Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 15 of 17

The villainous Black Dragon Society has fortified Sapporo with Mecha-Tsuyo, tanks, cannons, ships, thousands of troops, and the deadliest weapons their foul scientists could develop. Even so, the mighty Toroka has plowed through. Their only small hope for survival lies in the efforts of the Zero Hunter and his desperate plan to eliminate the gargantuan creature once and for all.

This is Part 15 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, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 first.

Content warnings: violence, animal violence, gun violence, death, drug use, alcohol use, human trafficking, mild swearing, creeps.

The Fish Cleaner.

SUNDAY NIGHT, JULY 24, 1932
THE GREEN BIRD NIGHTCLUB
SHANGHAI, REPUBLIC OF CHINA

//Translated from Mandarin.//

Four Knives Chen spun her oldest blade on her desk, watching how the worn steel caught the light. It was slender and about as long as her hand, still sharp enough slice through tuna ribs in a single stroke.

Debtors’ throats provided even less resistance.

Her enforcers stood shoulder-to-shoulder before her, patient, familiar with her moods. They had prepared everything she had requested. They knew that the undertaking she had asked of them would only make things worse.

She took a sip of her cocktail, a Last Word. The only habits she couldn’t shake from her short marriage were London dry gin and her son.

“Who is with the rifles?” she asked after a moment.

“The Mongol, and my son,” Dockmaster Wen answered.

“And mine,” Jun added.

“A drunk and two children?” Chen asked.

“We will send the Cousins,” Wen said. Chen nodded. Wen’s sister slipped out to deliver the message. Big band music blared through the office and cut out as the door closed behind her.

“Are the poppies on schedule?” Chen asked.

The Lin brothers nodded in unison. They had verified that the English smugglers would arrive at the port in two days’ time. The bribes were paid, the processing house ready. Chen nodded. Things were tense in the city, and smugglers risked being shot on sight, but the value of opium had tripled since the ceasefire.

“Hookman,” she croaked.

“Yes,” the fisherman replied.

“I hear the eastern market is behind on payments.”

The Hookman nodded.

“A week,” he answered.

“Go see Mister Liu,” she instructed. “Remind him what I did to his grandfather. Cut his palms to the bone.”

The Hookman nodded.

“Both hands? It is just a week,” Dockmaster Wen asked.

Chen and the Hookman glared at him. They had both grown up in that sweltering market. When she had been chained to a cleaning table, he had been cast out to sea, hauling rope for eighteen hours a day. His arthritic hands were twisted into claws fit only to hold a netting needle. Her own right hand was locked in a grip formed by the worn handle of the fillet knife laid out before her.

“If they can be late a week, what does that say to the rest?” she purred. “Both hands. And you can do it.”

The dockmaster cleared his throat.

“I gave them permission to pay late,” he admitted. Chen’s glare nearly sawed him in half. “There was a fire.”

“How does that concern us?” she hissed.

“They pay us for protection,” Wen started. He knew Chen was likely to cut any hesitation out of him, so he spat it out: “One of ours started it. Drunk.”

“Who?” Chen demanded.

“Hercules,” he answered. Her lieutenants, practiced killers and leg-breakers all, found her thick Persian carpet very intriguing in that moment.

Chen sighed.

“He is giving me no choice,” she muttered. She sank back into her chair’s thick upholstery. “I will speak to him.”

“And Mister Liu?” the dockmaster asked.

“Hercules will be there at dawn, cutting fish. He will make his payment for him.”

“I remember how much they pay,” the Hookman said. “He will not make that back in one week.”

“It is not about the money,” Chen snapped.

“He won’t stay,” Jun said. The others glared at him but did not disagree.

“He will if I ask him to,” Chen said.

“He will pass it off,” the dockmaster said. “When his work is hard, he pushes it off on our younger members.”

Wen nodded.

Chen had heard the stories before. He had set a fish market on fire, but before that it had been her Model T crashed into a canal, the broken front window on her favorite noodle restaurant, and a police officer with a black eye.

Her son thought himself a prince. She had grown up a slave and built her empire on hard work and broken bones. Hercules thought himself a gangster, but everything he had, he had been given.

Their city had barely survived an invasion. Thousands of people were homeless, hungry, wounded and rotting away. In the good times, before the war, she had been a vulture, that Four Knives knew. In the lean times, she was something else, she had to be. She couldn’t watch the city that made her who she was sink into the sea.

But while she evolved and the people around them starved and clawed and died, Hercules remained reckless, careless. A little prick. It was all he had known and he was going to get himself killed.

She had been raised to fight for everything she had. Hercules fought because he could not bear to live without. His father had made him soft and rebellious.

There were some days she wished Hercules had left for England with Oliver. The only thing that would make living with a globe-trotting professional singer and dancer seem dull to a nine-year-old was being the son of the most powerful woman in Shanghai.

It was foolish to force such a decision on a child. Hercules had never been the same after Oliver left, acting out in turns to impress his mother and surpass her.

In truth, however, he never knew her. He only knew the legend that grew around her.

It was time he met the real Four Knives Chen.

“I will make him work,” she decided. She hoped the market hardened him. The place she was sending him after would make it seem like a pleasant daydream.

He just had to last one more week without burning down a building or landing in the sights of the Japanese agents prowling every street in Shanghai.

Chen needed to take her mind off him, to focus on something less terrifying.

“Did you find the ninja?” she wondered.

“We did,” Bai answered. “He was in a sewer. Dead.”

“Do you have his body?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “It was unrecoverable.”

“It rotted from the inside out,” Jun clarified. “It fell apart when we touched it. Like picking up soup with your fingers.”

“He was alive yesterday,” Chen said. She wanted the assassin. She needed to show what the Four Knives meant. The Japanese knew of her works. They knew she could get people and things through their lines. They knew she could kill.

The Japanese would need her dead before they took Shanghai. Because of course they would try to take Shanghai again. When that time came, her people would need to know that she was not afraid, that she could protect herself, and them, not matter what her enemies threw at her.

Hercules would be their first target against her. He was brash, excitable, and stupid. The way he acted, even at only fourteen years old, anything could happen to him and no one would question it.

Enemies and friends alike would think he had earned his fate.

He was her only weak point. She had to armor herself, for her enemies had already begun their campaign to end her. To leave her feral child running wild was to bare her throat to the Japanese.

The night before, a ninja had tried to drive a poisoned knife into her back on the dance floor of her own club. She’d broken his arm and driven his own blade through his belly. He’d run, trailing the blood that her men followed.

“They tried to poison me,” she realized. A wasting venom was the only thing that could do that to a body so quickly. “The cowards.”

"Even his skull crumbled,” Bai said. “He melted and washed away with the shit.”

“A fitting end,” Chen said. “Tell everyone.”

“You can still show them,” Bai told her. He set a cloth-wrapped bundle on her desk with a thunk. “I got the kunai.”

She sheathed her fillet knife and opened the package.

“I washed it,” he assured her.

The diamond-shaped blade was forged from dark metal that seemed to swallow her office’s golden glow. She imagined green toxic veins running through the steel itself, strange and deadly venoms that could melt a man from the inside out. She lifted it, testing its weight. Its short handle was wrapped in fabric and terminated in a ring where the pommel should have been. It was heavy and utilitarian, ugly and efficient. To the ninja, it was a tool.

It would be her tool as well. A symbol of defiance and strength.

She was born unwanted. Everything she was she had hollowed out of stone with her teeth and fingernails.

Hercules would have to learn how to do that himself. She had to take away everything he thought he had: her money, her protections, her name.

The monks to the west owed her. When one of their own disappeared into the smoking halls near the river, her men had retrieved him and dragged him back to their mountain. She had held onto that favor for years. She would send them one of hers.

The ninja blade was perfectly balanced and spun on its venomous tip.

She would make those who meant harm to her city, or her business, fear its edge.

Her enemies already knew her butterfly daggers; she was a riot in one body with them. The ice pick she carried had been inspired by her former husband’s flair for the dramatic. Oliver had told her that all the Western gangsters used them. By the time she had grown tired of the cliche, she’d grown used to its feel in her hand. Her fillet knife, her first knife, she saved for the ones who really meant something. The narrow blade had also started as a tool before she turned it into something more.

Four Knives Chen had raised Hercules to be her fifth blade, a symbol and a tool. Instead, he had become spoiled, soft, entitled. He was dull, and a dull knife would only cut the person holding it.

“I will chain Hercules to the cleaning table myself,” she declared after moment. A week on his feet, gummy with blood and scales, would make him tender enough for the monks to break. When they got him, they would smelt and reforge him into something useful and terrible.

“Tonight, make it known what the Japanese tried,” she growled, still spinning the ninja blade, “And tell them what I did. Tell them that Five Knives Chen will never be driven from Shanghai.”

Strange times were coming: assassins in every shadow, her family broken, invasion gathering across the sea. She needed her fifth blade. Until Hercules could be honed, the kunai would have to do.

The Zero Hunter.

MONDAY MORNING, AUGUST 2, 1943
ABOARD JOLLY GREEN
ABOVE THE BAY OF SAPPORO

Sapporo was burning. The city, the shore, the water. Gray choked the air; what Hercules Chen saw was a crematory the size of an entire bay. There, standing in the midst of it, were the two monsters.

Toroka had left Mecha-Tsuyo a shuddering, ravaged wreck, barely able to keep itself from crashing to the ground. Oil, smoke, and flames poured from a massive hole in its hull while one of its great drill arms hung limp. Still it lurched forward, one of its tank-like feet dragging and burning behind it.

The great creature ignored the towering wreck, instead taking its time to eat. Toroka had torn its way into a dockside cannery and buried itself hip-deep in the building. Occasional shots from surviving tanks and Mecha-Tsuyo's few functional cannons bounced off of its armored skin. It ignored the explosions, reacting with little more than flicks of its tail that flipped cars and trucks and knocked over walls.

When the intel had come in from the Office’s coast-watchers, Imperial Navy moles, and civilian spies, it had arrived frantic and confused. The Black Dragons had commandeered entire companies for their operation, in addition to the entirety of the Sapporo and Otaru ports. They'd confiscated every scrap of fish in the western half of Hokkaido and taken over each fishery and cannery in Sapporo.

War-weary civilians had not taken well to seeing their hard-earned food dumped into the ocean, spreading rumors and discontent. The tips the Office received were wild, varied, and generally inaccurate, but they all pointed to the same place and a military action so large that it couldn't be anything but a trap for or defense against the creature.

“Target in sight,” Oxford reported. Hercules gave his wingman in Lily Liver a thumb's up. Of course he could see a giant armored salamander that was longer than an aircraft carrier.

Hercules clenched his teeth and fought against Jolly Green's controls. His Strike Lightning, usually overpowered and nimble, was flying like a tug boat.

The pair of fighters were shackled together with long cables running from the base of their fuselages that hooked into the top of the gliding I-A torpedo, right where the shivering canvas wings were bolted on. Every twitch of either plane's controls sent a shuddering tremor through the lines and jerked both the missile and the other fighter around.

“Steady, Boxer,” Oakley cautioned. She had been on edge since take-off. It was her job to synchronize with Blue to release the tow cables. Both gunners had been sweating bullets since Bdenie. It would only take one instant of inattention to smack both planes together or send them crashing into the ocean.

“Eyes up,” Blue grated between his clenched teeth.

“I can hear you,” Hercules said. A tremor passed through his stick. The hot winds rising off the burning city buffeted the conjoined planes. He was wary as they came in low over the bay.

“No signs of aggression,” Oxford advised.

“I guess Hye's message got through,” Hercules replied. They passed over the outer ring of the naval blockade. Several ships were smoldering in the shallows, while others had started rescue operations. Men were pointing up at them from the decks, anti-air batteries tracked them and could have sent up a shredding wall of flak, but the guns stayed silent.

Hercules didn't have any choice but to lumber through. The Japanese laid off their triggers and let them fly over.

“I can't believe they listened,” Blue said.

“Maybe they used all their ammo,” Oakley quipped.

“It is not like they have any other cavalry flying in,” Hercules pointed out.

“They would never reciprocate this risk for us,” Oxford said.

“We are not them,” Blue said. “Entering rocket range.”

“Launch,” Hercules said. Each Strike Lightning carried one of Plumber's whale call rocket buoys. The two tethered planes and their gliding missile shuddered as the rockets shot away. The wind erased the exhaust trails as quick as they were produced.

Both rockets plunked down a few hundred meters offshore and split into pieces underwater, re-emerging as buoys bobbing in the surf. Their underwater speakers began thumping the instant they surfaced. Synchronized whale song pulsed through the water.

On shore, Toroka reared out of the gutted cannery. Its blocky head snapped around, staring at the sea. The ultra-low frequencies had gotten its attention. Hye had modeled the songs after those of the Pacific right whale, an animal they had seen Toroka feasting on. She had made sure that the cries were of a distressed whale, one that was injured or beached to further entice Toroka with an easy meal.

The creature roared, flooding ruined Sapporo with another cloud of its toxic breath.

Mecha-Tsuyo fired off a neutered barrage, but Toroka did not notice the blasts, letting the ineffectual rounds burst against its armor. It was so large that any interaction that did not result in caloric intake was more dangerous to its continued existence than the weapons arrayed against it. Toroka had no interest in battling Mecha-Tsuyo, it simply had to feed.

It was not some malevolent god but a force of nature, one that Hercules and the Office could mitigate.

“Descend another hundred meters,” Hercules said. Oxford acknowledged and they wrestled their planes to the lower altitude. If the Russians’ math was right the glider bomb would drop one hundred meters for every lateral kilometer traveled. That meant they had to descend right into the mess to stay on target. If the Japanese opened fire or the Ax Hand dove on them mid-launch, they wouldn't be able to vary their vector if they wanted to stop Toroka.

They passed the outer edges of the battle. Hundreds of sailors flailed in the shark-infested waters. Entire sections of the shore had been washed out, with swamped tanks and artillery pieces abandoned in the surf.

“Five hundred meters altitude,” Oxford said, his voice grim.

“Five hundred,” Hercules confirmed. They kept dropping, passing through thickening smoke.

“Line up with the release lane, lower airspeed to two hundred K-P-H,” Oxford advised. They would be flying targets, just fast enough to avoid stalling in mid-air. The planes shuddered as they decelerated.

“Steady, steady,” Blue was saying, watching his tow cable to make sure it never got any slack.

“Two-hundred-fifty meters altitude,” Oxford said.

“Two-fifty,” Hercules confirmed. They eased into their attack avenue just as Toroka entered the water. The monster was swaying side to side, listening to the underwater whale song emanating from the buoys. “Target is open.”

“Four kilometers distance,” Oxford said.

“Timer started, hold her steady,” Oakley said. “Thirty seconds until release.”

Hercules tensed. Every gust of wind off the sea, every column of hot air rising from a burning ship, sent shivers through his controls, up his arms, into his chest. He took a long slow breath in through his mouth and counted the seconds while he exhaled through his nose. He cleared his mind of everything except for the plane and the target. Up there, Toroka was the ant. It could not reach him, it did not care that he existed.

“Bandit, ten o'clock!” Blue shouted.

“Keep it steady!” Hercules ordered over him. He risked a glance to his left. A single plane trailing black smoke was powering toward them. It was a pulse-jet rocket fighter, painted in a bloody crimson.

The Ax Hand.

“Mecha-Tsuyo has opened fire,” Oxford stated. The level of concentration he needed left no room for panic. The towering battleship had limped its way around to face them. Gunsmoke drifted away from the anti-aircraft batteries on its shoulders. A second barrage erupted outward as Hercules watched.

“The bastards,” Blue muttered. He sighed, waiting to be shot out of the sky.

“We keep it steady,” Hercules said. No one objected.

The Ax Hand was closing in, reaching the extreme range of his cannons. Tracers zipped around Jolly Green's nose. Sweat dribbled down Hercules' forehead, stinging his eyes.

A wall of flak exploded to his left, expanding like a thunderous gray storm front that cut off the Ax Hand from the Lightnings. Seconds later the wall of explosions bubbled to life again, roaring as it expanded across the Ax Hand's attack vector. The stream of tracers cut off.

Hercules battled against the concussive waves that assailed Jolly Green but kept her on-target.

“That was Mecha-Tsuyo, they are blocking for us,” Oxford realized.

“Ten seconds,” Oakley grated. She had not lost track of her timer.

“Turn on your gun cameras, Cataloging is going to want this,” Hercules advised. He flipped a switch which got a forward-facing film camera rolling. The Office would be able to learn a lot from their film whether their weapon worked or not.

“Here we go then,” Blue grunted.

“Five, four, three... cut it!” Oakley shouted. She and Blue hit the buttons in sync, releasing the gliding torpedo’s long tethers. The Russian contraption fell away as Jolly Green and Lily Liver both pulled up into steep climbs, Hercules banking to the left and Oxford to the right.

Jolly Green twisted into a vertical barrel roll.

“God,” Blue grunted. G-forces shoved Hercules back into his seat. He could feel the skin on his face stretching thin. He flipped their fighter upside-down and leveled off.

The glider was continued along its path, straight at Toroka. The beast was floundering in the water, desperate to find the source of the whale calls. It was oblivious.

The Russian glider met Toroka in its side, ahead of a deep, scar-burled wound. The beast ignored the glider as obliviously as it had ignored the shells and bombs which had bounced off its scales.

At its point of impact, the glider ignited into a blue sun.

The I-A bomb released its alien energies in a flare of icy light brighter than flash-lamps, brighter than anything Hercules had ever seen. It was like a lightning bolt had frozen the instant it hit the ground, a sphere of shimmering destruction that grew over the course of a few seconds until it had consumed Toroka from its shoulder to its hip. The beast writhed, terrified, confused. The August morning went dark as a winter night around it.

The alien light died away as quickly as it had appeared, leaving only a pink sear across the vision of anyone too slow to turn away.

A great cracking sound shook the bay, blowing out Sapporo's few remaining windows and pushing the columns of smoke and poisonous gas away. Lightning danced across the water. The surf roiled with bubbles as whole schools of bloated, steaming sharks bobbed to the surface, their fat white bellies facing the sky.

Toroka stumbled, roaring again. Instead of a billowing jade fog, black smoke and orange sparks issued forth from its gullet.

A gale-force wind struck Jolly Green seconds later, throwing it through the air. Alarms blared in Hercules' cockpit. Blue was yelling something, and for an instant the radio cut to a static shriek. Hercules ripped his helmet off to breathe.

The world around them was a blur. Unnatural forces tugged at Hercules' senses and organs. His controls were still connected, but nothing he did elicited any change in the plane's bearing. Jolly Green was in a flat spin, a death knell for any pilot.

Bailing out over Imperial Japan into a battlefield the Black Dragons had lost was not an option. Not for a Chinese man, an Englishman, or an official. The Dragons had an entire guild dedicated to torture, men who considered the parting of flesh their art. Hercules and Blue may as well have left their parachutes at home for all the good they’d do.

Hercules forced the animal panic out of his mind and let his awareness extend to every surface of his faltering plane.

His instruments were still intact and the engine was still running: Saltchuck's ad hoc shielding had done the trick against the I-A blast. If he could regain control, Jolly Green would still fly and fight.

Blue was shouting again. Hercules knew what he was saying without hearing the words.

“Do not bail!” he shouted back. “We have this! We know our plane.”

Hercules could feel every shudder and tick passing through the Lightning's wings and tail. He knew where the plane wasn't catching lift and could feel the wobble of her impotent flaps. He would have to get Jolly Green's nose down and hit the gas at the same instant. But he couldn't shift the plane with the yoke: in a flat spin, none of her control surfaces were catching drag, rendering them useless. They had to affect the plane’s pitch another way to get her back under control.

They had to change Jolly Green’s center of gravity.

“You need to eject your guns!” Hercules shouted.

“Oh Lord.”

“On my mark, dump them then lean as far back as you can. Ammo and all!”

Hercules couldn't see Oxford and Oakley out there, not even a flash of purple. He couldn't see Toroka or Mecha-Tsuyo or the burning city. He could barely keep sky separate from sea.

“Ready,” Blue shouted through his clenched teeth.

“Mask on!” Hercules yelled. He risked taking one hand off his rebelling yoke to strap his helmet and oxygen mask back over his head. The radio scream had stopped. Instead, he could only hear Oxford's tinny voice yelling over the airwaves:

“Jolly Green, respond now! Boxer, can you hear me?”

Hercules didn't have time for a discussion. Their near-vertical ascent after releasing the missile hadn't bought them enough height to free fall much further.

“One, two, three, drop!” Hercules ordered. Blue ripped the quick-release linchpin from his gun mount. The entire assembly, both Brownings and the Randall, slid out of the Lightning and fell away, trailing flapping ammo belts like ribbons in the wind. Blue shoved himself as far back into his seat as he could. Smoky, cold air rushed into the cockpit, shocking Hercules' remaining senses.

The Lightning's center of gravity lurched toward Jolly Green’s nose as nearly one-hundred-fifty kilos of guns and ammunition disappeared and another fourteen stone of ginger Australian scooted forward.

The second the Lightning's nose pitched down, Hercules ramped up the throttle. He pushed Jolly Green into a roaring dive. She broke out of the spin and swooped eagerly, filling Hercules' view with oil- and blood-slicked sea.

“Hold on!” Hercules yelled.

He hauled back on the stick and peeled Jolly Green out of the scalding dive with over fifty meters altitude to spare. He leveled off, only for the sea before him to be replaced by Toroka's armored, beaked head.

The monster roared, again spitting smoke and sparks. It extended its fleshy gills, but instead of pulsating pink tendrils they resembled the branches of a dying pine. They were dry and withered, gray twigs that snapped off with the slightest breeze. The many meters between the beast’s shoulders and hips had been burned black. Not the glossy black-and-gold of its healthy scales, but the charred, dead black of an old building fire. The beast stomped forward, furious at the unfamiliar sensation of pain.

Hercules banked hard, swerving around the enraged monster.

Toroka twisted to follow Jolly Green, only to stop short. A chasmic fissure yawned open along its flank, cracking further with each of its movements. Each expansion of the fracture sent a cloud of black particles erupting forth. Hercules maneuvered around it and glanced into the wound. The jagged hole was at least twenty meters deep, right into Toroka's barrel chest. He pulled up and clawed his way skyward.

“Positive hit!” he reported. Oxford and Oakley cheered from their position circling several thousand meters up.

“Bloody good show,” Oxford said.

“Now what?” Blue asked. “The bastard is still standing.”

He was right. Toroka was slowed and hurting, but it was still on the move. It settled into the electricity-churned bay and let the water rush into its wound. Great gouts of steam and boiling water geysered out of it.

A few surviving tanks and the last cruiser in the bay opened fire once again. Every round that hit Toroka's burned midsection chipped craters out of its flesh. It tried to dive but it surfaced seconds later: something sent it retreating back ashore.

Hercules couldn't see any submarines, mines, or other traps from his position above the beast, circling it like a vulture.

As the harried monster waded inland, it found Mecha-Tsuyo waiting for it.

The steel titan swung its single functional drill around, clobbering Toroka's face. The beast itself could take the hit, but its I-A-affected body was burned through and brittle. Each blast from Mecha-Tsuyo's cannons, each colossal haymaker, sent ashen tons of Toroka's midsection tumbling to the ground.

The beast tried to escape further into the city, but it was slowed to point that even the crippled land battleship could block its way. A point-blank blast from Mecha-Tsuyo's forward cannons sent Toroka sprawling to the ground, wiping out an entire block of shops and homes.

It tried to get up, but lost the strength and collapsed.

“It is down,” Oakley said. She sounded more somber than triumphant.

At the end, Toroka had just been a hungry, scared animal.

Mecha-Tsuyo limped forward on its good foot toward the dying creature. Just as ashen flesh broke away and floated upward with every rise and fall of Toroka's ribs, so too did flame and oil pour from Mecha-Tsuyo's ravaged structure. Its one arm hung limp, a great rend had been opened deep into its hull. Entire of batteries of guns and gunners had been ripped away. Mecha-Tsuyo's detached bow swiveled around until its two powerful main guns were trained on Toroka's head. The animal's golden eyes, wide with shock, stared up at the metal executioner.

Out in the bay, the last surviving cruiser burst into flames. Hercules wheeled around to see the ship broken into two pieces, each half already sinking. A huge ripple was working its way up the bay from the open ocean. A great wave formed around the disturbance, larger than the water Toroka had displaced.

“Is it a second one?” Blue wondered.

“No, it is larger,” Oxford replied.

Mecha-Tsuyo turned to face this new threat, ignoring the monster at its feet. Toroka used that moment of distraction to attack.

The monster surged upward with every bit of its remaining strength and took Mecha-Tsuyo's swiveling 'head' between its powerful jaws. One savage twist was all it needed to rip the detached bow away.

Flames and burning men boiled out of damaged vessel, little falling stars that winked out at the conclusion of their seventy-meter drop. Smoke projectors burst all over Mecha-Tsuyo, cloaking the whole contraption in white phosphorus discharge.

Somewhere in that chaos, Mecha-Tsuyo fell.

A bright light flared behind the smoke and a single rocket burst through the haze. It shot upward faster and further than Hercules could follow, and then was gone.

Toroka emerged from the smoke burnt and bloodied. Pieces of it were falling away. The gaps where its gills had been were burning holes, like the inside of a kiln. Orange sparks poured from its mouth. It limped, dragging its lifeless tail behind.

It sought safety in the sea.

The incoming surge was over twenty meters tall when it reached the shore. It collided with Toroka just as the monster reached the harbor again, staggering the beast. Before it could recover, a giant rectangular hull burst from the blue, shockingly scarlet against the surging water around it.

It was mechanical in nature, of that Hercules was sure. The thing was shaped like a crab, low and wide, with four sturdy legs larger than buildings supporting it from either side and a pair of menacing arms dominating its front. An armada's worth of turrets pocked its topside, arrayed around a canary-yellow hammer and sickle.

“Bloody Vinogradova,” Oxford cursed.

The Russian thing slammed into Toroka, knocking the beast to the ground. Hercules pushed the throttle and whipped around the mechanical crab's front side. Its forward face was nothing more than a great gaping hangar, open over Toroka's struggling form.

A bank of bright arc lamps snapped on, bathing the whole city in a sickly, familiar light. It was the yellow glow that had dropped off the I-A missile on Bdenie Island. The Ivan creation was large enough to straddle an entire island without having to take any of its feet out of the water.

It raised a massive arm high over Toroka, displaying a wicked claw as long as a ship. It cleaved through the beast's charred body, so deep that its point must have buried itself a dozen meters into the ground below.

Toroka's eyes rolled back, and the great creature went still.

The Russian weapon brought its second arm to bear, this one smaller than the first but still ending in a horrible hook bigger than a train car. It buried the barbed point into Toroka's head and dragged the creature toward its open hangar. The larger arm began working at the corpse with its claw, squeezing and pulling until the huge body split in two.

“Lord almighty,” Oakley whispered. Hercules dove low to see scores of thin men scrambling manacled inside the open hangar. They were throwing hooks and nooses over every one of Toroka's spikes and plates as the claws drew it in. Each of these lines ran back to winches, which they used to pull the body in.

A single shell ricocheted off of the Russian weapon's starboard leg. It did not so much as scrape the red paint but every one of its turrets came to life, sending a circular wave of gunsmoke rolling through the city, obliterating buildings in every direction.

“Evade!” Oxford snapped.

The Russian thing’s back was ringed with anti-aircraft guns that opened fire at once. The dozens of flak cannons tracked the dodging Lightnings, setting off a trail of explosions that followed their maneuvers across the sky.

“Don't they know it's us?” Oakley screeched. She hated AA fire. Planes she could handle because she could shoot back. Ack-ack was too sudden, too arbitrary for her to bear.

“We were not supposed to survive the I-A blast, that’s why they never mentioned the electromagnetic radiation,” Blue realized. “They did not want us to see that thing.”

“Thank Saltchuck and Plumber for that one,” Hercules said. If it hadn't been for that last-minute shielding they had installed over the Lightnings’ electronics, both planes would be in the drink. Hercules hauled back on his stick and swept Jolly Green up and around, avoiding the bursting flak that harried his every adjustment.

They were quickly outside the flak cannons' range and were left to watch as the Russian thing turned its attention back earthward. It walked its fire down every street and neighborhood within range. It was inhuman and methodical.

The resulting barrage swept through the ravaged city, doing more damage in minutes than Toroka had in the entire melee. Incendiary shells sent a firestorm raging through the rubble.

“Mother Mary,” Blue whispered.

“They are not leaving any witnesses,” Oxford realized.

Blast after blast rocked the burning the city. The Russians were not targeting enemy troops or strategic targets, they were shooting at everything. Any building or landmark that could house prying eyes was scraped from the earth. The Japanese army tried again and again to mount a defense, but what little they had left was obliterated the instant the Russians caught sight of them. The thing’s guns popped the remaining tanks like balloons. Flames consumed any soldiers fool-hardy enough to challenge it on foot.

The fire slacked off after an agonizing fifteen minutes. Every building, vehicle, ship, and hill within the Russians' reach was burning. It sounded a foghorn, low and mournful.

Hercules circled wide, bringing him in front of the Russian weapon once more. Its hangar had closed behind the scavenged half-corpse, leaving only riveted armor in its place.

The Russians began their withdrawal, easing their weapon back into the water, step by quaking step. Toroka’s abdomen and tail lay abandoned on the beach, burning and bleeding.

As the bay closed in over the Russian thing, fully submerging it, it shoved off the seafloor and jetted out into the open ocean. It kicked up a white wake for several kilometers before sinking to the bottom to continue its journey back to mainland Asia in the depths.

“What the hell was that thing?” Oakley asked.

“Above our pay grade,” Blue told her.

“Nothing left to do here save catch flak,” Hercules said, interrupting the chatter. He spoke through his clenched teeth, hoping no one heard the tension in his voice.

“They will not be pleased with this turn of events,” Oxford added.

“Exactly... and there they are,” Hercules said. A barrage of ack-ack shells burst a couple hundred meters below. Close enough to shake Jolly Green, but not enough to hit her. Despite the devastation, there were still survivors on the ground, survivors that were not happy that Allied planes were lingering in their airspace after the Russians had scoured their city.

“We are out of range,” Hercules said. The Black Dragons would want him dead out of vengeance. They would see the Russian attack as part of his plan. They would paint Hercules and the other officials as dishonorable backstabbers, no matter that they had stopped Toroka's devastation of the city.

“The active radar is picking up bandits, incoming from the east-south-east!” Oxford reported. Another flurry of black flak bursts blossomed around them. Fighters were scrambling from nearby airbases.

“Time to hoof it!” Oakley shouted.

Hercules turned Jolly Green west and punched it. The Strike Lightning took a big swig of av-gas and surged ahead, riding the burning fuel like a spurred mustang. He didn't need to look back to know that Lily Liver was right behind him.

There were bandits and flak at his six, but they were not what Hercules was afraid of. Somewhere out there, under the blue, the Russians were waiting with their secret weapon, a titanic war machine with a belly-full of Toroka that rivaled Mecha-Tsuyo in size and firepower.

It was a secret weapon that Hercules had on film, and it was a secret weapon that knew where he slept.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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