The other jets had flown into the sky with the slender agility of an eagle, but they were much faster. The clear, white clouds were shredded in pieces as they passed through them. The sun was setting in the horizon over the turquoise ocean. The sky was streaked with pink and a shade of red caused by the setting sun, and stars could be spotted on the opposite horizon.

This could be his last flight with them. They could almost be considered as kamikaze, suicidal soldiers who would give their life for a completed task, as long as it was in their country’s honor.

A message was sent through the planes radio, but he didn’t hear it. It didn’t matter. The only thing that did was the annihilation of the air-command post in the sector H5. Which was a few kilometers away. And he was coming up on them. The flying command centers were the secret of the human’s success in the past five or six bloody battles. He was part of a squad of top pilots bent on destroying them. Even if it meant his death.

He noticed his fellow – he snorted – pilots had left the formation he had been leading. In normal circumstances, this was considered treachery. But now, this was part of the mission. It only took one ship to disable the center; that is, if the pilot was brave, or crazy enough, to not mind giving his own life. His chances of surviving this mission had been calculated: he had a 0.001 chance of surviving. Talk about unlikely.

But this pilot didn’t mind death. It was only a reality waiting to happen. All creatures are meant to die some day. His kind was of a mixed origin anyways, he’d never feel happy with one or the other: the humans, or the demons.

He had enrolled in the youkai service by force and by accident, having gotten excruciatingly drunk one night; he was easy prey for the volunteer-less, weakening army. The humans had out numbered the youkai by at least three times, and although they had less technology and physical advantage (humans are easier to kill than demons), they were winning because of a few scientifically breakthroughs; such as the flying commandos. Puzzled by these flying vessels the size of a warship and able to carry double than one, it had taken a while before the demons could organize their forces to defeat the humans’ new toy, their new secret weapon.

Then the demons pulled out a new force: the kamikaze.

They were the soldiers ready to surrender themselves to the wind gods, or in more realistic terms, ready to die.

They were going to die heroically and bravely.

The pilot scoffed. He didn’t believe in all that stuff. The commander of their unit had blatantly chosen the more ruthless and desperate ones, the ones who wouldn’t be missed, the ones with no future after this war. Or the rare others like him: who were half-breeds.

He wouldn’t be missed.

He had nothing and no one to hold him back from death.

What he had to do was easy: crash into, at top speed, into an antenna at the top of the ship, enclosed in a strong magnetic shield. What did the antenna do? If he had understood correctly from the scientists who had explained their mission to them, it controlled a flow of electro-magnetic waves that circled the earth to do their bidding and permit the gravity-defying contraption to float. Humans were smarter than they look. That was what he had thought. The problem is that no missile or canon that the demons possessed had enough velocity or strength to pierce the shield lying around it, and they had decided to just send out a few kamikazes to blow up the place rather than make a new type of missile. The tank of oil was full, once crashed; it had a high chance of blowing up and killing many people.

Didn’t matter anyway, that detail. Once the antennae gone and the ship’s flying system disabled, they would all fall and crash into the ocean.

They were all are going to die.

He smirked.

How cynical and ironic.

Well, demons were known for loving blood.

He didn’t share their point of view. He didn’t like human blood wasted. This was a weakness he had inherited from his human half. The half he despised.

He thought youkai stupid and arrogant, and he found humans destructive, weak and arrogant too. He didn’t like both sides. He rejected both. But he preferred, in a sense, the youkai. They were strong. He wanted to be strong. He hated the world. He hated everything about himself.

Hate hate hate.

Which was what had driven this war anyways.

Humans feared demons. Demons killed humans. Humans fought back. Demons fought back. And so on and so on. There would never be an end, would there?

He didn’t care. They all deserved to die.

Since the middle of the twenty-second century in human years, when demons were discovered, this war had been waging, changing the face of the earth. The planet was deformed by the hate of all those souls who battled against each other for more than a century now, and never grew tired and never stopped to think why it was happening. One of the last, unchanged areas of the earth was the vast Pacific Ocean, but even that ocean was being used more and more during battles. The Pacific was losing its name: it was no longer a safe haven of peace but a new battleground for the bloodthirsty and ignorant opponents.

The pilot took a deep breath as he spotted the air-commando he was targeting approach.

It had noticed him and had sent two missiles, but he was faster than them. With a few extravagant acrobatics, he dodged them and didn’t even bother looking back to see them crash into each other and explode.

He was practically flying over its deck now: the long machine was in an oval-shape, a bit like a submarine but flatter and rounder. He didn’t have the time to admire the imaginative design, he didn’t care. All that mattered, or that sort of mattered, was the accomplishment of the mission.

He knew he could let the youkai down. He knew he could just leave with the plane and…be a convict as well as a mutt. He didn’t see the point. He was no hero, but he wasn’t a traitor. No matter how much he despised them, he couldn’t really bring himself to go against him. He didn’t even have enough of a reason to want to try.

‘Bloody bastards.’ He thought.

Time was slowing down.

His brain could barely comprehend what was going on, and he could see an extension passing him by, and that’s when he realized just how fast he was going. He could hear yells.

He could hear shots. They were shooting him.

He stopped hearing. His eyes were barely seeing, and he was losing feeling in his limbs.

That’s when it hit.

Pain seared through him, but he didn’t bother yelling. No one would hear anyways.

He could barely see out the glass compartment, this little capsule he was stuck in. He saw a wave of electricity shoot through the glass.

And that’s when he stopped thinking.

-

She was not a soldier. She was, however, the only daughter of a commander on the FCC3. She could see it hovering not to far away above the ocean. She was on a tiny island, her plane docked on the beach. Her plane was small and one of the lightest. It was a one man plane, small and dark blue. It was maybe twice her length, but had a long wingspan. It was about higher than she was.

Her father had given it to her on her fourteenth birthday. She had become an ace at flying it, and the small speedy plane, nicknamed by the army the ‘humming bird’. It was the smallest plane in the air force, and even though she didn’t participate in any of the battles, she was a friend of the army pilots. They knew her and she knew them, often speaking in their favor to her father.

She had a family, a mother, a father, a brother and a grandfather. And even if her grandfather wasn’t on the airship with the rest of her family, he was often in contact with her.

She was not an unhappy girl, and she was only nineteen. She was sheltered by many events of the war, but still felt sadness for what she did know.

She wanted the war to end, but they had no choice. The humans would not stop at peace with the demons. There were so many mistakes that were too harsh to be forgiven and forgotten. Not all had enough strength in their hearts to forgive the mistakes of the other side.

That day, she had wanted to fly down and feel the adrenaline rush of flying once more. Because of the apparent ‘secret location’ of the airships, or FCCs, this was forbidden.

But she had decided to leave early in the afternoon, after lunch where it was calm in the ship, and she would leave unnoticed, just for a couple of hours.

She had landed, though, on a small island she had spotted, and was lying on the white sad, enjoying the feel of the sun ad the smell of the ocean.

She had been there for about an hour (she had probably fallen asleep) and she heard a distinct crash. She sat up in a start and stared at the FCC3.

The top was giving out a thick black smoke, and it took her seconds to realize what was going on.

Realizing the ship was going to fall in the ocean and cause a gigantic tidal wave (which might, on the way, submerse the tiny island), she ran to the ‘humming bird’ and closed the glass top over her. Putting on her helmet as fast as possible, she turned on a few switches and watches as the ship started floating in the air, and she quickly and violently turned the handles to jerk the plane around and she sped forward. She watched in horror as the gigantic black mass she once called a safe haven, practically indestructible because of its secretive making and very rare weak points, fell into the depts, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

A few tears strolled down her face as she jerked the plane upwards to get out of the chaotic waves’ way.

Survivors. There had to be survivors.

There just had to.