[SWAMP - FINAL]

Slowly, Masaru opens his eyes and takes it all in. The frogs are there too, crawling around his legs and hopping from knee to knee, as if greeting him one last time with as much effort as they're able. "I suppose this is goodbye, then," Masaru asks them. They blink at him, and he smiles. And then they hop off as he shuffles up with his briefcase.

This is it.

Masaru understands that there's only one way to gut this fish, and something deep inside of him tells him it's going to be the greatest battle he'll face.

It's about the others just as much as it's about him.

It only takes a minute for him to get to the lake, as if the swamp itself has shifted its interior to deliver him quickly to his goal. Kenji and Valerie arrive almost as quickly, only seconds apart.

"Alright, what's the plan now?" Kenji asks, giving a proud pop to the stock of his rifle.

Masaru smiles at Kenji, nods, and looks out to the cabin in the middle of the lake. "That represents our anxieties of the unknown," Masaru says.

Valerie nods. "It represents our fear of the future, and of what might happen," she answers.

Kenji's brow perks up as he thinks it over. "I had a feeling," he says. "Deep down, I didn't want to say it was true, but I think that the only way we could face the unknown is the one thing we want to do the least."

All three of them look towards the lake. The little cabin, with its dark windows and dismal form, stands as a testament to fear itself.

Masaru looks down to the water. "What's more, the water around the cabin creates a buffer. We have to be vulnerable," Masaru says, "but we also have to go forward. If we just keep running, the future will always find us, but if we hunker down, it finds us too."

The three of them take a moment to reflect on his words.

Valerie smiles. "Well put, sir."

The corner of Masaru's mouth perks up a little. "I suppose it beats stuttering through an introduction," he says, as he pulls out his business card and looks at it again.

"True," Valerie says, her icy gaze turning back to the cabin. "So we're going to go there with a raft?"

Masaru shakes his head. "That would take too long. To ask for that kind of safety, will be sure to trigger The Stranger… We're going to swim."

The two look at him, Kenji with interest and Valerie with concern. "Uh, you told me that you don't..."

"Yeah," Masaru interrupts. "I'm going to do it." He takes off his jacket, undoes his tie, and removes his shoes. "We're going to go in with everything we have. I doubt it's set traps on its own island." Masaru's gaze sharpens to a steely point. "The fact of the matter is, it's been waiting for us to arrive this entire time."

Valerie's breathing picks up, but she goes ahead to take off her jacket and shoes as Kenji moves to do the same.

"Are either of you strong swimmers?" Kenji asks.

Valerie shrugs as Masaru shakes his head. "Don't you see? It's not the skill, it's not the guns it's given us. Tell me one time those rifles meant anything."

The two of them look at their weapons. Valerie affixes her fingers around her old rifle, and Kenji takes a look at the glistening rear scope of his own. "They'll be difficult to swim with," Kenji admits.

Masaru opens his briefcase.

Valerie moves forward with her rifle as Kenji steps back a little. "Isn't my rifle who I am?" Kenji asks, as Masaru slides Valerie's weapon into the seemingly bottomless compartment of his briefcase.

"They have their uses, but not when it comes to defeating this opponent, not really," he says. Kenji sees the spark in Masaru's eye as the salaryman continues. "All it wants to see is our audacity."

Kenji pauses a moment and comes to a reaffirming nod as he steps forward with his rifle. "Alright," he says. "Let's do it."

With the rifles stored and the briefcase closed, the three turn for the lake once again.

"I can't wait to see the look on its face," Masaru says, his gaze crisp with the violence of a platoon leader preparing an ambush.

Masaru takes a deep breath… and then another deep breath. The other two look at him. He takes yet another deep breath, but they both stay silent.

"Take all the time you need," Valerie says.

Masaru hurries a nod. "Thanks, I got it," he says. And finally, he steps into the water. He looks to the two of them. "If something happens, don't help me, okay?"

"We're doing this together," Kenji says.

Masaru nods. "Yes, we are, but I have to face my fears alone, or else it won't count," he says.

Valerie and Kenji exchange a curious look, and then Kenji nods as he turns again to the lake. "Sure," he says with a smirk. "Some things a man's gotta do by himself."

Masaru takes a step inside the water. It laps around his ankles with a warm, thick embrace. "Alright," he says under his breath one last time before wading out. The others follow him, shoulder to shoulder, and in only seconds, they're waist-deep.

This is it, Masaru says in his mind. This is it, he repeats again. Even if I drown, I'll come right back. And I'll keep drowning. I'll keep going. I'll keep swimming until I can’t, he asserts, tears of raw emotion welling up in his eyes.

Just as the water gets up to his shoulders, they begin to swim.

Masaru starts out forcefully, paddling the water as far under him as he can. It's hard with the briefcase under his arm, but by this point, he knows he won't quit. It could be a thousand briefcases, and he'd still make it. Kenji kicks forward with quiet, easy strokes under the surface of the water, almost like a frog headed for a lily pad. Valerie's strokes are short and inefficient, but her posture is clean.

They're both calm, the confidence of their technique pushing them further and further across the lake. The deeper they go, the more it feels as though there's something just underneath them, like the gliding touch of an eel along the rim of their skin.

Masaru, on the other hand, paddling with only one arm and flailing with his legs, is making slow, brutalizing progress with as much energy as he can muster.

"Calm down," Kenji says, as he hears the hyperventilating yelps of the man now a few meters behind him.

"I don't..." Masaru stops himself. "I don't know what to do." The water gets up to his chin, and he dunks down for the first time.

With some effort, Valerie turns over and looks at him. "Are you okay?" she shouts.

Nothing for a moment.

All Masaru can feel is the brown wretchedness of the water engulfing him. The past comes back to him. He's unable to see the cabin as his head dips more and more into the water. All he can see is the murk below and the bright, uncaring sky above. He realizes he's lost his grip on his briefcase and reaches to retake it as it hovers up to the surface. Once he does, however, an idea cuts through his mind like a bolt. He wasn't using that other arm to swim. What if he postured the briefcase underneath him? He folds it under both of his arms and attempts to paddle, a moment of calm overcoming him as the past reconnects with him.

I can't be weak anymore, he thinks. I can't do it. I have to let go.

It's so much like the lake that he had nearly drowned in as a child, but instead of a cute, shiny, colorful fish that coaxed his imagination out into the deep water, now it's lithe, tangling forms of long-bodied things in there with him. He can't quite see their faces from the quick glimpses, but he's certain they're sizing him up. He sees someone paddle nearby and he reaches up, but it's not enough. His constant thrashing in the water, even with the help of the briefcase, does little to pull him up as he slowly sinks lower… and lower…

Then, a voice chimes in through the dark.

"Can you hear me?" a young voice asks, seemingly from the very core of his mind. The chill dominating his spine in his moment of immense hopelessness gains a spark with the heat of a forge when he immediately identifies the source.

Yuna! Masaru thinks.

“If you can hear me, I'm okay. I made it. My parents are here, and I told them about you."

There's a pause, a bit of an awkward murmur between two adults who sound both awestruck and cautious.

"Mr. Abe," a man's voice starts, "I wanted to thank you for everything you've done for our daughter.”

“…She tells me that..." a glass-thin feminine voice starts with an undercurrent of raw emotion. She scoffs a moment before continuing. "She told me that you met while you were asleep. I didn't believe her at first, but I know that people can come into each other's lives in unusual ways."

"She knew other things," her father continues. "She talked about how you looked, your room number, the way you dressed. It matches the description perfectly. Whatever it is you did in there, the nightmare she had, I know you helped her through it, and we came here to encourage you and Miss Beaumont."

A sob from Yuna's mother punctuates her father's words. "If you can hear us, I wanted to tell you that you can fight too. You have to keep going, sir. Don't let your past define who you are. We don't always understand the… terrain of our lives, but with other people, we can pull each other out of our own understanding of what life is supposed to be. We will pray for you at the temple today for your swift recovery," he says.

"You got this, Masaru! Don't give up! I don't know what you're facing off against, but you're a strong person, Mr. Abe, and don't you forget it!"

There's a slight disturbance in Masaru's hearing as he hears her parents murmur something. There's a sudden tapping of feet. He feels the embrace of small arms wrapping around him from the side, as if he's on a hospital bed.

"You're going to make it, I know you will!" she says. "We're going to go visit the others now, okay?" she says.

"So long, sir," Yuna's father says.

"Take care, Mr. Abe," her mother says.

As Masaru drowns in the depths of the lake, he feels Yuna release him and hears their footsteps move to the end of a room with acoustics suspiciously similar to his hospital room.

Finally, his feet touch the bottom, the briefcase pushing him up gently but not enough to defeat the gravity of the lake. The sensation of the drowning is still there, but the panic has gone.

Masaru simply stands at the bottom of the lake for a moment. He looks at the very edge of his vision to see the fluctuating pale creatures. Sometimes teeth are flashed, or claws, or eyes, or tentacles, but he understands that this isn't their show—it never was.

From the very beginning, this was his story, his challenge to face, and these monsters are merely the fantastical trimmings to the mythic tale of a samurai.

This is not the first time Masaru's intuition connected the dots for him, but this is the first time the true mechanics of the world clicked. This is not simply a world of tests and challenges for one's demons; it's a world of intention.

Masaru reaches out with his open hand and waits.

Slowly, the beasts come forward, gauging his expression, his willingness to continue, the lack of fear in his eyes, the focus, and the desire to embrace something so horrifically unfamiliar to him.

…An appendage produces itself from the murk, waiting for his reaction, waiting for the flinch, the cringe, the muffled shout under the water.

But Masaru stays still.

He embraces the unknown… and the unknown embraces back.

It's not about learning how to swim; Masaru understands that much. It's about showing that he's ready. He tightens his grip on the pale thing presented to him, and it lifts him up higher and higher through the murk until he can see the sunlight again. It conducts him forward through the lake all the way to the shore, and abruptly, it shakes free from his grasp, off into the lake.

Masaru breaches over the surface once he hits the slope leading up to the island, wiping his face from the water as he takes in a deep, apparently unnecessary breath of air. He turns back to see the other two staring at him, aghast.

"Well," Kenji says, reaching the shore. "How’d you figure that out?"

Masaru takes a moment as he regards Valerie, still where he went down, a little ways off. The relief on her face is like seeing a rising sun after a truly terrible night. "I embraced the unknown," Masaru says simply, as the two watch Valerie begin paddling over to the island. "That's what this is all about."

Kenji squints. "Just like you said, eh?"

Masaru nods. "That which we don't know, the things that we're afraid of, the way the future will react when we do not move with intention."

Kenji crosses his arms, sparing a wary glance over to the cabin just a few meters away. "Well, I suppose that supports your theory," he says with a quieted tone. "We'll see just how far faith in the unknown can get us against The Stranger."

Masaru nods again as Valerie reaches the shore.

"Sorry about that," Masaru says as she runs up. "I didn't really..." He stops himself as she embraces him, burying her face into his chest.

"Are you okay?!" she asks with a muffled tone.

Masaru returns the embrace next to Kenji, whose eyebrows have raised higher than Masaru has ever seen them before—the kind of look a wiser man might flash when he thinks, Oh, it's like that, then.

"I'm fine," Masaru answers, as Valerie pushes up and looks him in the eyes.

"How... did you do that? You don't... you can't swim, right?"

Masaru shakes his head. "I can't. I'm going to figure it out soon, but not now," he says, turning to the cabin. "Besides, it's time for the main event."