When I was twelve years old, the sensha-do scene was thriving in full hot-blooded swing. The World Championships - a subsidiary of the Olympics - were due to be held at the end of August, throwing the entire country into the peculiar state known by the West as "panzer fever", as interest in the sport surged to the highest I had ever seen so far in my short life. Everywhere I looked I could see tanks - rolling through the streets in parades, adorning the streets as paper buntings, shooting and driving in grainy detail on our primitive television.
It was also this year that the Japanese Sensha-do Federation approved the use of the Black Box - a transponder system mounted in every tank that tracked the movement of every shell fired during a match and used a plethora of data in order to determine its exact effect. The sensha-do community was promised a more dynamic and realistic iteration of the sport, where judges did not have to deliberate on every hit and decide in real-time whether to rule a tank as disabled or not, as they had done in the past. This did wonders for the public's view of sensha-do, which had suffered a stagnation of sorts in the past few years.
Quite predictably, the National Under-16 Championships, which were held just before July, enjoyed some measure of the runoff too. It was easy to see the leap in investment and vibrancy - there were more investors, more advertising, and more competitors.
Finally, I thought. Give me something else. Give me something more.
Although I relished victory, the bull that pulls a light yoke will grow weak, and I knew this. I nurtured a burning desire to face an enemy that presented a challenge, that fought on the same terms and footing as I did.
I forgot to be careful of what I wished for.
She was arrogant, like I was. When we lined up before the match that would decide the victor she shook my hand, and her grip was strong. "Let's have a good match," I said. She did not reply and smirked at me instead.
She was also very, very good. I was caught off guard in the first ten minutes, where she pulled back her forces and retreated at full speed into a small copse of trees. I called for a standard advance, expecting her to have entrenched herself in her position, which would greatly favour a defender's battle.
No matter. It was a simple calculus - we had thicker armour, bigger guns, better discipline than the messy, disorganised rearguard action that the enemy had put up. All we needed to do was get into range and trade shots until one side ran out of tanks - and I was fully confident that it would not be mine.
We stopped at the edge of the copse, consolidating into a tight line that would maximise our firepower, and waited. We knew that eventually the enemy would lose patience and, overflowing with battle-lust, would stream from their hiding place like wild dogs, charging at us in an unorganised mass, which would then shatter on the anvil we had prepared for them like waves on stone. It would only take one tank to grow tired of waiting, one commander to disobey orders, and that would set in motion a cascade of failure that would deliver them into our waiting jaws.
We waited, and waited, and waited. Half an hour passed, then an hour, and then two. I felt sweat trickling down my back in the hot summer sun, tickling my spine with its warm unpleasant tingle. Several times I suspected that we had been given the slip, but the silhouettes crouched under the branches dispelled the thought. In the sweltering heat our tongues grew thick and our vision dim, and although I longed to charge into the cool shade of the trees, I knew that was exactly what the enemy wanted. So we waited in the heat, sweat soaking first our undergarments and then our uniforms, until we felt like we had been drenched in a pool of salty water.
We stewed there for the better part of the afternoon, getting more and more tired, more and more frustrated, and - in spite of all the training - less and less alert. Our iron discipline proved to be our undoing, as in our dogged determination we expended time and focus that could be used later during the match. It had not occurred to me that we were being worn down, bit by bit, by the very unbreakable will that we drew our strength from. By the time I realised my error it had already been too late.
Suddenly, after what seemed like forever, several white contrails burst forward from somewhere within the cluster of trees, exploding over our heads in an effusion of white smoke which quickly sank to the ground, obscuring visibility to the point that I could not see past the turret of my own tank. The screen cleared quickly, but as I inhaled the white gas I felt it burn my throat like liquid fire, and my lungs spasmed, trying to cough out the foreign substance. With no other choice, I retreated back into the turret, buttoning the hatch shut above me to stymie the spread of the noxious stuff, while the hacks and coughs that crackled through the radio indicated that the other commanders had done the same.
Immediately I was hit by a wave of heat as I dropped back down in the turret. No matter how bad it was outside, it was ten times worse in here - the air, stagnant for hours, had cycled through multiple sets of tired lungs, and the atmosphere was nearly unbearably moist. By now my crew were nearly dead on their feet, barely able to focus on doing their job, let alone stay alert enough to notice what had just happened.
With an urgent command I roused them from their torpor as they sluggishly returned to their posts, cursing and groaning under their breath. Slowly the turret began slewing from side to side, searching for the targets, as I peered through the thin slats of the cupola, searching in vain for something, anything.
"All units, slow advance," I called into the radio. In jerks and stutters, one by one, the formation began to crawl forward, with none of the cohesiveness that we had that morning. And then one, two, three tanks began to emerge from under camouflage sheets and piles of branches, rotating their own guns to meet our challenge.
Finally.
"All units, focus fire."
She had been waiting. Our formation erupted in a line of explosive fire, and a split second later, I felt something fly at us from behind, and then the tank next to mine crunched - a metallic, mucosal cough that sounded like the death rattle of some iron beast. There was no time for words - I kicked my driver and the tank rotated around to face the direction of the ambush, while another wave of white smoke burst over us.
It had been a simple strategy. She had lured us into a waiting game - an amateur trick, but her initial retreat had been intentionally inept, which had baited us into underestimating. Set the confrontation up so as we sweated our strength away in the scorching sun, her crew conserved their own in the cool shade. And then, finally, when frustration had reached the boiling point, presented an opportunity - none of the tanks that revealed themselves were the enemy flag, but by that point we were too weary to notice or care. All we saw were the moving hulls of a vicious enemy that had taunted us beyond human endurance.
We became the dogs, slavering and yipping at the chance to do battle with our tormentors.
The rest was textbook. The smokescreen forced the commanders back into the turret, restricting vision, while a single tank left the copse on a long flanking journey behind us. Once we had engaged the bait force, fully committing our resources to a frontal advance, it was a simple matter to line up a shot from behind. The only flaw was that they missed the only target that meant anything - the tank with the blue flag. Mine.
We had been cut apart, our organised formation degenerating into a dozen separate scrambling melees as our opponents finally surged forth in their full strength to engage us, but we had not lost our claws yet. Superior discipline and reflexes seemed to claw us back to grasping distance of victory, each separate commander putting up a ferocious fight against the odds. My own tank disabled three others in that desperate scuffle but when the smoke cleared there were two of theirs left standing against one of ours.
The rest was, as I said before, a simple calculus. The enemy had cunningly left their flag tank behind until the very last moment, when it finally rolled out from cover - behind us, so we had to rotate the turret to face it. From then on it was a numbers game. They could shoot at our flag tank, and we couldn't shoot at theirs.
Although my loader cranked the rotation handle faster than I thought was possible, there was no winning against cold, cruel reality. Two shells slammed simultaneously into the sides of the turret with a fatalistic clang, and the telltale pop of defeat followed a split second after. Then it was over, just like that, and the enemy had not fired more than ten shells between them. And I couldn't even blame the judges for not doing their job, either. The Black Box was a machine - cold, impartial, logical. This time there was no other variable that could decide the outcome of a match other than the mettle of the competitors.
I was in disbelief. How, I thought. How is it possible? I didn't know who I should have asked. The enemy commander? My mother? Myself? Those thoughts bounced around my head as I dismounted my machine and bowed my head to the enemy commander, as my mouth formed those unfamiliar, bitter words.
"It's my loss."
"It was a good game," came the standard reply, but as I straightened and offered my hand I could hear something genuine in the way she said it. For the first time I actually looked at this girl, this creature that had toppled me, and I saw her - not as an enemy, not as something to be overcome, but as a person like myself.
She was about the same height as me, and straw-coloured hair fell around her shoulders. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were glinting. "It was a close fight," she said. "We should do that again." And I was convinced that she meant it.
As she turned to walk away, a metallic nametag caught the light of the evening sun, instantly turning into a flash of brilliant white, but not before I glimpsed the words etched into its surface.
Chiyo Shimada.
