[Laeral]

"The Best Fried Chicken in Lao Sansong"

Tara Chatelain peered down at the quiet stretch of the roadway below. The night was frigid and still, with snowdrifts knee-deep on the rocky ground. This side of the border, only a small handful of kilometers from Laeralian territory, looked no different from the Xueyan hinterlands where she had grown up. Even though their mission tonight was strictly secret, a black ops mission that had been foisted on Tara and her squadmates through Intelligence, the cold and the foreboding pines of the surroundings didn’t bother her. If it hadn’t been for the fence they’d had to cut through at the Sansongian border, it would’ve felt just like one of the many training missions in the Xueyan territory she’d undergone to make Special Forces. Deliver death from afar, and slip back through the fence into the Laeralian side of the border.

Her walkie-talkie clicked.

“Signal Gold, Signal Gold.” That was Cesar, the spotter, confirming the target en route and with the expected escort. Tara’s grip tightened on her rifle, and she flexed her fingers in their nimble shooter’s gloves. A moment later, a road along the empty roadway heralded the arrival of the target. Just as their contact, a disgruntled retainer in the powerful Arkunda clan, had warned them.

“Target confirmed. Signal Green.” That was for Tara. She flicked the switch on the detonation device to power it on. A few heartbeats later: a BOOM from the roadway, as a red-and-orange cloud blossomed to life in the air. The speeding limousine which had been racing down the roadway, the dual-feather crest of the Arkunda clan emblazoned on its side, went tumbling onto its side. One of the motorcycle outriders from behind the car spun off the road and into a tree. There was a moment of silence, and then the gunfire began from the Laeralites’ ambush.

Staccato bursts of gunfire, from cruder assault rifles than those the Laeralites customarily used, raked the overturned car. There was no gunfire in response, and at a signal from the squad’s leader, the Laeralian squad ceased fire. Silence reigned over the woods, apart from the hiss and pop of the small fire guttering on the roadway.

“Dancer Three here, I’m going in,” Tara said over the comm. Grasping her rifle in both hands, she crept towards the roadway, approaching it stealthily. In the ditch by the edge of the road, she took out an empty clip of ammunition, engraved with the quasi-religious Arikata verses common to a local militant clan, and tossed it to the ground with a gloved hand.

“No sign of life here,” she said over the comm. “Report target downed.” Arkunda Hachiro, a lesser member of the region’s dominant Arkunda clan, was the target of the night’s ambush. A shady character, with interests in cross-border gunrunning and narcotics, he was nevertheless too small of a fish to normally merit a special forces hit—even in the frontier regions of Lao Sansong, where Laeralian commandos routinely operated. No, the goal tonight was to stir up the hornet’s nest of Sansongian politics, keeping the local clans and warlords focused on each other rather than venturing across the border into Laeral.

There was a small pop from the road, and Tara froze, scanning the roadway for danger. There was nothing, except for a few trashed fast-food wrappers rustling in the breeze. Then, Tara saw it. Someone from inside the car, desperately wounded, had crawled out, and in his hands he clutched a brace of grenades. Smiling a coarse, bitter smile in Tara’s direction, he chuckled and pulled the pin.

____________________________________________________________

Tara woke up in the darkness. She was cold, uncomfortably clammy, with a pounding head, and she was wearing dark clothing. Where was she? Some kind of ditch, it appeared, next to the road.

The walkie-talkie clipped to her shoulder squawked. “Dancer Three, fall back to reserve extraction point. Hostiles are inbound. Dancer Three, fall back to reserve extraction point.” She didn’t know who was talking to her, but it sounded important. Her head ached in protest at the noise.

There was a burst of gunfire in the distance—not far away, and getting closer. Reserve extraction point. Where was that? It would have been covered in the pre-mission briefing, but Tara couldn’t remember anything about it. She couldn’t remember even going to whichever place—it looked like Lao Sansong—where she was now.

There were a handful of pieces of paper in the ditch and on the road around her. Tara picked one up.

Grand Opening: Huenya Fried Chicken!

Join us for the grand opening of Lao Sansong’s first-ever Huenya Fried Chicken. 

Enjoy special grand-opening only deals on finger-lickin’ tasty chicken for the whole family!

Below, there was a date—tomorrow’s—and an address, in the nearby city of Funashbiru. Something clicked in Tara’s head. Of course. She was in Lao Sansong, on a covert mission gone bad, and that address must be the extraction point. Gathering up her things, she scurried off into the woods, away from the gunfire. Recuperate, make it to the Huenya Fried Chicken, and she’d find her way home.

[To be continued...]

[Laeral]

Kaoru Takagi was just three weeks into his first real, grown-up job, and he was already worried today was going to be his last. The news that a prestigious international culinary brand like Huenya Fried Chicken was opening its first Sansongian outpost in his neighborhood, and that his application for the role of Customer Experience Associate had been accepted, had been the single best thing to happen to him this year, ever since he’d graduated secondary school with no job prospects and his girlfriend Reiko had left him to go steady with Morihasa Tamura, who had a cool leather jacket and hung out with the biker guys from the High-Flyers.

Working at HFC, though—that was a real man’s job! One where he’d make over a thousand yen an hour, enough to buy a whole family-size Bucket o’Wings on a Friday night and be the hero of all the cool parties he’d get invited to with his flashy new job. Enough to make Mom and Dad respect him…and maybe even have a shot with all the babes who’d come flocking to his slick Associate’s uniform.

All he had to do is not mess this up. And right now, t-minus 25 minutes before the ribbon-cutting and the grand opening ceremony with the mayor and everything, he had a big, big problem. The guy who was supposed to wear the Tasty-otl the Flavor God suit, the one of a muscular chicken in a Huenyan headdress, had flaked.

Sorry bro, feeling sick, said the text message on his cheap phone. And with those four words, Kaoru could feel his fancy new job melting away like snow in the springtime. Mama Zhang, the Laeralian expat who ran this HFC franchise like a fifth branch of the military, had already shown approximately zero patience for screw-ups. Especially on the day of the grand opening, when the clan leaders, the mayor, and everyone who was anyone in Funashbiru City would be at the opening.

Kaoru felt sick to his stomach, right there in the HFC backroom. He pushed open the back door into the icy winter morning, anything to get some air—and smacked the woman standing there off her feet.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Kaoru said.

The woman, maybe ten years older than he was, had short-cropped blond hair and a dazed expression on her face. It took her a moment to respond, clearly struggling with the words. “I’m—looking for the Huenya Fried Chicken.”

“You’re about half an hour early, uh, and the ceremony’s gonna be over at the main entrance.”

“No, no—I’m here to get out.”

Kaoru stared at her blankly, and she sighed. “I want to speak to your manager.”

“No!” Kaoru yelped. “Listen, I can help you. Get out? I know a guy who can get you where you wanna go. Where are you going?”

“Xueyan. Cité-Gramont, if you can.”

“Uhhh…yeah. Yeah, that’s just over the border; there’s a crossing near town. But…you’ve gotta do one thing for me.”

_____________________________________

And with that, Tara found herself being helped into an oversized plush mascot’s outfit of a buff, bare-chested Huenyan warrior. Her stomach growled loudly as they worked, and Kaoru, who seemed absurdly thankful to have her filling the mascot role for her, offered her a breaded chicken cutlet.

“It’s the HFC Chicken Katsu! They’ll only serve it at the Sansongian locations.”

She wolfed it down.

“Damn,” Kaoru said. He vanished into the next room for a moment and came back with a styrofoam cup and a straw. Tara eyed it suspiciously, before taking a slurp from the straw. It was a milkshake of some kind, with a light cherry flavor.

“Cherry blossom milkshake. Also only in Lao Sansong,” Kaoru said. Tara drank some more, slowly.

“Now, all you’ve gotta do is be on stage during the speech and ribbon-cutting,” Kaoru said. “Wave to the kids and bounce around and stuff.”

“Bounce around?”

“You know? Be, like, jolly. Do mascot stuff. And then after I get off work this evening, I’ll take you to this guy who’ll get you across the border.”

There was a moment where he just looked at her with pleading eyes, clearly desperate for her to say yes. Tara was too exhausted to complain. Wordlessly, she took the mascot head and placed it over her own.

_____________________________________

The ceremony itself was passing in a blur. A grate in the mouth of the Huenyan warrior’s costume suit she wore allowed her to see out. Tara was feeling woozy—maybe she was overheating? One section of the restaurant had been cordoned off as an impromptu stage, and an old man in a suit with a sword at his side, whom Tara assumed was the mayor, was giving a speech while customers and employees in matching black uniforms applauded intermittently. She was standing in the corner, sweating in the mascot suit, sometimes swaying side to side or waving her mascot arms haphazardly, when she glimpsed a disturbance in the crowd. Some kind of instinct from years in combat brought her attention to it immediately.

The figure finally forced his way to the front of the crowd and Tara saw him clearly: a tall figure in ornate, samurai-style armor made of plates of some kind of bulletproof fiber, inlaid with silvery thread tracing out the dual-feather insignia of the Arkunda clan. A wicked-looking blade rested in a scabbard on his back, and a pistol in a holster on his side. “Who!” the warrior bellowed. “Who is responsible for the death of my brother?”

“Uh, excuse me,” said Kaoru, approaching hesitantly from the side in his black employee t-shirt. “If we can keep all the questions until the end, please—”

The warrior backhanded him across the face. “Quiet, you welp!” Kaoru fell to the floor with a groan.

Tara stiffened.

“I am Arkunda Kiichiro, warrior of the Arkunda Clan, son of Arkunda Shigeki, and brother of Arkunda Hachiro,” the samurai said. “My brother was betrayed and murdered not 30 minutes after he met with the lord of this establishment last night. Who? Tell me, who is responsible for this affront?”

Tara’s blood ran cold. The employees were shrinking back from Kiichiro, trying to put the tables in between them and the warrior.

“Hey, son, now look here—” said the mayor, stepping forward with his hands outstretched in a placating gesture.

“You are no samurai,” Kiichiro said. “In the ancient days, for an act of treachery which resulted in the death of a samurai…” he cast his eyes around the restaurant. “...We would take twenty peasant’s heads for the insult. Perhaps we should recreate such a day today.”

The middle-aged woman whom Tara knew as the HFC’s owner stepped forward. “Hey, so, uh, why don’t we all take it easy? I can get you some Huenya-Fries on the house, and we can—”

“Blood,” Kiichiro spat. “Blood is thicker than ketchup. My blood brother is what I lost last night, and blood is what I will have in recompense today. Beginning, of course, with you, you foreign, peasant wretch.”

With a steely scrape, Kiichiro unsheathed his blade.

“Wait!” Tara cried. The entire restaurant turned to look at her. “Arkunda Kiichiro, I challenge you to single combat!”

The samurai’s face, for the first time, appeared utterly stunned. “Tasty-otl?” He said. “The Flavor God?”

“I am a warrior, like my father before me,” Tara declared, her voice echoing from within the suit. “I challenge you to single combat. For the fate of this restaurant, and everyone inside.”
There was a long, drawn-out moment. “You have no blade,” Kiichiro said, his eyes looking at the oversized cartoon milkshake affixed to the chicken mascot’s right arm.

Tara gestured to the mayor, who hurriedly unsheathed his ceremonial blade and scurried over to her.

“Now I do,” Tara said, testing the weight of the sword in her mascot’s paw-like hands. Now that she’d challenged him to a duel, that would give time for help to arrive and lock up this madman.

“Now, how do duels work in this, uh, jurisdiction? Shouldn’t we, uh, postpone to a secondary location?”

With a roar, Kiichiro charged, bringing down his blade in a swift swing meant to bisect her at the sternum. Tara yelped and leapt aside, as the momentum of the samurai’s charge brought him past her.

Tara desperately tried to pull off the head of her mascot’s costume, as Kiichiro spun around and charged at her. She brought her blade up to block his strike, then his next, and the next, the force of the blows nearly forcing the sword from her grip. One blow slipped past her guard and slammed into the simulated-muscle forearm of the suit, scraping against the mesh and shearing off a jagged piece of flesh-colored fleece.

As Tara stumbled backwards before the onslaught, the top-heaviness of the suit betrayed her and she lost her footing, toppling to the ground next to one of the two-top tables. Kiichiro swung at her with a powerful overhead blow and she rolled, the blade cutting deep into the tabletop in a shower of splinters.

Dropping her sword, Tara reached desperately to her mascot head and wrenched it off, throwing the Tasty-otl head to the ground. Kiichiro gawked at her for a moment, and Tara scooped up her sword, holding it in two hands to mirror the samurai’s stance. She stared back at him, breathing hard.

“You’re no warrior!” Kiichiro said. “I can see it in your stance. You’ve never handled a blade.”

“Maybe not,” Tara admitted, dropping the sword to the ground with a clatter. “But I won’t let you harm these people.”

She settled herself, letting the sword rest at her side in a way that felt natural. She’d taken first place in the last wushu tournament in her company. She could do this.

“Then you will die too,” the samurai said, advancing on her with the long blade pointed at her. Tara flung her sword at him, causing him to flinch, before bringing her leg up in a swift, sweeping kick across the surface of a table, her foot catching the salt, pepper, and soy sauce shakers and sending them flying, like a perfect tennis serve, at Kiichiro’s face. One of them caught his face with a sharp crack, the cloud of pepper sending him into hacking, choking coughs.

“Your party tricks won’t save you, girl!” Kiichiro said. But Tara was already moving, picking up a chair and swinging it at his face. He brought up his blade and slashed at her, the blade lodging in the wood just an inch from Tara’s face. She swiftly twisted the chair, its metal legs trapping the blade and wrenching it aside, allowing Tara to leap onto him, fists flying.

Tara felt her fists hit flesh, felt something crack that might have been his nose, as her fists and knees scrabbled for impact. He buckled for a moment, still grasping at his sword as Tara flailed at him like a wildcat, before he recovered and grappled with her, pushing her off with a powerful toss that sent Tara flying through the air, slamming into a table and rolling at impact.

She briefly saw stars. She was lying on the floor by an upturned table, her chest throbbing in pain. Kiichiro bent and picked up his sword, swinging it experimentally through the air as if to test for damage, before stalking over in Tara’s direction.

Tara groaned in pain but, with a surge of adrenaline, brought herself to her feet, now empty-handed as the samurai advanced on her.

Looking from side to side like a rat in a trap, Tara made a dash away towards the restaurant’s order counter, the crowd backing away to clear a path for her as she ran. Kiichiro raced after her in pursuit, and Tara picked up a stack of trays, flinging them at him like oversized frisbees. She vaulted over the counter, landing with her feet firmly on the ground, and raced into the back, past heat lamps where buckets of Huenya-spiced chicken fingers sat in orderly rows.

Glass shattered around her as a burst of shots rang out, near deafening in the restaurant. People screamed and raced for the exits, but Kiichiro’s voice sounded over the din.

“You can’t escape me, you cowardly mascot!” he roared. “You’ll die, coward!”

Tara rounded the corner, breathing hard. In these crowded confines, she would have the advantage against Kiichiro’s katana—if only she could get near enough to strike a knockout blow.

She looked around her, eyes searching the fast-food kitchen for something, anything, that would give her an advantage. The metal door next to her swung cautiously open.

“Get in!” a voice hissed. Tara dove inside, finding Kaoru huddled there.

“What are you doing here?” Tara said.

“Trying to sneak out and get help,” Kaoru said.

“You have a phone! Call the cops!” Tara said.

“On the Arkundas?” Kaoru scoffed.

Tara looked around the dimly-lit space, at its shelves lined with rows of frozen chicken wings and cutlets. “We’re not gonna die in a damn walk-in freezer. We’ve got one chance…”

As the samurai warrior rounded the corner into the narrow kitchen, Tara sprung, swinging the freezer door out with sudden speed. Kiichiro grunted in surprise, and Tara reached for the kitchen’s deep fryer, grasping the vat of hot oil and flinging it over the man’s head.

Kiichiro screamed, the oil sizzling on contact, and Tara made a sweeping kick at his legs. He toppled over and hit the tiled floor hard. Kaoru, springing from the freezer with a yell, raised a sack of frozen chicken tenders in the air and slammed them into the samurai, who moaned and lay still.

Tara stood there, suddenly exhausted, as the oil of the other fryers burbled softly in the background.

“Holy shit,” Kaoru said.


_____________________________________

“I don’t quite know how to thank you,” said Mama Zhang, the formidable-looking Rén woman who owned the Huenya Fried Chicken. She looked around the restaurant—the trashed tables, glass shards littering the kitchen, and most of all the samurai warrior lying flat on the ground in a pool of oil, beneath a sack of frozen chicken tenders. “Can I offer you some chicken?”

“Respectfully, ma’am, I think I should be on my way,” Tara said.

“Kaoru, you didn’t mention that your friend the mascot was so talented,” Mama Zhang said.

“I think it’s the spirit of the Flavor God,” Kaoru said. “It appears when you least expect it.”

“Indeed,” Mama Zhang said. “And, Kaoru, you displayed some firm judgment and swift responses in a challenging customer situation. Especially with the bag of frozen chicken tenders. Keep this up, and perhaps you’ll make the Manager Training program.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Kaoru said.

“You know, I thought Huenya Fried used fresh, never frozen, chicken,” Tara said innocently.

Mama Zhang’s glare practically fixed Tara in place. “Breathe a word of that to anyone outside this room, and the Arkunda Clan won’t be the only thing you need to fear.”

“My friend here’s had a tough day,” Kaoru said. “Requesting permission to take her back home? I’ll need to borrow the store delivery van.”

Mama Zhang hesitated for a moment, before sighing. “Go ahead. And even…consider it PTO.”

“We get PTO?” Kaoru said.

“Two hours,” Mama Zhang said. “And make it snappy. Because we’re going to reopen at 1, and you’re going in the mascot suit next.”

Kaoru gulped. “Yes ma’am!”

With that, Tara followed him to the car, and the way home.

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