Comrades in Arms

I was on my feet before I knew it.

“Here’s MY idea you puffed-up-pencil-dicked-peter-puffer,” I shouted. “You just sit right there till the USAF drops a DIME through the roof and liquefies your ugly ass.”

“… through this roof?”

“It’s called a Small Diameter Bomb, it can punch through twice the concrete we’ve got above us, it’s accurate enough to hit between your tiny pecker and your ugly ass and it’s going to sandblast you into new forms of matter with tungsten sand.”

He chuckled; his baritone rebounding from distant walls at lower pitch to add its own minor-key accompaniment. “That might work on rubes like the Takamodo’s, but I don’t just have friends in the Diet; I used to be on it. I can quote the Status of Forces agreement to you verbatim, so don’t kid a kidder… kid.”

“Damn,” I admitted as I checked the hole in my leg – through muscle; too outboard for a major artery. “Well pops you drew the short straw today then, because I guess we’re back to my foot going up your ass.”

He laughed; that same eerie rebounding effect now creating an eerie resonance. “Oh, Peter, you certainly live up to your reputation.”

Kenta was shaking my shoulder but I brushed him off. Then I took out my earpiece, Dan’s tinny voice still imploring me, “–LISTEN for once in your life you–” and stuffed it in my pocket. “A’ight asshole I ain’t got all day – you huggin concrete or pushin daises?”

“Peter,” he replied; his tone conversational – almost jovial. “I love the energy, but we both know you don’t give a shit.”

His voice renounced on me thrice before the echoes drifted away.

“I know what the American families are like,” he continued. “It really is the same shit here, just a few dozen more layers of internecine status-seeking back-stabbing bastardy laid on top. Even worse than jolly old England, if you can credit it.” Now I noted the slight Oxford accent, he’d laid on thick at the end for emphasis. “What you care about is my new friend, here. Right?”

“Well he did try to kill me,” I said. “Then again, there’s a more recent entry on that list too.”

A chuckle. “And of course it’s all the Kurogane’s fault, right? According to the Takamodo, of course.”

“Well I don’t hear him roaring anymore, so you’ve got him muzzled. And I just got done mulching some of your boys upriver, so you want him bad and you’re willing to kill for it. So yeah, I’d say you hired that shaper I shanked.”

“I admit it,” he said; conversational, almost amused. “It was a business transaction, but that’s no excuse. I didn’t expect him to… cause a ruckus in your country but I should’ve sent my own people to make sure everything went smoothly. Nonetheless, here I am – cleaning up my own mess.”

“More like covering your ass.”

“As opposed to what? The selfless Takamodo’s? The ~protectors~ of Saitama’s virginal waterways?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice like venom. “I brought an army – two, if you count the men upriver. And who does the Takamodo send? One shunned dark-skinned branch-family bitch they only put up with because she’s got an ancestral blade and she’s too good with it to just kill her off without it getting messy. They wanted her to fail. They wanted this beast to slither in here and grow strong, grow powerful, because what’s a damaged Kentucky Fried Chicken in rural nowhere compared to a bloody massacre in downtown Tokyo, when it comes to reputational damage? And if we get the sword – well, what are a bunch of new-money gun-toting Yakuza thugs going to manage with it, anyway?”

I let the echos answer themselves.

“The funny part,” he said, warm amusement buoying his voice, “is they’re going to pretend to be upset when she doesn’t come back. Even though they never gave a shit; we have to pretend they did, even when they go crying to their pet Diet members, because… well… it’s all very Japanese, but the West has its sociopolitical absurdities too, right? And that’ll cause our Special Phenomena Response Division friends so many headaches.”

I heard Kenta suck a breath and hold it.

“Just leave it here. Unlike those hidebound Takamodo prigs I know talent when I see it; she has a future with my people… and if you don’t, she has no future at all, and neither do you.”

I felt my breathing steadying, the words still churning in my head. Digging in my IFAK I found an ampule of morphine and slammed it home in my wounded leg.

“I don’t have all day, Peter. It’s bad form for a villian to monolouge too long. Are you going home, or going to hell?”

I undid the tourniquet, letting it slide off my leg. “Hell?” I laughed – and as the morphine hit my system I really laughed, letting it roll as I plucked two flashbangs off my vest and pulled the pins with the middle fingers of the opposite hands. “What would a rich mage-clan motherfucker like you know about hell? I’ve been there, taken the tour and bought a shitty t-shirt at the gift shop. You wanna kill me? Then GET IN LINE, MOTHERFUCKER!”

Stepping out from the pillars I wound up and whipped them together underhand; spoons spashing as they hit water, and charged forward, eyes tight shut, into the dark. The blasts thundered through the cavern and I opened my eyes, snapping shots at muzzle flashes as rounds hissed past my ears in both directions. The rifle locked empty and I detached it from the sling and tossed it, plucking two frags from my vest and pulling the pins, hurling them at muzzle flashes in the dark–

–the scrape-clink of sheet metal on concrete behind me, the clatter of the wooden handle as it tumbles–

–I dove as something bright-red and hot warmed my scalp as it cracked overhead to explode on the distant concrete wall opposite. Skidding through water, I drew the 1911, looking back over my shoulder and aiming it upside-down alongside my leg, and sure enough I saw him, big as he sounded; and in the ugly light of the new fireball wreathing his cocked fist I saw a small feminine figure slumped against the pillar behind him.

He didn’t register the first hit, fist still punching towards me as fired again and again, blinded by muzzle flash but trusting the old Colt, riding the trigger reset, trusting the feel. Fire blanked my vision and steam washed over me, scalded the back of my neck – pain quenched by water as I rolled on my back and slid away over concrete, reloading and firing from prone at anything I could see.

My boonie hat bumped up against something, and I smelled the fetid stench of swamp and decay. Looking up, I saw the muzzled snout of the Gator God.

Staggering upright, I seized the shinemawa rope wound ‘round its long snout thrice and swung myself up on its back like a cowboy. From my shirt pocket I produced the KFC receipt and slapped it onto its skull, where it stayed as if glued.

“A’ight,” I said quietly as gunfire and explosions filled the dark, “GIDDYAP, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”

With my bayonet I slashed the shinemawa rope.

What ensued next is best described as “physics” as I was only party to those events as a point mass – or more specifically a very, extremely, regrettably elastic mass. I had a distinct impression of literally tumbling ass-over-boonie, feet rising and head falling and I might’ve completed one or three or twenty rotations before I slammed into concrete tailbone-first. Of my masterstroke I knew only the sounds – the gator’s gleefull roar rebounding through the cavern; Reji Kurogane’s handsome baritone chanting a spell better than any I’d ever heard in the heat of combat only to be cut off mid-incantation by an incredibly satisfying thunk! and at last, his voice roaring fit to match the Gator God’s as it echoed and echoed… and faded down the vertical shaft at the opposite end of the “temple.”

I lay there as the noises abated, bright hot pain radiating from my tailbone and up my spine. Through the morphine haze, even.

From the gloom appeared Mizuki’s face, her wet sidelocks dragging across my face.

“Daijōbu!?” she demanded. “DAIJOBU!?”

Apperently even magically-infused ink can only survive so many dunkings – not that my weak groan required translating.

Her wild-eyed expression steadied a little as she sucked a shaky breath and swallowed. “Daijōbu desu ka?” she said more evenly.

“Yeah,” I wheezed. “I’m daijobu. I’m daijobu as fuck, can’t you tell?” With her help I managed to sit upright, Dan and Kenta splashing through the water towards us with weapons raised – but in the darkness any survivors had apperently opted to vamoose.

As the morphine took firmer hold and my multitudinous aches and pains faded, I took stock of the situation. I’d made a powerful new enemy, but on the other hand I’d stopped an evil voodoo god from whatever dark ritual evil gods do in underground water temples and devouring half of Tokyo like a quadripedal Godzilla. So, Tuesday.

I could live with Tuesday. I reclined into the morphine glow, content to relax from my labors.

Above me in the gloom hove the haggard face of Dan; scowling dirks and daggers at me. “Peter… did you just release an evil voodoo God into the Tokyo sewer system?”

I rubbed my face. “Again. Again with the questions.”