Free All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka Page B

they could reach up my ass and yank out my spine. For an instant, I felt an irrational desire to lash out against them.
    Sure, I might look like I’d blow over in a stiff wind, but you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Want to try me? Who wants a piece of the little Asian recruit?
    Would the skills I’d learned to pilot a Jacket translate to hand-to-hand combat against another human? Had I gotten any stronger, any better? Why wait for the Mimics, why not test myself on these fine specimens now?
    The guard on the right turned.
    Stay calm. Keep your pace steady. He’s pivoting to the left. When he does, you’ll slip into his blind spot behind the other sentry. By the time he looks around for any sign of Keiji Kiriya, I’ll be part of the scenery.
    “Did you see something?”
    “Quiet. Captain’s watchin’, and he don’t look happy.”
    “Fuck you.”
    And like that, I’d infiltrated U.S. territory.
    My target was a U.S.-made Jacket. After a few times through the loop, I’d come to the conclusion that I needed a new weapon— something we didn’t have in the Japanese Corps. The standard-issue 20mm rifles weren’t very effective against Mimics. They walked a thin line of compromise between the number of rounds a soldier could carry, the rate of fire necessary to hit a fast-moving target, and the acceptable amount of recoil. They were more powerful than the weapons they used to issue, but if you really wanted to pierce that endoskeleton, 50mm was the only way to be sure.
    The basic UDF strategy was to employ a line of prone armored infantry firing 20mm rounds to slow the enemy enough so that artillery and tanks could take them out. In practice, the support never came fast or heavy enough. It fell to us to finish the Mimics on our own.
    The weapon of last resort for the old-timers, and one I’d used myself, was the pile driver mounted on the left shoulder. You could punch open a hole and spill a Mimic’s guts with one of those babies. The rocket launcher could come in handy too, but it was hard to a score a hit with, and more often than not you’d be out of rockets when you really needed one. As I grew accustomed to the fighting, I relied more and more on the power of the 57mm pile driver.
    But the pile driver had one major drawback: Its magazine only held twenty charges. Unlike our rifles, you couldn’t change magazines, either. Once you fired that twentieth round, you were finished. At best, a soldier was going to punch twenty holes in something. Once the pile driver was out of charges, you couldn’t even use it to drive a stake into the heart of a vampire. The people who’d designed the Jacket just hadn’t considered the possibility that someone would survive long enough in hand-to-hand combat with a Mimic to use more than twenty rounds.
    Fuck that.
    Running out of charges had killed me plenty of times. Another dead end. The only way to avoid it was to find a melee weapon that didn’t run out of ammo. I’d seen one, once, in the battle that had started this whole loop.
    The battle axe. Rita Vrataski, a Valkyrie clad in a crimson Jacket, and her axe. It might have been more appropriate to call it a slab of tungsten carbide in the shape of an axe. A battle axe never ran out of ammo. You could still use it if it got bent. It packed plenty of punch. It was the perfect melee weapon.
    But as far as the world was concerned, Keiji Kiriya was a new recruit who had yet to see his first battle. If I asked them to replace my standard-issue pile driver with a different weapon simply because I didn’t like it, they sure as hell weren’t going to listen. Yonabaru had laughed at me, and Ferrell actually threw a punch. When I tried taking it straight to our platoon commander, he ignored me completely. I was going to have to acquire the weapon I needed on my own.
    I headed for the barracks of the supply division that had accompanied U.S. Special Forces. Five minutes after crossing into the U.S. side of the base, I