Combatants Will Be Dispatched - Volume 1 - Chapter 1.2

2 

The moment the teleporter fires, I take a full blast of cold wind to the face and reflexively shut my eyes. After a moment to steel my nerves, I sneak a peek and see— 

“That idiot! I should’ve known better than to trust her! I don’t wanna die, Idontwannadie, donwannadieeeee!” 

“Could you shut up and stop panicking? Based on visual estimates, we’re about thirty thousand meters in the air. We have a bit more than two minutes before we hit the ground.” 

Yes, it turns out I’ve been teleported so high off the ground that objects below appear blurry. 

“What about this situation suggests I stop panicking? Alice! You’re a high-performance android! You have a flight mode, right…right?!” 

“Actually, my only internal feature is the self-destruct.” 

“You pile of juuunk!” 

My falling speed increases as gravity grabs ahold of me. The wind rushing past my ears and life flashing before my eyes make it hard to hear much of anything. Halfway between my first steps and my first bike ride, I notice Alice matching my fall speed and offering me the backpack she’d been carrying. 

“Put that on. Lilith and I are smart enough to plan for this possibility. If you set the target too close to the ground, even the slightest error means you and some dirt end up occupying the same space. Even your meathead brain can understand that’s much more fatal than a little fall, right?” 

The pack is a Kisaragi Corporation standard-issue parachute. It’s specially designed to allow for parachute drops wearing even these stupidly heavy suits of power armor. Doing as I’m told, I hastily place the pack on my back, double-checking that the straps are all in place. As I finish, Alice wraps her arms around my waist. 

“You don’t have your own?” 

“We don’t have the budget for it. Have to save with the little things. I’ll leave the deployment timing to you, but you better be careful. Remember, if we hit the ground too hard, the explosion will vaporize everything within a few miles.” 

That’s really not a reminder I need right now. I can’t shake the feeling that being followed around by this walking nuke is meant to be punishment. 

Once the parachute is securely attached to my person, my anxiety drops from panic to mild concern. I take a moment to scope out the ground below me. 

“Check that out, Alice. Looks like a city of some sort.” 

“Huh. Most of this land is untouched. There might be intelligent life but not a lot of it.” 

I catch a glimpse of something that looks like a walled city a distance away from our landing zone. 

A castle sits at its center, which is then surrounded by the city proper and some farmland. Enclosing the city, farmland and all, is a massive wall that’s an impressive sight even from this altitude. 

Outside the walls of the city stretches a vast plain of red-brown dirt. The plains reach out toward the horizon and disappear into the woodlands, and it looks like the rest of the world itself. 

I make these observations on our leisurely trip down. After a while, Alice and I make contact with the ground. I take a moment to savor the feeling of solid earth beneath my feet, then let out a slow breath. 

“…All right, Alice. Send our coordinates to those idiots in charge. Screw securing a base. We’ll put the teleporter together here and head back to regroup. As payment for the sudden near-death skydiving experience, I’m gonna grope that tomboy until she cries.” 

“Sorry, no can do. The teleporter is a really sensitive piece of equipment. It needs to be assembled in a clean room. We need to let the connection stabilize for at least a month. So if getting home’s important to you, you better get cracking on securing a base of operations.” 

……Seriously? 

“…Not again. Do you know how many times they’ve done this to me? You know what they told me before modification surgery? ‘If you get these modifications, you’ll be blowing through missions with ease. Promotion, reputation, money, and women—it’s all yours for the taking,’ they said. Do you know how much I actually make?” 

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. But cheer up! Teleporting so close to a settlement is pretty lucky. It’s not a bad start at least. Let’s begin by heading toward that city we saw on the way down.” 

Alice starts rapidly walking in the general direction of the walled city. I suppose it’s better than making a scene here in this barren wasteland. Throwing a tantrum won’t bring me any closer to a base. Still, this is going to take a while… 

“Hey…things were a bit hectic earlier…so let’s redo introductions. I’m Agent Six, the longest-surviving Combat Agent in the Kisaragi Corporation. I’ve made it through every hellhole and battlefield imaginable, and I intend to keep it that way.” 

I reintroduce myself as I hurry to catch up to Alice. 

“I am the Kisaragi Corporation’s high-spec pretty-girl android: Alice Kisaragi. No need for formalities. We’re the same rank.” 

“Hey, that’s my line! You do know I still have seniority, right? Oh, whatever. So what is it you can do? I can’t really do anything but fight. Oh, hey! Speaking of fighting, we could use more equipment. Lilith said to use these mini-teleporters to order what we need, right? Even if we can’t get a teleporter, we can order a buggy to drive around in.” 

I catch up to Alice, but she stops dead in her tracks and turns to me. 

“Oh, right. I need to explain that part to you. Six, how many Evil Points do you have?” 

Evil Points. 

It’s one of the things that allows the Kisaragi Corporation to function as an evil organization. 

Each individual member of Kisaragi is implanted with a chip that tracks that member’s Evil Points. You’d think that doing evil for evil’s sake shouldn’t be our highest priority, but our leadership takes our role as villains really seriously. So they’ve set up a system where they track our villainy. You can then use your accumulated Evil Points to get equipment or exchange them for reward money. 

People who are model evil minions have lots of Evil Points. The more you have, the better equipment you can buy, and better equipment means better performance on the battlefield. That, in turn, leads to promotions, which ultimately net you even more Evil Points. 

Unfortunately, I’ve never been particularly good at villainy. At most, the things I do are petty nuisances rather than truly vile schemes. That means whatever my abilities on the battlefield, the other members of the corporation view me as a poseur. 

The Supreme Leaders believe there’s an art and science to villainy. They expect Kisaragi Corporation members to be charismatic super villains rather than mere beasts or thugs. I admit I don’t understand what the hell that even means. 

“My current score’s about three hundred.” 

“That’s a bit low to be invading a fortress city like that. All right, we’ll walk there to save on points and infiltrate the city as spies.” 

Come again? We’re starting with the assumption of invading? That’s a little scary. 

“…Wait, are you saying we need to buy equipment with points? Just how evil is our corporation? I thought this was a giant, important undertaking!” 

“There’s a literal universe full of candidate planets. You may be the first scout, but they’ll eventually send out others. We don’t have enough resources to spend generously on each and every planet. We haven’t even finished conquering Earth yet.” 

…This is starting to feel like one of those RPGs where they give you about as much money as you’d get from bagging groceries and expect you to use that to defeat the Demon Lord. 

“It’s not like I have a lot of leverage given my limited skill set. Sigh… I have to admit it’s almost impressive how evil our corporation can be.” 

“If you don’t want to get fired, you need to focus on the job. If it turns out this planet is a good candidate for colonization, we’ll have plenty of things for you to do like fighting life-forms that threaten new settlements. So far, the atmosphere is breathable; that’s a good sign so far as this world is concerned.” 

Alice continues her explanation as she starts lightly tapping at my neck. 

“That seems like a good reason to provide equipment instead of this nonsense about Evil Points. I mean, with the right equipment, Mr. Six can easil… Ow! The hell are you doing?!” 

“I’ve injected you with immuno-boosting nanobots to protect you from unknown diseases. Anyway, let’s hope the inhabitants of this fortress city are pushovers. We did pick a world as close to Earth as possible, so there’s a good chance the locals are Homo sapiens like you. I didn’t notice any skyscrapers, and given the amount of undeveloped land, it should be easy enough to slaughter and subjugate them.” 

Well, if I had any doubts Alice is an android, that settled it. That cool expression as she casually discusses slaughter and subjugation? Yeesh.