Read Online All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka - Free Book Online Page B

ran his hand through his hair and patted the ground.
    I sat down as a gust of ocean wind blew between us.
    “I was on Ishigaki, you know,” Ferrell began. “Musta been at least ten years ago. Jackets back then were cheap as hell. There was this place near the crotch—right about here—where the plates didn’t meet quite right. Rubbed right through your skin. And the places that had scabbed over during training would rub through again when you got into battle. Hurt so bad some guys refused to crawl on the ground. They’d get up and walk right in the middle of a fight. You could tell ’em it would get ’em killed, but there were always a few who got up anyway. Might as well have walked around with targets painted on their chests.” Ferrell whistled like a falling shell. “Whap! Lost a bunch of men that way.”
    Ferrell had a mix of Japanese and Brazilian blood in him, but he came from South America. Half that continent had been ravaged by the Mimics. Here in Japan, where high-tech was cheaper than good food, our Jackets were precision pieces of machinery. Still, there were plenty of countries where it was all they could do to send their troops off with a gas mask, a good old-fashioned rocket launcher, and a prayer. Forget about artillery or air support. Any victory they did happen to win was short-lived. Nanobots spilling from Mimic corpses would eat the lungs out of whatever soldiers that were left. And so, little by little, lifeless desert spread through the lands people once called home.
    Ferrell came from a family of farmers. When their crops started to fail, they chose to abandon their land and move to one of the islands in the east, safe havens protected by the wonders of technology. Families with people serving in the UDF were given priority for immigration, which is how Ferrell came to join the Japanese Corps.
    These “Immigration Soldiers,” as they were known, were common in the Armored Infantry.
    “You ever hear the expression kiri-oboeru ?”
    “What?” I asked, startled to hear the Japanese.
    “It’s an old samurai saying that means, ‘Strike down your enemy, and learn.’ ”
    I shook my head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
    “Tsukahara, Bokuden, Itou, Miyamato Musashi—all famous samurai in their day. We’re talking five hundred years ago, now.”
    “I think I read a comic about Musashi once.”
    “Damn kids. Wouldn’t know Bokuden from Batman.” Ferrell sighed in exasperation. There I was, pure-blooded Japanese, and he knew more about my country’s history than I did. “Samurai were warriors who earned their living fighting, just like you and me. How many people do you think the samurai I just named killed in their lifetimes?”
    “I dunno. If their names are still around after five hundred years, maybe . . . ten or twenty?”
    “Not even close. The records from back then are sketchy, but the number is somewhere between three and five hundred. Each. They didn’t have guns. They didn’t have bombs. Every single man they killed they cut down in hand-to-fucking-hand combat. I’d say that’d be enough to warrant a medal or two.”
    “How’d they do it?”
    “Send one man to the great beyond each week, then do the same for ten years, you’ll have your five hundred. That’s why they’re known as master swordsmen. They didn’t just kill once and call it a day. They kept going. And they got better. ”
    “Sounds like a video game. The more you kill, the stronger you get—that it? Shit, I got a lot of catching up to do.”
    “Except their opponents weren’t training dummies or little digital aliens. These were living, breathing men they slaughtered. Like cattle. Men with swords. Men fighting for their lives, same as them. If they wanted to live, they had to catch their enemy off-guard, lay traps, and sometimes run away with their tail between their legs.”
    Not the first image that sprang into your head when you thought of master swordsmen.
    “Learning what would get you