Barony of Kai, Area Eleven, November 2015-March 2016
In the end, it had only taken him a week to make up his mind.
He'd mulled over Doctor Graham's last-ditch effort to get him to find something to live for, alone in the darkness of his government-provided apartment, for seven days and seven nights, though he admitted to himself that 'sitting in the dark and staring at a recruiting brochure' hardly counted as anything approaching thought or consideration, and on the dawn of the eighth day, with the dawn's light pouring into his bedroom through the window, he stood from the seiza position he'd kept, with exceptions only to relieve himself and for food and drink, for all those days, bathed thoroughly and dressed himself, and, on a flight of impulse, of his long-dormant but once well-honed instincts, he dug out his military blade and fixed it to his side, before venturing forth into the public, a newfound sense of purpose putting long-forgotten speed into his limbs, on the way to the nearest recruitment office that the inside of the brochure specified. Thankfully, it was within walking distance, and so only a few pedestrians caught sight of the sword he carried at his belt—he'd taken it to make a point, but it would be bothersome if too many people on public transit took exception to the act of carrying the weapon, and he would very much have preferred to avoid that outright. He had no idea if the Britannians had made a law against it, against carrying the weapon in the open, but he knew the anti-sword carrying laws from the imperial era of his since-conquered homeland like the back of his hand, if not better, and he had no desire to discover whether or not they had been grandfathered in to the law that governed the land these days.
The line was longer than he had expected—nothing egregious, certainly, due in large part, he did not doubt in the slightest, to the Britannians' prudence in setting up over two dozen recruitment offices all over the Tokyo Settlement, but considering that, the fact that there was barely room inside the door was itself an indicator—but it had moved relatively quickly, at least compared to his experience with how the IJA had in the past performed similar, as well as far more contemptible, functions.
That day, the sun had risen over the Tokyo Settlement at five minutes before six in the morning.
By the time the clock rang in the seventh hour, his name was written into the enlistment documents, clear as day and without fear.
Tōdō Kyōshirō.
And now, a little over a week after that, he and several hundred, if not a few thousand people, mixed in sex to the point of representing a fairly even split between males and females, he couldn't help but note, were ushered onto an armoured train that would take them to the headquarters of this 'Dread Legion' in the capital of what had once been Yamanashi Prefecture, but was now known as the 'Barony of Kai.' Many, he noticed as well, if not most of the other passengers, newly-enlisted and thus apparently classed as 'auxilia', were younger than him, and by a significant margin, to the point where he doubted many of them had been adults, or even in high school, when their homeland had become Area Eleven; and a few of them looked at him strangely as the train sped along the tracks, for which he couldn't blame them. Certainly, he must have seemed quite strange to them, clad as he was in his old IJA service fatigues and overcoat, which he had kept in pristine condition ever since the war's end, out of force of habit more than any expectation that he would ever need to put them to use again. He must have looked like some manner of re-enactor to these younger people, a thought that brought him as much amusement as it did an odd mixture of nostalgia and sorrow.
That sorrow was not for the IJA. He did not mourn it, and any concept of him mourning the state he had once served seemed to fade more and more by the day. The imperial legacy of Japan was, as he'd come to understand, every bit as bloody-handed as Britannia's—perhaps more so, even, if one looked past the gross numbers and adjusted for both empires' relative spheres of influence at their height—and there were a great many deeds he had been complicit in as a soldier, as had his father before him, that he could not look back upon without shame. The Empire of Japan, he recognised, was better off dead, and he'd long since made his peace with that, though the latter portions of it had also been with Doctor Graham's help.
No, what he mourned instead was the man that he had been back then. Certainly, now he could look back and understand that much of what the top brass and the Chrysanthemum Throne had commanded was wrong, that many of them were crimes, and most of those heinous beyond reasonable belief—Kusakabe had been the exact sort of officer who would have made a name for himself in the occupation of Manchuria, and that was no compliment, believe him—but he had been himself back then, had been a version of himself that he could recognise, that others could recognise, and know to be Tōdō Kyōshirō.
Perhaps, in due time, if he followed the path upon which he was embarking faithfully, he could be recognised as Tōdō Kyōshirō once again. The thought was a kind one, if nothing else.
And so he stood there in the train car, a relic turned into an island in the midst of the teeming sea of the future. Kyōshirō had no right idea how many of these near-children would survive to see the next five years, as this Dread Legion had only recently been formed, but he knew that not all of them would. He wondered, really, if any of them knew as much, and if any of them could contend with that grim but inevitable reality, devoid of the abstraction of youth. He supposed that time would tell.
The ride from the Tokyo Settlement to Kōfu left the station at quarter past seven; and at half past the hour of ten, it slid into Kōfu Station, an uneventful and quiet journey, and a peaceful one, to boot. But when it stopped, and all of them filed out onto the platform, they were greeted by a pair of young women—girls, if he was being honest with himself, just girls who really ought to have been in high school right now, and would have been if their world had been a sane one—in black and gold uniforms of Britannian make, a pair of red cloaks draped about their shoulders in the manner of the Britannian Knights of the Round.
"Attention!" the first one bellowed impressively, a tall, lean girl, with tanned skin that would have marked her as a member of a particular subculture back before the war, and silvery-white hair bound into a tail that hung over her shoulder, which Kyōshirō would have guessed was due to hair dye, if not for the fact that he knew that highborn Britannians often exhibited odd natural colourings that could be found nowhere else in the world. She had a good, powerful stance, her chest out and her shoulders back, her chin lifted in a commanding posture that would have made her the favourite of any OCS instructor back during his days in the IJA. "Welcome, brave auxilia, to Kōfu. For the next several months of your lives, this city shall be your home, and you shall accord it the same respect you would give to the place that raised you, if not more. You all have enlisted to join the Legion, and so you will be expected to abide by legionary regulations, in letter and spirit both, at all times. Guidebooks detailing these regulations and what they entail, as well as any and all disciplinary actions you can expect to receive for such infractions, shall be provided at a predetermined point along your orientation process."
The other one, a shorter and more overtly feminine girl, possessed of milky pale skin and raven hair, worn longer and unbound to her shoulders, produced a decently-thick, pocket-sized volume, bound in what looked to be leather, of all materials, and handed it to the white-haired girl, who held it up for all to see. "In these pages are contained all the information that you'll need to know in order to avoid disciplinary action. For those of you whose skills with Britannian are below the level of comfortable literacy, versions written in your mother tongue, whether that be Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, standardised Tagalog, Indonesian or otherwise, shall be made available to you. Therefore, ignorance of these rules shall not ever be considered an exonerating factor! It is therefore in your best interest to learn them, to commit them to memory, and to obey them."
Well-spoken thus far, Kyōshirō noted to himself. He remembered that some of the drill instructors at basic training back in the IJA were far more heavy-handed than this—he recalled one particularly colourful anecdote of an instructor who, to fresh recruits just off the train, gave the order for everyone to move their bags into a strict formation within the span of ten seconds, and then punished them with exercise once they inevitably failed to perform the feat. At the end of that exercise, he would repeat the instruction, but adding the specification that they were to do so in accordance with their unit assignment, and once that failed, he'd then punish them with further exercise, over and over again until they got it right—only then to visit more punishment upon the lot of them for having been too sloppy about it. He looked around at the greenhorns in the crowd, and he saw in their eyes that they thought this was perhaps a bit heavy-handed, and he shook his head in equal parts complicated nostalgia and dismay. They all had quite a lot to learn if this seemed like 'a lot' to them.
Then, from one of the wells that led down from the platform, there came another pair of girls, one of whom was stepping fairly lightly, while the other's stride seemed more in line with a swagger. The first was clad much like the others, with the exception of a white band around her upper arm that was further marked with a red cross, her skin fair, and her hair and eyes differing shades of mossy green, gathered up into what he recognised as a plait plunging down nearly to her waist; while the latter, with her slightly wild, chestnut brown hair and strange green eyes, the angular, almond shape of which marked her as an Eleven herself, seemed…almost hauntingly familiar to him…
"Joining us at this moment are Tenth Blade Kururugi Suzaku, Swordmaster and commander of the Bloodletters, and Fourth Blade Lindelle Rathbone, Chief Healer and commander of the Mendicants. In a few moments, I, First Blade Sif Blaiddyd, Chief Disciplinarian and commander of the Steel Wolves, and my esteemed colleague, Fifth Blade Yennefer Desrosiers, High Intercessor and commander of the Crow Heralds, shall see you all handed off into their care, both for medical examination and physical assessment. Thereafter, you shall find yourselves split into teams of ten, by means of weighted random chance. Learn them well, for those ten shall be your brethren, the ones upon which you must rely in times of trial. Your successes shall be their successes, just as theirs shall be yours; and likewise, your failures shall be their failures, just as theirs shall be yours. You will stand or you shall fall as one. You will live together, you will train together, you will breathe and you will eat and you will sleep together. A solitary legionary is a dead legionary: and this much, I shall go so far as to assure you, the Master-at-Arms will drill into your heads until it is a foundational axiom." The girl with the white hair, First Blade Sif Blaiddyd, looked out upon them sharply, then, as if to make sure that she had hammered her point home; and it was a good thing that Kyōshirō already understood the concept of a unit, because the lion's share of his attention right at that moment was arrested by the fact that not only was his old pupil, the only child of his old friend, Kururugi Genbu, still alive, but also, she was now apparently in a position that outranked him, if he'd managed to read this situation correctly, and by a significant margin. "But before all that happens, I would invite the Fourth and Tenth Blades to say a few words, should they feel so inclined."
The Fourth Blade ushered Tōdō's final student forth—presenting herself, perhaps, as a more laconic sort of commander, which was hardly surprising considering she was in charge of what sounded to him like the Legion's medical corps, and it was exceedingly unlikely that she'd find enough people with the knack, it seemed, from their ranks; though, he'd begun to hear tell of ships full of 'refugees' coming into port back before he'd left, last night before he shipped out, so perhaps there was something to that. His instincts told him that he would be well-served to keep an eye on that situation as it developed, though, and nothing good had ever come from ignoring his instincts, so he made a note of that and moved on. Suzaku—or rather, the Tenth Blade, he supposed—seemed neither to hesitate nor to appear unprepared; in contrast to how she had entered, when she strode forth, it was with a predator's lope, measured and precise, without even a shadow of a swagger: she was deathly serious.
"Why are you here?" she asked them, point-blank. "All of ya. I look around at the collection of ya, and I can't help but wonder, why the fuck are ya here?"
In the ordinary course, Tōdō would have expected one or more of the recruits to crack a joke, to try to break the tension, but he was unsurprised when it became clear that none of them were nearly so bold. It was a strange feeling that the Tenth Blade gave off—the phantom sensation of a blade with an edge keen as a razor resting upon his throat, brushing against his carotid with a lover's teasing caress. And where Tōdō, for his part, found this invigorating, found scattered parts of himself that he had thought he would have to relearn in their entirety as they emerged and began to restore him, piece by piece, to the soldier that he had once been all those years ago, he imagined that even the most brazen of the greenhorns gathered here found that whatever snide words or joking comments they were going to make shrivelled and died in their throats before any of them could get so far as to find the breath to give them voice.
"Have ya come in search of a payin' job? Of room and board won by the sweat of your own brow? Were ya thinkin' that ya got nothin' else to offer your home, your whole fuckin' society, than body and service?" she guessed, and from a few of the greenhorns, Tōdō caught a flinch in his periphery. "Aye, I can certainly guarantee that you'll get plenty of that. More dormitories in the barracks are goin' up every day, and in the time it's gonna take us to get ya to a decent fuckin' baseline, I reckon the whole fuckin' complex is gonna be a done deal. Ya got food, ya got drink, ya got a room you're sharin' and a bed that's yours, and a startin' wage of thirty thousand pounds sterlin' a year, not accountin' for your basic income stipends. And y'all can be sure, oh, y'all can be damn sure, that we'll be workin' every last one of ya to the fuckin' bone for every last shillin'.
"Have ya come in search of a purpose?" she continued, rolling her broadening shoulders back from where she'd hunched them to punctuate the previous statement, adjusting out of the threatening prowl that she'd settled into so gradually that even Tōdō had almost missed it as it happened. "Lookin' for a special little somethin' to go devotin' your whole goddamn life to, maybe? Lost everythin' else in your life, and now you've come here searchin' for a reason to live in the first fuckin' place? An old soldier of the last war who's achin' for a time that shit made sense, and ya knew who ya were, damn it?"
This time, it was Tōdō himself who flinched, though not out of any sense of shame. He'd made sure to make his peace with why he was coming here before he even set foot on the train, after all—he'd felt as if he owed it, to his fallen comrades, to his former comrades who yet lived, and last of all, to himself—and yet, there was still an eerie quality to being so thoroughly perceived without being recognised.
Or at least, he was fairly certain that his old student hadn't spotted him yet…
"Well, don't ya worry, buttercups," said the Tenth Blade, and the grin she levelled at them, at least as far as Tōdō could tell, resembled nothing so clearly as it did a shark's. "'Our cup runneth over,' aye, and y'all've found yourself in just the right place to go partakin' of the bounty. You'll find that you're in good fuckin' company here, and purpose aplenty's just about ripe for the findin' if you've got the eyes to see and the ears to hear. An open mind'll take ya far, and that goes double for here as it does for any other place in this dumpsterfucked firepit of a world.
"And last, but certainly not least, there's those of ya who've got fuck-all better to do," she said with a very different, much more gregarious grin, the unexpected nature of the statement drawing a mild chuckle out of some of them. The Tenth Blade looked up at the sky and sighed, pacing slowly back and forth, all of her limbs shrouded beneath the crimson cloak she wore. "Believe me, I can relate. So lemme tell ya, we've got plenty of scraps to get dug into, and we've got no shortage of scores in need of settlin'. And if you're a freak like me…well… The Bloodletters are always lookin' for new members. I'll look forward to any of ya tryin' to fight your way onto the rolls. Word of warnin': my chapter ain't gonna be wastin' any of its time or resources on any weaklin's, y'hear? You a freak like me and ya want in? Better be a fuckin' badass. And if you're weak now, don't fret. Out here at Headquarters? We're gonna make ya strong.
She paused for a moment to let her statement sink in; and when she started back up again, she was right back to sharp-edged words and a predator's loping grace. "Now, I know I just got done askin' y'all a question. I asked ya why the fuck y'all were here. But the real, honest truth is? It's a trick fuckin' question. 'Cause by the time we're done with ya, it won't fuckin' matter what special sob story of an answer you've got tucked away in your back pocket right as ya live and breathe and gawp in my general fuckin' direction. 'Cause by the time we're done with ya, you're all gonna have the same goddamn answer. Every last one of ya. I guarantee you that.
"'Cause when that day comes, I'm gonna ask you this same damn question over again. And I won't even need to hear your answers, 'cause I'll know that every last one of ya knows the right answer better than you'll know your own mother's face: that you're proper motherfuckin' legionaries, and here is where you fuckin' belong!"
The amount of fervour that the Tenth Blade put behind that final exclamation sent a jolt through all of their spines, and even Tōdō found his jaded old bones standing just that much more sprightly. He'd have been so proud if he felt that he could have taken any measure of responsibility for turning his pupil into an orator of such a calibre; as it stood, he was only able to be impressed, and to wonder after the quality of the instruction that the last of the Kururugi had received in the time since he'd last seen her directly.
And now, it seemed, the Fourth Blade saw fit to step forth, and say her piece. "There's limited space to walk abreast down these halls, and so you will form orderly lines—any pushing or shoving will provoke swift disciplinary action, arranged by the First Blade—down through the cordon to the transport vehicles at the curb just outside of the station. Those will take you to base, where the next phase of your induction will begin. Now, auxilia, proceed."
And so they did; apparently, the Tenth Blade's—Suzaku's—speech had left enough of an impression on them that, to his shock, they actually managed something close to an orderly procession, this crowd full of predominantly young people who might never have so much as held a shinai before in their lives, and in time, Tōdō himself was swept away in the flow, his old fatigues blending into the riotous smattering of all manner of different colours and garments, passing amongst roughly as many women as he did men, which was a feat that not even the IJA during their 'modernisation' efforts had ever managed to produce. It was a humbling thing, to witness centuries of gendered discrimination that his home country as a sovereign state could not hope to contend with in any meaningful sense be rinsed away in the swift reconstruction that had followed the conquest of the maritime island empire that he had once served, as had his father before him. The thought felt strange in his mind, of greater weight than he would have thought it warranted in abstract, and to such a degree that he could almost imagine that Kururugi Suzaku was not the only familiar face he glimpsed among the crowd, to the point where he very nearly mistook a brunette with a familiar-looking pixie cut he spotted elsewhere in the moving crowd for Captain Chiba…
His eyes narrowed. Wait a minute…
He made sure to keep pace with the rest of his fellow recruits—a mere suspicion on his part was no excuse to clog up the flow of traffic as it attempted to organise itself—but as he moved, he swept his gaze over the crowd with a renewed sense of purpose; and now that he knew what to be looking for specifically, it was almost disturbingly easy to pick them out.
There, over on his other side, having gone a little ways ahead, was the black hair and round glasses of Major Asahina, knocking shoulders with the swept-up shock of blue-black that signalled Major Urabe's presence, his old friend just about swaggering through the crowd alongside the only one of his former subordinates who could have been said to have rivalled Tōdō himself in severity of disposition. And given that he'd spotted three of his old comrades, it didn't take him much longer to spot a portly older man with a receding white widow's peak and the most square-shaped face Tōdō had ever personally encountered.
Lieutenant Colonel Senba, Tōdō noted with a dry, grim sort of mirth. So, the gang's all here… I had thought they were a bit light on protests when I told them that I'd enlisted… Figures that they'd go and try to pull a stunt like this…
He shook his head, and put his friends' presence out of his mind, turning his eyes forward as all the other recruits—auxilia, he reminded himself that he would have to get himself used to making use of their terminology if he was going to serve in their outfit—swept him up in the tide; and to his mild surprise and great amusement, it seemed that the warning given by the First Blade had worked wonders, given that he'd seen not even a third of the disorderly conduct he would ordinarily have expected in a situation like this.
He hadn't been to Kōfu since the war—once resettlement efforts had begun in earnest following the unconditional surrender, he'd travelled from the ramshackle camps that had overflowed Narita back to the Tokyo Settlement, and from there he hadn't departed in all the years since—but it didn't surprise him to see how little of the station he recognised, rebuilt from the ground up and 'made modern' with Britannian tech. Not that he was criticising, of course—as long as his own people, the Elevens, were also beneficiaries of all that technological know-how that their conquerors had brought with them, he'd long since decided that he didn't give much of a damn one way or the other—but it was still completely expected to see many of the same hallmarks of the various major train stations that littered the Tokyo Settlement present themselves in this building, three hours away. He lacked both the time and the inclination required to scrutinise properly the architectural choices of Britannian-built civic infrastructure as they presented themselves in the station, of course, but he made a note to discuss it with Asahina later. He recalled that the younger man had wanted to study architecture, and that he'd enlisted because Tokyo University had been too expensive for a man of his humble origins, thinking as he'd done it that the Imperial Japanese Army's Engineering Corps would at least be the second-best option, and while Asahina had ultimately proven to possess too great of a tactical aptitude for the brass to approve him being relegated to what some considered to be a 'lesser branch,' to the best of Tōdō's knowledge, it had remained a passion of his, even as a mere hobby.
They weren't rushed out of the door and into the streets, where Tōdō spotted a few dozen armoured vehicles idling by the roadside, nothing so uncontrolled as all of that, but there were personnel garbed in a uniform that Tōdō grasped to be standard hemming them in and ushering them along at a decent clip, out of the station and into lines to fill the APCs. From experience, he was able to grasp that each carried twenty or so auxilia apiece, so he let his hand fall to his side, grasping the hilt of his military blade more firmly than he would ever have dared if he'd intended to draw and use it, grounding himself with the motion. This is it. This is real. This is the next chapter of the life of Tōdō Kyōshirō, for better or for worse…
He wondered, idly, what was going through Chiba's mind as he followed the flow and climbed onto one of the Britannian vehicles, which, upon closer inspection, it became clear had been refurbished to serve the purpose for which he now boarded it. He recalled with startling clarity that she had mentioned growing up in and around her family's auto body shop, that she had worked after school on so many cars that, as far as conventional motor vehicles of all kinds were concerned, her knowledge was encyclopaedic. He recalled that she'd been a mechanic in the armoured divisions, a non-combatant member of the military, until she'd been put alongside her unit into a desperate situation in one of the many dozens of border conflicts that the old Empire had had with the Chinese Federation in Korea, which had only been turned into a victory due to her swift and efficient modification of their tanks to counter the tactical threat that had so endangered them. Her commander had recommended her for training as a combat officer, supposing—correctly, at least to the best of Tōdō's experience—that her expertise, when combined with a proper education in the scholarship of war, would yield a dangerously competent subordinate, and one day, perhaps even a commander in her own right. He wondered how her family had fared, given that the Britannian post-war reconstruction period had resulted in individual motor vehicles declining rather aggressively in prevalence. As he understood it, even in their own homeland, Britannians only ever used automobiles as status symbols, for the centralisation of their mass transit infrastructure had made Britannia into a country of rails and railways long before their already extant expansionist bent had begun to become truly aggressive.
Then he looked up to behold his fellows in the APC, to get some idea of who they were, their ages, and what had brought them here, where he prepared himself to seize his final chance at a life that he felt he could be proud of, a life lived with purpose, and for the sake of something bigger than himself, only to stop in his tracks, frozen in the moment, as three very familiar sets of eyes looked back at him.
…This cannot possibly be a coincidence, he thought to himself, dumbfounded. And he knew that he no longer needed to wonder what was on the minds and in the hearts of his fellows, because in that moment of shock, he knew that they were all thinking the very same thing.
Then, as if the cosmos seemed bent on vindicating their suspicions, one last portly figure climbed its way into the cabin, and Tōdō and the others all knew for certain that their proximity was by design.
Of course, they were not alone, not by any means, and that meant that they could hardly converse as freely as they might otherwise have preferred, given this extraordinary turn of events. But fifteen other ears craned themselves into their spoken word, and so plain speech was out of the question; thus, Urabe, ever a resourceful comrade, resorted to what might in the Britannian tongue be called a 'soldier's cant,' developed by intelligence officers of the Imperial Japanese Army so that soldiers captured in groups might be able to converse with one another without fear of infiltration, especially in situations where they had been forcibly prevented from committing suicide in order to avoid captivity in the first place.
And in that cobbled-together portmanteau drawn from nō and kabuki, obscure readings of a series of antiquated kanji, and a smattering of monogatari, Urabe intoned,"Well. So much for anonymity."
There was a great deal of amusement all around.
The ride from the station to the base, to the dormitories they would have in headquarters, was had in relative silence after that. A few different young auxilia struck up hushed conversations with one another in hopes of finding some common ground with those who could well be their assigned brethren-in-arms (as an armed force was, according to von Clausewitz and many a disgruntled veteran alike, a tool of politics, its inner workings were themselves political, and so it was never too early to attempt to start making in-roads), and there were perhaps one or two who were old enough to have been nearly of an age to be conscripted in the midst of the Second Pacific War who, in recognising the sound of the cant spoken, but lacking the skill to decipher it themselves, eyed Tōdō and his compatriots with something like suspicion (though exactly how much, Tōdō could not say; in his mind, suspicion required some small measure of ambiguity, and he'd come here in his old fatigues, after all, so it really ought not to have been that ambiguous who exactly they were), but in all, it was an uneventful ride as part of the convoy.
It took them the better part of half an hour to arrive at their destination, and when they did, with the armoured truck the Britannians used as a substitute for a proper battle tank coming to a stop, presumably in the company of its fellows, the doors opened, and the other auxilia disembarked first, with the five of them, practically a family at this point with how much they'd weathered together both during and after the war, in close proximity to each other, all but sticking together in a knot as the throngs congregated across a field of packed earth, at the other side of which were a series of tables, staffed by a series of people dressed in what Tōdō recalled to have been what Suzaku and the other Blades were wearing under their red cloaks; though, it became clear as they drew closer that that wasn't the full story.
Each wore a version of the uniform that Tōdō had assumed was standard across the Blades, but their version of the black breeches, boots, gloves, undershirt, and tailcoat was black without decoration, devoid of the gold trim he'd spied as part of the uniform of all four of the Blades he'd laid eyes on thus far; instead, each of them bore a single flash of gold, a pin secured to their lapels in the shape of a hand, some fusion of humanoid and reptilian, with four fingers and an opposable thumb, but covered in scales with knuckles that were more pronounced than on anyone Tōdō had ever met, each digit capped with a bestial, wicked-looking claw—most of which was inscribed within a ring of gold in a shape evocative of a storm-cloud.
"A dragon," Asahina leaned in to inform him. "In the western tradition, not ours."
Tōdō knew of western dragons—he'd recognised the one on the recruitment brochure easily enough a month ago, had he not?—but his unfamiliarity with the particulars of the iconography had kept him from recognising the limb as belonging to that variety of dragon at a glance. He could see it now, though, see the lay of it in how the similarity to the hand of a man was meant to symbolise avarice, and once he had, he let himself wonder exactly what it was about this outfit and dragons.
Despite the length and, for lack of a better term, girth of the throng, the people at the tables kept the queue moving along at a brisk pace, such that Tōdō was hardly standing still for more than a few seconds at a time; and by the time they reached the desk, another figure had joined on the opposite side, causing a few of the pin-bearers to snap the woman—for woman she was—a quick salute. Her surpassing height, metallic silver hair, and angular features marked her as Britannian, and from her black uniform with gold trim under a similarly-gilded crimson cloak, Tōdō knew her to be another Blade—though which one, he did not know. That she concerned herself with this part of the process suggested that she involved herself chiefly with the facilitation of clerical duties, and Tōdō was sure he dimly remembered someone or other ranting about how former Japanese land had been parcelled out to be the fiefdom of some baroness or other, a tale held up by a drunkard as a sign of the beginning of the end for the Japanese national identity—not that that even existed by this point, with most of the young people Tōdō had interacted with self-identifying as Elevens, with the term 'Japanese' now being viewed as antiquated and reactionary. Perhaps this woman, then, was none other than the baroness? It would make sense, now that he thought of it, to invest the land with someone who was high enough up in Princess Justine's inner circle to warrant the uniform and the title. It would allow for the princess to delegate the administration of the city in which she'd elected to build the Legion's headquarters without creating a separate party that might have their own interests and ambitions, and thus would need to be dealt with accordingly.
Whoever this woman was, she did not seem to recognise any of them at a glance, only sweeping her strange yellow-green eyes over the assemblage generally before returning her attention to the pin-wearers in particular, handing them a folder and communicating in low whispers with one pale Britannian girl, whose brown hair seemed to have been hacked off with a combat knife and then trimmed up afterwards, who then nodded sharply and turned back to her duties. The Blade turned with an almost theatrical swirl of her cloak, a flourish of crimson that looked too smooth and natural to have been intentional (perhaps the material was simply prone to behaving in such a fashion? He'd heard stranger, to be sure) and left, and after a few more auxilia, it was finally time for Tōdō and his compatriots to receive their own marching orders for the rest of the orientation process.
The clerk—for that was the function that they were all currently serving, regardless of any alternate duties that they might have had beyond the functions that seemed to have been conferred upon them by that dragon-claw pin—handed them each a copy of the book of regulations that they'd been shown before and told that they would be given (Tōdō remembered the look of it), and instructions to open it. Inside, he saw a card upon which was printed instructions that he then followed, parting from his friends as all of them went for their designated testing points.
The medical and physical examinations were both fairly standard fare as far as recruitment went, for this was a process for which Tōdō had already been on both sides of at different points in his life, though as that tended to go, they were also fairly exhaustive; the shadows were beginning to grow long when at long last, he was assigned his dormitory, which he would share with nine other strangers, he'd gathered, and then handed a uniform. They took his old fatigues from him, which he had expected, but strangely, they allowed him to keep his military blade, which he held in his hand (sheathed, of course) as he made his way into the foreboding dark stone edifice that seemed the prevailing architectural philosophy here at headquarters. The card he had been given with the number of the room he'd share over the course of training, he held before himself as he looked upon the notations by the doors in turn, the long hallways home to dozens, which were spaced quite a decent span of distance apart from each other.
At last, he reached the door noted on the card, and swiped it through the key-reader beside the door; the light on it turned from orange to green and gave a quick bleep before the mechanism came free, and he pushed upon it, bracing himself as he entered to weather the challenges that came with learning the names and faces of nine people whom he may or may not come to like, but would have to come to trust regardless.
He blinked, and corrected himself. There were not nine strangers here, as he had expected.
There were five.
Chiba and Asahina looked at each other, bemused. Urabe reclined as if he hadn't a care in the world, to the point where it took little effort to picture the reed he might mentally be chewing upon, and Senba was as solid a figure when seated as a stone statue, and about as expressive—squat and aged, but shockingly able-bodied in spite of what his balding white hair and greying skin might have suggested, Senba was the one whose presence most thoroughly perplexed Tōdō. The others were young—even Urabe, the most senior of the four after Senba, was younger than Tōdō himself at only thirty-three—and so it made sense that they might have been swept up in feelings similar to what had motivated the man himself, but even back when it seemed that the war was going to be a bitterer and closer-run thing by far than it had ultimately become, he recalled nothing that might have suggested that Senba still saw himself and his service as one and the same; if anything, he'd seemed eager to retire. He'd lived a long, full life, and the listless madness that had beset a great number of those of an age with Tōdō and older, who'd lived their entire adult lives as soldiers, driving even the once-great General Katase to addiction, madness, and eventually, suicide, had seemed to all those suffering from it at the time, Tōdō very much included, to have passed the stolid old man by in its entirety.
So why was he here now?
But of course, the five of them were by no means alone in the dormitory, for the five strangers with whom they shared the space looked upon them with a sort of detached curiosity, and much like with the five former officers of the defunct IJA, Tōdō sensed an unspoken unity that existed between them, as well. They were of a complexion with the various different breeds of Pacific Islander that the Empire of Japan had seen either under its thumb or piled into mass graves, and yet the lack of the baleful hatred that he'd always seen in the eyes of those people whenever he'd been stationed in their conquered homes discounted the chances of that outright. When he looked a bit closer, there seemed to be almost a reddish undertone to their skin in all its minute variations, not at all unlike a dull clay, and yet the shape of their eyes was unlike any race that Tōdō had ever personally encountered. He wondered where these five had come from, to have such unity at once even in this unfamiliar environment.
"So, you're the newcomers," said one of the men, standing from the folding-chair upon which he'd been sitting amongst his fellows—for indeed, this room was currently dominated by two part-rings of chairs that together formed a rough semi-circle, with half being the dark-skinned strangers, while the rest were of Tōdō's own group, for lack of better terminology. The man himself was tall and built like a fisherman's boy in the lean musculature of his frame, even beneath the partly-armoured black legionary uniform in which he was already attired. His youth shocked Tōdō—this man, this boy, couldn't possibly have been much older than twenty—but what shocked him more than the boy's age, more than the fact that he had the carriage of a veteran, a hardened killer, were his eyes. They were dark things, flinty and sharp, haunted and hollow, but alight with an unmistakable spark all the same, despite the fact that at times they seemed to fix upon a point kilometres in the distance.
Tōdō very nearly recoiled. It was wrong, wrong almost beyond words, that a man of such clear and unambiguous youth should view the world through such eyes.
"We are," Tōdō replied instead with a nod, not wasting his breath in trying to make their assignment out to be the work of mere happenstance and random chance.
The boy nodded, a gloved hand carding through a spate of thick yet pin-straight jet black hair, which had been shaven away to fine stubble on either side of his head, allowed to grow only at the top, where then it was secured into a tail that seemed like an aborted attempt at a topknot at the back of his head. Tōdō gave a moment's thought to exactly how strict the regulations regarding how hair was to be worn could actually be to allow this level of individual expression—but then, he supposed that the style did in fact avoid the kinds of visual obstructions that military hairstyle regulations were meant to prevent, and he and the rest of the men were painstakingly clean-shaven, so it could hardly have been lax enough to allow for anything an onlooker might construe as anything approaching 'slovenly', as was so often the concern. A military was more than merely a fighting force, after all, and as a visual representation of power, an image of discipline was essential to its continued utility in situations beyond the scope of direct application. "Well-met, then. I'm Raphael, by the grace of Her Majesty, and these here are my battle-brethren—Maria, Juan, Diego, and Isadora. Looks like we'll be the other half of your strike team."
"Those names…" Tōdō realised with a furrowing of his brow.
"Aye," Raphael replied easily, broadening his stance and folding his arms across his chest. His smile was easy, but it was also sharp, and laden with gentle warning. "As you've probably guessed, all of us were born in Area Six. Juan and Diego were saved in Jatai, Maria and I in Asunción, and Isadora was in Pirapora when Lady Tenth and Her Majesty led the first of us out of our bondage before cleansing it with holy fire. It is a great thing, to have been saved personally by Her Majesty's hand. No surprise that she's the most pious of us…"
The other four stood in turn as Raphael spoke their names. All of them were black-haired, their eyes dark, and they shared with Raphael that haunted hollowness, that sharpened dark spark—though, not all of them possessed both eyes: the right half of Isadora's face was a mangled ruin of burnt flesh, covered with a chin-length curtain of black hair and bangs, though the unburnt side was shaved below the crown, much as Raphael's was, and she revealed this to the rest of them as Raphael spoke of her piety, lifting the curtain and showing the pitted remains of aged scarring, though in the ragged, empty socket, instead of a gaping hole, it was an artificial eye of Britannian make, a baleful red glow mounted into an orb the hue of gunmetal, that stared back at him. Juan was taller, broader, and brawnier than Raphael, more a dock worker than the son of a fisherman, built for the hauling of heavy loads, his jaw squarer, his chin stronger, and instead of the sides of his head being shaved, his hair was cropped close to his head all around; Diego, on the other hand, was a more wiry sort, lean and slender and not as tall as his compatriot, and standing a little shorter than Raphael, even. He was whole of body, with a long face and a more prominent nose than the larger, bulkier man, but Tōdō had seen the likes of his dark eyes before, and knew that they missed nothing.
And finally, Maria—taller and brawnier than Isadora, who really seemed to have an acrobat's frame, she wore her hair similarly to Raphael, save for that she bound her hair fully into a topknot. In spite of her, frankly, almost Britannian stature, though, and the kilogrammes of corded muscle that were obvious, even through the pauldrons that adorned her uniform jacket, in the way that her shoulders filled the garment out, she boasted smiling eyes and an easy grin…though Tōdō reminded himself to take special care not to forget that sharks grinned easily, too.
"We were in the same unit on the front lines at the Two Rivers," Raphael recalled with a shrug and a chuckle, his smile a little sheepish. "Helped make us who we are today, really. So, uh, what's your story?"
I was right, Tōdō thought to himself in a sudden flash of clarity. This cannot be a coincidence…
The Legion, Tōdō was coming to learn, treated every sign of inclement weather as an opportunity to perform specialised training. Personally, he approved—the tides of war might wax and wane partly because of the weather, but not even a hurricane could stymie them. It seemed sensible, to him, to conduct exercises and war games in the mountains surrounding Kōfu, because though some might have thought it to be more than a little extreme to combine the two, he knew also that knowing how to survive the cold was only half the story; sometimes, it became necessary to give battle in conditions that might be less-than-ideal, after all. He knew, however, that some of his companions viewed the situation with significantly less charity.
"This is ridiculous," Chiba hissed, her voice as it came through the black full-face helmet sounding significantly more menacing than it normally would have. The crimson visor that protected her eyes but did very little to obstruct her vision swept this way and that across the uneven ground, coated in a thick layer of pure white snow, and they crept through it while keeping low to the ground, their guns readied so that their opponents would not take them unawares.
"This is training," Isadora disagreed, stalking silently up on Tōdō's other side. "That we suffer this now ensures that our bodies will not be frostbitten corpses in the snow in someplace like the Alps."
Her voice was low in register, and there was a scratchiness to her words as she spoke them that was, if nothing else, distinctive. He had worried about her artificial eye giving them away should the visor turn it into a glorified flashlight, but while the light of her eye was certainly strong enough to cut a blood-red path across a dark room, the visor, it seemed, was one-way, and kept that from becoming a concern.
Chiba scoffed softly, and it was only because he was himself that Tōdō refrained from sighing. The animosity between the two had almost been instantaneous—though it would, upon reflection, be wrong of him to pretend as though the feeling was mutual, when Isadora's response to Chiba's thinly-veiled hostility amounted to monotone apathy, and she was about as far from the instigating type as one could get. Not for the first time, he wondered if she had been the peacemaker amongst her group before Tōdō's had joined up. It certainly would have made sense.
What didn't make sense was whatever issue Chiba might have had with the woman. That Isadora, in all her laconic glory, was in the running for the most cool-headed member of their strike team, was only one of many reasons why Tōdō couldn't help but think she was a shockingly strange choice of rival. They were different classes, for one—it would have made more sense for her to get competitive with Maria, frankly, as not only were they also both women, but both carried the scattergun clipped to a mount at the small of their backs and the dull grey axe at their sides that marked them as rangers, while the much longer barrel and the scope on the gun mounted, albeit collapsed, upon Isadora's back, peeking out over her shoulder, marked her as a sharpshooter instead. But no, while she seemed ill-inclined to interact with Maria, Chiba didn't seem as if she had any special ire for the larger woman, either; and similarly, Urabe and Isadora seemed as if they'd come to a quiet understanding fairly quickly, and had been fast friends, or something close to it, ever since.
Though, to be entirely fair, it wasn't solely Chiba; Asahina, too, seemed to resent Raphael's general existence, and while he was quieter about it than Chiba, neither Tōdō nor the man who was meant to be his sergeant, his second-in-command and co-commander if they needed to split the team for tactical purposes, had actually managed to miss how the young, bespectacled man, who'd been given a specialist's kit, glared holes into Raphael's back whenever he thought he wasn't looking. To make matters worse, he had noticed that Raphael's half of the team—and wasn't that just the entire damned problem right there, that even in his own mind, Tōdō referred to it as 'Raphael's team'—had a marked tendency to close ranks whenever one of their own came under fire, which usually only resulted in escalation, requiring both him and Raphael to step in to put a stop to the foolishness.
He wondered if that wasn't the more insidious problem, really—that just like how neither Chiba nor Asahina respected Raphael's authority enough to abide his intercession unaccompanied, the five from Area Six didn't trust Tōdō, not really. Though, in their defence, he supposed he'd earned it: why would they trust in his leadership ability, when two of his subordinates (but he didn't have only four subordinates, did he? It was nine other people's lives he theoretically had in his hands, after all) only ever obeyed his commands off the field when he was looking, and inevitably countermanded the intention with which they'd been given in the moment it took him to turn his attention to something else. None of the former Sixes seemed to feel that same impulse, after all.
At times like these, he was beyond glad that both Urabe and Senba had chosen to tag along. Urabe's views on things aligned with Tōdō's more often than not, which wasn't surprising given exactly how many foxholes they'd shared with one another over the years, and Senba, who lumbered past him wielding a large and cumbersome-looking gun with multiple barrels, was entirely too old for this sort of factionalism. If he'd been alone in a sea of young people, Tōdō was not certain that he'd still be able to say that he remained in possession of his own sanity by now.
"Enough complaining," Tōdō ordered her.
"…Yes, sir," she replied after a tense moment and a deep breath.
"Diego," he called out, an intentional choice—he could hardly manage to weld this team together if he thought of the slight man as 'Raphael's specialist', after all. "Picking up any signs on your familiars?"
"Not yet, sir," Diego replied professionally, almost pointedly so. "So either they've dug themselves in already, or—"
"Or they're being stealthy on the approach," Tōdō interjected gruffly. "In which case, we would do well to be prepared for an ambush…"
"Or a night attack," Raphael added.
"A night attack? In this white-out?" Chiba scoffed. "Yeah, I can imagine this black armour blending right in…"
"Blends better than you'd think," Maria rebutted. "And if the strike team we're up against has a few vets like us, you'd better believe that they'll know how to use it…"
"It's curious that you know that," Asahina chimed in, his tone just shy of confrontational.
Maria scoffed. "We didn't exactly cut our teeth on drills alone ahead of Two Rivers and Rio, and those two were far from the only battles that we waged and won during the Rebellion. Most of them we fought far away from open fields. That's where a lot of us got the bulk of our field experience…"
"So your veterans are trained guerillas," Tōdō deduced, trying to avoid the scene that reprimanding Asahina out in the open like this was all but guaranteed to cause. It was the way things were done—at least in his experience; failures were punished openly, but infractions were a private matter…though, now that he thought of it, was that the part he had played in why it was taking so long for things to shape up? Perhaps it was simply that he had wedded his thinking to the way that the IJA operated without realising it. He made a note to ask Raphael, then, how the Legion handled matters like this—after all, better to take the blow to his pride than to make such an egregious mistake like letting a disciplinary and cohesion issue linger and fester. "That certainly lends credence to the night attack idea…"
Raphael shrugged. "It's what I would do, given the proper resources…"
If you had a strike team without a significant part of it snapping at another part's throat, you mean, Tōdō finished silently; and while he couldn't fault Raphael for the charity of his phrasing, and could easily acknowledge that it was almost certainly the right call, he couldn't help but hate him a little for how, with a single sentence, he'd put the onus directly at Tōdō's feet to put a name to the cause of the issue that drove a wedge into their operation. But then again, he supposed that that was just part of his responsibility as leader of this group, such as it was.
"Heads up, and keep your eyes peeled," Tōdō ordered with a nod, taking Raphael's words in stride. They crept through the snow-buried brush with greater caution now, and Asahina brought his own familiars in close, the little mechanical drones hovering without rotors in the air above them—whatever technology the Britannians had developed to enable their flight had rendered them entirely silent for it, such that all the mechanical black dragonflies glided through the air on silent, motionless wings, recording all that they saw and encountered and feeding the information back to the specialists controlling them, with four to a man. "I don't want us taken unawares…"
"Copy that," Raphael echoed, and immediately, all of them were at last properly on alert—albeit begrudgingly so in some cases, namely those of Chiba and Asahina. But Tōdō did his best not to mind that, at least not too much; after all, if worse came to worst, Tōdō had no choice but to believe that they would follow orders and do their duty, regardless of any of their personal grudges.
The strike team had been dropped into the mountains at midday, after being geared and briefed on what they were going into and what they were expected to do while they were there. They were transported to the A.O. by air and then had to parachute down, so that they would have to assess the topography and a slew of other navigational information the moment they touched down, or perhaps even during the descent, and not before. This, too, was wise, because he would hardly have expected anyone with any decent degree of experience with combat operations in inhospitable environments to have failed to take in, even if only by accident, a wealth of details about the surrounding area simply by the movements a ground vehicle would have made if they'd been riding it blind up here, but it certainly hadn't helped Chiba's or Asahina's moods any to have been strapped into a harness with a parachute and pushed out the ass-end of a Britannian shuttle to be air-dropped into all the cold and snow.
They'd gotten their bearings and gotten together fairly quickly, and then they had proceeded with all due caution through the skeletal trunks of leafless trees laden with more and more white snow, though there were a few points where, given how far off of the beaten path they were, there was no clear way forward, to the point where it had taken them several minutes—or in one case, as much as half an hour—to engineer a method to make further progress. The sun was already rapidly beginning to set, though, and even through the combat armour he'd been issued, which he would have bet his last yen on having been insulated against the cold and other conditions hostile to life, the cold was starting to bite at him more sharply, and the wind began to howl through the rocks and chasms of the Yatsugatake Mountains, cutting through flesh and blood to chill him in his very bones. The shadows were growing long, and the woods, even bereft of foliage, were now growing so thickly together in the areas that they were entering into that he knew more and more with each step they took that a night attack in these conditions would be a fire-fight straight out of the bowels of all eight of the hells.
He had been right not to doubt Raphael, Tōdō reflected. Would that he could impress such wisdom, meagre though it might have been, upon his two youngest former subordinates…
"How will we even know that we'll find them?" Chiba muttered under her breath. "This isn't what I would call a small area. We could just be passing right by them like two ships in the night and never know it…"
"That, too, is part of the exercise," Isadora chimed in mildly. "Think of it this way. We can hardly be trusted to secure a strategic objective in the field if we manage to miss another team that's also looking for us here…"
There was that, Tōdō conceded, but he wasn't so certain it was the whole story, either. Of course, he didn't fault Isadora from coming to that conclusion; but Tōdō's instincts, honed by spending his entire adult life being slung from one active combat zone to another, since he'd been apparently far too useful of a field officer to be wasted on a promotion to the general staff (which he rather doubted, considering that entire era of the IJA had been obnoxiously political, to the point where it took the Britannians smashing through all of the finest and most decorated fleets in the IJN without even a week's difficulty to get their heads on straight and do their jobs right), insisted on another option. To those instincts, which had accompanied him through many a trap set by an enemy force, and even guided him through suicide missions given to him by some of the higher-ups at the behest of rivals who boasted friends in high places, this entire situation reeked to him of a familiar intentionality—not like he was being led by the nose, but rather as if there was a hand upon his nose that, merely by its presence, was guiding him. There was a distinct impression he was getting that he'd become a rat in a maze—a remarkably spacious and open maze, to be certain, but still enclosed and directed towards a predetermined end.
No, there was no chance that they'd miss each other through bad luck in this place. When he looked at it the right way, he could start to see the lay of it: the topography of the A.O. herded them towards each other in such a way that fortune wouldn't play a part in it. Unless they were somehow stricken with a curse of absolute incompetence while they were out here, they were all but guaranteed to run into one another.
"The area only looks massive and open," said Tōdō, concluding that reticence was hardly wisdom in a case like this. "But make no mistake. It's herding us together. We won't miss each other by happenstance, Chiba, I promise you that…"
"Yes, sir," Chiba conceded immediately.
"I applaud your faith, Decant Tōdō," Isadora said, and though she clearly meant it as a compliment, it continued to rankle him the same as it had ever since he'd first been introduced to Raphael and his friends about two months ago. They treated the Princess Justine, a girl who was, by all accounts, freshly seventeen, with reverence that most men reserved for their gods—more, even, for though he had known many who'd proclaimed their piety as ably as these young people did in the past, he'd encountered far fewer who lived it with such devotion. He knew that they were evidence in themselves of the princess's works, but service and salvation alone did not a religion make—else every altruistic volunteer firefighter, beleaguered intensive care surgeon, or good social worker would have shrines of their own (though perhaps it would be a kinder world if it were so, and men revered the kindness they could visit upon their fellow men instead of domination); thus, it seemed to him that there was something else at play, something that could be pointed to as precisely why this slip of a girl he'd never actually met inspired such…almost cultish feelings from her soldiers. He wondered, and not for the first time, what this could possibly be—because while he'd heard of soldiers' cults before this, to the point where he was fairly sure that one had been forming around him after his 'miraculous' victory against the Witch of Britannia at Itsukushima, he felt quite sure that he'd never encountered anything quite like this before, not in all his years of soldiering. "Indeed, Her Majesty would not seek to set us to a trial that fortune alone would allow us to fail. How could I not have seen it…"
But Tōdō had more tact than to ask such things; instead, he nodded and continued to join the group as they moved forward, venturing into the forest even as night fell.
Darkness descended upon the part of the mountains through which they ventured before the sun had properly set—a strange hour, where they crept through increasingly difficult-to-see terrain as the light failed to reach them, yet on high, it seemed as though the mountains were anointed with a tiara of golden flame as the last remnants of sunlight blasted one side of the range and left the other in all-consuming shadow. But it was on account of this strange moment, this happening that would have driven a better, wiser man than him to poetry, and only that that he spotted it.
The glint of a stray beam of sunlight against a reflective surface.
"Sharpshooter!" he bellowed, and before Urabe could even begin to react, Isadora whirled to sight the contact and tagged them right out of the tree into which they'd climbed with a sound he was sure that he had never heard before in his life.
PYOOW—!
The red beam shot forth from the emitter before Tōdō could even fully process that she'd stowed the pistol and drawn her lance, lining up the shot and firing all in one smooth motion that took maybe a fraction of a second, all told.
In his moment of stunned hesitation, Raphael, in contrast, immediately snapped into action, stowing his own pistol and drawing his rifle from his shoulder. "All hands! Weapons free!"
"Weapons free!" he called half a beat later, but by that point, it was almost too late.
They'd surrounded them on three sides, their opponents, aiming to encircle them based on how they had spaced themselves out, but Tōdō had spotted one of their twin sharpshooters before they had managed to tie the noose properly. He had a brief moment to notice that one of their rangers and a grenadier were out of position before the other grenadier, almost opposite the first, opened fire.
The red barrels were a bright spot in the dark as they spun, the CHYUU CHYUU CHYUU—! of its rapid hadron blasts shockingly rattling as the cone of suppressing fire laid down ripped through the foliage; and while the power level that their weapons were all set to was low enough that their armour would be more than enough to protect them, it was a struggle getting his brain to comprehend that truth as that same weapon shredded wood into coal. The rangers rushed in under the covering fire, scatterguns flaring as gales of red light covered specifically their approach, packing enough punch to land anyone they hit directly onto their asses, and while their remaining sharpshooter was quiet, and their specialists had yet to deign to reveal themselves, Tōdō knew better than to hope, even, that that meant that they wouldn't.
The rear ranger's blast took Chiba full in the chest as she turned, sending the woman clear off of her feet and into the snow; Asahina turned and made to return fire, but the other ranger fired on him, and while the other ranger's scattergun shots missed, it was still pressure that forced Asahina to back down. Senba and Juan hoisted their light hadron cannons and sent them rip-roaring in counter-fire, forcing the other grenadier back so that they couldn't cover the area in a cross-section of fire, peppering them with ordinance that kept their heads down in whatever cover they'd been able to find, but Tōdō didn't have a good target to focus on within his view, keeping himself calm and scanning for the other sharpshooter—one of the most dangerous members of the enemy strike team, and almost certain to have recused herself from the chaos.
The rear ranger charged Chiba, seeking to take her out as she scrambled back to her feet, but even as Tōdō busied himself, Maria leapt into action, tackling the front ranger with her whole body and sending the ranger flying into the trees like a rag-doll, before turning and firing her scattergun directly from the hip into the other ranger—once, twice.
The remaining ranger evaded and continued to close the distance, so Maria discarded her scattergun, and pulled her vibroaxe from her belt; with the beard of that axe, which hadn't been activated, she hooked it onto the other ranger's scattergun right behind the emitter and yanked it out of their hands—only, of course, they didn't release their grip, and so were yanked forward in turn, yanked hard enough that Maria's punch that followed clotheslined them, and then she grabbed the scattergun and clocked them across the helmeted face so hard that they dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Meanwhile, Diego, who'd ducked for cover and relied on his familiars, brought them down to flank the firing grenadier and disabled the light cannon, giving Tōdō an opening that he took, charging the soldier whose firing had just stopped as the twin PYOOW—! sounds behind him signalled Urabe and Isadora firing on the other sharpshooter at the same time, the moment they ducked out to acquire a solution. Tōdō, for his part, bowled into the grenadier and scrambled, grappling with them in the snow until Tōdō's experience and training allowed him to get an arm right where he needed it, trapping the grenadier in a submission hold and choking them out until they went limp in his arms.
"Hostile!" Raphael called out, and Tōdō looked up to see his sergeant firing on the other grenadier, who'd snuck through the foliage and popped up to lay down a new cone of suppressive fire—only for a few of one of the enemy specialists' familiars to zip down and take the hits instead. The drone fell to the ground in a smoking heap, but the damage was done: the other grenadier gunned down Raphael, and took him right out in a single volley of low-powered hadron bolts.
Maria signalled for her and Chiba to approach the grenadier from two different angles, but as Tōdō looked on, he saw Chiba elect not to support her fellow, and presumably go hunting for the specialists who now began to wreak havoc in the area simply by flying their drones into inconvenient places. They jammed both Senba's and Juan's guns, occupied both Isadora, who was calmly firing them out of the air one by one with her pistol, but was nonetheless occupied, and Urabe, who was faring considerably worse against them. He made to call out to command Chiba to support Maria, but got as far as calling her name before the other grenadier, who'd gone slack, banged him in the head with their own helmet, struggling out and in his shock claiming the upper hand in their grapple.
Chiba, who'd heard his command but misinterpreted it as a call for her aid, circled back to Tōdō, charging the wrong grenadier with a hearty kiai, and Tōdō was too occupied to correct her, especially with the grenadier pressing down on his throat like they were in a bar brawl, so he was forced to watch, impotent and powerless to help, as the other grenadier gunned Maria down in a hail of hadrons, leaving them able to pick their targets with impunity.
Chiba slammed into the grenadier throttling him, but they'd clearly been expecting it, rolling with it instead of trying to resist the impact. They rolled to their feet, and took a low stance, having wrestled Chiba into weaponless-ness in the midst of her headlong charge, and though Chiba thought now to resort at last to her vibroaxe, pulling it from her belt and brandishing it, in a hand-to-hand situation, Chiba, who Tōdō had already been planning to reprimand for treating her ranger courses with such disrespect, was quite a bit less prepared than he had been to emerge victorious. She was occupied, essentially, and would be of no help.
Time to see if I can't salvage this mess, then, Tōdō thought to himself ruefully. Where are we…? The enemy has both specialists and both grenadiers, but is down both rangers and both sharpshooters. We have both sharpshooters, one ranger, both grenadiers, and both specialists. We're still up… But wait. Raphael… Where are the enemy's decant and sergeant…?
With that in mind, Tōdō was almost unsurprised when both Juan and Senba went down in crossfire, as the sergeant and decant, who'd been concealing themselves, made their presence known…and from the looks of it, one of them came from where Asahina had taken cover, so Tōdō took that to mean that now, the strike team was down one specialist as well as both grenadiers.
He looked, and checked to see that Chiba was holding her own—she was savvy enough to keep her weapon in hand, and denied the other grenadier opportunities to pin her, both of which reminded Tōdō that Chiba had grown up the only daughter in a family of boys—so that was at least one grenadier pinned down, albeit at the cost of his remaining ranger. That in mind, he picked his rifle up from where he'd discarded it in the snow, and decisively gunned down the other grenadier as they took aim at his sharpshooters.
His aim was right on target, and the other grenadier went down like a sack of bricks, but a hiss and a rushing flood alerted him to the fact that Urabe and one of the commanders—the sergeant, by the stamp on their black pauldron—had taken each other out nearly simultaneously. He had to clean this up yesterday.
"Diego! Find and target the specialists! Belay all other orders!" he commanded, before sprinting in full kit across the field, aiming to cover Isadora as she won her way free before the decant could get her into a firefight that he could ill afford.
"Yes, sir!" Diego called back, and immediately his dragonflies were in motion, while Tōdō skidded to a stop at last in between Isadora and a silhouette that he could see through his helmet's sensors. He began to open fire before he'd even gotten a chance to catch his breath, pinning the silhouette down long enough for Isadora to holster her pistol and bring forth her lance again.
In two quick breaths, she tagged the grenadier who now had a fully unarmed Chiba on her back, her body pressed into the snow and restrained, nearly pinned, directly in the head. Counting this as a win, then, Tōdō next called over his shoulder, "Split!"
Isadora obeyed without acknowledgement, rolling her way to one side while Tōdō himself rolled to the other—and not a moment too soon, as the other decant's hail of hadrons slammed into the snow where both of them had just been standing.
"Isadora!" Diego called out, but Tōdō trusted them to have the specialists well in hand. He circled in a crouching run around through the foliage, and the decant tried to prevent themselves from being drawn in a direction far afield of the firefight, but Tōdō pressed the issue relentlessly, denying the enemy decant the luxury of sensible decision-making as best he could.
The tactic bore fruit, and they exchanged fire back and forth through the bare trees, using them as a source of cover as bark and splinters and singes flew with every discharge of their hadron rifles. They went back and forth, shooting at shadows and falling snow-drifts as much as one another in the increasingly poor visibility of their surroundings.
At last, their running battle had depleted Tōdō's stamina. His forehead was damp and clammy, all beaded up with sweat; his chest heaved as he sucked in air; his heart hammered in his ears; his hands shook ever-so-slightly; and each was an increasingly unwelcome reminder that he was becoming an old man in a young person's profession, that he was hardly the hardened warrior he'd been in his early twenties, fresh off his first two tours and thinking that he had the world and the mechanisms of war all figured out.
What a fool he'd been in those days.
What a fool he still was, he amended.
Let's see what prevails, then, he thought to himself, keenly aware that if he and his opponent cleared their trunks at the same time, two trees with a rare span of open space between them, both would be able to get a clear shot at the other. Whoever won this, then, and got the chance to pull a victory out of this mess, as dirty and bitter as it would undoubtedly be in either of their cases today, would be the one who managed to get their shot off first. The vigour of youth, or an increasingly old man's experience…
With that in mind, he launched himself from behind the tree-trunk and the other decant, who'd had the same idea, did so at the same time. He fired, the decant fired, and Tōdō braced himself.
When he came to a few seconds later, he looked up, saw what had happened, and laughed. Laughed until his stomach hurt.
"Well, would you look at that…?" he said aloud to himself, with all the mirth of a hanging-tree. "It was youthful vigour who shot first, after all…but an old man's experience who actually landed it…"
Later, after he'd dragged himself back to the tattered remnants of his strike team, he, Diego, Chiba, and Isadora, the last four standing, set about the collection of some dry wood and branches to erect a proper camp so that they could survive the night. They laboured in the dark—three of them, anyways; Tōdō was in a mood still, and displeased with Chiba's performance especially, so he'd tasked her with gathering up their fallen teammates, so that they wouldn't be too disoriented upon coming to—and as they did, Tōdō wondered aloud, "How do they score this sort of thing, do you think?"
"Our armour has a chip in our chest-plates that is dedicated entirely to monitoring, transmitting, and recording our vital signs," Diego responded after a moment. "It registers if we're knocked unconscious."
"Ah," Tōdō hummed. "I see…"
Isadora shot him a look at that, and because they'd doffed their helmets by this point, Tōdō could clearly see the bemused expression on her face.
An hour later, after they had established a perimeter and gotten a fire roaring—as the old Britannian saying went, 'many hands make light work'—their comrades roused from their unconsciousness, while their opponents on the other strike team, defeated as they were, albeit narrowly, rose more slowly to discover the bundle of firewood Tōdō had commanded left for them, as now that the exercise was over, there was no real reason to continue to act in an adversarial fashion. Maria and Urabe were the first up, followed by Raphael and Juan, then Asahina, and finally Senba, and upon awakening amongst each other, they began to come to the fire and join in around the warmth. This all was fairly normal, save for the fact that the peacemakers on Raphael's side of the team were silent. Maria especially seemed moody (not that he blamed her; he was still angry on her behalf for how brazenly Chiba left her out to dry), and Raphael was mostly silent in solidarity, while Juan, though usually a bit of a gentle giant, laconic yet very often pithy for it, pointedly didn't look in either Asahina's or Chiba's direction.
Tōdō tried to hold it together, he really did—even if he'd been considering changing the way he did things, throwing out the IJA's methods that had become so deeply ingrained into him that not even he fully realised it sometimes, as the antiquated disciplinary standards of an increasingly bygone era, the other party wasn't so far away that he couldn't see the light of their own fire through the trees—but after both Asahina and Chiba threw out their third glare apiece towards Raphael's people, his ire finally boiled over. "Asahina. Chiba."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. They both still knew this tone of his, after all.
Both of them whipped their heads around towards him, while he sat upon a rock, his hands folded in front of him, while Chiba had a fallen piece of log and Asahina had his rear upon the naked snow. Now that he'd started, though, he didn't back down. Maybe this was what was necessary—necessary to get it finally through their thick skulls that the IJA was no more, that they had different allegiances now, and that they'd best start acting like it. He started softly regardless. "What the fuck was that."
Asahina's and Chiba's brows furrowed, and they glanced at each other in a way that really started to boil his blood. He couldn't tell which would be worse—if they were pretending not to know what they had done to earn his displeasure, or if they were somehow genuine in their ignorance. He supposed that it didn't fully matter, though, not in the long run; neither possibility made their behaviour any less unacceptable. But of the two of them, predictably, it was Chiba who found her voice first. "Colonel Tōdō, I don't…"
"Not 'colonel,'" he corrected her sharply. "'Decant' Tōdō."
"…Decant Tōdō," she conceded with a deep breath. "We don't understand what you're referring to, neither I nor Major Asahina…"
"There you go again," Tōdō said, pointing at her. "Using the wrong rank. You aren't Captain Chiba, Chiba, and nor is he Major Asahina. This is not Major Urabe, nor is this man Lieutenant Colonel Senba. Do you understand? None of us have had those ranks since we lost the war. We lost, and our military was at last dissolved along with our empire."
"We didn't lose, Col—Decant Tōdō," Asahina interjected with a passion that was rather rare to see out of him. In any other circumstance, Tōdō might actually have been impressed. Now, though, Tōdō could only find it saddening. "With respect, we were betrayed."
"Don't you dare try to rewrite history, Asahina," Tōdō hissed, pointing his finger towards the young man accusatorily. "Such reactionary conspiracism is beneath you. It degrades you, and in degrading you, it degrades all of us by proxy. War is politics. It matters not whether we lost the war by force of arms or at the behest of political machination: we lost it all the same. Or would you have preferred that we complied with Sawasaki's mad scheme, and brought the Narita base down upon our heads? Think, Asahina! What would that have accomplished save to bring the Britannian hammer down upon us even harder as our conquerors butchered us to avenge their slain princess, hmm? What then?"
Asahina looked away, abashed, his cheeks flushing with humiliation. Chiba, who was usually the far more aggressive member of the pair, interceded with a softer, more diplomatic tone, surprisingly, speaking in Asahina's defence as she did. "No one's saying that we should have listened to Sawasaki, Decant. I don't think he ever once thought of the impact that his actions would have upon the people, only how he could try to lionise himself in the pages of history with a legacy of defiance. But while we do understand that the war is over, we don't think it's right that we should be expected to forget where we came from."
Tōdō snorted incredulously. "What, the Imperial Japanese Army? That you would speak of it as if it was something worthy of remembrance tells me all I need to know about how little you kids actually know about 'where you came from.' Fools, the both of you…"
Chiba recoiled, as if struck, and replied heatedly, "Decant, I hardly think—!"
"My first deployment," he cut her off, beginning his tale. "I was fresh-faced and callow, barely past my majority. Back then, I believed every word that my father had said about what an honour it was to fight and die for the Chrysanthemum Throne, that as the sun rises upon our empire first of all nations, we should strive to win glory worthy of it. I'd gone to only the finest of military academies for my education from the time that I was old enough to learn to read, and I thought myself prepared—a second lieutenant, minted and graduated fresh and new. I was assigned my platoon, then, a band of fresh conscripts who were looked after in large part by an NCO whose exceedingly blunt manner had made him highly unpopular and unlikely to be recommended for a promotion. When I went to meet my platoon, then, I also met Sergeant Major Senba, without whose advice I wouldn't be here today, and Corporal Urabe, who headed my First Section.
"The captain above me was a glory hound, and at the time I hadn't known to have contempt for that, didn't know how despicable a man of that character had to be," he continued, noting absently that both men he'd named raised their hands as he named them. "But I was the only son of a man he considered a rival in both career and love, Senba had no patience for egotistical officers, and Urabe, as well as the corporals who headed the other sections, had all been conscripted either from poor farmers in the countryside, the slums of Tōkyō and Ōsaka, or the foster care system—especially the foster care system."
"That's me," Urabe volunteered with a jovial wave. "Yup. I'm the unwanted child."
"In other words, we were considered to be a collection of expendables, and at the time, we were in the midst of an increasingly bitter war with the Chinese Federation," Tōdō continued. "The Navy had most of the Chinese naval forces tied up in the South China Sea, so the High Eunuchs and their warlords brought the bulk of their forces to bear on us in Manchuria. They'd pushed us all the way back to the Taedong River by that point, but there was a bloody counter-offensive in the works at the level of the brass, and the captain of our company at the time, Kitano Seiji, volunteered us to be at the tip of the spear for our regiment. So off we went to Pyongyang, and not three weeks after my boots first hitting the ground with my platoon, Senba, Urabe, I, and forty-seven other young men were on the front lines of the push against the Chinese.
"Don't let the state of the Chinese Federation's armies as they currently stand deceive you," he said, gravely serious. "Their Knightmares might not be worth the scrap they're made from, but it was a different time then, and even by the time that you two enlisted, things were markedly different. This was back in the late nineties, before the—at the time—new Holy Britannian Emperor, Charles, had done anything of note beyond winning and keeping his country's throne, before the Indochinese War that bloodied the Chinese so badly that they still have only recently recovered. Though their leadership had always been low in quality, a different crop of warlords held sway then, and their armies were well-fed, well-equipped, decently-trained, and, most importantly of all, numerous. As soon as we set up to cross that river, every step we took north was bitterly contested, and at any given time, we could be outnumbered by two or three to one at minimum. Some battles, it got as bad as five to one; and what they don't tell you is that even if your tactics are perfect, you can still reach a point where you've more enemies before you than bullets. The skill I gained wielding a blade was won in the fight for my own survival, not some cushy dōjō; and after months of a bitter push that faltered several times because our supply lines were under increasing strain, we'd finally crossed over the mountains and into Manchuria.
"By that point, of the fifty men who ventured north from Pyongyang as part of my platoon, only ten still lived."
The silence that followed was mixed. From Asahina and Chiba, who'd heard, no doubt, of Tōdō and his accomplishments as if he was some kind of hero, it was almost stunned; from Senba and Urabe, it was a grim moment of shared recollection. And from across the fire, Tōdō saw that the other five were listening to his tale in solemnity and something that almost seemed like solidarity—an appearance that was confirmed when Raphael caught his eyes and nodded sagely.
"With this achievement came a pause in the campaign on both sides," Tōdō continued. "I say that it took months, but in reality, it took us five full years of bitter fighting to get that far. War exhaustion had set in on the Chinese side—not in terms of the will to continue the war, but in terms of local supplies depleting faster than they had the industrial capabilities to replace. Our diplomats arranged for a ceasefire lasting for two years, as both of us took the time to step back and reassess. In this time, promotions were at last given out, and we were properly reinforced, having been forced to spend most of the advance fighting at only half strength because of how high the mortality rate was for new recruits. We got new tanks, our kits received a complete overhaul, and new conscripts, many of whom had lost friends to the Chinese and were filled with a misplaced sense of righteousness, stoked by the propaganda campaigns on the home front and incendiary rhetoric from politicians in the Diet. I received a new commission, and my recommendations for Senba and Urabe to be promoted along with me went through; I was promoted to the rank of major, while both of them were raised to the rank of captain, and given their own companies to command in the process, while Kitano went from 'captain' all the way up to 'colonel.'"
"The kids they gave us…man," Urabe chimed in, huffing and shaking his head. "It was scary, all of that naivete and bloodlust bundled into a single package. Real rude crop of brats, too. Didn't much like 'em. And I know Senba here didn't fare much better…"
Senba grunted. "They were perhaps the single most unruly and least disciplined bunch I've ever had the displeasure of leading…"
"Though my father had tried to brand the honour of service into my brain, in reality, both the brass and the imperial government alike looked at conscription and saw only a convenient means of emptying out the crop of undesirables—the orphans and abandoned children, the poor and the destitute, the rural peoples whose labour maintained the breadbasket of Japan, anyone for whom their only feelings were contempt. We were the ones who paid the price of that as commanders, while they paid with their lives in droves; though, when we began to move to swallow up the rest of Manchuria, Britannia had already begun their invasion of Indochina, so the brass thought it was a brilliant opportunity to grab as much land for the throne and glory for themselves as they could." Tōdō paused to take a breath, and Raphael rose and walked around the fire to hand him a canteen of water to take a drink from—he hadn't even realised how dry his throat had become as he spoke until the creeping discomfort of it was alleviated—which he took a swig from, handed back, and then continued on with the recounting. "Colonel Kitano, who had friends in all the right high places on account of his monstrous father, was the one who drafted the strategy put into place. With soldiers we couldn't trust at our backs, silver-spoon glory hounds filling out our officers—for word had gotten out in high circles in Kyoto that the invasion was expected to be virtually unopposed—and our subordinates, and a mountain range in the way of our supply lines, which was certain to strain them, we marched, rolling over rural areas, villages and the like, and with so many of their forces tied down by the Britannians to the south of us, the token garrisons ahead of us buckled and ran. Things were going well, for a change…"
"And then came the Changchun Incident," Senba said grimly.
Tōdō grimaced. "I've always hated that name. It's so…sterile. It's sinister. More than that, it defiles the truth of what happened…"
"The Rape of Changchun, I've heard the Sinos call it," Urabe offered up from his own graven seat.
"We'd taken the city of Changchun," Tōdō explained, his hands clenching into fists, knuckles going white as the bone beneath. "It was important to the strategy Kitano had concocted, of which we'd been told precious little. And it made sense—it was a natural city for a supply depot as we pushed further into enemy territory, and boasted some of the best infrastructure for kilometres around, not that that was a high bar for a Chinese city to set, then or now. We gathered our forces there, and my battalion was ordered, along with an assortment of other commanders who were of like mind—the late General Katase was a major general back in those days, and still preferred to lead his troops from the front—to sweep out in a series of attacks on the various other cities in the region at 'lightning-quick' speed. Katase was tasked with taking the stronghold at Harbin, while I was assigned to the breaking of Shenyang, as part of a specially-assembled brigade; Kitano, meanwhile, contented himself with holding Changchun as a forward base, sending out orders and supplies, surrounded by his personal subordinates, cronies, and visiting political allies. It turned out that the intel that we were given was severely out-of-date, that Shenyang and Harbin were better-defended than we'd had any reason to believe."
"Shenyang was butchery, plain and simple," Senba added with a sagacious nod.
"We were wading into the Sanzu-no-Kawa up to our waists back then," Urabe chuckled mirthlessly. "Most of those who went to fight in that city died in its streets."
"We brought the equivalent of half a division to that city," Tōdō recalled, looking down at the snow. "The cobbled-together remnants of a battalion accounted for all who were able to walk out of there. Katase, with whom we linked up on the return journey, had been similarly bloodied, though not quite so thoroughly as us. But when we came to Changchun…"
"My father used to tell me stories of the occupation of Nanking, during the Second Sino-Japanese War," said Senba, filling the strangled silence that followed. "Around friends, he was expected to be proud of it. In private, it haunted him as Changchun haunts me. What I saw in those streets… Only the words of my father came to mind back then."
"The Blades speak similarly, when they speak of the places they found us," Raphael volunteered. "It was…enlightening, reading of the happenings at Nanking, and knowing that what we suffered at the hands of Britannia was not a uniquely Britannian form of evil."
Tōdō didn't know whether to wince or to chuckle at the irony of speaking about the (and yes, Urabe was right, it was a much more accurate name) Rape of Changchun in the company of those who'd been, for all intents and purposes, on the other side of a situation of similar character to what he'd witnessed; but his nodding in Raphael's direction, and Raphael's comment in and of itself, was enough to engage the others as well, all five former veterans at least looking over at their side of things. Like this, it felt almost as if they'd become a cohesive unit, though Tōdō was not so skilled in the myriad arts of self-delusion that he was able to bring himself to believe that they had anything but a long way to go on that front.
Still, it was a start.
"I don't blame them one bit," Tōdō settled upon, shaking his head.
"So, what happened?" Chiba asked, her agitation plain. "Did you report what was happening?"
Urabe snorted. "What, you thought the brass didn't know?"
"Half of them had taken comfort women in exchange for promises of political favours," Senba said. "The other half either looked the other way, or had…alternative tastes."
"There was nothing that I could do," Tōdō said. "There were too many eyes on me, Britannia was to the south, and the High Eunuchs are every bit as loathsome. There was no winning for the civilians trapped in that den of depravity."
"No one came for us, either," said Maria. "And before you say 'of course, it was Britannia,' Chiba, I want you to stop for a moment and ask yourself, really think for a moment. 'Who would?'"
"You'd think the E.U., for one," Asahina scoffed.
"The E.U. would sooner have put us into internment camps or penal battalions before ever giving us anything that would help," Maria countered with certainty. "We would become the reason why the fattened industrialists have let their workers' wages stagnate. The scapegoat whenever Europian men preyed upon a woman. We would be blamed for everything including our own poverty, whether we actually even had any part in it or not."
"That's…" Asahina gaped, before snapping his jaw shut and adjusting his glasses in an attempt to save some face, "…a grim prediction…"
Tōdō decided to be glad Asahina had the tact and the decency not to compare what the five of them were doing in the Dread Legion if not serving in what amounts to a penal battalion. If he'd said that, Tōdō thought that the other five might actually crucify him, and Tōdō didn't know if in that situation, he'd bother to lift a finger to prevent it.
Maria shrugged. "Hmph. It's a truth you've gotta face sooner or later, coming up like we did. There is nowhere in the world where the powers that be actually give a shit about the little people like us."
"The conquered masses. The impoverished throngs. The cold and the hungry," Juan listed off with all the investment and energy of someone reading a shipping manifest. "It really is the same all around. The people with the power to help are never actually willing."
"Well, almost never," Isadora chimed in with a sharp, somewhat lopsided grin.
The rest of them chuckled warmly.
"So that's it, then?" Chiba said dully, shrugging. "Nothing could be done?"
"I didn't want to accept it at first, either," Tōdō conceded. "But then I found a different reason to try and right the scales, and challenged him to an honour duel over the bad intel I'd been given. The fact that I cut him down where he stood, cowardly worm that he was, was the reason why, though Katase continued to climb the ranks, my career stalled out at colonel."
"Even after the old man covertly tried to clear out all the officers involved," Urabe recalled wryly, a faux-lackadaisical affect coming upon him as he leaned back on his arms, "the duel remained a black stain on dear old Tōdō-san's record. The generals who were cleared out, even the disgraced ones, had friends and allies in the Diet or in Kyoto, after all. Some of them were even brought on to advise Emperor Boruhito and the Imperial Family before the Second Pacific War, and remained right where they were all the way through to the bitter end—though most of them were killed when Boruhito bit the dust, too."
"The system itself closed its ranks around this crime at all levels of power, and Senba, Urabe, and I, we all witnessed it happen in real time," Tōdō explained, his tone hollow to his own ears. "But by then, I'd burrowed too deep into the institution to find my way out. Too much of me had been carved out by death to then be filled by the Imperial Japanese Army for me to really reckon with that legacy until just now…"
"…Then, why tell us this now?" Asahina asked after a moment. "As you said, the IJA is gone."
"Because you're acting like it's not," snapped Tōdō. "Or, more accurately, you're acting as if it was something worthy of fond memory. Instead, you should count yourselves fucking lucky that you weren't in for long enough for the higher-ups to tell you to just look away and act like you didn't see something that will haunt your dreams and stain your soul until the end of your days, or else take a tantō between the ribs. I was six hours away from taking my own life before I decided to join the Legion. It's my second chance at it all, my second chance to serve a military that doesn't turn my stomach to serve, that doesn't hold me there as a hostage until finally it collapses, and I'm left only with the weight of my own impotent sins. I suggest, in the strongest of possible terms, that you learn to see that for yourselves, and take it for the blessing that it undeniably is."
Asahina looked away, and Chiba's jaw clenched, her mouth screwed up like she'd just swallowed a lemon; but, to her credit, Chiba was the first of them to turn around and look at the others across the fire, meeting Maria's eyes squarely. "Decant Tōdō is correct. I conducted myself in a dishonourable fashion, and in doing so, I dishonoured you as well. You suggested a tactic, and I didn't have your back. It's…difficult, I think, for me to come to terms with working with someone who wasn't and would never have been IJA, but that doesn't excuse my actions. I…apologise."
"…Apology accepted," sighed Maria. "Honestly, it's been awkward for us, too. What, do you think it's a field of daisies for us to learn to fight alongside someone who's never seen the extermination towns? I don't think a single one of us is really thrilled to be standing arm-in-arm with people who weren't involved in the fighting at Two Rivers or the Rio Settlement. But Her Majesty asked this of us, asked that we put our defensiveness over our bonds of kin to the side for the sake of the greater good, and while we've been more than willing, even if it's uncomfortable for us, you and Four-Eyes over there aren't making it any easier on any of us to gel when you're so insistent on being a burr in our boots."
Tōdō was momentarily taken aback at the normally gregarious woman being so forthright about the issues she had with Chiba and Asahina, but for once, Chiba didn't seem to take offence, nodding and saying to her fellow ranger, "You're right. I haven't been fair…"
"Neither of us have, really," Asahina sighed. "And while I can't promise I won't slip back into bad habits, obviously, I can promise I'll at least try to get better about it."
"Same here," said Chiba.
"Then we shall pray that your efforts are successful," Isadora said flatly, her red eye glinting in the flickering dark. "Because frankly, this situation is otherwise untenable."
And when he stopped to look around at his two oldest living friends, Tōdō knew that they, like him, echoed her sentiment.
Two weeks after Tōdō's strike team's brush with disaster during the training exercise and war game in the Yatsugatake Mountains, Princess Justine returned to headquarters. He knew this because Raphael and Isadora especially had inroads with some of the other veterans of the 588th who had been tapped to become Wyrmguard, the personal retinues of the Circle of Blades, who had passed it down as rumour, which was in short order confirmed. Tōdō had not yet seen the girl, even in passing, for it was a rare occasion that she did finally deign to walk amongst the grounds, which made those among his fellow auxilia who had happened to catch a glimpse of her speak of the meeting in low whispers, like she was more myth than flesh. That still disturbed Tōdō on multiple fronts and for several reasons, not the least among them being what damage it could do to the mind of a seventeen-year-old girl, to be put on such a pedestal and made to feel like she had no choice but to live up to her own legend, but though the former Sixes with whom he lived and trained had perhaps the most permissive outlook on nonbelievers that he'd ever previously encountered (which perhaps had something to do with the fact that their goddess, such as she was, undeniably walked among them), his ability to delude himself into the belief that they'd even be able to grasp the foundational tenets of the issue he was bringing up was, by virtue of his age and his lived experience, virtually nonexistent.
It wasn't that they were unintelligent—that much was demonstrably false—but merely that Tōdō, in his time amongst them, had realised that there was a fundamental conflict of axioms at play between them.
One week after that, on a February morning, amongst the beginnings of an early spring, Tōdō found himself standing in a line with other auxilia (none of whom were members of his strike team, which had, in his mind, he realised, become something he recognised as 'odd,' with how accustomed he'd become to the constance of their presence, since even when they split apart to receive class training, it was into pairs), in a tiled and enclosed open-air training arena. The tiles were dark—andesite, and blackened at that, as far as he could pick out—as were the interiors of all of the main buildings, which, far from being as tacky as it might have seemed if someone explained that to him, instead lent them all an unsettling gloom and an aura of foreboding that made him appreciate the level of sensibility, restraint, and careful design that made such an environment menacing instead of merely farcical, and that meant that the training arena was hemmed in by deep shadows, through which murky silhouettes (which were usually Storm Furies, members of the Second Blade's Wyrmguard, prizing a union of administrative skill and martial prowess) sometimes dashed, seeing to some pressing bureaucratic duty or other, he was sure. But all of that served to narrow his, as well as the other auxilia's, attention in on the instructor for this special training course, so he couldn't argue that all the otherwise oppressing darkness of Headquarters didn't serve its intended purpose.
Speaking of the instructor… Tōdō's hand clenched around the handle of his military blade.
Tōdō hadn't had the pleasure of meeting the woman some called the 'honorary Eleventh Blade,' the Master-at-Arms, Mireya—not personally, at least. His old comrades and he had been fast-tracked past most of the courses that would have had him come into contact with her, given that they had prior service records and were therefore trusted to handle their endurance training regimens themselves—though to balance that out, they hadn't been exempted from the monthly benchmark examinations that all the auxilia were subject to as a means of ensuring that no one was falling behind or backsliding in their physical conditioning—and the veterans of the 588th were given a great deal of leeway, given that they were classified as only partially auxilia (which was fair, in his mind, considering they were veterans of recent wars), but he knew her by her fearsome reputation.
All agreed that Mireya was a harsh and unrelenting taskmaster, that her training was gruelling and almost cruel, that she broke down auxilia to their most foundational constituent parts and built them back up again; but all those complaints came with caveats, that while her training might have been sadistic she gave credit where it was due, that she was as fair as she was hard, and that for as hellish and brutal as her methods were at times, they did undeniably produce results. There were even rumours that she had trained the Blades, and some even went so far as to say that she had instructed Princess Justine when she was younger—though Tōdō had his own private doubts about the validity of the princess's storied prowess with the blade; still, if any of those rumours were true, then Tōdō felt it behoved him to witness with his own eyes the martial prowess of the mysterious woman who had allegedly taken over his old student's training after the war.
Truth be told, he still didn't know what to make of Suzaku's presence here. Tenth Blade or not, he'd known the girl since she was small, and while she'd been exceptionally talented for her age, such that it had been a joy to teach her, at least at first, it hadn't taken long for him to notice the edges of the unfathomable depths of bloodlust within her peeking out from around her attempts to conceal it. When he'd heard that she had defected, that she was the companion of a Britannian princess (though the actual terms used to describe her were not ones he'd have chosen to repeat at all, let alone in mixed company, at least until the stories of her deeds during the Peninsular Rebellion began to circulate), he hadn't been surprised; but he'd thought he was destined to put down the mad dog he'd helped to train if they ever met again for the past half-decade of his life, and that he was now not only subordinate to her, but also on her side, had put him in something of an awkward position, to say the least, both in terms of his duty and also how he felt about his duty. At first, he had hoped that with time and legionary training, his feelings would sort themselves out, but now that he stood there, across from the woman who might well have taught Suzaku the sword after he could no longer do so himself, he felt resigned to the fact that this was a problem time would not solve on its own, and that if he wanted to get any of it out of his conscience and off his chest, if he wanted to allay his sense of honour over this dilemma, however bruised and beaten it might have been by all he'd witnessed, he would have to find some way to encounter her face-to-face.
The clock-clock-clock of the matte-plated knee-high black boots that were standard-issue for Legion uniforms echoed from the far end of the arena, and a chill of primal dread shot down Tōdō's spine, making him and the other auxilia stand just that much straighter. The dread flushed out of him faster than it seemed to for the others, which wasn't nearly as surprising as the fact that he'd been affected by it in the first place, especially when the thing that he'd been most known for in the Imperial Japanese military was his nerves of steel, but he didn't let himself get distracted by that, instead watching attentively as she—for he knew from the first that this could have been none other than Mireya herself—emerged from the darkness.
She was dressed from the waist down in the standard uniform of the Dread Legion, her trousers and boots both black, and identical to what the rest of them were wearing; and even above the belt, she wore the cable-collared long-sleeved black shirt they were all wearing beneath their jackets to ward off the chill (for though it was no longer so bitterly cold as it had been a few weeks ago, it was still by no means warm), and it seemed from what few clear glimpses that Tōdō could get that she was wearing the same black gloves as them, as well. But that was where it ended, for instead of the jacket, armoured vambraces, or belt they were wearing, she wore a short black cloak that ended roughly midway down her thighs, concealing at least a bit the dual frog belts she was wearing, and the multiple swords—six in total, judging by the scabbards he saw, three for each belt—that hung from them.
The woman herself was tall in the way that many Britannian women seemed to be, standing at what he eyeballed to be around a hundred eighty centimetres, give or take, which placed her at around his stature, lean and well-muscled, and she carried herself with the unconscious lethality of a hardened and experienced killer. She was pale as an onryō, her face framed by straight, chin-length, bone-white hair, and though his first thought might have been some rare strain of albinism as the explanation for her odd colouration of both skin and hair, one look at her half-lidded eyes rendered that theory an impossibility. He didn't think that he had ever before seen their like, not in all his days—they were an unnatural shade of blue, cold and vivid, deathly and corpse-like, almost phantasmal but for the piercing intensity that rendered them unwaveringly, unflinchingly carnal. Their presence made features that otherwise would have been beautiful, in a way that was just adjacent enough to Britannian to be jarring—her slender nose and high, fine cheekbones, her face's angular cast and her thin lips—look like Tōdō was staring into a grinning skull when he looked at her too closely, and to say that the effect was unsettling was putting it lightly, to say the least.
He shook himself out of it, though—he didn't doubt for a moment that she was very well-aware of the effect that her features had on others, and she would likely be watching for their reactions to her, testing whether or not they could hold their focus in the face of the aura of passive menace that radiated from off of her in thick, cloying waves, so he was determined not to be found wanting—and gripped the hilt even more tightly, white-knuckling the stingray skin and tsuka wrap of the handle in an attempt to ground himself. She stopped, though, a fair distance from them, perhaps four metres, and then began to speak.
"I'm not normally inclined to preamble," she began, the timbre and tone of her voice feminine, and unmistakably so, but more than that was difficult for him to place. "But I've found that it's disappointingly effective in situations where my instruction has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff properly, and I will tell you that a swordsman, however skilled, who gets themselves into the habit of doubting the evidence of their own senses, especially in an attempt to resist change, is a dead man walking."
"Many of you know me. Some of you do not," she continued, looking directly at Tōdō as she said it. "As some of you may have guessed, I am Mireya, and I am your combat instructor. And as your instructor, I would be remiss if I did not lay out my expectations clearly. For those of you whom I have already taught, you would do well not to expect this special training to be as forgiving as what you have already undergone. That was compulsory, and this is not; therefore, as you have all gone out of your way to be here, I will treat you with all the extra rigour that that entails. Anyone who is willing to go out of their way to do more than is required of them, but is unprepared to face the consequences of that choice, is not brave; they are a fool. I do not suffer fools by choice, you see, and as this special training is elective, I am under no more of an obligation to suffer you should you prove yourself a fool than you were to stand here before me now. But I am not without mercy, for the mistakes of youth must not be judged too harshly: any of you who know that if they were to stay, they would make a fool of themselves, are free to go. You shall not be in any way penalised for walking away—on the contrary, there is wisdom in abundance in the recognition of one's own limitations, and the accommodations thereof. I shall freely admit that not all are fit to learn bladework under me: my methods, however successful, do trend towards extremity. I shan't apologise for that fact any more than I shall conceal it from you. Once again: if you seek to exercise discretion, now is the time."
She paused, looking up and down the line of them, arching a single silver-white brow progressively further towards her hairline, until she closed her eyes briefly and nodded.
"Very well," she intoned. "Then may the record show that you had your chance, and let none of you forget that…"
With that ominous phrase left to hang in the air like a funeral shroud, she reached up and unfastened her cloak, throwing out her lean arm and discarding it with a flourish in a single, fluid motion that was too swift for Tōdō's eyes to track. Beneath it, true to Tōdō's estimation, were six different swords arranged into three matching pairs: two tachi, two cavalry sabres, and two slender scimitars, judging by the three different sets of hilts that he spotted. Then, she drew the first pair in a motion so fluid it was worthy of poetry, and in so doing revealed both of the tachi to be not only completely identical, but works of art in their own right, finely-crafted, and all the deadlier for it; thus armed, she then began to scan up and down the line, her eyes looking each of them up and down, as if she was assessing them for some specific set of qualities to which only she was privy.
At last, those deathly blue eyes settled on him.
"You," she called, lifting one tachi and pointing it directly at him. "You don't look like you're in any danger of accidentally maiming yourself. Come forth, and let's see where your true skill level is at."
Well, I suppose there are few better ways to bear witness, he sighed internally, though, outwardly, he acknowledged the command with a nod, and stepped forth out of the line-up, forcing his grip to relax about the hilt of his military blade as he crossed the distance between himself and the Master-at-Arms.
When he had closed to just within two metres of her, she lowered the tachi, and said, "That's quite close enough. It would hardly be a productive sparring session if we were to begin essentially on top of one another. Now, are you prepared?"
"As much so as I feasibly can be," he replied honestly.
Her thin, pale lips quirked up into a half-smile, as she shifted her feet and her shoulders into a stance that was unfamiliar to him. "That's a good answer."
Accordingly, he eased himself into his favoured iaijutsu stance, his left hand clutching the scabbard as his right hovered above the hilt; and once his feet were properly placed, and the rest of his body was then properly aligned, his eyes slid back to her, and he watched her warily. He'd heard one of the more ludicrous rumours, that this woman, Mireya, had discovered and mastered six thousand different styles of killing, and while at the time, he'd dismissed it as the over-embellished mythology it sounded like, now that he eyed her form, he found himself feeling more and more that there might have been a kernel of truth in that incredible claim—though, he supposed he was about to find out, one way or another.
"There will not be a lead-in, and there will not be a countdown," Mireya cautioned him. "Remember that. What there will be is a single word. And when that word has left my lips, the bout has begun. Do you understand?"
He nodded. "I do."
"Very well, then," said Mireya; then, after a pause so tense that it felt like the world all around them was holding its breath, she spoke a single word. "Tatakae."
In the time it took to blink, she closed the distance. Her speed was astounding, astonishing even, but Tōdō didn't let himself panic.
Instinct, in his experience, worked faster than thought. He didn't spare even a split second to decide where his foot would go, and merely trusted his body to adjust without his input. Her blade passed by him, so close that it might have shaved off some peach fuzz, but he remained cautious—for with dual wielders, the second blade was usually more dangerous than the first.
Now.
In a flash, he drew his blade and parried the second tachi in the same motion, turning the blade aside and stepping out of the way of the first as it followed through. The second shot forth again like the end of a whip, and he parried again, letting his blade get turned with the blow, and struck her forehead with the butt of his military blade.
Or rather, he would have, if she didn't lean her head out of the way at the last possible second.
He felt his eyes widen and his stomach drop, and only by retreating right that very moment did he at all manage to evade both tachi closing the trap, the cleverly-hidden snare with which he had very narrowly avoided hanging himself.
"Sharp instincts," she praised him as they broke apart, putting a metre and a half of space between them, and began to examine each other for any new openings. "You've danced with death before."
"That I have," he confirmed without losing his focus.
"It leaves its mark on you, that sort of thing," she mused aloud. "You're never quite the same again. It's almost a sort of…rebirth, in a way."
To that, he didn't respond, and instead eyed her much more carefully, now that she'd given him an indication of how deeply she could layer her feints. It didn't help that she was using a style that was so very unlike any of the ryūha he'd studied, because while the fundamentals of melee combat were essentially the same across all different disciplines and weapons, limited as they were by the same set of biomechanics, the finer details could vary wildly—what was a sign of a feint in one style could be an indication of a full blow in another, and vice versa—and that made her so much more difficult for him to read. He needed to find a way to crack the code she presented, solve the puzzle, because if he couldn't correctly determine her strikes from her preparatory actions, then there would be no way for him to find a way off of the back foot.
I'll just have to plan my attacks in sequences that limit her options, he thought with a grimace: dual wielding wasn't a skill that most bothered to learn, and for very good reason, but when faced with someone who had obviously put in the time and the effort required to achieve mastery over the rare skill, it became a dangerously difficult thing to deal with as an opponent, both on the attack and defence.
Even so.
"Hah!" he grunted as he moved to close the distance, going on the attack. Aiming for her head as he was, Tōdō wasn't surprised when his blade met steel and not flesh. She deflected, and went for the riposte, but he committed hard, defending himself and pressing the attack in the same motion. His focus narrowed down until only they existed, trusting in his instincts and listening for the beat. Clash! Clang! Clatter! Their blades met again and again, Tōdō committing fully to his calculated recklessness, but to no avail.
Fighting Mireya was like fighting a hurricane. Her tachi flashed like knifing blades of wind, and all he could do was weather the storm, leaning into some gales and away from others, putting one foot in front of the other regardless. He was fighting his way to the eye of the storm, stymied and buffeted, but instead of growing frustrated and making mistakes, he counted every centimetre he gained as a victory, every one lost as a mitigation of further losses. Sweat dripped down his brow, stinging his eyes, but he barely noticed; his blood was up, his heart beating in his chest and in his ears, steady as a war-drum, his lungs like the strokes of oars against choppy waters, doggedly steady and made sturdy with toil. And like the oarsmen, he moved his whole body to attack and defend, dodging and parrying and attacking and pressing and parrying again, all compressed into a handful of motions. It had been years since he'd last been like this, fighting for his life amidst a cacophony of ringing steel, but he surprised even himself with how well he held his ground—as if he'd never before been in better form.
And then his blade was wrenched out of his hands, and he staggered back, barely managing to save himself from falling entirely.
He was breathing heavily, raggedly, sweating heavily, his blood buzzing with adrenaline, unarmed.
What… he struggled to ask himself. What just happened?
"Good," Mireya pronounced, her appearance and composure as immaculate as it had been when the bout began, as though sparring with him had taken no more of her effort than an unhurried stroll down the corridor. "Good reflexes, excellent fundamentals, wonderful instincts. Technique's too rigid by half, but that can be taught, fortunately. Frankly, you're quite a bit better than I would have expected, given what I know of your background, and you've got a decent amount of potential for growth. I hope that the rest of you had the good sense to watch him closely, because I expect each of you to be able to reach his skill level by the end of the month."
Tōdō didn't look up to see the reactions of the other sword trainees, too busy with searching for his military blade, the one memento of his service he'd been allowed to keep—and truthfully, the only one that he would have cared to keep anyways, given that at the end of the day, no matter whatever atrocities that he might have seen its like used for in the streets of Changchun, a sword was a sword, and his was a damnably good sword. Finally, after scanning about and calming his breathing, his heart rate lowering slowly as all of the adrenaline bled out of his system, leaving him with a bone-deep exhaustion in the wake of the sudden exertion of sparring that was a very much unwelcome reminder that he was now closer to forty than twenty, Tōdō managed to spot it on the tile, and went over to retrieve it, picking it up, checking it over for any sorts of damage it might have incurred while sparring—chips, dulling of the edge, stress fractures—and when he found nothing, he sheathed it, and turned to return to the line of trainees…
…Only to come face-to-face with his former student, in full uniform, arms folded, hips canted.
During the induction process, though he'd recognised her, he'd only seen her from a distance before now, and so he availed himself of the moment to examine her more closely.
She was taller than him now, he noticed; not by an excessive amount, certainly, he didn't need to tilt his head up to meet her gaze or anything like that, but there was enough difference between their respective heights for that fact to be as noticeable as it was undeniable. Gone were the lanky proportions and the slight awkwardness of youth, instead filling out with layers of lean, useful muscle, built for combat and killing; he remembered that she'd always struggled with her hair, that the refinement that many had expected of her on account of who her father was and her resulting position in Japanese high society and her inability to adhere to that standard of femininity, to conform, was in so many ways exemplified by that mass of chestnut curls, and so there was a part of him that looked upon the thick, high ponytail in which she'd bound it, looking as jagged and wild as a fox's bushy tail as it went down her back, and found that he was glad that she'd found her own way of being a woman. Even the bloodlust he'd seen in her jade eyes when she was a child, a thing barely-bound and shoddily concealed at the best of times, seemed to have been tamed—not gone, certainly, not by any means, but nonetheless put into its place; and though a large part of him could not help but to be wary of her, he chose instead to represent the part of him that saw her sun-kissed complexion and the light, however impetuous, that danced in her eyes, as he said, "You look well."
"An' here I halfway thought you were gonna give me the silent treatment," Suzaku said, her mouth pulling itself into a grin that was all teeth—wild, but genuine and jovial, devoid of any intentional menace. She chuckled, shaking her head. "Hisashiburi da ze, Ossan."
"It has," he agreed, nodding. "You've risen high in the world, Lady Tenth. As your former teacher, I wish that it could have been under different circumstances, but I'm proud all the same."
"Ah, you can drop the 'Lady Tenth' shit. I get enough of it from the ranks," she said with a grimace, waving it off dismissively. "Feels weird comin' from you, anyways."
"As you wish, Suzaku," Tōdō said with a nod that was partly a bow.
"Oh, an', just so this doesn't come up later," Suzaku said. "Just wanted to tell ya that it was nothin' personal, me killin' my dad an' defectin'. That 'do or die resistance' bullshit would've been a fuckin' waste of time an' dignity, as far as my dad goes, an' as for defectin'? Well. I made a friend."
"I imagined that you had your reasons, Suzaku, worry not," Tōdō sighed, and shrugged. "And we're better off for it now, anyways. Questions of principle and honour aside, history has vindicated you."
"Fuck history. Milly's the one to thank," Suzaku chortled. "She might be one crazy megabitch, but she knows her shit. Just don't tell Justine I told ya that—I dunno that she knows what to think of how Mills an' I get on, an' it'd just make it awkward."
"Well, if you'll excuse me, I do have special training I signed up for," Tōdō pointed out, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
"Oh, ya don't gotta worry about that," said Suzaku, jerking her chin up. "Mireya-chan knows I ain't gonna interrupt her class without damn good reason, and fortunately, I got one."
"Something involving me, I expect?" Tōdō deduced, shifting his stance to a variation on parade rest.
"A-yep," she nodded, popping the 'p.' "Justine wants to talk to ya. I offered to come here and bring ya to her, ASAP. As in, right fuckin' now."
"I see," Tōdō nodded, considering. "And the Master-at-Arms is aware?"
"'S why she ended the bout when she did," Suzaku said, shrugging again. "Else she would've kept goin', just to see how far you could go before ya broke. She likes ya, I think."
"I…see," he repeated with remarkably less certainty. He sighed, and indicated the way past her with a hand. "Well, in that case, lead the way."
"Sure thing," Suzaku nodded, turning and taking a few steps away from him before throwing over her shoulder, "Try to keep up, Ossan."
Headquarters was a massive complex—as it needed to be, to support its swelling population of both auxilia and support staff, many of whom, in the latter case, had since started setting down roots of their own in Kōfu, which, when Tōdō brought it up, Suzaku explained was one part of a much broader re-urbanisation program that the viceroy was setting into motion in an attempt to prepare for an expected meteoric upswell in the population, ensuring Area Eleven's infrastructure was sufficiently robust to accommodate the coming baby boom without buckling under the strain—and as they passed by training fields and outbuildings, many of which had different auxilia milling around outside of them or drilling upon them, Suzaku's passage drew quite a few eyes, and quite a lot of awe. The evidence of the upswell in the population brought in as a part of a trade agreement Suzaku explained with a singularly insolent grin was called the Amistad Accords was all around them: Koreans mingling with Filipinos, Vietnamese and Cambodians working side-by-side with Indonesians and Papuans as well as Japanese, all of them legionaries in training, and all of them bearing the legal designation of 'Eleven'; and while it was vindicating, in a very real way, to see them brought together beneath the dragon banner, and gaping in identical awe at Suzaku, who, Tōdō was now forced to realise at last, had since become a living legend in her own right, there was also a cynical part of him, the part of him that had grown to replace the piece of himself he lost upon discovering the state of Changchun, that started to worry about backlash, about people who might recently have gone quiet about the reclamation of the old ways of their corrupt empire—for indeed, it had been every bit as malignant as Britannia, just not nearly as powerful, and so unable to practise their imperial depravity anywhere near as freely—but had never really stopped believing in them, and what they might do when they perceived that their already tiny niche in the new nation that was rising amidst Area Eleven was shrinking even further. He had had the great displeasure of bearing witness to some of the things his fellow soldiers back in the IJA believed about the mixing of the races, about the other peoples of the Pacific and the Chinese, and try though he might, he couldn't allow his hope for the future to erase the fact that he knew for a fact that those people still lived, and that they might still try to spread their poison wherever they could.
Still, there was nothing that could feasibly be done about that issue until it reared its ugly head, and so although Tōdō couldn't manage to put it out of his mind entirely, he resolved not to give it any purchase in his mind more than it was due. It was true that he could not blind himself to it, after all, but if he allowed himself to obsess over it, he'd be of no use to anyone by the time the situation became truly urgent.
They chatted as they walked regardless, Tōdō and his old student, passing by bowing Wyrmguard in the corridors and awestruck civilian staff, and despite the immensity of Headquarters, the way in which the compound had been designed meant that it didn't take them more than fifteen minutes to travel to the doors before which Suzaku finally stopped, both of them black-stained cedar with cast-iron handles formed in the shape of two identical snarling dragon heads, though plated in a decorative coating of bronze. Suzaku gave him a look and nodded to the double doors. "This here? This's the head office. Follow me."
With that, Suzaku put one hand on each of them, and with a flex of her shoulder-muscles that he had no trouble spotting even under the layers that her crimson cloak and gold-trimmed black tailcoat provided, she pushed both doors open with enough force that they squealed loudly on their lightly-oiled hinges, both of them swinging inwards. She didn't hesitate and crossed the threshold, and Tōdō followed, while both of the doors swung back on some mechanism he hadn't spotted and closed behind him, not with the slam that he'd honestly expected, but instead a more muted thud.
Inside the doors was an antechamber, its floors tiled in blackened andesite, the furnishings, such as they were, made from black iron, with some decorative detailing done with what looked to have been either copper wire or rose gold, and the walls made from the same smooth, featureless black stone that formed the walls in the corridors and in the rest of the main building, and most of the outbuildings too. Here, any of his knowledge of geology was no longer of any help, for this was a stone that he'd never seen growing up, and so knew nothing of, but the foreboding lack of decoration, save for a few bronze sconces on the walls, was a choice that was interesting all its own. His mother had always told him that one could tell quite a lot about a person by taking careful note of how they received guests, particularly those of lower status than the host, and as they crossed through the dark, gloomy room, he wondered, albeit only idly, what she might have said about Princess Justine based on her waiting room—aside from the fact that, for all of the elegant flourishes and deftly-placed design details that kept it from looking tacky, it was still almost painfully teenaged. It was a source of mirth as well as concern, really—his prior misgivings about what it would do to a girl who was not even twenty to be placed upon such a pedestal hadn't gone away, after all—but he decided that it would be for the best if he reserved judgement for the time being, so that was what he did.
The inner doors were nearly identical to the outer, the only real difference being that these were not quite as tall as the ones that connected the antechamber to the corridor beyond, and notably, when Suzaku at last approached these, she did not fling them open, but instead raised her hand and rapped what had to be a coded knock into the wood.
"Enter," came a muffled, melodic voice from beyond it, and Suzaku this time only opened one door, not two, holding it open for him and ushering him in—and after the darkness of the antechamber, all of the light that came through the window directly opposite the door struck his eyes with an intensity that seemed blinding, and certainly dazed him.
"Ah, Decant Tōdō Kyōshirō," that same voice, beautiful like a songbird's, greeted him as his eyes at last began to clear, and he worked to blink the spots out of them. "And so we finally meet face-to-face. You have my apologies for the suddenness of the sunlight—a hazard of the hour, I'm afraid. Are you well? I can send for some tea, if you'd like. Oh, and thank you, Suzaku. Punctual as ever."
"You know me," Suzaku replied jokingly. "Always on a tight schedule 'round here… It was good to chat, Ossan. Hopefully we'll get plenty of chances to catch up more extensively in the near future."
She punctuated that statement with an encouraging pat on the back that would have sent someone of Asahina's build stumbling, and then slipped out from the door and let it close behind her, leaving him in the room, seemingly alone, with someone he could only guess was none other than Princess Justine herself.
Then his eyes cleared enough to let him see again, and Tōdō saw quite clearly that he had to amend his initial assertion.
Standing just off to the side behind a black office chair, itself positioned just behind an impressively large and finely-crafted black wooden desk, was a tall, well-built young man—mid-twenties, Tōdō guessed, but definitely younger than thirty—with a neat, side-swept coif of teal-blue hair that on its own would have been enough to mark him as Britannian, and amber eyes that flicked him up and down, seeming to scan him for potential threats. He stood ramrod-straight, drilled to perfection, in a gold-trimmed black uniform unlike the uniforms worn by the Wyrmguard or the Circle of Blades, let alone the legionary style, with high black boots and black breeches, a single-breasted and side-fastened black jacket with reinforced shoulders, a high collar that exposed a white cravat worn beneath it, and bearing the winged sword pin of a Britannian Knight of Honour fastened to its breast; though, his long black gloves were identical to those that the Blades wore as part of their own uniforms. He was a bodyguard, then—Margrave Jeremiah, Princess Justine's knight, he recalled in a flash—almost certainly armed, though Tōdō doubted that the man would use it. He meant the princess no harm, after all, and if half the stories about her were true, he rather doubted that he could even pose a credible threat of bodily harm to her person if he wanted to.
The princess herself had stood from her chair, presumably shortly after he'd entered, and because he had never so much as seen her before, he took the opportunity to lay eyes upon his commander-in-chief for the very first time.
Princess Justine was actually slightly shorter than a lot of the Britannian women Tōdō could recall having seen in passing over the last five years, which surprised him somewhat; from the descriptions given to him by her devotees, he had halfway expected her to be closer to Princess Friederike in height, towering and physically imposing. She was slightly short, slender, and shockingly feminine, with narrow shoulders, delicate wrists, and tapering fingers, full-figured and not particularly muscular, not that he could see. He recalled the end of the war when Princess Cornelia had been forced to accept their unconditional surrender, his mind conjuring a recollection of a woman who was sternly beautiful, seeming almost more of a statue than flesh and blood, with a tall, strong body that was built to an Amazonian standard, every centimetre of her a warrior-princess through and through—and even though he could spot some clear markers of a family resemblance in the slender profile of her nose, the shape and strength of her dark brow, and the fullness of her plum-painted lips, altogether it was as jarring a night-and-day difference as he could imagine. She was a beautiful child, to be certain, and for that alone, he knew, there were many who would follow her, but while her elder half-sister radiated martial strength and stoic determination, Princess Justine instead radiated grace and elegance, an aura that seemed to him as if it would be more at home in the comforts of the court than the blood and mud and death-filth of the battlefield—a distressed damsel and not a gallant knight, to borrow a few narrative conventions of Europian origin.
That she was dressed from head to toe in black—a blouse of black silk with long lace cuffs, a black leather outer corset, a black pair of buckskin breeches, black gloves, and a knee-high pair of black riding boots—did nothing to make her stature appear more substantial. On the contrary, it only highlighted the fact that she was slender and slight, and though the slightly elongated hourglass of her body-shape was far too pronounced for him to think of her as a waif, it was only on those grounds that she was disqualified. Where Princess Cornelia had been a statue when he had first met her five years past, Princess Justine resembled nothing so much as a doll, and that was only grounds for greater concern.
"You seem distressed, Decant," she remarked, tilting her head like a bird. "Is there aught amiss?"
"N-no," he stuttered, shaking himself out of his previous train of thought. The absolute last thing he needed right now was to cause offence. He bowed. "Pardon me, your highness. Your youth…surprised me, I must confess."
"You were expecting someone similar to Cornelia in stature, I take it?" she guessed, though on some level, Tōdō was convinced that she already knew that was the direction his thoughts had taken him. "Well, I suppose I can't fault you. I have acquired quite the fearsome reputation as of late, after all, and I would say that I'm well-aware that that kind of thing does tend to bring to mind a rather, shall we say, specific set of physical attributes. Oh, and, by all means, Decant, please, do sit down."
Tōdō was about to ask where he was meant to sit, but he held his tongue, looking down and finding a pair of rather comfortable-looking chairs that, due to the sunlight blinding him, he hadn't noticed before. He sat down in one of them, while Princess Justine settled herself into hers, and her knight stepped forth to grab hold of it, rolling her into her desk.
"Thank you, Jeremiah," she said, her large, upturned amethyst eyes radiating warmth as she looked upon the blue-haired man. Then the princess looked back to Tōdō, steepling her gloved, interlocked fingers before her mouth as she assessed him in silence. "I'm sure you're wondering why it is that I've brought you here to meet with me today."
He thought for a moment, and then shook his head, resignation suffusing him. She arched an elegant eyebrow, strong and dark, so he explained, "I imagine it concerns the after-action reports filed by my strike team in the wake of the most recent training exercise in the mountains three weeks ago."
"Partially," she conceded with a nod. "But only in part."
"Then I must confess, your highness, I'm not entirely sure what the rest could be," he admitted.
She smiled, then, sharp as the edge of a blade, and with how the light poured in through the window behind her, her amethyst eyes amidst her shadowy silhouette seemed to glow with a light all their own. He felt his blood chill in his veins at the sight of it, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt as if he was beginning to understand exactly how this child had come to terrify so many. "The rest, my dear decant, is a question of doctrine."
Just then, another shadow passed before the sunlight—a black shape against the cold blue sky, what he recognised a heartbeat later to be a bird tapping against the window.
"Jeremiah, if you would," the princess bade the knight, who nodded, and opened the pane of one of the windows, such that the large black bird could fit through it. It looked around, the raven, its eyes strange, not the black of others of its species, but crimson, like blood, before it spread its wings and flew over to the princess's shoulder, where it alighted gently. The princess seemed unperturbed by this development, lifting a hand to stroke the raven's plumage, a deep, iridescent black almost identical to the hue of her hair, while she spoke soothing words to it in a voice too low for Tōdō to make out from across the span of the desk. "Decant Tōdō, this is my companion, Satanael. Come now, say hello to Decant Tōdō, pet."
"He-llo," the raven said, fixing those too-intelligent blood-red eyes upon him, as if assessing him.
"Our paths crossed when Suzaku and I were on our way to Pirapora, the first of the extermination towns," Princess Justine recounted, lifting the raven off of her shoulder with one hand, causing the raven to flutter its wings, but otherwise remain perched upon that hand, and gingerly placing it down upon a perch in the shape of a human skull—teenagers—whereupon it settled itself anew, the bird positioning itself so that its mistress could easily reach the feathers of its back and keep stroking them, which she did. "She was such a broken thing when I found her, injured and half-starved… It was a challenge, nursing her back to health in the midst of the desolation of Pirapora, but…well, at the very least, she never went hungry…"
There was a bitter note in her voice at that last remark, and it took Tōdō a moment to connect some of the necessary dots. "It's a carrion raven, then, isn't it?"
"Yes, she is," Princess Justine chastised him, cocking her brow again. "You are in a unique position, Decant. You are one of the rare few not of one of those accursed places, nor of my friends in the highest echelon of the Order of the Dragon, who might have an inkling of what that place was like. It would have been kinder of my erstwhile countrymen to toss the Sixes straight into the deepest pits of Hell—at the very least, Hell only visits its torments upon the deserving."
The vitriol of that final statement surprised him, though he knew full well it shouldn't have. No one went to the trouble of eradicating something that they only mildly disliked from the face of the planet, after all. Still, would I have felt such a fire from within, such a call to action, were I to find myself in the position she described to me just now?
It shamed him that he already knew the answer.
"But, we are here to speak of you," Princess Justine sighed, the intensity that the vitriol brought her bleeding out as she exhaled, "not to reminisce at length upon atrocities already redressed."
"I will admit to some ignorance of what exactly could be meant by 'doctrine' in this instance, your highness," said Tōdō, bowing his head slightly.
"Well then, allow me to be more specific," the princess replied, a sharp smile cutting across her face as she spoke, the plum of her lips looking almost black in the silhouetted shadow of the large windows. "In this particular case, Decant, I'm speaking of chain of command. It's been perhaps the most vexatious of the problems the Dread Legion faces as I and my compatriots work tirelessly to organise it out of its humble origins, shall we say, as a short-notice ad-hoc conglomerate of whatever retinues of household troops the families of my friends could spare, and into a proper fighting force. Unlike materiel or recruits, the thing we have lacked most sorely of all cannot merely be bought or arranged via trading-deals or produced through a flourish of deftly-written policy: we either have them, or we do not. There is no middle ground. And right at this very second, though I have managed to secure the allegiance of several qualified individuals to sit upon my war council at the head of their respective branches, and the War Ministry has taken to sending me lists of personnel, that I might peruse and select from among the pool of those discharged in the wake of the last reshuffling of the ranks that my dear sister, Field Marshal Princess Cornelia, precipitated upon her being promoted to the office of Chief General of the Imperial Army, the process of filling those ranks out is vanishingly slow, far too much so for the plans that we currently have in the works.
"So I suppose that you can readily imagine my relief, Decant Tōdō," she stressed, her amethyst eyes glinting intensely, visibly, through the dark, every bit as surely as Isadora's false eye, "when I looked at the rolls one day, and saw that not only several former members of the Imperial Japanese Army's officer corps, but the Hero of Itsukushima himself, former Colonel Tōdō Kyōshirō, had enlisted, and were to be brought out to Headquarters for training. I thought, this is a stroke of good fortune! An entire quintet of officers that have tangible, proven service records, all but dropped into my lap! In fact, I had even gone so far as to start to consider you as the second of my marshals, under the Grand Marshal, of course. And so you can imagine my disappointment at the record that your strike team has displayed thus far, in their training courses as well as their team exercises. That your victory in the latest field exercise came at such an unduly high cost is not shocking to me, Tōdō—it is merely yet another link in an increasingly distressing chain."
To that, Tōdō could say nothing, save to bow his head in silence.
The princess sighed, leaning back into her chair, her fingers intertwined upon the desk as she looked him over, studying him. Then, she began again: "When I was thirteen years old, Decant, I sat for the exam to qualify for entry into the youth programme at Ad Victoriam. I scored top marks in that entrance exam, at Number One in the rankings. But it wasn't through my personal skill alone that my team ended our term in that institution with top marks, because at Ad Victoriam, one person's failure is the team's failure. With that stipulation, they taught us, Decant, that the chain would only ever be as strong as its weakest link—a test of cohesion, cooperation, cohabitation, yes, but above all, it was a test of leadership. If I had not kept my door open for my friends to approach me with their concerns or struggles, if I did not work and go out of my way both to excel, and to ensure that my friends developed methodologies that allowed for them to excel as well, Suzaku and I would have been dragged down with the ship, as sure as the sun shall rise. You understand, at least, that a team's failures reflect upon their leadership, but I remain, unfortunately, quite unconvinced that you understand all that that might entail. Ordinarily, I would consider that failure, in and of itself, to be very much grounds for disqualification from such a high office—which is lamentable, for I feel, even now, that a man of your observed talents would be wasted in the ranks. But if the passage of time and the defeat of the homeland you once served has taken the fire from out of you, if it has, in effect, snuffed that flame out, then I'm afraid that there's really nothing for it."
Tōdō nodded solemnly, but something about her wording gave him pause, and he said, "Pardon me, your highness, but you said 'ordinarily' just now, as if…this is not an ordinary situation."
"You would be correct—it is not," Princess Justine nodded, leaning forward again. "No matter how dire the situation becomes, I am reluctant in the extreme to compromise on the quality of my officer corps. It was a lesson that Napoleon eventually had to learn, that to tolerate incompetence down the ranks of one's subordinates was to be complicit in the complication of one's own strategy, whether that be offensive or defensive. I firmly believe that an incompetent or lacklustre officer can often be a worse detriment to a unit's efficacy as a fighting force than a lack of one at all. I say all of this so that you can appreciate, Decant, just how readily both Sergeant Raphael and Dame Suzaku vouched for you and your skills, and the value you would, in their eyes, bring to the Dread Legion, that I have been convinced to extend to you a second chance to prove your quality, and earn your spurs in so doing. A second, and might I add, a final chance, to demonstrate that you can get your team in order, and forge them together into a cohesive unit, capable of acting both in pursuit of the mission objective, and in pursuit of each other's well-being."
Tōdō, stunned, gaped for a few moments, his jaw working soundlessly as he processed what he had just heard. A second chance…? And for such a high office…? "I… Thank you, your highness, but…"
"It isn't entirely unselfish," the princess interjected smoothly, leaning to the left side of her chair in a casually fluid motion as she tapped the fingers of her right hand against her desk. "Suzaku has asked for me to arrange a proving-ground for the first crop of her Wyrmguard, to see which of her Bloodletters will make the cut, which could potentially make the cut with some remedial tutelage, and which are entirely not what she's looking for—the selection processes for Wyrmguard are currently under development, you see, for I have tasked each member of the Circle of Blades with developing their own criteria and screening methods. As I see it, in pitting your team up against potential members of her Wyrmguard, I fulfil her request, help to hone the selection criteria and methodologies across the Order of the Dragon, and give you a task befitting the station to which I would raise you, should you succeed. One stone, three birds. Efficient, no?"
Tōdō's jaw snapped shut, and his eyes widened in shock and mild panic, but ultimately, he nodded. It would take nothing short of a miracle for his team to be ready in time, let alone to pass the test put before him, if the Wyrmguard were truly as elite as they were meant to be, especially with Suzaku in command, as he did not for a moment entertain the thought that it would be otherwise—but then, had he not been known for his miracles, once upon a time, however briefly?
How better to prove, to the princess and to himself, that he still had it in him?
"Very well, your highness," Tōdō assented, standing so that he could bow to her properly. "I accept this test that you have prepared for me."
"I never doubted that you would," the princess said with a smile, shifting to sit straight ahead of him with her interlaced fingers steepled before her mouth, elbows propped upon the top of the desk. Her stated 'companion', Satanael, ruffled her feathers, and stared him down appraisingly with those strange crimson eyes, before lifting a single black wing, and beginning to preen herself. "Now, I shan't detain you any further. I'd imagine that we both have quite a bit of work to do in the coming days, and I don't believe in setting any of my would-be subordinates up for failure."
Taking the implied dismissal for what it was, Tōdō bowed again, but then a thought occurred to him suddenly, and he felt foolish, momentarily, for not having thought to ask it sooner. "Your highness, I would like to pose a further question to you, if I may."
She shrugged. "Ask away. Though, I do reserve the right to deny you an answer should I feel your query to be in any way inappropriate."
"I would expect nothing less," he assured her with a nod. Then, he asked, "In the event that we pass your test, and I am named marshal…what becomes of the careers of the rest of my team?"
"They shall be named to positions under your command, Decant—as best befits their aptitudes, of course," the princess answered calmly. "Staff positions, I expect—though, I have heard tell that the Seventh Blade has taken an interest in one of your team members, Isadora. As Wyrmguard appointments supersede the allotment of subordinates in terms of priority, should Dame Elizabeth select her, and should Isadora accept the post, then you will have to count her out of both your staff and field officer corps. That said, you will, of course, be consulted on the subject, and as you will be commanding them, your counsel will be granted the full weight that it is due. This is merely to prevent…errors in judgement, shall we say."
If he was inclined to be uncharitable to her, as Chiba, for all her efforts spent improving as of late, would likely be, he might have taken the princess's caveat to be a sign that he had much less of a choice in this than she was letting on; but, as she had given him no reason to believe that, and that for all that Suzaku had changed, he still could not see her being as close as she was with someone who was inclined to conduct themselves in such a way, he instead took it as an extension of her prior point, that she flatly did not believe in setting up her subordinates for failure.
"Thank you for the assurance, your highness," he said at last.
"Of course," she replied, smiling. "If anything, that you thought to ask at all lends credence to both of the testimonies I received in your favour, Decant Tōdō. And should you prove their defence of you to be warranted in the coming weeks, then know that I shall come to expect a great many things from you."
"Of course, your highness," Tōdō said, and he did not doubt for a moment that the headiness of that statement might take a while longer to descend upon him in truth. This meeting had given him a great deal to process and work through, he reflected as he turned upon his heel and marched for the door. Perhaps he'd been unfairly infantilising upon first striding through this door—though, to be frank, he did not know which would be the more disquieting option: that Princess Justine was a normal, albeit brilliant, girl of seventeen, who had taken upon herself a task befitting her talents, but of such grandiose scale that it would smother her youth, or that the Britannian aristocracy's methods of child-rearing were so irremediably warped that a girl of seventeen could be prepared to wield an institution of the scale that the Dread Legion was shaping up to be, when the seventeen-year-olds he had encountered and trained all his life had barely known the butt of a rifle from the barrel when first they came into his care. In either case, he supposed, her innocence and youth were surefire casualties.
He opened the door, and was halfway over the threshold, when he looked back, and said to her, for he felt that he needed to test which was which before he departed definitively, for his own peace of mind, if for no other reason, "By the way, your highness, that's quite an incredible replica."
She arched a brow. "Replica? I'm afraid that I don't follow. Everything in this room is an original."
"The skull," he elaborated, pointing at the carrion-raven's perch.
"Oho, my dear decant," she laughed—half a chuckle, half a giggle, throaty and amused. "You seem to be under a misconception. This skull here, as well as the other two in my possession, are as genuine of an article as the desk upon which I work. Taken from the field of battle at the Two Rivers, from the corpses of two young noblemen and a foreign officer who sought to oppose me. You might have known him, in fact: I believe that he said that his name was…Swaile Qujappat?"
Tōdō blanched—even if he hadn't known of the infamous mercenary captain by name, the fact that the skull was a genuine article, a trophy taken from a human body upon the field of battle… "I knew of him more than I knew him, your highness. We never met face-to-face, he and I."
"A pity, that," she sighed whimsically. "He was quite the droll fellow, you know. I offered to allow him and his men to go free, for our quarrel was with their employers, not with them. And do you know what he did? He spat in my face… Proverbially, of course, given the fact that we were both in our Knightmares at the time, but all the same…"
She laughed again, that same strange expression of mirth that was at once both chuckle and giggle; and though his instincts told him that the answer to his next question would be one that might unsettle him, making him wish that he hadn't asked the question to begin with, Tōdō almost couldn't stop himself from asking, "And…what became of him, such that he ended up as a trophy-skull upon your desk…?"
She shrugged. "The rebels brought a weapon of mass destruction to the field along with them, one I was already aware existed, that the Chinese Federation had supplied them with, and once the tides of battle, such as they were, began to turn against them, they used it. The weapon, once it had been fired, mixed with the inclement weather that had already started to close in around us over the course of the fighting, forming a deluge of rain that stripped the flesh from the rebel soldiers' bones, but for some reason left ours entirely unharmed—just a little wet, I suppose. I pulled Qujappat out of his Knightmare as this started, and held him aloft as it fell upon him, for he had rejected my mercy, and I wished to oblige him. His screams as his flesh melted off of his bones were most delightful, indeed…"
Tōdō nodded jerkily, and closed the door behind him. He had his answer, he supposed—the second, it was, and most definitely so. She was a creature of war, through and through, and it seemed that the way that noble Britannian children were raised was, in fact, warped beyond belief. "No wonder so many people are so terrified of her…"
Still, the princess had been absolutely correct—he had quite a lot of work to do…
A Storm Fury later on that day happened upon Tōdō, notifying him that the test that was to be his second chance had been scheduled to take place in one month; and so, over the course of that month, he not only informed his team about the arrangement, but also, in conjunction with Raphael, conspired to run them ragged. He was on both Asahina and Chiba about their training, certainly, trusting in Raphael to look where he could not, and at all other points in the day, he pressed them into just about every team exercise from all the bullshit seminars he had been required to attend as a colonel in the IJA that he could recall having been even moderately effective, and drilled the strike team to work together, day and night. As with all things of sufficient import, it ultimately came down to the wire, and Tōdō was still more than a little wary of whether all their efforts over the previous month would have been enough, but as the VTOL carrying the ten of them began to swing out over the AO, he could at last be honest with himself and acknowledge that, between him and Raphael, they had gotten the strike team about as ready for this challenge as they were ever going to get them. It was a rule he had learned back when he had been rotated back to the home front after the bloodying his battalion had taken at Shenyang, tasked by the brass with aiding the training of new young conscripts to be fed into the meat-grinder that the Fourth Sino-Japanese War had become—that the time they got to train their companies was all the time they had, and that, even if they got the extra week or so, it wasn't likely to get them any more into shape than they already were. At a certain point, the only thing for it was a trial by fire, in which all he or anyone else could do was pray that they were forged, and not burned.
"Coming right up on the AO," came the voice of the co-pilot over the speakers. "Strike Team Delta, prepare to drop."
"That's our stop," Urabe called out, pointing at the speaker and getting up out of his seat; Jose, with his light hadron cannon cradled in his arms, rose alongside him.
Tōdō rose, and then Isadora, Chiba and Maria, Senba and Diego, Asahina and Raphael, all with the packs that carried their parachutes strapped to their bodies, checking over all of their weapons one last time to make sure that they left nothing behind, and putting on their helmets as the bay doors began to open with a steady, hydraulic hiss that was quickly drowned out by the rushing winds at their high altitude. Then, two by two, with their helmets and weapons secured, they ran for the bay and dove out of it, shooting down into a rapid free-fall so that they didn't overshoot their landing point. As he leapt from out of the VTOL himself, letting gravity take hold of him with a sickening sensation of his guts rising through his back that he'd been told once was called 'inertia' and to which he had long since grown accustomed, he slimmed himself down to shoot like a bullet down through the cloud cover and the blue skies to the patch of forest amongst all the same mountains they had fought in before, for all that they were significantly further down the range, as he and the rest of them waited for the last possible safe moment before flattening out and pulling the drawcord on their parachutes, deploying them with a jerk that almost felt like it was tearing their bones straight out of their skin, but nonetheless allowed them to reach the ground without leaving any craters or breaking any of their bones.
As soon as he landed safely, cutting his parachute free, Tōdō started a head-count to ensure that they were all accounted for; and when at last Maria and Chiba touched down with a slight bending of their knees before they cut themselves free and joined the rest of the group, Tōdō turned to Raphael, and said, "It looks to me like we're all here. You?"
"I don't see anyone missing, either," he confirmed with a nod.
"Good, good," Tōdō replied, nodding himself. He turned to his strike team, then—the unit for which he bore ultimate responsibility, and no one else—and said, "We're going up against the Bloodletters, so you can expect some heavy fighting, and definitely a few ambushes. Keep your weapons hot, your eyes peeled, and watch each other's backs, and we'll get out of this just fine."
"Yes, sir!" came the unified chorus in response.
Then, Isadora snapped her head up, and pointed up at the sky. "Sir!"
Tōdō looked where Isadora was pointing, and sure enough, a few moments later, out from the cover of trees, high above them, came a Britannian gunship, swooping down low enough for the silhouettes in the threshold of the open bay doors to look upon them clearly—and in a place deeper than he was entirely used to his instincts speaking from, Tōdō knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of the vehicle's occupants was Princess Justine herself. "It seems that Princess Justine herself has come to observe our performance."
There was a muttered chorus, as alarmed as it was excited, that murmured about 'Her Majesty,' and as one, the former Sixes under his command clicked their heels together, and saluted the passing gunship as it swept above them—an open-handed pectoral salute, arm held level across the collarbone, with the elbow cocked up, that Tōdō knew to be the 'legionary salute'—which Tōdō himself echoed a moment later, seeing it as a moment he could use to lead by example. Accordingly, all four of his former IJA subordinates, Chiba and Asahina included, followed suit, some more hesitantly than others; but it was, at the very least, a decent enough start.
It was the strangest thing—he doubted that he could have sensed it before meeting with the woman, but now, in the aftermath, he could almost feel her gaze upon him and his strike team, along with what felt like an echo of an echo of approval—and now that he was aware of it, quite suddenly, Tōdō felt filled with a determination that he'd come to associate with youth, which Tōdō had long since come to understand that he was too old and too jaded to experience ever again, and with it came a rush of vigour.
He would earn his spurs here. He just knew it.
"Sergeant," he called out at speaking volume, as they relaxed out of their salutes.
"Yes, sir," Raphael replied dutifully, at his side before even a full moment had passed.
"Have them fan out and establish a perimeter," Tōdō ordered. "The force we're going up against is a contingent of would-be Bloodletters—assault specialists, if my read on the Tenth Blade is correct. Defence in depth is the order of the day. Rangers and familiars on the outermost layer—familiars should be set only to scout, and to withdraw if they meet any resistance, because the reconnaissance they provide is far, far too valuable to us in this situation. Second layer, grenadiers. Third layer, sharpshooters and specialists. They're to work together, specialists as spotters, sharpshooters as executioners of high-value targets."
"Define high-value targets, sir," Raphael requested.
"Anyone who's tearing through our formation too readily," Tōdō replied, drawing his military blade and letting it hang loosely in his grip by his side, and drawing his hadron pistol with his other hand. "If that won't suffice, you and I will need to be on hand to deal with the problem."
"If they're assault specialists, won't going on the defensive only serve to grant the Bloodletters a favourable engagement?" asked Raphael, his tone inquisitive, but neutral, even as he flashed out the orders Tōdō had delegated to him in a series of hand-signals, from the standardised sign language that what classes they had to take ensured that they learn. Far from insubordinate, he seemed to be trying only to understand Tōdō's rationale, and that much, Tōdō could more than work with.
"It plays to their strengths, to be certain," Tōdō acknowledged. "But it also plays to ours. And even then, I'm willing to wager that they'll have the numerical advantage, so to attempt to trade with them on the open field, so to speak, is…ill-advised, to say the least."
"So what we're giving up in terms of tactical initiative, we're making up for…"
"By forcing them to come to us, yes," Tōdō nodded slowly. "Because believe me, they want this as badly as we do. If Her Majesty is here, then the Tenth Blade will be, as well, and their placement among the Wyrmguard depends solely upon the approval of their bloody-handed mistress. That much is something that we can use against them…"
"Mmn," Raphael nodded solemnly, drawing a tube from the small of his back that, with the press of a concealed button, telescoped out into a double-ended spear. "In retrospect, you know, this must have been the rationale behind the Two Rivers."
"How so?" asked Tōdō, eyes tracking across the tree-line surrounding their perimeter for any signs of disturbance or encroachment.
"We were badly outnumbered," Raphael recounted. "For each of us, the rebels must have had about thirty, or even forty. In terms of pure figures and war potential, we seemed entirely finished. But, at least as I have come to understand it, we had a strategic advantage of which Her Majesty and her generals, later the Circle of Blades, sought to avail us—that being, the rebellion's strategic objective was our annihilation."
"So she used that to determine where the enemy needed to go," Tōdō deduced. "And thus she chose the most favourable ground available for you all to make your stand…"
"In five days, we dug trenches three ranks deep," Raphael explained further. "With the enemy's own munitions, we turned the approach into a minefield, and then mined the gaps between each rank of trenches. By Her Majesty's grace alone, we picked our way across in the heat of battle, and with that, we bled our foe as they pursued us. Her Majesty's grace guided our steps, that even by accident, we could not have set off a buried chaos mine, but the rebels were graceless, and so were they judged, and found wanting…"
"Then the Knightmare corps, which would later become the Raven Knights, dealt with the opposing Knightmares, and the rebel superweapon did the rest?" Tōdō guessed, raising a brow that Raphael could not see, but that the younger man likely heard. He'd made a conscious effort not to mention the princess in that, his slip of the tongue in referring to her as 'Her Majesty' something that bewildered him, though he knew that he certainly had no reason to be ashamed of it. Had one meeting with her truly been enough to get him started down the road to the religious reverence that many of the legionaries held for her?
"So I hear," Raphael shrugged. "I was in the second rank of trenches at the time, before we fell back to the third. The particulars of the tactics employed by the Circle of Blades evade my understanding. But we won, in the end. It's why I like your plan so much—I've seen it work before. I have no doubt that it'll work now."
"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Tōdō said truthfully, still scanning the tree-line. "Make certain that our formation is rotating in accordance with the flow of new tactical intelligence."
"I took the liberty of including that in the initial relaying of your orders, sir," said Raphael.
"Good thinking, then," Tōdō replied with a nod, having grown used to seeing this man as someone he could personally rely upon over the past couple of weeks. Tōdō had known, as anyone would have, that Raphael was capable practically since meeting him, but the man's willingness to cooperate with Tōdō was a facet of him that Tōdō hadn't thought to avail himself of until recently, and it had made the former Six into an invaluable second, as far as Tōdō was concerned. He watched as Asahina and Diego, who huddled near Urabe and Isadora, seemed to lean over and exchange notes, and moments later, the formation shifted about twenty to forty degrees, either clockwise or counterclockwise, in accordance with what the two specialists' familiars fed back to them in terms of reconnaissance, and girded himself more and more for the combat to come, the fight that he could feel in his bones, just over the horizon. "They're out there… I can feel it…"
"How many are there?" Raphael asked Asahina—a purposeful choice, Tōdō imagined, and a shrewd one, at that, given how it reinforced the current state of the chain of command.
"So far, we've counted four different groups," Asahina replied without taking his eyes off of all the data that his familiars were feeding back to him. "Each the size of a strike team, but there's far less in terms of versatility to their compositions."
"Four to one," Tōdō nodded slowly.
"Then it's an even fight," Raphael replied with a nod.
Tōdō chuckled at the pronouncement, but he didn't disagree.
"One party's closing in on us from two o'clock," Diego called out.
"And another from ten o'clock," Asahina added.
"This is where the fun begins," Tōdō quipped grimly.
"Showtime," Raphael agreed.
And sure enough, from out of the trees, there came a surge of armoured auxilia, wielding a mixture of melee weapons and only a few scatterguns and rifles amongst the crowd, charging upon them in silence from two different directions.
The riflemen opened fire, clearly trying to shut down the grenadiers early, but Isadora was faster on the draw, and took three of them out in quick succession; and while Urabe took a moment longer to follow her lead, he tagged two in the second group at a steady pace, causing the remainder to fall back, seeking out cover from the two sharpshooters.
The grenadiers, granted this opportunity, decided to switch things up. First Senba stowed his cannon and brandished his chaos javelin, and Juan followed in short order, setting up and firing to clear the rangers a path through the oncoming wave, their fragmentation ammo a far cry from the modified chaos mines that the weapons were named for and meant to fire on the battlefield, but more than enough to send many of the opposing fighters flying.
BOOM! BAKOOM! The fragmentation charges erupted, and into that breach waded the two-person team of Maria and Chiba, blasting their scatterguns into the disordered lines as they advanced steadily. The two covered for each other, even as the fight began to descend into a brawl, and once the grenadiers started laying down suppressive fire, it looked as if they really had a chance to come out of the other end of the test that Princess Justine had set before them with some degree of ease.
And so of course, that was when things chose to become astronomically more difficult.
"Contact on our six!" Asahina cried, and Tōdō and Raphael whirled around just in time to catch the last two teams coming out of the tree-cover, their weapons drawn, a more even split of melee weapons and scatterguns, though no rifles to be seen.
Not that they were needed, of course, considering the fact that they'd closed in on the position of the strike team so quickly, and charged in the moment that they were the most overextended.
"Urabe! Isadora! Flip the script, now!" Tōdō barked out. "Maria and Chiba! Finish mopping up."
"Senba, keep up the suppressive fire," Raphael added. "Juan, cover us."
"We're flanked. Shit," Tōdō swore, shaking his head with a mirthless chuckle. "Though, I suppose that it just wouldn't be the same if things didn't go to Hell in a handbasket on the turn of a coin…"
"That's the spirit," Raphael chortled in agreement.
Stowing his pistol, Tōdō took his military blade in both hands, looking to his second, who was now brandishing his double-sided spear towards their opponents threateningly. Tōdō sighed, twirling his wrist as he gauged the calibre of the opposition, and muttered, to Raphael, "Let's get to work…"
With that, he took off, his blade flashing, with Raphael speeding behind him, close on his heels.
They crashed into the wave of armoured, weapon-wielding soldiers like rocks in the face of a wave. Tōdō, understanding a melee like this down to his very bones, having cut his teeth on it, sacrificed whatever innocence he might once have had to it, took to it with an almost mechanical gusto, evading and parrying as his opponents closed upon him from all sides—or at least, nearly all sides, as there was a gap created where Raphael's spear commanded the space. He'd never witnessed the younger man sparring or training with the weapon before, but then, he supposed that there was quite enough that he'd missed through the lens of what negligence he had been guilty of up until that turning point of a training exercise.
As it was, that whirling, double-ended spear was just about the kindest boon he could possibly have asked for in a brawl like this, where he was shoulder-checking and striking out at opponents with the butt of his blade's hilt about as much as he was actually brandishing a blade, a deafening clash and clatter of bright and flashing steel and other metals, all while his back was clear because no one wanted to get too close into critical distance with the sheer, animalistic ferocity of Raphael's lashing spear, whistling its way through the air with all the celerity and precision of an adder. Like this, Tōdō allowed his mind to sink into that space of parrying and blocking and dodging, that liminal corridor on the edge of life and death, all while buying time for his rangers to finish their work, and the entirety of the strike team's firepower to come pouring down on them in the aftermath of it.
Dodge and weave, strike and bleed—the first splatters of blood drawn upon that black armour worn by his opponents was their cue to leave, a blow that, if struck with a vibroblade, both of them knew entirely well would have left the opponent in question short a limb (there had been a demonstration at some point in the past month that had been very…illuminating on that score)—and Tōdō was in his element once again, a bright madness arresting him.
He thought, as he slashed with an increasingly potent fervour, with all of the strength and vitality of a man fifteen years his junior, twenty-one and not thirty-six, of the speech that Suzaku had given when he had first come to Kōfu; he thought of the offer that she had made to the Bloodletter aspirants through which he now battled, that she would offer them neither boons nor mercy, but would breathe the strength to strive and to slay into them, would acknowledge their strength and make them more than what they had been. He thought of the Dread Legion itself, and how she spoke of taking in those whose weakness was not the kind whose perfidious proliferation was rightfully condemned, the weakness of those addicted to the allure of power, to its seeking and its holding—whose weakness was not complacency, so easily moralised through a sophistry of consensus, but rather that of means; of body and skill and fortune, not that of the heart or spirit, and shape it anew into strength. He thought of the Sixes, a desolate people who had seen their former selves in those breathing, heart-beating husks that had haunted his soul ever since the return to Changchun, where he had done nothing and allowed the structures in which he lived to silence him, believing too deeply in the goodness of men who possessed none and could truthfully lay claim only to weakness and venality, and he saw Raphael fighting alongside him right now, made and shaped anew, the proof of the Legion's claim that drew breath and strove for greatness alongside Tōdō—even when Tōdō himself failed to keep the faith, and stumbled and fell, so willing to vouch for him when even Tōdō doubted his own merits, his own quality…
He thought, as well, of the Princess Justine, who had looked upon him, with a conquering greatness in every breath she took, and deemed him worthy of a second chance—the very thing that he had enlisted with the Dread Legion seeking, in lieu of his own death.
It struck him, then, and that striking came with such a joy that he rather felt like breaking out into an interminable fit of uproarious laughter. No wonder they revered her so, this girl, this woman who brought to them not only salvation, but a vow, duly kept—that if they yielded their weakness and despair unto her, she would make them strong. How foolish of him to think it unearned—what hubris of his, to think her unequal to the task that she had undertaken with such warlike fervour! For here was the truth of the woman to whom he'd sworn his fealty, albeit indirectly up until now: to the hopeless and to the wretched, she brought hope and was a saviour; to the sightless, she granted them eyes to see and sights to behold; she ennobled the downtrodden and the beaten-down, this legion she had crafted of the refuse of the empire that had birthed her, those whom a loyal adherent to the throne that governed Britannia would have exterminated utterly; she beheld a world bereft of hope and offered it salvation at the tip of a sword.
No wonder they looked upon her and saw a goddess—for what god but she had come for them, their darkest hour the moment of her calling?
Yes… Tōdō thought to himself as yet another would-be Bloodletter felt their blood being let by his hand. This is a worthy cause indeed; and worthier company with which to seek it, I could not ask for.
You were right, Suzaku. I am a legionary, and here is where I belong…
Full lips, plum-painted, stretched into a satisfied smile in his mind's eye.
He felt it, then. He felt it flowing through him. All of a sudden, he found that he could see three, six, even eight moves ahead, his movements in accordance with a cosmic rhythm that reverberated with the beat of his heart. He was stronger, he was faster, he felt younger—no, not younger. Never would he reclaim what youth he had lost in Korean fields and Manchurian ruins, what innocence had been shriven from him by the grinding gears of an empire that had been Britannia's equal, once, in morals at the very least. Nor, he knew, should he seek it again, no more than Chiba or Asahina should look backwards with undeserved kindness to a polity, to the horrors of which they had not yet been exposed. His youth was gone, and that was good, for it had granted him the wisdom and experience to be here, now—the skills to serve in the capacity he sought to earn, to prove himself worthy of. He could not have assumed this post as a young man, as a young fool in his father's shadow, his father who had lingered in the shadow of his own father, and so on back through all the history of his homeland; he would have been unequal to the task, had he never once stared into the river of blood that was Shenyang, into the heart of darkness at Changchun, had never stared the true foe that this, the Dread Legion, had been formed to vanquish, in the face, beyond the trappings of borders or of flags, of emperors upon flowered thrones whose blood would never be shed upon the fields they demanded the lives of their nation's youth ought to be spent, of the uncaring plutocracies of greed and stagnation that existed to perpetuate and to leech off of that system in equal measure.
For were Nanking and Changchun truly any more uniquely a Japanese evil than the open-air death camps, the so-called extermination towns, had been a Britannian? Certainly, they were the most vile, but the conditions that had given birth to such vile evils weren't unique, were they? In fact, judging by the state of Europia, they weren't even particularly rare…
A child might have looked upon the state of the world as it was and sought to obliterate Britannia.
The princess—Her Majesty—had looked upon the state of the world as it was, and saw, instead of a singular empire that needed to be destroyed to create a just world, an entire world, an entire paradigm, that had allowed the Empire of Japan, man-things such as the High Eunuchs and the disgraced former president of the E.U., Richtofen, and even the Holy Empire of Britannia itself to be born into it, had suffered them to come to power within it, and found it all wanting.
He would be a part of that cleansing tide.
He would.
He would.
Her Majesty's hand guided his blade. Her voice strengthened his will. Her kindness drew him out of darkness, and bolstered him to weather the light. Her weight was upon the cosmic scale of his fortunes, and suddenly there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could not do in her service, had he but the will to seek it and the resolve to see it through to the bitter end.
Tōdō Kyōshirō was a man reborn, emerging like a phoenix from out of the fires of faith—of loyalty, steadfast and true. It warmed his blood and chased his skin, excited his mind to alacrities the likes of which he had never before experienced, and forged his soul anew. No more, he vowed, would he suffer himself to cower in the face of injustice. No more would he allow his hand to be stayed by the weight of expectation, by the pressures of the powerful and the normality that existed to serve their ends. No more would he be the man who passed through Changchun and did not seek immediate redress, did not rally his men to put to the torch the depravities he had witnessed that day. That flame of righteousness he had not been strong enough to bear before, he claimed anew, and vowed that he would be worthy of it—every day, and for all the rest of his days.
By Her Majesty's grace…
When Tōdō returned to himself once again, he was breathing heavily, with every centimetre of him drenched to the bone in clammy sweat, his heart hammering in his chest, and surrounded by his strike team, all of whom seemed also in similar states of dishevelled exhaustion.
"What…the fuck," Chiba gasped out, as she bent over with her hands upon her thighs, as if she was sucking in air, "was that?!"
"Yeah, I second that question," Urabe added raggedly, raising an arm high above his bent body as he leaned up against his own lance, butt planted into the ground, for support. "What the fuck kind of drug trip did we just go on?"
"It was no mere drug trip," Isadora corrected him sharply.
"It was Her Majesty's grace," Tōdō agreed, nodding weakly—and all of the former Sixes nodded at his words in near-unison.
"…Well, whatever it was," Urabe continued after a silent moment. "It seems like it gave us the edge that we needed to pull off a win, finally…"
Tōdō nodded faintly, looking around himself at the carnage he and his strike team had wrought, the would-be Bloodletters strewn about in various degrees of disqualification—many had been laid out into full unconsciousness, others were merely bled and now nursed their wounds, though all of them had been taken out of commission one way or the other—and understood the truth of his victory, not with any sort of glee, but a sense of grim satisfaction.
This work, he had done in Her Majesty's name.
This work, they all had done in Her Majesty's name.
And it was good.
Thus came around again the gunship from before, only instead of swooping overhead, the armoured aerial vehicle seemed to be coming in for a vertical landing.
"On your feet," Tōdō commanded, before the approaching rotors could drown out his words; and as the other nine nodded and did as he had commanded of them, Senba included, the wind of the rotors began to buffet them, flattening the grass of the clearing and sending much of the foliage flying, the new growth a few weeks hence as of yet—it wasn't even sakura season—and the silhouettes who had been standing in the open bay doors came into clearer view.
Tōdō counted five silhouettes standing at the threshold as the gunship touched down which he could clearly see; Suzaku, of course, stood there, her arms folded across her chest, an almost uncharacteristically serious and distinctly pensive frown upon her face, her crimson-and-gold cloak fluttering in the backdraft of the rotors, her black, gold-trimmed coat-tails smacking across her legs, plastered to her thighs with the gales, her hair once again bound up into the thick, high chestnut ponytail he had witnessed her wearing it in before, and alongside her, Tōdō saw Mireya, smirking for some reason of which he was entirely ignorant and clad in a modified form of the standard legionary uniform, as befit her status as Master-at-Arms, her bob of white hair adrift in the gales but otherwise entirely impeccable. Aside from the two of them, he saw two men—one of whom Tōdō didn't recognise at all: a man dressed in a long black cloak, a variation on the standard uniform that Tōdō imagined to serve as clear indication of a higher rank, featuring a noticeably longer coat and gold trim on what few flashes of pauldrons Tōdō could catch from beneath the cover of that fluttering black cloak, and a gold pin-bearing peaked cap sitting atop a head of tousled, royal blue hair, with a clearly square-jawed, sun-kissed, and brown-eyed face all arranged beneath it; while the other man he recognised at once as Jeremiah, Margrave Gottwald.
Which made the identity of the fifth person rather obvious, didn't it?
They began to step out of the bay of the gunship, one by one—Suzaku and Mireya, followed by the man Tōdō didn't recognise (was that the Grand Marshal?), Jeremiah Gottwald, and finally, Princess Justine herself, the scalloped tails of her black coat flapping about her ankles like the fluttering of a restless pair of draconic wings.
Tōdō lowered himself to one knee the moment her heeled boot touched the grass, and he didn't have to look behind him to know that the former Sixes had done the same, with his once and future comrades all following suit after half a beat of hesitation, lowering their heads before their commander and liege lady.
Clapping heralded her approach, he understood as the tips of her knee-high black boots came within his view, and the shadow she cast fell upon him. "Bravo, Decant Tōdō. Truly, the performance of your team today exceeded even my lofty expectations, given the brief amount of time you were given to whip them all into shape. I'm impressed."
"In contrast, looks like my first crop of Bloodletters needs some serious fuckin' work," groused his former student. "There's some promise, to be sure, but I'm gonna have to pull some serious bullshit to get 'em all mission-ready…"
"We've time yet, Suzaku, never fret," the princess replied airily. "We have other matters to attend to while we're here, after all.
"Yeah, you're right," Suzaku sighed, and Tōdō could imagine that she was shaking her head. "Mimi an' I'll be straightenin' this lot out for a good long while afterwards, I'm thinkin'. Let's get your shit outta the way first, though…"
"Just so," the princess replied; and then, he could feel her gaze upon him as surely as he would feel the material of her gloves were she to lay a hand upon his body. "Now then. Rise, Decant Tōdō, and behold the spurs that your labours have earned both you and your sergeant."
"As you command," he intoned, raising himself to his full height.
And indeed, before him, somewhat shorter than him for all that it didn't feel remotely like that, was Her Majesty, looking him up and down with an appraiser's shrewd gaze. "Yes. Yes, I think you'll do rather nicely indeed. Grand Marshal?"
"Present, your highness," said the man with the peaked black cap, the golden pin adorning it, Tōdō could now see, having been figured into the shape of a legionary draco on a background of a sword crossed against an old-style percussion-cap rifle with an affixed bayonet—an eye-catching design, to say the least.
"Decant Tōdō Kyōshirō, allow me to introduce the Grand Marshal of the Dread Legion, and your commanding officer, Julian Cardemonde," the princess declared with a flourish of her hand. "And in turn, I present to you, my lord Grand Marshal, your soon-to-be direct subordinate, the illustrious Tōdō Kyōshirō, the very newest of my marshals."
"Sir," Tōdō replied promptly, shooting the man a crisp legionary salute.
"At ease, Marshal," the Grand Marshal said gregariously. "You know, I have heard quite a lot about you over the years. It's good to see that that wasn't all smoke and mirrors. Allow me to say that I very much look forward to working with you."
"And I, you, sir," Tōdō replied, nodding his agreement.
"Splendid!" the princess cried, clapping her hands together. Then, she turned the full weight of her gaze upon Tōdō, and pinned him to the spot, assessing him, and he was certain that if he was to speak false right now, she would know of it beyond a shadow of a doubt. But he stood before her, freshly-reborn, with no more to hide from her than a swaddled babe, and so he knew he had no cause to fear or to worry. "Now then, my newest marshal, I have one very important question for you:
"Are you ready to begin?"
And to this question, Tōdō knew his answer better, almost, than his own name.
This was where he belonged, after all—even if it had taken him a few tries to find it, find it he had.
"Yes, your majesty," he said, bowing to her from the waist. "I am yours to command."
Yes, indeed—for at last, Tōdō Kyōshirō knew that he had found his life's true purpose…
