Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 5 of 17

Gima Goro was transformed by his encounter with the devastating force known as ‘Toroka.’ Now, the Office has come to him for answers. But could they hope to do in the face of such indescribable power?

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

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

The Dead Man.

FRIDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1943
NIZKI ISLAND
THE BERING SEA

//Translated from Japanese.//

The purple-bellied fighter wheeled around to swoop back over Gima Goro and his pathetic comrades. Gima stood over his cowering herd. They had whimpered objections when he had begun to follow the three intruders, but they would never defy him. He had broken them like the animals they were.

The roaring Lightning overhead and the three people who had come ashore by seaplane were the only living humans Gima had seen since he'd found the island. His comrades, the whimpering deniers, were something else.

But these new humans, they were his chance.

He had to get off the rock. He had to find Toroka. He would take the plane from them.

He still had the knife. He kept its edge sharp with ocean-smoothed stones, It could effortlessly peel salt-marinated flesh from tendons. It would feel no resistance from the neck of an intruder. When he came for them, they could not stop him.

He had seen shells and bombs bounce off of Toroka's black and gold hide like they were rubber. When a grayed flake of its skin had floated to the island, Gima had claimed it as his own. He strapped it to his chest with shredded blankets and wore it like samurai's breast plate. Bullets would not hurt him.

A rock clattered down the low ridge to Gima's right.

“Stop there!” a young woman shouted from above them. A white man with ridiculous red hair stood to her left. His rifle was aimed at Gima's chest. Another man, a white half-breed by his look, held a large blade in either hand.

“Which of you saw what happened?” she asked, her pronunciations of Gima's noble language tainted by a mongrel's accent. “We are not here to hurt you, we just want to know what happened.”

Gima had no words because there were no words. He said nothing. But his creatures stood, suddenly having found their voices.

“I saw it!” they claimed. “I saw Toroka!”

Gima's stomach dropped. These animals, they did not know Toroka. They did not know, for they could not see. Why would they claim to?

“It was enormous!” one stammered.

“A monster!” shouted another.

The idiots began babbling as if they could comprehend Toroka. Gima laughed. It was like listening to a child explain the stars. At his laugh, all four of them fell silent.

The blade-wielding Chinaman growled something in English and glared at him. Gima took a step up the shallow slope.

“These know less than nothing,” Gima said. His four cowered in his shadow. They suddenly had nothing to say.

“Are you the leader here?” the woman asked. Gima laughed again.

“Leaders lead men,” Gima replied. The woman translated his words, eliciting objections from the half-breed and the white man in their barbaric language. Gima turned and walked into the midst of his followers.

“No one knows Toroka but me,” he growled. The knife appeared in his hand, and in four quick slashes, his creatures were dead. Hot blood stained his clothes, the insistent spray of a quartet of opened throats. As quick as he had produced the blade, he dropped it. Gima turned back toward the shouting intruders and puffed out his chest, presenting the scrap of Toroka's skin to his opponents. The woman's eyes went wide.

“I am the only one who knows Toroka,” he declared.

The woman snapped off an order, and the obedient half-breed charged and swung. The punch split Gima's eyebrow with the knuckle guard of his giant knife. The world went dark and Gima crumpled down onto the pile of his twitching, bleeding dead.

It was dark when Gima was finally awoken by a long and jagged rock tearing his calf open, and the sting of salt water in the fresh wound. His blood was thin, and warm, and the water was cold. He tried to grasp the injury, but his hands were restrained.

The white and the half-breed had him by the arms and were dragging him through the surf to their waiting seaplane. Sharp stones slashed and rasped against his bare legs. His knife was gone, his armor was gone.

They were yelling at the woman behind them. Gima wrestled against his captors, kicking and wrenching his arms away. The white man stumbled and let him go. Gima swung a weakened punch at the half-breed, who simply swatted it aside.

The radio on the Chinaman's back began grunting Caucasian gibberish, terse and rigid. It distracted the half-breed, who shoved the starved man aside. Gima could only understand a single word, the one they spoke in Nihongo: Girudo, 'the Guild.' Gima grinned. The Navy knew about him. They were coming to put these mongrels down and take him to Toroka.

High above, the circling Lightning opened up with its guns. Phosphorus burned in the darkness, tearing through whatever it was targeting. Gima and his captors watched the light show. Flames erupted whenever the burning bullets found their invisible targets.

An orange fireball bloomed from one of the Lightning's engines. A cry of joy escaped Gima's lips. The half-breed's radio began screaming again, this time with panic bleeding across the language barrier. The two men and the woman burst into action.

“Get on the plane!” the woman yelled at him. Gima lashed out at her, but she turned his attacks aside with serpent-like speed. In an instant she had twisted his emaciated arm behind his back and was shoving him toward the seaplane. As hard as he struggled, her grip was unbreakable.

“Release me, witch!” Gima hissed. She did not waver, instead torquing his arm even further. He fell to his knees. Rancid water splashed into his gaping mouth.

The half-breed shouted again. The woman froze in place. Waves splashed over Gima's head. The white man was firing into the air when Gima shook the water out of his eyes and ears.

A fluttering sound, like that of a hundred giant kites, filled the night air.

“Shadow Guild!” the white man shouted, and kept firing upward.

The muzzle flashes lit up the darkness. A dozen shapes careened above them, twisting and twirling around the white man's shots. They were like giant bats with white wings and black bodies. Gima was entranced.

The woman yelled at the white man, who cursed and tossed his emptied rifle into the seaplane's open door, then followed it in. He emerged a second later, hooting triumphantly. A drum-fed light machine gun in his hands roared, spitting burning tracer rounds into the flock of descending creatures. Every round that pierced a wing ignited the white membrane.

As one, the bodies shed their burning wings. The kites wheeled away, light enough to glide upon the ocean breeze. The bodies spun and flipped as they fell, sprouting arms and legs before they hit the ground. Each landed in a crouched position, arms and legs splayed like a hunting spider.

Gima could recognize a curse, even in the half-breed's savage tongue. The white man echoed the utterance, dropped his empty machine gun to the deck, then dashed into the seaplane's controls. The engine coughed to life, and the propeller above the cockpit began to turn.

Moonlight flashed off the razor edge of a drawn blade. The figures who had dropped from the sky on paper wings stood before them now. They were skeletal, covered head to toe in black cloth. Each held a blackened katana in one hand and a delicate imperial lotus in the other.

“Shinobi,” Gima whispered. The emperor's silent assassins. Not men, but the absolute will of an empire in human form.

The half-breed and his woman stood their ground, even outnumbered six to one. The Chinaman drew one of his large daggers and held a smaller, fine blade in his other hand. The woman was unarmed. Gima chuckled. If they dared to fight ninja, they would only die sweaty.

Gima stayed on his knees in the water. He craned his head back, exposing his sunburned throat to the assassins. He left it to them whether he lived or died.

A last, defiant challenge escaped the half-breed's lips. He braced himself for combat. Beside him, the unarmed woman assumed an unfamiliar fighting stance. Gima watched in silent glee, ignoring the scouring spray that the seaplane's engine kicked up as it revved up to speed.

The ninja attack came swiftly, like a shadow passing across the moon. Shuriken whipped through the cool air, spinning toward their targets with enough force to bury their poisoned points deep into flesh and bone.

The woman wove her body through the steel storm, dodging the metal stars as if she had practiced this deadly dance for weeks. The half-breed withstood the barrage, knocking aside every shuriken with his knives.

Less than a second after the shuriken arrived, so too did the ninjas. Black blades, with only their razor edges revealing raw, reflective steel, sliced through the air. The woman spun around every swing, administering bone-crunching knees and elbows to the offending shinobi. Gima heard ribs and joints shatter under the woman's strikes. A second assassin was upon her before the first had fallen, and she promptly collapsed his throat with his own forearm.

Dark blood arced across the rocky beach. The ninja who had reached the half-breed first was rewarded for his speed by a slash across the throat so deep that his head flopped over, only held on by the un-severed nape of his neck. The half-breed kicked the body away and greeted his next attacker with a wide dagger through the sternum.

The half-breed's face twisted into a wide grin. Battle was his home. He spun the impaled ninja around, blocking a dozen slashes from his screaming victim's comrades. The half-breed threw the body into the mass of his attackers, buying him the seconds he needed to stab another ninja in the neck six times with his slender knife. He left this blade buried in the dead man's jawbone and drew another from a sheath on his hip.

Despite their loses, the ninja were advancing. They had already pushed the dogs back to the waterline. Every kick brought up sand and water, each falling corpse went down in a briny cascade.

An uppercut from the woman pushed one ninja's jaw through his skull and brought about his end with a sickening gurgle. She ducked back behind her knife-wielding comrade, who had retrieved his slender blade from his victim's face. He held a diamond-shaped kunai, dripping with shinobi blood, and a needle-sharp ice pick that he'd just extracted from another ninja's kneecap.

The woman removed a checkered yellow canister grenade from her back pack and pulled the pin.

“Back!” Gima yelled in warning. He was so close to seeing Toroka again. The ninja recoiled as the woman loosed the bomb.

The grenade burst, not with a fireball and shrapnel, but with a sound so loud and so deep that the breath was pushed from Gima's lungs, and the wary ninjas were shoved back almost a meter by the air pressure alone. A blood vessel burst in Gima's eye and his eardrums popped. The blast pushed the surf away in a concentric circle before it came surging back forward and knocking Gima onto his belly in the water. A pair of forceful hands hooked under Gima's arms began dragging him toward the idling seaplane.

He wiped the salt water from eyes in time to see the woman standing in the open door above him, blazing away at dodging shinobi with the Caucasian's machine gun. The half-breed lifted Gima and threw him into the seaplane. The woman stomped down on his boney chest to pin him in place.

“No!” Gima shrieked, but he was too weak to fight back. The half-breed hopped in and began shouting profane orders to the Caucasian at the plane's control. He could feel the seaplane moving out in the open water.

A flurry of poisoned shuriken thudded into the fuselage of the plane, sending the woman stumbling backward. Her weight was off Gima's chest and he scrambled for the open door, dragging himself on his belly. The plane was picking up speed. Bodies banged against the hull, their soft flesh splitting open against the pontoons.

Gima grasped the door frame and pulled himself on his belly, toward his countrymen. He got one arm free of the plane, out in the open air.

He was almost back to Toroka! He had to stand in the presence of power once more.

The half-breed grabbed Gima by his skinny ankles and tried to haul him away from the door. Before he could pull him back in, pain screamed in Gima’s arm. He found a thin barbed chain tightening around his wrist, biting through the skin.

A shinobi on shore had snared him with a kusarigama chain whip. The assassin jerked back on the chain and its spikes ripped into Gima’s tendons. He screamed as his shoulder lurched out of socket.

The half-breed’s grip failed him.

In an instant, Gima was out of the seaplane, thrashing in the rotten sea. He clutched at the first thing his usable arm encountered, a water-logged corpse, and pulled himself to the surface.

The seaplane was rising out of the water, far away, but the half-breed was still hanging out the door, shouting muffled curses and ineffectually firing the machine gun.

Gima smiled, watching shots perforate the bloated bobbing bodies around him. He felt a tug through his crippled arm. The shinobi was reeling him back to shore by his ruined wrist.

He was going back to Toroka.

The Zero Hunter.

SATURDAY EVENING, JULY 10, 1943
SPETSIAL'NAYA TYUR'MA
VLADIVOSTOK, U.S.S.R.

“They have had us sitting in this hole for two damn days,” Hercules complained for what seemed like the fiftieth time. In fact, it had only been overnight and the better part of a day, but he was not one to abide confinement lightly. He threw his ice pick at the wall, thunking it deep into the fresh-cut wood.

The bustle of the Chinese district of the Russian city permeated the room. Hercules and his wing men could hear hundreds of refugees moving around just meters above their heads.

“'Specialist' my behind. A specialist would've been done by now and had us out of here,” Blue grumbled. He was laying flat on his back on the concrete floor, staring through the ceiling. None of them had seen Hye since they had arrived. She had taken the biological sample they had captured from that nutcase on Nizki and disappeared into a lab.

“Most of the Eastern European bureau's officials are prisoners, Boxer,” Oxford said. “I imagine that our current accommodations are significantly more comfortable than theirs.”

Oakley spit across the room, pinging her tobacco off the inside of their bucket toilet.

“Glad they pulled out all the stops,” she muttered.

“If I were you, missy, I'd be happy to be locked away from all those grubby convicts,” Blue said.

“Seems like the ladies here keep everything in order,” Oakley observed. Hercules could not help but agree.

While the rank and file of the Russian bureau were a mob of tattooed, frost-bitten criminals commandeered from Siberian gulags, their leaders were a different story. Every order-giver in this bunker walked its halls armed, armored, and female. He had seen the women beat their men senseless with wooden batons on three occasions since they’d arrived.

“Hear, hear,” Oxford said, sipping on a tin of warm water like it was a fine brandy.

“Yeah, why are there so many dames?” Blue asked from the floor. Hercules stalked across the room and pulled his ice pick out of the wall.

“They used up all their men in the regular army,” Hercules answered.

“Indeed,” Oxford said. “All Soviet males had been forced into the meat grinder of the so-called 'Eastern Front.' After Barbarossa, Churchill and Roosevelt informed Stalin about the Office. In order to form their bureau, the Russians turned to their remaining resources: their women and their worst criminals.”

“Should've turned to the ladies first for the whole damn war,” Oakley said. “I hear they run their bureau like clockwork.”

The single door to the small room creaked open, revealing an emaciated man with a scar-twisted grin and manacles on his ankles standing in the doorway. He was hunched over, with thin, patchy hair and a desolate look in his eyes.

“Come, come,” the new arrival said, then pointed at the open door. It had never been locked, but two enormous, ursine women with thick black braids and brutal truncheons had strongly encouraged them to rest instead of exploring the base.

“Where to?” Hercules asked, slipping his ice pick up his sleeve. The Russians had locked the rest of his blades in their armory as soon as they had landed, but he had managed to hold onto it. He wanted to be ready for anything, especially if there were more characters like that one wandering the halls.

“Come, come,” the man repeated, then turned and began clinking down the hall. Hercules looked at his wing men, shrugged, then followed the man out of the room. Oxford, Blue, and Oakley were close behind him. The two hulking guards brought up the rear, brandishing their clubs menacingly.

“Has Official Eun completed her analysis?” Oxford asked the thin man.

“Come, come,” he replied.

“They send us someone who don't speak a lick of English so we couldn't ask any questions?” Blue asked him.

The thin man smiled again. The poorly-healed slice from his chin to the half-ear it had left him caught the corner of his mouth like a fish hook, twisting his grin into something freakish.

“Come, come,” he said.

Hercules, Blue, Oakley, and Oxford followed in silence. The support beams through this area still smelled like sawdust. This facility had been built beneath the streets of Vladivostok in a hurry. Open conduits ran across the ceiling and walls. Sweating steam pipes hissed here and there. Half the lights flickered, and a few of the rest were out.

The thin man led them into a small room, though it was larger than the one they had been sequestered in. He presented the wall benches to them with a flourish from his inked, three-fingered hand, then left the room. The silent giants who had accompanied them slammed the door behind him. The four officials studied the featureless room for a moment, and fell onto the benches, resigned to wait a while longer.

“What are we doing here?” Hercules finally asked.

The door creaked open again, and Hye came in, pushing a brushed steel cart with a sheet over it. Hercules hopped to his feet. He had gained a new appreciation for the Specialist after seeing her pulp Japan's deadliest assassins with her bare hands.

Hye saw Hercules pop to his feet and did all she could to conceal a smile. She almost hid it, but Hercules caught the corner of her mouth twitching upward. Blue, Oxford, and Oakley also stood.

A squat man in a khaki National Revolutionary Army uniform followed Hye. He had modified his uniform with pieces of traditional banded armor that scraped together as he moved. Hercules noticed that his dadao broadsword had been confiscated by the Russians as well, and its scabbard hung empty. Not that he needed it: the man was wide and strong, with shoulders as broad as an ox.

General Ma Gang-hai's eyes were fierce and piercing, and he glared around the room from behind his overflowing black beard. His face had been weathered to the texture of an old boot by a lifetime on the plains of Qinghai. His hair had wound itself into long dreadlocks which he had bound with a crimson band.

“General,” Hercules said, snapping to attention. His wing men followed suit, salutes quick and sharp. Ma returned their salutes with a grunt.

“Officials,” he said.

“These are Officials First Class Dubashi, Lockwood, and Pabst, sir,” Hercules said, introducing his squadron. He’d met Ma at the Distant Bells Temple years before.

“Oxford, Oakley, and Blue,” Ma snorted. “I know everyone under my command, whether they know me or not. Baptist sends his regards.”

Ma studied each of the officials before him in turn.

“Am I to understand that you four and Official Eun survived an attack by the Kuragarigirduo?”

“Oxford and Oakley managed to down almost half of them before they could land, sir,” Blue said.

“With their numbers reduced, Official Chen and I were able to distract them long enough for Official Pabst to affect our escape,” Hye added.

“A Lewis gun and a drum grenade didn't hurt, either,” Blue said sheepishly. Ma raised a bushy eyebrow.

“You are aware that a single Girudo assassin killed an entire Kuomintang platoon in broad daylight with three throwing knives and a piece of bamboo,” he said. “It took eighty pounds of dynamite and an avalanche to finally force her retreat.”

“We are aware, sir,” Hye answered for them. They had all heard of Yūrei Mikiko.

“Less than a month ago, FAS Sugar was totally wiped out by another ninja clan,” Ma continued. “And my entire Warhawk recon mission went missing just hours before you reached Nizki Island. Seastorm barely managed to report an ambush by red pulse-jet fighters before we lost contact with his entire squadron.”

“Seastorm is dead?” Blue asked. He had helped train the brash Mandarin pilot. He slumped against the wall.

“Red fighters. The Ax Hand,” Oakley whispered. Only one man flew such a plane.

“Whatever they think we found on that island, it has to be important to the Black Dragons,” Hercules started, “That's the only reason they would send him.”

Ma waited in silence while the officials around him considered the information. The Ax Hand's involvement brought the mission to a new level. The pilots looked at one another. Each of them knew someone that the Ax Hand had killed. In fact, it was said that Takamoto had made it his personal mission to wipe out Office pilots. Ma cleared his throat, retrieving their attention.

“You allowed your eyewitness to be captured by the enemy and left evidence for them to recover,” Ma said with grave finality. He put up a hand, silencing Hercules' objections to this assessment. “However, I consider this a victory.”

Hye and Hercules looked at each other, but still said nothing. Ma continued:

“The Girudo has never felt true loss before. You have introduced them to doubt. That can be as powerful a weapon as any gun,” he said. “And the evidence Official Eun did collect was sufficient.”

“Evidence of what, sir?” Hercules asked cautiously.

“Official Eun's findings have been classified 'Most Secret,' Chen. They are of the highest priority, which is why you were ordered here. The Vladivostok base was the closest facility where we could secure this information,” Ma replied. A gravelly Russian voice interrupted Ma before he could say more:

“Thank after for hospitality, General.”

A huge woman stomped into the room, ducking low and twisting to fit her steel-encased frame through the door. Pistons hissed with her every lumbering movements.

Hercules recognized the woman: she was a darling of the Soviet propaganda machine. She had single-handedly captured a suit of panzerritter powered armor during the chaos in Stalingrad and turned it against the Nazis. It was said she never took it off. The politicians had seized upon her story and twisted it for their desperate masses.

She had been forged into a Hero of the State.

She was the Stahl Seržánt: Valeriya Vinogradova, Stalin's Steel Sergeant.

“Official Vinogradova is here to represent the Eastern European bureau,” Ma explained, not reacting to the woman's idling battle armor. “The incident in the Bering Sea is of world-wide significance.”

There were posters and banners and paintings of Vinogradova throughout the embattled Soviet Union and beyond. These depictions of her, with a sledgehammer in one hand and a machine gun in the other, iron boot on the neck of the German invader, were very flattering to her unique appearance. In person, the woman was hideous, a hardened creature with the best features of a hairless bear. Her prematurely gray hair was cut into an angular flat top, and her yellowed eyes were dull but vicious. Her head looked like an over-ripe gray peach sticking out of her scarred, battered armor.

“We like to cooperation with countries,” she said, stumbling over her English. For a second she looked bashful, embarrassed over her problems communicating. She looked over her shoulder, did not see anyone, and shouted:

“Dva-Ukha!”

Hercules started. The same man who had guided them through the base entered the room, but he had changed so completely that even with his lost fingers and scars he was almost unrecognizable. The man now stood tall, with excellent posture, and a bearing of intelligence and authority. His eyes were sharp and observant, and he moved with fluid surety, even chained. He clinked with every step; how he had returned to the room without anyone hearing was a mystery.

“Da, Seržánt?” he asked. Vinogradova glared down at the smaller man for a moment, then barked a set of orders in Russian. The thin man gave his twisted smile, then turned to the assembled officials.

“Sergeant Vinogradova is here in the spirit of inter-bureau cooperation and wishes to offer all the resources she has available to help contain the situation,” the man said in the King's perfect English.

“I knew he understood us,” Pabst muttered to no one in particular.

“I am Official Second Class Usatov, though I have been called Dva-Ukha for many years. In English, it means 'Two Ear,' you may call me that,” the prisoner said. He chuckled and showed off his mangled ear.

He flattened his wild brown hair to his scalp and looked back to the Sergeant, who was scowling. Two Ear clammed up automatically: his shoulders drooped, his gaze lowered, shadows gathered under his eyes and in the crevice left by his scar. He devolved into the wretch who had guided them from the first room before Hercules' eyes.

The Russian woman growled something, which Two Ear meekly translated.

“What have you determined from the Nizki expedition?” he asked for her. From Vinogradova's manner, Hercules also assumed that Two Ear cleaned up her question a bit.

“Official Eun, present your findings,” Ma ordered. Hye cleared her throat, then began:

“In the last two months, drastic changes have occurred in the marine ecosystem.”

Two Ear translated quickly and quietly for his glowering armored sergeant.

“Entire fisheries have been decimated, pods of whales have disappeared, and shark populations have been wholly displaced. When I submitted my findings to catalogers at the Library, I was immediately transferred to General Ma's command to investigate.”

“So you are just an analyst?” Hercules asked incredulously. He had never seen anyone fight like her before. Her Korean martial arts were explosive. The woman had faced the Girudo unarmed. He could not believe that Hye was anything less than the Office's most deadly spy.

“I am a specialist. A marine biologist,” Hye snarled. “And with the Germans' recent interest in cetaceans, my opinion is suddenly held in high esteem, pilot.”

“Shut up and listen, Boxer,” General Ma ordered. “Continue, Official Eun.”

Hye took a deep breath and glared at Hercules before resuming her briefing:

“During the same time period, I began to record anomalous sonar readings. Ultra-low frequency sounds emanating from deep in the ocean. They featured characteristics that left no doubt that their origins could be anything but biological, and nothing that had ever been recorded in nature before.”

She let that sink in for a minute and waited for Two Ear to catch up. Hye started up again as soon as she saw Hercules' mouth open to give his two cents.

“I have been tracking the development of artificial organisms since the beginning of the war. Most alternative science divisions have focused on the creation of tactical-level organisms. Everything created serves only front-line, local battle situations. The Germans have their trench sharks, mannesser hounds, aurochs, kobold, and more. They have captured live blue whales for unknown purposes. It does seem, however, that the death of Adrial Nordholm this May was a heavy blow to their arthropod projects.”

Hye's pause seemed almost like a moment of reverent silence for the Nazis' dead entomologist. She noticed her comrades stares and started back up.

“Allied developments have been relegated to limited programs after the failure of sciever project, We had focused on cultivating bacteria and fungi, as found in their Franklin torches and Osteo-Bond, or the wormline project. Their developments with vertebrates are limited to reviving the French aigles de guerre program. Our hosts, in the Soviet Union, have looked to the past, breeding ancient animals, such as the Iosef bear and the wooly mammoth.” At that, Vinogradova and Two Ear exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

“The Japanese have instead focused on mechanical developments, though outlier programs such as the training of tanuki or the Unit 731 plague labs certainly present significant dangers,” she continued. “You have all been briefed on these developments, but I reiterate them all so you understand the depth of knowledge that I draw from when I say that what we are facing is beyond the bounds of anything a rational scientist could hope to imagine.”

The assembled officials looked at each other without speaking, save for Two Ear who was translating grimly and deliberately. He did not want to get a single word wrong. He trailed off when he reached Hye's final claim, and Vinogradova's gnarled face set itself in granite defiance as she heard it. Her grating voice was the first to shatter the shocked silence.

“You have to back up such a claim,” Two Ear translated carefully. Vinogradova grunted her assent.

“The ultra-low sonar recordings I made first led me to believe I had detected a new cetacean species that had been displaced by combat,” Hye answered. “But the sounds were deeper and louder than any whale could ever create. The math did not work: the laryngeal sacs required to make such a sound would have to be larger than the average entire whale.”

She held up a series of papers, each covered in scrawled mathematical figures riddled with Korean, Japanese, and English characters. Everyone in the room nodded like they could make sense of her arithmetic.

“The sound was also too fluid to be from anything inanimate. I ruled out calving ice, storms, tectonic movement, and underwater volcanoes, rock slides, and earthquakes quite quickly.”

“My thoughts then turned to cephalopods. Giant remains have been discovered all over the world, and legends persist of immense octopi and squids. The kraken, Charybdis, Akkorokamui, Iki-Turso, every sea-faring culture has spoken of these creatures for generations. More modern writers continue to reference them: Wells, Verne, Melville, Lovecraft. But even these creatures of legend could not inflict the damage on a modern fleet that the Japanese Aleutian fleet suffered.”

Hercules snorted. Save Melville, the writers she mentioned were useless men whose minds were so immersed in their fantasies that they never could get a grasp on the real world. Hercules' father had insisted he read the drivel, but it had never stuck. Fictional tales seemed inane when confronted with the realities of Shanghai gang wars, imminent Japanese invasion, and Shaolin training that made up his everyday life.

“I had reached an impasse without new evidence. The depleted fisheries and displaced populations screamed massive change within the ecosystems, but I had no conclusive evidence. It wasn't until we retrieved the physical specimen from the Japanese survivors on Nizki Island that I was able to reach any solid conclusions,” Hye said. She pulled the sheet from the cart she had wheeled in, revealing the dried gray thing they had recovered from the murderous Japanese madman. “This is an osteoderm.”

“A what?” Oakley asked before everyone else got their chance.

“Bone skin,” Oxford whispered, showing off his knowledge of Greek.

“Generally, yes,” Hye said absent-absentmindedly. “Specifically, this is a flake of a single layer of a section of an osteoderm. They are segments of skin covered in thick ossifications that serve as a form of natural armor.”

The officials around her leaned in and studied the half-meter wide scale of dried skin and bone.

“I have never seen a specimen like this, so the closest comparison I can draw between this one and the anatomy of a living creature is to the back plate of a salt water crocodile. If we used the crocodile as our baseline, this creature's skin would be thick enough to deflect even the largest cannon shells. The creature could also be as much as two hundred meters in length.”

The room burst into chaos. Every official had their own concerns and disbelief to voice. Hercules reached out and rapped the dead scale with his knuckles. It was solid as a Sherman's side armor.

Hye cleared her throat and they calmed.

“From the limited amount of information we were able to get from the Japanese survivors before their deaths, I have determined five things,” Hye said in her normal tone. Her comrades went silent instantly. “The subject is an icthyovorous amphibian or reptile. It is black and gold in color. It can submerge for extended periods, though it might be able to survive out of water for just as long. It is not a Japanese or German creation; neither Department Three nor the Society have anything to do with this. And those who have survived it call it 'Toroka.'”

Hye's revelations were stunning. An unpredictable monster was stalking the waters north of Japan, powerful enough to destroy entire fleets and gorging itself on entire regions' worth of sea life.

Hercules was the first to say out loud what each official was thinking:

“So we let it wipe the Japs out, right?”

“It is a wild animal, it could go west as easily as it goes south,” Pabst said.

“Yes,” Ma said thoughtfully. He perked up to his full stocky height. “We cannot take the risk that this monster would come onto the mainland, or even to Japan. We do not allow this thing to happen to anyone. ”

Vinogradova grunted something to Two Ear.

“The Back Dragons would let us burn,” he translated.

“That is why they are they, and we are we,” Ma replied. “We have to find Toroka, and make sure it does not reach land.”

“So you want us to find it?” Hercules asked.

“This has become a hunt, no job for soldiers,” Ma said.

“Luckily, I'm a bit of a big gameswoman myself, general,” Oakley said, stretching nonchalantly.

“No, Toroka is not big game, it is the biggest game. To bring down the biggest game we must have the best hunter,” he concluded. He looked pointedly at Blue. “You know where he is, Pabst.”

The Australian gunner groaned loudly.

“No, not him,” Blue pleaded.

“You suggest we work with that drunkard?” Oxford demanded.

“He is the most renowned hunter and tracker in Asia. If anyone can find this beast, he can,” Ma resolved.

Blue's objections were ignored, for flashes of inspiration already gleamed in Ma's black eyes. The former warlord stroked his thick beard, already laying the foundations for a plan in his mind.

“Where is he, Pabst?” Ma asked. Blue sighed, looked around the room for support, did not find any, and resigned himself to his fate.

“Last I heard, the bastard was drinking himself into the pit in the middle of Macau.”

“That is ludicrous!” Oxford protested. “That cesspool is overrun with spies and killers! The Japanese have agents on every street corner. You cannot expect anyone to breach the deadliest city in southeast Asia for that degenerate, especially after he almost cost Official Ng his life!”

“I know what he did to Baptist, but he is who we need,” Ma said. He knew what he was asking of them. “This is not a request. It must be done.”

“It will not be easy,” Hercules said. “Every country has agents on every street corner there: we have as many contacts as the yajirushi and Abwehr do. Macau is a free port free-for-all.”

“The Eastern Bureau has deep connections among smugglers,” Ma stated. “Sergeant Vinogradova, can you get this team into Macau?”

Two Ear quickly translated.

“Da,” she said, then rumbled off a series of orders for Two Ear. The convict shuffled out of the room in a rush.

“Scum to find scum,” Blue grunted. “Perfect.”

General Ma ignored the diminutive Australian's rumblings. He already had a plan for them.

“Fast Freddie, you and Official Eun will need civilian clothes and all your wits about you. You are leaving for Macau tonight, and when you return you will bring Tusker Leatherfell back to the Office.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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