Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 8 of 17

The Ax Hand had been tasked with awakening the greatest weapon forged by the greatest weaponsmiths in Japan: the mighty Mecha-Tsuyo! But even the Ax Hand cannot be in two places at once, and with Fast Freddie captured in Macau, the Black Dragon Society’s agents are coming for them.

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

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

The Last Warrior.

SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 11, 1943
NAKA ISLAND, LAKE KUSSHARO
HOKKAIDO, JAPAN

//Translated from Japanese.//

A sunset red as fresh blood splattered on glass streamed over the horizon.

“The Germans claim it was the Americans that caused the eruption,” Zuboshi said. He stood next to Takamoto on the western shore of Naka Island. The volcanic sun blazed crimson on the surface of Lake Kussharo's acidic waters. The warm summer winds blew the smell of sulfur off the lake, helping Takamoto better imagine the pyre burning in Italy.

“It is magnificent,” the Ax Hand declared.

“Our geologists estimate that the ejecta will affect the sunset for at least four months,” Zuboshi continued. “And they know of no weapon in the American arsenal that could cause such destruction.”

“The Americans did not do this. It was Department Three.”

Takamoto was smiling as he considered the catastrophe. The dedication it must have taken to destroy Vesuvius, to sacrifice so many for ones goals filled him with a sense of resolution. Were he gifted with the honor of making such a choice, he would not hesitate.

The island rumbled beneath his feet.

The Emperor's swordsmiths harnessed the geothermal vents that ran through the Akan volcanoes to craft their weapons. They had dug tunnels and caverns beneath the island, well below the bed of the caldera lake, in order to use the earth itself as their forge. Now that same earth could feel the wound that had been gouged into it, half a world away. The ground groaned as if in pain.

“The Italians were their allies,” Zuboshi objected.

“And remain so,” Takamoto replied. “Do you not see? Italy was on the verge of collapse. They would turn on Hitler to appease the Allies. Department Three has welded the Axis with blood. Either the Mussolini turns a blind eye, rouses his people, and gains a crusade against the Americans, or he gains an enemy that can shatter the Earth that is already at his doorstep.”

“What do we do with such an enemy, Ono-te?” Zuboshi asked.

“Our enemy is an animal. We will drive it onto the Allied threshold. We shall harness the beast, and direct it as we wish.”

“You are a fool!” Gima Goro howled from down the beach. Takamoto was numb to the wretch's lunacies, and chose not to break the battered man in half for so petty an insult.

Gima was sitting in the shade of a bent dwarf pine rubbing his knobby ankles where the new manacles were digging into his leathery skin. His soiled, tattered clothes were stained through with Arata's browned blood.

“You say Toroka is the typhoon?” Takamoto asked Gima. He raised a hand to the red horizon. “Do you see the sky, creature? Man's will is the power of gods, now. What strength does the typhoon have to resist the will of God?”

“Is Mecha-Tsuyo truly so powerful?” Zuboshi wondered. Takamoto spun and slapped the gigantic pilot across the face with an open hand. His wingman staggered backward. Takamoto hissed:

“Doubting the Society is a mistake few are allowed to make twice.”

Gima giggled hysterically, drawing a murderous glare from both pilots.

“Hold your tongue or I will rip it from your rotten skull and feed it to the tanuki,” Takamoto growled at the wretch. Gima's demented laugh subsided, and the Ax Hand turned back to Zuboshi. He reached up and grabbed the larger man by his collar, dragging him down until they were eye to eye.

“And you. Mecha-Tsuyo is the creation of the Society, a weapon conceived in the dead dreams of a drowned man, crafted under the guidance of Tetsujin himself with technologies that surpass their German origins, forged by the Imperial Smith. It will crush fleets alone and wade through the Siberian wastes, destroying armies until it razes Moscow herself,” Takamoto fumed. “When it rises, you will see. And never again will you doubt the power of the Society. The German barbarians have no concept of war, yet even they can make the earth bleed. What we will do will shake the heavens.”

He shoved Zuboshi away and stalked off, toward the Swordsmiths’ lair.

“Gima Goro,” he called over his shoulder, “Attempt escape if you must. If you survive these poisonous waters, and avoid the teeth of the fish, freedom is yours. Stay and you might see Toroka again.”

Gima slumped back against the pine, his yellowed eyes wide.

The entrance to the forge was wide enough for large trucks to enter, but completely invisible from the air. In all they did, the smiths were expert craftsmen. Zuboshi followed in silence. Gima's whispers and cackles resumed as soon as they were out of sight.

There were no guards or locked doors on Naka, the Isle of Swordsmiths; the smiths themselves preserved their secrets. Takamoto and Zuboshi stepped into a utilitarian elevator. Its steel door glided shut on oiled rails and they began the long descent into the heart of Naka.

It was several silent minutes before the elevator reached the depths of the forge. Zuboshi fidgeted in a corner, while Takamoto stared at the featureless metal door. The elevator decelerated smoothly, with its occupants almost unable to tell it had stopped. The door whispered open, and Takamoto stepped through with his lumbering wingman in tow.

The forge was humid and oppressive, and walking into the wall of shimmering heat was like pushing through underbrush. The lake surrounding Naka was once a volcanic caldera. The Swordsmiths had hollowed it out beneath it to create a massive space that tapped into the geothermal power pulsing beneath the surface of all of Nihon. Six hundred hammers sounded around them, massive sledges slamming and precision rounders pinging, shaping Japanese steel into weapons and armor.

No one noticed their entrance. There were no soldiers, yajirushi, or Matagi there, only artists.

The six hundred men and women who made up the Imperial Swordsmiths worked in silence, letting their tools sing for them. They each wore traditional white robes, their sleeves characteristically charred and tattered by their back-breaking work. Each of the fully-vowed smiths wore some manner of mechanical device on his or her body, be it a metal collar, vest, or belt. Sweat beads formed on shaved scalps, only to be wiped away by harried legions of adolescent apprentices.

The closest smiths were forging the tank-shredding dōtanuke rounds, thousands of machine gun bullets and cannon shells fashioned by hand, examined and perfected by a master smith's naked eye. Each bullet was folded over one hundred times, the tank shells folded one thousand. Even more were working to press brass casings, while apprentices were straining to count individual grains of gunpowder by candlelight. Missing fingers were worn like silent badges of honor.

Takamoto and Zuboshi watched in reverent silence, listening to the symphony of metal. They had torn enough targets to ragged, bloody pieces with dōtanuke rounds to know the importance of the forge's works. The smiths' noble work could not be interrupted. Instead. Takamoto became absorbed in the work at the closest station. He watched silently as a white-bearded master tapped near-invisible imperfections out of a single bullet for a quarter of an hour.

“Kaiken Takamoto, Jitte Ikeda,” a small voice whispered.

The two pilots turned to find a waif of a man standing before them, his arms tucked into his sleeves and crossed over his puffed-out chest. He wore the long white robes of the smiths, but his had never been touched by ember, soot, or oil. A large metal collar encircled his neck, with a trio of inward-pointed hollow spikes fixed over his arteries and spine with barely-restrained springs. He bowed low.

“Speaker Ayumu,” Takamoto responded. He tilted his head slightly instead of bowing. “Where is Mecha-Tsuyo?”

“It is undergoing the Imperial Smith's final inspection in the inner forge, kaiken,” Ayumu replied. The smith’s representative’s disdain for the Society men was obvious in his voice.

“Show me,” Takamoto ordered. The speaker snorted. The spring-loaded needles rattled, poised and eager to plunge into his flesh.

“I do not follow orders from you or from your Tetsujin,” Ayumu hissed. “I am the servant of the the Heavenly Sovereign.”

“The want of Tetsujin is the will of the Emperor,” Takamoto growled.

“The Heavenly Sovereign's advisers have made that clear,” Ayumu stated. A look of disgust flashed across his plain face, but the speaker regained his composure without registering that he had lost it. “Follow me.”

Takamoto and Zuboshi followed, winding through clusters of geothermal forges worked by leathery, silent masters. Schools of apprentices rushed around them, pulsing back and forth like hungry minnows but keeping their distance from the visitors, leaving them to walk in eddies of relative calm.

“We let him talk about Tetsujin like that?” Zuboshi whispered to Takamoto.

“Ayumu is the Speaker of the Imperial Smiths,” Takamoto replied. “If we cannot speak to him, we cannot speak to anyone. He is the smith chosen to represent the rest, who have taken vows of silence.”

He gestured at the closest men laboring in clouds of steamy sulfur.

“To enter their ranks, a smith must take a vow to never utter the secrets of forging the imperial weapons. And they must build that Vow,” Takamoto explained. Zuboshi noted the mechanical collars, belts, and vests once again. “Each smith creates a device which will end their life were one word to escape their lips. Many wear belts loaded with razors designed to slice open their own bellies. Others chose to open their throats. Some drive shunts into their own hearts.”

The speaker had led them to a looming door at the edge of the sweltering cavern.

“They are very dedicated,” Zuboshi noted.

“We are,” Ayumu agreed. He raised an arm that ended at the wrist and banged against the unadorned metal with a scabbed stump. They had taken his hands.

“The Speaker is allowed to talk, but at the cost of his ability to perform the Emperor's work,” Takamoto explained, loud enough for Ayumu to hear. “Every Swordsmith is charged with silencing their speaker were he to utter secrets or a blasphemies against the Emperor.”

“If I were to bring disgrace upon myself, I would be bringing it upon my brethren and the Heavenly Sovereign, as well. I would welcome the opening of my veins,” Ayumu assured them.

“The Speaker's Vow is designed to shoot each of those needles into his neck, Zuboshi,” Takamoto said. “With his arteries pierced, Ayumu would be drained in seconds.”

“As I said, kaiken, I would welcome it. For were I to earn such a fate, I would deserve it,” the speaker said. The doors before him groaned open and Ayumu slid his maimed arms back inside his loose sleeves, out of view. The speaker stepped through the doorway. “Follow me, it is here.”

The door opened to a set of stairs that led up into shadow. They climbed in silence for several minutes, ascending into the hollowed ribcage of the island's stratovolcano. The stairs opened into viewing gallery over a massive space, somehow larger than the cavern housing the forges beneath. It had taken hundreds of days to drain the lava out of the mountain, and almost two years to sculpt the cavity into a dry dock large enough to house Mecha-Tsuyo.

Under burning spotlights, where the molten innards of the earth itself had once resided, a steel beast slumbered.

Mecha-Tsuyo’s main structure was over one hundred meters in length, and the side-mounted secondary hulls housing its engines were nearly as long. It was large for a cruiser but smaller than the battleships whose armaments it rivaled. Its skin was thicker than even Yamato's, every inch of it hand-folded steel.

Takamoto stood on the lip of the dry dock and watched the smiths make their final inspections.

The Imperial Smith, the old wizard of metal and fire, ordained by the Emperor Himself to craft His weapons, paraded the hulking ship’s deck, performing some ritual to complete his works with a dozen apprentices in tow. He studied Mecha-Tsuyo’s curves and bolts, its cannons and anti-aircraft guns. Its superstructure rose high above his head, stories taller than even that of the largest battleship.

The master smith's rite was nearly complete. He lead his procession to the bow of the ship, beneath the twin barrels of its massive main guns. His hummed prayers were reaching their wordless, monotonous crescendo. His Vow rattled menacingly with each hum. It would decapitate him with a garrote wire should he utter a word.

The apprentices assumed their places, cautiously eyeing the incense in their hands, mentally preparing to stifle any reaction as the burning wicks crawled toward their fingers. The scented smoke curled around their master and wrapped around the cannons above, sixty-six-centimeter monsters that loomed over his head and hung past the prow like the horns of a charging bull.

Only a small portion of the ship was dedicated to crew and control. The rest was built to ferry weapons, and to power. A hundred other emplacements bristled down Mecha-Tsuyo's spine, from flak cannons and quad-machine guns to rocket batteries, depth charge launchers, mine layers, torpedo tubes. Tetsujin had ordered the smiths load a squadron of B90's into the spine of ship, modified with fold-back wings to fit in its small launch bay.

Takamoto would be able to reach out and touch Toroka when they finally met.

With such weight and power contained in the hull, Mecha-Tsuyo had been built in a catamaran style, unique amongst the world's fleets for a ship of its size. Hundred-meter pontoons were positioned to either side of the main hull, housing powerful engines which turned the drill-like screw propellers. Each blade was honed to a razor-edge and strengthened with black diamond inlays. The arms that held the pontoons in place were slender but powerful, the smiths' engineering so effective that they could manage the weight a dozen times over.

Takamoto realized with a start that the Imperial Smith had become silent. His throngs of apprentices had disappeared, with only the strong scent of incense left behind. The old man knelt and bowed, placing his papery forehead flat on the deck. The ship rumbled to life beneath him. Society men appeared in every gunport and porthole.

The Imperial Smith lurched to his feet. Twenty stories of impenetrable armor and innumerable guns roared above him. Blinding spotlights snapped on from Mecha-Tsuyo’s hull, cutting scathing arcs into the cavernous room. The two brightest lights beamed out of the bow, unblinking, furious eyes glaring below the bull's horns.

The master smith was in awe of his work.

“Mecha-Tsuyo is ready,” Speaker Ayumu observed.

“So it appears,” Takamoto replied.

Mecha-Tsuyo roared in its dry dock, shaking dust off the walls and ceiling. Scaffolding fell away from its hull.

“You are launching now?” Zuboshi shouted over the din.

“You will need to make way soon,” Ayumu replied. He drew a radio missive out of his sleeve, pressed between both stumps. Takamoto snatched it away and read it quickly.

“Toroka has appeared,” he told Zuboshi. “He has taken Mutsu Bay.”

“Honshu,” Zuboshi said. The creature had attacked the main island. “This is your chance.”

“Yes,” Takamoto replied. His clash with Toroka was inevitable. “Forces of nature.”

Takamoto handed over the message to Zuboshi, who carefully rolled it into a scroll and placed it in his pocket. It would be an artifact of Takamoto's legacy one day. Creases would not do.

A pair of massive tank-treaded trawlers rumbled to life in the basin beneath the dry dock. The vehicles were impossibly large, each nearing thirty meters in length, twenty in width. They were based on the O-I super-heavy designs, each being four of the gargantuan tanks linked together to roll as one. Both trawlers were powered by an quartet of submarine engines, roaring together for over one-hundred-thirty-thousand horsepower.

The trawlers were rolling battleships. Each was a bunker unto itself. A swarm of motorcycles, mine-sweeping trucks, and machine-gun-mounted Black Medal four-by-fours circled the trawlers, which each carried fifty crew members with space for the support vehicles and three dozen perimeter troops inside.

The tanks' main armaments had been removed, replaced with towering jointed structures rising eighty meters into the air. Reinforced sockets topped the armored constructions. They roared and moved into place beneath Mecha-Tsuyo's hull.

A pair of sections slid open on Mecha-Tsuyo's hull, halfway between the bow and stern. The panels revealed connection ports matching the sockets atop the trawlers' structures.

The two towers extended upward and clamped into Mecha-Tsuyo. Pistons rumbled as the sockets intertwined, and the two trawlers and the ship above became one terrible organism.

“She can walk,” Takamoto whispered. Mecha-Tsuyo howled in response.

Its pontoons howled and rotated down and forward on their arms, the screw propellers pointing at the ground. It groaned, the deep shudder of metal taking on immense strain. The dry dock shattered, and Mecha-Tsuyo dropped onto its treaded legs, which flexed at the knees and ankles under its weight but held.

The Imperial Smith stumbled and fell to the deck.

Mecha-Tsuyo lurched forward, then caught itself on the tips of its propellers, hunching over its diamond-tipped knuckles like a mantis-gorilla chimera with the head of a bull and flesh of folded steel.

The entire mountain shook as it settled.

The Imperial Smith struggled to his knees, riding Mecha-Tsuyo's backbone as it gained its balance. He raised his wizened arms to the heavens, overcome by his greatest work.

“Perfec-!” he shouted, only to be cut off when the high-tension wire he’d built into his Vow snapped taut, slicing through soft tissue and most of his spine in a split-second. The master fell to the deck in a crimson spray. Hi head bounced and rolled of the deck, falling into the dark cavern below.

His blood left a stain that would never wash out.

Speaker Ayumu watched the pink mist drift from afar. His jaw dropped open and a moan of despair escaped his throat.

“It hungers for blood already,” Takamoto declared.

Mecha-Tsuyo's bow broke away on a hidden seam and stretched forward, extending on a mechanical neck. Its pointed head turned to look at Takamoto, gazing upon him with blazing eyes and creaking cannons.

“And it knows who will feed it,” Takamoto declared. The beast knew its master already. He issued his orders to the crestfallen speaker: “Open the gate, Ayumu. Free it.”

“The master...” he muttered, still staring at the smith's corpse.

“The master may have been sworn to the Emperor, but he lived for his forge. He lived for this. There is nothing beyond perfection,” Takamoto told him. “He retired at the height of his skill, as a master should. Now open the gate. Let the world marvel at his works.”

“The gate,” Ayumu stammered. He got to his feet, never taking his eyes off the hulking Mecha-Tsuyo. The metal monster seemed to breathe, rising and falling as its internal mechanisms struggled to find their rhythm.

Ayumu staggered over to a panel installed on the wall and tapped a lengthy staccato only its bare surface with his wrist bones. When he completed the rhythmic code, the panel popped open, revealing two switches with green lights glowing above them.

“Give birth to his legacy,” Takamoto urged. Ayumu took a deep breath, then flipped both switches.

Charges planted in the rock above them cracked as one, shattering the mountain. The explosives were precisely placed, measured to the millimeter to split the hollow shell of Naka into cascading layers. Ayumu pressed himself against the wall while Takamoto and Zuboshi struggled to maintain their footing. The outside of the mountain was sliding into the acidic lake, using the broken tons of falling rock to create a land bridge across Lake Kussharo.

The rock slide was punctuated by further explosions timed to continue the fall. Each successive blast reached deeper and deeper into the mountain, until finally the inner magma chamber cracked open. A beam of cool moonlight peeked through the narrow fissure. Mecha-Tsuyo shied away from the alien luminescence.

“Take your destiny!” Takamoto shouted.

Mecha-Tsuyo reared back, lifting one of its pontoon arms high. Its screw propeller howled, gleaming silver as its diamond blades caught the blue light. It roared with diesel fury, then crashed through the remaining stone before it like the heart of its volcanic womb was formed from eggshells. In three titanic strikes, it was free. It dragged itself up and out on its treads and knuckles, reveling in the cool fresh air.

In the commotion, Takamoto had ignored a sweating apprentice who had scampered over to deliver a message to the speaker. Ayumu scanned it quickly, then cleared his throat.

“You are headed to Honshu,” he stated.

“Yes,” Takamoto snapped. Destiny was before him. The greatest power on earth waited to face him. He would not make it wait due to this servant's inane inquiries.

“Then this would only interest a man who could be two places at once,” Ayumu said. Takamoto snatched the paper from him.

“Zuboshi,” he said slowly, re-reading the report. “Who is the Society's highest agent in southern China?”

“Umezu Yoshijirō, a jitte,” Zuboshi answered promptly.

“The commander-in-chief of the Kantōgun Army?” Ayumu asked.

Takamoto glared at him. The Speaker talked too much. Zuboshi nodded nonetheless, confirming Ayumu’s outburst. Umezu had nearly one million soldiers under his command. The Ax Hand smirked and said:

“He will do. Send him new orders from me.”

“Yes, Ono-te.”

“Hercules Chen has been captured in Macau. His captors have set a price, but it is very high.”

“You want to buy him?” Zuboshi asked.

“They think I would pay for a subhuman mongrel?” Takamoto laughed. “Umezu will retrieve the Zero Hunter for me. And he will take that miserable city for the Empire. The cost of arrogance.”

“Yes, Ono-te.” Zuboshi confirmed.

“We will make the call from aboard Mecha-Tsuyo,” Takamoto said. He did not take his eyes off his lumbering weapon. “Zuboshi, fetch me Gima. Addled as that creature's mind may be, he is the only witness to Toroka's attacks. He may yet have insight to provide.”

Zuboshi followed the message-bearing apprentice down the stairwell, back to retrieve Gima Goro from his leash by the shore.

Takamoto sighed and leaned forward on the rail separating him from the deep fall into the dry magma chamber. Ayumu joined him.

“This one man is worth war? The Heavenly Sovereign has declared neutrality with Portugal.” Speaker Ayumu asked.

“This man is a stain on upon purity,” Takamoto answered. “The Smith shaped his world. I will shape ours. Hercules Chen is an imperfection in my art.”

“Then you must do as the master would: find the tool you need, and correct it,” Ayumu said.

“Today, my tool is a conquering army,” Takamoto replied. He stared into the newly exposed sky, through the haze of Mecha-Tsuyo's exhalations. “It is past time the Emperor's flag flew over Macau. This neutrality is but useless appeasement to a poor kingdom halfway across the world. We do not bow to corruption or Caucasians. Umezu will invade the city. Should Chen survive, he will be brought to me. Should he die, so be it. It would only mean that he did not deserve to be noted in the histories we shall write.”

The streak on Mecha-Tsuyo's back was but a crimson pinpoint at that distance.

“I will return the Imperial Smith's body. A master deserves recognition,” he assured the Speaker.

“His country deserves the chance to revere him,” Ayumu agreed.

Takamoto smiled. He watched Mecha-Tsuyo pound the settled rock slide with its screws, exultant to run and stretch with its new freedom. With his guidance, it would best the power of the earth itself. Takamoto would be the man to overcome nature incarnate in a battle so gargantuan that every soul could not help but be struck with bone-shaking awe.

“Yes,” Takamoto whispered, “Nihon deserves to revere all her heroes.”

The Zero Hunter.

SUNDAY NIGHT, JULY 11, 1943
PROVINCIAL POLICE STATION FOUR
PROVINCE OF MACAU

The cell's tan bricks were warm and smooth against Hercules' back, worn down by all the hopeless men who had leaned against them before him. He applied pressure to his handcuffs gradually, hoping to hear them snap.

Hye, Blue, Oxford, Oakley, Leatherfell, Hercules, and Jia shared the small room, taking their places along the three walls, careful to avoid the bucket in the corner. It had been full when the heavy iron bars clanged shut behind them. Hercules leaned his head against the bricks, examining the strongroom.

“Anything new out there?” he asked Doninha. The Portuguese police captain with tobacco-colored teeth leaned back from the window. He pinched the wad of chew out of his bulging lip and dropped it into a cup that he left on the sill.

“The sky was red, now it is black,” he observed.

“What the Hell could do that?” Oakley wondered.

“The Germans say it was you, Yankee,” the man snarled.

“You believe that horse manure?” Oakley said. “Then I got a bridge to sell you, chump.”

“I do not care who burned the sky,” Doninha snapped. “If it stays over that horizon, it is not my worry.”

He looked at his watch, then hissed something in Portuguese to one of his men. The officer hefted his SMG and left the building. That left Doninha, with his brown-stained teeth and red-stained pants, locked in with six officials and one tremendously hungover Jia. He spun a tarnished revolver on one white-gloved finger, then laughed when he saw them eying it warily.

“You are no prize dead,” he assured his prisoners. “Most of you.”

“I'm sure the bounty on my melon must be enormous by now,” Leatherfell boasted.

“They did not care for you,” Doninha snickered. “It was this Chinese they wanted. They prefer we kill you. Hercules Chen is my prize.”

“You gave them my name? That was not smart,” Hercules sighed. He only knew of one man who wanted his head that bad, and the Ax Hand was not known for paying his debts in cash.

“I could split the take fifteen ways with all of my men and still retire tomorrow,” the officer snorted. “I will leave here. To Brazil. I will own a mansion and never smell another pirate for the rest of my days.”

“May not be many of those days left, Donny,” Blue said.

Doninha quit spinning his pistol and caught it. He leveled it at the Australian and stepped up to the bars. He stood over Hercules.

“They were not interested in paying much for you, Paul Pabst,” Doninha warned.

“They will not pay for any of us,” Hercules said. “The only thing that would shame the Ax Hand more than paying for an enemy is being strong-armed by a bottom-feeder.”

“Bottom-feeder? A gun commands respect in Macau, Mister Chen,” Doninha retorted.

“In Shanghai, men command respect,” Hercules replied. Doninha spat, spraying Hercules with brown .

“Money commands all in Brazil, Chinese,” the cop hissed.

“You will not get there,” Hercules replied. Doninha raised his pistol again but Hercules did not flinch. They stared each other down for a long while from either end of its sights.

The police captain eventually hissed and holstered his weapon. He stomped over to his ramshackle chair and kicked back, propping his filthy boots on his desk.

“Be quiet,” he ordered, then closed his eyes and waited for his money to arrive.

Hercules studied the room in silence. This Macau police station was located on top of a hill overlooking the slums that Venju and the other Moro crews controlled. They were only one half-mile from the docks and the Soviet smugglers waiting to extract them, but in a city as dense as Macau the hike there could take hours. There would also be a thousand pirates, uncounted yajirushi, and a legion of war-ready corrupt cops aching to get in their way.

Doninha closed his eyes and began snoring a few minutes later. Hercules tested the handcuffs again. They were old, stressed by time and ten thousand wrists. He was studied each link, as well as the aged locks. Everyone else had the same idea, save Leatherfell who was busy comforting a moaning Jia as she nursed her throbbing head.

“Stop!” Hye hissed. Everyone quit fiddling with their restraints at once.

The door creaked open and an officer stalked in, this one carrying a rifle. Doninha woke with a snort. The two began whispering in Portuguese. Hercules could not catch a word of it.

Doninha’s brood continued to arrive in pairs until the small station was packed full of officers, so many that the officials’ cell seemed roomy. Conspiratorial murmurs and a nervous stink choked the air.

“It must be time for the exchange,” Oxford intoned, quiet enough that the police could not hear him over their own rumbling.

“Buzzards gathering,” Oakley agreed.

“Which would make us dead meat,” Blue said.

“Don't be so down, mates,” Leatherfell finally said, tearing himself away from Jia. “We've gotten out of tougher scrapes than this. Did I ever tell you lot how I escaped a pack of mannesser hounds in the Ardennes?”

“Not today you haven't,” Blue sighed.

“It was May in forty-one,” Leatherfell started. Everyone but Hye groaned. They had each heard this story a dozen times before, though never the same way twice. “The jerries were rushing through the forest, much faster than we thought. They sent out a pack of those slobbery mutts to wipe out our forward outposts. Any who was in the forwardest outpost?”

“You were,” Hercules said.

“Yours truly,” Leatherfell said, ignoring Hercules' exasperation. “These hounds were the size of horses, I tell you. They cut through us like steel teeth through butter. It wasn't until I wrangled their leader that they stopped.”

“Then you lashed them together and had them pull your Jeep like a chariot, all the way to Chaumont,” Blue finished.

“Well, yes,” Leatherfell huffed. He took great pride in his stories.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Hercules snapped. “Are you going to tie these bobbies together and ride them down to the docks? You cannot ride weasels.”

“There is always something that can be done,” Leatherfell replied.

“I suggest prayer,” Oakley said.

“Good plan,” Blue replied. “Let's wait and see what falls out of the sky.”

The single telephone in the station rang, silencing everyone.

Doninha snapped an order, and the closest officer picked it up after the second ring. The man listened in silence for a moment, then hung it up.

“O quê?” Doninha asked.

“Ele está morto,” the officer replied grimly. The phone line was dead. The assembled men looked at each other.

Doninha calmed his officers, reminding them how spotty their utilities had been with so many refugees drawing on them. One dead phone line meant nothing in Macau.

The officers eventually calmed down, producing yellow beer and black coffee in equal measures while they waited on the delivery of their blood money. Despite having calmed them, Doninha himself looked the most agitated. He checked the phone every few minutes to his frustration, and laid a heavy wooden beam across the from door. He had resumed his post at his desk and was swapping out his soaked chewing tobacco for fresh wads on an increasing frequency.

A harried rap on the door almost knocked him out of his chair.

Doninha shouted at the arrival through the locked door, and a wheezing man replied. The answered satisfied him and he ordered his men to open up with a flick of his soft chin. He smoothed his thin mustache and stood, hand ready on his sheathed baton.

The door creaked open to reveal a blooded policeofficer, covered in soot. He was propped against the door frame, sweating and shuddering.

A low whistle grew in the distance while he caught his breath. The officials froze at the ominous sound.

“O japonês,” the new arrival finally managed. ‘The Japanese.’

The whistle had become a howl. The exhausted messenger turned around in search of its source. The other officers leaned around him in the door, confused.

They were police, not soldiers. None of them recognized the scream of falling long-range artillery.

“Button up!” Leatherfell warned. He threw himself over Jia and screwed his eyes shut. The other officials curled into the smallest balls they could and readied themselves.

The lights went out an instant before the first shell struck. It cracked in the darkness like lightning and snapped the messenger and the men closest to him as if they were saplings. Hot wind, vaporized flesh, and pulverized brick washed through the station in a concussive blast that threw Doninha off his feet.

The building broke around them, splitting apart in spiderweb cracks across the ceiling from the front door to the back of the cell. A thick curtain of brown grit hung in the air.

Through the dust, Hercules saw opportunity. A fissure split the bricks anchoring the cell's iron bars.

The officers were panicking, prisoners were their last worry. Shells exploded outside like like a deadly drumroll, pounding the city by the dozen. Screams pierced the night.

“Hye!” Hercules shouted as he hopped to his feet. “Third bar!”

He took two long steps and leaped, slamming the loosened bar with a flying kick. It rattled but held. Hye followed his lead and hit the bar even higher. Dust rained down and the crack grew with each strike, but it held.

“Together,” she said. Hercules nodded. On a silent count of three they combined their strength, hitting the old steel as one. The bar creaked and bent just enough to fall free from its failing foundation. It clanged against the ground, loud enough to draw attention, even in the midst of the bombardment.

Hye slithered through the narrow opening and disappeared into the dust, arms still restrained behind her back.

“Wait!” Hercules shouted, but she was gone. The gap was not wide enough for him to follow, so he could only listen to the obscured scuffle. An officer shouted and close by another answered. The unmistakeable sound of impacts on flesh sounded out. Rifles roared, flashing in the dust like lightning behind clouds. A body hit the floor, followed by silence.

“Hye!” Hercules shouted.

Another salvo of shells landed, these further away. Their blasts reverberated through the shattered station, shaking down even more dust. The station, more a collection of broken pieces somehow leaning against each other than a building, groaned with every rattle pulsing through the ground. If the Portuguese did not kill them and the Japanese did not capture them, Hercules and company would soon be crushed when the building finlly gave up the ghot.

“Hye!” Hercules tried again.

“Official Eun!” Oxford added. There was a cheerful jingle and Hye appeared out of the dust, swinging a key ring on her finger.

“Turn around,” she said, and Hercules complied. The handcuffs fell away, and he took the keys and went to work on his comrades.

Hye was waiting when he was finished with the cuffs and unlocked the cell door. Her arms were full of their confiscated weapons. Hercules gladly took his mother's knives back, as well as the Baby Nambu she had offered earlier.

“The shelling is getting heavier,” Hye said.

“They are softening up the city for a full-scale invasion,” Hercules realized.

“Takamoto must really like you,” Blue joked.

“I told them he would not pay,” Hercules said.

“Time to move, mates,” Leatherfell said. He holstered his revolver and sheathed his knife, then took Jia by the hand and gingerly stepped over the groaning of cops Hye had dropped and the still bodies of those who had caught Japanese shrapnel. The officials followed him out of the haze of the crumbling building and looked down on the city from the hilltop.

The power was out in all of Macau, with the only lighting the the raging fires that going unfought. Red winks of distant explosions tore through the lower parts of the city, knocking down tenement buildings and abandoned warehouses stuffed with refugees. Civilians were dying in numbers that the Japanese would never care to count. Families ran east, trying to get as far away from the western edge of the city as they could. Police officers, those not under Doninha’s command, swarmed west, fighting back with small arms and desperation.

“There they are,” Oakley gasped. She pointed west, past the edge of the blackened city. A ripple of flashes lit up the horizon. Long guns, Hercules realized, firing from miles away. Closer still, a dragon of headlights snaked up the main highway.

“Tanks?” Hercules asked Oakley.

“Yeah, a mess of 'em,” she answered after a second. Oakley hopped up on a fallen timber to peer at the advancing army. She had the best eyes in the squadron. “Half-tracks and trucks, too. They're going whole-hog for you, Boxer.”

More shells found their mark, erasing entire blocks in a rippling wave. The civilians sheltering within them were gone in an instant.

Another squad of policemen appeared from the smoke, twenty harried men carrying rifles and a Maxim gun. Hercules put up a fist and ducked down, letting them pass. They were ready to fight an entire army.

The officers were almost out of sight when a penny whistle pierced the night air. The squad stopped in their tracks, looking around for one of their own.

“Bugger,” Leatherfell cursed.

Doninha staggered out of the broken station, shouting blowing his whistle and waving his baton like a madman. Red streamed from a cut over a broken cheekbone, crimson ran between his brown teeth.

The officers stopped and spread out, surrounding the officials, guns at the ready. Doninha lurched into the circle with a cruel swagger.

“Giving us to them will not make them stop,” Hercules warned.

“You are why they are here!” Doninha retorted.

“The Japanese army took trying to selling us as an insult,” Oxford explained loudly, hoping that the newly-arrived, seemingly less-corrupt officers understood English. None reacted to his words. Doninha smirked, then rattled off orders in Portuguese. They produced handcuffs and advanced on the officials.

“Surrender,” Doninha growled.

“Do you know what they intend to do with us?” Oxford asked. Doninha smiled in red.

“They will take you, and leave,” he answered. “Now drop the weapons.”

Hercules raised his Nambu and leveled it at Doninha's face. The advancing officers froze in place and snapped their weapons up. Hercules stared down a score of rifle barrels and smirked.

“Either we all leave, or none of us do,” he said. Doninha's eyes narrowed. His hand drifted down, inching toward his holstered revolver. Hercules growled a warning to him: “Do not touch it.”

Another salvo crashed into the city, crumbling an entire city block not two hundred meters to their west. The rain of metal slivers and pulverized homes forced them all to the ground as a wave of dirt rolled over them, blacking out the night. They arose cautiously, swinging their guns around, desperate to find their targets.

The dust cleared, revealing the standoff as they had left it, save more guns had been drawn. Every official was brandishing a firearm, while Doninha had pulled his own pistol. It was leveled at Hercules' face.

“I would think twice,” Hercules said. He nodded at something over Doninha's shoulder. The stout officer sneered, but the arrogance faded when saw what Hercules saw.

Doninha and his minions were surrounded.

Dozens of urchins had encircled them, perched on rubble and broken furniture and overturned cars. Boys and girls, children barely old enough to scamper away with a wallet, stood together with gangly youths wrapped in rags and self-administered tattoos. Each of them held a rock, or a bottle, or any of a hundred heavy, throwable weapons. Arun stood above the rest, a brick in each hand.

“Filhos de frascos,” one policeman gasped.

Arun yelled in Cantonese, and the urchins around him laughed. They outnumbered the police six-to-one, and none seemed to care that the men they faced carried rifles.

To their credit, the officers seemed more distraught than angry. Firing on kids was not their initial response.

Doninha stared at the mob around him. As he muttered some threat a cracked corner of masonry crashed into his sneering face. He staggered, and the air was filled with bricks and tiles. The officials dropped to the ground and covered their heads.

The policemen swung their weapons around, firing in panic, but each was pummeled over and over again. Scalps split, noses broke, eye sockets shattered. They tried to fight back, but their shots went wild. Arun's pickpockets moved as a liquid, ebbing and flowing, flooding up to batter the police with debris and shrinking away before they could be targeted.

Officer after officer fell, dazed or concussed.

Shells screamed overhead. One block away, the world shattered. The street rose seventy-five feet into the air then fell back to earth. Buildings collapsed, and a hot red gale swept over them again, blinding everyone once more with powdered brick.

“Go!” Arun shouted through the gritty haze.

That was all the encouragement Hercules required. He shoved the Nambu into his pocket, drew his kunai and icepick, and shoved a terrified, concussed policeman out of his way. Oxford knocked the officer out with a textbook jab. Hye picked Jia up and led her through the rubble in her high heels. Blue's shotgun roared, scattering the few officers with able to run, and Oakley brought up the rear. Hercules could hear her walloping anyone close with her shotgun cane.

The dust washed away as quickly as it arrived. Arun's urchins were gone, the officials were on the move, and the police that could had escaped. Only two men stayed behind.

“Chen, mate,” Leatherfell called out.

Hercules spun to see the big man standing rigid, his hands in the air. Doninha stood behind him, pistol pressed against Leatherfell’s temple. The little man peered over his hostage's shoulder, sneering through running blood. His mouth was a scarlet ruin. The other officials stopped, but Hercules waved them on.

“I can finish this,” he assured them.

“Finish me? Do you want this man dead?” Doninha sputtered.

“Not especially,” Hercules said.

“Let go of your blade, Chinese,” Doninha demanded. He ducked down, leaving only his rodent eyes visible behind Leatherfell's body.

“That is all I wanted to do,” Hercules said. He whipped his right hand forward, letting steel fly.

Doninha staggered away from Leatherfell then fell to the ground, dead.

The Australian waited for a confused second before he looked at the corpse. Hercules' kunai was buried deep into Doninha's forehead. He’d died instantly, still sneering, though if he hadn’t the ninja poison would have finished the job.

“Good onya, Boxer,” Leatherfell said. He leaned over and tugged the kunai out of Doninha's skull. He wiped the blood on the dead man's red-striped pants, pausing when he noticed a clump of white whiskers than had fallen onto the body. He reached up and felt the bald patch that the hurled blade had shaved into his left muttonchop, muttering: “That shot wasn't any old piece of piss, but lord, did it have to be so bloody close?”

“It got where it was going,” Hercules said. “And so should we.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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