A Young Girl's Guerilla War

by RagnartheSemiGreen

Tanya dies in an artillery barrage on the Rhine Front, contrary to both her and Being X's plans. Unwilling to let his chew toy escape so easily, Being X reincarnates Tanya back into Japan... Six years before Britannia conquers Area 11. (First posted on Space Battles)

21. Chapter 20: A Shinjuku Reunion (Pt 1)

Chapter 20: A Shinjuku Reunion (Pt 1)

(A big thank you to Siatru, and to Sunny, WrandmWaffles, Thearpox, and 1iop from the Discord for their editing and suggestions.)

APRIL 18, 2016 ATB
SHICHIKASHUKU, MIYAGI
1232

Lieutenant Colonel Kusakabe Josui, of the Japanese Liberation Front, sat comfortably in seiza, his knees protected from the traditional tatami of his formal office by an overstuffed pillow. Externally, he was stoic, properly joyless in accordance with the regulations inherited from the late and lamented Republican Japanese Army. Internally, a fierce tide of rising elation threatened to drown his firm demeanor in wild joy.

The only thing truly holding Josui back from such a celebration was the messenger, who droned on monotonously as he read his report aloud. Despite the fact that the report could have simply been printed off and delivered to Josui, or even emailed to him, the JLF just like the RJA ran on tradition, and thus the mandatory report reading.

It was a relic of times when a commander might not have been able to read, a relic of a time before standardized education and the radio. Thanks to that honorable tradition dating back who knew how many years, all reports sent to a staff officer were to be read aloud by the messenger to prevent any inadvertent public shaming. Like much of the JLF, it was practically useless in the face of modernity.

But today, nothing – not his dark thoughts, not even the yammering of the messenger – could dent Josui's enthusiasm. Not in the face of the report's astonishing contents.

Somehow, Onoda had managed to make good on his promise, and had proven once and for all that his previous successes weren't flukes. Not only had he managed to turn the pathetic group of Shinjuku rats that the Six Houses had dumped on them into a useful and expendable unit, Onoda had managed to deploy said rats effectively on the field of battle. In the process, the wily Major had significantly raised the profile of Kusakabe's 3rd Division within the JLF, to say nothing of the other benefits his shoestring operation had yielded.

For the meager price of some crates of cabbage and a few cheap anti-armor missiles, Onoda had purchased several hundred fresh recruits and an embarrassment of riches in the form of spare Knightmare parts, Energy Fillers, and specialized tools.

'Not a bad return on investment,' Josui chuckled to himself, as the sergeant continued with his reading. "-hundred and ten replacement seal kits for Slash Harken systems, five hundred meters of replacement Slash Harken cable, fifty replacement Slash Harken heads, two crates of bearings for the Slash Harken retraction motors, a box of heat shrink tubing for insulation repair..."

"Enough!" Despite his good mood, Josui's patience abruptly snapped. He had never been the most patient of men, and little wore through his meager supplies of tolerance quite like pointless formality or babbling subordinates. "I'll read the rest on my own. Get to the radio room and relay the report to Narita HQ over the general band, and attach a message with my compliments for Colonel Tohdoh's Chief of Staff. Make sure the phrase 'generous gift to the Knightmare Corps' appears in the message. Go!"

The sergeant promptly saluted, but Josui had already forgotten the man as he eagerly flipped through his copy of the report. The first section had been transmitted from the outpost in eastern Nagano where Onoda's pet militia had dropped off their hijacked truck, and was mostly concerned with detailing the cargo's contents. The second, more interesting section, had come from Onoda.

"Four Knightmares and no casualties, eh?" Josui mumbled aloud. It was, in a word, unbelievable, but Josui had known Onoda Hiroo for six years, and had never known him to inflate his own successes. Or at least, not to do it so blatantly.

So the report was probably accurate, which meant that Major Onoda had once again handed Josui and the rest of his faction more ammunition for the upcoming General Staff summer strategy meeting. 'And just in time too – that headache's only two weeks away now.'

General Katase would be there, the doddering old fool, as would Colonel Tohdoh, head of the Knightmare Corps and Katase's heir apparent. The rest of the divisional commanders would also attend, along with their seconds, and at least one emissary from the Six Houses to make sure that Kyoto's views were represented. And of course, Kusakabe Josui would be in attendance as well, and unlike everybody else, except for the man from Kyoto, he had something substantive to bring to the table.

There was, unfortunately, no way that Josui could justify holding onto the Knightmare spare parts. Much as he would have liked to break Tohdoh's monopoly over the JLF's scant Knightmare forces, that wasn't going to happen, thanks to Tohdoh's family history and his own personal reputation.

Tohdoh Kyoshiro had deep family connections to the military, going back through the Republican Japanese Army days through the Imperial Japanese Army, all the way back to the time of the Bafuku. Tohdoh's father had served with distinction during the First Pacific War and the younger Tohdoh had been the personal armsmaster to the Kururugi clan, including the Prime Minister and his family. More to the point, Tohdoh had the much touted "Miracle of Itsukushima", and the conventional wisdom was that the only man to beat Knightmares with conventional forces was the best leader the JLF Knightmare Corps could hope for.

Josui personally had his doubts on the matter. Despite – or perhaps because of – his impressive personal fighting skills, Tohdoh was a living fossil. The man represented a deep well of Japanese military tradition, and lived like the samurai of old. Unfortunately, that made him incredibly hidebound, wedded to old thoughts and traditional concepts of honor.

Honor, of course, had its place. That place was in a freed and refounded Republic of Japan. After the Day of Liberation had come and gone.

Josui was encumbered by no such outmoded concepts, and had thus realized that they represented a critical vulnerability in the other man. Not only did the idea of "honorable combat" sound like a joke when the Home Islands were under the degrading occupation of a foreign empire, the need to be seen as honorable was easily exploited.

Josui had, in fact, just exploited that sense of honor in the message he'd ordered attached to the report forwarded to the Narita Headquarters of the JLF. By making the Knightmare parts and tools into a freely given gift to Tohdoh's command before General Katase could make his views known, Josui had just put Tohdoh into his personal debt under the old honor codes, while simultaneously undercutting Katase's authority, the authority to which Tohdoh was heir.

Alone in his office, Josui permitted himself a grin of satisfaction. With this second victory under his faction's belt in less than a month, Katase would be all but forced to commend him in front of the entire General Staff. If he didn't, considering the lack of any other combat operations conducted recently, Katase would be all but admitting that he hadn't authorized the operations, which would undermine his authority even further. The one lever Katase could have used to cut Josui back down to size – redistributing his spoils – Josui had pulled himself before Katase had even known it existed, disarming and redirecting the threat before it could be made.

'I'm almost looking forward to that damned meeting, just to see the old windbag's face...'

Josui's satisfaction was all too short-lived. Thinking about the leverage that he held over Katase's head had inexorably brought his thoughts back around to the other headache, and the source of most of his ever-increasing gastric distress.

While his power was now secure from threats from above or from his peers, Josui was acutely aware that a growing menace was developing below him, in the ranks of his own faction. Gekokujo was a sword that could cut both ways, and no superior was truly safe from a sufficiently motivated subordinate clever enough to find a way to dress up their insubordination as a rightful defense of 'true authority'.

And unfortunately, the man who had done more than anybody else to advance Josui's own campaign of rightful insubordination was the one best placed to plunge a knife into Josui's back if he so wished. Major Onoda Hiroo.

'Onoda...' Just thinking about the man made Josui grimace with discomfort. More than Tohdoh, more than Katase, Josui blamed Onoda for the slow growth of his ulcers.

A graduate of the Nakano School of Military Intelligence, Onoda Hiroo had served in the Special Operations Group before the Conquest. Unlike most of the Republican Japanese Army, then-Lieutenant Onoda had seen combat before the Conquest, as a military attache at the Japanese Embassy in Hanoi. Taken together with his post-Conquest service as an infiltrator and scout, not to mention sometimes assassin, Major Onoda was an invaluable subordinate, despite his thoroughly common family background.

That plebeian origin, so different from Josui's own as a member of a minor noble clan, coupled with his apparently sincere loyalty, had made Onoda one of the most valuable officers in Josui's faction. It had been easy to mitigate the potential threat represented by Onoda to Josui's power base by assigning him to all the long-term, solitary missions Josui could find. Not only had this played to Onoda's skill set, it had kept him far away from headquarters, far away from any junior officers he could suborn with a carefully placed promise or threat.

But now, that plan seemed to have slightly backfired. Onoda had parlayed his intended assignment into exile into operational independence, and in the process had created a power base entirely independent of the JLF. While Josui doubted that he had to worry about the direct threat of an assassination courtesy of Onoda's pack of strays, a potential homecoming could prove equally disastrous. If Onoda could ride the success of his victories in the field into a return to headquarters, he might bring some or all of his private army back with him.

'But... he hasn't done anything yet...' Josui heaved himself to his feet and made his way out of his official office. 'But that doesn't mean anything. The man's sharp as a knife, and famous for his patience. He's smart enough to play the long game.'

While it was Josui's officially listed post as the Commander of the 3rd Division, the traditional room he had just left was more or less useless for anything but impressing underlings conveying messages. His actual office, sporting a thoroughly modern computer a mere eight years old and complete with a connection to the internet the Technical Service had assured him was secure, was where the actual work got done.

Unfortunately, sitting in his swiveling office chair behind said computer and staring at the Japanese flag hung behind the guest's chair did nothing to resolve Josui's dilemma.

Onoda was, above all else, loyal to the cause of liberation from the shame of foreign occupation. His dedication to that task was beyond reproach, and his record of successful missions spoke to his ability to leverage that zeal to produce concrete results. He had no obvious vices: He drank only in moderation and never blabbered his secrets when in his cups; he had no interest in men, not that such interest was quite as useful of a secret as it once was; likewise, while he was interested in women, his interest wasn't enough to overcome his rationality.

Indeed, Onoda's only true passion seemed to be for the Cause, and for shedding blood for the Cause.

Josui chuckled uneasily to himself, the collar of his uniform jacket wet with sweat, clammy in the room's stifling heat. 'How is it possible that an almost perfect subordinate is a bigger pain in my ass than the rest, huh?'

This was far from Josui's first time warding off threats from below. As the 3rd Division was General Katase's preferred assignment for any overly aggressive or ambitious soldiers or officers, Josui felt confident that he had likely warded off more coup attempts than any other staff officer in the JLF. More often than not though, he had been able to pick the would-be usurpers off before their plans got off the ground – suicidal missions for the incompetent, trumped up courts martial over various alleged crimes or dishonorable actions for the competent followed by unceremonious executions or disappearances.

By virtue of his incredible competence and sterling reputation, Major Onoda Hiroo had effectively knocked both of Josui's best swords from his hand, and by building his own power base Onoda had dodged Josui's attempt to drive him into irrelevance and exile.

Simply killing Onoda was far too risky. A bullet behind the ear would certainly solve this particular problem, but... If someone learned about it and handed the information that he had executed a successful and productive subordinate without cause to Katase or Tohdoh, the balance of power in the JLF would swing definitively against Josui.

It was unfortunate, but just like Tohdoh and the Knightmare supplies, Josui couldn't see any way around it; the fact of the matter was, he would have to wait until ironclad evidence of Onoda's schemes was found or manufactured.

'Well... if I can't punish him...' Josui thought, scowling as he logged onto his computer and dutifully followed the written instructions to fire up the secure network connection provided by the bespectacled private from the Technical Service, entering the username and password the technician had helpfully added to the end of the instructions when prompted. 'I suppose I'll have to reward the bastard... Dammit... I can't promote him and money's tight enough as is... A formal notice of recognition, perhaps...?'

Kusakabe Josui shook his head irritably. 'No, that's the last damn thing that man needs. More recognition among the rest of the Division and they'll start wondering why he's not in charge.'

An idea struck Josui, and, smiling, he began to draft an email to his chief of staff. 'Onoda likes being independent, does he? Fine by me! He'll get an extension of duty, then! Let him keep fucking about with Shinjuku rats and rural bumpkins – I'll even increase his discretionary budget! And while he's busy screwing around in the backwoods of Gunma, I'll find everyone in the Division with a positive word to say about the man and beat it out of them!'

Josui allowed himself a second satisfied grin as his fingers danced enthusiastically across the worn keyboard, content that his position was once again secure from enemies above and below. With the ammunition Onoda had provided, Josui would be able to take the fight to Katase and Tohdoh once more, until he finally had the power to force the JLF awake from its torpor.

'Onoda might even appreciate what I'm doing,' Josui thought with amusement, 'after all, I too am fighting for the Cause! Every day Old Man Katase is in command, the Day of Liberation is one day further away, and Tohdoh's almost as bad. If Japan is ever to be free again, we must have better leadership!'

Finally, content with the enthusiastic commendation that he had written to congratulate Major Onoda on his recent success and the attendant order to continue his mission until further notice, Josui hammered the Send button, committing the email to the surprisingly labyrinthine bureaucracy that had somehow survived the conversion of the RJA into the JLF. 'Damned cockroaches survived the Conquest, and they'll probably survive until the Day of Liberation itself... Not much longer after that, if I have my way...'

And on that topic, Josui turned to the battered and heavily annotated political and topographic map of Japan that hung on his office wall, just by the door and above the wastepaper basket.

The General Staff summer strategy meeting was of course supposedly concerned with lofty affairs of high strategy and the formulation of the next cunning stratagem to unleash against the hated foreigners, and it wouldn't do to show up without some form of proposal in hand. Although the proposed plans were ultimately more set dressing than substance, openly acknowledging the farce would fatally undermine his hard-fought position. And now that the matter of internal politics had momentarily been dealt with, it was high time for the Commander of the 3rd to figure out what his contribution to the sham meeting would be.

Unlike the last few dozen such meetings, though, Josui felt like this time he might actually have a chance to force the issue. 'If I can call in that favor with Tohdoh... Or even suggest that he take the field personally, the "Miracle Worker of Itsukushima"... Hmm...'

APRIL 21, 2016 ATB
SHINJUKU GHETTO, TOKYO SETTLEMENT
1550

Six years ago, when my mother and I had been forced behind the freshly built walls encircling the Shinjuku Ghetto, I had dreamed of the day I would leave the massive prison our conquerors had built for us. Through the years of struggle, hunger, and sickness, I had dreamed of my past life, of soaring high above any wall built by human hands. I had dreamed of freedom, freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from the hollow-eyed gaze of men and women infected with the hopeless miasma of Shinjuku.

Now, I was entering Shinjuku once again. As it had six years before, my randoseru hung low on my back, crammed to capacity with clothes and other supplies. As before, I lowered my head as I passed through the checkpoint into Shinjuku, my distinctively bright hair hidden under a rag. And as before, the scent of Shinjuku – a stew of clogged gutters, rotting garbage, feces, and too many people living in too small of a space, all simmering in the heat of the afternoon sun – rose up to greet me.

The pistol butt pushing into my gut was, of course, a significant departure from that long ago August day. Likewise, while my mother no longer trudged before me, bent under her own load of meager possessions and grief, Ohgi now walked beside me, standing as tall as a Japanese man could in this land of Elevens. Most importantly, I was not entering Shinjuku as a refugee. The times had changed, after six long years.

While I still dreamed of freedom, I no longer dreamed of escape.

Besides Ohgi and myself, Nagata and twenty-eight of the freshly trained insurgent fighters returned to Shinjuku the same way we had left it – in ones and twos, for the most part, merging with the crowds of returning day laborers and Honorary Britannians coming to the Ghetto to indulge their vices. Tsubaki and the rest of Squad 2 were taking a slight detour on the way into Shinjuku, rendezvousing with one of Inoue's Rising Sun trucks to load the weapons and equipment we had brought from The School.

Despite the familiar stench, Shinjuku hadn't remained unchanged in my absence. The cheeks of passersby seemed a touch less hollow, and their hair and skin somewhat more lustrous. People's eyes seemed brighter and more alert than I remembered, and most of the crowd walked purposefully and quickly, instead of the trudging "Shinjuku Shuffle". Fresh asphalt glistened under the sun from freshly filled-in potholes, tar still soft and sticky, and fresh whitewash unblemished by gang tags shone on tenement walls.

And, while the cheap brothels and bars that clustered in the streets near the checkpoints were busy as always, even in the mid-afternoon, I noticed a lack of any obvious gangsters swaggering about the place. Even the pimps and the callers hustling for customers seemed more well behaved than I remembered from my mother's time.

Beside me, Ohgi let out an impressed grunt, and I nodded in agreement as we walked. This slice of Shinjuku, just under a kilometer from Naoto and Ohgi's shared apartment and a kilometer and a half from the Rising Sun's meeting house, while neither thriving nor prospering, looked significantly better off than it had mere months ago.

As we turned off the road leading to the checkpoint and left the view of any curious Britannian soldier, Ohgi turned to me and broke the silence, speaking with a slight smile. "Naoto and Inoue have been busy, I see!"

I hummed in agreement, somewhat distracted by my attempt to fish the handheld radio out of my randoseru. "They've made a good start, no doubt about that." Finally, I felt the hard plastic shell of the radio and pulled it from its nest of clothes. "And if we can keep up the momentum, perhaps the Haulers will only have half their usual workload come December."

Ohgi frowned at the reference to the often gang-affiliated body disposal contractors, but nodded in agreement. I felt a bit bad at dumping proverbial cold water on his good mood, but it was important to keep the stakes in mind when evaluating progress.

Shinjuku had taken a step in the correct direction, but that single step didn't make up for the long flight of stairs it had been shoved down. In all likelihood, the same old trucks would cruise the streets of the ghetto with their grisly cargo as winter increased the caloric requirements for survival and weakened already damaged immune systems. The weak and frail, the very young and the very old, the unfortunate and the foolish, would all die.

In a way, it was almost a fulfillment of the Britannian ideal. The strong would live and the unworthy would shiver their last hours away. Like all things Britannian, that 'ideal' was hypocritical in application and fundamentally corrupt. Fortunately, I now had the basic tools to carry out some artificial selection of my own.

I might not be able to prevent the usual winter death toll, but this year I'll damned well make sure the gangs don't profit from it.

"Backpack to Boxcar. Report, over." I resumed walking as I released the 'transmit' button. Ohgi fell into step beside me, taking care to shorten his usual stride so he wouldn't leave me behind. A few seconds later, the radio crackled to life. "Boxcar to Backpack. We're through the gate. The pass and the envelope full of cash worked. ETA five to eight minutes, over."

Far more interference than out in the boonies, but still understandable. Good, I was worried about that.

"Backpack to Boxcar. Keep up the good work. Remember to check the receiver, over." A moment later, a thought crossed my mind, and I turned and looked up at Ohgi. "Inoue probably has the evening meal well underway by now, right?"

"Hmm... Unless things have changed..." Ohgi mulled the question over for a second before shrugging, "probably so. Besides, I'm sure she'd be able to find something for Tsubaki and whoever's driving the truck, even if dinner's not quite ready yet."

Deliberately ignoring both the knowing smile on the man's face and the irritation heating my neck – when did he get so smug about predicting my motives? - I thumbed the channel back on. "Backpack to Boxcar. Take your time and get a meal while you're there." A momentary pause, and I continued. "And remember your table manners – you're still on the clock. Backpack out."

I crammed the radio back into the randoseru and strode forward, continuing the familiar trip to the apartment. Irritatingly, Ohgi easily kept up with me. Damn him and his long legs! Somehow, he picked up on that thought and laughed – laughed! - at me. When I tried to pick up speed - I was, after all, eager to see Naoto again and to report in after months away – the bastard laughed even harder!

I almost turned on my heel to lay into Ohgi, to wipe that laughing smile away by threatening him with remedial courses back at The School, but then I remembered that he would be heading back soon enough regardless of my threat. Someone with rank needed to keep an eye on Onoda, after all, and Ohgi was already familiar with the man and with The School.

I guess I'll let him laugh a bit longer before I shut him up...

I had told Naoto to expect us at 1600, and I felt very gratified as I knocked on the door to his apartment at 1600 on the dot. Sometimes, it's the small pleasures that make the day worthwhile.

Almost immediately, the door swung open, revealing a barely recognizable, albeit beaming, Naoto. Despite his smile, his bloodshot eyes were momentarily wary, his free hand held behind his back, clearly gripping some kind of weapon. A second later, the wariness had vanished and Ohgi was being pulled into the apartment, and into Naoto's embrace.

"Ohgi, man, great to see you!" Naoto laughed with undisguised glee, slapping his second on the back enthusiastically. "You're looking tanned as hell – guess that mountain air did you good, huh?"

Ohgi was more restrained in joy to be back in his shared apartment, but eagerly returned Naoto's embrace, minus the back-slapping. "Guess it did – I could have done with a bit less snow, though."

I took the opportunity to follow the other two officers into the apartment, closing the door behind me as Naoto exclaimed "Oh yeah, I bet it gets real deep up in the mountains!" as he released Ohgi and turned to me. "And Tanya... Woah, when did you get so tall? I was about to make a joke about you getting buried in the snow, but I guess that's not an issue now!"

"I wouldn't go that far," I demurred, idly chatting as I looked around the studio apartment instead of focusing on Naoto. Idly, I noticed the pistol he'd been holding while answering the door wasn't the Britannian standard issue sidearm. Wonder where he got such a large caliber coilgun? And with a silencer, no less! "I only gained a few centimeters, and Ohgi was kind enough to act as my snowplow until the spring melt had begun." Remembering my manners, I held out my hand. "It's good to see you again, sir."

Naoto brushed my proffered hand aside and hugged me too. A moment later, I remembered to return the hug. It was difficult; While I had never been particularly physically expressive, this time I was more worried about somehow breaking Naoto if I touched him. He already looked so... fragile.

When I had left Shinjuku behind, Naoto had looked like a somewhat overworked and overstressed office worker in his mid to late twenties, ignoring his unprofessionally long red hair, of course. Despite the dark shadows under his eyes, he'd still been very energetic, throwing himself into whatever task was at hand with all his might and enthusiasm.

Naoto had aged a decade in the four months since I'd last seen him. His smile still had a shadow of the boyish energy I remembered from our first meeting, but his wide and glassy eyes, ringed with dark circles, goggled out from his sallow face. Deep lines of stress and fatigue were carved into his forehead, and his face was overrun with bristling stubble.

Not to mention the stink.

Over the last few months, I had forgotten how hard it was to stay clean in the ghetto. With only cold water available from the taps, and all soap either homemade or purchased at a premium from smugglers importing Britannian goods into Shinjuku, for years cleanliness had been out of the question for me. That had only turned around once I had met Ohgi and Naoto, and once the Rising Sun had made it far easier to import necessities through the Britannian checkpoints.

But Naoto had slipped, and slipped hard, on matters of hygiene. When I had met him, I had been somewhat astonished at how clean he had been, compared to the men I had labored beside on the work crews. Now, his shoulder-length red hair was matted and greasy, his fingers were yellow with cigarette residue and grime, and his breath reeked with halitosis.

"I think," Naoto said, leaning back from the embrace and smiling down at me, "that you can call me by name now. In fact, I insist – don't call me 'sir', Tanya." He smirked, and ruffled my hair. "After all, I've been following your plan while you've been away – maybe I should start calling you ma'am, eh?"

I scowled up at Naoto, but I didn't have the heart to chide him for teasing me. Humor is, after all, a perfectly valid coping mechanism, and he'd clearly had a hard time lately. And if he wants things to be a bit more familiar when we're in private, I suppose that's fine too. "No need for that, Naoto. I'm just following your orders."

I paused for a moment, trying to remember how Naoto had put it when he'd redefined my duties months ago, before parroting his own words back. "Think about the big picture stuff and the logistics, and work out with Nagata so you get some muscle?" I arched an eyebrow as I lifted my arm up for inspection, pushing the t-shirt up out of the way and flexing my bicep. "I believe I've made a good start on both of those tasks, yes?"

Naoto laughed at that, and jokingly squeezed my arm. "Looks like the country life was good for you – both of you!" He turned back to Ohgi, who had dropped his backpack off on his bed before rejoining us by the table. "You're looking pretty good too, Ohgi! The training must've really been intense, huh? Is Tanya really that much of a taskmaster?"

"Oh, you have no idea." Ohgi circled the table and clapped his hands on my shoulders, before dropping down heavily onto one of the mismatched chairs, which creaked under his weight. "This one was only half the problem – I'm going to have to go back to The School the day after tomorrow to keep an eye on the other half."

"Wait, The School? You're calling the training facility... The School?" As we'd been talking, the flat look in Naoto's eyes had diminished as he grew more involved and interested in the conversation. Despite this, he still seemed to somehow be looking through Ohgi and I, instead of looking at us. But as Ohgi nodded in confirmation, the flat look disappeared entirely for the first time since he'd opened the apartment door.

In its place, a look of flabbergasted wonder, mingled with amusement, spread across Naoto's face. He was still filthy, obviously stressed out, and deep into sleep debt, but in that moment, he no longer looked prematurely aged. "You can't call it The School!" Naoto collapsed into another chair, and theatrically rubbed at his brow. "Which one of you geniuses came up with that? Do you want the trainees to come up with their own name for the place? Was it Ohgi? I bet it was Ohgi."

I bristled slightly as Naoto sighed dramatically. Admittedly, I hadn't been able to come up with a clever name for the training facility, and it was true that I'd just started referring to the place as "The School" for lack of anything better, but marketing was not part of my core skill set, dammit! "There's something to be said for elegance in simplicity," I replied, perhaps a touch frostily, as I joined the other two at the table, "and I couldn't care less what the trainees call the place, as long as they learn enough to be worth my time."

Naoto nodded agreeably. "Yeah, wouldn't want to haul 'em all the way out to the boonies only for them to screw up and catch a bullet their first day out." Ohgi winced, and reached across the table and patted one of my suddenly clenched fists. I closed my eyes, tuning out Naoto's mortified expression as I took a deep breath, held it, and released it. I need to remember to visit Sumire's family to convey the news.

When I opened my eyes again, Naoto was staring off into the space beyond my shoulder, all trace of his earlier amusement gone. A moment later, he blinked and refocused on me. "I'm sorry, Tanya," His voice was gruff, and sounded somewhat choked, "That was a stupid thing to say. It's... It's been a while since I could talk to anyone without being on my game."

Naoto sighed, leaned forward, and cradled his forehead in his hands. "I've been so busy and so stressed... I can't even sleep a full night anymore..." He sat back up, rubbing at his head. "But that's no excuse to be a jackass. I'm sorry. I've... I've lost a few too. Mostly militia, but... One of Chihiro's girls bought it a month back. It was damned bad luck too – we bandaged the cut, but it got infected, and..." He shrugged helplessly, "She's still kinda broken up about it – Chihiro, I mean. She took it kinda... badly."

I nodded, trying to indicate that I accepted his apology. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that piece of news – on one hand, it was, of course, unfortunate to lose comrades, but on the other, it didn't feel quite as raw personal as my own losses felt. I suppose I only knew Chihiro's team for a month, and then I left for the camp... That's probably it. Distance and time make separation easier.

I would need to pay Chihiro a visit, sooner rather than later. I hadn't really gotten to know either Chihiro or Souichiro outside of a professional capacity, and I suspect that might have had an adverse impact on our relationships. While Chihiro had been at best cool towards me, perhaps now that we had a shared misfortune to bond over, I could mend some bridges? Plus, it'd also be a good idea to see if everyone else who stayed behind in Shinjuku looks as exhausted as Naoto. If they are, that's an issue, and if they aren't... that's also an issue.

"That's... truly unfortunate, Naoto," I began, trying to express my sincere feelings of regret over the loss of a comrade without sounding like I was faking a personal grief that I wasn't sure I truly felt. She was his comrade and subordinate too – if you can't truly feel sad about her death, try to feel sad for him and for his loss. "Speaking from experience, I can say that it's hard to have people die under your command."

It all sounded wooden and pro forma, even in my own ears. I began to feel that irritating heat of embarrassment and shame crawling up the back of my neck. How the hell did Ohgi make talking about this look so easy? And how did he sound so honest? It was just another reminder, as if I needed one, of the importance of finding people who could support me and cover my weaknesses. In that case, best to delegate the task of sympathy to someone competent.

"I'm sure Ohgi can and will put this better, but I'm sorry for your loss. I will visit Chihiro later and console her as well." I forced my mouth closed, as the words began to tumble out, somehow emotional and stilted at the same time. The itchy heat crawled further up my spine, but I refused to submit to it, and plowed my way back to more familiar ground. Back to business.

"Now, before that, how about you give me a rundown of the last few months, here in Shinjuku? What's happened since Ohgi and I left?"

Kozuki Naoto smiled at the true leader of the Rising Sun Benevolent Association, and tried not to show how exhausted he truly felt behind his politician's mask.

The not-as-tiny blonde really had grown significantly over her absence from Shinjuku – both physically and emotionally. Limbs that could once only be called scrawny were now toned, already sun-gold hair had been bleached by the sun to a near white towards the tips, and Tanya gave the overall impression of constrained energy, only barely holding herself in place. The chronic fatigue from the first months she had slept in a nest of blankets on the floor of his apartment was, as far as Naoto could tell, completely gone.

More importantly, Tanya clearly had opened up to Ohgi, at the very least. Naoto's own skills of personal observation, initially cultivated by his father and developed by his time caring for his sister and mother, had been strengthened over the intervening months by his dealings with the Public Safety Committees; now, the girl's previously enigmatic body language spoke volumes. She was looser and less controlled in her gestures, yet also increasingly confident in expressing emotion both physically and aloud.

And yet, at the core, Tanya was the same. The dark bags beneath her eyes were gone, but the fierce intelligence shining in those startlingly blue eyes was just as piercing as it had been when she'd made her recruitment pitch so long ago. She was seasoned by experience, and judging by how she'd accepted Ohgi touching her hand, she no longer flinched away from human contact; she had clearly gone from strength to strength.

'I wish I could say the same thing about myself,' Naoto thought, doing his best to package away the grief and lingering horror over Makoto's agonizing death, 'but even Ohgi looked shocked when he saw me. Guess it's even worse than that time we went on a five-day bender.'

"At first, it was business as usual." Naoto kept his focus on Tanya as he began, but angled his head so he could face Ohgi, including him in the conversation as well. "I focused on keeping up the pressure on the gangs with Tamaki and Chihiro's crews. We spent a fair amount of time conducting reconnaissance to sniff out their hideouts and stash houses and hauling a few choice gang members into basements for friendly chats. Souichiro was instrumental when it came to interrogations – he still remembers plenty from when he was a policeman, so that's not too much of a surprise, I guess. Thanks to the intel we had gathered, we were able to keep up the pressure and hit various gang facilities, including armories and supply dumps."

It was, Naoto thought, amazing how such a brief summary could reduce weeks of effort into a list of seemingly trivial affairs. Hours spent carefully shadowing gang members through the crowded streets of Shinjuku, long nights of staking out targeted apartments and safehouses, and moments of intense violence as he and his comrades burst into said safehouses in the early morning and hauled their targets away to basements and subway tunnels across Shinjuku, all reduced to a handful of sentences.

"We managed to spread out pretty far, and ended up claiming a lot of territory around the Rising Sun's meeting house. Turns out, establishing firm control over the area solved a few of Inoue's headaches – since the gangs weren't around anymore, and since we had control over all the territory between the meeting house and the Mejiro Avenue Checkpoint by mid-February, we were able to import a ton of food into Shinjuku, as well as make significant progress on fixing up some of the infrastructure. Clearing drains, fixing roads, that kinda stuff."

It had been amazing, watching Shinjuku come back to life as the food and construction supplies had poured in. For the first time since Naoto had left his family to come live with Ohgi in Shinjuku, the seemingly inexorable decay had been reversed. Potholes had been filled in and shattered asphalt had been melted down and rolled back into freshly repaved roads. Rebuilding the drains had been a momentous task, and Naoto wasn't fully confident in their amateurish work, but hopefully the pipes and streets full of standing water wouldn't make a reappearance come the monsoon season.

Money had been difficult, of course – the money gained from the raid on the subway station was long gone, and without reselling drugs seized in subsequent raids within the ghetto, the cash taken in those same raids could only go so far. Expanding the Rising Sun's operations was an expensive undertaking, and the costs had quickly mounted up. From the bribes paid to the checkpoint guards, to the cost of construction materials, food shipments, work permits, tools, and the rental fees for the trucks, the costs were never ending. To say nothing of the costs of Mister Asahara's specialist devices - even with his "discount for virtuous works and repeat customers," his work demanded a premium.

But in the end, they had managed to make ends meet, somehow. Kallen had managed to net some donations from the more paternalistic invaders in the Tokyo Settlement by publishing several articles that spoke eloquently about the plight of the Honorary Britannians and how much the Rising Sun had done to alleviate their suffering, while dancing around the reasons why the Honorary Britannians were in such dire straits in the first place.

Then, with the seed money provided by those donations, Inoue had come up with a scheme to buy work passes into the Settlement, where Elevens could find day labor or other low paying work. She distributed the passes to Shinjuku denizens who didn't have the means to pay the necessary "processing fees", on the understanding that a significant portion of their wages would be handed over to the Rising Sun Benevolent Association in the name of purchasing more such passes. Between the paternal Britannian donations, the trickle of money seized from gangsters, and the income from their workforce, Rising Sun had just barely kept their heads above water.

"So, yeah, things were going very smoothly for the first three weeks or so. We didn't tag all the places we hit, so some of the gangs thought they were under attack from the others. Honestly, I think lots of them were just surprised to be attacked at all! Guess they got arrogant, or maybe they actually believed that the Purists attacked Shinjuku-gyoemmae, who knows? Anyway, it took them a while to get a clue and stop messing around."

Naoto felt his smiling mask slip slightly as he remembered the end of the good times. Over the course of a week in mid-February, things had spiraled from bad to worse.

"They started getting smarter – posting more guards, setting up actual checkpoints near their bases, their officers starting to enforce some kind of discipline – and the really smart ones started buying better weapons. Most of the low-ranking guys had been using knives and blunt weapons and only the higher ups had pistols, but now lots of the lower ranking gangsters were carrying guns and the elites – the ones who like to dress up as Britannians - started getting military gear."

"It was pretty jarring to suddenly have something like parity, you know? No clue who was flooding the market with Britannian Army weapons that must've fallen off a truck somewhere, but suddenly every gang officer had an SMG to call their own. Thank the gods they never bothered to learn how to aim, much less actually maintain their new toys! Anyway, we were still able to pick off strays, but taking the war to the gangs got far too risky by the first week of March or so."

Naoto, Inoue, and Souichiro had spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out where the gangs were getting their new equipment without success. It was possible that the gangs were buying their weapons from corrupt Britannians with access to military supplies in the Settlement, but that didn't answer the question of how the guns were being trafficked into Shinjuku. A possibility was that the larger and more powerful gangs, the ones who directly catered to the Britannians, had decided for some reason to flood Shinjuku with military grade weaponry, perhaps at the behest of the Britannians or some third party. That didn't make sense though, since the big gangs didn't profit from it in any way that Naoto could discern.

For his part, Naoto suspected that the street gangs that he had fought over the last three months were probably getting their weapons from the same source that the now-defunct Kokuryu-kai had gotten the Knightmare Tanya had blown up in Shinjuku-gyoemmae Station months ago from. He had no hard evidence, but that Knightmare had been remarkably out of place in that weapons market back then, almost as out of place as the sudden flood of military grade weapons was now.

"The real problem was the numbers. Chihiro's group, Tamaki's group, Souichiro, and me – that's ten – weren't really able to both attack the newly equipped gangsters and protect the Rising Sun at the same time. So, we switched to the defensive. Mister Asahara knew a guy who knew a guy, and we bought some scoped rifles from him."

"Is there any chance," Tanya abruptly interrupted, leaning forward slightly with an air that reminded Naoto of a falcon zeroing in on a suddenly exposed target, "that the gangs were perhaps buying their weapons from Mister Asahara's acquaintance as well?"

Naoto blinked, feeling momentarily befuddled as he ran the idea through his mind. To his sudden and growing irritation, he realized that he had never considered the possibility, and that he really should have. 'Guess I still have a lot to learn,' he thought, 'thank the gods Tanya's on my side.' Aloud, he admitted: "It's a possibility, but not one I'd considered."

Ohgi nodded. "It's definitely worth a follow-up, at the very least. Arms dealers aren't known for their scruples, after all."

Naoto nodded, and then continued his report. "Chihiro and her team set up some apartments overlooking the major streets in and around Rising Sun territory as sniper's nests and started picking off anybody wearing gang scarfs that they could see. While they weeded out the brave and the foolish, Tamaki's crew and I took shifts watching over the construction crews and the meeting house in case any got through."

Split up into pairs, with the pacifist Kasumi acting as a spotter for Chihiro, Chihiro's team had shifted from sniper's nest to sniper's nest several times each day, with at least one pair active at all times. The gunfire from the rooftops had proven amazingly effective at disrupting the various gangs' amateurish incursion attempts – the scarf-clad thugs had no idea what to do in the face of the high-powered rifles. The heavy bullet effortlessly pierced the crude homemade body armor the gangs tried to put together, and the abundant practice on live targets meant Chihiro's girls were remarkably accurate with their weapons. A single paired team could effectively lock down entire roads, shredding attempted invasions with ease.

As always, the only problem had been that Chihiro and her girls could only cover a small slice of the urban jungle at any given time.

"Still, we were getting pressed pretty hard. Lots of our workers had gotten beaten up, and some were severely injured. We were pushing ourselves harder and harder to be everywhere, but all that did was tire everybody out even faster. It was only a matter of time until we were forced back. Thankfully, I remembered how you'd reached out to the locals and their committees. I told them that we were having trouble keeping the gangsters out and the food coming in, and that they needed to help us out if they wanted to keep eating. Problem was, they weren't organized – every block and street and tenement doing its own thing, you know? So, that was the first step, getting them all on the same page."

'And boy, was that a gigantic first step,' Naoto wryly reflected. It was astonishing how people, even with so little to lose and everything to gain, could have so many grudges. And those grudges were incredibly petty in scope! This block asserted that that block had been dumping their waste onto this block's street, so that they'd have to pay the hauler crews to deal with it! That tenement committee asserted that the tenement next door was using too much water, reducing the already low water pressure in the barely functional plumbing system and depriving the upper floors of their tenement of water all together!

Trying to get everyone to cooperate had been an endless headache, but thankfully Naoto had leverage over virtually everybody in the Rising Sun's zone. After all, nobody wanted to go back to eating watery soup once a day.

"Fortunately, they all needed the supplies we were bringing in, plus we'd built up some good credit by dealing with the gangsters for the last few months. So, they all agreed that the Rising Sun should be in charge, but dealing with their grievances with each other took some work. After I helped arbitrate a few of their disputes, we got representatives from the ten or so biggest groups in the Rising Sun territory to agree to work together, and to join a Central Committee that I'd be chairing."

Truth be told, Naoto had desperately tried to find someone – anyone – who could handle the Committee nonsense in his place. Unfortunately, the only other viable leader would be Inoue, who had flatly refused. "You're the charismatic one," She said when he had asked her directly, "not to mention the noble's son, and the one who they've all been talking to. You handle the politics, and I'll make sure you've got all the carrots you need to get them to cooperate." And so, Naoto had found himself once again thrust into a leadership role he felt unqualified for – but this time, he felt like he'd actually managed to do a good job.

"I told the Committee that we were having trouble, and needed help. We could give them weapons, but we needed bodies to use them. Some of the recruits who'd signed up after Christmas stepped up, which was a good start, but the leaders didn't want to just hand over their people to us. We managed to work out a compromise, where I'd consult the Committee before making any big moves, but I'd be allowed to manage their day to day as I saw fit."

It had been a difficult task to get the Committee to concede even that much. While few of the local leaders considered the Rising Sun Association a threat to their personal authority, thanks to Tanya's early policy of treating said leaders as stakeholders and partners instead of potential rivals, none were eager to concede even a fragment of their personal power bases. Naoto had been forced to lean on his role as the conduit of food, ammunition, and weapons into the territory to assert his ultimate authority over the newly formed "Sun Guards" militia.

"So, we got a militia set up. I armed them with gear we'd liberated from gang armories the month before and put them in charge of patrolling and guarding the territory. Their job was to hold things together until I could send Tamaki or Chihiro as reinforcements to deal with any troublemakers."

It had been far from an ideal solution – for one, the Sun Guards stuck out in the open as highly visible targets ran the risk of being overrun before reinforcements could arrive. Fortunately, most of the gangsters who swaggered into Rising Sun territory were there to try and gain respect from their crew and loot, not to die for a few meters of pavement. Once the nearby Sun Guards units started rallying to the pinned unit, or once Chihiro's snipers or Tamaki's now veteran streetfighters appeared, most gangs broke and ran rather than stay and fight.

Of course, that was only if the rank-and-file gangsters weren't accompanied by any of the competent gang officers. The presence of leaders or veteran fighters willing and able to hold their own increased the danger presented by the gang incursions significantly. Unsupervised, the rank-and-file members were content to fire a few potshots and hang back, but under the eyes of their bosses, they were far more willing to close with the enemy, more afraid of their leaders than they were of Naoto and his comrades.

"The gangs didn't like this very much, and made several attempts to take back control over their lost territory. They tried to mimic our hit and run attacks, but that mostly amounted to them just charging in and breaking everything they could, or ambushing an isolated militia patrol. They tried a few big attacks – once, a few local gangs rallied and showed up with a few hundred men. That was a bit of a dangerous moment."

"The fools didn't realize we'd known they were coming. Wouldn't you know it, hungry gangsters can be bribed with food too!" Naoto mimed an expression of theatrical shock; Tanya's cool gaze and lone arched eyebrow said that she wasn't impressed with his attempt to inject a moment of humor, but Naoto was rewarded by a slight upward twitch of her lips. He smirked for a moment, before exhaling, the humor slipping away as he returned to his report.

"That's not really a surprise - not like gangs are very good at building loyalty, or information security. Since we knew when they were coming and where they'd show up, we had time to buy some of Mister Asahara's best and set up a nice little ambush." Tanya's lips twitched upwards again, and Naoto saw a quick flash of teeth before she seemed to remember that she was 'on duty' and suppressed her visible amusement. 'She always loves her little ambushes,' Naoto thought fondly. Those early memories of Tanya, fresh from her truck hijacking and dripping with gore, were old enough to almost be nostalgic.

It had been, in Naoto's opinion, a plan worthy of Tanya - simple in execution, yet highly effective. A handful of nailbombs concealed by random garbage strewn around the planned line of advance and activated via tripwire had scythed at knee height through the approaching mob of gangsters. Immediately, the smart ones and those lucky enough to avoid debilitating injury turned and fled, abandoning their injured and crippled comrades to the Rising Sun's tender mercies.

Naoto had seen little reason to offer any of the gangsters any hint of mercy, and instead stood back and let the militia have their fun; the gangsters had chosen their side - they could reap the whirlwind. Years of fear of the swaggering bullies had boiled forth in an orgy of freely expressed rage, and justice had been meted out with bricks, bats, and knives. The mess had been awful, as had the noise, but Naoto hadn't been able to find it in himself to care.

Plus, he'd had no shortage of volunteers eager to clean up the mess in the aftermath. In the end, the inhabitants of the Rising Sun's slice of Shinjuku hadn't even needed to deal with the sanitation hazard of thirty-odd corpses smeared across the pavement, much less a return to gang subjugation.

"Eventually, we managed to kill enough of the bastards to get them to back off, once and for all. They've still been poking around the edges, hassling construction crews and trying to hijack trucks bringing supplies in, but we've been able to handle that. Turns out, having the dismembered bodies of your thugs dropped off in your territory sends a message. After things cooled down, I managed to get most of the militia guys back to working on fixing up the territory, since we didn't need as many guards."

One of those attempted hijackings had actually been how poor Makoto had ended up with a knife in her bicep. A gangster had jumped up on the running board of the truck she had been driving as she slowed around a corner and put the knife to her throat through the open window. She'd managed to shove his arm back and away, ultimately pushing him off the running board, but in the process had taken a nasty gash across the bicep. Despite attempts at disinfecting the wound with moonshine it had turned septic, and a week later Makoto had died as the fever ravaged her body.

It had been a painful and ultimately avoidable death, but Naoto was quietly thankful that Makoto had been the only one of "his people" who had died during the three months of near constant violence. Several of the Sun Guard militia had died, and he felt badly about them and had taken the time to visit widows and families, but they weren't "his" people the way Chihiro and Tamaki's teams were. Chihiro had been utterly inconsolable, and Naoto had ended up giving her a week off to spend with her sister. He still needed to find someone else, preferably female, to slot into the vacancy in her squad.

"Eventually, we managed to get enough hands available and enough resources built up that we could start some of those other projects you'd floated a while back, Tanya. Trying to improve the ghetto's resource base, and maybe get a little self-sufficiency, in case the Brits decide to squeeze us again. Plus, it gave everybody more work to do instead of just standing around or working on the drains, which is always a good thing."

Tamaki, surprisingly, had been the one to point out what a bad idea it was to leave armed and angry young people, mostly men, without anything to do. "I know I'd probably do something stupid," he'd admitted to Naoto after one of their team meetings in the old basement headquarters, "but if you keep 'em busy, they'll be too tired to do much damage." Thankfully, improving Shinjuku was a functionally endless task, and Naoto wasn't running out of projects in need of strong hands.

"Anyway, we started building planters for rooftop vegetable gardens, rain funnels into cisterns, and stuff like that. One of the militia guys actually had a good idea about how to purify water on the cheap using the sun's heat and a glass pane, in case the water mains get damaged or the Britannians decide to turn the water off. Getting the window glass for it into the ghetto and up to the roofs intact was difficult, but we managed. Of course, we had to build the distillers to a somewhat smaller scale than we wanted, since typhoon season's going to be starting in a few weeks and we'd need to haul them inside when the winds turn."

"We even managed to give Souichiro's poultry coops idea a stab! The test coop is actually up on the roof of this building, in a shack we rigged up. The first batch of chicks is still growing, so we haven't had any eggs yet, much less meat, but Souichiro's pretty happy about it so far."

Naoto subsided back into his chair, and took a sip from the glass of water Ohgi had slid across the table to him as he'd talked. He'd been speaking for the last ten minutes, and he felt like he could easily speak for hours more, if Tanya really wanted a blow by blow, or wanted the details of how he, Chihiro, and Souichiro had really acquired that intelligence from abducted gangsters.

It had been a turbulent few months, and Naoto couldn't say that he was proud of everything he had been party to, everything that he had ordered, over that time. On the other hand, despite Tanya's absence, things hadn't fallen apart – he had held the line, and indeed moved it forward, advancing the Rising Sun's control over Shinjuku while improving the quality of life for those under his control. While Tanya, inexplicable genius that she was, could probably have accomplished just as much as he had, Naoto doubted she could have done much more. Feeling somewhat lighter, now that he'd had a chance to express the events of the last three months to someone who understood the pressure of leadership, he gestured at Tanya, encouraging her to speak.

"So, it's been a pretty busy three months. How about you?"

"A busy three months," he says? Honestly, Naoto was badly underselling himself and his achievements by concluding his report on such a blasé note. When I had left Shinjuku in January, I had expected them to hold the line, and to continue the Rising Sun's humanitarian efforts. I had expected the sudden loss of trained personnel and stockpiled resources and, if I was being honest, my direct oversight, to have arrested the growth of the Kozuki Organization's control over Shinjuku. How could I have been so arrogant? In believing that only I could make a difference, I had fallen for my own hype. A handful of minor successes, and I'm already turning into a megalomaniac! Unacceptable!

Contrary to my expectations, Naoto and Inoue had taken my half-baked plan for potential future improvements to Shinjuku and run with it, in the process achieving an almost unimaginable degree of success. Wait, maybe he wasn't teasing me by saying he was following my plan? But...

True, I had sketched out the 'plan', which was a generous term for the collection of speculations and dreams that it truly was, shortly after Naoto had given me permission to start the Rising Sun Benevolent Association. I had expanded on it after Ohgi had told me about the Six Houses of Kyoto, while trying to assemble a pitch for these potential investors, only to more or less drop the project as the man from Kyoto dashed my hopes of significant support. But I couldn't really call it my plan, especially not after Naoto had put so much hard work into expanding and realizing it.

It was humbling. In three months, I had built two platoons of effective and highly mobile fighters, training and equipping them for the long fight to come, and had led them to a pair of minor victories. In that same time, Naoto had significantly improved the infrastructure of our zone of control, enforced that zone of control against all comers despite being greatly outnumbered, constructed a far larger army than I had, and had formed a government in embryo.

I found myself looking at my profoundly tired leader with fresh eyes. Is this how the 203rd had looked at me? When I had first met him, I had seen a charismatic warlord on the rise, a young man determined to set fire to the world that had left him a disinherited bastard in his own land. Later, I had seen him as a well-intentioned if somewhat naive and decidedly inexperienced leader – a green officer who, while promising, needed to be carefully instructed and handled. Now, though, after I had taken a step back, after I had ceased to hover over his shoulder...

Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it does make it easy to take people for granted, and in hindsight, I had taken Naoto and his dependency on my tactical acumen for granted. I had never stopped recognizing his institutional authority over me, and I had never doubted that his charisma gave him a great deal of sway over the members of the Kozuki Organization, but somewhere along the way I had stopped looking to him for orders. I had simply concocted plans, and expected him to follow them.

I had initially followed Kozuki Naoto out of fear, and out of a need for support. Once the fear had lapsed, I had followed him because he had the respect of those around him, and because he had respected me. But now, I felt like I could follow him out of legitimate respect. I would, of course, still create plans, determine objectives, set goals – that was what he had appointed me to do, after all – but I would be sure to get his input when I did so. When I had left Shinjuku, he had risen to the occasion, and truly proved himself worthy of my loyalty.

"Naoto," I began, trying to figure out how to put that sentiment into words without admitting my earlier potentially disloyal thoughts. The man himself paused mid-sip, and put his glass of water back on the table, focusing his attention back on me. His blue eyes had seemingly darkened with fatigue, and it seemed like he was staring straight through me, glaring at a point just behind my head. "You have made a commendable effort. Ohgi and I were both deeply impressed by the cleanliness and order we saw on our way here."

"The place hasn't looked this good in the last six years!" Ohgi interjected, backing me up. I nodded in acknowledgment to him, before turning back to Naoto.

"I still need to catch up on the details," Three months worth of broad strokes crammed into a ten minute summary was a good starting point, but I would need more information before I could begin planning prospective next moves. "And it sounds like I will need to visit Inoue as soon as possible, so she can get me up to speed with the Rising Sun's current operations," I saw Ohgi open his mouth, and I hurried to pre-empt him, "After I've visited Chihiro and offered my condolences, of course." Ohgi closed his mouth, but he was still frowning at me. There's just no pleasing some people.

"Hey, don't leave yet!" Naoto made a staying gesture, hand trembling slightly as he beckoned me to stay seated. "I still want to hear what you've been up to over the last few months. Plus," his thin lips twitched into a slight smirk, "someone's coming to see you. I told her you'd be arriving back in Shinjuku today, and she's very eager to see you again."

I blinked, momentarily confused by Naoto's ambiguous phrasing, before abruptly realizing who he hadn't mentioned yet. "Ah yes, how rude of me. How is the family, Naoto? I hope your mother and sister are well?" And on that topic... Have you heard from your father lately, Naoto? What's he planning, across the Pacific in the Homeland?

Naoto chuckled. "Last I heard, Mom's doing fine. I haven't gone to see her in months, to be honest – I've been busy, and the last thing I need is a scolding to take care of myself." He looked like he was about to say something else, looked at me, and visibly reconsidered. A second later he shook his head, and smiled. "I'll let Kallen speak for herself – she should be here in an hour or so." He leaned back slightly in his chair, and folded his hands behind his head, pulling his jacket up and revealing the empty shoulder holster concealed below. "Just long enough for you to tell me about your spring vacation to Gunma!"

I nodded, acknowledging the implicit order. "Well then..." I closed my eyes, and took a minute to quickly get my thoughts in order. A moment later, I was ready.

"While still a work in progress, I am generally satisfied with the quality of the initial test cohort of trainees." They were no 203rd, but I had neither asked nor expected them to be. For a group of new recruits, many of them suffering from chronic malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies, the double-sized first cohort had done an admirable job in their training. "I have brought twenty-eight of the first cohort back to Shinjuku with me, leaving the other platoon in place to act as training cadre, as well as to deal with the logistics of keeping The School functional."

"The School curriculum, at present, provides general military training, supplemented with specific scouting and ambush training," I continued, moving on to discussing what the returning recruits could be expected to know and what tasks they could be expected to perform. "They are physically fit, capable of both distance marches at speed and sprinting while carrying up to thirty-five kilograms. They are all able to drive manual transmission vehicles, and can conduct basic vehicular maintenance, as well as sabotage. They are all confident marksmen, and are qualified with standard-issue Britannian sidearms and assault rifles, as well as shoulder-fired missile launchers. They are all trained in the correct and safe usage of radios and other communications devices, and have also been trained to install basic wiretaps and other surveillance and signal interception devices. All have been given a thorough education in basic strategy, ambush tactics, basic logistics, and the political and ideological basis of both the Britannian occupation and our own continued struggle."

I paused, realizing that I had dropped into a monotone as I listed point after point from the basic training package. This is a summary report, fool! Stop reciting the syllabus! "Of course, that's a good start, but I hope to expand The School towards more specialized programs over time, including a greater focus on human intelligence operations, demolitions and explosive device assembly, and, provided we can find training pods, Knightmare piloting and maintenance."

Naoto nodded in approval. "Having skilled bomb makers in our organization would make us less dependent on Mister Asahara, which seems like a really good idea if he really is somehow involved in arming our enemies here in Shinjuku."

I hummed my agreement. It hadn't escaped me that Mister Asahara was remarkably connected; when we had first sought out the Six Houses, he had put us into contact with Kyoto – and now, he had put Naoto in contact with whatever arms dealer had sold him those sniper rifles and ammunition. Not to mention how unconcerned he was when I threatened to shoot off his other leg back when we first met. The elderly engineer was an unknown, and I was increasingly certain that the less we depended on him, the better. Just like Onoda...

"Which," I said aloud, "in a roundabout way brings me to the reason Ohgi needs to return to The School as quickly as possible. You recall that the JLF was providing a liaison officer?" Naoto nodded slowly, with an air of slight confusion. "I suspect that he will attempt to suborn our trainees, left unattended."

"Wait, what?" The slight confusion had progressed into angry bewilderment. "He's trying to steal our recruits or take over your training school?"

"I... Well, I don't have any hard evidence that he's planning anything of the sort," I admitted, "but considering the man's personality, I'd almost be more surprised if he isn't trying something along those lines. He, Major Onoda Hiroo, is an intelligent man and a skilled soldier; he's also assisting his superior's bid to seize control over the JLF and has been remarkably open about his thoughts about my leadership, and for similar reasons may be suspect of yours as well."

"Tanya's very much underselling how unpleasant this guy is," Ohgi interrupted, leaning into the conversation with a frown. "When we arrived in Nakanojo for our first meeting with Onoda, he actually refused to speak to Tanya, much less acknowledge her leadership. He would only respond to what she said if I repeated it, and then he'd only speak to me, even though we were all in the same room!"

As Ohgi spoke, gradually accelerating into an angry rant, he began drumming his fingers on the table's scarred surface, giving some outlet to his seething energy. Naoto seemed equally annoyed - although likely for more personal reasons, considering the mixed heritage we shared and the reactions some Japanese as well as most Britannians had to it.

"He has, in that respect, gotten better," I put in, "although I frankly think that his early unwillingness to acknowledge me is the least of my concerns about him." Naoto turned to me, eyes full of clear disbelief, and I nodded in confirmation. "I am more worried about his reckless disregard for the lives of civilians – both Japanese and Honorary Britannian – and his eagerness to deliberately provoke tit for tat violence as a tool of boosting recruitment. He and his superior are also currently involved in an attempt to undermine the current leaders of the JLF, presumably to seize power for themselves."

Naoto's eyes continued to widen as I went into greater detail, describing my conversations with Major Onoda, including the points when he had practically outlined his faction's ongoing Gekokujō campaign. By the time I finished describing Onoda's unconcealed joy at the round-the-clock activity of Niigata Prefecture's crematories, which considering that Britannians tended to be buried instead of burnt spoke volumes, Naoto's expression had gone hard and flat.

"So, he's an asshole and clearly doesn't care about civilian casualties," Naoto summed up after I finished speaking. "Why are we working with this man?"

"Well, besides the fact that Kyoto House probably pushed the JLF to assign him to our facility deliberately," I began, "he's a very skilled soldier, scout, and infiltrator, and has done a satisfactory job conveying those skills to our trainees. More to the point, the faction that he represents is the only part of the JLF that is actively interested in taking the fight to the Britannians, instead of remaining in their bunkers. They're also the only faction in the JLF currently willing to arm and supply us."

I went over the first and second deals I had negotiated with Onoda, taking care to emphasize how much of a poisoned chalice the Six Houses had served us by pointedly not extending logistical support and by probably making sure Onoda – a known racist and bigot – was assigned to liase with a detachment headed by a female hafu. "...So, it was a case of making the best of a bad situation," I summed up, trying not to second-guess my decision making process in the face of Naoto's obvious disgruntlement. "Short of pulling back to Shinjuku and abandoning both the training camp idea and our credit with the Six Houses, I didn't see any other viable option."

Naoto grunted an acknowledgement, before shaking his head, and smiling reassuringly at me. "I'm not questioning your decisions, Tanya. It sounds like you did a good job in a bad situation." He started to frown again. "I'm just questioning whether or not seeking help from the Six Houses was a good idea in retrospect." He leaned back in his chair, and massaged his forehead. "I guess it doesn't matter, the deal's already been made. Did you say something about missions?"

Recognizing my cue, I briefly ran through the missions in Niigata and Nagano Prefectures, going over the objectives of each mission, the plans, the executions, and the outcomes. Ohgi jumped in periodically to add details that I had missed or neglected to include, but he was generally content to let me explain as the officer in the field what had happened on each mission. Naoto generally nodded along to each beat of my report, reserving his questions until I had finished running through each mission.

The only time Naoto reacted differently was when I mentioned Squad 1's losses during the Niigata mission. I had mentioned that detail only because it was an important "lessons learned" point for the mission, and had thus only discussed that small tragedy in a professional manner. Despite my attempt to stay impersonal, my treacherous voice had warbled annoyingly, and I'd had to clear my throat. I saw Naoto and Ohgi exchange a look, but I didn't know what it implied, nor did they explain. At the very least, Naoto did me the courtesy of not bringing up the minor but embarrassing burr in my presentation when he started to ask his questions.

Unsurprisingly, Naoto was far more interested in the ambush of the Knightmare convoy in Nagano than the radio station raid in Niigata. While he was attentive and interested in the details of the first mission I had conducted on Onoda's behalf, he was very clearly focused on the anti-Knightmare measures I'd used in the second mission. I couldn't blame him – not only was it a confrontation with a unit from the occupation army itself, if and when the Viceregal Governor ever attacked Shinjuku, his vanguard would likely be composed mostly of Knightmares. Knowing that they can be beaten by a non-peer force is a weapon in and of itself, I think.

Eventually, Naoto's seemingly inexhaustible supply of questions finally tapered off, to my faint relief. It was gratifying to have an interested and engaged boss, not to mention one who clearly had trust in my decision-making process. Despite Naoto's past displays of trust in my judgement, I still occasionally found myself wondering when he would interrupt and chide me for overstepping my authority. That moment never came - Naoto only asked for further details or clarifications about our operations over the last three months. After dealing with Onoda's frequent slips back into semi-open contempt of my heritage or gender, simply relaxing around my fellow leaders was a surprisingly relaxing experience.

"Well, it sounds like you guys have been pretty busy yourselves," Naoto commented, leaning back onto his chair's hind legs as I answered the last of his questions. "While I can't say I'm happy that we're more or less locked into dealing with this... Major Onoda," Naoto's mouth twisted, as if he'd bit into something rancid, "it seems like the deal's already paying off. So, we might as well make the most of it."

I nodded. "My thoughts exactly." I hadn't really expected Naoto to disagree with my decisions, but I was also happy that he seemed to understand why I had made those decisions and agreed with my reasoning. The similarities between my independent negotiations with Onoda's faction of the JLF and Kusakabe's efforts to undermine General Katase through unsanctioned missions were not lost on me. Unlike Onoda and Kusakabe, I had no interest in undermining or overthrowing my leader. He knows that, doesn't he? Of course he does...

I frowned, slightly uncomfortable with that line of thought, and wished that I had a cup of coffee at hand. It had been a long meeting, full of substantial dialogue and the exchange of important information, but no meeting really felt quite right without coffee. Besides, I've had to ration myself for months now! It's not fair! With a sigh, I pulled my mind back on track and I turned to Ohgi. "I think we've covered all the important developments, yes?" I was fairly certain everything worthy of discussion had already been handled, but I might have forgotten something.

"Well... No." No? I quickly racked my brain, going over the turning points and major decisions of the recent months, but I couldn't think of anything I'd missed. And why is he looking at me so expectantly? "Tanya, isn't there something you're forgetting about? Something important?" Ohgi was neither glowering nor glaring at me, but there was something in the single raised eyebrow and the kindly, yet firm, set of his face that told me that, whether or not I felt this mystery topic was important, he surely did. What am I forgetting? What important thing does Naoto not know about that is important...? ...Oh.

I had never really decided to share knowledge of my magic with anybody else, including Ohgi. That choice had been made for me, when Ohgi had followed me to that cobble-strewn riverbank and seen something inexplicable. At that point, the decision had been taken from my hands; lying to Ohgi almost certainly would have backfired, and simply refusing to answer hadn't really been a viable option. Necessity had forced my hand, and for the first time since I had begun my third life, I had told somebody about one of my two most closely kept secrets.

Unsurprisingly, I found myself resenting Ohgi for forcing the issue here and now. Magic was my one inheritance from my second life, not to mention the secret to my survival in this wretched third life in Area 11. I had only lived this long because the people around me saw only a malnourished and weak girl, one incapable of defending herself or surviving on her own; this perception had allowed me to get the drop on the unwary, most notably when I had taken advantage of my malnourished frame to fold myself up behind a truck chair, only to use my magically enhanced strength to stab two gang members to death.

On the other hand, I understood where Ohgi was coming from – my magic was a factor that our leader needed to know about, so he could best quantify my abilities and assign me a workload commensurate with those abilities. And, going beyond the sort of cold logic that came so easily to me... I trusted Naoto, and he trusted me. He and Ohgi had taken me in when they had very little, and I had nothing to contribute at all. He had seen my worth, and had promoted me in his organization, giving me both the authority and freedom to choose my own tasks and assignments. He had trusted me to keep Kallen safe during the subway raid, and had trusted me to handle negotiations with the Six Houses. He had trusted me. And, something that always left me feeling vaguely surprised when I consciously considered it, I trusted him as well, him and Ohgi and the other four core members of the cell.

I had trusted Naoto this far; I would trust him again.

That's all well and good, but how do I introduce magic to him without sounding crazy?

The same way I introduced it to Ohgi – a demonstration, clearly. This time, an intentional demonstration.

"Naoto..." I turned back towards the Kozuki Organization's leader, which meant so much more now than it had a mere six months ago. His chair's front legs thudded into the worn linoleum as he shifted forward, exhaustion once again pushed back behind a businesslike mask of an expression, eyes following me attentively as I returned to the table.

"There is something else I need to discuss with you, something that I've been keeping to myself for quite some time." I tried not to wince at my own awkwardness, and forced myself to continue speaking, fighting down my rising anxiety as I stretched out my arms, palms up over the table. "I honestly should have probably disclosed this information earlier, but I found the idea... uncomfortable."

Ohgi smiled encouragingly at me, but Naoto just looked quizzically at me. He looked like he was about to say something, but looked over at Ohgi and clearly reconsidered, gesturing for me to continue.

Over the last two and a half months, since Ohgi had discovered me in the middle of practice, I had continued to experiment with the formulas from my past life. The original spells I learned in the Empire have been optimized for use with computation orbs, complicated carefully engineered bundles of smaller subsidiary spells. I had to work hard to tease out their individual components, such as the strength enhancement or the acceleration formula.

Those small formulas had been low hanging fruit, as both were integral to the flight spell package, the bread and butter working of every aerial mage in Imperial service. Without the strength enhancement, a human flying at hundreds of kilometers an hour would be shredded; without enhanced reflexes, navigating around barriers was nigh impossible at high speeds. I had been intimately familiar with both in my previous life, and simplifying them down to an orbless level had been comparatively simple.

But the flight package hadn't been the only spell I had memorized. As an aerial mage and a training officer, I had committed as many spells as I could manage to memory. Among others, I had memorized the round enchantment formula, the passive shell and active barrier formulas, the guidance formula that also served as a primitive means of radio wave interference, and of course the ever-handy Mage Blade formula.

One of my least used spells had been the Napalm-Type Formula, an explosion spell that was frankly inferior to the far more versatile artillery enchantment formula. However, inefficiencies aside, the napalm spell didn't require any container for the power, like the artillery enchantment did, and included a component to generate the pilot flame from pure magical energy. After much time and effort, I had managed to isolate the ignition component and found a way to cast it without the aid of a computational gem.

Frankly, it was an unimpressive spell, more of a party trick than a tactical enhancement. It was an energy intensive working, and actually projecting the flame or spreading it required an even larger investment of mental effort and energy. A lighter did everything my spell could at a far lower cost.

But I could make a tongue of flame dance on the palm of my hand on command, and even a party trick could be useful in a demonstrative capacity.

Yellow and orange tongues of flame sprang into being in each of my hands, stretched halfway across the table towards Naoto. While only ten centimeters or so high, the flames were already greedily devouring my energy reserves. So inefficient! For a moment, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the Empire and its computational gems. I almost miss Schugel. Almost.

The flames reflected in Naoto's goggling eyes, wide with a blend of what looked like shock, delight, and an unsettling degree of awe. His mouth hung slack, and his frown had disappeared, expression wide open and completely unguarded.

It seemed like the demonstration had its intended effect. Mysterious flames are probably equally dramatic as a magically controlled fall; I'll have to remember that, for the unlikely event of any future demonstrations. Satisfied, I snuffed out the fire dancing on my left hand first, and then raised my right hand, palm aflame, to eye-height before slowly reducing the flow of energy down to nothing, the flame dwindling as the supply tapered off. Let nobody say I lack presentation skills - and every good presentation needs a touch of the theatrical to hook the audience's emotions.

I met Naoto's eyes across the table. "You can call it magic – it's as good of a descriptor as anything, and the term that I use." Almost before I finished the sentence, I knew more of an explanation would be necessary. Naoto was far from a fool, and I had no doubt that he'd believe his own eyes – but Naoto was also a tired man, one who had spent the last several months looking for any edge he could use against our enemies. He's a politician too now! He has constituents! I need to make sure he knows what I can do, and more importantly what I can't do, before he starts getting ideas!

"I've had this power all my life, as far as I can tell," I maintained eye contact as I spoke, half-expecting an angry outburst or a disbelieving laugh at any moment. The latter because my previously malnourished state made little sense for someone with such a power, the former because I had withheld knowledge about said power for the last year.

"I was able to muster extra energy, back when I was working to feed myself, energy that let me work the same hours and carry the same loads as some adults. Energy, strength, enhanced balance... but it wasn't a significant boost. I'm sure my old supervisors simply chalked it up to willpower, or perhaps desperation." Perhaps they simply didn't notice, or didn't care at all. Caring takes effort and energy, after all, and both of those were in short supply after the Conquest. "Either way, before I met you and Ohgi, my 'magic' was decidedly limited, hardly enough to keep me functional, and alive."

To my mild surprise, it was far easier to discuss my magic here than it had been back on that riverbank in Gunma. Perhaps it was the comfort of familiar surroundings, perhaps it was Naoto's famous charisma. More likely, it was the benefit of explaining things a second time – it was easier to sort the background out into a rational and ordered flow, instead of a half-panicked tumult. The fact that Ohgi didn't call me a witch also helped. Now that I think about it, he took it remarkably in stride.

"After I joined the Kozuki Organization, and more importantly after I started eating significantly more food with higher caloric yields, the energy reserves that I draw from for my 'magic' expanded, increasing both the strength and variety of effects I could manifest. Admittedly, just correlation, but that trend continued and expanded after Ohgi mandated specific shared meal times and increased portion sizes." That should explain why I didn't strike the various gangsters dead back in the day.

And now to explain why I'm not using my abilities to push the Britannians into the sea single-handedly. "Even now, it's still not particularly impressive. Those flames, for example, took a significant portion of my available energy." I shrugged, trying to defuse any disappointment via a commiserating 'What can you do about it?' expression. "It's frankly most useful the way I have been using it, as a way of boosting my own capabilities. It's got a few other minor tactical applications. Unfortunately, it's too weak to really make a difference in the greater scheme of things."

I jumped in my seat, startled despite myself at the loud impact. Naoto was standing, leaning forward across the table on the hand that he'd just slapped down onto the surface.

"Are you even listening to yourself!?" I leaned back, away from my suddenly crazed leader. A medley of expressions whirled across Naoto's face, too fast to pin down – anger, shock, hope, amusement, and just a hint of disappointment. Then, he blinked, seemed to notice my reaction, and coughed slightly with embarrassment at his outburst.

"Tanya," Naoto began, twisting away to scoop up his fallen chair, righting it, and sitting back down before leaning back across the table. He leaned forward, lowering his head so he was directly at my eye height, and took one of my hands in his. "Tanya, you are an incredibly intelligent, and incredibly capable person. I respect your accomplishments; your plans and ideas have done so much to help so many already, and I'm sure you're only getting started. But, here? About this? You're wrong."

It was my turn to blink with surprise and confusion, and I'm sure I would have leaned back in my seat if Naoto hadn't already captured my hand. The sudden whirlwind of compliments was flattering, but... What does he mean, I'm wrong? Without a focus, my magic is incredibly weak! I can't melt a Knightmare with a handful of fire! Even if I had a computational orb, a single aerial mage against the Britannian Army is suicide!

Before I could express my rebuttal, Naoto started talking. "Weak or not, Tanya, you can do magic. Magic! Nobody else can – nobody I've ever heard of, at least! It's a sign that you are important!" He laughed, "Not that we didn't already know that, of course!"

A moment later, Naoto sobered up and continued, his tired eyes lit from within with a fervor I already disliked. "It's like the old stories: An evil army of demons comes to a peaceful land, and conquers the people. The people cry out for a hero, and from their midst, an orphan emerges... and her bravery is recognized by Kami, who gives gifts marking that girl as a hero." He smiled, a wry twist to his lips. "I did say that you'd done Amaterasu's work when you smote the thugs in the station with fire and steel, didn't I? This looks like proof that I was more right than I ever could've suspected."

I have no idea what my face looked like, as I gaped at Naoto, but I could only assume horrorstricken would have been an apt description. His reaction was one I hadn't even imagined, yet was somehow far worse than any I could have expected. I should have seen this coming! All the signs were there! He references the Gods far more often than is healthy!

Whatever my reaction had been, it clearly hadn't been what Naoto expected either. His eyebrows rose in surprise, and he quickly started speaking again, this time taking a different tact. "Look, whether or not the Kami have blessed you isn't important – but the idea that you could have been is! I'm not trying to be cynical here; way back when we were first recruiting, you said that it's important to give people some reason to hope that tomorrow will be a better day, and that giving people something to fight for would make them more willing to fight over the long haul, right? We've already started that by giving them food and stuff, but they need a symbol, something to really rally behind!"

I clenched my teeth and endured the sting of having my own words thrown back in my face. Dealing with fanatics was annoying even at the best of times; even when I could safely ignore the ranting, simply encountering people who had chosen to forsake rationality for overwhelming dedication to their pet obsession reduced the quality of my day. Unfortunately, I couldn't ignore this situation in the hopes that cooler heads would prevail; Naoto was the leader of my organization, and now the political head of Shinjuku – there were no cooler heads who could force the genie back into the bottle. I can't believe I almost missed Shugel, even for a moment.

"Once the word starts getting out, the people of Shinjuku and the Japanese outside the Ghetto will rally to us!" Naoto continued his pitch, trying to convince me of the wisdom of his wild idea. "We have lots of recruits already, but they're all from Shinjuku too – if we can spread the word outside the walls, who knows what kind of opportunities we'll get? We might be able to finally get clear of the Six Houses, get clear of that treacherous piece of shit at The School! If the people truly believe that the gods are with us, they'll flock to our banner! We'll push Britannia back into the Pacific – hell, we'll push them all the way back to Area 7!"

"Naoto… Are you sure about that?" Naoto and I both jumped slightly in our seats with astonishment, and turned in unison towards Ohgi. I had been so overwhelmed by Naoto's lunatic reaction to my magic that I'd completely forgotten about the other man in the room, and judging by Naoto's reaction, he'd forgotten we weren't alone as well. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Britannia smashed like any man, but…" Ohgi smiled apologetically, and gestured at our surroundings, "but our people don't have that kind of power. Not right now. I've been out in the countryside, Naoto, outside of Shinjuku and Tokyo – things aren't that much better out there. In some ways, they're actually worse."

Thank you, Ohgi! Thank you! The man had injected a moment of logic into the stream of zealotry, and had bought me an opening. I pushed my advantage with every iota of ruthless efficiency I could summon. "Ohgi is correct, Naoto. The spirit of our people may be strong, but it is also bloody, starving, and sweating under heavy burdens. A general uprising might lead to some temporary victories against the Britannians, but make no mistake – they would indeed be temporary."

Naoto turned back towards me but I pushed on, refusing to brook any interruption. This idea had to be ended here and now, for my sake and for the sake of everything that we were fighting for. I can't live a comfortable future if the Britannian Empire decides that Elevens will have no future! "Currently, Japan is under occupation by the garrison under the command of the Viceregal Governor, Prince Clovis. This is not an active theater; the Britannians do not particularly care about Area 11," Both men winced at my use of the colonial label, as I'd intended. "They do not care, and so only inferior forces are assigned here, for the most part. Second rate garrison troops and embarrassments only, no elite units or Knights of the Rounds."

I paused to let that implicit dismissal sink in, before continuing. "However, the Britannians very much do care about the Sakuradite mines. The moment we threaten those, all bets are off." I saw the disbelief rising in Naoto's eyes, and quickly answered the implicit question before he could ask it himself. "I am not saying we should give up the fight, and I'm not saying we should resign ourselves to Britannian domination. I am saying that it would be a betrayal of our people and of Japan to strike before we have a chance of not only liberating Japan, but guaranteeing a future for our people that lasts longer than a year." And a year's remarkably generous; even if we did win control over the Home Islands, I'm sure the counter assault would land in weeks.

I could still see the passionate flames burning Naoto's eyes, but they had been somewhat dampened. Good – keep pressing! I took a breath, and exhaled the panicked anger that Naoto's rant had lit in my belly; getting angry at Naoto would only make him angry in return. I liked and respected Naoto, this temporary bout of insanity aside, and I wanted him to respect me as well; more to the point, I had to continue to work with him in the future. I couldn't simply browbeat him into submission, I had to convince him that I truly was correct by appealing to his sensibilities. And if there's one thing that's truly fundamental to Kozuki Naoto's sensibilities, it's his role as the big brother looking out for his little sister. At every turn, Naoto had been motivated by his relationship to Kallen – and so, at least for a minute, I had to become the little sister.

"Naoto, I want a good and happy life for our people," I began, speaking in softer tones, and squeezing down lightly on the hand holding mine. "I want a world where the next generation of children doesn't have to live like I did, and doesn't have to see the things I did. I want a Japan that is free, where I don't have to fight, and where I can do something productive instead." I let a degree of firmness re-enter my tone. "But I've seen this path before, and I've heard the cries – 'one glorious push, and we'll force them out! The gods favor us!' That's what the resistance groups always said, and it always ended the same way – a wall and a hundred dead Japanese for every dead Britannian. If the gods truly favored us, we would already be free."

I squeezed down again on Naoto's hand, still lightly but again with a hint of firmness, and this time he let me go. The flames had dwindled down to scattered sparks. "Besides, what happens if the word gets out, and the Britannians hear about it somehow before we're ready? Do you think that we're ready to hold Shinjuku against all comers? And, if the Britannians hear about my magic… What do you think they'd do to me, Naoto? The Britannians have always loved to talk about strong bloodlines – what do you think the nobles, to say nothing of the Imperial Family, would do for a magical bloodline?"

It was a dirty trick, but I didn't regret using it. I knew I had won, even before Naoto reluctantly nodded. "You've got a point Tanya," he sighed, before ruefully laughing and resting his forward on his hands. "Guess I really got ahead of myself there. I just… I thought your magic would be a shortcut, and we could just use it to skip to the end of this…" He sighed again, and halfway through it turned into a yawn. Over his head, Ohgi and I exchanged a look and nod of acknowledgement. He really did look exhausted; get sleep deprived enough, and you might as well be drunk.

"I don't think there are any shortcuts here, Naoto," Ohgi said, patting his friend and roommate's shoulder. "Just a long hard slog, but…" The former teacher looked back over at me, and then patted Naoto's shoulder again. "I think we're up to the task, no matter how long that slog is. We've got each other, we've got our other comrades, and we've got the organization we've begun to build." I wasn't quite as sanguine about our prospects as Ohgi seemed to be, but I nodded along anyway. No point in undermining a perfectly good pep talk, after all. Naoto collected himself a bit and sat back up in his chair, shooting Ohgi a worn smile as his chair squeaked against the linoleum.

"Although, since we're on the topic," Ohgi began, turning towards me with a curious expression, "I've been wondering about your magic for quite a while now, Tanya. Do you think you're the only one who has it? And, do you think you can teach it to others?" Naoto perked up at that, and likewise turned towards me, eyes alight with the same eager curiosity that had shown in Ohgi's.

I grimaced, but promptly replied. "I have no idea if I'm the only one who has magic; I have no idea how I would detect it in other people, or if that's even possible. As for teaching…" I paused for a moment, before shaking my head and continuing. "I think I could probably explain how I use my magic, but I don't know how I could teach someone to get magic."

It was disappointing to admit, and I could tell by my friends' matching crestfallen expressions that they had hoped for a different answer. Unfortunately, that was the answer I had for them; at the very least, I had the cold comfort of knowing that everything I had said was the truth, without even the slightest bit of prevarication. I didn't know if I was the only one in this world who had magic – even in the world of my second life, mages in general had been uncommon and A or B class mages had been rare. I didn't know how to detect other mages without the use of specialized equipment that I had never studied and couldn't come even close to replicating. And as for teaching, I could explain my spell formulae, but I couldn't give magic to someone who lacked it.

Before Naoto and Ohgi could spend too much time mulling over my answer, my radio crackled to life, breaking the contemplative silence. "Trainspotter to Backpack, come in. Over."

I looked to Naoto before I responded, both for courtesy's sake, and to show my continued respect for his leadership after resisting his ideas regarding my magic. As soon as he nodded, the handheld radio was at my mouth. "Backpack to Trainspotter, I hear you. Sitrep? Over." 'Trainspotter' was one of the two fighters I'd assigned to guard the apartment building once they successfully infiltrated Shinjuku. Unless something had gone wrong, he should be five stories below me at this very instant.

"Trainspotter to Backpack, someone's here to see you. I think she's the one you designated as 'Cherry'? Should I send her up? Over."

Naoto, who was clearly listening in to my radio conversation, raised an eyebrow, silently asking who "Cherry" was. "Kallen's arrived, it seems," I answered his silent question by passing on the report, as if he hadn't been sitting only a few feet away. For some reason, his inquisitive eyebrow remained high on his brow, and I felt compelled to explain the code name I'd selected for his sister. "She's got red hair, cherries are red. It seemed like a fitting code name. That's all."

"Oh yeah, no argument here!" Naoto replied, his inquisitive expression punctured as his mouth stretch wide with another barely suppressed yawn. "It's just an… interesting choice for Kallen. She's a bit too spicey to be a cherry, and far too spikey to be a blossom."

"I thought it was a fitting name…" I muttered, ignoring a knowing look from Ohgi and also the flushed heat spreading across my cheeks as I pressed the transmission button back down. "Backpack to Trainspotter. Send her on up, and keep me posted if anyone else drops by. Backpack out."