Thorvald of Lym
A Little Sketchy
The faint glow of the crescent moon barely reflected off the backs of two figures, doubled over yet making blistering speed across the hillside. From time to time they would pause at a vantage point, take a sweeping glance of their surroundings, then hurry on, pat-pat-pat, the soft swish of their clothes and rustle of their packs almost imperceptible amid the cool night breeze. The sight of anyone moving so swiftly, with such purpose, this far deep in the heart of Honshu would give any onlooker cause for a journal entry, if only to confirm to themselves that they hadn't simply imagined it. There was nothing in these empty wastes to journey to; every region was as derelict and destitute as its neighbour, and none dared migrate lest they stumble into the domain of a warlord and be murdered. Or worse.
Japan had once boasted itself the greatest country in the world; six years after Indonesia's treachery all but obliterated the nation and it had utterly failed to bounce back. Ruchang's ruthless assault on the rule of law had succeeded, binding all state functions, all sense of stability, to a single man. Shiro shot his brother thinking he could usurp the makeshift throne then and there, dangerously miscalculating how fragile the Japanese psyche had become, and grossly overestimating his ability to right it. His own civil war had demolished what little remained of the very infrastructure he needed, and upon realizing his impotence the coward turned tail rather than confront the slavering behemoth he had unleashed. When the régime fell, there was no institutional life preserver left for the war-weary populace, only blood-lusting veterans and the memory of Ruchang's iron fist. Japan turned on itself, perpetrating horrors tenfold worse than those from which it had pretended to extricate Vietnam.
The UN forces that landed in the wake of Shiro's flight thought they knew what they were taking on, many of the higher-level commanders having come straight from Vietnam. They quickly learned they were up against a far greater beast. The Vietnamese crisis had been precipitated by what was now jadedly called "standard" warlordism, the many helpless civilians exploited by the tyranny of the well-placed few; in Japan that psychopathy had taken root across the whole social spectrum, colonel and commoner alike. So many incidents had occurred of aid workers coming under unprovoked attack by unarmed civilians that all initial encounters, even of solitary nomads, were to be treated as potentially hostile. Families separated by the civil war went at each other as though they were complete strangers. Children orphaned by everything from the famine to the aftermath of chaos formed themselves into savage gangs even William Golding could not have described. Some thought it was a lingering reaction to "foreign imperialism", but that didn't explain why such hatred was turned against fellow Japanese. It was not merely that the island had degenerated into tribalism; it was positively feral. Veterans of Vietnam that had fought the Imperial Japanese Army face-to-face found this mentality more terrifying than anything they had witnessed on the front.
The UN-controlled "safe zones" provided some relief from the nightmare, and the western ports even approached something vaguely reminiscent of an ordinary life; yet even at the heart of the relief operation there were traces of that nefarious cloud. They had expected a nigh-identical strategy as Vietnam: secure the area, get the population self-sustainable, and press on. Instead they found themselves running what amounted to an asylum, struggling to detoxify a people that seemed to want to butcher itself the moment the warden turned his back. If Malta thought it could win over the archipelago with free blankets and choice sermons from the Good Book, it was sorely mistaken: UNVIFOR had attained complete control in a year; UNJARMIS had spent five years corralling a mere fraction of that population and still only barely managed to achieve stability. So hopeless seemed the debacle that a despairing international community twice motioned to abort the mission and let the Japanese devour themselves, but both times Germany and the UAR, the former citing general humanitarian principles and the latter steadfast moral conviction, shot down the appeals.
The duo knew suffering. Both were forged, quite literally, in the fire over Cairo in '06, so they had first-hand experience. They had been traversing this God-forsaken wasteland for days now, so they had seen plenty of it. Yet even they who had gazed into the abyss, who had endured the most animalistic conditions imaginable, who hesitated to call themselves human anymore, even they were amazed by the depths of Japanese depravity. The further they journeyed the worse it got: bodies lying torn apart on the road; flayed cadavers swinging from trees; slavers parading chain-gangs of men and women stripped bare and abused in every way imaginable. One steered far clear of cities: if they weren't being rent asunder by warlords they were infested with lunatics so savage they barely seemed capable of speech, the outer limits lined with grotesque gardens of impaled victims, put out either as a warning to potential challengers or some sick trophy display to goad them on. Communities that hadn't given over to barbarism were inaccessible to all but mountain goats and fortified to the point that none entered, nor did anyone leave.
It was precisely such displays that had led to the crushing pessimism regarding the mission. Yet those that remained committed to seeing it through knew that this devil incarnate could only be fought back by pushing forward. But pushing forward required resources, and even before attempts to pull the plug the global flashpoints had sapped the chief contributors' strength. Praise be to the state-sanctioned deity that Indo-Persia, always quiet in its international plans, had stepped up to the plate.
The pair was not a UN vanguard; they had been deployed under top-secret orders by the Ministry of Intelligence, and their very presence had been rigorously concealed from mission command. As incredible as it was to fathom amid Japanese degeneracy, they hunted a foe even more catastrophic. Suspicions were raised midway through the war that Ruchang was linked to OSIRIS, and al-Kader had commissioned a special task force devoted to discerning the truth. While his profile came back clean, it confirmed that the group had infiltrated the Japanese government and may have facilitated if not Ruchangs rise to power then at least his ensuing dictatorship. But the investigation stalled just short of the hard facts, and following the civil war Sempo was left running blind as venues for information shut down.
It had taken years of wild guessing and no shortage of personal favours, but they had finally regained the scent. Shiro had fled the country but OSIRIS hadn't, exploiting the tempest of central Honshu to pursue its nefarious goals beyond the watchful eyes of government... or so it thought. The investigation into Al-Qusayr had touched off a firestorm in the Ministry, and the next four years witnessed a series of clandestine purges within state offices, culminating in the thwarted assassination attempt on Amirmuaz in 2110. Al-Kader had never established direct contact with the Wolves themselves, likely for their own safety, but they had dropped enough clues for his department to carry on. Now, if Sempo had pieced the puzzle together correctly, they were poised for the greatest sting since Volgograd.
The operatives crested another hill, paused, and were about to move on when a shrill scream caught their attention. Down at the bottom of the embankment to their right were three figures near a burned-out barn and an overgrown stockpile. Two of them were locked in a fight while the third, a woman in a badly-torn dress, was stumbling away toward the hill. As they watched, one of the combatants threw the other man down and staggered after the woman. He wore a tattered army uniformnot that rank and insignia meant anything anymoreand gripped a makeshift weapon in his left hand, what looked like a linoleum knife. The woman cast fleeting glances backwards as she tried to get away, only to trip over her dress or her feet and lose time picking herself up. Soon enough he was scarce metres away; the other man was moving but clearly out of the fight, leaving her at the mercy of her pursuer.
The figure looked to its comrade with the air of someone confronted with the paradox of shooting an endangered species to save it. Receiving a curt nod in reply, it brought the scope of the Dragunov to its eye. The assailant was on top of her now, arm raised and ready to strike. There was a sharp hiss, like a pneumatic piston popping, and the man was thrown sideways. Startled, the woman watched with baited breath, and when he didn't get up she looked about for her would-be rescuer. But the shadows had already glided on. They didn't have time to follow up on their good deed, or even confirm that they had helped: worst case, they had merely settled a fight over scraps; best case, the couple had a meal for the next few days. Anyone imbued with reason and emotion couldnt not want to do more; but even if the pair was absolved of their deadline, they were only soldiers, and the wretched country was in urgent need of doctors from each and every profession. Besides which, there werent enough bullets between them to even manage a temporary fix.
Such was life in Japan, and one did not do well to dwell long upon it. The venturers only hoped that in snaring their quarry they would spare the rest of the world a similar fate.
Japan had once boasted itself the greatest country in the world; six years after Indonesia's treachery all but obliterated the nation and it had utterly failed to bounce back. Ruchang's ruthless assault on the rule of law had succeeded, binding all state functions, all sense of stability, to a single man. Shiro shot his brother thinking he could usurp the makeshift throne then and there, dangerously miscalculating how fragile the Japanese psyche had become, and grossly overestimating his ability to right it. His own civil war had demolished what little remained of the very infrastructure he needed, and upon realizing his impotence the coward turned tail rather than confront the slavering behemoth he had unleashed. When the régime fell, there was no institutional life preserver left for the war-weary populace, only blood-lusting veterans and the memory of Ruchang's iron fist. Japan turned on itself, perpetrating horrors tenfold worse than those from which it had pretended to extricate Vietnam.
The UN forces that landed in the wake of Shiro's flight thought they knew what they were taking on, many of the higher-level commanders having come straight from Vietnam. They quickly learned they were up against a far greater beast. The Vietnamese crisis had been precipitated by what was now jadedly called "standard" warlordism, the many helpless civilians exploited by the tyranny of the well-placed few; in Japan that psychopathy had taken root across the whole social spectrum, colonel and commoner alike. So many incidents had occurred of aid workers coming under unprovoked attack by unarmed civilians that all initial encounters, even of solitary nomads, were to be treated as potentially hostile. Families separated by the civil war went at each other as though they were complete strangers. Children orphaned by everything from the famine to the aftermath of chaos formed themselves into savage gangs even William Golding could not have described. Some thought it was a lingering reaction to "foreign imperialism", but that didn't explain why such hatred was turned against fellow Japanese. It was not merely that the island had degenerated into tribalism; it was positively feral. Veterans of Vietnam that had fought the Imperial Japanese Army face-to-face found this mentality more terrifying than anything they had witnessed on the front.
The UN-controlled "safe zones" provided some relief from the nightmare, and the western ports even approached something vaguely reminiscent of an ordinary life; yet even at the heart of the relief operation there were traces of that nefarious cloud. They had expected a nigh-identical strategy as Vietnam: secure the area, get the population self-sustainable, and press on. Instead they found themselves running what amounted to an asylum, struggling to detoxify a people that seemed to want to butcher itself the moment the warden turned his back. If Malta thought it could win over the archipelago with free blankets and choice sermons from the Good Book, it was sorely mistaken: UNVIFOR had attained complete control in a year; UNJARMIS had spent five years corralling a mere fraction of that population and still only barely managed to achieve stability. So hopeless seemed the debacle that a despairing international community twice motioned to abort the mission and let the Japanese devour themselves, but both times Germany and the UAR, the former citing general humanitarian principles and the latter steadfast moral conviction, shot down the appeals.
The duo knew suffering. Both were forged, quite literally, in the fire over Cairo in '06, so they had first-hand experience. They had been traversing this God-forsaken wasteland for days now, so they had seen plenty of it. Yet even they who had gazed into the abyss, who had endured the most animalistic conditions imaginable, who hesitated to call themselves human anymore, even they were amazed by the depths of Japanese depravity. The further they journeyed the worse it got: bodies lying torn apart on the road; flayed cadavers swinging from trees; slavers parading chain-gangs of men and women stripped bare and abused in every way imaginable. One steered far clear of cities: if they weren't being rent asunder by warlords they were infested with lunatics so savage they barely seemed capable of speech, the outer limits lined with grotesque gardens of impaled victims, put out either as a warning to potential challengers or some sick trophy display to goad them on. Communities that hadn't given over to barbarism were inaccessible to all but mountain goats and fortified to the point that none entered, nor did anyone leave.
It was precisely such displays that had led to the crushing pessimism regarding the mission. Yet those that remained committed to seeing it through knew that this devil incarnate could only be fought back by pushing forward. But pushing forward required resources, and even before attempts to pull the plug the global flashpoints had sapped the chief contributors' strength. Praise be to the state-sanctioned deity that Indo-Persia, always quiet in its international plans, had stepped up to the plate.
The pair was not a UN vanguard; they had been deployed under top-secret orders by the Ministry of Intelligence, and their very presence had been rigorously concealed from mission command. As incredible as it was to fathom amid Japanese degeneracy, they hunted a foe even more catastrophic. Suspicions were raised midway through the war that Ruchang was linked to OSIRIS, and al-Kader had commissioned a special task force devoted to discerning the truth. While his profile came back clean, it confirmed that the group had infiltrated the Japanese government and may have facilitated if not Ruchangs rise to power then at least his ensuing dictatorship. But the investigation stalled just short of the hard facts, and following the civil war Sempo was left running blind as venues for information shut down.
It had taken years of wild guessing and no shortage of personal favours, but they had finally regained the scent. Shiro had fled the country but OSIRIS hadn't, exploiting the tempest of central Honshu to pursue its nefarious goals beyond the watchful eyes of government... or so it thought. The investigation into Al-Qusayr had touched off a firestorm in the Ministry, and the next four years witnessed a series of clandestine purges within state offices, culminating in the thwarted assassination attempt on Amirmuaz in 2110. Al-Kader had never established direct contact with the Wolves themselves, likely for their own safety, but they had dropped enough clues for his department to carry on. Now, if Sempo had pieced the puzzle together correctly, they were poised for the greatest sting since Volgograd.
The operatives crested another hill, paused, and were about to move on when a shrill scream caught their attention. Down at the bottom of the embankment to their right were three figures near a burned-out barn and an overgrown stockpile. Two of them were locked in a fight while the third, a woman in a badly-torn dress, was stumbling away toward the hill. As they watched, one of the combatants threw the other man down and staggered after the woman. He wore a tattered army uniformnot that rank and insignia meant anything anymoreand gripped a makeshift weapon in his left hand, what looked like a linoleum knife. The woman cast fleeting glances backwards as she tried to get away, only to trip over her dress or her feet and lose time picking herself up. Soon enough he was scarce metres away; the other man was moving but clearly out of the fight, leaving her at the mercy of her pursuer.
The figure looked to its comrade with the air of someone confronted with the paradox of shooting an endangered species to save it. Receiving a curt nod in reply, it brought the scope of the Dragunov to its eye. The assailant was on top of her now, arm raised and ready to strike. There was a sharp hiss, like a pneumatic piston popping, and the man was thrown sideways. Startled, the woman watched with baited breath, and when he didn't get up she looked about for her would-be rescuer. But the shadows had already glided on. They didn't have time to follow up on their good deed, or even confirm that they had helped: worst case, they had merely settled a fight over scraps; best case, the couple had a meal for the next few days. Anyone imbued with reason and emotion couldnt not want to do more; but even if the pair was absolved of their deadline, they were only soldiers, and the wretched country was in urgent need of doctors from each and every profession. Besides which, there werent enough bullets between them to even manage a temporary fix.
Such was life in Japan, and one did not do well to dwell long upon it. The venturers only hoped that in snaring their quarry they would spare the rest of the world a similar fate.
