[The End of Osamu Ashikaga]: Tug of War

The sliding door to Suite 1313’s conference room flung open, startling Manami. Taeko and Nastasia barged into the room, and from just one look at Taeko, Manami knew something terrible had happened. Taeko’s pallid face and horrified eyes said it all.

“We need your help.” Taeko said. “Osamu was shot.”

News of Osamu’s condition spread like wildfire throughout Minavere’s military. The Shoku Twins made sure to relay the horrific news to ever vampiric lord and their units. By the time Hima returned to the city and entered the senate building, the halls were filled with talks of Osamu’s injury. Their morale was completely rattled.

They knew Osamu had very little chance of surviving such a wound without either an expert neurosurgeon or a skilled exorcist. The end of Osamu Ashikaga meant the end of Minavere and the vampire race. With their king hanging onto life by a thread and barrier burnt to a crisp, matters looked depressingly grim. Hima saw in their dull, darkened eyes that the troops were losing hope that any of them would make it out of this battle alive.

Anya turned the hall and saw Hima standing a few steps past the doorway. Upon seeing her injured queen, Anya rushed to help her.

“Hima! Your shoulder!” Anya cried.

“Never mind that!” Hima said, pushing Anya’s hand away. “Where’s Osamu? How bad is he hurt?”

Anya bit her lip and lowered her head. “The Shoku Twins said Johan shot him in the head. Thankfully, one of my units heard the gunshot and raced Osamu to the hospital on the east end. But…we don’t know if he’ll make it.”

Hima’s eyes flung wide open. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, her breathing becoming erratic and high-pitched like a steaming tea pot. She turned and barged out of the door, ignoring Anya’s calls to come back. Hima sprouted her wings from her back and took off towards the hospital, the national guardsmen and SSK agents watching her fly away in awe.

Anya swallowed the lump in her throat and turned to her men. “Everyone, we still have jobs to do. We keep performing our duties until we’re down to the last man. There are wounded whose lives depend on us.”

Despite Anya’s best efforts to keep preserve the men’s morale, more terrible news came blaring from her radio. It wasn’t from the Shoku Twins or any of the vampiric lords. Instead, the message was coming from the northern garrison of the Eastern Military District, who were manning the radar, anti-air, and naval defenses on the northern coast.

“This is Major Petrov of the northern garrison. We’ve confirmed the presence of American and Canadian vessels off the north coast. It’s a combined fleet of over three-hundred and fifty ships. We will hold the north coast and fend them off for as long as possible. We’ll buy you as much time as we can.”

“Damn it…” Anya said, her lips quivering. “It’s exactly what we feared. The United States and Canada hope to put us in a pincer with Russia. Osamu…please…don’t die on us…”

Osamu’s life hung in the balance and Minavere’s doctors fought like hell to keep him alive. Upon entering the hospital, he was put onto a stretcher with an oxygen mask strapped to his face and wheeled into a sterile operating theater with light blue walls and white tile. The medical troops were able to maintain his blood pressure and oxygenation, but now it was the job of five of Minavere’s best surgeons to save him.

They carefully lifted Osamu off the stretcher and got him onto the CT scanner tray. The first thing they needed to do was perform x-rays of his brain to see the damage they were dealing with as well as where the bullet stopped inside his head. Fine lines of red light passed up and down Osamu’s head, generating a clean, black and white x-ray image for the surgeons.

“It’s bad.” one of the surgeons remarked, looking at the imaging results. “Two bullet fragments, one in the right motor cortex and the other in the superior sagittal sinus. Both the posterior and anterior tables of his frontal sinuses are fractured. I’m seeing multiple bone fractures scattered into both his frontal lobes, some of them comminuted. Anterior superior epidural hematoma as well. Did the troops test for brain stem activity?”

“Bilaterally reactive pupils, movement upon inserting cold water into both ears, and movement upon rubbing cotton swab on his eyeball.” another surgeon replied as he got his latex gloves on.

“That’s good. We’ll need to perform a decompressive craniectomy to relieve the pressure in his brain and a bilateral anterior frontal lobectomy. We also need to get those bone fragments of out his frontal lobes and reconstruct the superior sagittal sinus”

“Is he…is he really going to be able to survive all this?” asked a third surgeon.

“I don’t know, but we have to try. Furthermore…”

The doors to the operating theater flung open as two nurses rolled in another person on a stretcher. Both startled and vexed, the senior surgeon approached the nurses with his arms extended outward, blocking them from taking even a single step further.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing? We have a patient here in critical condition!” yelled the senior surgeon.

“I’m sorry, sir!” cried one of the nurses. “The other rooms are full and this patient needs the best team he can get! Please, operate on him, not Osamu!”

The surgeons were stunned silent. Never in their lives had they ever seen their own nurses so desperate to save one life over another. The crying nurse pulled back the sheet covering the second patient’s head. Upon seeing his face, everyone in the room recoiled and gasped as they realized that they were faced with an impossible dilemma.

The nurse got on her knees and bowed to the surgeons. “He’s still alive! Please…save Johan instead! If you save Osamu, we’ll have the world’s blood on our hands! All of humanity will be wiped out! I can’t live with that! You have to save Johan!”

As the surgeons were presented with that terrible decision, Taeko, Manami, and Nastasia arrived at the hospital. They were greeted by the female receptionist at the front desk, who stood up from her chair the moment she saw them pass through the automatic doors. The hospital was filled with horrific screams coming from every direction, down every hall and every bedroom.

Soldiers suffering from gunshot wounds and phosphorus burns filled the hospital beyond capacity. Some of the wounded troops had to be operated on in the middle of hallways, including those in need of burn treatments and debridement. The smell of blood and pus permeated in the air and mixed with the cacophony of dissonant screams to produce a truly hellish atmosphere in the hospital. That atmosphere made it that much more of a relief to see Taeko, Nastasia, and Manami.

“Lord Taeko! Lord Nastasia!” the receptionist gasped, bowing her head. “Please, come this way. Osamu’s in here.”

The trio were led deep into the west wing by the receptionist, stopping at an electronically locked double door that partitioned the operating theater from the rest of the hospital.

“The senior surgeon is Doctor Anton.” the receptionist said, unlocking the door with her ID card. “He’ll only want medically necessary personnel inside, though.”

“All three of us have experience with medical magic, especially Manami here.” Taeko said.

“Good! Please, save Osamu. I don’t want to die here.” the receptionist said as she opened the door.

Taeko, Manami, and Nastasia passed through the door and marched onward as it shut behind them. The door to the operating theater was only a few paces down the hall. There was a small waiting area with chairs, a couch, a table, and a few magazines scattered about. The Shoku Twins sat on the couch together in silent dejection. Akatsuki held her terrified sister’s hand, both of their faces wet with tears.

Upon seeing Taeko, Nastasia, and Manami, the twins stood up onto their feet, but were hardly able to compose themselves. Their tears kept falling as they barely managed to squeeze out two or three words at a time.

“Taeko…” Omagatoki wept. “We don’t know… if he’ll…make it.”

“Please…help him…” Akatsuki said, covering her crying face with the sleeve of her black robe.

Taeko didn’t have the heart to console either of them. As far as she was concerned, they were both traitors as well. “I’ll help him, but I’m not doing it for either of you. I’m doing it because he was my friend. Unlike you three, I love my friends.”

“If he dies…Dark Dawn can’t be stopped.” Omagatoki said. “Osamu doesn’t intend to kill every last human on the planet.”

“Yeah.” Taeko growled. “Just Ninety-nine percent of them, right? Come on, let’s go.”

Taeko, Nastasia, and Manami marched on towards the operating room door. As they got closer, the sounds of shouting and crying bled through the door. Fearing the worst, their march turned into a full-on sprint.

When they barged through the door, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The argument fell into quietude as the surgeons and nurses glanced at their lords in shock. Three surgeons stood around Osamu on the right side of the room while two surgeons and the two nurses stood on the left side, guarding Johan.

“What…what’s going on here? Why is Johan here?” Nastasia asked.

“My Lords…I…” the senior surgeon stammered, his widened eyes darting across the room. “These four want to save Johan instead of Osamu.”

“Johan was under SSK custody before he arrived here.” Taeko said. “You snuck him away from Anya’s medics and brought him in here?”

“You’re a human, Lord Taeko!” one of the nurses cried. “You can’t possibly support what he’s doing to your own kind!

“Out of the question!” Nastasia shouted. “Whether you like him or not, Osamu is your king! If you’re opting to save the life of an enemy of this nation instead of your king, you’re just as much of a traitor as Johan! Get him out of this room and operate on Osamu! Now!”

“…We refuse. I’m sorry, Lord Nastasia.” said one of the surgeons guarding Johan. “It’ll take a full medical team to save either one of them. You can’t save Osamu without us.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” Nastasia rebuked. “The one most equipped to save his life is Manami. She can do it with just three of you to help.”

All eyes in the room turned to Manami, who felt their gazes crawl upon her like insects. She stepped forward and got a good look at Osamu, then at Johan. She couldn’t believe either of them had managed to survive.

Johan had been impaled through his stomach with sharpened steel and Osamu lied on the CT scanner tray with a bullet in his head and severe damage to his brain tissue. Saving them both wasn’t an option. Manami would need the majority of the surgeons just to save one of them. In the time that would take, the other would surely die.

Manami looked upon Osamu’s face and the bullet hole in his forehead. Like Taeko, she remembered the days before everything turned out so horribly, the days before the Inari Standoff when Osamu was still just her son-in-law living happily together with his family and friends. Her maternal instincts screamed at her to save his life, to not fail him like she failed Lucrezia. That part of her still loved him.

Her heart and her soul went in opposite directions. Her own humanity saw Osamu as a threat not just to her, but to all human beings on the planet. She stood before a man who secretly plotted the destruction of the world, sacrificing his friends and child along the way. She stood before a man that riled a vicious, ultranationalist revolution amongst a race of people that worked so hard to avoid persecution.

Everyone in the room waited to see which side she would listen to, her maternal instincts or her own human soul.

“Johan…he’s still alive?” Manami asked.

“Manami!” Taeko shouted, knowing exactly where she was going.

“Yes.” answered the nurse. “Like Osamu, he’s badly wounded, but he’s still alive.”

“Traitors, all of you!” Nastasia screamed, reaching for the daggers hidden under her black, lace sleeves.

Taeko grabbed Nastasia’s arm and stopped her. “No, stop! We can’t have a fight in here! We might kill Osamu! We also need these surgeons to help save him!”

“Taeko…” Manami said. “You know I loved Osamu as much as you did, but…the man is a monster. He wiped out his own people! Did you hear what happened in Korea as well? They’re nearly gone from this world! He’s killed millions of people already and he won’t stop until the earth has ravaged!

“I know you didn’t support this plan. You gamble and make extraordinary sacrifices, but you would never condemn the human race itself to face such cruelty. If you oppose the genocide, we can end it here and now. We take Osamu’s blood and heart and give it to Johan instead. He can end Dark Dawn and save the world.”

“If you do that…” Taeko began, scowling at Manami, “you’ll condemn everyone here in Minavere to death. Everyone, including us.”

“So we either save Osamu’s life and condemn the world, or save Johan and condemn ourselves.” Manami said. “Do you think you’ll be able to live knowing you helped him wipe out billions of people? All those nations, all those ethnicities…exterminated by the man you dared to save.”

“Why should we care what happens to the human race?” the senior surgeon asked. “In case you’ve forgotten, they’re out there trying to kill us right now! They could bomb this hospital at any moment and the only man who can tip the odds in our favor is Osamu! He has the power to help us win this war!”

“How many other doctors would save a man’s life knowing he’s going to destroy the world?” Manami questioned. “Every life he takes from that point forward will be on your hands just as much as his!”

“I care about everyone’s lives!” the senior surgeon yelled. “But humanity doesn’t! It picks and chooses and it has no qualms with annihilating an entire race of people! They do it all the time! I’m trying to save my life, my co-workers lives, my friends, and my family! Am I supposed to let them all burn to save your people? There are innocent people here too, Manami!”

The choice was devastating for nearly everyone in that room. Saving Osamu meant the end of the rest of the world. Saving Johan meant the end of the vampiric race. The fate of the world and all of humanity lied in the hands of everyone in that room. It all depended on who they saved and who they left to die.

The eyes of the surgeons and nurses suddenly widened in shock as they looked past Taeko, Nastasia, and Manami. Their frightened gazes made the trio turn around to face the doorway, where Hima and the Shoku twins stood in horrified awe. Hima’s shock slowly morphed into a venomous fury. The very fact that anyone in that room even considered letting Osamu die caused her blood to boil and her bones to ignite with rage.

“Hima…” Nastasia gasped.

Hima’s eyes darkened as her hands balled up into fists. “What are you all talking about? This is Osamu Ashikaga, our king. He’s our only hope of making a world safe for vampires to live in. You’re going to save Johan over him? I won’t let you. Save him right now or I’ll kill each and every one of you.”

“It’s an empty threat.” Manami said. “I’m the only one in this room with enough medical expertise to save him in a short amount of time. Killing me means he’ll have to go through extensive brain surgery to get the bullet out of his head and repair the damaged tissue. I reckon he’ll lose a good portion of his frontal lobes in the process. It’ll take at least eight weeks for him to recover from this. Minavere will be reduced to ash in a day or two, at best.

“You can’t kill any of us because you need us to save his life, but you also can’t force us to do so. Furthermore, starting a fight in this tiny room is sure to kill both Osamu and Johan. Neither side would gain anything from that.”

“Manami…you wouldn’t…” Akatsuki said.

Manami shook her head as she locked eyes with the Shoku Twins. “Omagatoki, Akatsuki…you sadden me. How could you do something so fucking monstrous? Taeko and I had a plan. There was no need to go this far.”

“Shut up!” Omagatoki screamed. “I’m so sick of all of you! You’re convinced your small-minded plans would’ve saved anyone but yourselves! Osamu is the only person in this room with the power to end all wars, both human and supernatural! We did what we did to help him achieve that!”

“It’s not like I can’t sympathize.” Manami said. “You two were the victims of such a war. I understand your animosity towards both humanity and the gods, but from what I can see, you plan to achieve peace by ensuring there’s no one left on the planet to start another war.”

Manami stepped back and checked Johan’s pulse through his neck. Sure enough, he was still alive. “We’re saving Johan. You can’t stop us and you don’t have the power to force us to do anything else!”

Omagatoki wanted nothing more than to strangle Manami right then and there. Osamu’s dream of a peaceful world was slipping away right before her very eyes, and as much as she hated to admit it, Manami was right. They had no cards to play against her. They needed Manami in order to save Osamu’s life in a timely manner.

But then a sudden, dark thought crossed Omagatoki’s mind. It was nothing short of evil and desperate, but if it was to save Osamu’s life, she wouldn’t let that stop her. Without saying a word, Omagatoki stepped away from her sister, clasped her hands, and vanished from the room.

“What?” Manami recoiled. “Where did she go?”

“I’m sure Osamu didn’t intend for it to be this way, but if you won’t help him survive this, then we still have a card we can play.” Akatsuki hissed.

“What can you take me from that Osamu hasn’t already stolen himself?” Manami scoffed.

“Everything.” Akatsuki answered. “Just remember, you brought this on yourself.”

It didn’t take more than just a few seconds for Manami to realize what Omagatoki was after. There was only one thing left in this world that Manami held close to her heart, and Omagatoki knew she would find it in Moonglow Castle.

It was a far cry from the meals they used to have at their home in Japan, but Yoko and the rest of the girls ate together in the dining hall of the castle. They sat at a long, rectangular table beneath the light of six crystal chandeliers hanging above their head. Hima had left them with an assortment of premium ingredients to make whatever they wished. They ate on priceless, fine china and drank from cups with polished, silver handles.

The food itself was better than anything they had ever had. For a vampire, Hima understood the human taste buds quite well. And yet, despite the quality of the food, it was a hard meal to stomach knowing that the world was being destroyed while they sat safely in a castle, powerless to stop their madman husband from going through with his terrible plan.

Furthermore, there was another issue at hand; Izanami had been gone for much too long and didn’t return. Kagutsuchi was there with them, so they knew Izanami couldn’t have died even if she was caught up in the destruction of Japan. It only made it infinitely more puzzling why she didn’t return.

Osamu and Taeko were in Yakutsk fighting for their lives, both Aika and Rei were dead as far as they knew, and the Shoku Twins had betrayed their trust. More and more, it looked like the family they had built over the years was diminishing, as war often does to families.

“She’s still not back…” Kagutsuchi muttered, her fingers tracing the rim of her half-full wine glass.

“I’m sure she’s okay. I mean, nothing can kill her.” Amatsuki said.

“Millions of people are dying all across Southeast Asia right now.” Tsukiakari remarked. “The slaughter will spread all across the world until damn near everyone has been wiped out. Izanami is feeling each and every one of those deaths, seeing all of their final moments. I can’t imagine what that’s doing to her.”

“It’s just like Akatsuki said, isn’t it?” Yoko asked. “All we can do is rely on Taeko. We can’t fix any of this ourselves.”

“Don’t think like that, Yoko.” Shinju said, placing a comforting hand on Yoko’s shoulder.

“No, as horrible as it was to say, she was right.” Yoko said, tears gathering in her eyes. “Our blindness was what put Osamu into such a dark place. We refused to see the disaster we were heading towards. He and Taeko saw it. My mother saw it. Even the Shoku Twins saw it. We got his hopes up and made him believe peace was possible. Now we’ve created a monster who’s obsessed with peace.

“We’ve always failed to save people’s lives. We failed Aika twice. We couldn’t save Isabella. Couldn’t save Inari either. Osamu is just the latest casualty. What I wouldn’t give to start all over again and make different decisions.”

“Maybe we all played a part in creating the beast.” Tsukiakari suggested. “It’s not just on your shoulders, Yoko.”

“I agree.” Kagutsuchi added, twirling her cold linguine around her fork. “I’d give anything to back in time right now.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m here, isn’t it.”

The distant voice startled the girls right out of their seats. They stood and turned towards the dark hall, seeing a pair luminescent, purple eyes shine from beyond the shadows. Omagatoki stepped into the light, her glare glued to Yoko.

“Omagatoki…” Kagutsuchi said. “What do you want?”

“While you’re all here enjoying your fancy dinner in an isolated, safe castle, Osamu is sitting in the hospital with a bullet in his head.” Omagatoki explained. “Your mother is threatening to save our enemy instead of Osamu.”

“Osamu’s hurt?” Kagutsuchi gasped.

“Manami is trying to save the world at the cost of Osamu’s life and all the vampires. I won’t let her have her way.” Omagatoki said, snatching Yoko by her arm.

“What are you doing? Let go of me!” Yoko cried.

Shinju wasted no time aiming her finger gun at Omagatoki as Kagutsuchi aimed her palm at her. Knowing full well those two would snap into action, Omagatoki held Yoko like a meat shield, making it far dangerous for either of them to attack.

“Back the fuck off!” Omagatoki screamed, her hand gripped around Yoko’s throat. “I’m borrowing Yoko for a little bit. We’re just going to go remind Manami that she still has plenty left in this world to lose!”

“What?” Tsukiakari recoiled. “Omagatoki, don’t!”

Before anyone could protest, Omagatoki teleported away with Yoko in an instant. Tsukiakari screamed in agony, not knowing what Omagatoki was going to do with Yoko. The girls knew that if the Shoku Twins were willing to sacrifice Chiya, Aika, and Rei, Yoko wouldn’t be out of the question either.

The girls knew all too well now that Manami and Omagatoki were playing tug-of-war with Osamu’s life and the world itself, and both of them were desperate to win out.