“What’s going on? Why are these our customers?!”
“How should I know?!”
“They’re all scary foreigners!”
“This is so bad. They’re driving the other customers away!”
Even as they spoke, a customer who’d come in hopes of seeing waitresses in swimsuits appeared in the door, then turned right around and ran the other way. Those who’d already been seated when the men first arrived left without finishing their tea, unable to bear the quiet menace of the scene.
“Ahh... This is a terrible atmosphere for a café,” Tomita moaned. “Normal foreigners are bad enough...”
“Tomita! Tell them to leave!”
“Are you crazy,” he said, “I don’t speak English!”
Tomita and the others remained engaged in their hurried conversation, when a member of the group of Arabic-looking men sitting in a corner of the room raised his voice.
“Excuse me!” he called out. “Excuse me!”
Tomita and his classmates looked up and saw him beckoning to them. Unable to refuse, Tomita approached the group.
The man then began speaking in broken Japanese, holding a notebook in one hand for reference. “Doko, Kashim? Watashi au. Watashi kita. Tooku. Tawku.”
“Huh?” said Tomita. “Um... um...”
“Kashim! Musuko. Tora, Badakhshan. Musuko. Al Majeed!”
Tomita was just about on the verge of tears in his confusion, when...
“Zaid, Fahim, Gulrose!” came a voice from the door.
He turned and saw Sousuke running into the room.
“Zaid. Thank you for coming. You too Fahim, Gulrose.” His expression was as sullen as ever as he greeted the three Pakistinis who met him with broad smiles. He’d completely ignored the confusion of the Japanese kids around them.
“Kashim,” said Zaid, “you’re looking well. Why are you dressed like that?”
“It’s this school’s uniform,” Sousuke explained.
“School? Is this a school?” Zaid and the others looked around, as if something had finally snapped into place for them.
“And where’s Muhammad?” Sousuke asked.
The three Pakastinis immediately turned grave. “We haven’t seen him for two years. He took the Rk-91 you left him and volunteered for the civil war in Tajikistan.”
“I see...”
“I don’t know how things are going there. The enemy apparently has a lot of French ASes.”
“Mistral IIs? Too much for that beat-up old Savage to take, I’m sure...” said Sousuke, trailing off regretfully.
“Yeah, but Muhammad’ll work things out. Now, Kashim...” Zaid glanced around him. “It seems you have a number of other friends here. Shouldn’t you attend to them?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. We’ll catch up more later.” Leaving Zaid and the others looking surprised by his apology, Sousuke went to greet his other visitors.
A stern-looking Black man raised a hand to Sousuke and said, in English, “Seagal. You’re looking well!”
“Thanks for coming, Zimmer,” said Sousuke. “How’s everything at the training camp?”
“Well enough, though we’re going to be busy. We’ve had issues with our ammo resupply routes. How are Weber and Mao? Things going well for them?”
“I think so. How’s Major Estes?”
“In a bad mood, as always. We got a real snotty little trainee in recently, and he half killed him in hand-to-hand combat practice,” Zimmer laughed. “By the way...”
They continued talking about one thing and another. The Class 7 café had been transformed into a reunion venue exclusively for Sousuke and his friends—in other words, a danger zone populated by veteran mercenaries from dangerous regions throughout the world.
“Just who is Sagara-kun?” Kyoko asked Kaname as they peeked in the door, sweat pouring from her brow.
“You know who he is. And yeah, dangerous men like that are the only friends he has,” Kaname muttered back to her.
“Geh... I heard he grew up in some scary foreign countries, but it never felt real until now.”
“Well, this confirms that those Class 7 guys tried to swipe our customers, at least,” said Kaname.
“Yeah,” Kyoko agreed. “Maybe we should be grateful, in a way...”
Just then, Sousuke—who’d been engaged in conversation with a man who looked like an American mercenary—turned back to Kaname. “Chidori!” he shouted.
“What now?”
“How are preparations for the Class 4 café coming?” he asked. “I’d like to move everyone back there if I could...”
“No! No freaking way!” Kaname crossed her arms, forming a large X in his direction. “We won’t be able to open for a while yet, sorry.”
In fact, Class 4’s café would be opening very soon, but Kaname lied without regret and then strode away without even waiting for his reaction. Sousuke apparently believed her, and resumed his hushed conversation with his old battle colleagues. The members of Tomita’s Class 7 could only look on while silently praying for them to leave.
“Sorry, Norris. I’ll have to ask you to continue killing time here,” Sousuke said.
The American mercenary frowned. “I’d love to, but... Sagara, for a while now...”
“What is it?”
“Don’t turn around, all right? At your four. Those two Latinos... They look just like men I fought in Colombia”
“Costello and the others? Don’t be ri—”
“No, I’m certain of it. They’ve seen me too, and they’re radiating hostility.” The mercenary, Norris, spoke casually, adjusting his posture so that his hand could dart into his coat at any moment. That kind of strangely relaxed posture, in a professional soldier, was a sign of high alert.
Meanwhile, Tomita and the others were in a full-blown panic.
“Sagara. Are they really your old comrades?” the mercenary asked. “You didn’t invite them here through some other route or third party? There’s no chance they used you to lure me out here?”
“No. You’re worrying too much.”
“Sagara, you saved my life. But I’m sorry, I can’t trust you.”
“Norris.,” Sousuke said coldly, “there will be no killing here. I told everyone else the same thing.”
Norris swallowed hard. “But neutralizing them without killing them is on the table?”
“Norris!”
They were all veteran soldiers, after all, so the other men reacted immediately to the malice that Norris was now projecting. Some laid their coffee cups down on the tables, while some undid the buttons on the front of their suits, and others surreptitiously moved their chairs back to the walls. The Latino soldiers, too, took a stance that suggested an expectation of action.
It was unusual for a culture festival exhibit to reach this level of unpleasantness.
“Um... gentlemen, please... If you want to fight, I’d like to ask you to do it outside...” Tomita said, but of course, nobody listened to him. Barely any of them even understood Japanese.
And anyway, it wasn’t going to be a fight: it would be a war.
The air in the café, strained and chilly, was at last broken by one of the waitresses. “Please... Please, no more!” she shrieked, running out of the room. This had the same effect as a tossed coin hitting the ground in a duel scene in a Western.
The customers snapped into action at almost exactly the same time. There was chaos and shouting, followed by more chaos. Glasses broke, tables were overturned, and several men were thrown into walls or the floor. Movements so fast that the eyes of amateurs couldn’t follow were exchanged as the dozen men brawled, resulting in an unprecedented scene.
●
“Well, they’re not so bad once you get to know them,” Norris said later, a bruise around one eye.
“You’re a good man too, señor,” said his Latino companion, Costello, as he took a shot of tequila. He was bandaged up as well.
“Honestly, I was worried for a minute back there,” Zimmer said, turning up the glass of bourbon he’d brought.
“Good thing we’re in Japan, so none of us have guns. What do you usually do, Kashim?” Zaid asked, a cup in one hand.
“That’s a secret,” Sousuke said with his usual sullen expression. “But what were you thinking? This was my first culture festival. I wish you’d shown more self-control. I hand-picked you, after all. I hoped it would be a show of the faith I had in you...”
“Hey, we’re sorry,” Sousuke’s old comrades said in unison.
“It’s just a small world in this business.”
“It makes you really paranoid.”
“I feel sorry about what we did to that shop, too.”
They had moved from the Class 7 café to the Class 4 one. The Class 7 café had been completely destroyed in the brawl. And while the soldiers had apologized to the students of Class 7 and offered to help clean up, Tomita and the others had just stared at them, tears in their eyes, and asked them to leave.
“Now, my new friends,” Norris said, after a long round of talk and laughter in the Class 4 café. “Now that Sagara’s introduced us, what do you say we meet again here in this classroom at the next culture festival?”
“Oh? I like it. It would be a great chance to swap info.”
“And have another brawl? That’ll be something.”
The mercenaries shared a hearty laugh.
Sousuke, his expression as sullen as ever, just nodded along occasionally.
“Don’t come again! Never again!” Kaname, who was listening in, shouted at the mercenaries, sweat rising on her face.
Obviously, they weren’t listening.