The Game Is Afloat

Dan and Kenta had swung by the hotel so Dan could drive my Humvee to the shrine himself, so I was able to top off mags and grab more gear. As I approached the trunk of Kenta’s government sedan with the last pelican case I found him opening one of his own.

I leaned over and peeked. “MP-7, huh?”

“Compact, concealable, balances great with a suppressor, punches through soft body armor and light structure. Hard to beat Hecker and Koch.” He glanced at my rifle hanging from my one-point sling. “.300 Blackout?”

“.458 SOCOM. The extra oomph is nice against beasties and it gives the mages more room to scribble.” I slid a round off one of my spare mags and handed it over so he could study the tiny magic rune etched into the heavy flat-nosed spitzer bullet.

“Not familiar with this kind of magecraft, but it looks a lot like an elemental channeling rune.”

“Pretty close; it generates pure mana on impact.”

“So you rely on kinetic energy to do the real work. Proper antimagic’d be better, though.”

“Apparently too complex to cram onto the bullet. So if the extra oomph doesn’t penetrate a magical shield I’ve got to get creative.” I had floated the idea that 45-70 Auto was superior to the “45-70 we have at home” from a room-for-geeks-to-scribble standpoint but NAIC’s armorer had expanded my personal invective vocabulary by twenty percent for it. “What about you? You manage to cram runes onto four-point-whatever by krautmagic or whatnot?”

He gave me a slight, knowing smile as he hung the MP-7 against his chest from a one-point sling and shrugged on a short-sleeved seersucker shirt over it, its “buttons” actually magnetic clasps that’d allow him to pull it open for fast access. “I have other ways of handling mages.”

He hopped in the driver’s seat as I finished sorting my loadout. By the time I hopped in the diver’s-side-rear, Mizuki was sitting in the front passenger seat, doing a good impression of a gravestone in winter. The GPS chimed politely in Japanese and Kenta put the sedan in gear and pulled out. I got one last look at Dan, talking seriously with Ruriko, tapping one of her translation talisman’s against his leg in quiet agitation. He caught my eye and gave me a Look before we pulled onto the road proper.

“… out of curiosity, you ever have problems with people seeing you printing?”

“That’s an English idiom I don’t know.”

“Oh, I mean, the outline of your gun through your shirt.”

“Not with a PDW. I don’t know about that short barreled rifle, though.”

“Ah.”

“Why you ask? Still spooked about being pegged by an airsoft otaku the second you stepped into that 7-11?”

“Uhrrm,” I said with the sinking feeling common to men feeling out their girlfriend and EOD techs clearing a minefield that just heard a click. “So in my defense–”

“It’s fine,” Kenta said. “But I owed you that much, at least.”

“Was it the summer jacket?”

“Actually not to uncommon here, given we’re still in the tail end of the rainy season.” He leaned forward and squinted at the sky, which was already darkening. “As you can see. Anyways, Japanese people tend to dress a little more conservatively at the same temperatures. You’ll get funny looks if you’re over twenty five and wearing shorts anywhere but the beach, so a summer-weight jacket doesn’t even rate a second glance.”

“Ahh.” I said.

I let the hum of the wheels fill the air for a moment.

“Sooo you’re not mad?”

“Is that what I said?” he said, the Cheery Boy Scout tone straining like thin ice crackles underfoot. “I don’t remember.”

A moment.

“Refresh my fucking memory, Peter.”

“… nnnno…?”

Now he let the wheel’s hum fill the air for a moment. “… we’ve got better things to worry about right now. Besides, I think someone else is a lot angrier than I am.”

Mizuki’s chin lifted ever-so-slightly to put both of us definitively below her nose’s altitude. But since we had a good twenty minute drive to kill and I couldn’t help myself I said “speaking of discreet attire…”

Mizuki flicked her gaze at the rearview mirror, firing a look of disgust my way like a boxer’s jab by way of bank-shot, and folded her hands together to make a few somatic gestures while she whispered a spell. A moment later her black and red robe had changed into an aquamarine dress. It was an incredible illusion; the spell hugging the surface of her actual garment so closely that I found it difficult to distinguish despite the illusion’s translucency and the robe’s darker color. I saw Kenta’s eyebrow wiggle despite himself and even I had to admit that this round went to her. I dug out my government-issue toughbook laptop (which Dan had shoved into my arms with enough impetus to constitute a “suggestion,”) and did some map recon for the rest of the drive.

* * *

“Are o hontō ni tōrinuketa no!?” Kenta said. Before us the Great Weir of the Tone River stretched across the great river’s five hundred meter width; the roar and rumble of water through the concrete structure suffusing the air.

“Asoko, mitemite,” said a young woman in business attire as she pointed – one of Ruriko’s subordinates from the Reiwa-sai Group. Even from the road, seventy meters distant, we could see the claw marks riven through solid concrete where something had heaved its way out of the water on the upstream side, right before the first concrete tower supporting the elevated roadway running over the weir.

He glanced at me. “Is this why you went east from the KFC?”

“Yeah. Big gator from a big river, and a mite too big to go slithering through irrigation canals.”

“I saw it; he’d fit okay,” Kenta said, then glanced back at the claw marks with an air of irritation. “Well, let’s get on with it.”

The Reiwa-group employee had obtained a boat for us, which was attracting some attention about three hundred meters downstream of the weir; it was definitely not a designated boat launch. A paved bike path paralleled the river through a beautifully landscaped park-like area, families with children everywhere gathering up their picnic blankets and preparing to scatter as the sky grew ever-darker to the west. We skidded down the grassy bank to the boat.

“Ruriko-san ni, fune o sōjū dekiru kara tte haken saremashita. Hitsuyō deshō ka?” Ruriko’s employee asked.

“Iya,” Mizuki said. I didn’t need the talisman to know what that meant. She stepped into the boat – a larger skiff-style one with squared bow and fiberglass hull – and sat down at the outboard motor’s tiller like she owned it.

She looked at me and Kenta like a teacher at late children. With a sigh, we turned to each other and by mutual visual consent, raised our fists and–”

“Jan Ken Pon!”

He wrapped his hand around my fist.

“Fuck,” I said, and stripped off my boots and socks, tossing them into the boat as Kenta clambered in. I shoved the boat off from shore and jumped in before I could wet more than the hem of my pants. Mizuki started the motor and we roared away downstream.

I’d been with NAIC long enough to know that a sunny day in the middle of Civilization was no guarantee against things becoming very magical and extremely dynamic anywhere, anytime – both mages and monsters tried to avoid it, but the self-enforcing nature of the veil ensured there were no hard guarantees. But despite that, I felt a chill creeping up my neck as the picturesque summer cruise down the sunlit tone river yielded to an increasingly overcast sky and a rising wind from behind. I dug my boonie hat out of my tactical pack and uncrumpled it as I caught the clean scent of rain cutting through the boggy river smell, and Kenta produced a ballcap from somewhere.

Mizuki, however, didn’t flinch – just gave me a poisoned look till I shifted left to give her a clear view over the bow.

Mizuki was gunning it down the river, and neither Kenta nor I ventured to ask her why – she was the most qualified bloodhound by far. Nonetheless, with the tension creeping up my nape, I gave into temptation and started scanning the area a little too fast; as if the dreamings were lurking just outside the corner of my eye and could be caught there if they tarried.

It never worked, and this time was no exception.