Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 4 of 17

The Ax Hand is one of the Black Dragon Society’s most ruthless, effective warriors. His search for the force that destroyed an entire Japanese fleet takes him north, on a collision course with the Zero Hunter.

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

Content warnings: violence, death, animal violence, mild swearing, creeps.

The Last Warrior.

FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1943
ABOARD ZEKKYŌRYŪ 1
ABOVE THE BERING SEA

//Translated from Japanese.//

The Ax Hand whipped through the air meters above the cold water. He always led his formation, the point of the spear, the first into battle. The rest of his squadron struggled to match his blistering airspeed and reckless altitude.

The five B90 Zekkyōryū pulse-jet fighters roared louder than a tornado. The jets had been named ‘screaming dragons’ for a reason: the thunder of their top-mounted jet engines would be heard for miles. The Ax Hand himself had blown out windows on carrier bridges and control towers by accelerating too hard off the runway.

He twisted in his seat to examine his squadron through the bubble canopy. They had assumed a perfect formation. Zuboshi was crammed into the cockpit of the fighter flying to his right, while Majo flew on his left, and Gaikotsu and Akainu drew up close behind.

He grinned and pushed his accelerator.

The engine's howl reached a fever pitch, like a chorus of men being branded. It pushed the Ax Hand deep into his padded seat as he shot out ahead of his squadron. They struggled to navigate his supersonic turbulence and keep pace.

Zuboshi sighed and flicked his radio to the squadron's secondary radio channel. Takamoto rarely spoke with his subordinates while in the air, and he never used their back-up frequency. Instead, he expected them to react without needing his orders. If they could not do so, he did not mind if they died as a lesson for their replacements.

“Majo,” Zuboshi called, “You and Akainu spread out to the left, we will cover Ono-te's right.”

“Affirmative,” the old woman grunted. Her B90 peeled away from Zuboshi's to cover Takamoto's left.

Tachibana Chiyo hated her call sign, but it, like many things, was something she chose to take in stride. There was no disputing Takamoto, or any of the men she had had to prove herself to in the last ten years. Majo, they called her. ‘Witch.’

At fifty years old, she was not only the oldest combat pilot flying for the Society, she was one of few women. If not for her skills in the air and her family's history with the Tetsujin, she would have been left at home with the mothers and children, slaving in factories and huddled around a radio. It had taken years of abuse, blackmail, favoritism, and determination to get her into the air, but it was worth it.

She gunned her engine, jolting ahead to catch up to the Ax Hand.

“Majo, pull back,” Akainu warned over the radio. Majo sighed: the boy was right. To catch up with the Ax Hand would be considered a slight, to overtake him, a challenge to his leadership.

While Majo may have been grateful that the Ax Hand was confident enough in her abilities that he allowed her to fly with him, she held no illusions about the man: he was a megalomaniac and a killer who took joy in his work.

“Slowing airspeed,” she sighed, then eased back on the throttle. The Ax Hand was another kilometer ahead, less than four-point-five seconds away at current airspeed. She was close enough to respond if anything happened.

Akainu closed with Majo on her left and matched her vector.

She thought him a foolish boy but she knew he was a prodigy of an aviator at only twenty years old. He thought her an old woman and second-angriest person he’d ever known, after the Ax Hand himself. She reminded him of the neighbor he’d called ‘grandmother:’ gray, plump, and unafraid to slap him down if he let his mouth work faster than his brain.

Akainu's parents had died young, and his grandparents would not have him. He had lived off the streets of Tokyo, picking pockets and robbing shops. While Majo might have hated her call sign, Akainu could not have loved his more: aka-inu. Where he was from, ‘red dog' was slang for arson.

His favorite trick had been to set a small fire behind a shop and make away with whatever he wanted while the keepers fought the blaze. He had given up the name Minami Makoto as soon as he had the chance.

‘Grandmother’ had let him sleep in her attic whenever he gave her first choice of his thievings. She almost treated him like a human, and when she was drunk enough she let him to call her ‘grandmother’ aloud. She was also quick to turn him over to the Army when they came conscripting. His inhuman reaction speed caught the attention of his superiors, and within six months he had been taken away by the Society.

He was a full-fledged jitte of the Black Dragons, their second rank, by the time he was nineteen.

In person he was soft and small, with a baby face and unruly hair and the body of a man who had gone hungry as a child, but that did not matter in the air. Akainu had a sixth-sense for flight, able to judge airspeed and trajectories instinctively. He could slice through clouds of flak and escort fighters like a minnow through a salmon net. Halfway through his second combat mission he became an ace.

Much of the credit for Akainu's success went to Sato Ryu, who flew to Zuboshi's right. Until a year prior, the spindly Sato had been a clan leader in the Kuragarigirudo, the Emperor's Shadow Guild. It was he who developed the rice-paper gliders their assassins used to swoop down onto their targets. He never spoke of why he had left the Girudo, but his call sign, Gaikotsu, marked him a dead man. He was not known as 'skeleton' simply for his thin frame and sallow, sunken face.

When Akainu had joined Takamoto's squadron, it was Gaikotsu who had taken on the responsibly to train the green pickpocket to fly. Akainu had arrived with great potential and raw ability, but it was Gaikotsu who had shown him the mechanics and intricacies of combat in the sky. The older man hunted enemy aircraft like an imperial eagle, and he had taught Akainu his ways.

“We are nearing the island, Ono-te,” Zuboshi reported. Gaikotsu smirked. The giant flying to his left was large enough to crush the Ax Hand's head with one hand, yet he submitted to the man like a beaten puppy. Gaikotsu was sure that even Takamoto's signature Ax Hand punch would do little to slow his lumbering wing man.

Still, perhaps Zuboshi had the right idea. Ono-te was connected: he knew many of the high-ranking Society members, as well as Tetsujin himself. Thus, he was the only reason Gaikotsu had been exiled to Kokuryūyari instead of having been cut down by his former subordinates in the Girudo.

Takamoto slowed as Nizki Island came into view on the horizon. It was typical of the tail-end islands of the Aleutian archipelago: small, rocky, and uninhabited. It jutted through the smooth blue skin of the Bering like a broken bone. Takamoto pulled back on the yoke, rising a hundred meters in a second, then banked to his right, following Nizki's western coastline.

He did not have to look back to know that the rest of his squadron had followed his lead.

From that altitude he could see the island clearly. Its rocky shores were littered with the debris of eighteen thousand deaths. Blankets, clothes, canned food, arms, and legs. As he circled the island, the wreckage grew thicker. Whole bodies were thrown ashore, next to entire bulkheads, somehow broken away from their ships. A shape loomed in the shallows. Takamoto ascended to get a better view.

It was an escort ship, beached in the surf. Its three turrets were missing, leaving jagged holes where their mounts should have been. Takamoto would have assumed that their magazines had caught fire and thrown the cannons free, but there were no scorch marks, just torn steel. He dropped a little lower and noted the lack of blast points and shell holes anywhere on the ship's port side.

He was truly intrigued.

He zoomed low over the bridge then performed a tight turn to study the starboard side of the broken ship. The setting sun illuminated a long puncture running down its hull. The ship looked as if it had been sliced open by a giant knife. The gash was straight and deep, running through entire sections of the ship from bow to stern.

“What?” Zuboshi whispered over the radio. The Ax Hand's squadron had seen the same thing he had: a heavily armed and armored ship of the Imperial Navy, cast aside like a gutted fish.

“Was it rammed?” Akainu asked. None of the other pilots dared answer their juvenile wing man's question.

“No,” Takamoto eventually said.

“How do you know?” Akainu started, but Majo hissed into her mic to silence him. The Ax Hand smirked. The old crone knew how he liked to fly: silent, with nothing but the wind under his wings and an enemy in his sights.

“Spread out,” Takamoto ordered.

His planes split off into different directions to scan the tiny island and its surrounding waters. Everywhere he looked, there was the carnage of a massacre. Shredded corpses and twisted wreckage was strewn like a typhoon had raged through, but he found nothing so intriguing as the escort ship.

What could leave so clean and deliberate a cut in reinforced steel?

“Toroka,” he whispered. The last word the fleet had transmitted.

It was something new, something more powerful than he had ever known. This could not be Americans. They would not know what to do with a weapon powerful enough to wipe out a fleet in an instant. They did not have the will.

“Ono-te,” Gaikotsu interrupted. The Ax Hand almost did not recognize the skeletal ninja's voice. The man rarely made his thoughts known.

“Speak,” he ordered.

“Survivors spotted, eastern shore,” the man croaked. “Five men.”

Survivors, those who had seen the power of Toroka and lived.

“Zuboshi, send a plane to retrieve these men,” the Ax Hand said. “I wish to speak with them.”

The radio clicked as Zuboshi switched to Kokuryūyari's frequency. There would be a seaplane in the air in minutes.

The Ax Hand circled the small island, surveying Toroka's work.

It was breath-taking.

The scores of bodies slowly sinking into the sand were testament to a new spectrum of war. Whatever else Toroka was, it was the end of the Ax Hand's supremacy. Not even the greatest warrior in the world could hope to overcome such a force. An unwelcome feeling bloomed in his chest, a feeling like his innards were sinking and cooling.

The Ax Hand had never felt so small.

A bright light winked to his from the western horizon, followed by a dozen more. The Ax Hand's soul swelled to fill his body. He had recognized sunlight flashing off a score of bubble canopies instantly.

“Are there friendly forces in the area?” he asked.

“Tetsujin only dispatched the Kokuryūyari to this place,” Zuboshi replied.

Takamoto smiled. It was an enemy, any enemy.

“Form up on me,” he hissed into his radio. “We fight.”

His squadron snapped into formation and followed him into a steep ascent. He rolled his Zekkyōryū and studied his incoming targets. There was at least a dozen planes, stubby fighters, propeller-driven and charging ahead with the obliviousness of Americans. They flew in a too-tight cluster, a series of three or four spearheads that had muddled together in their grueling flight from the mainland. The pilots were tired, and the long-distance fuel tanks bolted to their wings were dragging on them like anchors.

The Chinese fighters had not reacted to Takamoto's change in position: he would have surprise on his side. The Ax Hand leveled off three thousand meters above the enemy. They had no idea what would rain down on them.

“Now,” he growled into his microphone.

Five pulse-jets roared and the Japanese aces pushed forward, roaring into a skin-shearing dive toward the heart of the enemy formation. The Ax Hand was close enough to identify his targets now. Fourteen P-40 Warhawks filled his sights: American-made fighters emblazoned with the blue Kuomintang sun. Chinese Nationalists using borrowed toys.

He grinned, then punched the pair of red buttons on his console.

Two M20 tactical anti-fighter rockets screeched and lanced from beneath his forward-swept wings. The red blurs sliced into the middle of the Chinese formation.

Americans called the deadly rockets 'firecrackers.' The Ax Hand watched in glee as the rockets burst. Each warhead carried a cylinder of six dozen honeycombed 120-millimeter shells, and when it burst, each shell fired off simultaneously, releasing a wave of death in every direction. Roaring metal shredded through the Chinese fighters, throwing the entire formation into disarray.

Broken planes fell into the sea.

The Chinamen panicked, only to fly into high-velocity clouds of chains and blades that sheared through their wings and tore off their propellers. Majo, Zuboshi, Gaikotsu, and Akainu had launched their kusarigama, and the chain-shot weapons had performed perfectly. Another two fighters were shredded into parts.

“Take them,” the Ax Hand ordered.

His squadron peeled away in pursuit of their own scrambling targets. He lined his Zekkyōryū up on the lead fighter. The point man was brash: his Warhawk was painted in a dazzle pattern of waves and lightning bolts. The Ax Hand led the Chinaman generously, then pulled his triggers. The Warhawk flew straight into the path of the 20-millimeter shells as if they were magnetic. A bursting round pierced his target's cockpit and exploded out of the Warhawk's belly, trailing scrapped metal, burning fuel, and pulped pilot with it.

For a moment, the Ax Hand forgot how small he was. In that blast of shrapnel, instruments, and pulverized human flesh, Toroka was absent from his existence. He opened up on another Warhawk, igniting its fuel tanks with his twin machine guns.

There was nothing but the battle.

The five Zekkyōryū fighters cut in and out of the Chinese formation over and over, taking out Warhawks with every pass. It was over in minutes. None of his enemies were able to resist him; all fell before his guns. Chinese corpses joined the noble dead on the shores of Nizki Island.

The Ax Hand eyed his fuel gauge and turned back south. The survivors of Toroka would be retrieved soon, and once they were aboard Kokuryūyari, he would know the truth.

The Zero Hunter.

FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1943
ABOARD PUSHY PENGUIN
ABOVE THE BERING SEA

Hercules slumped in his seat behind the controls of Pushy Penguin. The biplane flying boat chugged along through the air like an overfed pigeon. He glared out of the corner of his eye at the Specialist, the woman who had forced him to fly the damn seaplane and leave Jolly Green in her hangar.

“Keep your eyes ahead, official,” she mumbled over whatever she was scribbling in her tiny notebook. Hercules huffed indignantly. She put the book down and glared at him. “This island was the last place General Ma's reconnaissance flight transmitted their location.”

“I got my eyes on, ma'am,” Blue said. He was handling the dual aft Vickers, scanning the sky for any threats that might swoop in on the lumbering biplane. Hercules grumbled something in Mandarin under his breath.

Official First Class Eun Hye sighed. Pilots were exhausting when someone invaded their territory. She had bounced between three Forward Attack Squadrons in the last month, and they were all the same. Every pilot was fiercely independent and fought hard when they thought anyone was intruding on that independence. Being a Japanese-Korean woman, twenty-one years old, and just over one-and-five-tenths meters tall did not help her assert her authority over the gangs of rebellious air jockeys.

“Hold onto your seat, miss,” Hercules grunted. He pushed the Penguin into a deep nosedive. The single prop engine rumbled over his head. Hye went pale, eliciting a smirk from Hercules.

A little airsickness might encourage her to ease up.

The Specialist had been spouting orders since she had stepped out of her DIVERT capsule. She had made Hercules, Plumber, and Blue carry and stow her hundreds of pounds of gear, everything from sonar equipment to centrifuges and seismographs. That was not the right foot start off on.

Hye's stomach lurched, but she was used to the feeling. She made DIVERT drops every other week, and besides, every flyboy who took umbrage at receiving orders tried the same trick on her. She held onto the seat and rode the dive out. Hercules pulled up at the last second and evened out to skip across the surface of the Bering. The water dragged the flying boat to a halt just outside of the breakers off Nizki Island.

“Taxiing to shore, Oxford,” Hercules reported over the radio.

“Acknowledged, Boxer,” Oxford replied. Hercules leaned forward to look up through the windscreen. Lily Liver was circling above, covering them while they surveyed the island.

Blue appeared at Hercules' shoulder.

“What in the blazes happened here?”

Hercules and his gunner stared ahead. The shoreline of the tiny island was littered with debris. Sections of ships were beached, torn away from the rest of their structures in their entirety. Something thumped against Pushy Penguin's hull, making Blue jump.

“What was that?” he asked. Two more thumps sounded through the cabin.

“Corpses,” Hye answered. She stood from her seat and moved aft, opening one of her many crates. She extracted what looked like a microphone on a long cable. “Official Pabst, open the hatch.”

“Please,” Blue muttered, then undogged the port hatch and shoved it open. The air stank of rot. Uncountable dozens of bodies bobbed in the water all around them. Screaming sea birds were perched on each floating corpse, nipping away bits of salt-softened flesh. Blue grabbed the Lewis gun that Saltchuck had mounted above the door and fired a burst into the air. The nearest birds squawked in terror and took flight, but the rest simply gave him an annoyed look and continued their meals.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Get off of them!”

“Official Pabst!” Hye roared. Blue and Hercules were both shocked silent by her ability to project such volume from her diminutive frame. “That is enough!”

“Stop that!” Pabst yelled at the remaining birds, but the ones he'd startled had already landed again. He raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed at the closest corpse.

“Move aside,” Hye ordered, then shoved Blue's machine gun out of the way and dropped her mic into the water. She pressed a red button on her hay-bale-sized sonar device and two magnetic reels began turning. Hye clamped a set of headphones over her ears and squatted next to her device, adjusting levels. Blue resigned himself to allow the birds to feast, and slumped against the door to cover Hye with the Lewis gun.

Hercules maneuvered the flying boat between Japanese wrecks, ignoring the brow-furrowing that Hye was doing over whatever sea noises she was recording. He flicked the controls and cut the engine, sending the flying boat into a slow spin that would beach it facing away from the island.

“Brace up, we are hitting the beach,” Hercules warned them. Blue propped himself against the door frame, but Hye did not have time before Penguin's keel ground onto Nizki's southern shore. She tumbled backward as the plane ground against the sand. Hercules had to suppress a snort.

Hye stood and brushed her uniform off like she had no idea Hercules had done that on purpose. She reeled in her microphone without saying a word and boxed the sonar machine back up. She stepped back and pointed at a pair of smaller packages.

“Officials,” she said calmly, “Pick one and follow me.”

She pulled an M1 jungle carbine out of her pack, racked back the bolt, and gestured toward the open door with her barrel.

“Less than an hour ago, we lost contact with our recon flight. I do not intend on lingering here.” She glared at both men, then snapped: “Move it!”

Hye jumped into the waist-deep surf and trudged her way to shore, giving wide berths to the corpses in the water. When she reached dry land, she turned and waited expectantly for Hercules and Blue, one hand on her carbine, the other on her hip.

Hercules finally got a good look at the Specialist. The sea breeze had caught her bobbed black hair. The uniform she wore did nothing to show off her physique, but Hercules could tell she had been trained in martial arts: her movements were calculated and balanced. He did not recognize the style, but he guessed that she practiced one of the outlawed Korean fighting systems. There was more to the woman than she wished to show.

Hye watched impatiently from the shore. She had, of course, heard of the Zero Hunter: the half-Chinese, half-English orphan who had risen from the slums of Shanghai to be one of the Office's most proficient pilots. It was said that he etched Shaolin tattoos into his chest for every enemy plane he'd downed. If one went by such stories, Hercules Chen should have been indigo from head to toe.

Instead, a young, indignant yet inconspicuous man stood before her. Hercules looked like one of millions of young Chinese men who had risen up against Japanese oppression. He stood a few centimeters taller than her, and his thick black hair fell around his face, tousled by the wind.

It was his eyes that interested her the most. His eyes were piercing yet reserved; they took in everything around him in an instant but did not offer anything in return. He worked hard to keep himself to himself.

Hercules hefted a leather camera bag onto one shoulder, a field radio over the other, and splashed down into chilly water that rose almost to his belt. He struggled against the waves, before relenting and allowing them the control to push him ashore.

Hye's background in taekkyeon martial arts allowed her to see beyond the facade Hercules presented. She knew he had analyzed her the instant they had met, and she wanted to test her own ability to identify markers of another warrior.

She watched Hercules work his way between the insistent waves, studying his stance, balance, and speed. He was graceful by his training yet raw through his experience. She could see the flow of Master Wong's teachings informing his every movement, and how they struggled to hold him together. Shaolin wushu was an art of patience and consideration, qualities that ignited a war within Hercules. Every inch of him that could carry a blade was strapped down with one. He was always ready to fight.

She smiled politely when he came ashore, eliciting a scowl from the burdened man.

“Cat's eyes, that is cold!” Pabst yelped as he splashed waist-deep into the surf. Hye's polite smile became infinitely more genuine.

Hercules' Australian gunner was far easier to analyze. Paul Pabst presented himself as he was, from his calloused hands and his wide grin to the blazing copper hair that stuck up in every direction. There was no hidden pain in Pabst, nor dark capabilities. The man simply wanted to defend his country and return to his family. Whereas Hercules' strength and dedication were rooted in loss, Pabst's were the result of love and joy.

“So you never properly billed us about what we're doing here,” Blue observed when he had hauled himself ashore, his crate balanced on his shoulder.

“They do not usually send us on babysitting runs,” Hercules growled. He was clearly more at home skyborne. Hye rolled her eyes and started to walk east along the macabre surf's edge.

“There have been unusual occurrences in the Bering and northern Pacific recently,” Hye said. “It is our job to determine their nature; whether they pose a threat to the Allied war effort or not. ”

“It is war, strange things happen,” Hercules observed. Blue nodded enthusiastically.

“It would surprise you to learn that front-line combat troops, such as yourselves, make up less than fifteen percent of the Office's total manpower,” Hye said. “The majority of us are scientists, analysts, crewmen, quartermasters, technicians, radio operators, investigators, sailors, lobbyists, fund-raisers, trainers, cooks, tailors, armorers, cartographers, cryptographers...”

“We understand,” Hercules said.

“My point is that the Office is more than fighting and shooting,” Hye replied. “Today, you are going to help with the rest of it.”

“So what are we doing for our field trip?” Hercules asked.

“Collecting samples, taking photos. Cataloging is in our name, Official Chen.”

Blue smirked and poked Hercules with his elbow, then followed Hye.

“My box is empty.” he whispered, and winked at Hercules.

“Marching without a gun is hiking,” Hercules grumbled to himself. He adjusted the heavy bag on his shoulder and trudged along behind them for half an hour in silence. He still wasn't sure why General Ma would put his unit under the command of a clever girl paper pusher.

Hye marched up a small rise overlooking the corpse-littered shore. Hercules and Blue were in awe as soon as they crested the ridge. Whatever had happened on Nizki Island was something they had not encountered before.

The gutted remains of an Etorofu-class escort ship had been beached thirty yards offshore. Hundreds of human bodies floated around it, and tens of thousands of birds swarmed around them. Hye offered no explanation. Instead, she took a tripod out of the bag Hercules had carried and set up a movie camera. She began taking footage of the wreckage, committing all the shredded vessels and drowned bodies to film.

“Never in my life,” Blue was saying over and over.

“Me neither,” Hercules responded each time Blue muttered.

The two men stood behind Hye while she filmed and took notes. The wind whistled through the impossible reams in the ship's pitted steel. The seabirds were louder than ever, their flesh-fueled cacophony having reached a fever pitch. They cawed obliviously while Hye filmed the devastation from various angles.

Blue had taken Hye's carbine and lined up on the closest bird. He stared at it for a few seconds, then mocked firing.

“Pow,” he whispered.

“Boxer, come in Boxer,” the radio crackled. Oxford was on the line.

“Boxer here,” Hercules replied.

“One bogey taxi, screaming downhill from the east,” Oxford reported. “Japanese recon seaplane.”

“We got company!” Blue shouted to Hye, who immediately turned off her camera. Hercules spun and squinted at the southern horizon. A small seaplane was coming in low over the sea. The radio sounded again.

“Engaging,” Oxford announced simply.

Lily Liver screamed toward the oncoming seaplane, all six of her guns blazing. The small plane shuddered under the impact of bullets and shells. It folded over on itself and crashed into the water at full speed. Lily Liver pulled out of her dive, just missing the towering plume of seawater.

“Bogey eliminated, Boxer,” Oxford reported.

“He got off a call first,” Oakley cut in. Hercules and Blue burst in action.

“Time to go, Specialist,” Hercules shouted, but the young woman was already moving. She shoved her camera back into her bag and threw the tripod over her shoulder.

“I still need physical samples,” she said as she bounded back toward the plane.

“No time,” Hercules grunted.

“We have nothing without samples,” she argued.

“Boxer, come in,” Oxford called insistently.

“We are evacuating to the Penguin right now, Oxford,” Hercules snapped. The radio was silent for a second as Oxford considered Hercules' agitated tone.

“You have five tangos stalking you on the opposite side of the ridge,” Oxford finally said. Blue spun on his heel to cover the hilltop on his right and Hercules dragged Hye down to the ground. Lily Liver zoomed a dozen meters above Hercules' head. Oakley's face was squished against the glass.

“Japanese Navy uniforms, no weapons,” Oakley quickly reported.

“No physical samples, Specialist,” Hercules said. “But how about a half-dozen eye witnesses?”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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