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

Hercules Chen takes on a personal mission to find an old friend who has gone missing in the aftermath of the devastating Battle of Sapporo. Then, a deadly new threat appears north of te Arctic Circle.

This is the finale of Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, the final chapters. If you’d like to avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 first.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, mild swearing, human trafficking, drug use, creeps, Nazis.

The Zero Hunter.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 24, 1943
DEPARTMENT THREE WAREHOUSE
SHANGHAI, OCCUPIED CHINA

An explosion shook the cavernous warehouse, sending dust and dirt cascading from the perforated sheet metal ceiling.

“Where is Fan Jin?” Hercules Chen shouted in the foreman's face. He’d beaten the man until he’d gotten his full attention, and it had worked. A full-auto salvo pocked the wall above their heads and the foreman did not so much as flinch. The Eleven Bullets rebels was engaged in a furious firefight right outside and all he could see was the man right in front of him. Hercules tried Mandarin: “Where is Messner?”

“He... took... everything...” the foreman groaned. Blood trickled out of his nose.

“I can see that,” Hercules snapped. The yawning warehouse was empty. According to the Eleven Bullets, it had been filled to rafters with weapons and ammunition just weeks before, so much so that they’d stolen enough I-A bombs to kill Toroka without the Nazis noticing they were gone. All that remained to Hercules was dust, rats, and scrapes in the concrete floor. Hercules' voice echoed through the expanse when he shouted: “Where did he take him?”

“He left with the fleet... a week ago.”

The effort of speaking was too much, and the foreman closed his eyes and groaned again. His head lolled and he fell unconscious.

“Bloody hell,” Hercules cursed, imitating his father without realizing it. He laid the limp man down on the filthy floor and stood up. A dozen other thugs were strewn about around him, all in similar conditions. Hercules had threshed through them all. They were street toughs, smugglers, and muscle men, hardened and encouraged by their Nazi employer. They'd been eager to attack an intruder, but they had not been prepared for what a trained official could do.

Hercules left the battered thugs where they lay and exited the warehouse. An army of Eleven Bullets men had formed a perimeter around the facility. Salvos of rifle fire erupted from the other side of the building and pistols barked back.

Wen Chao, son of the infamous Dockmaster Wen, shouted orders. At his word a half-dozen men took off around the building to support their comrades.

“Did you find him?” Wen asked. Hercules shook his head. Wen grimaced, an expression warped by the waxy scars on his cheek and the dark patch strapped over his eye, then spat: “Damn the German!”

Wen Chao was a year younger than Hercules. They had grown up in the Five Knives Gang at the same time, but their lives had been very different. Whereas Hercules had been born the scion of the gang, Wen had been forced into it. He and his father had fought their way into the family. They had no connections outside of Shanghai, and when the Japanese had fallen upon the city the second time, they had stayed and Wen had burned.

“We will find him,” Hercules assured him.

“Or you can leave,” Wen snapped. “Why stay? This is not your city, Chen. Go. Fly away.”

Hercules did not know to respond. When he had learned that his mother's old gang was looking for help in recovering Fan Jin from Many Guns Messner, he had been excited to rejoin them. Ten years ago, before the Japanese had come back, the Five Knives Gang had been full of life, hilarious yet terrifying, and the streets of Shanghai had been wild and vibrant. But the Eleven Bullets were not those men, and theirs were not those streets.

“Fan Jin was my teacher,” Hercules finally stammered.

“Fan Jin taught all of us,” Wen said. “If it were not for him, I would still be doing what Five Knives Chen had taught me to do: cutting the palms of fishermen behind the market for a handful of yuan.”

“I would be fighting cocks,” another said.

“I would be smoking opium.”

“I would be conscripted into the Collaborationist Army.”

“I would be homeless.”

“I would be dead.”

“I would be a communist.”

“I would have hung myself.” Hercules knew the haggard old man who said that: Jun, one of his mother's elder soldiers. His son had been on the rise when Hercules had been sent to the temple, but he was nowhere to be seen. A score of men left their positions and encircled Hercules and their lieutenant. They were all muttering in agreement with Wen and Jun.

Hercules had recognized too few of them. He had been gone too long and too much blood had been shed. He counted Bai but not his father, Jun but not his son, the Lin brothers and their sister, the Mongol, the Hookman, and the Cousins.

Many more were new faces to Hercules. Scores had joined since the Japanese had shot his mother and her captains, eager to pay back the violence extolled by the invading Imperial Army. They were once tong men, triad men, martial artists, communists, anarchists, pirates, surviving veterans, former prisoners, escaped slaves, disgraced deserters, and desperate refugees.

Before, they would have been Five Knives Chen’s victims, not her soldiers.

At their apex, the Five Knives Gang were extortionists, opium dealers, thieves, and purveyors of carnal vice. They were infamous and feared, dangers to the people of Shanghai, far from saviors.

When the Japanese shot Five Knives Chen, they were lost, rudderless, and full of fury. Her death became a spark.

The Office was eager to destabilize the Japanese occupation, and in the Five Knives Gang they found men for whom violence had already been a means of survival. They filled the vacuum left by their mistress’ death with legendary warriors like Fan Jin and Iron Skin Qiu. They convinced a group of casual killers that their brutal skills were anything but monstrous. and in doing so created something just as violent as his mother had, but self-justified in their carnage.

Fan Jin gave them purpose.

Under his mentorship, the Five Knives Gang changed their name, commemorating their founder not for her life but for her death. The Eleven Bullets was an urban militia, directed by officials and armed to the teeth with American guns shipped across the Pacific and smuggled into Shanghai by the Ghost Eye Triad.

The gangsters-turned-rebels were still mad dogs but with a different hand holding the leash. But even mad dogs had their uses.

Hercules did not know how much he owed the men standing before him, but it was a debt. And Shanghai had been his, once.

“I am not running from this city,” he tried to insist.

“If you cannot find Fan Jin, you have nothing to offer,” Wen replied.

“I know this city better than anyone, my mother - !” Hercules started, but Wen cut him off:

“Your mother was one of us, she brought us together and helped us up from the gutters. But we have outgrown her lessons, and her memory. We have grown greater than she wanted us to be. You are an artifact of an abandoned age.”

“This is how you all feel?” Hercules asked. There were grim nods all around. “My mother bought your father a house, Wen.”

“The Japanese found my name in her ledgers after they shot her. They burned that house down with my father and wife inside. I owe your mother many things, but loyalty after her death is not one of them.”

Wen and his men were holding their guns close. Hercules didn't know whether they were going to attack him or leave him. His mother had been many things, and had molded them into those things as well. He was surrounded by killers who resented that fate.

A salvo of Japanese fire interrupted whatever the Eleven Bullets men were thinking. Wen barked sharp orders and the assembled rebels scattered, advancing in practiced fire teams to flank the attacking Imperial soldiers.

“This is not your city anymore, Chen,” Wen told him. “You may have been born here, but what made it yours is gone. Go with it.”

Wen hefted his Garand rifle and followed his men. Hercules watched their backs. The yajirushi and their lackeys were closing in. Grenades burst, close, sending shockwaves rippling through the warehouse's corrugated skin.

Hercules watched the Bullets men run south, toward the Japanese, then looked north. It was straight shot through the warehouse district to the hidden boat launch the Eleven Bullets had smuggled him in with. Jolly Green and Blue were waiting across the Yangtze, the plane fueled and ready to fly. They were hidden in a fake house made of paper and bamboo, and there were men prepared to shut down a bridge to use as a makeshift runway.

Fan Jin was gone, and Hercules wasn't going to find him by arguing with the men searching for him. He wasn't going to find anything by staying.

His fight had changed as much as Shanghai had. He was not the prince he had been born as, or a rebel. The Five Knives, the men he had idolized in his youth, had never existed, he realized. The faces he remembered were masks worn by opium peddlers and killers trying to entertain their feared leader's child. They held neither fond memories nor respect for him.

The place he’d made for himself was in the sky, in the open, with the allies he had earned. He had made his own fight, and it was not in Shanghai.

Hercules strapped his daggers into their sheathes and took off toward his hidden plane. The sound of rifle fire faded as ran toward his fight, ahead and above.

The Frozen Thief.

SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 29, 1943
NORTHBOUND TRANSIT ROUTE, ROTATION B
NORTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

//Translated from Russian.//

“Do not,” the vor hissed into Fazil Voronin's ear.

“Then soon,” Fazil grunted. He slid his knife back into the sheath he'd sewn inside his sleeve. The guard's back would be spared its kiss for the moment.

“Soon,” the vor agreed. The older man, known as Denis the Billhook in Arkhangelsk, huffed fog and trudged past Fazil, stomping through the knee-deep snow. Fazil watched as the vor struck up a conversation with the guard whose life he’d just extended.

The bulky woman listened for a moment then shoved the vor aside with her club. The pattern of round spikes on its iron head matched the throbbing dent in Fazil's scalp. She adjusted the thick furs surrounding her round face then stepped out of the way let the vor and Fazil lurch past.

The guard stared at him as he walked by, as if by glaring hard enough she could read his thoughts. Fazil steeled himself; he stared straight into the snow at his feet and tensed his aching muscles. He did not know what the vor had told her.

Despite the Billhook's crowning into the vory, he was still a collaborator. For all Fazil knew, the vor had told her about the knife. Fazil had never been crowned, he carried no ink stars or epaulets, but he knew that a vor would never help the authorities. It was a violation of their code punishable by a blade, or worse. Who knew what other oaths the Billhook might forget?

Since Fazil did not feel the back of his skull collapse under the guard's club, he assumed the Billhook had not mentioned the blade.

He trudged on through the endless white.

The landscape beyond his mask’s eye slits was he same had seen over the last few days: white snow, white wind, white sky. It was as if Fazil was walking in place. The clouds had not broken once since they had landed on the ice shelf. He could not tell where the horizon began and the heavens ended.

At night there was the suggestion of color behind the blackened clouds, but Fazil never saw it directly. Once, when the need to take a piss had woken him early, Fazil had seen an ethereal redness rising from the south, a hint of scarlet so faint it might be the remnants of a lingering dream. He had not seen it again on any morning since.

Forty other prisoners formed a winding train behind him, the closest over ten meters away. There were eleven more guards walking parallel with the roving vor to keep Fazil and the rest in line. The women kept their distance and let Denis the Billhook be their liaison. They arranged so that when throats started opening, the vor’s would be first.

The guard who watched was the same who had put the stitches in Fazil's skull, of that he was nearly certain. Each of the women looked identical, even to a man who had not seen a woman in six years. Their faces were worn and lumpy, never betraying a single emotion, their bodies fur-wrapped, large, and packed with Siberian muscle. Fazil recognized his guard by her jacket: he had nearly ripped the patch off of her sleeve as he struggled against her blows. In the field she only had red thread to sew it back on, marking a distinctive border around her Eagle, Eye, and Sickle emblem.

Fazil stretched his neck and pulled at his shoulder straps. The frost-coated canvas was digging through his jacket and rubbing against his collar bone. He had struggled under the weight of the pack padlocked to his back at the start of the trek, but over the days and nights the weight became a part of him. Sometimes, however, it had to remind him that he did not own it.

The minute adjustments he was able to make caused his cargo to shift, digging an unyielding corner into his kidney.

“Shit,” he muttered. He would have spit, but he could not risk removing his scarf. One or two breaths of the frigid air would be enough to burn his lungs and stagger him. Then he’d slow and the women would unlock him. They only needed a mule, not a man. Without his pack he would either die in the snow or die by their hand.

The cold was not the worst enemy Fazil and the others faced. Nor was it the Nazis. It was the women, their guards who treated them as less than animals.

Every man in the long train had their own plans for how they would die. Fazil knew his: he would pull his knife and slash the eyes out of the guard with the red thread. He’d let the guards do it. They wouldn’t hesitate: they would either beat him to death or shoot him. Then it would be over, at least.

He would not have to wander their white hell anymore. He would not have to keep waiting to be put down.

Fazil had been having such thoughts more often. It was the women who had brought him there, and they would die for it. But it was also the women who kept him alive. No one but they knew where they were going, or why it must be on foot. No man knew what their packs contained. Even if Fazil could escape, he would have no idea of which way to go, and no way to prepare supplies for the journey. He would wander the white until he became part of it.

But as oft-considered as Fazil’s plans to die were, his desire to feel warmth once more outweighed them all. So in that the vor was correct, the guard would have to wait for his knife. She would open the door to whatever sanctuary could be found within beyond the ice, then he would cut her open.

The streets of Sochi had been warm in a way Fazil could no longer remember. There was a sun there, and water that flowed over the skin without fear of taking a finger or toe with it when it left.

His parents had loved the sun, which was what brought them down from the Bolshoy Kavkaz mountains. They didn't even bother to learn Russian. They were happy with their little jobs and little lives under the Black Sea sun.

Fazil was not. He found the ends to live beyond his means. Even if those ends belonged to someone else.

When the NKVD arrested him, his parents did not understand. He imagined that was why they never wrote him.

His years in gulag were formative. He had gone in a child and a petty thief. It was where he became a man, an atheist, and a killer.

The changes Fazil had undergone were for survival. He had learned the politics of the vory and the unspoken codes. He had come to accept the horror of the gulag and he found a kind of peace. It was blood, desperation, and ice, and it was unchanging, reliable.

Then the women came to the prison. They offered labor, or the cold. Those that resisted, vors or guards, were killed on the spot. There could only be the conscripted and the dead. They’d left no one would tell where they went.

Fazil had rejoiced when the gulag burned.

The women chained the former guards to their former wards, and the bastards were dead within a week. Those that remained marched across Siberia for two months. By the time their ragged column reached the sea, only the most vicious, hardened men remained.

The ship that carried them north had no windows. More of them died in that hold. Their corpses were fed to the boiler. The women could not risk a bloated dead man washing ashore where the Motherland's enemies would find it.

Fazil trudged onward. His snowshoes helped spread his weight across the drifts, but they made every step an exertion. His scarf was soaked with his exhalations and would soon freeze over his nose and mouth.

A sharp whistle sounded from the back of the line and was quickly picked up by the attending women. Fazil froze in place. Not responding quickly enough was what had earned him the mace and the stitches in his scalp.

The whistles sounded three more times in quick succession. Fazil dropped to his knees, tucking low enough to hide in the snow while remaining ready to bolt at any moment.

“Enemies!” the guard with the red thread barked. She shoved her mace in a loop on her belt and pulled a a PPSh-41 sub machine-gun from beneath her fur-lined cloak. Denis the Billhook slithered up next to her. His hand was open, imploring her for something. She raked the side of his head with her hardwood buttstock instead. Denis fell, leaking crimson into white.

A distant gunshot snapped through the still air. Fazil whipped around to see a man falling. His striped jacket marked him a man of the gulag. He had made it nearly fifty meters before he'd been dropped. A kneeling guard racked the bolt on her smoking rifle and snarled promises and threats to her remaining wards.

The whistle sounded thrice more.

“There, there!” a man shouted. He was pointing upward, into the clouds. A low-pitched scream rose in the distance, quickly becoming so loud that its howling drone drowned out whatever else the man was yelling. Fazil followed his gaze.

He saw it then: a black shape, angular, draconic, and inevitable, emerged from between the clouds. It was horrible and majestic all at once. Lightning arced between its spines and the billowing thunderheads. The air around Fazil was shaking as the buzzing scream grew even louder.

The shape was enormous, dwarfing anything Fazil had ever seen.

Something in him broke. He was running before he knew what his body was doing. He made it ten paces before his shoulder jerked hard to the right with such force that the rest of his body followed it.

He flopped into the snow, boneless and confused, staring upward. The pain was slow to catch up, but his seeping blood was not. It steamed as it poured out of the bullet hole just below his right collar bone.

The ominous shape continued to grow, as did its scream. A dozen black dots danced in front of Fazil's eyes, growing until he could no longer see the immense thing in the clouds behind them.

Fazil groaned.

Tracer bullets zipped over him. The dots had become men, falling from the sky trailing great tongues of smoke and flame. They were dressed in black and blue uniforms, red around their arms, with oxygen masks and goggles covering their faces. Nazis. They each carried a chattering long-barreled machine-gun.

Fazil ignored his shoulder and battled against his heavy pack like an overturned turtle. He finally pushed himself up out of the snow and sat up.

The flying Nazis had landed in a circle around the supply train. They were slow on the ground, careful with the massive contraptions hooked to their backs. Fins on the smoking devices twisted and adjusted with each movement of the soldiers' wired helmets. They kept firing into Fazil's comrades, unconcerned whether they were shooting armed women or chained men. Denis the Billhook was nearly split in two, with pieces of him spread across ten square meters.

Within moments, they had wiped out anyone with the strength to resist them.

“Prisoner Voronin,” a voice wheezed. Fazil jumped as the guard with the red thread pushed herself up out of the snow meters to his right. The woman was bleeding from a wound in her chest. Her red face was pale and twisted with pain. Tracers whipped past. Other men screamed. She hauled herself toward Fazil, gasping: “Help me.”

Fazil slipped the knife from his sleeve. It was aluminum, a scrap of a sign that he had snapped out the gulag's fence as they left then polished and sharpened every time there were no eyes upon him. Her eyes went wide.

He pulled his scarf to the side, then peeled back the bound layers that kept his head covered. He wanted her to see the scar she had given him, to know why he was about to carve on her. She had put him in a daze for weeks, never mind the pain of having an open wound in the Siberian wilderness. The other prisoners had stolen from him while he was weak, had hurt him, had forced him to carry their weight.

When the wound had finally healed it was ugly, a puckered mess of ruined flesh that extended from behind his right ear to the corner of his right eye. His parents wouldn't recognize him if he ever got to see them again.

The guard was faster than Fazil. She knew how to deal with his ilk. Despite her wound, she unhooked the mace from her belt and brought it around in one practiced motion. Its pig-iron head dug into Fazil's skull with a wet smack and a jarring crack. The new tear in his scalp gushed, mirroring the twisted scar. He dropped, limp, the knife tumbling out of his numb fingers.

“Xуй,” she swore at him, loud enough that he heard it over the Nazis’ rattling gunfire. She spit red onto his face and used her mace to shove herself to her feet. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and down her chins. She raised the club above her head. Bits of Fazil's skin and hair were stuck to its knobby spikes. He closed his eyes and waited.

After a minute he opened them again. The guard was gone. He gently sat up. He brushed the left side of his head with his fingers.

“Shit!” he said. His fingers had come away from his head red. The wound was pulpy and sensitive. The arctic wind cut into it like a serrated knife.

A crackle drew his attention. The guard was laid out a meter away on her side. Smoke was coming out of a half-dozen new wounds. The bullets were burning inside her. Her fluids sputtered as they boiled out.

“Was ist das?” an echoing voice asked. Fazil craned his neck to find a pair of Nazis standing over him. Their faces were wholly concealed by breath masks, with tinted glass, tubes, and armored plating inset into their leather hoods. Thick fur collars protected their necks from the wind and cold. The swastikas on their armbands twisted in his vision like they had too many arms.

“Das ist ein Verbrecher,” the Nazi on the right said. He poked at the prison stripes on Fazil's sleeve.

The pair spoke back and forth for a moment. They never let their guns leave Fazil. While they debated, their comrades were walking up the line, nudging the fallen guards and prisoners with their boots. When someone was too alive for their liking, they loosed a salvo of bullets into his body.

“Hello, Ivan, hello,” the man on the left said, getting Fazil's attention. The Nazi's Russian was awful.

“Hello,” Fazil managed to groan.

“Why are you... trapped?” the Nazi asked, unsure of his wording.

“What?”

“Why are you...” the Nazi tried again. He fumbled for the words, but then gave up and waved Fazil off dismissively.

The Nazis debated again, then drew their combat knives. Fazil did not have the strength to prevent them from sawing the straps of his pack. They sliced open the heavy canvas and withdrew a trio of metal canisters.

“Oberst!” they shouted. A third Nazi came over and examined the strange prize. This one had silver laurels stenciled on his helmet, an officer. He tucked the canisters under his arms, suddenly jealous.

“Das ist es,” he said. He clapped the two men on the back and strutted away, carrying his new trophies.

The pack on his back was enormous, a thick cylinder covering in stubby wings and flaps. It was gray and blue at the top but scorched black around the wide mouth at its base. Long flame-scored shields were lashed to back of the officer's legs, and a hydraulic system helped the Nazi carry its weight.

“Soldaten! Schnelle Auszahlung!” the officer shouted. With that he pressed a button in his wrist and braced himself. A furious jet of greasy flame burst from the base of his pack, melting snow around him in an instant. The Nazi officer shot off the ground like he'd been launched from a bow. In a few seconds he had shrunk into a dot in the sky, flying upward toward the looming shape.

The other Nazis were taking off as well. Enormous heat and concussive forces washed over Fail. One-by-one, the attackers launched themselves back skyward.

“You see this, Ivan?” the Nazi with the terrible Russian pronunciation asked. He was pointing at the majestic thing cutting its way between the clouds. “This is Hōfuku-Sora, do you know how to say?”

Fazil shook his head. He felt fluid sloshing inside his skull as he did so.

“Japanisch name. It means 'death.'”

Fazil could see it. The great shape in the sky was a ship, with a pointed bow and wicked ramming spar. It had to be over two hundred meters long, a killing machine birthed among the clouds. Fazil's mouth fell open.

“Goodbye, Ivan,” the Nazi said. He turned around so that all Fazil could see was the dark opening at the base of his pack. A low orange light glowed between the pipes and the soot.

Heat radiated across Fazil's face, a warmth he had not known since he had lived in his father's house on the shores of the Black Sea. He basked. Then the warmth became greater and the little orange light became brighter.

Fazil would have screamed, but he was dead before he understood what was happening. The super-heated rocket exhaust scoured his body from the ice sheet as the Nazi went airborne.

As Norbert Fromm rose into the frigid sky he couldn't help but chuckle at the idea of killing a man with his rocket pack. Rainer had said he wouldn't do it, and now owed him a lager. He was still laughing when he pierced the veil of clouds.

The rest of the armored flying ships came into view. The fleet, save its smallest member, the nimble scout that had launched the racketenritters, was loitering above the white, manned by skeleton crews. Sunlight glinted off their cannons and bomb bays. Rows and rows of Ba 240 Orkan rocket fighters, Me 262 jets, and Haunebu heavy saucers waited on dozens of flight decks, ready to be helmed by Japanese pilots.

Norbert could see the Oberst's exhaust trail before him. The old man would take credit for his capture of the Russian assets, he was sure of that. He was not sure what the vials in the canisters had contained, but they were valuable enough to divert the entire mission. If the Oberst was more honorable than Norbert suspected he was, some reward would be coming his way.

He touched down on the deck of the ascending scout ship and was set upon by technicians who began the lengthy process of extricating him from the rocket rig. Their scout ship was the only fully-manned vessel in the air and was intended to train the Black Dragon crews that would come north to take possession of the fleet.

Closer to the bow, a crowd had gathered around the Oberst to peer at his prize, clap his shoulders, and shake his hand. Norbert sighed; it seemed his only reward would be the lager Rainer owed him.

It took ten minutes to remove the last of Norbert’s rocket pack and machine-gun rig. He felt the deck shifting as he walked to the command tower. They were turning back north, toward the rendezvous point. The Sparteführer was waiting there, along with the Ax Hand, two of the deadliest pilots in the war.

Norbert ducked into a hatch at the base of the command tower. It was warmer there, though only enough to notice if one were coming in from sub-zero temperatures. He shivered, but steeled himself: he would not have to endure the cold too much longer.

Within two months, the Oberst had promised, the Japanese would be flying the Hōfuku-Sora fleet. They would have the most advanced weapons ever crafted, battleships that ignored mountain and sea and ran on lightning.

In three months they would be flying over the west coast of the United States of America, raining bombs and fire unlike anything the Allies ever imagined.

The Yankees would crumble quickly, and then the war would be over and Norbert could go home.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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