Before that disastrous match I had never known what it was like to lose. Winning came naturally to me, and I took it for granted, like a deer who has gone down to the same brook to drink for every day of his life.
One day, the brook dried up, and I had to face the fact that I had not achieved victory. Worse still, I had allowed an enemy to gain victory over me. That wasn't even the worst part.
If I was defeated, then my family would have been defeated, as they had trained and raised me. The Nishizumi school would have been defeated.
My mother would have been defeated. I would have brought dishonour to her name.
Oddly enough she didn't seem overly concerned that I had lost to Chiyo Shimada. In fact, she didn't seem concerned at all. After the match had concluded I made my way to my mother, covered in a fine crust of dried sweat - the badge of my overestimation and foolishness. I fully expected to be subjected to her icy rage again, and I remember thinking that my frazzled appearance was not going to do anything in favour of my case.
I stood before my mother, dishevelled and contrite - or at least I hope I appeared that way.
"I'm sorr - " I barely managed to squeak out the first half of the apology before my mother interrupted me.
"You underestimated her," my mother said brusquely. "She expected you to do it, and she punished you for it, because she was trained to do so."
"Who was she?" I asked.
"That was Yoko's child. Shimada's child," my mother said.
"Shimada - "
"Yes, the Shimada school," my mother affirmed, and I thought I could hear a tinge of grudging respect in her voice. "They and I disagree on many things but they are not a common or vulgar foe. They have been trained to exploit the smallest mistakes, and flow around the tiniest gaps. You must harden your defences to the point that they are airtight," she said, as we walked back to the car that she had driven me to the match in. "Otherwise you will suffer a hundred defeats at the hands of that girl."
I looked at the ground and said nothing. One defeat was bad enough. The idea of a hundred was nearly impossible to bear.
"It was the first time you fought her," she said, as if she was trying to justify something. Then she paused for a moment and I could see her thinking of what to say next. "The use of the smokescreen was dishonourable," she finally affirmed. "I don't expect that they will do it again. That is the issue with the Shimada school. Every time they come up with something different, so it is no use fighting them on their own terms. But it is no matter. All you have to do is learn to wait, learn to maintain your positions, and eventually they will expose a weakness in all their scurrying about."
I took my mother's advice to heart. It was true. The Nishizumi school focuses nearly entirely on defence, and a good defender is a patient defender. So I took time to train my own mental fortitude and that of my team in the last few months I had with them before graduation, so that we would never lose control of our emotions and impulses ever again. Long runs, several kilometres in length, sometimes carrying the six-kilogram shells used by our tanks. We ran ourselves ragged, sometimes until we threw up from sheer fatigue. To my surprise, however, no one seemed to object the hellish regimes I put them through.
I think we were all motivated by the same feeling - defeat. It sat deep within me, a black, heavy feeling coiled at the base of my stomach. I wanted to cough it out, rip it out of my body, and I knew that to do so I had to never lose again.
Make your heart like steel. Maintain your positions. Not one step back.
I also began to review the footage of our match at least once a day, analysing every decision made and trying to see exactly what had gone wrong, when. The Nishizumi school believes in a vernichtungsschlacht, a critical point, if you will, where the way the balance swings decides the outcome of the entire battle. But I couldn't find one. Decisions impacted one another until it became impossible to trace the defeat to a single one. What I did realise, however, was that she knew at nearly every moment exactly what I was thinking, and that I had been dragged along on a leash since I ordered that advance on the copse of trees. I began to suspect that our strategy had become predictable, and during a tactical review I brought it up to my mother.
"No." She was adamant. "So what if she knows exactly what you are thinking? Does knowing that a bullet is flying to your heart stop the bullet from killing you? If your defence is truly impenetrable, then knowing about it won't help her break it. Focus on yourself. Not on her. You can't change her but you can do something about yourself."
That made sense at the time, so I dropped the subject and went back to my training. But I couldn't get Chiyo out of my mind. The way she smiled mockingly at an enemy she hadn't even defeated, as if she could tell the future. The way the contrails of smoke lanced up and out into the air, bursting into plumes of white.
Dishonourable, yes, but so very beautiful. Away from a tank she was just a normal girl, on the shier side, but on the battlefield she moved with the lethal grace of a predator, a queen in her castle, as if she towered figuratively over everyone around her.
I didn't want my mother to know, but I became more and more intrigued by this girl and the uncanny intelligence that lurked behind those innocent-looking hazel eyes. I tried to find out whatever I could about her - I told myself that I just wanted to learn more about an enemy, but I knew that wasn't entirely true. Over the course of my research I learned that upon learning the name of her opponent Chiyo would absorb as much information as she could on them - even down to mundane things like descriptions of their personality. She sought to build a replica of the opponent's mind, so that she could pick it apart as she pleased, dissect it and observe it until she knew exactly what it would think and when it would think it.
I remember that when I learned of that, the first thing I felt was a deep respect welling from inside me from this girl whose genius bordered on madness. And then shortly after that, I thought, I don't really mind losing to someone like that.
But I didn't tell my mother, of course. And I told myself that it wasn't true. I did mind after all.
