CountDown Untold Stories

CountDown ⑦ [Untold Stories]

Preface:

Life's greatest tragedy is to stop fighting.

"There's a line in Fullmetal Alchemist: 'Life's greatest tragedy is to stop fighting.'"

Sergeant Anto said this as he pressed the car's ignition button and reminisced with Sula, the machine gunner in the passenger seat.

He was a forty-two-year-old Austrian with a wife and daughter, a middle-aged man whose extraordinary life had taken him from rock bottom to the top. Or perhaps every nobody in the Fast Knife Warband had a résumé that could be turned into a documentary script.

"Fullmetal Alchemist?" Sula said with a smirk, a smile on her face. Every inch of the twenty-seven-year-old woman's skin was covered in tattoos, including her face. The names and insignias of every warband she'd visited and every comrade she'd known—dead or alive—were etched on her body.

"No," Sergeant Anto said. "How the Steel Was Tempered."

The Audi RS e-tron's dashboard and center console lit up. Ten years ago, the electric car had competed in the Dakar Rally. That had also been the darkest period in the underworld. Even so, Ming De hadn't abandoned the Moon God Cup or this costly sporting event that wore people out.

If you asked what the essence of sports was, was it faster, higher, stronger?

Was it humanity's pursuit of its own limits? The thrill of commercial competition?

Perhaps you could find Ming De's answer in Sergeant Anto.

With his hands on the rally car's steering wheel, it seemed as if everything had returned to the racetrack—

—Sergeant Anto had once been penniless. At thirty-one, he was still a taxi driver. Picking up fares on the streets of Paris, he had to put up with the blows of policies promoting low-carbon electric vehicles, pay more for his means of making a living, and