“You know… haa… you’re the super soldier…” panted Mizusaki, dragging the large and heavy plastic carrier container against the floor and lifting a small cloud of dirt with every step he took. The distance between him and Azuma was no longer that of a couple of inches but a good few meters. “But I… haa… I’m but a mortal… haa… I don’t have your freaking monstrous strength or stamina!!!”

“Mizusaki, you’re starting to be more of a dead weight than a supervisor,” grumbled Azuma, starting to feel extremely irked towards the soldier and his slowpoke speed behind him. “I should have already arrived at the highest spot in this military base, the air control tower. But because of you and your weak human body, I’m still ground level.”

“I’m the one who has the right to complain here!!” yelled Mizusaki, releasing the large trunk’s handle and letting it fully fall on the ground. “You said it very well just now! I’m your supervisor, not your goddamned slave! If you want to have this thing with you, then carry it yourself.”

“I’m not carrying that,” immediately rebuked Azuma, halting his walking and looking over his shoulder in Mizusaki’s direction.

“Well, I’m not carrying it either,” announced Mizusaki, crossing his arms over his chest to make his stance in this arguing as clear as water.

A silent staring contest started between Azuma and Mizusaki, none of the two showing any signs of giving an inch to one another in their stances.

Even with the distant sound of rifles being fired resounding amid the tense atmosphere between the two of them, Azuma still refused to move an inch, though Mizusaki had gotten quite restless with the beginning of fighting inside of the military base. Their objective right now was to clear the path to the Japanese soldiers still not being safely kept inside of the auditorium; they couldn’t afford to be arguing over silly things at that moment.

“Okay, okay, let’s do this, then,” said Mizusaki, releasing a tired sigh at the same time as he crouched down his body and gave a couple of soft taps to the trunk. “Whoever loses a round of rock, paper, scissors has to carry this thing, okay? Rock wins over scissors, scissors win over paper and paper wins over rock. Rock is done with your closed fist, scissors is your index and middle fingers spread apart and paper is your hand fully open. Got it? Okay, rock, paper, scissors!!”

At Mizusaki’s countdown, both of them lunged one of their hands forward, Azuma with a certain reluctance even though his movements had been as quick as the soldier’s. Mizusaki’s hand displayed paper and Azuma’s scissors.

“Eh!? You’re kidding me!!” yelped Mizusaki, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets at the result that they obtained in the game. “I was sure you were going to use rock! Every newbie to the game uses the strongest sign and a rock is clearly stronger than a piece of paper or a pair of scissors in the real world!”

“If you knew Iru as well as we do, you would think twice before claiming that scissors are weaker than a rock,” pointed out Azuma, turning around on his heels and resuming with his walk towards the control tower. “The first person Iru killed was minced into pieces with a pair of children-sized scissors. And you’re already aware how old in human age he was at that time, aren’t you?”

“Geez, I could go very well without the morbid adventures you went through in your messed up childhoods…” grumbled Mizusaki under his breath, conforming himself with the fact that he would have to continue to carry that heavy as hell box. His ‘escape plan’ had backfired on him in a completely unexpected way. “Do you at least know how much— Woah!”

As Mizusaki was about to ask Azuma a question, a long limb was wrapped around his lower torso and he was picked up from the floor as if his body was filled with air, the plastic carrier trunk still being held in his hands. The next thing he noticed, he was a good few metres above the ground, nearly barfing in one of the corners of the rooftop of the control tower that they had been aiming at.

“I-I told you… no supersonic travels… Ugh…” complained Mizusaki with a weak voice, slapping his hands over his mouth all of a sudden as another intense wave of nausea was threatening to climb up the walls of his oesophagus.

After long and painful minutes, Mizusaki could finally straighten his body enough to get up and not feel the contents of his stomach doing the flip flop in it. He walked over to Azuma, who had long finished ‘building’ his shooting weapon and was now intently staring in a particular direction – Mizusaki knew the auditorium was situated in that direction and deemed Tsugi and Eki were moving around somewhere around that area.

Not having much to do or worry about, seeing as they couldn't be attacked in such a hidden and high place, Mizusaki walked over to one of the short walls of the rooftop and dropped his body there. The back of his head neatly leaned over the inner edge of the wall as he stared away into the sky.

“Hey, Azuma… Who’s ‘Shuuai-kun’?” asked Mizusaki without any warning, the clear blue sky above them warming up his body after the intense case of nausea. When he looked sideways to Azuma, he found him completely motionless, his eyes wide open as he looked at him in utter shock.

“...That’s M0’s childhood friend, from what he claims…” mumbled Azuma. He twisted his nose a little bit and slowly removed his glasses from the bridge of his nose, neatly putting them on top of the short wall near his shooting position. “Now stop talking and let me concentrate. You won’t make me fail my shots but will definitely make me feel like shooting you together with the invaders. And since they have started making their move, it’s my time to do so as well.”

Azuma took a hold of the M24 sniper rifle laid by his feet and quickly removed the scope from its top section, also leaving it upside down on the short wall in front of him. He positioned the sniper rifle in front of him and aimed with his eyes alone. Three shots echoed in quick succession in that otherwise silent area, Azuma lowering the weapon afterwards.

“Tsugi, five more are moving in your direction from the southeast,” said Azuma, still looking in the same direction as before. Mizusaki didn’t even need to wonder about Azuma’s sudden words – he was well aware already that distance didn’t pose a problem in terms of communication in between the six super soldiers. “Do you want me to take care of them? …Okay.”

Mizusaki continued to observe Azuma from his sat down position on the floor as he lowered his rifle once again to the short wall. These people that went by the name of ‘super soldiers’ and ‘mass murder machines’ were possibly the strangest things that his eyes had ever captured and he was certain that he had already seen pretty disturbing and weird things throughout his life, before and after joining the army.

For once, he couldn’t imagine humans taking certain actions like they did, like using Morse code on a table to communicate in secret while surrounded by their capturers or enjoying a flight on the unprotected rooftop of a military aircraft. But if he took a closer look to said abnormal actions… he could find logic in them.

As they say, there’s a fine line between genius and insanity and it seems like they have successfully erased that line, inwardly pointed out Mizusaki as he turned his body slightly around and peered over in the same direction that Azuma was gazing at with concentration of steel.

“Rather than using this control tower, you should have stationed yourself in the building a few meters behind the auditorium,” said Mizusaki, turning his body back around to a straight sitting position, one of his hands sneaking inside of his pants’ pocket and removing his cell phone from it. “It has a large water tank slightly hidden in between the roof of the first floor and the walls of the second floor. The visibility is better there and you wouldn’t have wind as a disadvantage to you since you won’t be that high up. Of course, your visibility would be as good as here, since it has an almost open view of the entire surrounding area of the auditorium.”

“Do you have the same function as Atsumu in your squad?” asked Azuma, curiously looking over in the soldier’s direction, one of his eyebrows slightly arched in his brows.

“Spy? Nah~” denied Mizusaki, waving his hand around in the air to dismiss that misguided conclusion. “If anything, I guess I have the exact same function as the place we’re standing at. A ‘control tower’. Communication with other squads, reports and yadda yadda. But I was lucky to be born with an extremely good pair of eyes so I have the best spatial vision of the Japanese army by far~”

“I highly doubt that,” snorted Azuma, once again positioning the sniper rifle in front of him and firing a couple more bullets.

“Hey, not all humans are crappy animals festering the planet with their uselessness, okay?” grumbled Mizusaki, a half dissatisfied, half pouting expression popping up on his features as he continued pressing his fingertips on the electronic device’s screen, maybe a little bit more aggressively than before.

“They are,” announced Azuma, lowering his weapon and continuing to peer into the distance. “That’s why I answered the way I did.”

You weren’t born with those eyes, you were cursed by your own to have them.