The gun to his head didn’t help either.
Muratagi’s troops had never left - the plant had been assigned a contingent of Internal Troops back in, what had it been? 2017? Anticipation would give forever if probed in the right way. Distant echoes of firefights, and sonic booms, and the occasional deep growl of artillery had become ubiquitous with the arrival of the 1st Maneuver Corps of the Three Colors across the river. The self-styled warriors across the river had arrived chiefly in two brigades, “Nature’s Open Hand”, and “Nature’s Closed Fist”. Well, if they were trying to make a point, they made it.
This part of the war had been competitive. The Internal Troops had held a petulant inferiority complex against their military since their organization by Muratagi a decade before, and now, with hostilities in the air, everybody had something to prove. The only thing Nakato was trying to prove was that he was going to stay very alive through this whole ordeal, and the only person he was going to prove that to was himself. He had no time for these soldiers; he was a decorated physicist, after all. Before Muratagi, he was out in Fujikawa, researching fusion in a state-of-the-art laboratory? Now? Running a horribly dangerous reactor design, for a legion of children.
The head child was Commander Ren Izula. A large-framed woman hovering somewhere in her mid-thirties, she had been handpicked by Muratagi to lead the operation, and rumors had often echoed amid the scientists that they regularly talked to each other. Nobody had any reason to deny the theory - they were all hostages of the former state now, keeping the plant running with the explicit knowledge that they were to force a catastrophic meltdown of the reactor should anyone explicitly attempt to take the facility.
The value of threatening ecological extinction for an area the size of a subcontinent hadn’t been lost on Muratagi, either, because by the time April had hit, Muratagi had already been threatening the same should the Three Colors assault the former capital of Karasuna, which, Nakato imagined, they could very easily do by now, should the leverage disappear. The gun to his head twitched, and Nakato relaxed. Izula lowered the handgun, as the coolant levels began to increase, and the blaring alarm in the foreground disappeared.
“Good, Dr. Comuro. If I find out that these leaks are being caused by someone on your team, I’m gonna take your fucking head.”
Charming, thought Nakato, though he wouldn’t dare say it. There was an additional layer of tension between the two - an air of supremacy and power brought on not just by the Udebatsu revolver in her hand, but by the far more slippery force of ideology, which permeated every corner of the structure, from the majority of its inhabitants to its very construction. Muratagi had wanted his power plants, and he’d got them.
“Commander, if we keep running at this capacity, in these conditions, in this unfinished factory, well, these things are to be expected.” replied Nakato, to which the Commander relaxed her stance and nodded, looking now more sincere than ever. Nakato had seen this complexity of evil lost on other technicians, sometimes to their own misfortune. He reckoned by now that she was a sociopath of some sort, enjoying the prodding of those that her beliefs had designated “lower”. Despite his Doctorate and position of authority, Ren had made things abundantly clear that, because of his Latin-Kongō roots, he would never have the same status as the lowest of those considered purely Tsurushemese. Muratagi’s self-designed hierarchy of ethnicities had only complicated things more, though he doubted even some of those serving under Ren still believed in their charade as whole-heartedly as their commanders.
“Alright, Doctor. You know you don’t need to be told not to fail the National State.” she threatened from behind a pleasant facade.
“Indeed,” mumbled Nakato, turning back to the old analog terminal which continued to display various fluctuating diagnostics.
BANG!
“Fuck!” spouted Nakato, sprouting from his cot. Red warning light bathed the ceiling above him in a curiously steady dance of on-and-off, and immediately a pit formed in his stomach as he staggered to his feet, taking a look around. Several other scientists were supposed to be here, sleeping, but they were already gone, their cots vacated. Bolero, Taduron, Dr. Corvaton, all gone.
Another rumble shook the building. Was this a meltdown in progress? Did he fuck up yesterday? DID HE? But the red light only gave more cadence to the air of curiosity. Something was off - after so many false coolant leaks and imminently fixable problems, he’d told Commander Ren months beforehand to turn the alarm lights off and make it easier to read. Now, they were on again, and rumbles continued to shake the building.
The Three Colors? Banno? Another fucking boom! He had to go. So he turned around to his coat rack, and then the old office door to what was now his bedroom swung open, and he briefly gazed at a masked guard, wearing Muratagi’s flag.
“Doctor Comuro, come here NO-!” he said, before his head exploded into a mist of rather unsettling gore, and two figures crept up to the door in the oscillating red light of the now-open door frame.
“You, are you Dr. Nakato Comuro?” asked the first figure, walking into a red haze to reveal itself as a woman of Waboyan descent dressed in Three Colors uniform. Another masked gunman trailed behind her, his head on a swivel as he continued to check for targets. Nakato was still thinking about the head explosion of moment’s before, so he hesitated briefly before answering the question:
“Yes, I’m Dr. Comuro. And you work for Ashikaga.” he responded tersely, pointing at the pair as another burst of gunfire echoed somewhere else in the building.
“No time for that,” interjected the woman. “Your bosses were going to melt this place down on the thirtieth. Now that we’re here to stop them, they’re trying right now, and they-”
A PA system buzzed, sounding delightfully tinny, and Commander Ren’s psychotic voice echoed from the other end, “GET ME DOCTOR COMURO!”
“Where are my colleagues?” said Nakato as he heard that the head child was looking for him.
The lady’s masked friend peaked up, “Wyome, they’re coming, we have to take him and go!” he hushed as a distant rumble of what Nakato assumed were footsteps seemed to approach. Wyome looked at the Doctor and shrugged, “If they woke up already, they’re dead. We have to go to the control room, now!”
And with the last word, she grabbed the doctor’s wrist and began pulling him through the hallway in a brisk walk, almost a jog. Distant shouting and gunfire seemed to creep closer, the mass of footsteps now having definitely arrived at the converted dormitory section of the plant. Both of the soldier’s radios buzzed with the gruff voice of what he assumed was another soldier, “Wyome! Did you get the damn doctor?”
“Got him, Karo, we’re coming righ-” POW!”
Flashes of yellow erupted from behind them, and Nakato felt himself tugged forward by a burst of strength from Wyome, who, alongside her masked friend, promptly turned and raised their weapons at the staggered militia, firing through suppressors at the figures at the end of the narrow hallway and taking cover behind a mass of desks that someone else had earlier set up as an impromptu barricade.
Nakato had sensory overload; he couldn’t react to this type of action the previous year, when the plant had come under more scrutinized military occupation, and he sure as hell couldn’t do it now, red and yellow light having soaked the previously cold and gray ambience of the facility with what the doctor could only call the colors of Hell itself. Several innumerable bursts of gunfire later, and with shrieks of pain echoing from the other end of the hallway, the trio took off again, turning a ninety degree corner towards the control room.
Within moments of turning, the two found themselves face-to-face with another pair of soldiers, and for a moment they looked ready to empty their magazines into each other before the masked man recognized the other pair as friendlies and lowered his mask, revealing Southern features and a prominent scar through its lip. “Fuck, I almost shot you two!” he exclaimed, as Wyome threw Nakato into view of the two operators.
“There you are!” he said towards the pair, who also lowered their masks. The alarm continued blaring, half-muted by more immediate sounds. “So you’re Dr. Comuro?” asked one of the gruff and moustached men in the group. “We don’t have much time, we’ve gotta-”
Another explosion seemed to rumble the very floor beneath them. Nakato finally spoke up. “Fuck! If they breach the damn reactor and it can’t hold it’s steam - it’ll melt down.” he blurted as the five of them now proceeded to the cold metal doors of the reactor control room. Wyome butted in:
“You think they know how to do that, Doctor?”
“Incompetence and malice can be hard to distinguish. I don’t think they have a clue, yet! Unless one of the other scientists is helping them, in which case, we’ve gotta-”
“Shh!” said one of the lead soldiers, who now had stopped at the metal door, and glanced around either end of the T-shaped hallway for movement before locking eyes with Nakato as he pressed his ear against the door. “Looks like the Commander’s in there,” he hushed. “We’re gonna have to breach it. Keep the Doctor out of sight.”
And so, Wyome let go of Nakato and let him sit in a rather dark and obstructed corner of the hallway, as smaller rumbles continued to permeate through the building. As he waited, tensely, Nakato wondered how many other soldiers were fighting in the hallways of this building; maybe even right on top of the field of control rods that defined every reactor room. Or, worse, below ground, in the piping that connected to the Kumata River.
What were the chances he would die today? His heart buzzed with energy but he dared not ponder it before the adrenaline wore off. He glanced over to growing commotion. Three more Three Colors soldiers, looking equally special-forces, had arrived and begun setting up wide and rectangular explosive charges on the exterior of the door.
“ALRIGHT, ABORT THE MISSION, FOLKS! GET THIS DAMN REACTOR MELTING, AND EVAC ASAP!” Another buzz through the PA - and, to top it off, Commander Ren’s voice had been loud enough that he could hear it through the metal door. Impressive, considering its thickness, but also concerned enough to give Nakato a right dreadful shudder as the soldiers around him also all tensed up, ready to enter.
Hand signals flashed, and Nakato tensely observed from his corner as the air filled with a puff of sparks and the excruciatingly loud pinging of metal. For a few moments, the dark silhouettes of the Three Colors descended into the somewhat-decently lit room, and then Nakato’s eyes adjusted, and in that moment, he saw Commander Ren, the head child, hit in center mass by a burst fired from one of the soldier’s rifles. In shock, the loyalist yelped and pressed down on her own trigger, sending a flurry of bullets first in a haze towards the door, then towards the ceiling, and, finally, towards the control panel itself, before collapsing on her stomach. As one Three Colors soldiers quickly finished off the Commander with another shot, a silhouette emerged from the room and back towards Nakato.
It was the man from the door, earlier, with the lip scar. His left arm was drenched in what appeared as a simple dark stain in the red warning light, but what Nakato reckoned was blood from a hit, filtered cruelly by the ambiance of disaster. “You’ve been hit,” he soon advised the quickly approaching soldier, to which the man nodded and grabbed the Doctor’s shoulder furiously. An imminent-sounding bang resounded from the floor above jittering the building enough to send clouds of dust descending down on the hallway from the tall and pipe-laden ceiling.
“No time,” he blurted, “Fix this, now!”, and shoved Nakato into the control room. He glimpsed the carnage; four dead loyalists, including the Commander. Worse, his sight momentarily turned to the corpses of six others wearing white jumpsuits - the Reactor 1 crew, except for him. Before long he was facing the control panel. It’d been properly riddled; lattices of shattered glass permeated half of the displays, and he gulped at wondering how many crucial buttons had been disabled.
Behind him, as he began flipping the screens on, he heard the man’s back-mounted radio crackle loudly again, this time on what seemed to be a general frequency. “Attention all units at Points Nakamura 6-9, we are detecting at least an infantry company-sized formation headed your way, and we are beginning our assault on the plant in thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to gear up and pack your bags for movement.”
The doctor barely heard it, he was so distracted. Reactor 2 was dead, as it usually was in the dead of morning, but Reactor 1?
Coolant...dropping.
Pressure control...dropping.
Positive void coefficient; working as intended. Shit!
In quick reflex, he scrambled through the buttons with his eyes, looking for the one button he needed, the ASBAK, as it was labeled, but what he had learned as SCRAM at his training in Akutera years prior - Safety Control Rod Actuator Mechanism. Most of the control rods were out, now, and he needed to…
Oh no.
“They shot the damn ASBAK button!” he groaned, turning around to the soldiers holding fast, as his hand laid outstretched in a gesture towards a giant 7.62x40mm-shaped gash where the little red button was supposed to have gone. “Manual failsafe,” he glanced back at one of the unbroken screens, “We need to trip the manual failsafe SCRAM lever. In the basement near the reactor. Get those damn control rods in, before this thing runs out of coolant and overheats!”
Judging from the group’s bewildered reaction, Nakato’ eyes must have been glowing bright yellow from the urgency. A momentary lapse of reason in command. Finally, the first soldier he’d met, the woman, Wyome, stood up and looked at him incredulously. “We have to move,” she said, handing him the dead Commander Ren’s handgun. “I don’t expect you to care about us or our code, but you better be a damn good enough human to die stopping nuclear meltdown, Doctor.”
It didn’t take a moment of more pondrance from Nakato. After all, he’d been pondering scenarios in his head for a long time, about what the Commander could have eventually wanted him to do, and he wouldn’t have traded his life just to give them an easier time blowing it up. “Let’s go. We have even less time than your guy gave us.” he said, examining the revolver which had not twelve hours earlier been pressed against the back of his skull.
The three men that had shown up to help breach the control room eventually left, evacuating along with the scarred soldier that’d been shot. That left Nakato, Wyome and the two they’d almost shot in the hallway, who he came to know were called Matunaga and Nastas, though he could barely tell them apart under their gear. The lights still red, the revolver oddly balanced in his hand, and the air crisp as on a winter day, polluted seemingly only by the sound of war.
Two corners turned, nothing. No surprises.
“How many did you say were stationed inside the plant, and not around?” asked Wyome in a hush, her face illuminated by the increasingly dimming red glow, and the yellowish haze of her weapon’s powerful tactical light. “We know about the three regiments, I mean, in the building,” she said in a quick pre-empting response from Nakato.
After pondering a bit, counting faces in his head, and turning another eerily dark corner, Nakato sighed, and guessed: “Just a company. One company. I don’t know if that’s them outside, or not. It’s early, they’re usually not physically inside the building. How many did you kill, so far?”
“Twenty-four or so.”
“So we still have problems. Not much longer to this lever now,” said Nakato as the building’s roof rumbled above him and he groaned, “Listen, I don’t know if you can affect this, but this reactor is in no state to be turned back on. It’s already being pushed every day, and now it’s got a serious coolant leak. Pray it’s not down here, in the basement, or else we might as well just have died when that bitch, Ren, shot the button.”
“It is what it is,” replied Matunaga as he pushed ahead slightly, turning a corner to illuminate a bright red lever, placed rather idyllically underneath a bright red light that seemed to bathe the whole room in that familiar perpetual atmosphere of hell that was only occasionally lent to the higher floors. Directly beyond the lever’s pedestal, a rather intact outline of a reactor core stood embalmed in concrete, sounds of churning coming from within. Briefly examining it, Matunaga turned back, “Is this it?”
Nakato nodded, and as he stood forward to pull it, Matunaga jerked to the side, from Nakato’ view, and after what seemed like a second, he crumpled, blood pouring out of his mouth. In his back, a strange cylindrical knife seemed to have embedded his own body armor into his back. Wyome yelled from behind in what seemed like a contortion of pain, and surprise. The Three Colors were known for stoicism - the fact that she’d broken immediately made him pre-linguistically turn to flight or flight, raising his revolver and looking around. In a moment, a shadow moved forward and tackled him to the ground grasping another knife; sounds of commotion and later four or so gunshots erupted from the other end of the hall, but Nakato had to get the brute off of himself before any of those additional worries could have the privilege of springing to mind.
For a moment, the red light dangled at a good angle in the light, and Nakato stared for a moment at a bald Belisarian-looking man with wide eyes and a knotted beard. He had to fight him off! But his damn knife was inching closer by the second from his left, and it took all of Nakato’ strength to keep this man’s huge arm at bay. He gave the knife’s hilt a hit, he needed to get it out of his enemy’s hand, but to his surprise it did something else and shot out with the sound of a silenced gunshot, embedding itself in the metal latticework of the floor, not an inch from Nakato’ ear.
The bearded man let out a guttural scream and headbutted Nakato, breaking his nose, and going for the kill, trying to choke the doctor out. For a moment, Nakato could see his very vision turning from red to purple, but as fast as it’d started, a flash took the man’s enormous weight off of his body, and he saw that Wyome had tackled the man in the dark, giving him a strike to the temple and a prompt strike from the butt of her gun on the back of his head. In the very second that Nakato propped himself up by the elbows and looked up, he heard another guttural scream, followed by a loud gunshot of a pistol, “Got him!” shouted Nastas, the other soldier, with a heavy waver in his voice. Wyome shot the bearded bald man with another eye-disturbing flash of light and stood up, groaning in exhaustion as she helped Nakato to his feet.
He pulled the lever, unable to speak, and all the reactor’s churning stopped, and the lights began to dim. Nakato breathed a raspy sigh of relief, coughing as the his throat finally mustered the ability to breathe beyond a smidgen. Nastas jogged over quickly, gun held high in a tactical grip, and looked to Wyome, “Ya got him?” he asked, lowering his weapon briefly as he kicked over the corpse of the Belisarian man.
“Volsung Regiment. If they’re part of the people operating outside, we can’t use our regular exfil, and we sure as hell have got to get out of the basement. I don’t like fighting at a disadvantage,” murmured Wyome to Nastas, who gruffly nodded. Nakato looked at the man, and then at the dead Matunaga.
“What about him?” Wyome and Nastas both flashed him a look of seeming inconsiderateness. “Truly an honorable Senshi. He must be left here,” said Nastas tersely as Wyome looked away with a sigh.
“Where do we go now?”
“Coolant pipes for the inactive reactors. We can use them to walk the marshland and get into the woods, and then we’re safe to rest a while and hopefully get choppered out.”
A grueling ordeal would have been putting it mildly, but no inconvenience of being covered in brackish and possibly radioactive water could make Nakato wince as much as the sight he saw upon emerging from the other end of the unfinished Reactor III’s coolant pipe, into the shallow shores of the Kumata River. Tracers filled the skies, giving the rising sun a contender in brightness, and the sounds of distant rumbles seemed intensified, ever-closer. Distantly, across the Kumata river in what was the territory of the Banno Shogunate, he could see vehicles rushing along the access road, watching, tensely.
Behind him, the two soldiers that had, essentially, saved his life, trotted towards him in ankle-deep water. He didn’t know what to think of these people; he’d trained his brain to expect the cynic’s outcome and be surprised at the smallest smidgen that would suggest otherwise, but this had broken that algorithm. Giddily, now, he looked down at his jeans and loafers, and worn tank-top, the clothes he had gone to sleep in the night before. Levity was a rare and valuable commodity indeed in Enyama.
But it didn’t seem to ring true for the pair that had escaped. Now that daylight was growing, he was finally able to get a look at their faces. Both seemed rather young, especially rather young to be leading raids. For as long as he’d been under Muratagi’s so-called protection, he would have never guessed that it’d gotten bad enough that every faction was using overgrown children as cannon fodder. Or perhaps he had been spoiled by academia, too, by what he saw on foreign interventions on the news in his younger years. The gentleman’s war was perhaps too naive a concept to ever have worked in a place as innovative and dangerous as Enyama had become.
“How many did we lose?” asked Wyome, looking back at the power plant, and noting the loud sounds of industrial gunfire that were now erupting on the other side, presumably in the courtyard, where the Three Colors were hitting the Volsung Regiment. Nastas sighed, “I don’t know...I’m sorry, Sora.”
“It’s...fine, man.” said Wyome, hesitating. Nakato cocked his head, confused before he realized Wyome was a surname. “Does your General know he can’t attack the building directly? We might have killed the Commander, but the reactor can’t take more hits.”
Wyome looked up at Nakato. “He’s not our General.”
“What do you mean? Who are you people? I thought you were Three Colors!”
“We are. But we’re not from the 1st Maneuver Corps, and we’re not with that asshole, General Uzumati. We were sent by General Sohoban Kenshin of the High Council to get the hostage situation resolved, specifically so that the 1st Maneuver Corps could assault this place, and, you know...get the war moving, Muratagi dead.”
“So are you special forces?”
“We’ve only been in the fight for...eight or nine months, both of us? That’s still longer than most of the grunts; if we were Shinobi troops, your friends might have survived.”
“Well, hold on, damn it, what about the Reactor 2 team? Did you check their rooms, at least?” interjected Nakato, frustrated at the seeming disregard for his own colleague’s lives.
“Ugh. Damn it, I don’t know, okay? They weren’t in their room, so let’s hope they're dead.” Wayobe looked increasingly erratic in her own processing of the combat that had just occurred. Still, Nakato had to stand up for his fellow prisoners.
“What?! Those are people, woman!”
“Yeah, I know! Okay?! I didn’t want...listen, we got you out. You’re the head scientist, are you not? The last reactor is shut down. What are they gonna do, turn on another one?”
Nakato sighed, flabbergasted, and let his arms flop to his side as he dejectedly looked at the river again, still clutching the Commander’s revolver in his hand. “Ffffucking amateurs.”
“It is what it is,” said Nastas as he let go of the radio transceiver on his ear. “Evac in five. Doctor, you’re coming with us to Takayama.”
“And what if I don’t want to?”
“Then, you’re free to wade through the warzone in your tank top.”
With a sigh, and finally, a chuckle of acknowledgment, Nakato watched as a black speck of a chopper on the southwestern horizon slowly got closer and closer to the river, flying so low as to evade fire and straddle the border between the small patch of loyalist land that remained, and the Shogunate. With a thump, the zippy Little Bird set down, and the three of them got on. Nakato grinned at his newfound sense of freedom, though in his heart he knew he might have just transferred cages.
