
bystander, and it helps loads when they don't bystand around and watch
me work.

We let them pass us. Never take a team from the front, we'd learned.
They always seem to walk around in the precise formation that best
protected everybody on the team, although you'd never get one of them
to explain how they knew to do that, because they honestly didn't know.
It was just luck, or fate, or whatever silly bugger made them magical
girls in the first place having some influence on matters.

Conversely, if you flush out a team from behind, you've got two or
three advantages. First, you've got that essential first second of
surprise, and often you can bag the whole bunch with a nice area effect
weapon right then. Second, they're out of their little formation, and
not really prepared for a fight from behind anyway. Third, they'll
scatter in different directions instead of falling back, giving the
opportunist (that's me) a chance to hunt them down one-by-one. Much
safer.

I'd lost the quick game of Janken with Itami, so I had the water side
of the dock to cover. This was bad; at least two of them had water-
related powers and I was no Olympic swimmer. Plus I didn't have nice
thick warehouses to hide behind. No, I was stuck on an unstable stack
of crates, highly flammable more likely than not. At least they weren't
filled with explosives. Don't ask me how I learned to check for that.

First things first, then. I pulled a canister of smoke from my
bandoleer and eased the pin out of the thing. Don't drop the pin, oh
no. They'd always hear a pin drop, it was too cliché for them not to.
Find the fin cutting the water, aim, throw. There. No warnings of help
from mister dolphin today, folks.

The smoke grenade arced perfectly toward the cute little dolphin,
actually smacking it on the fin before exploding into a massive ball of
roiling fire. The thing went off like a napalm bomb, coating several
square meters of water in burning jellified gasoline. Ever hear a
talking dolphin scream while it's getting burned to death? Brr. That's
a sound to go up your spine.

I ducked down against the crates, hoping to hell that none of them had seen me
chuck the thing. On the bad side, things were now certainly one hundred
percent not going according to plan, and I was going to have to have a long
talk with Finn about the proper way to label grenades before I tried to
do my 'smoke disappearing' trick again. On the good side, however, that
would make for one damn fine distraction, and the irony was rather
pleasing in and of itself.

Well, the cat's out of the bag now, I thought. I pulled my new gun from
a shoulder holster, and saw Itami easing around the corner to my left.
With any luck, they'd be too busy staring at...

"Maru-chan!"

"Somebody killed Maru-chan!"

"YEAH! Come and get it, you bastards!"

That last one had -not- been the voice of a magical girl shocked to see
the death of her special animal friend. I looked up, in front of the
dozen (now thoroughly shocked) girls, to see another figure standing on
another convenient stack of crates. She was wearing a camouflage fuku,
and holding my dear old nine mil, and making funny gestures with her free
hand. Funny, in that all of them involved various permutations of the
standard 'bird'.

"Now, you'll pay for crushing my future! I'll kill you all myself! I
am... PRETTY DEADLY!"

Itami and I opened up. Lesson number one of fighting magical girls, and
if you forget everything else you've ever learned, remember this one:
you'll never get a better opportunity than when one of them is in mid-
speech.

He put a round into the back of Virgo's head, splitting her skull like
a melon. I had a priority target, though, sighting in as I was on a
particular crimson fuku. The gun bucked, damn near coming out of my
wrist, and Cancer blew in half.

Want to see that in extremely slow motion? Okay, first the penetrator
hit. That's a really small and fast-moving bullet that's designed to go
through things like police vests, armor plate, and the occasional
shield spell. Poor Cancer didn't have any of these, though, so the
round blew completely through her, not really doing a lot of damage.
The hollow-point round came in right afterwards, making it about
halfway through the path of the first before it started to flatten out,
and it would have made for one hell of an exit wound if the explosive
round hadn't summarily cut her in half.

This all happened faster than I could see, of course, and my only
immediate reaction was "cool!"

Now, then, you guys might be thinking that I'm a cold bastard, taking
joy in the gorier parts of my work, and you might even be right. I
freely admit to taking some pleasure, though, in wasting somebody whose
main attack gives the recipient several progressive and terminal forms
of a deadly disease. At least her folks wouldn't have to watch this
happen.

I moved. Not a little position adjustment, now. I heaved myself off of
the crate and dropped the ten feet to the ground behind the crate, and
ran like hell afterwards. The crate exploded into flaming shards of wood and
burnt fabrics as it was smashed by a Taurus Charge shortly after being
immolated by the Aries Strike. I got a brief glimpse of Itami ducking back,
heading for the warren of narrow corridors between cargoes, and I would have
smiled if I hadn't been gritting my teeth at the moment. Aika might have
gotten lucky, but she was probably dead, and definitely out of action. Damn. I
felt bad about bringing her along, not that it was my idea in the first place.

---

I didn't piece together the entire sequence of the fight until later,
of course, but I'll take advantage of my survivor's perspective to try
to give you a picture of how things took place.

Aries, Taurus, Leo, Gemini, and Libra came after me. Itami got lucky,
sort of. Scorpio was nasty, but I figured that he could handle
Sagittarius and Capricorn easily. That left Aquarius and Pisces to go
after Aika and check on their Maru-chan.

It was not a good move on the magical girls' part. I'm not rigged out
as a sniper, and Itami always prefers close quarters if he can get
them, and 'Pretty Deadly' sure as hell wasn't a threat to them. If
they'd stayed in one bunch and hauled ass, most of them would have made
it away. A smart one might have actually thought of this. Fortunately,
the 'brains' of the outfit were scattered outside of Virgo's skull,
split in half in the form of Cancer, and rapidly turning into roasted
seafood.

There's a reason I had a ninety-nine percent success rate, folks; I
thought these things out.

Go after Aika, had I said? Yeah, she's not dead, I won't leave you hanging.
She dodged a Lion's Roar Bullet and dropped off the back of her crate,
immediately fading into the background like a good decoy. Maybe she'd
planned it that way, I dunno.

Right then, I was thinking "oh, shit" rapidly. After all, I'd attracted
most of the combat contingent, and at the rate I was going through
cover I'd run out of boxes before I got to the cargo warehouses. The
girls had split up, each one trying to spot me first, and Libra won
their little competition. She yelled out something, probably would've
been a "he's over here" if I hadn't proceeded to stitch three rounds
into her chest. I ran on, clutching my gun arm and cursing. Damn, but
I'd need a brace for this thing; it was a kick-ass gun, yeah, but it
felt like it was trying to break my wrist.

No choice, then; I dropped another smoke grenade behind me, speeding up
from a dead run into a drop-dead-from-stroke sprint. Fortunately, this
one just spewed out pinkish smoke instead of a holocaust of fiery
destruction, and I made it to the warehouse without mishap.

The next five minutes were fairly boring, in comparison. I wandered
through the warehouses, trying to spot them before they spotted me, and
found nobody. At one point, I heard a high-pitched scream, which cut
off abruptly. With any luck, that would be Itami at work...

The Taurus Ram took me in the side, before I saw her coming, and I
learned a lesson of my own. I was not built to fly. In fact, I only
flew about ten feet before hitting the floor and sliding another ten,
at which point I calmly blew a porthole through Taurus's forehead. The
jacket had worked; the moment I got hit, it hardened and saved me the
blow. Of course, this was going to hurt like hell once the adrenaline
wore off, and I'd have one big bruise along my right side come morning,
but hey, it wasn't fatal.

Then it was back to the hunt. Ever play Doom or Quake, one of those
deathmatches, where there's a lot of people running around in a big
level and you can go for minutes without running into anybody? I
haven't. Too much like work. But I imagine that it's like this, without
the smells or the aching wrists or the high pay.

I saw a really shadowy corner, and started towards it. Just because I
wasn't rigged out for sniper work didn't mean that I couldn't
improvise, given a good place to hide. Then, I saw -why- it was a dark
shadowy corner.

Itami stood, facing Leo, with that crazy sword pointed at her. You
could forget, in this job, that magical girls get their dumb-looking
wands and magic powers for the specific reason that there are actually
really evil objects out there to oppose. Seeing this sword in action
was a wake-up call. Part of it was the way that the wind kind of
swirled around Itami, part of it was the dancing flecks of black energy
that flowed off of the end of the blade, and most of it was the crazy
leer that was on the guy's face. Sure, he enjoyed his work as much as I
did, but not that much.

Leo pointed, shouting, "Lion's Roar BULLET!", and a green arc of energy
shot from her outstretched finger. Itami raised the sword to parry,
instead of dodging, and I spent the next half of a second wondering
where the hell I could find a new partner, 'cause I was sure going to
need one. Then the energy bent, and twisted, and spun off to pulverize
a random roof tile. It didn't like the sword at all, it seemed.

I've already done enough graphic description of violence for one page.
Suffice it to say that Itami quickly finished her off, spun around,
-winked- at me, and ran down another corridor. That scared me even more
than the rest of it put together, naturally. I shrugged, deciding to
ask him about it later, and took a step forward.

And a magical girl came crashing down on my back.

This is another advantage that I normally have over my opponents, you
see. I weigh over ninety kilos, and a good portion of that is nice,
rock-hard (well, at least hard) muscle. The average magical girl was
anywhere from thirty to sixty kilos, and Gemini was on the slight side.
Still, though, when you drop from three stories onto somebody, you're
gonna hurt them no matter how much you weigh. As it was, I was sent
spinning into an unidentifiable piece of industrial equipment, face-
first.

I avoided passing out, mostly by sheer luck, and turned around. I
didn't have my gun, it was over there on the floor, and the yellow-
garbed freak had a predatory look on her face. I waited for the
obligatory admonition against evil, but she just started toward me,
cutely cracking her knuckles.

Screw that. I'm not bad in a fist fight, but I'm mark one mod zero
human being, not a magically enhanced warrior. I reached into my jacket
and pulled out a large combat knife, the kind with a teeny guard and
good grip. I slashed out toward her, going for a gutting strike... and it
passed through thin air, where Gemini had stood only a moment before.

Don't get me wrong; she didn't dodge. The air shimmered, and a moment
after my knife went spinning out of my hand, I saw -two- Gemini, one on
each side of my aiming point.

One of the few video games I have seen is the Darkstalkers one, mostly
because it happens to be a favorite of several of the less mentally
balanced magical girls. In particular, there's one special move where
the really sexy-looking demon moves forward, splits into two, and beats
the ever-loving crap out of the poor guy whose player just forgot to
block. This felt exactly like that, except much more painful.

I found myself lying on my back. This was actually an improvement,
because in the lull of being beaten, I was able to pull my spare .45 and shoot
one of the twins. The other one was already down on the
floor, and then somebody was helping me back up, and I saw Aika's
smiling face plus headband.

"Still ticked that you brought me along?"

I nodded, dumbly, still not really into it. After all, this neat impact
armor stuff wasn't at all effective if your opponent happened to hit
you somewhere that you weren't armored. Add that to the fact that I'd
left the jacket open (hey, I need to get in there for stuff!) and
you've got a lot of pain. Good thing I'd worn a cup, or I'd have to
change the register of my voice.

"Neh, neh, Yoi-san, are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm okay." We staggered through the entrance of the
warehouse, careful to stop and retrieve my gun and knife. "'Pretty
Deadly', huh?"

She blushed. "I swear, I have no idea where that came from."

Itami was waiting outside. I held up four fingers, he held up four
fingers, Aika held up four fingers. That left no living magical girls.

It didn't occur to me that I should have asked Aika if she had counted
Gemini, like I did, until we were halfway to the car with our backs
turned. It was shortly after I heard a crazed voice shout, "I'll KILL
YOU!" and shortly before I heard the crack of a whip. By the time we'd
turned around, Scorpio had been strangled to death.

"Hiya, Sailor H!" I performed quick and not entirely coherent
introductions, careful not to use Aika's name. Hell, if you're gonna
have a secret identity, might as well keep it secret.

Sailor H slid up to Itami. "Pull that sword out again, Itami-chan... it
makes me feel tingly all over!"

---

Given our protagonist/anti-hero, a quiet man with an ancient cursed
evil sword, an unbalanced magical girl gone horribly bad in all the
right ways, and a reluctant military otaku turned magical vigilante,
where could you possibly go?, I wondered. Guess I'd have to wait until
the "next episode".

Andy
--
"He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall.
He'd just hung around with the wrong people."
Crowley, Good Omens