Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 10 of 17

The fallout of Toroka’s brutal attack on Japan continues. Captain Umihara Shou, creator of Mecha-Tsuyo, must deal with his failure to stop the beast. Meanwhile Fast Freddie comes up with a plan to protect everyone.

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This is Part 10 of Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo. If you’d like to avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 first.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, animal violence, death, mild swearing, creeps, tobacco use, drug use.

The Soaring Stone.

SATURDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 13, 1932
THE DISTANT BELLS TEMPLE, YĬ JÙRÉN MOUNTAIN
WULINGYUAN, REPUBLIC OF CHINA

//Translated from Mandarin.//

Hercules Chen collapsed at the top of the twisted stairs. He felt like he had been climbing for months. He wheezed and hacked, trying to spit out saliva as thick as stew. The stone landing was cool against his cheek.

He did not know how long he laid there, shuddering to catch his breath, before the waiting man spoke:

“How old are you?”

Hercules jolted, suddenly fearful and even more suddenly furious at his fear. He tried to spring off the ground, but his body failed him. His trembling arms could not support his weight and he simply flopped like a fish. He settled on turning his head, letting his other cheek draw refreshing coolness from the smooth rock.

“Who are you?” he managed.

The man who had spoken was sitting on a carved bench, moonlit from behind. His bare head gleamed and his white beard tumbled over his chest. His golden robes hung off his narrow frame and he was leaning on a golden staff, smirking at Hercules.

“I am a friend of your mother’s,” the man answered. At any other time, his voice would have been calming.

“My mother does not have friends,” Hercules hissed. His mother owed people, and people owed her. Her last friend had been Hercules’ father, and everyone knew what had happened with him.

“That is true,” the stranger admitted. “Your mother helped me with something some years ago. Now, I am repaying her.”

“By trying to kill me?” Hercules gasped. He struggled around to look back down at where he had come from. The twisted staircase was steep, with uneven, sloped, jagged steps, unpredictable turns, gaps wide enough to fall through, and hornets, thorns, wind, and snakes haunting its edges.

“All students here must walk the Ten Thousand Stairs,” the man replied. “It is tradition.”

“I am no student,” Hercules gasped. He could barely comprehend what he was hearing. His mother was running the black markets back home, helping the resistance against the Japanese occupiers, and she had sent him away like a petulant child. His father had told him about boarding schools but he had never expected to end up at one, especially one that had nearly killed him before he’d found the door.

“And what are you?” a second man asked.

The second man was wearing the same golden robes as the first, but he carried an American pistol and a cleaver on his waist, with a black wok strapped across his back like a shield. He was bald as well, but he kept his face shaved clean. His cigarette glowed as he drew on it.

“I am a member of the Five Knives Gang, and I run Shanghai,” Hercules gasped.

The second man chuckled.

“Who are you?” Hercules tried to snarl, but his voice cracked.

“I am Master Wong, he is Master Yuan.”

“You expect me to call you that?” Hercules sneered.

Yuan chuckled again.

“How old is he?” he asked Wong.

“Young,” Wong replied.

“I am sixteen,” Hercules lied.

“You are fourteen,” Wong replied.

“Too young,” Yuan said.

“I was twelve when I climbed the stairs,” Wong countered.

“That was a long time ago, and our ways have changed,” Yuan replied.

“He climbed the stairs, Xie. And I promised his mother.”

“How do you know her? What did she do?” Hercules asked.

“She found one of my students when he was in trouble,” Wong answered. “And now her son is in trouble, and she wishes him to become my student.”

“What the hell do you know?” Hercules snapped. He sat up, though his entire body was wracked with tremors.

“I know that you are on a dangerous path,” Wong replied. “If the Japanese do not kill you, your friends will. Your mother’s life is one built on violence and pain. She wants something different for you.”

“You think you are better?” Hercules asked. Wong was not wrong, his mother was feared throughout Shanghai, and for good reason. But he could see the gun on Yuan’s hip. They were violent men as well.

“I do not judge,” Wong answered. “But I can see. You deserve a better life than the one you had.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are a person,” Wong replied. “Everyone deserves a chance at peace.”

“Peace,” Hercules spat. Fools and weaklings. His and his mother’s men could carve them up.

He caught his breath and looked around. The landing he was on was carved out of the mountainside and worn smooth with footfalls. It was lit by lanterns hanging from hooks on the raw cliff face.

“He is lost,” Yuan muttered.

“Then that is our fault,” Wong replied. He leaned on his staff and stood. He asked Hercules: “Do you know where you are?”

“Thirteen days away from home,” Hercules answered.

“Observant,” Yuan said. He ground out his cigarette and packed the butt away in his robes.

“You are at gates of the Distant Bells Temple,” Wong said. “We are a Buddhist shaolin order, dedicated to the pursuit of peace.”

Hercules found the strength to stand. He staggered past the old man without speaking and leaned on the waist-height wall ringing the landing. Moonlight carved the outlines of the column-like Wuling Mountains against the black sky.

Below, the path he’d climbed wormed its way up the mountain, twisting around outcroppings and trees like squid tentacles. He could not see the bottom.

“A temple, huh?” Hercules asked after a moment. The dark landscape before him was too packed with peaks and ravines to accommodate anything larger than a shack. “Where is it?”

“You will need to think beyond what you are so sure of,” Wong told him, his back to him. Hercules would make the tottering old man regret that.

“Oh yeah?” Hercules asked. He faced Wong and snatched the hidden knife out of his waistband. He didn’t even get the chance to make a threat.

Wong flicked his golden staff backward without looking. The movement was lazy, almost dismissive, but it knocked the blade out of Hercules’ hands. The small knife tumbled over the edge of the landing.

He might as well have shot it out of a cannon.

“How did you…” Hercules asked.

“That is what we teach here,” Wong answered. He faced Hercules. “We teach you to be at peace with yourself. To end conflicts with restraint and efficiency.”

“Where is here?” Hercules demanded. “All I see is rocks!”

“Change the way you see,” Yuan advised.

“What?” Hercules snapped.

A bell sounded, its reverberating tone bouncing off the stone around him. He looked around but found nothing but far-off mountains and open air. The bell rang once more. Hercules spun in place, searching for its source.

“The things you have been taught, the things you are so sure of that you anchor your life to them, they are no so concrete as you believe, Hercules,” Wong told him. “You can learn to soar, but things you think can never change will weigh you down like a stone.”

The bell sounded again.

Hercules did not know why, but he looked up.

Above him, the mountain blocked the sky, topped with a massive, overhanging cliff. A score of buildings clung to its underside, hanging over him like stalactites. Lights flickered in their windows, vines and gardens hung from their balconies. The bell rang from an inverted tower. Golden banners decorated every surface. He could see robed men watching him from dangling platforms.

His jaw dropped open. He had never seen anything like it before.

“Welcome to our home, Hercules,” Wong said. “Would you like to come up?”

The Drowned Captain.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 14, 1943
ABOARD MECHA-TSUYO
NOHEJI, AOMORI PREFECTURE, JAPAN

//Translated from Japanese.//

Captain Umihara Shou gave no regard to the limp corpse as it slid to the floor. Yokozuna Suzuguchi's shot had rung true. The wrestler shoved the Nambu back into Chief Fujioka's hand and stalked off the bridge, fuming.

The creature Gima Goro was dead. Kilometers away, the creature Toroka still lived, harried by Kaiken Takamoto's planes.

“Cease fire, cease pursuit,” Umihara ordered his crew. Mecha-Tsuyo ground to a halt below him. Her idling engines cycled down, a deep thrumming growl rather than the diesel roar of open combat. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his itching eyes. The gunsmoke stung in the enclosed space.

The captain's chair was stiff and hard: its leather cushion had yet to be broken in. Still, it felt divine against his twisted spine. The monster's attacks had wrenched his back, his wrists and elbows, joints that had been ravaged by decompression sickness one too many times. The hot bath he would draw in his cabin would alleviate some of that pain, but that was far off, past his next encounter with the mad kaiken.

“All stations, damage reports,” Umihara said, half-listening. His officers reported calmly.

The damage was extensive, but not fatal. The smiths’ work had held strong. Still, every section had suffered at least minor damage. The 'neck' had been bitten clean through, but that would seal tight when retracted. An entire battery of twenty-millimeter guns had been ripped free and thrown half a kilometer, gunners and all. Engine three had taken on an internal knocking, and the chief engineer was requesting to shut it down for inspection. Mecha-Tsuyo's legs were strained but undamaged. One tread had snapped but the repair teams had already replaced it. Umihara's ship could still walk, sail, and fight.

The crew had not fared so well. They counted sixteen broken arms, three cracked skulls, a pair of broken collar bones, a shattered wrist, the rocketry officer's broken neck, thirty-six had internal chemical burns from Toroka's poison breath and were violently ill, and fourteen men were lost with their anti-air battery. Umihara had not yet assessed the casualties of his ground teams. A single Ebisenshi had crawled from the water, and only the motorcycle and truck teams that had been scouting the far side of the swamp had escaped Toroka's deluge. Amongst them, several had been hit with friendly fire from Mecha-Tsuyo's blind barrage, while many and more had been poisoned and were vomiting blood.

“Chief of deck,” Umihara said quietly. Chief Fujioka reappeared at his side when summoned. “Have my bridge cleaned.”

The blood of two loyal officers and one wretch stained his bridge. It stank of cordite, of iron and sweat, urine and vomit, and the poisonous exhalations of both an abominable creature and the beast Toroka. Fujioka called below, and the maintenance crew came running, mops in hand, tanuki in tow.

“Commander Kioshiro,” Umihara said some time later, be it ten minutes or an hour, he could not be sure: “Inform naval command that I will submit my report on the engagement. We will need replacements for injured and lost crew immediately.”

“Captain...” Kioshiro, his ambitious X.O. started, but a deep voice cut him off:

“Captain Umihara, the kaiken requests your presence.”

Takamoto's wing man towered over Umihara, a hulking dim ogre who had to stoop to stand on the bridge. If the big man noticed Gima Goro's absence he did not say a word.

“X.O., compile reports from all stations. Allocate medical attention and repair teams according to priority. Inspect all decks with tanuki before we make way,” Umihara ordered. He wanted things in order in case he did not make it back to the bridge in good time.

His eyes ached, the old seeping pain that started in the nerve and grew and grew throughout the day. The accident had started the pain so long before, but the recent stress induced by the kaiken had had woken it in a way he had been ill-prepared for.

Takamoto’s goon stayed silent, awaiting his response. Umihara clenched his jaw, then finally turned to the Dragon agent:

“As the kaiken requests.”

Umihara followed the other man into the upper superstructure in silence. The goon did not look back to see if Umihara still followed. There was no possibility in his mind that anyone might refuse his kaiken's summons. Crewmen, healthy or otherwise, parted before them. Tanuki scampered away at the sight of Umihara's grimace.

The captain climbed up to the flight deck.

Mecha-Tsuyo carried a half-dozen spring-winged B90 Zekkyōryū in its steam-actuated launch tubes. The fighters could swarm forth from the ship, launched like rockets. Takamoto's freakish squadron awaited the captain there, lounging in hammocks that they had set up amongst their fighters.

A sallow, skeletal man watched him enter. His eyes marked him a comfortable killer. The old woman whose face never unscrewed from a furious scowl glared at him, but she continued cleaning the barrel of an unauthorized pistol. A boy, no older than Umihara's youngest daughter, was splayed out across a stack of ammunition crates snoring softly. Takamoto's kennel, loyal thugs all.

“Where is he?” Umihara demanded. The goon pointed to the pilot's briefing room. Its windows had been covered with crimson curtains. Umihara took a sip of warm water from his canteen, he was so thirsty, then pushed past the large man and entered the dark room.

“Jitte Umihara,” Takamoto said softly. It took the captain's strained eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. The room was lit by a single beeswax candle. Oranges dots around the room marked a score of burning incense sticks. Their overpowering fragrant smoke drove his eyes to tears. He dabbed at them with silk. The kaiken was seated on the bare floor, motionless as he stared into the candle's flame.

“Kaiken Takamoto,” Umihara replied. The title was dry on his mouth. Only in the Society would a pilot outrank a captain. He detested the Black Dragons, but they had foresight and resources, the two essential factors that set them apart from the Imperial Navy.

In addition, had he not sworn himself to their service, they’d have seen him killed or jailed.

“Is Mecha-Tsuyo capable of combating Toroka?” Takamoto asked softly. Umihara recoiled with sudden fury.

“Capable?” he snapped.

“Does your creation have the ability to defeat the creature?” he asked again, very slowly. The pressure behind Umihara's eyes spiked.

“She spilled the animal's blood,” Umihara snarled. “She cracked its armor.”

“Indeed she did,” Takamoto agreed. “So why did the creature Toroka escape?”

“It was your prisoner - !”

“My prisoner!” Takamoto shouted. He stood and spun and stalked over to Umihara, his face centimeters away from the captain's. “Mine. That you had killed.”

“The wretch was already dead. He was poisoned, in his mind and body.” Umihara's objections fell on deaf ears. He saw then that Takamoto was naked. His bare chest heaved with every breath, twisting the vipers and dying women on his chest into motion. The captain took an involuntary step back.

“If one dead man can foul so great a creation, how great can it truly be?” Takamoto asked himself. The little man turned his back on Umihara and paced away and asked over his shoulder: “You gave the order to cease pursuit. To surrender.”

“The creature is too fast on land, and one of our drive treads was broken. It took moments to repair, but Toroka was beyond effective range by then. We would have had it in a few minutes more of uninterrupted direct contact.”

“A few more minutes, a few more crewmen, a few more bullets,” Takamoto listed. “It seems you always come up short, jitte.”

“I am captain of this vessel. I designed her, from the bolts to the cannons. I recruited her crew and trained them,” Umihara shouted. He stalked after the smaller man. “It was you, with your over-eagerness and pride, that mishandled this operation.”

“You blame your failure on me?” Takamoto asked.

“You and the dead man, your foul pet,” Umihara answered.

The pilot whipped around low, sweeping Umihara's feet out from under him with a lightning-fast kick. The captain slammed to the deck, battering his old bones against steel. He moaned in pain. The pressure in his eye sockets was unbearable.

Umihara opened his eyes to find a Takamoto leaning over him, nude, dangling, and leering at him between stars and flashes. The pilot unhooked the hearing aid from Umihara's shirt and brought its microphone to his lips. His foul whisper squealed and crackled in the captain's ears:

“My squadron planted three transponder harpoons in the beast's flesh. I could follow it to hell if that is where it is going, and the men who have dared speak to me as you just did will be there waiting for it.”

Umihara's mouth was too dry to speak. His bowels roiled. Takamoto placed his bare foot on the captain’s chest and pressed down, pushing the air from his lungs.

“I am a kaiken of the Black Dragon Society, captain,” the pilot hissed. “Your Navy has given you to me like a chicken. I could break your neck with my hands and hang your body off of your precious bow. I could sink your monstrosity of a ship into the ocean. Your life, your crew, your ship, they are mine. As is Toroka.”

Takamoto leaned onto Umihara's ribs with all his weight. He ripped the captain’s rank off his collar and dangled the ragged strip over his face for a long moment before removing his foot and squatted next to the captain. He gently placed the hearing aid back on Umihara's chest.

Umihara coughed, but could not speak. Even if the pain had allowed him words, he knew then that the kaiken saw him as a tool, a resource that he could expend or extinguish without a second thought.

“I know of your contributions to my war, Shou,” Takamoto continued. “I know of your years spent in Germany, learning their techniques. You took this research and improved it, but you stopped short. A diving suit? A toy.”

Umihara snorted. His Ebisenshi were no mere divers. They were armored warriors, the first men into the most hazardous theaters the war could offer. They were the panzerritter, but perfected. General von Oberndorf's designs were limited. Umihara had removed those limits. His brazen warriors were designed to withstand chemical poisons, the pressure of the deepest seas, and the strongest weapons.

“It was not until the Imperial Smith peeled your corpse from a hospital bed that you were able to achieve greatness. Death becomes you, Umihara,” Takamoto continued, smiling. “Why so timid in battle then?”

Blood pounded behind Umihara's damaged eyes. His mouth was dry. His lips twitched, cracking as he sought an answer to the man's question. Takamoto stood and walked away, never listening. He threw Umihara's rank patches onto a cluttered table.

“Have you lost faith in your creation? I have not. You will remain aboard Mecha-Tsuyo. You will guide her, but command falls to your executive officer. A good man, a dedicated jitte. The announcement has already been made to your former crew.”

Umihara glared up at the nude man. He almost spit on the floor, but his throat was dry as sand. The pounding in his head had become rhythmic and was spreading. It shot through his nitrogen-addled bones like barbed lightning, connecting the pain in his skull to his toes and everything in between.

“It is a pity you played with your toys so long, Shou. What fun this weapon would have had at Pearl Harbor.” Takamoto took his seat before the candle again. “Go, make ready for pursuit. Prepare the men for combat, make repairs. Captain Kioshiro will receive jitte and renga reinforcements shortly. Make them comfortable.”

As if on cue, Takamoto’s goon pushed through the door and dragged Umihara to his feet, wheezing. His lungs felt like they were shriveling up on themselves. Umihara was hauled out of the dark briefing room. The weak lights of the launch bay were as solar flares to his sensitive eyes.

Takamoto's trio of gargoyles watched in curious glee at Umihara's shame, his pain. Another cough wracked his body, staggering him. The sallow man chuckled, and Umihara stumbled out of the launch bay.

The ladders and stairs blurred past Umihara. The old pain was too great to think about the future or even the present. Yellowed, tattered memories rushed back, from the days before the accident.

Umihara had been young once, with straight bones and joints that did not scream or swell. He had been quiet and studious. Mechanical schematics were as paintings or poetry to him, and his love of the open sea and the wonders beneath it drove his imagination. The Navy welcomed him, and his tinkerings were well-received, his creations encouraged.

The Germans sent for him after Manchuria. Their philosophies opened unto him new avenues of study into the martial sciences. Department Three, despite their claims, had not always existed, and those that came before them had crafted wonders. General von Oberndorf spent years bastardizing his father’s works to create the powered armor, but he needed Umihara to turn it into something operable. Their creation became the panzerritter. For von Oberndorf, a heavy weapons platform was where his vision ended.

Umihara was quiet back then, a man in a foreign land with ideas beyond what he was asked to supply. When von Oberndorf gave him his leave and the panzerritter blueprints, he destroyed them rather than present them to the admiralty. In the four fevered nights it took him to return to Tokyo, the Ebisenshi were born.

The captain smiled at the memory, despite the old pain.

With his designs for impregnable soldiers in hand, he sought to save Japanese lives, to open areas of the world denied to man. Instead, Umihara and his designs were claimed by the Black Dragons, and his servitude in darkness began.

Mecha-Tsuyo lurched under Umihara's feet, throwing him into a bulkhead. His shoulder ached as if it had popped out of its socket. He squeezed it gingerly, determined it was intact, then continued toward his cabin, bracing against each of the ship’s subsequent steps. Another stumble wrenched his wrist, but Umihara kept himself off the wall.

“Careful, you ingrate,” Umihara snarled, as if his traitorous executive officer could hear him. Kioshiro was working Mecha-Tsuyo hard after its ordeal, as obedient to the Dragons as he was careless with the vessel. They would be back in the water soon enough, and Umihara could only hope that the repair teams would have sealed all the breaches before Takamoto demanded they set sail.

The sea had already taken Umihara's life once. He was bolder then, testing Ebisenshi prototypes himself. His last attempt saw a gasket fail at a shoulder joint. Black-blue death that rushed into him at two hundred meters’ depth. He bones twisted, his lungs collapsed, his blood turned to jelly, and his eyes pushed their way free of their sockets.

He had been dead for four hours in the cold depths before they dredged his corpse from the bottom and breathed life back into him. When he was revived, his soul carried a weight with it, a vision he could not shake: Mecha-Tsuyo had risen from the darkness with him.

Umihara recovered over weeks in a hyperbaric chamber, willing the nitrogen bubbles from his marrow. In that time he filled notebooks with blueprints, schematics for the greatest weapon ever conceived. His feverish scribbles were written off as diver's madness, but one of his pages reached the Imperial Smith.

The edges of Umihara's vision blurred. He needed relief, the pain had reached chest, his stomach. His innards twisted themselves into a knot, his heart was racing. He rubbed stars from his eyes, shook the muck out of his head, and looked around. He had somehow dragged himself to his quarters.

His cabin was dark and empty. The bunk had been jostled in the battle with Toroka, but everything else had been buttoned up. He was not new to rough seas. His kit was where he left it, hidden under the foot of his mattress. He stuffed it into his pocket and staggered out of the stifling cabin.

Umihara suffered through the pain and made his way into the belly of the ship, into a utilitarian barracks and armory beneath the waterline. He sought his Ebisenshi.

Only one of his deep-sea warriors had been recovered from the swamp, and with Mecha-Tsuyo on the move, perhaps only one would be. The survivor's hulking armor gleamed in its bay, alone under a golden light. Umihara almost missed the diver. The man was curled into a ball, mumbling in his bunk nearby.

“What was it?” he asked himself over and over as he rocked.

“Ebisenshi,” Umihara called to him quietly. The man took no notice.

The captain stalked to the light switch and flipped a bank of spotlights to life. The broken man recoiled in horror. Umihara recognized the hardened leader of the armored divers. The man was a shuddering wreck, more like Gima than a naval special forces officer.

“Tsukihashi,” the captain implored. The man's red-rimmed eyes locked onto his commanding officer.

“Did you see?” he asked. His voice quaked.

“I did,” Umihara answered. “I saw a scared salamander. Now get out.”

“What?” Tsukihashi stammered. The old pain flared behind Umihara's eyes.

“Get out of here!” Umihara shouted. His throat was so dry it felt ready to tear. He charged at the officer and kicked him in the calf hard enough to spill him off of his bunk. Tsukihashi scampered on his hands and knees, finally gaining his feet as he disappeared through the door.

Umihara stalked after him and slammed the hatch shut, locking it tight. He grabbed a metal chair, dragged it before that last suit of Ebisenshi armor, and flopped onto the seat.

His muscles and joints pulsed with a second of relief before the old pain came back, stronger and angrier.

“I know you are still there, old friend,” he said to the anguish. It loved to hear him speak, to hear him complain. It laughed in his face then lashed back harder, every time. He knew what it wanted.

Umihara sat back and unrolled his kit on his leg. He stared up into the six eye-lenses of the glowering armor. Its reinforced claw hung useless at its side.

“My first child,” he told the pain, but it already knew his passions and was jealous. It jammed its thorns into him to let him know.

He removed the glass jar from his kit and pulled its cork stopper. The black tar within was pungent. He scooped a thick bead onto the tip of a pen knife, then scraped it into a ceramic bowl no larger than a sparrow's egg. A long stem fit into the hole in the bowl's side. Umihara examined his work, then laid back in his chair. Mecha-Tsuyo stomped toward the sea beneath him.

Feed me! the old pain screamed, and feed it he did.

Umihara sparked a match and touched it to the waiting pipe bowl. The black resin within rose up to the flame, bubbling into vapors as it woke.

The drowned man sucked in a deep lungful of the awakened mists and sighed as they wrapped around his pickled brain, silencing the old pain. Umihara watched the brass armor before him stretch and twist, its plates expanding as it breathed itself alive. He smiled and let himself go blind as he exhaled.

Hot opium smoke curled around his head.

The Zero Hunter.

FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 16, 1943
SPETSIAL'NAYA TYUR'MA
VLADIVOSTOK, U.S.S.R.

“There's a tool for every job, mate,” Tusker Leatherfell said as he twisted his remaining mutton chop and stared at the wall. “What we need is an elephant gun.”

Hercules snorted.

“Any specific caliber you would recommend for a two-hundred-meter newt?” he asked.

Tusker’s eyes refocused and he shot Hercules a smirk and a wink, then offered up one each to their Russian hosts as well.

“Possibly something armor-piercing, magnetronically actuated, with a thousand-millimeter bore,” he said knowingly.

Two Ear glared at the flamboyant Australian for a long second then translated for his hulking sergeant. Vinogradova's eyes narrowed as she heard Tusker's words. She growled an ursine reply.

“All of the rail mortars are aimed west,” Two Ear parroted. The single bare bulb hanging above him cast a harsh light across his craggy features. The shadow within his long scar looked six inches deep.

“So turn them around,” Tusker said.

“It would be easy enough to stick a transponder in that thing's neck.” Blue added.

“And the pact-breakers could home right in,” Tusker concluded. He laced his fat fingers behind his bald red head and sat back, victorious.

By then, every official had seen the recon photos from Noheji Bay. The monster they sought was unlike anything that should exist on earth. It was more a force of nature than a living thing, beyond biology or philosophy. Hercules doubted that even the Russians' massive bunker-busting mortar shells could fell it.

Two Ear did not have to wait for the Steel Sergeant's response.

“The mortars take twenty hours to aim, twenty-four to adjust for accuracy,” he explained. “They are designed for a siege.”

“Ineffectual against a moving target,” Oxford said. Tusker scowled.

“So what else do were have?” Hercules asked. “Rockets and cannons are out. You read the same report I did, even that walking battleship barely slowed it.”

The officials stood in a loose circle in the same unadorned room they had met in before Macau. Hercules shifted uncomfortably. His bones still ached from the battering he had taken, but he was whole. Oxford, Oakley, and Blue had gotten off easier, though Tusker was decidedly lop-sided after the loss of half his facial hair.

The Office had a hundred informants within the Imperial Navy, and the report they had received had come from a home guard unit stationed in the north of Honshu. It told a tale of lost titans, lumbering metal monsters, annihilated towns, and furious Dragons.

“How did we not know about this Mecha-Tsuyo beastie before?” Blue asked the room. No one had any answers save excuses.

“You know the Imperial Smiths,” was all Oakley could manage. The Office had never been able to question a smith, they had only performed autopsies on disemboweled, exsanguinated bodies.

“It must have taken all the steel in Manchuria,” Hercules said. No one knew where the resources such a weapon would consume could have come from. None of it made sense.

“What else have we missed?” Hercules wondered, dumbfounded.

A hoarse cough brought the officials to attention. General Ma had arrived. The powerful man carried even more files, each stamped with the Eagle, Eye, and Sword: cataloged intelligence directly from the Library, organized by the ADA computation engine.

“Our enemies hide much,” Ma said. He tossed a file to each official and let them study it.

Hercules rifled through the pages with growing horror. He was looking at documents captured from Vesuvius before its eruption. The papers proved something the Office already knew: the Nazis were insane. Department Three was made up of eleven branches, each larger than the entire Office. Mecha-Tsuyo was nothing to hide compared to that kind of money and manpower. Thousands of military men were involved, and millions of civilians spread across all of Europe and the world.

“A branch for the army, one for the air force, another for the navy,” Blue read. “Karl Adler running the March Arm. He was the one who gave Takamoto those pulse-rocket fighters, remember?”

Hercules grunted. He knew all about Adler, the Black Baron, a man responsible for the deaths of even more Office pilots than Takamoto. It was said that the Baron nearly won the Battle of Britain on his own.

“There are many names we know listed, beginning with a name familiar to the Sergeant,” Ma said.

“Von Oberndorf,” the hulking Russian grunted. Obersturmbannfuhrer Jakob von Oberndorf was listed as the head of Department Three’s January Arm. The Office had imprisoned the man's father decades ago, and as his form of vengeance he had created the panzerritter armor that Vinogradova was wearing. Her pistons hissed at his name.

“Can we beat them?” Blue asked quietly.

“Sure as David did,” Oakley answered. “Keep 'em dancing and pop 'em between the eyes.”

“That is already in motion,” General Ma said. “The African and Western European bureaus just executed at strike against the May and July arms as we speak. That is where the DIVERT fleet is, and where the rail mortars are aimed.”

“Compared to the Germans, Toroka is small fish,” Hercules said grimly.

“A small fish that can swallow a whole city,” Blue added.

“So what options are left to us?” Oxford asked. “The creature has access to the Russian coast, Manchuria, Honshu. We cannot let it run amok, even on enemy soil.”

“A few battleships and carriers could pulp the thing,” Oakley said.

“That is no guarantee,” Hercules replied. “The British are still on the other side of India, the Americans are island-hopping, and the Australians would get shredded sailing north through the gauntlet. We will have to find something else.”

“That thing is big as a mountain, what could take it down?” Blue asked. Vinogradova muttered something in Russian.

“The Germans have destroyed a mountain,” Two Ear translated.

“That's right,” Oakley said. Her eyes lit up. “The I-A.”

She was right. Ionen-Aktivierung weapons seemed unaffected by size or armor. The krauts had brought down Vesuvius with an I-A device and its effects stained the sky, even halfway around the world.

“Would an I-A attack work?” Ma asked. He turned around to face Hye. The young biologist had sequestered herself behind a stack of intel reports in the furthest corner of the room and was rifling through them, heedless of the conversation around her. Ma cleared his throat and tried again. “Would it work, Official Eun?”

Hye jumped to her feet like she'd sat on a pin, scattering papers around her.

“Would what work, sir?” she asked.

“Could an I-A device kill Toroka?” Ma asked. Hye's face screwed up as she considered the question. Her nose crinkled in a way that made Hercules smile.

“There is no question of the devices' potential to damage living organisms, but the ion-activation grenades I am familiar with do not have a large enough radiant radius to affect any of Toroka's vital tissues or organs via an external attack,” she said carefully.

“'An external attack?' Bloody hell,” Tusker snorted.

“I am not diving down that thing's gullet,” Oakley declared.

“Were we to chain them as the Germans did in Vesuvius, we might produce a large enough reaction to affect it from the outside” Hye said.

“Rocket or torpedo might do the trick,” Blue mused,

“Even if it could work, any I-A devices the Office possesses are stored in America,” Ma replied.

“The physicists in Oak Ridge are trying to reverse-engineer the weapons,” Hye confirmed, nodding. She was well-versed in the goings-on within her bureau.

“So there are none for us,” Hercules concluded.

Vinogradova growled something to Two Ear. He whispered back, eliciting another snarl from the hulking woman. They went back and forth for a while before the convict translated:

“Sergeant Vinogradova will allow access to our bureau's I-A research.”

The other officials looked at each other but said nothing. They knew the Russians were notoriously secretive, only handing over intelligence to the rest of the Office once they had analyzed it themselves. No one was surprised they had their own I-A program.

“Did you refer to us as 'mud crabs?'” Oxford wondered, the only man in the room who spoke a lick of Russian. A glare from the conspiratorial Ivans and his own general shut him up.

“Thank you, sergeant,” Ma said, quick to redirect any issues they may have taken with Oxford's eavesdropping. “How many operational devices are available?”

Vinogradova grunted a reply.

“None,” Two Ear said. The sergeant snarled again, and her translator continued: “But our technicians could build a daisy-chain device if they had working examples.”

“We could capture some,” Blue suggested.

“Only grenade-sized devices have been captured, and those one at a time, always in the possession of high-ranking enemy agents,” Ma said. “We need more than that.”

“Then we go to the source. Get them straight from a Black Dragon armory,” Hercules suggested.

“If we even knew where that was, how do you propose to get in?” Oxford asked. His expression was telling. He thought Hercules' idea ludicrous. “Do you intend to fight your way past Matagi and ninja on your own? We are too few for battle and too far for reinforcement.”

“I am sitting in a room with some of the greatest fighters in this hemisphere. The Roaring General Ma Gang-Hai. The Steel Sergeant. Specialist Eun Hye. Lily Liver can blow a gap in their defenses, the four of us go in, and Pushy Penguin gets us back,” Hercules said.

“The Thunder Crash Slam, every bloody time,” Oxford muttered. Hercules glared at him.

“So what do you suggest?” he snapped.

“There could be another way to acquire the devices,” Oxford said thoughtfully.

“You expect the Dragons to just hand them over?” Hercules demanded.

“Perhaps they would trade for them,” Oxford said. He and Oakley shuffled through a stack of other reports, those skimmed and ignored in the looming face of Toroka's attack.

“We do not deal with butchers,” General Ma huffed.

“Here,” Oakley said. She peeled a mimeographed sheet out of her stack and handed it to her pilot. Oxford read it quickly and nodded.

“This report indicates that the Imperial Swordsmith has died,” he said.

“So?” Hercules asked.

“We also know that the walking battleship was severely damaged and that many of its crewmen and support personnel were lost or injured,” Oxford replied.

“Some of the weapons were damaged, its hull was pierced, and more,” General Ma read off the radio transcript. “It walked away under its own power and sailed out of the bay.”

“It will need repairs,” Oxford said. “The new Imperial Smith will be anointed in Tokyo, and replacement crewmen and his smiths must be brought to the ship before they can confront Toroka again.”

“What are you planning? That we infiltrate the Imperial Swordsmiths?” Hercules asked.

“They are a silent order, Boxer,” Oxford answered. “You would compromise our cover in seconds.”

Blue and Hye laughed, only to be cut short by a glare from Ma.

“I propose we give them an additional item to deliver to Takamoto,” Oxford said.

“Please tell me it's a bomb,” Tusker muttered.

“It would be a message,” Oxford snapped. “The offer of a trade. The Society's resources for our help in neutralizing the creature.”

“They are murderers and sadists,” Hercules said quietly. No one objected to that characterization. By then they all knew the Society personally: they'd each lost family and friends to the monsters.

“These are truly desperate times,” General Ma intoned. He cast his dark eyes to the filthy floor. He'd lost a son to the Matagi just a year ago, and a daughter to the I.J.A. a year before that. His men had been slaughtered by the score, whether by pulse-jet ambush, ninja massacre, or man-made plague.

“You're not agreeing to this,” Hercules growled.

“You have seen the photos.” Ma replied. He sighed and looked at the Noheji reconnaissance. “Entire towns swept away. Thousands killed in minutes, crushed, drowned, eaten, and poisoned. Women, children, and elders. Toroka is a force beyond rivalry, justice, and vengeance. At this time, we are not the Office and the Society. We are humans, and humans are the prey of this predator. We find the smiths and deliver our message.”

Hercules relented. He couldn't overrule the general.

“How would we find them?” he asked.

“Our people have eyes on them,” Ma said. He crossed his arms and adopted a wide stance. He was steeling himself for a fight. He nodded to Vinogradova, then said: “We know how to reach them.”

“And if they do not agree to share their weapons with us?” Hercules pressed.

Pistons hissed and the Steel Sergeant stepped forward, shoving past Two Ear and growling at them directly in her own rough English:

“Leave that to me.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.