Sousuke looked up at the ceiling, his eyes searching for nothing in particular.
He felt a strange chill in his back, similar to the itch he got when he knew he was being followed. A sort of "soldier's sixth sense", these instincts had served him well and saved his life on a few occasions. It was also the only countermeasure that was useful against someone like Ranma, who had been tracking him before he had taken this mission, or the Black Ops team that had been staking out the airport.
An inconvenience, since he didn't have time to properly dispose of them and they may have gotten a better look than he would have liked, but they were not his enemy. At least not yet. He'd have to ensure a greater level of security around the surrounding area, though; surveillance of a battleground announced to the whole city was one thing, but anybody who tried to keep tabs on his base was simply knocking on Death's door.
Buttoning the collar of his school uniform, he looked into the mirror and nodded. "Equipment ready. Health status normal." Gathering up the various notebooks, pens, pistol clips, and a block of C-4 into his bookbag, he moved out of the bathroom, stopping to give a formal "Good morning" to a drowsy-looking Negi.
A bit later, he was on the bus that would take him to Juuban High... on the bottom, that is. His bag pressed between his stomach and the fuel line, Sousuke kept tight hold with a pair of cheap leather gloves he had for precisely this purpose.
After ten minutes of this, while mapping out the bus's turns against the mental roadmap in his mind, he let the bus roll to a stop, and then let himself fall flat onto the asphalt. The bus rolled away a moment later, and Sousuke quickly jumped to his feet, noticed only by a street sweeper who gasped in surprise. Sousuke regarded her for a moment and decided that she was an allowable security risk. For now.
While ignoring the woman's query about if he was okay and what he had been doing, the mercenary headed off toward the school, which was still a block away, taking some time to wipe the dirt and grease off his face and uniform with a rag. After he felt he was sufficiently clean not to raise any suspicions, he carefully removed and unfolded a sheet of paper from within his shirt pocket, stepping to the side so that he could concentrate on reading it.
If you were to ask Kaname Chidori about Sousuke, one of the things she might say in the long list of unnecessarily harsh and degrading criticisms is that Sousuke never learned.
She would be wrong, of course. Sousuke was a soldier, but he also considered himself a student of war. Someone as hardened as he knew of the thousands of little things one had to learn to survive and succeed on the battlefield that one didn't find out in any kind of training. It was only through mistakes and experience that some lessons could be learned, and a soldier simply had to do his best and use his instincts to insure that he was still breathing after the lesson was taught. And as he was wont to do, he simply crammed the learning experience of civilian life and school into the context of learning he was familiar with, and treated simple urban living like a battlefield experience.
So, actually, in THAT respect, maybe Kaname was right.
Either way, he had learned a lot from protecting the tempermental beauty, and he had carefully and dutifully compiled his experiences and the lessons learned so that he may put that experience to use in later missions of the same type. He found note-taking especially useful, since these sorts of missions seemed to have a lot more subtleties to them that a "bottom line" thinker like Sousuke could easily forget otherwise.
Looking at the note in his hand, he went over his lessons to insure that THIS time, he would not overly aggravate the target or draw undue attention to himself.
1: When destroying suspicious packages or tampered lockers, use SMALL charges.
2: When it appears a threat has surfaced in the girl's locker room, CONFIRM existence and location of threat before entering. Avoid entering at all if possible.
3: Do not take bioweapons or chemical weapons of any sort to school, even if the container is properly sealed and labeled. High school students are idiots and will open anything.
4: Use care when determining trap placement on school grounds. Security is extremely lax, and there are few areas where students will not go.
5: If invited to an isolated rendevous by an unknown person, neutralize and dispose of him or her right away instead of simply hiding and awaiting suspicious activities. It will save your time, as well as that of the target, who is probably watching from a different hidden location.
6: Never touch a girl's undergarments. If forced to make contact with said articles when removed from their owner, dispose of them immediately above all other non-lethal concerns.
7: Hot spring "vacations" have an odd tendency to increase stress rather than reducing it. Bypass such opportunities and dissuade the target from going if possible.
8: All trips outside the general area of residence have at least a 50% chance of provoking a kidnapping. Suggest alternatives to the target, such as a local museum, or being tied up in the coat closet.
Nodding to himself, Sousuke carefully folded the note back up and placed it back in his shirt pocket. He was ready. The operation had begun!
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(Posted Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:58)
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