Siggy and the other Goowies, upon hearing the sounds of combat, charged from the auto shop. The rifle in his hand felt awkward. He didn’t even know who to fire it at. Ahead of him, a grenade-lance detonated against one of the Kintoki gunships, bisecting the plane and sending both halves careening down to the square.
“Sayuri!” he screamed over bullets and shattering petrol bombs and screaming.
“Oi, Siggy! She’ll be awright. Stay with the plan, mate!” Oz said, beckoning him behind a barricade the GGUW had erected. He piled up with the others behind it, waiting for orders to charge once the air had been cleared of gunships. Siggy counted five plus the crashed one, but more could be coming for all he knew.
“Fuck’s sakes! I’m ready to go!” another boy said.
“Shut yer gob n’ wait for orders,” Oz said, clutching the radio like a religious idol.
More grenade-lances launched from rooftops with concussive booms that rattled street windows and went wide as the gunships employed evasive maneuvers. Gunship autocannons spat shells back at their rooftop Compatriots, exploding in showers of cement and sparks.
“Oh gods! What if this weren’t it!?” said one of Siggy’s compatriots.
“Shut it!” Siggy yelled. “Either ya want a new world bad enough to die for it or ya don’t!”
Despite his own words, Siggy was trembling. Before Sayuri had dropped the Shroud, he’d felt like a part of an invincible whole. But as larger forces resolved themselves in explosions overhead, he realized how small he was. How vulnerable.
Oz planted an arm on his shoulder. “Y’alright, Compatriot?”
Siggy grabbed his arm back. “Yar. Yourself?”
Oz laughed. “Scared shitless. But we gotta do this. If we don’t, there won’t be nobody else.”
They waited and waited for the steel raptors to be punctured by grenade-lances, but the GGUW was clearly losing the war for the skies. The strength Siggy was drawing from the rest of his compatriots was flagging.
Then, all five of the gunships hovering above the square exploded one after the other in a hailstorm of metal. Warfighter planes screamed through the square and split formation to target ground installations in the upper bands. Rockets and tracer rounds lit up the sky over the Kaihonjin part of Éstfýr.
“We’re clear! We’re clear! Let’s go compatriots!” Oz shouted, waving with the arm not clutching his radio.
Siggy expected to have to push through a crowd, but it was more like the crowd was pulling him with it as it poured through gaps in the steel barricades and charged the front doors of the Kintoki supply center. Fighting vehicles out front burned with plumes of raging black smoke and those Kintoki soldiers that survived the initial fight were being finished off.
Across the street, Siggy could see where the destroyed gunships had smashed into tenements. The frenzied crowd was not only angry workers, but their families. He saw parents trying to shepherd children out of the pandemonium. Others lay crushed and mangled under debris.
This was the moment. Æfrians were taking back what was theirs. Scenes of seizing the sites of conglomerate oppression he had dreamed of were playing out in front of him. And he wanted to join them. He desperately wanted to join them. But Siggy looked again at the tenements shorn open by propeller blades and made another choice. Breaking from his squadron, he sprinted to where the gunships had crashed.
“Oi! You lot!” Siggy yelled at two Goowies headed towards the Kintoki building. He grabbed their arms. “We’re gonna evacuate folks and get ‘em medical services.”
“But we got orders—”
“Nuts to yer fuckin’ orders! Yer a Goowie for fuck sakes. We only take orders we wanna take!”
After rounding up a few more compatriots, he sent some to flag down and direct people away from the square and others to clear an evacuation route through the barricades. His dream of being a proper revolutionary would have to wait.
~~~
The crowd was a storming wave threatening to drown those who didn’t move with it. Eventually, Sayuri stopped fighting. She let the great mob of rioters nudge her towards the Kintoki building. As her self-imposed restriction was to not use her hatsuden for anything but saving lives, the rooftop of the twelve-story supply center seemed the optimal place to spot where her intervention might be needed. This was Sayuri’s thought before the Genji warfighters rumbled overhead, shooting down the hovering Kintoki gunships.
It happened so suddenly, all Sayuri could do was redirect a falling turbine into a fountain, accidentally turning it into a shrapnel bomb of pink marble. Horrified, she watched the masonry strike and injure some rioters. Near her, the other downed planes careened into buildings and the crowd.
She made towards the crash to see if she could help, but someone slapped her back and pushed her towards the Kintoki building.
“Go! Let’s go compatriot! Úre!”
They had mistaken her woad cloak for baggy blue coveralls. In this way she found herself sucked through the smashed doors of the Kintoki supply center.
The inside was a kaleidoscope of anarchy. The reception area was full of rioters doing what their spirits possessed them to, taking potshots at portraits of the Kintoki clan, stomping on a pair of soldiers begging for their lives, or engaging in a firefight with Kintoki soldiers for control of a hallway.
In a daze, she wandered through the chaos to the giant supply warehouse where a battle was being waged between GGUW insurgents who had captured up to row “わ” and Kintoki forces defending Row “ま” with their backs to the wall. A dozen bodies lay dead or screaming between them. All the while the insurgents were prying open boxes full of Conglomerate-grade rifles, grenades, and machine guns.
Sayuri took it in with numb horror. Had she done this? Just by bringing the Shroud down? In this state of shock and revulsion, Sayuri’s legs took her towards a utility stairwell overlooked by the rioters. Its concrete shaft was a gray tomb. As she ascended the metal stairs, the ricocheting bullets and cries of pain and vicious slurs blurred into a buzzing drone.
Her ankles and calves burned and her heart thumped in her chest as she threw herself up the stairs. All she wanted was to do right by others. To help them. To be useful. Why was it so hard? Why did even her attempts to be helpful result in death and destruction?
Sayuri arrived at the doors to the roof and staggered out of them. She was alone. From her vantage, she saw the riot throbbing through the streets. She witnessed pockets of Kintoki soldiers shooting people who stood in their way, and being lined up and shot against walls but the GGUW. She saw Æfrians dead under gunship wreckage and cheering from open windows for the rioters seizing the supply center.
Above it, swarming like vultures, were planes bearing the Genji clan crest. The invisible force of their railguns and autocannons were only made visible when they erupted against buildings and streets. In horror, she realized who the real winner of this riot would be. Not the striking Æfrians or the GGUW, not Kintoki and the other conglomerates, but Genji Heavy Industries.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
She shivered violently at the humming black shapes and watched as they cut resistance out of the city like an intervening god, carving a new and horrifying world one incision at a time. It was her fault for releasing the Shroud, and she was helpless to stop what she had unleashed.
~~~
Persimmon was a devout worshiper of Wotenha. Humans were capricious, greedy, and unreliable, but the universal laws that the August-God placed into motion at the creation of the universe operated without failure or exception. Intuition was the key to understanding laws which science did not yet understand.
Bearing that in mind, Persimmon waited and watched the tides of anarchy below. He ignored the Genkai-Wabu Air Fleet’s operation. It was just a sideshow, not the coup de grace Vice President Tetsuo Genji believed it was. Machines could conquer a city, but the conflict he was interested in was waged inside of minds.
And then, he spotted her. Standing on the roof of the Kintoki Supply Center like a conqueror surveying her domain, Sayuri Ueichi. Persimmon turned to leave for the supply center, stepping around the exploded skulls of two Zukunashi and their unfired grenade-lances.
~~~
“That’s Sayuri! It has to be!” Thomas said as the Shroud raised.
Milly looked around wildly. No sooner had the Shroud lifted than Hel’s Oubliette opened and the accumulated debts of a century of repression and violence spilled out into the world. Nothing—not the ethnic riots in Suigen, not the horrors during the famine—had prepared Milly for the brutality unleashed with the raising of the Shroud.
Striking workers pushed into the spiked barricades, sometimes impaling themselves in the process. Others were shot climbing over them. But the workers, especially the Zooks among them, repurposed the barricades as their own defensive positions, firing into the open square and butchering Kintoki soldiers like a turkey shoot.
Milly screamed and ducked her head as Thomas fired at someone or something she couldn’t see. She clutched the sleeve of his jacket in her fists.
“Thomas, forget Sayuri! If we don’t get out we’re gonna die!”
“Maybe!” he yelled.
Milly had been raised to want revolution, but at no point had she given much thought to what it would look like. Only, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. If she died, none of it would matter anyway. Even if Thomas refused to go, she had to save herself. That was all that mattered. After struggling so long to survive, to remain free and independent, she would not die. Freedom was all that mattered, all she wanted.
Letting go of Thomas, Milly pushed against the onrushing crowd. She braced her legs to withstand knocking shoulders and shoving elbows, allowing herself to be buffeted but not blown back. She was making it out. She had to. At some point, tears filled her eyes and her chest heaved and she didn’t know why.
A hand wrapped around her arm.
“This is it, sister! This is it!” said a young girl in blue coveralls, eyes filled with zealous frenzy. She must have been half Milly’s age: A teenager with fiery eyes and a rifle over her shoulder. A child going to die.
Looking in those eyes, hearing the word “sister,” Milly knew then why she was crying. It wasn’t freedom she had wanted all this time, it was belonging. She didn’t want to be independent. She wanted to be bound to people who cared for her. Even if it hurt or inconvenienced her, there was no other way. Freedom meant nothing without that.
Her voice was too choked up to say anything to the young Zukunashi girl rushing onwards to join her fellow Æfrians.
“Milly!” Thomas called. He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Are you alright!? Are you hurt!?”
She shook her head. “N-no, no! I-I’m fine. Let’s find Sayuri.”
Milly pointed at the roof of the supply center. It would be dangerous to get up there, of course. But being bound to other people meant plunging into danger for their sake. And it didn’t just mean saving Sayuri, it meant keeping the girl out of the hands of people who would hurt Æfrians. That was her role in this, Milly knew, and the chaos around her suddenly made sense.
~~~
Thomas found a basement window and used the grip of Mamoru’s pistol as a hammer to smash out the glass.
“Don’t get cut,” he told Milly.
He didn’t follow his own advice. A shard of glass in the frame caught his jacket and left him with a cut on his upper arm.
“Tommy, your blood is glittering!” she said.
He swabbed the blood and saw what she was talking about. Little glittering points dotted his blood. He’d seen it during his interrogation in Burnehithe too, but thought it a hallucination.
“Worry about it later. We need to find a stairwell.”
The basement room was some sort of pantry for field rations. Peeking the door open, Thomas looked down a cement hallway ringing with gunshots from the floor above. Behind, he heard the crowd noticing the new opening.
Thomas pushed the door aside. “Stay close behind me.”
They stole through the basement corridor before towards a steel door with a sign for a stairwell. Pounding up the stairs in the hopes of surveying the riot for signs of Sayuri, they instead found the girl herself, huddled against the roof parapet.
“Sayuri!” They both called out at once.
The girl looked up at them in shock.
Before they could run to Sayuri’s side, the wind whorled around them. A Genji gunship flew overhead and from it, a man dropped to the roof. In the glowing spotlights beams, Thomas could see his face with its bushy beard and creases of gold reaching into his lips.
Thomas raised his gun.
“Otoshite,” Persimmon ordered.
Thomas felt his muscles seize, as though every muscle in his body was cramping. A second later he dropped his gun.
“T-Tommy!? Wh— what are you doing!?” Milly said.
“Obeying his orders,” Persimmon replied. The man strode over to Thomas and struck him in the jaw.
“Thomas!” Sayuri screamed. She hopped to her feet and ran towards them. Milly grabbed the girl and pulled her back.
“It’s one of the more brilliant uses of hatsuden to date,” Persimmon said, drawing his oversized magnum from his coat. “We made little super soldiers who turn on and off when we want them to. There were hiccups, sure, but it was a fascinating program with all sorts of implications. For health, for science… But we discontinued it. Do you know why?”
Milly and Sayuri stood in shocked silence.
“It was one of your family’s programs, Lady Ueichi. Your scientists led the charge. Perhaps you can guess why they stopped,” Persimmon said. Sayuri looked away in guilty recognition.
Ignoring a frozen Thomas, Persimmon turned towards the other two. His boots thumped, somehow sounding louder and more ominous than the screaming and gunshots below. Sayuri turned her and Milly invisible.
“No you don’t!”
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Persimmon reached her in the next second and gripped her invisible face in his palm and squeezed it like an orange until she cried out and dropped the invisibility on herself and Milly.
“And don’t try to teleport either, or I’ll paint the fucking rooftop with his brain,” Persimmon screamed as he waved his magnum at Thomas’ immobile body.
Sayuri yelped in pain. “What do you want!?”
“A new world! One not burdened with squabbling, short-sighted conglomerates who can only think three months ahead at a time,” Persimmon said. He let go of Sayuri’s face, his tone calming. “So, do you want to know why the kinketsu program was canceled, despite its promising research?”
Sayuri glared at him. “I know not.”
“It didn’t. Turn. A profit,” Persimmon said. His sonorous voice burst into a roar. “We can’t organize as a species unless some fucking clan makes money from it!”
“Y-You’re a royalist?” Sayuri said.
“No. No. Of course not,” he said, calming just as quickly. “The Emperor is impotent and decadent. The whole Imperial family is. They’re even more pathetic than the conglomerates, who at least have the will to change the world, even if it’s to make the world more stupid, frivolous, and degenerate. No. I want a Kaihon Empire that resembles the gunsei governments of old. Ruled by men who know how to act and how to make tough decisions. Loyal men, capable of sacrifice. Honorable men.”
Milly’s chest heaved with fear, but she found the strength to ask, “men like you?”
He turned to her.
“Men like me,” he replied.
Milly raised her pistol and fired. Bullets slammed into Persimmon’s chest and the suited gorilla laughed. Shrugging his overcoat off, he stood bare-chested in the cold winds save a black vest with two craters in it. He grabbed and twisted the wrist that held the offending pistol.
“For a savage, you have a warrior’s spirit, but I can’t have you doing that.”
Persimmon’s other hand raised the barrel of his magnum up to Milly’s arm and fired, blowing it off at the elbow. Milly wailed in pain. Sayuri gasped in horror. Thomas stood at attention, awaiting orders.