Chapter 0:

Recount 1/4 From Fallen Valor

Fragments of madmen


Recount of 2043 month 3 20th Friday

Yea I’ll never forget that day. The crowd was wild, well it was a Friday night death match between the Technician and Roy The Kid. They were fighting on the Osaka Floating Isles stadium on the center island. I still to this day have a distaste for glorifying these criminals, they don’t deserve to be gladiators but go figure.

The stadium outside was packed, we were squeezing in between a lot of bodies making it difficult to even get in. No more float taxis are allowed there anymore ‘cause they just kept dropping people off on different sides of the island to avoid detection and docking fees. The assignment was for an elusive engineer who was attending. The bounty on his head was the only thing we really needed to know before taking the job..it would’ve been our last.

Now we don’t get a whole lot of details that don’t help us move forward. We’re not the brains, we're the firepower. What someone did to have us come after them, well you might imagine they weren’t great people who did great things just the opposite.

What I do know is we were chasing a team creating B.I.M. in manufacturing plants that they continuously tore down and reconstructed all over Japan. The places that were found included Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, and Sapporo. Now, we didn't get sent to the stadium at first, while following a dead end in Hokkaido we had gotten word of a strange shipment that came in from Wakkanai shore line and followed it to Osaka where we had our first bit of luck. We found an engineer working with the team we were sent to find him.

We were ready to get him there but we didn’t make it in time. We were tracking his terminal but it just felt too easy. It led us to the box seats near the top of the stands. We came through an unlocked door to an empty room. On a coffee table in front of a couch overlooking the arena was a terminal and a keycard.

“We didn’t lose him, where do you think this goes?” I asked Jack as I picked up the keycard.

“Looks like hotel Granvia.” Jack offered casually.

“You’ve been there?” I asked genuinely curious.

“No, but that's what's on this terminal.” Jack said as he raised the terminal displaying the hotel not too far from them.

“Well I’ll be damned, looks like we’ve been invited!” I said feeling like I was preparing for a shootout. Those become more frequent than not hunting people that don’t want to be found.

“Let's not waste the invitation. Think I should change?” Jack joked as he began checking the clips he had around his body.

“I’ll drive.” I declared.

The tape needed to be flipped to the B-side, Avirous took the ancient tape from the recorder and flipped it.