A Soldier Out Of This World

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Niamh Bradley's first thought upon waking was that she was dead.

The twenty year old soldier remembered volunteering for the training exercise, she remembered the journey out of the Winchester barracks and onto the MOD (Ministry Of Defense) land on the testing grounds. She remembered joking about with her mates, checking her gear twenty odd times, it had been a live fire exercise and they had all been hyped-up and nervy, this would have been the first time she would fire live ammo anywhere outside of a firing range. She remembered being given an injection of some kind by a white-coated MOD 'shirt' and she remembered being sent into the mock-up of an eastern European village, a hold over from the Cold War, that like several other such sites was still used now, in 2001, by the British military. Niamh struggled to recall more than that, as she lay there, her eyes closed still, not wanting to open them and find out what death looked like.

It was a cool breeze across her face that made her eyes flick open and she found she was looking up at a grey, cloudy sky. At the same time she realized that she was lying upon a stone that was wedged under the bottom of her bergen (the heavy military backpack she and all the other volunteers had been lugging), the stone hurt and with an effort she jumped to her feet, nearly falling over and unbalancing what with the weight on the pack.

Pushing back her camouflage covered helmet from her eyes Niamh gazed about herself. She was not in the town-mock-up anymore, but rather she stood in a scrubby wood, oak trees and elms all around her.

"What the fu...?" Niamh breathed and turned around looking for something to draw bearings from. Where the hell was she? Where was her unit?

For a brief moment Niamh began to panic, this was fucking outrageous, running forwards she tried to find some break in the trees and eventually, breathing hard stopped and took several deep breaths.

"Okay girl, get a grip, you're not some little lost kid who can't find her mum, you're a soldier. Act like one." Unbuckling her bergen straps Niamh shucked the heavy pack, she checked her L85A1 assault rifle was in working order, then checked her ammo pouches; including the magazine actually in the rifle all five clips, each containing thirty of the dully gleaming 5.56 x 45 mm bullets, were present and accounted for. That was a relief, the army looked dimly upon soldiers who lost bullets and weapons during training exercises. Three grenades, her Bowie knife she gotten while she was in the states and her Beretta M92F handgun that holds twelve rounds. She has four boxes of bullets that held eighteen spare bullets each. Also she has her reloading tool to make new bullets once her rounds are use up, as long as her spare shells and gun powder held up that is. (1)

Continuing her rapid inventory of her gear Niamh located her compass and quickly took her bearings, then checked the results again. Well, that was one good thing, according to the compass she couldn't be more than a short distance from the town-mock-up, she must still be on the MOD land. She sat down and ran her left hand over her tightly braided black hair.

This was a nightmare, how would the male members of the regiment react to hearing that she'd got lost and passed out during the exercise? Things were hard enough for a woman in the army, she had fought against the belief that women weren't soldiers for the two years since she joined up and she had never fucked up this bad before. Up until today she'd been convinced she was a good soldier and as hard and 'wary' as any in her regiment. She'd even hoped to make sergeant, then officer maybe.

Standing, she zipped up, pulled on her pouches and bergen, picked up her rifle and pulled on her helmet, doing it up under her chin. Then, taking a quick compass reading again, she jogged in the direction the town-mock-up had to lie in, nearly due south. For about an hour Niamh jogged, becoming more and more worried as she tabbed along, there was no sign of anything other than the continuing scrubby forest, no signs of any MOD land, no farms, no planes overhead and no traffic noise about her. Going was fairly slow as the forest floor was totally wild, shrubs and plants caught at her boots and dragged on them. Stopping, she puffed lightly and rested her hands on her knees, this wasn't just scary now, it was fucking weird. She couldn't have missed the town-mock-up, the compass could be off or broken, but she was sure she was headed south basically, judging from the position of the sun and the MOD training land she had been on was not that large an area. She felt sure she should have reached a perimeter fence by now.

Turning around she stared at the trees as if seeking answers from them. Then she realized something. The plants and trees she's seeing aren't the ones she seen earlier and they shouldn't be here either. The trees and plants reminded her of the ones she had seen when she was on her vacation in Japan.

"Okay soldier, there's nothing else for it." Raising her voice Niamh started shouting for help, she'd been trying to avoid doing just that in order to avoid the mockery of her regiment, now there seemed no choice. She also continued tabbing south.

Ten minutes or so later she crested one of the low hills that she had spotted that she knew shouldn't have been there and her next shout for help died on her lips. Standing on the bare hill top Niamh gazed out over the downs to the distant blue haze of the sea. But these weren't the English country side she's use seeing, there were no cows grazing on open fields, no farms, no towns, no ships on the sea, no planes in the sky. All was covered with scrubby woodland as far as she could see in either direction and turning she was confronted with a view of the most vast forest she'd ever seen. Thick, dense foliage making a green blanket into the distance over the rolling hills.

Niamh sank to her knees and her brain locked down in complete confusion.

"This cannot be...this cannot be...this cannot be." She repeated over and over to herself.

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Night in this wilderness was blacker than any Niamh had ever experienced, she had taken part in exercises out in the wilds of Wales, Dartmoor and Scotland, yet even then there were the winking lights of planes overhead, the dim glow of farms in the distance...here there was nothing. This wasn't any lands that she knew of in Europe, more like the forest of Japan when she went on that tour.

Niamh had forced herself to make camp on the crest of the hill before night had set in and she now sat in front of a small, but cheery fire, her rifle across her lap, chewing slowly on some of the few rations she'd brought with her. She'd also found some wild apples growing nearby and had a couple laid out nearby for 'afters', at least she thought they were apples, they were about half the size of 'normal' apples and when she'd bit into one that afternoon she'd been surprised by the fruit's sharpness.

Sitting there by her fire Niamh asked herself for the hundredth time where the hell she was. What had she done to deserve this?

Niamh had always been a bit of a tomboy, she had grown up in Guildford the only girl with three brothers, her dad was Welsh and her mum half Irish-half English, quite a mixture. Her brothers had always made her life extremely competitive and she'd learned to stick up for herself very early on. When she was twelve she'd got into kickboxing at a local gym after getting hooked on the Bruce Lee films her elder brother Iain had been into. By fifteen she'd come second a national championship and could lay out her much bigger brothers if she tried. It had come as no surprise to her family that she began talking about the army for a career.

It wasn't that Niamh was an unattractive girl, far from it, she had inherited dark Celtic beauty from both sides of her family and coupled with a fair complexion and eyes that were so deep blue as to seem violet in some lights, she was chased by more than one local boy. It hadn't been until she'd got through basic training that she'd actually 'gone with a man', he'd been a corporal from the regiment and the actual business had been swift and uninvolving, for her at least. She'd known it had been a mistake almost straight away and when the dick-head started bragging to his mates about it, she'd had to publicly humiliate him by kicking the shit out of him in the gym in order to avoid the mocking of the male soldiers.

In the year since then she'd made a point of avoiding any further liaisons of that kind, she didn't miss it and hated the thought of becoming dependant on a man, like she'd seen happen to other women soldiers, who often hooked up with one of the officers. Hence the leering slang term 'Officers' Bedding' that was sometimes hurled in their direction.

Now though Niamh would have been grateful for someone to hold, she was scared and just as she was getting to sleep she leapt up at a series of mournful drawn-out howls, which she was sure were those of wolves. The eerie howling continued and Niamh gripped her rifle's pistol-grip tightly. Wolves? Christ, this strange land she has wolves as the land she was from, were all hunted away hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Where the hell was she?

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Niamh woke with a jump to bird-song and jumped up her rifle in hand swinging it about searching for targets...there were none. She was alone still.

Once she had breakfasted upon the last of the wild apples, Niamh got her gear together and set off again for the coast to the south. After half an hour the woods about her broke and she found she was looking down a low hill to a building, beyond which lay what looked to be a grey sea. The building was a small wooden building along the main road that looks was made in Japan; the purpose of the building was to provide shelter to travelers during the night, she remembers the tour guide had said when she was in that tour group in the forest of Japan. Which would mean she was somewhere in Japan then but how in the world did she get here in the first place. There was no sign of any occupants about and Niamh crouched in the undergrowth, her camouflaged kevlar vest and fatigues hiding her well, debating with herself as to what she should do.

Eventually plucking up the courage Niamh half rose and made a crouch-run across the open ground for the building, her rifle held in her hands and ready for use, her eyes scanning the house, the edges of the forest and either direction along the clear area of hill.

She reached the back wall of the house and threw her bergen bedecked back against it, breathing quick and fast, scanning all around for any signs of her being spotted. Assured she was undetected the soldier edged around the corner of the wall, making for the shuttered window that was located on the side wall of the building. Quickly she darted her helmeted head just far enough round the cottage window and saw it was deserted within. Breathing easier, though still very wary Niamh eased around the front of the building and found the doorway was open, there was no door and the cottage seemed overgrown within...the place was a ruin.

Sighing with disappointment Niamh went inside, there was at least a months worth of dust on the wooden floor. Strangely though, as Niamh squinted at the door frame, she realized there was no sign of metal hinges ever having been attached the frame and as she walked inside she realized that this place was really for any travelers to rest in like the one that tour guide pointed out to her. There was a central fire place and a hole in the ceiling directly above, presumably the chimney, no side rooms at all, just the main room and that was all. But it was still better then nothing at all.

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Before doing anything else Niamh decided to first to get her gear out, the ones that she needed anyways. She got her sleeping bag as it was late in the day, her knife and handgun out as she might need them for later, and some ration packs as she's getting hungry. Sighing after a few minutes, she decided to clear up the dwelling and use it as her base camp until she worked things out more clearly.

Niamh's green camouflage fatigues might have been an asset in the woods, but standing alongside the wood building they had just the opposite effect and as the young girl-soldier went back inside she was spotted from afar, though she didn't of course realize that fact.

After nearly an hour of clearing up Niamh had got the place in some kind of order and she had laid out her sleeping bag in the corner, as she turned to pick up her rifle and go scout out the lay of the land some more her heart stopped as a large figure blocked the doorway. Niamh had heard nothing and was so surprised that she opened her mouth speechlessly and squinted trying to see more of the silhouetted figure, just as his ham-like fist thundered into her jaw.

The blow was massively powerful and Niamh was smashed back against the far wall, her rifle flung out of her suddenly nerveless hand.

Dazed and struggling to stay conscious Niamh could hear voices and harsh laughter, she couldn't see the men clearly but could discern that there were three of them. One of them, the one that hit her she thought, knelt down beside her and cupped her face in a hard, calloused hand, then growled something at her in a language she thought sounded a little like Japanese. She does speak Japanese as she learn it in collage, her vision cleared a little and she gasped as she focused on the man's face, he had a huge lantern jawed head, a brutal looking face across which ran several deep old scars (knife wounds perhaps Niamh guessed)

The man who hit her pick her up to punch her again when she reach down and pulls out her knife and struck it into his neck. He threw her across the room as he cried out in pain. As the other two men ran in with knives in hand, Niamh dived across the room and seized her rifle, before rolling and standing in the corner while flicking the safety off and leveling the assault rifle at her attackers.

Niamh held the rifle on the men for a moment and realized they were showing no fear of it at all, the stabbed man was struggling to pull the knife from his throat and in the process was pouring stringy gouts of arterial blood all over the floor, while the other two were standing slowly and holding their knives low. One of the men even held out his hand to her as if she had no choice but to surrender.

"You fucking bastards!" Niamh said quietly and pulled the trigger, in the confined space of the cottage the gunshot was loud, the high velocity bullet went straight through the big man's chest at this range and then buried itself deep in the wooden wall behind him. Driven backwards by the impact the big man was flung onto his ass, his back against the wall, coughing he started trying to stand, then his mouth filled with blood and his scream ended in a bubbling death rattle. The other man looked at his comrade and then at Niamh, his eyes wide with incomprehension rather than fear. Her second shot blew the back of his skull up the wall, killing him instantly, a third shot drilled through the wounded man's breast, dropping him also.

Niamh gazed down coldly upon the three corpses, they were the first people she'd killed and she felt nothing for any of them. Fuck them as she saw in the first man's eyes of what they had plan with her.

At that moment she heard the shouting from outside. Walking outside she saw a small group of five people on the road. Three of them are young kids, two boys and one girl with pink hair? A man with silver hair that sticks up with a headband covering his left eye, who like the three kids are dress up like that reminds her of ninjas like the ones in some the animes she have watch. And the last person is a gruffy old man who has a straw fishing hat like she has seen in her vacation.

Deciding that's she was in Japan she shouted out in Japanese that she hopes she still knows while keeping her rifle aimed on them, "Alright who are you guys? Were those three your friends?"

The spiky blond kid in the orange jumpsuit was the one that step forward, "No we're not! We saw those three attacking you while we were walking down the road and ran to help up. But then we heard those loud bangs coming inside. So what's your name?"

"Who are you guys first!" she asked still pointing her weapon at them if any of them tried anything. But something about that kid made her feel at ease for some reason.

My name is Naruto, the ones behind me are my teammates, Sakura, Sasuke and our teacher Kakashi-sensei. The old man is Tazuna were escorting him back to his village."

He was punch in the back of his head by the pink haired girl that Niamh figures to be Sakura, "You idiot! Why did you tell her that for!" The three others of their party merely shook their heads.

"Sorry but she did ask us," the boy name Naruto said rubbing the back of his head before looking back at the strange woman, "Hey mind if we camp in the rest stop with you?"

Niamh couldn't help but chuckle hearing this as she lowers her weapon, "My name is Niamh and I'm kind of lost. If you guys help me pull out the bodies in the building you're welcome to stay the night. Besides I need you guys to tell me where the world, I am."

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Should I continue this or what?

Author's Notes

1 – Reloading Tool - A tool used to load mixed material into an empty bullet. It is use to combine with the Gun Powder.

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