The first thing Sekitanki noticed about the Kamakura Period was that humans smelled different from insects.
Not better. Not worse. Just different. Where prehistoric predators had carried the chemical scent of chitin and alien biology, these armored people reeked of sweat, steel, and fermented rice. Fear had a smell too—sharp and acrid, mixing with the morning incense that curled through the compound's wooden halls.
He lay on polished cedar floors, every nerve screaming damage reports his mind could barely process. The temporal jump had been worse than the first—like being disassembled and reassembled by someone who'd lost the instruction manual halfway through. His bones felt wrong. His organs sat at incorrect angles. Blood leaked from his nose in slow, steady drops.
But he was alive. Again. Impossibly. "Bakemono," someone whispered. Demon. Sekitanki's eyes focused on the ring of armored warriors surrounding him. Their faces were hidden behind iron masks shaped like snarling demons—an irony not lost on him. Each warior held a curved sword that caught morning light and scattered it like broken glass.
Samurai, his history-addled mind supplied. Kamakura Period. Somewhere between 1185 and 1333 CE. Seven hundred years before I existed.
The temporal calculations involved in that displacement made his head pound. The machine's improvised construction had thrown him wildly off target. He'd been aiming for October 2024. Had landed in feudal Japan instead.
What are the odds? Astronomical. Literally astronomical. The probability space was so vast that—a sword point pressed against his throat, and probability became irrelevant.
The lead samurai spoke in classical Japanese—so archaic that Sekitanki's modern ear could barely parse it. The grammar was wrong. The pronunciation foreign. But he caught enough: identify yourself, how did you appear, demon, sorcery.
"I'm not a demon," Sekitanki rasped in modern Japanese. His voice sounded alien even to himself—three weeks of Carboniferous screaming had damaged his vocal cords in ways he'd stopped noticing. "I'm a scientist. A researcher. I traveled through time and—"
The warriors recoiled. One made a warding gesture. Another's grip on his sword tightened until knuckles showed white beneath sun-darkened skin. They can't understand me. The language has drifted too far. I sound like nonsense to them. Or worse—like demonic speech.
The lead samurai barked an order. Two warriors moved forward, producing rope. Hemp rope, Sekitanki noted distantly, his scientist's mind cataloging details even as his situation deteriorated. Not synthetic. No modern materials at all in this era. Everything organic, biodegradable, real in ways his laboratory had never been.
They bound his wrists with efficient brutality. The rope bit into skin already scarred from Carboniferous survival. More damage layered over damage. His body was becoming a historical record of impossible journeys.
The warriors hauled him upright. Pain exploded through his ribs—still broken from the scorpion encounter, never properly healed. He gasped, vision whiting out for three seconds. When it cleared, they were dragging him across the compound.
Through gaps between buildings, Sekitanki caught glimpses of the world he'd landed in: Rice paddies stretching toward mountains that looked simultaneously familiar and alien. Wooden structures with curved tile roofs—architecture he'd seen in museums but never imagined existing as present rather than past. People in layered robes stopping their morning routines to stare at the blood-covered stranger being hauled toward judgment.
This is real. Actually real. I'm in feudal Japan. In actual feudal Japan. The absurdity would have been funny if he weren't about to be executed. They threw him into a storehouse—windowless, dark, smelling of rice and rats. The door slammed shut. A beam dropped into place outside.
Sekitanki sat in the darkness and took inventory.
His body: catastrophically damaged. Broken ribs. Scarred arms. His right arm still mostly useless from the Carboniferous infection. New injuries from the temporal jump layering over old ones. He was a walking catalogue of traumas that should have killed him individually, let alone combined. But most of his organs began setting back into place. And soon the others would to. But he had more bigger things to worry about.
His resources: zero. No weapons. No tools. No allies. Not even the primitive chitin blades from the Carboniferous—those had been lost in the transition.
His knowledge: vast, but useless. Quantum physics meant nothing to people who thought earthquakes were caused by a giant catfish thrashing beneath the islands. Modern Japanese was gibberish to ears tuned to classical dialects.
His chances: approaching zero from the negative side. So. Same situation as the Carboniferous, just with humans instead of insects. The thought arrived with something like humor. He'd survived three weeks in prehistory. Surely he could survive feudal Japan?
But insects were simple. Predictable. They operated on instinct and chemical signals. Humans were complicated. Political. They killed for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger.
And he'd appeared from nowhere, speaking impossible language, covered in scars that suggested either divine punishment or demonic origin.
They're going to execute me. Probably by beheading. That's the standard method in this period, right? His historical knowledge was fragmentary. He'd studied physics, not Japanese history. The Kamakura Period was just a name, a date range, context for when certain temples were built or literary works composed.
He'd never expected to be in it. Sekitanki pressed his back against rough wood and felt something inside him—something forged in prehistoric survival—begin to calculate escape vectors.
The storehouse had one entrance. Wooden walls, probably pine, approximately five centimeters thick. No windows but gaps between planks where light filtered through. The beam securing the door was on the outside—couldn't be moved from within.
But the walls... His left hand—his only truly functional hand—felt along the planks. Found where two boards joined. The gap was small but present. Wood grain suggested the boards ran vertically, supported by horizontal beams. If I can widen this gap. Create enough space to slip through. Time it for nightfall when fewer guards are active...
The plan was forming even as his conscious mind recognized its impossibility. He had no tools. No leverage. Just scarred hands and the stubborn refusal to die that had become his defining trait. Good enough. He started working.
Night fell with surprising speed. Or maybe Sekitanki had simply lost track of time, lost in the methodical rhythm of prying at wood grain, exploiting natural weaknesses, widening gaps millimeter by painful millimeter. His fingers bled. The wood was harder than Carboniferous plant matter—actual hardwood, aged and cured, designed to withstand weather and time. But it was still just wood.
And he'd learned in the prehistoric swamps that everything had weaknesses if you were desperate enough to find them.
The gap widened. His left arm fit through up to the shoulder. Then his head, turned sideways, skull scraping against splinters. His torso—lean now after three weeks of survival, still too wide, requiring him to exhale completely and push until he thought his ribs would puncture lungs.
Then he was through. Falling two meters to muddy ground outside the storehouse. Landing badly. Biting his sleeve to muffle the scream as damaged ribs protested.
Move. Move before they notice. The compound was quiet but not silent. Somewhere, guards patrolled. Somewhere, night watch maintained vigilance. But the darkness was deep—no electric lights, just occasional torch flames creating islands of illumination in an ocean of black. Sekitanki moved through that ocean like he'd moved through the Carboniferous: silent feet finding purchase, body flowing around obstacles, every sense hyperaware.
A guard appeared around a corner. Time froze. They stared at each other—the escaped demon and the night watcher—both equally shocked. The guard's hand moved toward his sword.
Sekitanki's body moved before thought.
Three weeks fighting prehistoric monsters had taught him that hesitation was death. His left hand struck the guard's throat—not enough force to kill, but enough to collapse the trachea temporarily, cutting off sound. His right knee came up, catching the person in the skull. The guard fell silently.
Sekitanki caught him before he hit the ground. Lowered him gently. Took his sword—a curved blade that felt alien in his grip but familiar in its purpose. A weapon. Finally. A real weapon against human opponents.
He ran. The compound erupted behind him—shouts in archaic Japanese, the sound of armor clanking, torches being lit. They'd discovered the escape. Sekitanki vaulted over a low wall, landed in mud that sucked at his feet, kept running. Rice paddies stretched ahead—flooded fields reflecting moonlight like mirrors. No cover. Nowhere to hide.
He ran across the narrow earthen divides between paddies, hearing pursuit behind him. Splashing. Shouting. The unmistakable sound of arrows being nocked. And also secretly stole some rice patties while he was at it. And ate them almost instantly. As he continued to run.
They're going to shoot me in the back. I'm going to die by arrow in feudal Japan after surviving prehistoric scorpions. The irony would be hilarious if—pain exploded in his shoulder. An arrow had punched through muscle, the force spinning him sideways. He fell, hit water, went under. The lake ahead saved him. Arrows hissed into water above his head, losing momentum, falling harmlessly. Sekitanki swam—one-armed, barely conscious, following the underwater earthen divides by touch—until his lungs screamed and he had to surface.
He came up gasping a hundred meters from where he'd fallen. The pursuit had stopped at the paddy's edge—either unwilling to follow into the water or unable to see where he'd emerged in the darkness.
Sekitanki eventually dragged himself onto solid ground and collapsed in tall grass, shaking, bleeding, alive. Day one in the Kamakura Period. Already made enemies. Already injured. No resources. No plan. No allies.
Perfect. Just like the Carboniferous.
He laughed—a broken, exhausted sound that dissolved into coughing. Blood on his lips. Arrow still embedded in his shoulder. The stolen sword clutched in his left hand.
Above him, stars wheeled in patterns he recognized. Same constellations. Same moon. Same Earth, just 700 years earlier.
I need shelter. Need to treat this wound. Need to figure out where I am, what year exactly, what's happening politically in this era. Need to find out what happened to my time machine.
That last thought crystallized everything. The machine had made the jump with him—it had to have. Temporal devices didn't just disappear. They existed across time even when transitioning between eras.
Which meant it was here. Somewhere in this Japan. Waiting to be found. His only way home. Sekitanki forced himself upright, using the sword as a walking wooden stick. His body protested. Every injury screaming. The arrow grinding against bone with each movement.
But he was moving. Still alive. Still refusing to let time or fate or impossible odds decide his story.
In the distance, torches still flickered at the Hōjō compound. Searching for the demon who'd escaped. The monster who'd appeared from nowhere and vanished into darkness.
Let them search, Sekitanki thought, limping toward the tree line. I've fought things they can't imagine. Survived an era that turned everything into prey.
Whatever this period throws at me, I've faced worse. Probably. He disappeared into the forest as dawn began painting the eastern sky, and the hunt for the time-lost genius began in earnest.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Ronin's Path"]